Adult Learning, Global Civil Society and Politics
by Budd Hall
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
Introduction
I am currently a faculty member in the Adult Education and Community Development programme of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. From 1975 - 1991, I was working with the International Council for Adult Education, a global civil society organization concerned with research, information, training and networking in the field of adult education. I have been engaged in doing and writing about participatory research from the early 1970s to the present day. I am also working on a longer term collaborative writing project on globalization, adult learning and global civil society. This paper is in a way a bridge between my participatory research and global civil society work. I have never tried to make the link on paper before and put these forward simply as preliminary remarks.
This paper is part of a larger set of papers related to civil society and the construction of knowledge systems. This paper is a product of a complex interaction between those civil society spaces which I occupy as a social movement adult educator or as an environmental adult educator and spaces in a dominant rich country white male academic system which I also benefit from and work within as a Professor at the University of Toronto. This paper represents theorizing which has arisen first as an actor in a global civil society organization and later as an academic. It is worth noting that myself and the many others I have worked with in the global civil society spheres of influence in the 1970s and 1980s were creating knowledge about the opportunities and dangers of the global market utopia as much as 20 years before the books on 'globalization' began to churn out of the universities. Our civil society location made it impossible for us to ignore the changing global relations of power. That experience has profoundly influenced me so that I know that if we talk of 'epistemic privilege' in terms of civil society knowledge, it is to those women and men located in civil society networks and structures to whom we give that privilege. And as we have said for many years about participatory research, it is in our collective interest to find ways to support autonomous space for the construction of knowledge by global civil society workers and intellectuals. We all can play a hand in limiting or transforming the monopoly which universities, particularly minority (rich country) universities continue to experience in many of the social sciences. This paper therefore comes from the global adult education community and represents one effort to see how the links between adult learning, globalization and global civil society can be made.
The world is not OK
In spite of the glow and the glisten of video images, in spite of the tunes and tones of the global markets' pulsating sounds; in spite of virtually unlimited money being spent to sell all aspects of a consumerist vision, most people in the world do not feel that the dominant world economic system works for them. Most people feel less secure now than they did 25 years ago. Taken as a whole, the combined machineries of global market domination, are, as my colleague Edmund O'Sullivan says, "a killing machine".(1) If there were to be only one theme which all adult educators were to work with, this would be my suggestion as a place to start. The world is not OK.
This paper addresses themes of adult learning and the development of global civil society. In doing that I deal briefly with my understanding of globalization, some comments on the moment in which we live, the growth of global civil society, and some implications for adult education, adult educators and adult learning.
What do we mean by Globalization?
Globalization is being experienced in a very wide variety of forms and practices. The most commonly understood form of globalization is that of economic structures, business and production. But there are several other forms or dimensions of globalization which I also wish to mention: the state, communications, movements of people, sales of arms, violence and crime, and resistance and the rise of global forms of civil society.
Each day, according to the UNDP Human Development Report of 1995, over one Trillion dollars changes hands for financial transactions totally apart from funds needed for global trade purposes. These transactions have to do with currency speculation by private and public banks, with investments of all kinds through the computerized stock markets of the world, with bond undertakings at both private and state levels. The political leadership in most parts of the world has joined the call for each of us to play our part in the competitive global market. Products are assembled everywhere, sold everywhere crossing borders sometimes scores of time before finding an ultimate place of rest or sale. And the movement of durable goods does not stop with sale. Within days, weeks or years most of the goods produced in the contemporary world will be discarded and our goods then rejoin the global search for another resting place. If we live in the cities, we send our waste to the rural areas, if our waste is poisonous or toxic, we will send it to the furthest reaches of our countries or failing that to the poorest parts of the world where countries fight over the right to become a dumping ground for the waste of the rich. Jobs, health and safety conditions, environmental regulations, human rights, and immigration policies are thrown out as deregulation on a global basis strips national legislation of its force.
