Tag Archives: voices

Roaring 20s: The Voices we Need Now, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Oct

Next year’s words await another voice.  T.S. Eliot

The loudest words are the ones we live.  Mia Sheridan

If you can roar, roar for others.  M.L. Shanahan

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Don DeLillo

Speech is the voice of the heart.  Anna Quindlen

Their comfort isn’t worth your silence.  Rudy Francisco

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.  Vera Nazarian

Two things happened at the UN this week, both potentially quite positive and both related to each other at least in my mind, though perhaps only to my mind.  First off, amidst all the appropriate hand-wringing about the decline of both biodiversity and human agricultural health, amidst the gloom in some quarters (including ours) that the upcoming COP 26 meeting in Glasgow will not result in firm commitments to the changes we are running out of time to make, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution affirming that “access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right.”  With leadership from Costa Rica and other states, this resolution will soon be passed on to the UN General Assembly for final consideration, hopefully in time to create even more pressure on the Glasgow delegations to negotiate urgently and act boldly while action is still a remedial option.

And in New York, a group of 61 countries with Denmark and Costa Rica (again) in the lead, urged through the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly to end what was deemed the “silence” of civil society, referencing groups that through their lived experiences, diverse range of expertise and feet on the ground, “enrich and improve the relevance and outcomes of our work.” This statement called both for UNHQ access for NGOs and a stronger online component to allow those far from New York to keep abreast of what the UN is doing and not doing to address global needs.   The statement also highlighted that while this silencing of NGO voices impedes engagements between delegations and diverse civil society backgrounds and expertise, it also sends a signal to abusive regimes that civil society involvement is no more than a marginal enterprise, and that attacks on human rights and environmental advocates, indigenous leadership, media professional and more can more easily be conducted absent UN rights scrutiny.  This is especially jarring with respect to civil society leaders who choose to cooperate with the UN in implementing its own human rights and environmental priorities.

Those of you paying attention so far might well have ascertained the linkage that forms the basis of this post.   But if not, please allow me to lay it out as best I can.

As welcome as the Human Rights Council resolution is in placing clean, healthy and sustainable environment squarely within the domain of the UN’s human rights pillar, questions of implementation stalk this resolution as they do most that emanate from this Council or the General Assembly to which it is tethered.  Questions go beyond how we can possibly guarantee such a right to other fundamental questions of how we should best pursue this fresh obligation.  Whose job is it to promote the kind of environment we increasingly do not now have, to enable the benefits of a healthy, sustainable environment to the communities most in need, those who are most threatened by eco-predators, whose fields are most rapidly losing their productivity as floods and drought ravage and pollinators have long since fled the scene?

In our own work and through wonderful partners such as Green Map, we have long advocated a localized approach to mitigate the impacts of environmental deterioration and climate change and have done our small part to develop and disseminate tools that can help recover both a sense of place and the full, healthy recovery of those places, recovery led by those who know their spaces and its diverse inhabitants better than any outsider or algorithm possibly could, leaders with homegrown ideas about how to address threats, including from mining interestes and other eco-predators, which are less likely to make circumstances for themselves and their families even more challenging.  

In this tech-charged and overly bureaucratized world we are fashioning for ourselves, it is relatively easy to romanticize local leadership.  We have certainly done so, though many of our previous travels and connections have led us to the conclusion that this is not a wholly inappropriate exercise.  People in these diverse settings may not always “know” what we know, but they certainly “know” differently, sometimes better, and what they know can be essential elements in both local environmental restoration and in building capacity to cope with shocks to come, shocks generally not of their own making but certainly the cause of their own suffering.  It is this ability to convince local others that restoration is still possible and then to grow the number of hands and minds devoted to that restoration which ultimately gives me hope, indeed as much hope as welcome resolutions emanating from Geneva and New York, some of which have mostly gathered dust after the initial energy generated by their passage has worn off.

We know that there are many such people of commitment and energy, many caretakers of locally-led organizations that offer tangible hope to people who may well feel let down or under-served by people like me, people like me who so badly want to get back inside the UN that we may have forgotten what we are there to do. We can forget what privilege requires of us as we return to a setting where our own voices have always had an outsized volume, a “roar” which is too often about our organizational mandates and not often enough about enabling those who seek and deserve the opportunity to roar for themselves, not only to speak at our conferences and zoom meetings but to have that speech be meaningful, actionable, influential.  We reference here voices that aren’t always required to be polite or driven by protocol, that are able to speak their accumulated truth firm in the knowledge that such is more than a mere exercise to gain status or funding, more than a one-off which moves an audience out of their comfort zones for a fleeting moment but which does not often enough result in real partnership based on the flow of ideas that better connect the norm-builders in our global centers with the people who, from their more local vantage point, don’t always experience those norms as amounting to enough.  

