Annual South Asia Conference 2009

“Climate for a New Consensus: Policies for a Fairer Globalisation”

Silver Oak, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

Introduction

Centad is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that conducts policy research and advocacy on global issues with a focus on trade and development. It focuses on India and South Asia with reference to the world economy and the international order of trade, finance and law. Centad’s research focuses on understanding the real impact of international trade and finance regimes on realizing development for the people of South Asia. These covers agriculture and non-agriculture, climate change and public health with a view to human development with gender inclusion.

Centad’s vocation concerns the mandate and impact of the global multilaterals which have a wide scale effect on policies and human development across the world. It has traditionally analysed the WTO and has now extended it’s mandate to the IMF. The Centres deliberates with the UNFCC and the UNCTAD. Apart from the multilateral world system, the centre also holds dialogues and conducts policy analysis of regional geopolitics with a scoping of South Asian dynamics.

Over the last four years, the Centre for Trade and Development (Centad) has organised Annual Conference with focus on South Asia in the multilateral and regional trading regimes. The event and the yearbook that follows have been widely recognised for deliberations on new approaches to global dimensions of regional problems in South Asia related to trade. This year’s conference takes place in the context of an ongoing financial crisis, an impending food crisis, wide disagreements over a new climate regime and continued impasse in the multilateral trade negotiations.

Within these problems, there is a momentum of gloablisation, in the context of a rapidly altering structure of global geopolitics. There is a new order of international trade, the decline of unipolar world order concomitant with growing multipolarity which is informed by the rise of several centre of world growth. It is now widely accepted that a certain type of consensus which was the central driving force behind the architecture of internationalism needs to be revised. This is for ensuring justice to all nations, which is a precursor to ensuring that no nation is left worse off in the global discourse aimed at fairness. The ongoing economic crisis is a strict lesson and the impending threat of climate change a pointer to immanent catastrophic developments. Within an uneven gloabalisation, the agenda for human development seems severely debilitated. We need to develop a climate for a new consensus aimed at ensuring that policies and procedures dovetail to a commonly agreed and shared vision of societal development. This is the modest aim of the forthcoming fifth annual conference, which the Centre will hold on November 23rd and 24th, 2009. Titled, “Climate for a New Consensus: Policies for a Fairer Globalisation”, the Conference will bring experts from a wide range of institutions.

The conference will be organised across key themes. (Please see box for summary). These themes will link globalisation as expressed in multilateralism and its regional dynamics with reference to South Asia. The rise of Asia has moved beyond rhetoric and one school of thought, now taken seriously is contending a U turn towards Asia, of the world’s markets, production as well as consumption centres. These facts create obfuscation when matched with the human development scenarios in the region. The questions then raised are as: Is the emergence of Asia just another rearrangement of global capitalism or does it mean anything for development at home in these nations and equal opportunities for the rest of the developed world to participate? The rise of Asia comes as a parallel to the development of global capitalism and yet seems to create a separate identity outside the neoliberal fold. What do these changes mean for accumulation and for regulation? What are the implications for global inequality? The Annual Conference will situate educated debates on specific issues within the ambit of the politics of gloabalisation with a view to seek solutions in processes and policies. The conference will be organised across specific themes led by international experts, with a view to a detailed discussion on the problems, prospects and policy solutions.

Broad thematic Areas

• The opening Plenary: Climate for a new Consensus: Problems and Prospects in the context of globalisation
• The role of the WTO and the Doha Round negotiations in the midst of the current situation: Reference to South Asia
• The impact of the global economic crisis: Towards Solutions in realm of regulation.
• Innovation , Access and Public Health: Problems and Prospects
• Gendered dimensions of Trade, Finance, Public Health and Climate Change: Towards Inclusive global regimes