Disagreeing To Disagree Disagreeably
Arjuna Seneviratne
The madness of debating aid effectiveness and climate change
Let us temporarily set aside the never ending debates on what love is, what friendship is and whether religion has helped or damaged the world.
Apart from those, the two longest running debates n recent world history are the climate debate and the aid effectiveness debate. We have gone through 18 COPs, 2 Rio’s and a Kyoto on the climate debate and four HLF editions of the aid debate over the last two decades. Not to mention the estimated 1.5 million other side-meets, side-events and side-shows at global, continental, regional, sub-regional, national, provincial and local levels.
These two discussions have a common reason for their existence and a natural congruence in the human responses to them. Both of these arose out of guilt for what the movers and shakers of the world had managed to do to this planet, its plants, its animals and its people over a period of 400 years. They meet, mesh and meld as a result of the fact that the same shudder-mongers believe that the two issues can be solved by flinging a bit of money around.
Anyone who has been involved in one of these would tell you they felt like they were being spun into a whirlpool while the said whirlpool was being simultaneously spun through a jet engine.
Now me? Well! I must have done some terrible karma in a past birth.
Through no direct fault of my own, I have been engaged in not one but both of these at a pretty high level (COPs, IPCCC on climate and the OECD on aid). Why a crazy, long haired nutjob would be allowed inside the august portals of the OECD HQ in Paris or be asked to back-seat formulate Sri Lankan strategies for a COP or contribute to an IPCCC requested communiqué is a mystery that is beyond my ability to comprehend. Yet, there you have it. I was whirlpooled into these debates and over nine long years I served a sentence for some heinous crime I know nothing of. Read More