Given the time left for us, and despite my profound gratitude for those seeking to enable our UNHQ return, I don’t know for sure that I will ever again set foot inside the UN.  Our 20 months of remote online coverage has convinced me (and a few of our junior colleauges as well) that the UN has become akin to alien space, well branded, utterly state-centric, attracted to money and organizational heft like bees to honey, stubbornly holding on to antiquated fire codes while the world burns around it.  We have long fought thse trends as we have reisisted what we have seen as the “voice over” disease, the tendency to roar over the aspirations of others, the tendency also to forget that as our speech is the voice of our hearts, so too is it the voice of the hearts of millions of others. These are the millions whose own path to progress remains akin to navigating heavy traffic, overcoming one obstacle after another, one burnt field or frightened child after another, one crisis that they are late to solve before another crosses their path. But these are also some of the voices of persistence, the persistent convinction that sustainable progress is possible, that lands laid low can regain their bounty, that damaged biological chains can recover their predictability, and that the guns which have stood as an almost insurmountable barrier to any sustainable relief can finally go silent.

In a policy world of voices muted or unheeded, ours has mostly had a volume disproportionate to the size of our lungs and the strength of our vocal chords.  Given this, we have tried our darndest to let our lives drive our voice, to embed our values in our policy and organizational choices and less in our speeches. But we also recognize that the world has changed so much over 20 years. There are now so many voices in the queue waiting to roar, waiting for a chance to be heard, waiting to be taken with full seriousness.  Perhaps more than any time in our professional lives, “next year’s words await another voice,” another voice which can convince and contextualize, which can cajole and correct, which can sing an energetic tune demanding the more harmonious relations which have largely eluded us during our own tenure.  With whatever time we have left, and for the sake of a planet in multiple forms of distress, we will continue to do what we can to find and encourage those next voices.

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Voice Lessons: Ceding Space for Those Waiting Their Turn, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Apr
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I know you can’t live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. Harvey Milk

No voice is too soft when that voice speaks for others.  Janna Cachola

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. Morgan Carroll

You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they MUST protect them. Wangari Maathai

The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation. Sarah Kurchak

I was always taught that when you’re lucky enough to learn something or have some advantage you should share it.  Areva Martin

It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others.  Matt Perman

There have been a series of articles lately by journalists and academics expressing concern about the long-term affects of a pandemic that seems “determined” not to release us fully from its grip.  

We know about the COVID “long haulers,” those unlucky individuals who have been unable to shake the effects of the virus months after their initial infections.   But there are other “long haul” effects that we have only begun to assess, the economic, educational and psychological consequences that we have done our best to hold in abeyance, hoping for conditions that will allow our children back in school before they’ve forgotten what they’ve learned or lost touch with their dreams; conditions that will allow our small businesses to survive a year of numerous adaptations and little income; conditions that will allow some healing for those whose psyches have been battered over this past year by social isolation, fear of the loss of loved ones and incomes, and now concern about whether or not we have what it takes to successfully engage with people who seek to become for us, once again, more than a screen presence.  

Clearly, we are not “out of the woods” and are unlikely to be so even after available vaccines have finally been evenly distributed and this particular pandemic has been finally brought under control.  The sun will indeed rise post-COVID, but it will shine on a world that in many key aspects has lost its way, if not altogether lost its mind.   Despite our own privilege and general good fortune, we wonder if some of those aspects don’t equally apply to ourselves. 

It has been over 13 months now since we have set foot inside UN headquarters which, as most of you realize, is the setting for most of our work, the primary space where we have been “lucky enough” to learn some important things and then “using our advantage” to share what we think we’ve learned with others.  Over these long months, we have missed the personal diplomatic interactions, the rapid movements between conference rooms and issues more connected than acknowledged, the endless coffee breaks to discuss what we’ve heard, what we’ve failed to hear, who impressed and failed to impress, what comes next (or should come next) for our advocacy and outreach, and even the surprise visitors to UN spaces who allow us to better direct our energies and modest assets in the service of interests those visitors help to refresh.

Throughout this long physical hiatus, one which shows no signs of abating, we have managed to keep track of UN processes almost exclusively through digital means.  This past week, for instance, the United Nations and its excellent technical team managed a remarkable set of digital engagements, including a sober ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, important discussions in the Security Council on threats from landmines and the current crisis unfolding in Myanmar, and events celebrating the restoration of diplomatic engagements by the US, specifically on Climate and Security and on addressing the care of Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. 

All of these activities – and many others where these came from — are important markers of a global system alternately hopeful and discouraging, a system which, in the case of the UN, is often more political than thoughtful, whose “genius” lies in crafting consensus among states more than in creating urgent remedies for those decimated by armed violence or facing long-term food insecurity from what might be irreversible climate change impacts.  We who operate in UN contexts are sometimes surprised by something we should already know well:  that while the UN has a firm stake in many issues it has limited power to resolve them; indeed that the resolution engine of the UN is largely about persuasion rather than coercion; and that the many skilled and caring diplomats assigned to UN headquarters are as beholden to the aspirations of their foreign ministries, for good or ill, as they are to UN Charter obligations.