The state itself has taken on global forms. The richest states of Europe now work together in a powerful economic union where the restrictions and limitations of individual governments are giving way to regional forms of state control. In Asia no serious economic decisions are taken by a single state government without direct or indirect talks with governments of trading partners such as Japan, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and increasingly Thailand and Malaysia. The United Nations system and related regional banking and development agencies are a further layer of an internationalized state function. These multi-lateral bodies have more power and influence in the medium and smaller states with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank taking on nearly full control of the economies of the least powerful states.
Crime and violence are also disturbing features of our globalizing world. The complex combination of rich country drug use and poor country weak economies create patterns of international activity which take advantage of all the modern means of communications and money transfers. The world over people are caught in vicious patterns of cruelty and violence which spills over into each and everyone of our homes.(2) Entrenched poverty, the increased in the gap between the rich and the poor, the flight of people for economic and security reasons are but a few features of the globalization of violence and crime.
A related form of globalization relates to the arms trade. While the overall world expenditures on the military has declined since the 1989 accords between the formed Soviet Union and the United States, the arms trade itself has taken on a new life. Particularly in the form of low cost ways to kill. The United States in particular has accelerated its sales from roughly $9 billion in 1987 to over $22 billion in 1992. In that same period the former Soviet Union has decreased arms transfers from $30 billion to $2.8 billion. According to war historian John Keegan, those,
who have died in war since 1945 have, for the most part, been killed by cheap, mass-produced weapons and small-calibre ammunition, costing little more than the transistor radios and batteries which flooded the world during the same period.(3)
And among the low cost weapons which cross our borders each day are land-minds which can be produced for several dollars each and which can kill or maim a person with ease. There are an estimated 100 million land-mines distributed in roughly 60 countries around the globe.(4)
And while money flows with the speed of light, goods and services at the speed of air and sea transport, people are on the move as never before in human history. The combination of economic destruction, civil conflict and positive inducements to move has created global movements of people. Of course people do not move as easily as either goods or finance capital. The idea of the global market is that people will stay in communities where low wages can be sustained under conditions that are inexpensive to maintain from social or security points of view. In my country, Canada, money can move in and out between Mexico, the United States and our financial institutions with ease, but people have much more difficulty. The open capital market has not produced an open labour market. On global terms over 100 million people are refugees, living in countries that they were not born in against their choice.(5)
As D'Arcy de Olievera and Tandon point out, "the weaker, the more vulnerable, the powerless, those who do not produce or consume anything of value for the world market, those who can hardly be privatized or internationalized are becoming expendable."(6) The same sweeping forces for global economic integration is deepening the age old divisions of the rich and the poor. Out global village has an expanding slum area and the affluent are increasingly afraid of the poor. The many faces of globalization creates not surprisingly new forms of resistance, new calls for community revitalization, a renewed emphasis on self-sufficiency, withdrawals into searches for security through reinforcing cultural identities, new forms of community economic development. And as this paper will explore later, new forms of regional and global networks of activists, non-governmental agencies and citizens are actively contesting the movement towards poverty, ecological imbalance and exclusion.
The Shipwreck of the Grand Society
Serge Latouche, a French economics professor who writes extensively on themes of globalization and issues of contemporary western economic culture, provides us with an extensive critique what he calls the grand society. The grand society is the western market oriented ideal of modernity and consumption put forward as the highest stage of human civilization by liberal ideologues. He argues that we are experiencing the shipwreck of both the idea and the practices of the grand society.(7) He notes that the shipwreck of grand society is producing ever larger and growing groups of 'castaways'. In the rich countries not only does economic development produce ever larger numbers of maladjusted people, but now contributes to a rising new poor, push-outs from schools, the homeless, the chronically unemployed, the de-institutionalized and so forth. The estimates are that there are well beyond 100 million such rich country castaways.
