We must give fiscal sovereignty to developing countries to decide which social protection regulations are in their interest, and hold them to account to deliver these.
Multilateralism is in crisis, prioritising profit over wellbeing. Over the years, financing conditionalities imposed by the IMF and the World Bank have required fiscal austerity, trade liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation of social and economic sectors.
This has exacerbated developing countries’ vulnerability to health epidemics, social, environmental and economic shocks, as well as climate change.
The Bretton Woods institutions, the OECD and the UN have encouraged increased reliance on (unaccountable) private financing for development and humanitarian responses.
This series of articles has been published in partnership with Dalia Gebrial and Harpreet Kaur Paul and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in London. It first appeared in a collection titled Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal.
Life-giving
The Women’s Working Group on Financing for Development (WWG on FfD)15, now more than ever, sees the need for a comprehensive and systemic response while promoting a demo- cratic transformation of how global governance takes place.
A decolonial feminist Global Green New Deal must upend the structures that deplete wealth, resources, nature in the Global South to fuel consumption for the most wealthy, and an economy that relies on unpaid domestic and care work from women or pays marginalised women precariously to undertake this labour.
We join the Civil Society Financing for Development call to challenge existing economic, trade and financial dynamics. Under the umbrella of a call for a UN Economic Reconstruction and Systemic Reform Summit, we want to work towards a New Global Economic Architecture16 that works for people and planet.
We must bring redistributive justice and environmental integrity to the center.
We are continuing to erode public spending, especially in relation to crucial life giving and making sectors such as health and education.
Indigenous
This is happening at the very time when we should be learning why care work, adaptive infrastructures and expansive universal social protection are absolutely vital.
This includes improvements to maternal health, child, social and health care, life-long education and decent work, and pensions - the things that protect everyone throughout our life course.
Only by ensuring this - as we undergo decarbonisation processes - can we ensure a justice centred transition.
New Green Deals must include these decolonial and feminist approaches.
This is especially true when we witness attacks on indigenous peoples local communities, and those facing multidimensional discrimination on the basis of the lottery of our geography, exposure to poverty, gender and gender identity, sexuality, age, indigenous or minority status and disability, national or social origin, birth or other status.
We must give fiscal sovereignty to developing countries to decide which social protection regulations are in their interest, and hold them to account to deliver these.
Arms
Indigenous people, for example, now make up less than five percent of the world’s population, but preserve 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.
This means rejecting false solutions based in the financialisation of development that rely on private exploitation of what should be recognised as commons.
This also means centring redistributive justice in our understanding of what an economy is for and how it functions.
We can do this with progressive taxation so that those who can afford to contribute to the well-being of all, ending subsidies for carbon intensive industries such as fossil fuel, construction, agroindustry, mining, and arms industries, tackling illicit financial flows, and committing to running economies for people and the future of our planet.
Alliances
We must give fiscal sovereignty to developing countries to decide which social protection regulations are in their interest, and hold them to account to deliver these.
We must give fiscal space through debt cancellation and tax justice, place a moratorium on unfair trade and investment agreements - especially on vaccines, medical treatments and technology, as well as on food systems.
We should also regulate financial institutions and markets.
We believe this is the time to form alliances amongst social movements to ensure humanity finds its path again towards justice and wellbeing for people and planet. The time to act is now.
This Author
Emilia Reyes works for Equidad De Género: Ciudadanía, Trabajo Y Familia (Gender Equity: Citizenship, Work And Family), based in Mexico City.