Reims, France — Three hundred years after renowned 19th century philosopher, Jean Jacque Rousseau's birth, academics are this week meeting in Reims, France, to debate his ideas and define a new social contract for the post-2015 era.
Dubbed the Third "Rencontres Internationales de Reims" onthe theme: Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals: Towards a New Social Contract, the forum's debates are geared toward contributing to growing calls for a new social contract in to enhance environmental governance, regional development and social justice.
In a key presentation entitled, Rio, Rousseau and the Social Contract, Mr. Carlos Lopes, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) drew parallels between the Rio Summit agenda and Rousseau's values of a socially cohesive community guaranteeing social autonomy as reflected in his seminal work - The Social Contract.
"Today, three hundred years after Rousseau's birth, twenty years after the original Rio Summit, and following decades of multilateral negotiations, Rousseau's principles of social responsibility, civic freedom and collective sovereignty have come into stark reality, stated Lopes.
"In short, Rousseau's well-worn Social Contract has unmasked the complexity of re-configuring the world's problems into a singular, dominant global governance regime," he added.
Elaborating extensively on current trends in ageing and Africa's booming youthful population, he said Africa's young people have the potential to expand the continent's productive work force, promote job creation and entrepreneurship and harness the enormous resources that the continent is endowed with.
He told the forum that Rousseau and Rio both in terms of historic blueprints, "compel our generation to not shift the costs of inequity to future generations but to start "locking in" some of the benefits."
"Balancing the development sheet needs to be done in ways that do not leave the majority of the world's population disenfranchised," he stated.
He also underscored the need to catalyse market supply chains and enable poor farmers to increase their access to markets in a sustainable and profitable manner. "The problem is not to pit public versus private sector, but the difficulty resides in enhancing and sustaining effective growth in Africa," said Lopes.
He pointed out that the Rio rationale twenty years ago is not radically dissimilar to the Rousseauian ideal of freedom and justice and the need for a participatory form of democracy "that becomes the model of choice."
He also argued for an institutional architecture that is able to define the rules of the game and the manner in which the "game" is played in order to bring greater equity to social cohesion and equity.
He concluded that with the potential of the continent to become an economic powerhouse due to current significant increases in GDP rates, "a new social contract that will keep growth rates steady and equitable, and inspire new found confidence in the youth will enable the continent to actively pursue its "sprint" to transformational development."