The second group of castaways are the indigenous minorities throughout the world. Being first, being Aboriginal, being indigenous has become a nearly universal qualification for being cast off the ship of Grand Society. There are between 250 and 300 million first peoples of the world. The third group of castaways are the most numerous and live in what the United Nations currently calls the Least Developed Countries. These are not the countries represented in the "emerging markets" categories in the world's stock markets, they are the countries where the physical infrastructure of western development is deteriorating. They are countries were each year more and more children lose places in schools. Much of Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America are the homes to hundreds millions of people castaway from the shipwreck of the grand society.
But as in the analysis of citizen activism undertaken by D'Arcy de Oliveira and Tandon in their study of global civil society, Latouche notes that in spite of the exclusion of these many people from the drawing rooms of the satisfied and secure, the castaways taken collectively, "also constitute a milieu in which cultural fermentation can take place: they are the laboratories of a possible future"(8)
Other economists have offered up elaborate critiques of the science of economics itself as a major tool in extending the Grand Society or attempting to extend the vision of the Grand Society as the only paradigm for human economic interaction. Marilyn Waring in her book, If Women Counted, lay much of the blame on the patriarchal nature of the practice of economics. She argues that men and historically men concerned with the financing of WWII, have created a system of national economic accounting which measures only the narrowly interpreted production activities as being of value economically. For example she notes, an oil tanker disaster, is from national economic accounting terms, one of the most productive forms of activity possible. The hole is the ship has to be repaired, thousands of people are thrown into action rescuing sea animals or trying to reduce the impact of the spills, insurance companies leap into action, legislators work night and day, other ships have to take over from the disabled ship and on and on. The fact that the spill destroys a part of an irreplaceable ecosystem is never figured into the economics at all.(9)
Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., authors of For the Common Good, have their own description of the shipwreck,
...At a deep level of our being we find it hard to suppress the cry of anguish, the scream of horror--the wild words required to express wild realities. We human beings are being led to a dead end--all too literally. We are living by an ideology of death and accordingly we are destroying our own humanity and killing the planet. Even the one great success of the programme that has governed us, the attainment of material affluence, is now giving way to poverty...;
The global system will change during the next forty years, because it will be physically forced to change. But if humanity waits until it is physically compelled to change, its options will be few indeed....If it changes before it has to change...it will not avoid suffering and crises, but it can be drawn through them by a realistic hope for a better world."(10)
Thomas Berry, theologian and cultural historian adds his own analysis to the 'shipwreck' metaphor. His is one voice in this emergent consciousness. He makes a seminal contribution in his formulation of a broad system of interpretation which locates human history in the context of earth history as well the history of the universe itself. He names our historical moment the `terminal Cenozoic.' (11)
The Neolithic period, the Civilizational period, and our modern period of Progress have so far been judged, not by their effects on the integral functioning of the planet, but by our rational understanding, the increase in our human comfort, in our consumer satisfaction, in our capacity to travel more rapidly from one place to another, by our capacity for communication, by our control over illness, by the abundance of our food supply. We judged our advance simply by its benefits for ourselves. According to Berry, were insensitive to the effects this was having on the natural world. We built our dams for electrical power and thus profoundly disturbed the flow of the rivers. We forced the soil to produce, not according to its own rhythm, but according to the demands we made through our chemical fertilizers. We took the petroleum from the earth and used it for heat, energy, fertilizers, plastics, fibres, and a multitude of other uses, little realizing that we were disturbing the wonderful balance of the elements that nature had worked out over the millennia. We paid little attention to the effects that would result from the carbon and sulphur that we were pouring into the atmosphere. In a certain sense, we humans have `borrowed on our savings'.(12) Suddenly in these late decades of the twentieth century we are becoming aware of our profound disruption of the natural world, the extinction of species, the killing off of the rainforests, the pollution of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere as well as the geosphere.
