Citizenship in an increasingly global context 8: seeking a common ground 5

This is the 8th installment to a series on citizenship, as I see it as representing more than just legally supported membership in a national or otherwise geographically constrained community. I have been discussing here, both the possibilities of and our compelling need for humanity as a whole, to find and to institute a wider and more inclusive form of community and of citizenship that we can collectively work together through in meeting the increasingly global threats and challenges that have become hallmarks to this 21st century. And it is those threats and how we act upon them that will become our enduring legacy to future generations; that is what we of today will be remembered for in the tomorrows to come.

I ended Part 7 by offering a challenge as framed by a comment and two closely connected questions:

• Citizenship is a participatory sport if it to mean anything real at all; it at least should be.
• Can an individual who makes every effort possible to avoid paying taxes, never votes where they could, who never serves on a jury or in any other way participates in the civic life of their community or their country actually claim to be more than just a citizen in name only?
• Phrasing that more directly, what meaning and value can a claim of citizenship hold, beyond a simple legal definition of community and national membership, if benefits are demanded and claimed but no effort is made or even considered as to how such individuals might contribute to making the benefits of their citizenship possible and securely so?

And I followed that by stating that I would turn here to “more explicitly consider the issues of what does and does not work in affecting positive change, and in ways that can gain sustainable support in the face of pushback and resistance.” As my series on pandemic COVID-19 and its history, and my series on our globally faced climate change crisis illustrate by way of multiple examples, actually bringing a threshold level of stakeholder support for positive change together so as to be able to take real action is the greatest single challenge that we face – and particularly where we face collective disruptive threat that can only be effectively addressed through real and significant change on our collective part.

Citizenship as I have been discussing it here might include a willingness to take an active role in the societies that we claim such membership in. But I have not in any way addressed the directions that such participatory involvement might be directed towards. And one individual’s, and one stakeholder group’s idea of positive and protective and supportive engagement might be more part of the problem as viewed by others.

I find myself writing this on December 19, 2023 and in the immediate aftermath of the United Nations sponsored and supported COP28 global climate change summit as just concluded in Dubai. Yes, promises were made to phase out the use of fossil fuels, just as happened coming out of COP27. But look at what came out of that summit’s solemn pledges. All of the key fossil fuel producing nations promised to significantly cut their national carbon footprints coming out of that, just to increase their production and use of these fuels to record high levels when they faced their day-to-day needs and as they chose simplest ways for them to meet them.

The host of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber, even began this event by publicly declaring that fossil fuels and their burning are not contributing to global warming and even just marginally! With a start like that, what can any of us reasonably expect to come from this summit and its pledges, in decisions and actions actually taken?

This is a series on citizenship, and on global citizenship. And as I highlighted in Part 7 it is about citizenship as an inclusively engaging participatory role, and as one that we all have a moral responsibility to pursue, and certainly where and as we can. I wrote in my climate crisis series (as can be found in my United Nations oriented directory pages) of bringing stakeholders and groups of them together in order to take meaningful action. In many and even most cases, organizational stakeholders are only going to agree to they’re proclaiming a commitment to positively act here if they see a sufficient groundswell of demand for that on their part coming from the grass roots on up. And they will in most cases only follow through on such pledges if that grass roots on up pressure is sustained and developed and brought into sufficiently compelling focus.

The nations that pledged to cut their fossil fuel use in earlier summits and related gatherings, that reneged on those promises in practice (as noted in my climate change series) did so and consistently so because of the intense lobbying and related pressures of stakeholders who saw more value and certainly in meeting their own interests, from simply maintaining the status quo of today – at least for now and with any real change deferred to some ultimately undefined future.

I am going to continue this line of discussion concerning building a real, sustainable consensus for positive action in the face of our shared need for that, in the next installment to this series. Meanwhile, you can find this series at United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 and at Ubiquitous computing and communications – everywhere all the time 4. And you can find related material at my Macroeconomics and Business directory pages.