Pitfalls
and potentials for localism:
A model for internationalized solutions
By K. W. James Rochow
President, Trust for Lead Poisoning Prevention
 |
CitNet
member Jim Schulman of Sustainable Communities Initiatives
shares community development ideas with local officials
from Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks visited CitNet's office
as part of their multi-city U.S. tour sponsored by
the State Department. |
Linking U.S. groups to foreign
counterparts and international processes is one of the
most important functions CitNet and other NGO-based networks perform. The limits of localism, the growing opportunities
for interlocal communication, and the current belligerent
isolationism of the U.S. necessitate increased internationalized
efforts to promote sustainable development. Although the
international system remains a static state-centered system
on paper, it presents dynamic opportunities for participation
in its operation. An exemplary model for such efforts can
be found in the Trust For Lead Poisoning's International Action Plan For Preventing Lead Poisoning and in the operation of the Global Lead Network.
(Note: “Internationalized” is
used to denote a dynamic that transcends both narrow localism
and literal inter-nationalism.)
Localism Reconsidered
Variations on the concept of localism
have provided many of the animating mantras of the modern
environmental (and by extension, sustainable development)
movement, a concept embraced by its poets, philosophers,
and thinkers including Amory Lovins, E. F. Schumacher,
and Gary Snyder: Think Globally, Act Locally, Small Is Beautiful, Local Knowledge. Localism particularly resonates with American myths of frontier self-sufficiency,
village democracy, and the simple life.
Localism is also increasingly
highlighted as an overarching principle in international
declarations and agendas concerned with sustainable development,
often expressed in terms of devolution of governmental
functions to enable more direct citizen participation.
The Habitat II agenda, for example, has a whole section
devoted to decentralization under the rubric of “Capacity-Building and Institutional Development” (Section IV D. 2.).
In
fact, localism does posses an organic relationship to sustainable
development and should remain one of its pillars. The multiple
efficiencies of sustainable local consumption of local
products and resources present one cogent example of the
benefits of localism. Athenian democracy remains an ideal,
sometimes realized in such localized institutions as the
New England town meeting. Many environmental problems,
including lead poisoning and pollution, have variations
that necessitate solutions tailored to local circumstances.
A grounded sense of place has poetic and spiritual as well
as political dimensions.
But localism also functions as
a piety that disguises or justifies fragmentation, enforced
weakness, tribalism, and social retrogression. Localism
often provides a rhetorical smokescreen to slough off unfunded
responsibilities to local governments and undercut efforts
to enforce social responsibility. As books such as Harry
Caudill's Night Comes To The Cumberlands dramatically illustrate, localism in the worst case is used to justify neo-colonist
exploitation of people and resources that weak or co-opted
local governments are unable or unwilling to resist. The
evolution of environmental legislation in the United States
was toward the imposition of uniform minimum national standards
to overcome local competition to attract industry by creating
pollution havens. More basically, localism can lead to “reinvention of the wheel” through repetition of mistakes and duplication of effort uninformed by the instructive
experience of other communities and regions.
At the level of international
process, too, localism often remains a pious profession
rather than an enacted reality. The Trust For Lead Poisoning
Prevention has made a point of inviting groups in the New
York City metropolitan area to its various side events
at the Commission for Sustainable Development and other
United Nations meetings. Uniformly, those groups—many of them outward looking and representing Third World communities—were unaware of, much less engaged with, UN agencies and processes that bore
on issues of highest concern to them. That lack of engagement
highlights the need for workable models that dynamically
harness and integrate effective action at all levels—from the municipal to the global.
Systematic engagement of U.S.
groups with the broader world is especially imperative
at this moment. The U.S. currently stands in a peculiar
position of bellicose unilateralism that combines the worst
aspects of isolationism and interventionism. Interlocal
sustainable development initiatives powered by civil society
provide urgently needed counter-balancing examples of constructive
cooperation toward achieving common goals of the international
community.
Internationalized Solutions
The preceding overview highlights
the limitations of a fragmented parochialism as an antidote
to pervasive pieties extolling localism in the abstract.
