summary paper - Alliance of Religions and Conservation

Saanen, Faith Liaison Office and Katherine Marshall, Senior Advisor HDNDE. As with past Faith and
Development Leaders Meetings, the focus will be on dialogue on a range of development issues.
(ii) scale up the use of private sector instruments and channelling of funds, e.g. pension and investment
funds of FBOs to be channelled to socially and environmentally responsible investments, as the case
study on the investments of the church of Sweden and Norway in successful private sector forest
exploration in Mozambique demonstrated. Links with the World Business Council on Sustainable
Development also to be explored.
(iii) focus on urban growth and the brown agenda. The success of FBO in Ghana in the clean up of the
urban environment could serve as an example to all country teams. The Ghana CT basically acted as a
catalyst bringing the FBO together with just some minor funding from the TFESSD.
(iv) focus on key strategic themes and bring key players together, e.g. FBO provide staggering amounts
of education (and health) services all over the world. What influence could the FBO have on the learning
of young people re. environmental issues.
d. Carry out excellent analytical work, e.g. M and E work on the impact of the partnerships.
Martin Palmer
Secretary­General, The Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC)
ARC
This is the next stage of an interesting evolution in the way donor countries and agencies have related to
developing nations, communities and cultures. In the 1970s and 1980s the norm was that development
agencies worked directly with governments in recipient countries. Later, corruption was perceived as a
major factor that often prevented effective projects on the ground. James Wolfensohn in the World Bank
raised this taboo subject very forcefully.
In the 1990s there was a reaction – a popularly held sense that in order to be effective, development
agencies should work outside the government. That was the decade of the NGOs. A problem is that
many NGOs could be seen as clones, resembling their donors in almost every way, except that they are
dependent. On the other side, donors see NGOs as service providers and as watchdogs.
Recently the buzzword is a wider, more amorphous body called “civil society”. Up until now the faiths
have rarely been invited to the table except in their NGO incarnations (eg Christian Aid, Caritas) and Rick
Scobey talking about recent meetings he has been to underlined the fact that most of the time religious
groups had not been invited to the table as part of the civil society. Today, if development agencies are
considering inviting the faiths to become partners, this is the next natural stage of evolution. There is no
suggestion that they should ever be the only voices, but that in a plurality of groups, the faiths should
always be there.
Sometimes people ask: where are the faiths The truth is that many of he faiths have been working on
“development issues” themselves all along. They have schools, forests, hospitals, old people’s homes,
gardens, farms, small industries, buildings – and they too have been looking at issues like poverty
reduction, organic farming, forest management – using their own language and teachings. And if the
development organizations know little of this, it is perhaps simply because they have never asked. In
many countries the faiths are the only providers of education, health services and so on because the
governments have not been able to offer these services or they have given them back to the faiths.
Here are some examples:
* The World Council of Churches set up a full time department of climate change in 1990, after a group of
Christian women on islands in the South Pacific came to them and said that their lands were
disappearing.
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