The first phase of the Helsinki Process culminating in the Helsinki Conference of 2005 focused on how to mobilize the political will and resources required to implement commitments agreed upon by the international community.

Government and civil society representatives from Africa, Europe, and other regions of the world are meeting here beginning November 27 to examine issues of globalization--from peace and security, environment and energy policy, to respect for human rights, and financing for development, reported Gfmag.com.
The Dar al-Salaam conference, to be carried out from November 27 through 29, will be the third held as part of the Helsinki Process on Globalization and Democracy since it was initiated in 2002 by the governments of Finland and Tanzania to address developing countries fears that growing international interdependencies are creating greater inequality in an already unequal world.
The meeting, titled “Inclusive governance--bridging global divides“, is the follow-up of a September 2005 conference held in the Finish capital of Helsinki marking the culmination of the first phase of the process.
The role of non-state actors in promoting peace and security is high on the agenda for the review conference.
“The aim of the session on peace and security is to explore the specific contributions non-state actors could make to confidence and trust building, the challenges of improving both democracy and security in unstable environments and the possibilities for non-state actors to contribute to resolving individual crises, especially in the Middle East,“ Folke Sundman, of the Finish ministry for foreign affairs, told IPS.
Another theme to be discussed at length in Dar al-Salaam is the relationship between national and global economic policies.
“The aim of the debate at Dar al-Salaam is considering how developing countries could both best utilize their existing policy autonomy and gain more of it within the context of the global economy,“ Sundman stressed.
How the global economic framework could best support national development programs, and what innovative measures and new forms of cooperation between different stakeholders could be envisaged at the national and global levels,“ will also be discussed, according to Sundman.
“At the Helsinki conference, it was decided that our process, facilitated by the governments of Finland and Tanzania, should continue its work of mobilizing political will for the implementation of global commitments and developing multi-stakeholder cooperation in global governance,“ Ilkka Kanerva, Finish minister for foreign affairs, said in a joint declaration with her Tanzanian counterpart Bernard K. Membe.
“In order to set a timeline for the Second Phase of the Helsinki Process, it was decided that a review of activities taken and experiences gained would be organized after two years, to provide a forum for facilitators of Road Maps, hosts of Roundtables, Consultative Network members, as well as other partners and key external reference groups to come together and discuss what has been done and what still needs to be done,“ the declaration read.
The concept of the multi-stakeholder cooperation is based on the understanding that globalization has brought with it a fundamental change in world politics: states, traditionally seen as the only legitimate players on the international stage, have been joined by other stakeholders, such as international organizations, civil society organizations, and business and religious actors.
In the realm of peace and security, new threats have emerged. Transmissible diseases, cross-border organized crime, trafficking and drugs, and climate change, menace not only states but also their citizens directly.
The Helsinki Process is based upon the belief that state security and human security have become intertwined.
The first phase of the Helsinki Process culminating in the Helsinki Conference of 2005 focused on how to mobilize the political will and resources required to implement commitments agreed upon by the international community--such as those outlined in the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The MDGs--to be achieved by 2015--include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.

Conventional measures of economic success do not take sufficient account of the social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, according to senior European Union economists.
Speaking at a high-level conference here Monday titled Beyond GDP, Emeka Anyaoku, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature’s (WWF) president and former foreign minister of Nigeria said, “Economies are a means, not an end.“
“Governments and industry of today, never mind tomorrow, need to know how our ecological and social assets are performing, just as much as our economic ones,“ he told Ipsnews.net.
Since the 1930s, the main economic indicator used internationally to assess wealth is gross domestic product (GDP). It calculates the total final market value of all goods and services produced in a country over a set period.
“Welfare of a nation cannot be inferred from a measurement of national income,“ Simon Kuznets the economist who invented GDP said in 1934. JosŽ Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, noted Kuznets’ words, stressing that data is needed to illustrate how measures for tackling climate change will bring benefits, so that they are accepted by business leaders and other interested parties.
While GDP has proven useful in comparing data from different countries, one of its main weakness is that it “cannot distinguish between activities that have a negative and a positive impact on the well-being“ of society, said Joaquin Almunia, the European commissioner for economic affairs.
Output arising from wars and natural disasters may even register as an increase in GDP, he pointed out. Almunia noted that the indicator dates back to the Great Depression era--the worldwide economic downturn which began with a U.S. stock market collapse in 1929.
GDP is still used by the EU for such matters as deciding if its member countries fulfill the criteria to join the euro single currency zone, Almunia said.
No comparable indicator has yet been devised for measuring well-being, he added, although a “certain amount of progress has been made“ in that direction.
The WWF has been monitoring the environmental performance of different countries using a combination of two alternative indicators. One is the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), which is based on such data as life expectancy and school enrolment, as well as GDP per capita. The other is the Ecological Footprint, which measures the cropland, grassland, forests and fishing grounds needed to produce the food, fiber and wood a country consumes, in relation to the quantity of waste it produces.
A new WWF study concludes that as a society registers a better performance under the HDI scale its Ecological Footprint grows. At one end of the spectrum of countries studied are those considered “unsustainable,“ with a low ecological footprint and a low HDI--including Bangladesh the Central African Republic, and Chad.
On the other end we find countries with both a large ecological footprint and a high HDI--including Australia, Kuwait, Luxembourg, and the US. These too can be considered as “unsustainable“ because of their high footprint.
In the middle lies a group of countries that may be considered to be the most sustainable having a relatively small footprint, as well as mid-range HDI values. Countries in this group --China, Mexico, South Korea, and Vietnam--are, however, moving toward higher Ecological Footprints and HDI values.
The European Union’s Ecological Footprint in 2003 stood at 2.26 billion global hectares (gha), or 4.7 gha for every man, woman and child in its then 15 member countries.
The gha is a hectare of land capable of global average productivity--the ability to produce crops or other resources and absorb waste sustainably. Globally in 2003, there were 11.2 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water available and 6.3 billion people on the planet. This makes 1.8 gha per person.
In the same year, the EU’s total supply of productive area was 1.06 billion gha--0.2 gha per individual. According to the WWF, if everyone in the world consumed at the same rate that Europeans do, over two-and-a-half planets would be needed to provide the resources required and accommodate wastes.