This section attempts to catalyze further analysis and
discussion by sketching some exemplary elements of a successful
dynamic that integrates the undoubted strengths of local
knowledge and grounded experience into a broader internationalized
effort. Such integration is reciprocal: local knowledge
and grounded experience inform solutions in other communities
and at different levels, while extra-local organizations
and initiatives can be invoked to support and reinforce
local efforts. Local groups can even effectively participate
at the international level by utilizing networks to find
points of dynamic opportunity to influence government positons
and the outcomes of international processes.
The
following elements are derived from the Trust For Lead
Poisoning's International Action Plan For Preventing Lead Poisoning and the experience of the Global Lead Network. Lead poisoning and pollution
requires internationalized solutions because the problem
is both genuinely inter-national, owing to discharges,
emissions, products, practices, and populations that cross
national boundaries, and quintessentially local, because
of wide local variations in exposure source concentrations.
1) Local
knowledge of international context
Local communities
should systematically explore the ultimate sources of their
problems through empirical investigation and research that
results in a more fundamental understanding. In cases of
communities with an actual or potential lead problem, groups
should comprehensively assess the imported aspects of the
problem. “Imported aspects” should include imported consumer products (and wastes). But that phrase should
also encompass blood lead screening of immigrated populations,
such as children adopted from abroad. In addition, the
products and artifacts of continuing cultural practices—such as home remedies and cosmetics—must be evaluated for toxicity. Conversely, groups should consider whether their
own communities are the source of exposures elsewhere,
for example the export of locally generated products or
wastes.
Community groups should research
and reflect upon the international context of their problems
concurrently with their empirical assessments. Legal/institutional
analysis of international trade agreements and treaties
that may prohibit or control the movement of lead-containing
products and wastes is basic to understanding the structural
context of the problem. Considering the possible sources
of indigenous exposures that may have caused lead poisoning
in children of foreign origin serves to increase empathetic
understanding of other communities and receptivity to internationalized
solutions. A culturally sensitive anthropological perspective
can help reveal and explain why cultural practices are
often fossilized—and thus the use of certain lead-containing products can continue in immigrant
communities when they are no longer found in their home
countries.
2) Interlocal communication
Interlocal communication is the
bedrock of internationalized solutions. It allows local
groups to take advantage of modern communications technology
to share best practices and instructive experience directly
and relatively inexpensively with each other and with the
world across national boundaries. It is now a commonplace
to point out that the range of options offered by information
technology extend from passive postings to virtual conferences
in real time. The Internet also provides an accessible
portal for local groups to link to international processes.
(Although governments and others continue to try to censor
Internet communications, the characteristics of the medium
guarantee the ultimate failure of those efforts.)
3)
Multiplication of networks
The formation and multiplication
of relevant NGO-based electronic networks helps facilitate
and reinforce local efforts. Such networks first and foremost
serve as the basic instruments of interlocal communication.
(It is important that NGO networks resist the seductions
of technological glitz to find an appropriate level of
technology that allows maximum interactive participation
by local groups, especially those in developing countries.)
NGO networks have a multiplier or synergistic effect by
convening, catalyzing, and as appropriate representing
their local members at international and regional events
(see #6, below). NGO networks can mobilize their members
by posting reports and reporting back to them on conferences
and proceedings as they occur. This kind of nearly instantaneous
communication can in turn allow local groups to communicate
their opinions and positions back to their NGO and government
representatives on an on-going basis even at far-away meetings
and proceedings.
The multiplication of both horizontal
and vertical networks helps to reinforce, not confuse or
undercut, the effective participation of local groups in
internationalized solutions. The proliferation of issue
networks helps local groups connect with other similar
groups, but also allows them to broaden the base of their
knowledge and support by linking to related issues and
agendas. A local group concerned with lead poisoning, for
example, can help develop and promote needed interdisciplinary
solutions by linking to networks concerned with environmental
health, housing, consumer protection, and sustainable development.