Through the use of twitter and other dubious means, we have been able to follow the ups and downs of multilateralism, at least in part, and we have continue to share views within and well beyond the UN community on what should happen, what is not happening, and how we might better integrate our ethical and caring impulses into our policymaking going forward.  I am quite sure that the UN doesn’t miss our physical presence, doesn’t miss our constant scrutiny of its promises and working methods, doesn’t miss our relentless concern that, especially in this time of COVID, branding has too often been allowed to crowd out substance and urgency in our policy deliberations.

The “zoomification” of policy has clearly been a boon to this sort of branding.  While we continue to encourage digital events by our younger colleagues to help them define generational issues and concerns within pandemic-imposed limitations, we are also mindful of how much easier it is to organize events in digital spaces than to ensure their follow-through.  While there is no shortage now of online images of diplomats and (mostly) large NGO leadership saying things which are perhaps meant to be profound but are often self-evident and self-referential, there is too little reason to believe that any of it matters as it should, to believe that the endless statements uttered by these leaders are actually tethered to real concerns in a broken world and reflect policy priorities they are fully determined to address.

This is the dilemma faced by our sector in this pandemic age.  How do we navigate the spaces between image and substance, between the rhetorical branding of global problems that concretely and painfully impact the lives of constituents and the brand-building that allows us to fund salaries and our endless publications, creating strands of expertise that rarely reach and connect beyond the borders of our mission statements?  And how do we ensure, in the name of constituency building, that we are not also constituency-gate keeping, that we are not also oblivious to the reality that people are much more than a “calculation” to substantiate our annual reports, that we recognize people who can only speak their truths to the extent that those of us with privilege and access speak in “soft voices,” and commit to sharing the microphone rather than endlessly grasping for it?

Our sector is fond of calling for change in the UN’s priorities and working methods, as well it should, but it often fails to address the need for reform within our own ranks.  Moreover, for reasons that are only tangentially related to our organizational missions, our collective tendency has become to suggest only the changes that won’t ruffle feathers or threaten funding sources, only the changes that can be incorporated into bureaucracies that it is surely not our principle job to placate.

The damage exacerbated by this pandemic and related crises is experienced broadly by the global community, including within our own offices.  More than a few of our colleagues are also depressed and hurting, are also burned out, are also angry and frustrated that the agencies and processes into which they have poured their live energy have been able to deliver only half a loaf when a full loaf was called for. And what of our colleagues with more direct engagement with the wounds and deprivations which characterize so many communities in this world? What do we in our relatively safe policy bubbles owe those journalists, mediators and humanitarian workers who have taken on the arduous and often dangerous task of reporting on our messes, cleaning up after our messes, or negotiating an end to messes that need not have occurred in the first place? What more do we need to do in our own spaces to bring hope to communities and those who serve them without “imposing our grid” on to lives where such impositions have historically been too frequent and where they simply don’t belong?

There is now a movement among some NGOs around UN headquarters, one which to our mind is not mindful enough of our complex debt to front-line advocates and constituents, a movement which has deployed the twitter hashtag #unmute through which it seeks to organize legitimate concerns regarding access and impact. To be sure, there are people around the world doing the work for real that we purport to be doing in principle, people under siege and threat, people doing their jobs while trying to protect their children and keep from languishing in prisons where guilt is largely fabricated and release is often serendipitous. To be sure as well, there are people around the world, some of whom we have been honored to meet over many years, who are literally models of resiliency and resourcefulness, extending hands of care and promises of empowerment well beyond the attention of UN conference rooms, beyond the reach of funding agencies and international NGOs, small and large.

Let’s be clear: We who function in and around UN spaces remain more privileged than muted. Our voices connect with policymakers beyond our size and volume, likely also beyond demonstrated impact. The doors to UN headquarters remain locked to us. The interactive life inside UN buildings is becoming something of a dim memory. But we are not muted. We have a say, we always have a say, even the smallest among us, even when we have nothing fresh to contribute, even through a flat screen in the middle of a stubborn pandemic which has otherwise exposed and compromised so much in us.

The key for us going forward in these treacherous times is not so much about branding but about sharing. How can we better help people affirm a hope that is based neither on wishful fantasy nor on some externally “imposed grid”, a hope which is grounded instead in a more generous reception for the truths they can convey, truths that can make our own work richer and more relevant to shifting circumstances? And how can we do our part to help “unmute” those whose voices truly demand more attention, those who have been hoping and waiting more patiently then perhaps they should for us to voluntarily mute ourselves, to make way for contributions we need and cannot replicate?

We have had the privilege to learn many things in this UN policy space. And we have enjoyed advantages of institutional access and respect, much of it unearned. As the pandemic continues its relentless eroding of our psychological health while enabling inequalities in so many forms, we will do what we can with what remains of our organizational capacity to help spread what others have come to know, the hopes they sustain and the skills they have accumulated, over our own policy deliberations. And to do so in their own voice.

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