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YOUTH PARTICIPATION IN GLOBAL DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES
The NGOs' Parallel Event, The Global Forum '92
The Global Forum '92 was supposed to be the place where NGOs from different regions and backgrounds were going to hold activities related to UNCED. It was located in the Parque do Flamengo, where dozens of tents were placed to serve as gathering centers for different NGO sectors. Indigenous peoples, environmental educators, women, urban movements, youth and many other sectors had their own tents at the Global Forum. The place was like a circus, with thousands of people, publicity booths, exhibits, and hundreds of different events going on at the same time. If there is something close to a general chaos, the Global Forum would qualify. As described by a young person from Asia:
"Organized with the help of the UNCED Secretariat and funded by multinationals like Coca-Cola, the Global Forum was part soap-opera, part new-age carnival, part human zoo. Instead of protesting against the Earth Summit, most NGOs were there having a celebration. Each day, over the 12 days of Earth Summit, there were concerts, fora, exhibitions and so on at the Global Forum, to keep the 20,000 NGOs people fully occupied and contented." (ASA News, March/June, 1992)"
Youth participation in the Global Forum, through the Youth Open House was very diverse. One of the factors that most affected youth participation was the different backgrounds of the youth at Rio. Some of them came from the preparatory processes carried out for the Youth '92 Conference, others were activists from the A SEED international campaign; also, there were national youth delegations that were sponsored to go to the Forum without coming really from a preparatory process; others came just to see what was going to happen; in the end, all of the youth there demanded an equal standing in the decision-making process that had to happen in the Youth Tent, at the same time that they had different levels of knowledge, expectations and experience in the whole process. This situation made the coordination of activities among the youth, and with other sectors very difficult.
One of the most important NGO activities in Global Forum '92, was the International NGO Forum, which coordinated the initiative of the alternative NGO treaty making process. All the NGO sectors were invited to write a treaty related to its sector or to a specific relevant issues. The treaties were supposed to be documents containing actions that people would commit themselves to implement. Some people thought that the treaty writing process was very important, although it kept NGOs busy and distracted from what was going on in the Earth Summit, at Rio Centro.
Youth also participated in the treaty process. The writing of the Youth Treaty was quite complex. To be honest, the Treaty produced at the end, was not really a document of consensus among the youth in Global Forum, but it represented a process where people really tried hard to be representative and include most of people's concerns and proposals. (The full text of the treaty is included in Section One, Chapter One of this Sourcebook.)
The most important youth actions coordinated in Global Forum '92, led mainly by the Brazilian Youth Committee were: a protest march against militarism, as it was not included in the UNCED agenda (youth marched backwards, imitating military uniforms with paper, from Global Forum to a military barracks 1 km away); a demonstration against the presence of the World Bank in the Global Forum ( youth marched inside Global Forum that ended at the World Bank booth where the leaflets and display materials were burnt, "World Bank" sign was changed to "People's Bank"); support for the "Echo of the Oppressed" protest march (organized by different oppressed sectors of Rio de Janeiro society), and a symbolic boycott of Coca Cola that was present all over Global Forum. Also young people had good contact with the media, and produced different press releases through the 12 days of the conference.
Some proposals for follow up were informally discussed by some of the youth in Rio. Some of them included the creation of a de-centralized world database of youth and student organizations done by youth; the continuation of the A SEED campaign; the need to support capacity building for southern organizations; the need to distribute the information generated through the UNCED process to other youth organizations at different levels; and mainly, the need to keep the UNCED momentum going.