Berry contends that the Cenozoic is being terminated by the plundering industrial economy that is considered as the flowering of the fruits of western euro-centric culture. This plundering industrial culture is at present being considered as the glory of the human. As western culture glorifies its achievements over the vast regions of our planet, we are also aware of an immense shadow that it casts on the planet at large. Our supposed higher achievements must now be reexamined and reevaluated in terms of what is happening now to the planet on which we live and on which we depend absolutely for survival. Throughout our post-war history, North Americans were cultured and schooled into an era of consumption of the Earth's resources heretofore unknown in the total history of the Earth
The Emergence of Global Civil Societies
As has been noted earlier the combined forms of globalization are finding a variety of responses, forms of resistance and transformative possibilities. The strengthening of forms of global civil societies are one part of the complex set of responses. The emergence of a set of visible and articulated global civil societies is both conceptual and practical. I would argue that our ability as intellectuals to describe and analyse new social phenomena often lags behind the creative impulses of women and men to construct new forms of human interaction. This is certainly the case vis a vis the recognition or naming of global civil society. Civil society has re-emerged over the past 25 years as a useful concept to describe the autonomous space for citizen action, organization or theorization. Michael Welton, has recently produced a thoughtful review of the historical origins and the contemporary renaissance of the concept of civil society in relation to adult education.(13) Welton argues that, "the idea of a third sphere of social action--separate from but in interplay with--the formal realms of economy and the state holds out the promise of providing us with a 'unifying project' towards the 21st Century".(14) And in Welton's formulation, civil society combines the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (voluntary, political parties, etc), the sphere of movements (women, ecology) and the sphere of 'publics' (communications).
This paper argues that a set of global civil societies or a complex and elaborate global civil society has emerged and has gained visibility in the context of global economic consolidation. Like Locke's argument in his original notion of civil society that human communities exist as collectivities and in possession of agency earlier than and independent from the creation of political society, I would argue that the forms of global civil society have existed many years prior to their contemporary rediscovery. I would argue however that just as the concept of civil society holds out some promise for a renewed understanding of transformative politics, the practice and concept of global civil society holds out promise for a global politics and a global transformation. I understand global civil society to refer to at least two related phenomena. The first phenomena can be understood as the sum-total of local, national or regional civil society structures. Within this form of evolving global civil society practice, the tasks are the identification of local, national and regional forms of civil society and the creation of ways to strengthen communication, coordination, reflection, capacities to act among the discreet organizational forms which already exist. Nurses, public health workers, social workers, veterinarian, teachers and thousands of groups have over the past 70 years been linking up with their respective colleagues in country after country. In addition there have been an entire new generation of civil society organizations created in both the rich and the poor countries during the 1970s and 80s, the ubiquitous NGOs or non-governmental organizations. These newer forms of civil society organizations have been increasingly reaching out to those share common values in other parts of the world. The CIVICUS study of global civil society represents a strong first effort at articulating the role and vision of these hundreds and thousands of smaller and larger civil society structures.(15) The emphasis in their study is on understanding the phenomena civil society organizations within the context of various regions (arabic-speaking, Africa, Asia, etc).
A second form of global civil society construction is represented by the proliferation of specifically global forms of civil society. The Nestle Milk Boycott organizations, the various environmental organizations, women's organizations, peace groups and thousands of others have arisen within spaces of world citizen action. For these forms of global civil society, no national or local identity can be necessarily attributed. Leadership shifts according to functions, timing, locations of activities or cost effectiveness. The main organizational form of these kinds of global civil society structures are the International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOS). A definitive and in-depth study such as the CIVICUS study, of these forms of global civil society structures has yet to be undertaken. We do however have some ideas about the nature and extent of the INGO phenomena.
An International Non-Governmental Organization has its own international governing body composed of representatives or leadership from a number of different countries. And while the address of the headquarters is most often in a single nation, an INGO is not an expression of any given national position. It reflects consensus from a variety of geographic and most often ideological locations. Each INGO has its own international constituency and distinct and varied ways of working. Each INGO looks after its own administration and its own funding. INGOs are responsible to their members not to any government. INGOs have their headquarters in many countries around the world, both North and South. Some of the older ones are located near United Nations agency headquarters, many newer ones have their homes in the South.
