On my final week in Brussels as a citizen journalist I extended my curiosity beyond my local community at the bottom of the lift next to the Palace of Justice. I experimented with routes through the fashionable quarters of the upper level.
That's how I stumbled on a lunchtime seminar at the External Cooperation Infopoint. Did you know EU are the largest donors of official development aid globally? In 2013, Member States provided €56.5 billion or 52% of the total amount donated from around the world.
I'm not sure what that means, but one thing I learned is that there is at least a large roomful of bureaucrats in Brussels who are concerned about human rights, electoral observation, governance and crisis resolution. At first, development aid in EU was regarded as a moral responsibility following decolonisation. Aid focused on former colonies of Member States. Today, millennial goals for reduction and elimination of poverty have broadened the scope.
The presenters at the seminar were Francois Busquet and Aurelie Boffa, Senior Researchers with an organisation called Cirad (www.realliance.org/resilience). The seminar was entitled 'Resilience and Development: from households to social and ecological systems.' The two academics shared theoretical perspectives emerging from a recent conference, and illustrated with examples of two development projects that they are working on. One of these involved the use of community theatre to bridge the tension between government and local knowledge. The other examined the idea of diverse trajectories when managing land use conflicts.
The projects were fascinating but it's the theoretical perspective that extended my own ways of thinking about my world in terms of individual and system resilience, and potential for change. What was new to me was the visualisation of diverse pathways to the future winding their way through twin boundaries of ecology and human rights. In hindsight, I recognise that the Futuring workshops run in Malta by TimesUp as part of our training as citizen journalists was informed by this perspective. If a particular pathway to the future breaches either boundary, then it is unsafe and requires change. The difficulty is that the boundaries are determined by human deliberation, although sometimes explained by divine intervention, and may change over time as we become more aware. Many of the pathways that humans have chosen in the past have already breached ecological boundaries yet climate change deniers still insist that the path is safe and the system does not need to change.
The example that rings in my head is the tragic shock of the Grenfell Tower fire, where authorities chose the pathway of dressing up high rise social housing using combustible material. The resilience of local people is told through stories of communities working together, of neighbours supporting each other, of heroism amongst local helpers and fire fighters. But anger against the system also emerged when stories were told of how the authorities had ignored the warnings from local people who advised that the people living in that volatile block had been placed on an unsafe pathway. Thankfully, the national government is now taking steps to change the cladding on multiple other high rise buildings in UK. To what extent will the system that allowed this to happen also change? The political debate is ongoing about the role of austerity, privatisation of public service and the divide between rich and poor.
But I want to finish with a few personal examples of how chosen pathways can work to connect people within safe boundaries. In Australia, a good friend has made a community garden on the verge outside her home in a suburb of Brisbane. Every morning at daybreak she is on the footpath tending to the endemic plants. She chats to her neighbours as they hurry to the train or take their children to school. She is part of a supportive community and she tells people about the importance of the local environment. But local authorities are anxious about residents assuming control of public space. They worry about insurance, about loss of uniformity, about risk. On the Sunshine Coast to the North of Brisbane, where local residents have linked up to create community food gardens
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