Eradicating Poverty: Human Dignity at the Core of Policy Dialogue

Year 2015 is a signpost for international cooperation, partnership and solidarity. Time for assessing processes and outcomes of the MDGs; and for understanding whether, how and why progresses were made. Time to spell out the post-2015 SDGs’ Targets in details, into a true policy perspective – and everybody knows that details can make a lot of difference. This special moment may simply end up with a consensus on a new, more complete and encompassing, “book of dreams” for the future of our world. More cynically, this consensus may result from “aggregation”: individual actors – countries, public agencies and non-governmental organizations – agree on a long list of targets, each loosely defined so to accommodate all perspectives, to preserve or expand their political and economic space, to promote their special priorities and agendas, to gain political visibility or some command over resources. We on the contrary need to hope and work and for more than that. People, real people with a face and a name, are suffering from hunger, deprivation, injustice, denial of elementary freedoms, environmental degradation. Heeding their call means activating and decidedly supporting those processes that can effectively lead to ending poverty and hunger. Here, in a sense, all that matter are the details. Real names, real faces. Choosing reality – with all its contradictions – as the starting point for cooperation, partnership and solidarity provides a realistic, unitary starting point for spelling out policies details. In a sense, the political framework shifts from mapping the policy space, so that each actor’s particular agenda can be adequately represented in the overall emerging consensus, to sustaining processes of development, building on human dignity and sustaining bottom-up initiatives.