According to the Canadian International Development Agency,
INGOs are global networks of individuals, non-governmental organizations or professional associations. They generally focus on one specific issue and they are driven by accepted universal values. INGOs frequently play an important policy and coordinating role at the international level."(16)
Other Sites of Global Civil Society Formation
The large United Nations fora of the past 15 years have been a particularly important space for global civil society formation. There have been increasingly important gatherings of autonomous civil society organizations either as part of the intergovernmental meetings or as a separate NGO forum operating in parallel since the 1985 World Women's Conference in Nairobi and including Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995 and the Women's Conference in Beijing of the same year. 1996 has seen the Habitat conference in Istanbul, Turkey. In addition there have been a continual series of alternative summits organized each and every time that the governments of the G-7 get together. And at each of these events the sophistication of the NGO or Global Civil Society organizations grows. In Copenhagen a call was floated for the organization of a "Civil Society Summit" that would be called independently of the UN system before the end of the decade to signal the full coming of age of global civil society.
These global events serve to give visibility to the continuing expansion of numbers and professionalism in the global civil society sectors. The work on treaties, policy formulation, setting of organizational agendas, government lobbying and direct action taken in Rio in 1992 for example was remarkable. Taken together the documents produced there represent years of reflection, often deep democratic debate and input from hundreds of thousands of people from all parts of the world. They represented a source of inspiration and material to study, along with the governmental documents as a way of understanding best how global networks function in this day and age. Importantly these spaces serve as indicators of growing consensus around acceptable forms of global cooperation. The principles upon which all '92 Global Forum participants agreed included:
1. Respect for earth's ecosystems to ensure biological and cultural diversity;
2. Recognition of the rights of all people to basic environmental needs;
3. Recognition that poverty effects us all and is increased by debt flows from the South to the North;
4. Recognition that national boundaries do not conform to Earth's ecological realities;
5. Rejection of the use of military and other force for the resolution of conflict;
6. Calls for free access to information particularly by those in the South or in subjugation;
7. Recognition that those who have been responsible for environmental destruction must cease such activities and bear the costs associated with such destruction.
8. Calls for a shift from a society dominated by men to one which more accurately reflects the valued contributions of men and women to human and ecological welfare.
9. Recognition that threats to the biosphere have increased in rate, magnitude and scale to such extent that inaction would be negligent.(17)
In an analysis of the Halifax People's Summit entitled, "Building Civil Society 'From the Ground Up", Andrew Parkin, noted that the organizers of the Halifax People's Summit also adopted a list of core principles or values(known as the seven P's) to which all participants were assumed to subscribe: poverty elimination and employment; progress for all; protection of the environment; power to the people; promotion of equality and fairness; preservation of cultural diversity and peace.(18)
Parkin suggests following the works of Calhoun, Cohen, Keane and Offe, that the new social movements interact with global civil society in at least four ways: the strengthening of global civil society; defending civil society; expanding civil society and rendering civil society organizations more inclusive.(19)
Adult Education: Possibilities and Problems
At its most basic, learning is the process by which we make sense or give meaning to our experiences. It is the name which we give to that most creative of human activities which allows us to become conscious of our movements through life and the movements of others and other processes. In short our ability to survive, resist or prosper depends on our collective capacities to learn and upon our finding ways to share that learning with each other. Adult education to me is that process or those processes which stimulate or create conditions for human individual and collective learning.
Adult education is also about choice. As adult educators or as persons with interests in the facilitation of adult learning, both the way we work and the content of our work important. While we may not have a full range of choice in each of our adult learning contexts, we have the choice to understand the strengths and the limitations of what ever work we do. We also have the choice sometimes to make direct contributions to actions which may have the potential for larger impact than just ourselves. Given the contemporary moments we are each experiencing in our lives, in our communities and in our networks or movements, the choices we make are important.
