Climate change was identified here yesterday as one of the most signficant business issues going forward. But civil society leaders, in private session, voiced their extreme concern that their voices were being excluded from the debate. "How can we have a panel on climate change made up entirely of leaders of energy companies, debating the merits of diverse biofuels, but utterly ignoring the broader social justice issues and links to water and food production?"
Civil society participation is definitely reduced this year - fewer people, lower pecentages of participants, and reduced visibility in key panels and discussion groups. Logistics and numbers, we are told, has underpinned this situation. NGO leaders suspect more devious reasons. My take is that the mainstream, notably business, feels that it has worked out how to digest a bundle of stuff that has come onto the agenda permanently. Debt, aid, energy security, climate change are all now acknowledged issues, but there is a sense of their being 'business as usual' solutions.
The heartland of the mainstreaming experience is that the politics and underlying accountability issues are stripped out as the issue proceeds from the edge of the crowd to center stage. The 'we can solve this' mentality of business is, in one sense, to be applauded, despite its disturbing limitations.
After all, much of the technology innovation and applications needed will involve centrally business, a fact we as civil society organisations tend to ignore, at our peril. But the limitations are, in effect, what we are all about. Our trojan horse tactics of developing tools, metrics, business cases and the like can (and does) at times accelerate the mainstreaming of some issues. But these Faustian deals have consequences that are experienced in full technicolour at the very moment of their success.
