Posing local challenges in global debates: Comments on poverty eradication, human rights and gender justice in Latin America

CONSTANZA TABBUSH

Paris

Simposio; UNESCO/ISSC Expert Meeting: Global justice, poverty and inequality in the post-2015 development agenda; 2014

UNESCO

According to the Latin American Public Opinion Pool, poverty, and citizens civil rights and security are the two main regional social concerns that should be put forth in the global debates. I attempt to highlight some of the possible contributions of Latin American feminists scholars and activists critical views on both topics, with the objective of nurturing global debates with local concerns relevant for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first concern of Latin American citizens is poverty eradication, the top priority of the Sustainable Development Agenda. This topic considers the deployment of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) as key mechanism for the inclusion of the poor. In this case, I will inspect the space to improve the synergies between gender equality and rights-based approaches to poverty eradication. Whereas the second topic of concern indicates the challenges posed by the negative human rights outcomes of the US-led transnational agenda to battle drug traffic in Latin America -as Pilar Calveiro calls it the war on drugs- for global justice. With this second concern I aim to identify crosscutting themes that connect the local, regional and global, and could serve to shed light on intersecting forms of inequality. In this vein, I will discuss the language and hierarchy given to the following SDGs areas of interest: a) poverty eradication, b) gender equality and women´s empowerment, and c) peaceful and non-violent societies, rule of law and capable institutions. Three crosscutting questions for the Sustainable Development Agenda emerge from this regional context: 1) Can poverty alleviation combine rights-based approaches to poverty eradication with gender equality and women´s empowerment perspectives while maintaining a generational approach? 2) Can other dimensions of the North-South inequality (other than socio-economic) be incorporated to make SDGs a responsibility of both developing and developed countries? 3) How could gender equality and women´s empowerment become a part of the Sustainable Development Agenda, in a meaningful way?