AFP — Pope Francis calls for a ‘rethinking of our models of economic development’

Pope Francis on Thursday urged governments around the world to show more solidarity and strive for equality following a period of economic crisis, a day after being declared “Person of the Year” by Time magazine.

“The succession of economic crises should lead to a timely rethinking of our models of economic development and to a change in lifestyles,” Francis said in his message for New Year’s Day, which is World Peace Day.

“Effective policies are needed to promote the principle of fraternity, securing for people… access to capital, services, educational resources, healthcare and technology,” he said in a written text which will be read out in Catholic churches on January 1.

Governments have a “duty of solidarity” towards poorer nations and a “duty of social justice” towards their citizens, while individuals should also practice fraternity by “sharing their wealth”, he said.

He also said disarmament accords were not “sufficient to protect humanity from the risk of armed conflict”.

“A conversion of hearts is needed which would permit everyone to recognise in the other a brother or sister,” he said.

Francis called for “a culture of solidarity” and said the biblical story of Cain and Abel showed “the difficult task to which all men and women are called, to live as one, taking care of each other.”

“Rampant individualism, egocentrism and materialistic consumerism, weaken social bonds, fuelling that ‘throw away’ mentality which leads to a contempt for, and the abandonment of, the weakest,” he said.

He also reiterated his critique of financial speculators saying they were often “both predatory and harmful for entire economic and social systems, exposing millions of men and women to poverty”.

The Raw Story
Pope Francis calls for a ‘rethinking of our models of economic development’
Agence France-Presse

Global civil society and the rise of the civil economy

The last thirty years has seen the re-emergence of a civil economic challenge, side by side with the advance of globalisation, as a distinct strand in the development of global civil society. Don’t underestimate its longterm significance in the glacial shifts now taking place in the world economy. 

Global Civil Society: the three words mark out a field and an aspiration. Global rather than national, civil not the state and corporation, society not the individualism of the late consumer market. It names a civil challenge to unrestrained globalisation. 

In this sense, the Global Civil Society yearbooks have shown the extent to which global civil society has developed. Part of it evokes on a world scale the civil response to a previous period dominated by market utopian policies that Polanyidescribed, in his account of early industrialising Britain in the 1830s.  Then it was the Chartists, now it is the occupy movement, and the innumerable campaigns that have multiplied since globalisation took hold in the 1980s. Like the Chartists, they are contesting the new order politically. 

Read it at Open Democracy

Global civil society and the rise of the civil economy
by Robin Murray

(h/t kristinsponsler at The Energy Bulletin)