To take an example of vertical participation, local groups
often can benefit from participation in regional networks
because instructive regional differences in context and
approach typically play out against a common frame of underlying
reference (see #5, below).
4) “Squeeze
play” strategies
The definition of internationalized
solutions includes best practices adopted or adapted by
one community from the interlocally communicated experience
of other communities. But the concept of internationalized
solutions also includes broader strategies designed to
take advantage of the capacities of all levels and all
actors in the international system. Putting a squeeze play
on national governments though concerted “upward” pressure by local groups and “downward” pressure by international agencies and organizations has often proven successful.
The effort to phase out leaded gasoline worldwide has greatly
benefited from the persuasive pressure the World Bank and
other international organizations have placed on national
governments concomitantly with phase-out campaigns initiated
by informed and energetic local groups. In the Ishigaki
(Japan) case, local fishermen who wanted to protect their
coral reef fishing area from an airport development plan
successfully petitioned the IUCN (The World Conservation
Union) to place that reef on its list of areas of biological
significance that should be preserved and protected. Although
the list is technically unenforceable because the IUCN
is an NGO, the fishermen were able to use the reef's inclusion
to convince the Japanese government to conduct an environmental
impact assessment, which it had resisted doing.
5) Regional approaches
Local groups can also exploit
levels between the local and the international to advance
sustainable development. Regional approaches can often
prove effective, particularly because countries in a region
typically share underlying assumptions and mindsets notwithstanding
their often pronounced cultural and political differences.
Regional fora, for example, can serve to use models of
competitive emulation to highlight countries in the regional
vanguard of a sustainable development issue in order to
exert subtle or overt pressure on “fence sitting” and “stick in the mud” countries. Local groups can advance their agenda in such a setting by serving
as a constituency of support if their country is in the
vanguard and as a catalyst for improvement if is lagging.
In addition, regional fora often provide the opportunity
for local groups from more NGO unfriendly countries to
elevate their status to a place of equality in the proceedings.
6) International fora
Many
aspects of international fora and processes understandably
discourage local groups, including the time and expense
of participating in far away meetings and their characteristic
proliferation of lofty rhetoric apparently unaccompanied
by action for implementation. If opportunistically utilized,
however, international fora can play an important role
in advancing internationalized solutions for sustainable
development. Despite the advantages of electronic communication,
it is important on occasion to meet foreign counterparts
face-to-face and international fora efficiently maximize
opportunities to do so. Networks can facilitate such meetings
through side events and communicate back to local groups
not able to attend the event (see #3, above). While the
implementation gap is real and international organizations
lack independent authority to take direct action (although
they may often condition grants or loans), international
declarations of principle are important because they have been endorsed by governments and can serve
as the basis for advocacy pressure such as the “squeeze play” strategy (see #4, above).
One of the paradoxical features
of international fora is they often provide easier and
more concentrated access by local groups to their own and
foreign governments. The Habitat II conference (Istanbul
1996) provided one example of the creative use of that
access in an internationalized context: the U.S. delegation
and the Trust cooperated to arrange meetings between local
groups representing Third World communities in the U.S.
with developing country governments that helped overcome
the resistance of the latter to making lead poisoning prevention
an international priority.
________________________________________________________________________________
K.W. James Rochow
K. W. James Rochow is President of the Trust For Lead Poisoning Prevention.
The Trust
For Lead Poisoning Prevention has been waging a comprehensive interdisciplinary attack on lead poisoning and
toxics pollution in the developing world for a decade.
The Trust's mission is to achieve
prevention through policy innovation, advocacy, partnerships,
and proactive education/public awareness. Its main programs
are the Global Lead Network and the Global Lead Initiative.
The Trust also partners with international
foundations, institutions, and Network members to implement
regional and local projects.
Contact info
K. W. James Rochow
President
Trust for Lead Poisoning Prevention
33 Alexandria Drive
Oxon Hill MD 20745
USA
Tel: +1-301-567-4700
Fax: +1-301-567-7885
Email: jrochow@globalleadnet.org