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|  | Liaison Newsletter > LIAISON-Canada Electronic Newsletter #3
Habitat II: More issues than answers Judging from the number of issues in play during the recent Habitat II PrepCom, it seems the message that Habitat organizers have been spreading for the past two years - that Habitat is not just about buildings - has been a little too successful. Speaking at the PrepCom’s opening plenary, Habitat II Secretary-General Wally N’Dow told delegates that the key issues of the conference - jobs, housing, security, services, the quality of the living environment and the right of ordinary people to participate in the decisions affecting their lives - were no less than the major worldwide issues of the day. To his list, N’Dow might have also added issues relating to women, human rights, sustainable development, population, and families, all of which became points of discussion and debate during the PrepCom, which ran from February 5-16 in New York. As a result of this growing and increasingly controversial agenda, much of the final draft document remains in brackets. Entire sections, such as those on commitments, capacity-building and institutional development, and international cooperation and coordination, remain to be debated and resolved. The daunting task of removing all the bracketed language, which reflects either a lack of consensus or the fact that time constraints prevented many items from being debated, will now be left to the official Habitat II conference, which will take place in Istanbul from June 3-14. Concerns by official delegations about piling so much on the agenda that the final document becomes unwieldy and unfocussed, as well as the inability of delegates to refrain from re-living old debates, framed much of the discussions in New York. Members of the NGO women’s caucus, for example, noted that their efforts to include stronger gender-specific language in the document often met grumblings that “This conference is not about women.” Debates around key women’s issues, such as the feminization of poverty and the use of the terms “equal” and “equitable” were also reopened. Many of the more contentious issues on the Habitat II agenda, in fact, echo strongly of past UN conferences. Among them: Housing rights as human rights: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, reaffirmed by the World Conference on Human Rights of 1993, states that: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including … housing.” Yet largely because of American concerns, the sections of the Habitat Agenda dealing with housing rights remain bracketed. Sustainable development vs. sustained economic growth and the right to development: Efforts by the G-77 and China to link sustainable development with sustained economic growth re-opened the whole issue of the right to development. The G-77/China initiative was opposed by some developed countries, and the question will be sent to Istanbul for resolution. Involvement of non-state actors: Special efforts have been made throughout the Habitat process to allow more room for the participation of civil society in the formulation and implementation of the Habitat Agenda. Despite this, some delegates complained about the “privatization of diplomacy”, while some NGOs worried about being assigned responsibilities for implementation without an accompanying transfer of resources. More information on the Habitat II conference, including many of the official documents, is available through the following WWW site: http://habitat.cedar.univie.ac.at/habitat/ |