Transformative adult education is about supporting shifts away from the vision of growth-oriented, market-driven, and consumerist human societies towards other visions. It is about contributing to the transformation of structures of power and domination whether discursive, electronic, mechanical, social, or physical. It is about self-awareness, critique and creation. Adult education and intentional adult learning has an important role to play in the strengthening of global civil society.
I want to make perfectly clear that I am not advocating that the primary purposes of adult learning should be focused on the interplay with global civil society. I believe that there are many effective and valuable roles for adult educators and adult learning to focus on which may not appear to have any direct bearing on the question of global civil society, but the focus of this section of this paper is on the critical role that adult education could play in this important area of emerging political and cultural activity.
Self-Education of ourselves as adult learners/educators
The first place to begin is with ourselves. In the contexts of shifting paradigms and sharply divergent and contested visions of community, we need to open ourselves up to new ways of understanding who we are and what we do. That means being open to an on-going process of self-learning that functions somewhat like the peeling away of the layers of an onion. It means understanding the nature of our privilege. It means my deepening my own understanding what whiteness, maleness, nature-domination, hetero-sexuality, able-bodiedness, rich-countryness, English languageness and related badges of privilege mean to my ability to see, hear and comprehend our de-centering or re-centering world.
It means finding out more about the specific ways in which global corporate power is organized and how it effects life in my community, university or life. It means finding ways to read through the dominant media messages of consumption. It means working towards a way to break the consumer addictions in myself. It means deepening my conceptual understanding or at least keeping myself open to learning from aspects notions of civil society and social movement theory, queer theory, race theory, ecological theory, diverse feminisms and so forth so that I can better recognize critical learning moments or creative political moments. It is about recognizing limits, stepping back and developing a stronger sense of personal location.
Strengthening the learning dimensions of global civil society
There are literally thousands of threads of global civil society in the making. Let me take the environmental movement as an example. The environmental or ecological movements is structured through many local and international civil society organizations. Because much of the environmental information comes from science and scientists, there is a way in which the entire environmental movement is information driven. Many environmental organizations or environmental research projects focus on various kinds of environmental assessments, presentations of global warming statistics, energy use models or resource use assessments. There seems to be a feeling often that the public will be transformed through the sheer presentation of data. Press conferences are called and the 'facts' are presented or talks are given with slides and data which seldom produce the kinds of impact the environmentalists would hope for. Those of us who work in the field of adult education know that top-down information strategies are seldom the most effective way to stimulate learning especially action-oriented learning.
International networks or global civil society organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, the International Women's Tribune Centre, CIVICUS, the World YWCA or any others could increase the effectiveness of their work through increasing the attention paid to principles of transformative adult education or popular education. For example many of the information programmes of the various global NGOs or networks would be much more effective if they were to be re-conceptualized as learning networks or adult education programmes because of the emphasis needed on interactive starting-where-one-lives learning. Global learning strategies or global adult education programmes are an essential component of an eventual global civil society.
Making the Civil Society link for adult education organizations
The adult education movement itself contains elements of the emerging global civil society. There are already existing networks working in the spirit of global civil society. The International Council for Adult Education, the Asia and South Pacific Bureau for Adult Education, The International Federation of Worker's Education Associations, the Commonwealth Association for the Education and Training of Adults, the International Congress for University Adult Education, the International League for Social Commitment in Adult Education are some of the better known such networks. Adult educators should find out more about these global networks within their own field of study and find ways to make a contribution or a link.
The formal structures of adult education reach literally tens of millions of adults throughout the world in a complex and intricate variety of adult education offerings. Elements of the shift from the vision of a world which doesn't work to a world which might work better are possible to include in literally any course or programme that can be conceived. It may require some extra effort, it may require the development of a whole set of new tools or ways of working, but it can be done and it is important to try. Aside from the formal channels of media communication, the combined network of adult education structures reach a larger proportion of the world's adult population than any other single form of communication. And while much of the offerings may be technical, vocational or in other ways circumscribed, something could be done in each and every case to draw attention to the need for and the possibilities of change.
