| Quarterly Newsletter N° 9 | January- March 2007 |
PEKEA NEWSLETTER
IN THIS ISSUE (click on a heading to jump to that section) :
1- Editorial by Yves Berthelot
2- Lessons from Dakar conference and its building on the previous ones
3- Moral Economy in Africa, by K. Sugimura
4 - Information, Publications, Conferences, Websites
1- Editorial by Yves Berthelot
With this first newsletter of 2007, let me wish you and your family a year of peace and achievements, a year during which dialogue and exchanges among PEKEA's members give us a sense of common undertaking and brotherhood.
In 2006, PEKEA organised for the club of local governments a very successful seminar on Local indicators of societal progress and I am confident that the club will extend and contribute to enrich PEKEA understanding of participative democracy. Dakar was also a success thanks to Dakar University hospitality, Abdou Salam Fall's warm efficiency, and the quality of interventions and debates.
The task ahead is exciting: we have to take stock of the work accomplished over the last four years, sum it up in a book and organise a scientific workshop where will be designed the future programme of work of PEKEA. The challenge is not only intellectual, it is also financial: for PEKEA to have a future we need a stimulating vision and means.
We rely on the dedication of those who committed to contribute and we hope that many of you will help.
Yves Berthelot
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2- Lessons from Dakar conference and its building on the previous ones
We must try to write down a short synthesis about what we learnt from the DAKAR conference before we may get the results of the on-going work carried out under the guidance of Jean Louis Perrault to take stock of the five world conferences organised since 2002. Thus I will give only short remarks, I hope they will be useful to those who could not come and that those who participated to the debate will compared them to their own conclusions.
First, let me confirm that from the Rennes Conference (2003) on, we go on claiming that even if markets have a necessary role to circulate the goods, we have to take another way in determining and in observing what makes value for our society. The observance of this value means to ensure that everybody may live with dignity and this will guide our analyses, our policies, our activities. They are also guided by the awareness of our -individual and collective- responsibility to decide and to build altogether, to create this world, to elaborate our common future . It is in this line that we stood (in Bangkok, 2004) with a constructive and methodological stance, away from the protracted wrangling between sustainable development and growth. This ethics of conviction for dignity and that of responsibility seem to us accompanying the wish of the great majority of the people and therefore these ethics must be carried out within the field of the organisation of powers, that is politics.
The first demand is to avoid that democracy give up in front of ecocracy , to avoid that the sovereignty of the people disappear behind the sovereignty of the law of the market. The enforcement of democracy relies on measures that allow the citizenship of everyone to express itself through various processes according to each level from the local to the global (what we discussed in Rennes in 2005). The individual commitment and the individual expression give to everyone, powers, but for the good of the society, not to create an individual becoming a sovereign. It is this question about the articulation of the individual and collective powers that was mainly addressed during our Dakar Conference (2006) having in mind to put the economy in the service of society. How to succeed in avoiding to go from free individual commitment towards the other extreme where society is crushing individual identity and autonomy?
A liberated individual, recovering enough power to act, is soon ready to do anything, either because she or he feels abandoned, or because he wants to follow desires that are potentially beyond any boundaries. Thus, common rules are necessary and voluntary adhesion to them by anybody may be said as a required loyalty from the individual towards the collective and law by which, the collective is ensuring the same loyalty to the individual. It is a matter of acceptance of a common law - democratically deliberated between citizens beforehand- and a matter of compliance to it. The individual is a citizen committed in the collective making of a law that gives rights to her or him, these rights are warranted by the collective; however we must not stop here, the individual must commit herself or himself, she or he has not only rights but also duties linked to the respect to this common law. It is a matter of behaving individually and collectively with loyalty, especially in economic activities. This loyalty may allow the individual blooming with dignity and responsibility and it is limiting in the same time individual desires so that they might inscribed themselves within the building of a "good society": the one that ensures the achievement of the collective well-being following a socially aware and democratic process.
