Assignment

On
Voice from depending world

Submitted to: Dr. Rezai Karim Khondker

Visiting Professor

Submitted by: Nusrat Pervin

Roll: 05
Batch: 06
Objectives
This review of the literature on the evolution of strategic communications in
international development provides a framework for assessing advocacy
strategies and tools and reviews the current challenges to influencing local
sanitation budgets and expenditures through the use of such tools. Effective
advocacy is often necessary to achieving changes in budgetary allocations, and
shaping how programs or policies are implemented. However,
nongovernmental and community based organizations rarely tailor their
communication to overcome specific implementation barriers, or rigorously
evaluate the effectiveness of their messages and strategies. This review first
provides a brief overview of how communication goals and methods have
evolved and been utilized to change local policymaking, programming and
budgetary allocations in developing countries, focusing on water, sanitation,
and hygiene. Based on this review it provides an effective and useful typology
of advocacy based on the barriers to policy change. The typology may be used
to diagnose the need for and potential of an advocacy and communications
strategy.

State the major issues

Few would contest that we have an obligation to future generations: not to
leave them an impoverished Earth and fragmented societies. In its simplest
interpretation, sustainability is about this concern for intergenerational equity.
Intellectuals and government decision makers are not alone in their concern
about a long-term sustainable future. Small-scale farmers, community activists,
leaders of women's groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and
parents around the world are equally committed to leaving our children a
world worth inheriting.
Much has been written about sustainability, what the term means, and what a
sustainable future might entail. Global policy studies of the conditions required
for sustainability abound, as do grassroots initiatives to improve the lives of
common people by investing in their present and future. How do the
recommendations of top-down analyses mesh with the bottom-up experience
of leaders and activists? What have we in the West learned that must be
shared with the East, and what can the proverbial "South" teach the "North"?
Are the philosophical and methodological differences between the two
irreconcilable? Most importantly, does a single definition of sustainability exist,
and should we be searching for a globally acceptable plan for the future?
The 2050 Project was developed to explore the common elements--and the
deep cleavages--in people's views of a sustainable future to design innovative,
integrated strategies for achieving sustainability in the next century.(1) (See
the box on page 13 for methodological details.) Eighty-eight individuals in 47
countries were asked to submit essays on their visions of a sustainable world,
and 19 interviews were conducted in 14 countries. The majority of those
surveyed were from developing countries (the box on pages 32-33 lists the
participants in the 2050 Project).(Box omitted) This bias was intentional: The
views of the industrialized world are already well known through a rich
literature of Western visions..

Valid arguments
Although such obligations to future persons or generations are intuitively
plausible, whether based in ethical imperatives to avoid causing harm to future
others through present actions or in justice principles that require a fair
distribution of resources over time, several objections cast doubt on the
applicability of leading ethical or justice theories to currently nonexistent
others. These objections have provoked various attempts within ethical theory
and environmental philosophy to address the challenges they pose. Two of the
leading objections to futurity obligations concern uncertainty and identity, and
are sketched below.
The intuitive plausibility of having obligations to future generations owes to
the arbitrary nature of the exclusion of persons from moral consideration
based solely upon their time of birth, over which they have no control.

Major points
A biodiversity paradox is happening: the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth
are also places highly vulnerable to destruction and degradation. Local and
indigenous communities, environmental practitioners and scientists from
developing countries are often at the forefront of the socioecological and
conservation movement in these regions, from Central and South America, to
Africa, to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. However, our experiences and
perspectives, ideas and innovations, are often lost or rarely heard. This blog
aims to give a voice to our work.

Calculation
Thinking about a sustainable society in the 21st century unavoidably leads to
examination of the ethical principles and the prevailing organizational styles in
evidence today. Independent of cultural diversity, the globalization of the
economy and the incidence of communications technology in shaping minds
and people's wishes reduces the effectiveness of any isolated effort to build up
a new society, whether at the national or regional level. Thus, sustainability
will depend basically on the international acceptance of new social principles. I
believe that only this consensus will alleviate international conflicts and
facilitate the convergence of efforts to construct a more satisfactory social
order.