The failure to create new jobs will lead to strikes, riots and a further rise in violent crime and political instability.

For Africa, 2008 will be the year of the jobless.
Millions of rural poor will, as ever, go hungry and perish from curable diseases, but the focus in 2008 will be on the continent’s cities and towns. The failure to create new jobs in the slums will lead to strikes, riots and a further rise in violent crime and political instability, reported Economist.com.
Africa’s economies will grow, many by 6 percent or more, but the urban underclass will grow still faster. The African Union, in its attempt to be taken more seriously on a range of political and economic issues, will launch discussions on how to increase the workforce, but little clear action will be taken.
As a result, gangs will prosper. Kenya’s Mungiki gang started decapitating its enemies in 2007. More terror is in prospect in 2008 as gangsters take a potent mix of tribal history and popular culture, drawing on American and Jamaican swagger, to recruit more disaffected young men.
Foreign investment will remain too small to have much influence on Africa’s population. Most of it will continue to be extractive: oil and gas in West Africa; gems, ores and logging in central and east Africa. Some progress will be made in securing rights to Congo’s trove, but not in the building of the new roads and railways needed to bring the minerals to market. Outside South Africa, Egypt and the Maghreb, manufacturing will remain limited.
In several countries the dumping of cheap manufactured Chinese goods will become an issue. Indeed, after a golden year in 2007 China will suffer a reverse in popularity in Africa. Enthusiasm for turning over large parts of tropical Africa to biofuels will also falter in 2008.
Immigration policies will restrict the number of work visas available to foreigners. A similar populism, fuelled by unemployment, will also work against potentially useful measures to legalize dual citizenship and finally capitalize on Africa’s large and increasingly wealthy diaspora. At the same time, new biometric passports and more forceful policing of borders will make it much harder for undocumented Africans to get into and stay in the European Union. Record numbers of young Africans drowned or were otherwise killed in 2007 trying to escape the continent. More will die in 2008.
The city of Mwanza, population around 500,000, can serve as a benchmark for Africa’s challenges and opportunities. There has been hope of remaking this capital of Tanzania’s Sukumaland, on the south shore of Lake Victoria, as the new metropolis of east Africa.
That will remain a dream, but tower blocks will go up in 2008 and a new lakeside park will be opened. Swanky villas will be built on the rocky points overlooking the lake, to make the most of the sunsets. The region’s eerie beauty has unrealized tourism potential, but malaria, AIDS and also bilharzia mean that it will remain untapped.
This kind of disease-burden matters, as does the mud-hut poverty of Mwanza’s hinterland, but more telling is the state of the local shipping. Ferries ply routes across Lake Victoria from Mwanza as far as Kenya and Uganda. The larger vessels are old and decrepit.
The fishing trade has failed to move on. It is rudimentary and dominated by middlemen--the same middlemen who own the villas. But the modest attractions of Mwanza are such that it will suck in new poor in 2008.
Mwanza’s officials are caught, like Africa at large, between boosterism and desperation. The city needs to create several thousand new jobs in 2008 just to keep up with the inflow--and the chances are poor.