Conclusion
The contemporary global political economic context is characterized by a major paradox: while the complex web of multi-national corporate and related financial interests gives the appearance of robustness and strength, it is actually quite fragile. The global market operates currently outside of structures of accountability. Profit, not social, ecological or distributive justice, call the shots. Further the market depends on both a continued expansion by incorporating more people into patterns of increased consumption and on increasing the density of consumption by converting people into higher profit per sale items. But with the numbers of absolute poor growing in even the rich countries, with growing biospheric limitations to certain patterns of global production, with increasing threats to security through increased violence, the house of cards may tumble when we least expect it.
Secondly our moment is characterized by an increasingly vocal and articulate backlash to the for profit vision of global corporate greed. There is near universal acceptance by those working in the field of international cooperation that the concept and patterns associated with the word 'development' is bankrupt. A wave of recent books, the most recent being David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World, are coming to wide circulation with detailed accounts of how and why global corporate interests are out of control. Cultural Historians such as Thomas Berry tell us that we have during this century crossed the turning point of our Cenozoic period (the period during which all of our flora and fauna came into life) where over have of the species of our era have gone into extinction. Indigenous prophecies in more than one continent are reaching outwards to the rest of us to say, 'enough...stop'. We are at a point in time when choice is upon us.
Adult educators, all those concerned with lifelong learning, popular education or any other type of public learning have the possibility to participate in that choice. What we do counts on both a personal as well as a community and institutional basis. There are many worthwhile ways in which we might act. In this paper I am suggesting that deepening our understanding of how global citizens action is being constructed, finding ways to make links with the many forms of global civil society activity, and lending our skills and networks to the creations of new ways to live are exciting and valuable ways for each of us to be part of a new future.
References
1. O'Sullivan, Edmund no date The Dream Drives the Action (unpublished manuscript)
2. The Commission on Global Governance. 1995 Our Global Neighbourhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Keegan, John A History of Warfare quoted in The Report of the Commission of Global Governance
4. Grimmett, Richard. 1994 Conventional Arms transfers to the Third World. Washington D.C.: Library of Congress.
5. UN High Commission on Refugees. 1995 Annual Report. Geneva: UNHCR
6. Miguel D'Arcy de Oliveira and Rajesh Tandon. 1995 "An Emerging Global Civil Society" in Citizens: Strengthening Global Civil Society. Washington D.C.: CIVICUS
7. Latouche, Serge 1993 In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development. London: Zed Books
8. Latouche, Serge. IBID. p. 42
9. Warring, Marilyn If Women Counted
10. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, and Environment and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. p. 21. Daly and Cobb begin their introduction with the following quote from John Maynard Keynes, "Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking".
11. Swimme, Brian, Berry, Thomas, The Universe Story: An Autobiography from Planet Earth 1992.
12. Ornstein, Robert, Ehrlich, Paul, New World New Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1989).
13. Welton, Michael 1996 Civil Society as Theory and Project: Adult Education and the Renewal of Global Citizenship. Paper for Reconciling the Irreconcilable Conference, University of Leuven, May 9-11, 1996.
14. Welton IBID. p.43
15. D'Arcy de Oliveira and Tandon. 1995 Citizens: Strengthening Global Civil Society. Washington D.C.: CIVICUS
16. INGO Division, CIDA. INGO Discussion Paper. Hull: INGO Division, CIDA, October 23, 1991. p. 1.
17. NGO '92 Global Forum. The Earth Charter. Rio de Janeiro, June 11th, 1992. pp. 2-3.
18. Parkin, Andrew C. "Building Civil Society 'From the Ground Up: The Halifax People's Summit" presented at the conference on "The Emergence of Civil Society: A Precondition or a Problem for Democracy" Centre for Studies in Democratisation, University of Warwick, England, February 16-17, 1996
19. Parkin IBID. p. 17
This paper was presented as the keynote at the
Midwest Research to Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing and Community Education
at Michigan State University, East Lancing, Michigan, October 17, 1997.