Marc Humbert
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3- Moral Economy in Africa, by K. Sugimura
From now on, in each of our Newsletters, we will introduce a group of works in line with our common way of thinking and we will try to turn around the world to help dissemination and cross-fertilization of various attempts to build a political and ethical knowledge in economic activities. In this start of 2007, I am pleased to introduce to you a piece from Kazuhiko Sugimura, one of our Japanese colleagues who are carrying out analyses based on the concept of Moral Economy mainly applied to Africa and working with African colleagues. This group has already produced a huge number of works applied to African and Asian countries. They are observing rural societies and questioning the usual methodology with which "economic development"is targeted through reference to the sole GDP index.
Robert Antoine Frouville.
AFRICAIN PEASANTS AND MORAL ECONOMY,
by Kazuhiko SUGIMURA (University of Fukui, Japan)
Despite the continuous assistance to African countries that various international organizations and donor countries have so far given, the stagnation of rural Africa still stands out even among developing countries. In rural Africa, although commodity economies are spreading, modernization of agricultural production is not progressing. This stagnation of rural Africa must be closely related to some unique mechanisms pertaining to the African peasant economy. It is an urgent task to uncover its mechanisms. We shall pay attention to internal rather than external factors of the dynamics of African rural areas and focus on the moral economy of African peasants as a customary economy based on the right to subsistence and the norm of reciprocity.
Read the whole paper by downloading it in pdf format: Click here
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4 - Information, Publications, Conferences, Websites
Conference
The V International Conference of the Community Indicators Consortium (CIC) , Connection: Building Bridges, Networks and Community of Practice will take place in Jacksonville, Florida, United States on the 7th - 9th March 2007. The conference is designated to bring together the individuals and organizations from around the world who are involved with creating, implementing, and sustaining community indicator projects. Attendees at the Conference should expect to: Connect with other to build a stronger network of community indicators practitioners ; Learn of new data sets and new ways to use data to inform your community ; Discover how to better connect community indicator projects with government, media, and the community to create positive and sustainable change. For all the relevant information regarding the Conference, please visit the official website Click here
Publications
The United Nations is pleased to announce the release of its latest annual publication, Economic Situation and Prospects 2007 , which provides an overview of recent global economic performance and short-term prospects for the world economy. The WESP 2007 is a join publication of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UNCTAD and the five UN regional commissions. The complete publication can be downloaded, please Click here. Hard copies can be ordered through UN sales, please Click here
Sous le titre La démocratie au péril de l'économie , (collection Economie et Société, PUR, 368 p.) l'ouvrage issu de la sélection de textes préparés en français pour notre colloque « Démocratie et Economie » organisé en 2005 (Rennes, France) avec le soutien du MAUSS (Mouvement AntiUtilitariste en Sciences Sociales) vient de paraître. « La question des rapports entre économie et démocratie se pose désormais en des termes finalement très différents de ceux auxquels nous avaient accoutumés les débats classiques. Elle n'est plus tant de savoir comment trouver le bon dosage, le bon équilibre entre nécessités économiques, contraintes sociales et exigences démocratiques. La question est celle de savoir dans quelle mesure l'imposition planétaire de la nouvelle norme économique rentière et spéculative ; au nom de la démocratie ne constitue pas une menace mortelle pour la survie de la démocratie et des valeurs humanistes du pluralisme ». Pour plus d'information et commander Click here
Website
_ Jean Aubin est heureux de vous annoncer l'ouverture du site internet de présentation de son ouvrage « Croissance : l'impossible nécessaire », Planète bleue, 2006, 238p. :
Click here
Vous pourrez non seulement y retrouver des extraits de ce livre mais aussi avoir accès à des articles et à la programmation des conférences données par l'auteur.
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| PEKEA President: Yves BERTHELOT yves.berthelot@unog.ch Executive Secretary: Marc HUMBERT Marc.Humbert@univ-rennes1.fr Scientific VPdt : Theotonio DOS SANTOS theotoni@terra.com.br Treasurer: Danièle BENEZECH daniele.benezech@univ-rennes1.fr |
PEKEA Newsletter Chief editor : Robert Frouville |