World Social Forum in Tunisia, report

This music video is about the World Social Forum in Tunis, Tunisia in March 2015.

By James O’Nions from Britain, reporting from Tunisia:

World Social Forum diary – day two

Friday 27th March 2015

JAMES O’NIONS reports from Tunis, where climate change is high on the agenda

THE sheer number of sessions at the World Social Forum (WSF) can seem quite overwhelming. The programme is divided into six different streams of discussion: citizenship, environmental justice, social justice, equality and rights, the economy and alternatives and migration.

In any one time slot there are over 100 sessions happening simultaneously, covering diverse topics from co-operatives and the solidarity economy to water as a human right and freedom of expression in North Africa.

Add in the the difficulty of actually finding the session you want to take part in and communication issues across different languages (despite the valiant efforts of many volunteer interpreters) and it can take quite a while to get the hang of being here. But take a step back from the practical issues and the scale and diversity is really inspiring.

The hundreds of sessions are each being run by multiple organisations from different countries, ranging from trade unions and peasant organisations with millions of members between them to campaigning groups with few or even no staff.

For an organisation like Global Justice Now, there several reasons for being here. First of all, there is no other space in which we can meet and build relationships with such a wide range of people who can help make our campaigns more effective. For instance, as part of our new campaign against the British government pushing electricity privatisation in Nigeria, we have started working with a Nigerian organisation called Social Action. Until now that was happening just over email, but I met its co-ordinator yesterday to talk about future plans.

We’re also here to show our solidarity with other struggles, whether we’re working on them directly or not. The sense of common cause, and of many people defending ideals you also hold in many countries around the world, is certainly motivating for me just as it is for others I’ve spoken to here.

And of course, we’re also taking part in some actual planning and organising. For instance, this year’s WSF takes place eight months before the meeting in Paris of the UN conference on climate change, which is being talked up by some as the next big opportunity for the world to agree an effective treaty on climate change.

That assessment rather ignores the utter failure of previous UN conferences to agree any such thing, not least thanks to massive corporate lobbying by the fossil fuel industry.

In France a broad coalition has come together to mobilise enormous and diverse protests in Paris during the two weeks of the UN conference. It includes environmental campaign groups, trade unions and social movements.

Despite their differences, there is a relatively high level of agreement that the mobilisation can’t simply be aimed at encouraging world leaders to make the right decision given the likelihood that they won’t. Instead they aim to communicate to the world at large that things cannot continue this way and highlight alternatives to the current fossil fuel economy which are already being built.

The WSF has been an opportunity to internationalise the mobilisation. We took part in workshops on how to organise this demand for climate justice, which will be taken back to the French coalition. For Global Justice Now, which will be taking activists to Paris in December to take part, it was really useful to feed into the current plans, which include a counter-conference, a movement space in central Paris with daily assemblies and a mass demonstration at the end of the two weeks.

Climate change is not simply an environmental issue but a question of justice for millions of people all over the world who stand to lose their livelihoods or even their lives for the sake of a rich minority invested in the status quo.

Action on climate change is not just a question of political will but of power, which can only be overcome through mass mobilisation to force a shift to more collectivist ways of running the world. The message we’re taking away from the organising meeting here in Tunis is that the Paris mobilisation is an important step in building this opposition, and I hope campaign groups and trade unions in Britain will get involved.

James O’Nions works for UK campaigning organisation Global Justice Now.