Canadian Network for Democratic Learning (CANDLE)
a Discussion Paper on Renewing
an Adult Education Network
in English-speaking Canada
Introduction
We would like your help in rebuilding an adult education network in Canada. Two meetings have been held to clarify the role and purpose of an adult education network. At the second meeting, held in Toronto in April, a Steering Committee was formed in order to gather responses to this idea, solidify support from committed groups (see Supporting Groups section) and, hopefully, form a permanent body at a meeting next fall.
Up until last year the Canadian Association for Adult Education (CAAE) acted as a network for adult education groups and educators in English Canada. Once an inclusive organization, over the years its constituencies have gone in separate and independent directions. Recently it lost its government funding. Some of the members of the CAAE Board and other committed groups and individuals are driving this initiative to rebuild a new and different adult education network.
This discussion paper gives some broad value statements and guiding principles for a prospective adult education organization. We would like your response additions, objections, editing and other suggestions.
Vision
Our vision is to build an effective, interdependent and articulate organization that draws together a broad range of people committed to grassroots and participatory adult education. We want to reflect the wide variety of approaches to democratic learning and help develop and advocate for clear alternatives to top-down, government or corporate-driven models of adult education.
Guiding Principles
CANDLE will be guided by the following principle statements: We believe adult education should work to develop and promote democracy, citizenship and civil society. We will reflect a balance of philosophical and practical approaches to education in our work. We will practice sensitivity to language as it relates to Quebec and to minority language groups. We will reflect the rich diversity and adult education heritage of Canada. We will ensure that we reflect the best of the fast-changing society and field we work and learn in. We will work to bring progressive and alternative views of adult education before our members. We will be proactive, responsive, inclusive and visionary in our practices. CANDLE will be run by its members in a collaborative and cooperative fashion.
Objectives
- To develop and advocate for democratic (participatory) and grassroots approaches to adult education.
- To provide our members with relevant and focused services, such as: information and communication services, education opportunities and discussion and brainstorming sessions.
- To build stronger international ties with other adult education groups.
- To build the capacity of adult education organizations and educators in Canada.
- To be proactive about developing adult education initiatives, policies and projects.
Models for Organizational Structure
We are considering the following issues regarding organizational structure:
Governing council: should the organization be run by an elected or appointed council? For instance, should regional representatives be appointed by regional groups or elected by regional members of CANDLE? How should the governing council be organized? How can we ensure balanced representation by region, equity group, organizations (national and grassroots)? Should we have designated seats and members-at-large? Will the council be led by an elected Chair, a rotating chair, a facilitating group or executive committee, co-chairs, etc.? What will our decision-making process be? Consensus, 50% + 1, 2/3 majority, membership referendum, etc.?
Activities
CANDLE will ensure that its objectives are met through the following activity areas:
Communications and networking (e.g. newsletter, web site, workshops, discussion groups, study circles, committees, etc.) Advocacy and public policy development: coordinate collective initiatives in advocacy and policy development on behalf of Canadian adult educators Public education (e.g. radio, TV, pamphlets, web site, etc.) Professional development (e.g. conferences, workshops, brainstorming/discussion sessions, etc.) ¿"_¿ Best practices (e.g. dissemination of models, tools, techniques, resources, etc.)
Membership
We are considering the following issues under membership:
The following categories of membership have been suggested:
- community-based,
- union-based,
- institution-based,
- aboriginal and
- general.
Categories of membership could be reflected on the governing body of the organization by designating seats. Representatives would either be elected or appointed to these designated seats.
This document was posted by Nancy Hyland. The committee that drafted this discussion paper is seeking the advice of colleagues in the field of adult education. Comments and suggestions on the draft can be directed to Nancy at hlfxtrad.hylandnm@gov.ns.
Posted on 19 July 1997.
