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Status of Women in new zealand
New Zealand's 6th CEDAW report to the United Nations has been released.
Report by Deborah Te Kawa, Senior Policy Analyst, Ministry of Women's Affairs
On Women's Leadership: The Challenge of Gender Mainstreaming, a course conducted by the United Nations University in conjunction with the 23rd special session of the United Nations General Assembly
within this section:
Introduction
The United Nations University/International Leadership Academy (UNU/ILA) trains potential leaders through direct interaction with present leaders and through a series of seminars and training related to pressing global issues.
This course was held in two cities – New York and Amman. Twelve women from throughout the world attended. The course was divided into a series of modules, the first of which was an intensive two-day session focusing on the role of leadership within the United Nations system. Each session was led by at least two scholars from within the UNU.
Day one: the United Nations system in the 21st century
The objective of the morning session was to understand more fully the role of the United Nations in the 21st century. Course participants agreed that as the United Nations embarks upon its second half-century, widespread scepticism and disillusionment cloud its future. Following the euphoria of the immediate post-cold war ‘honeymoon', a sense of multilateral fatigue - and sometimes even crisis - has pervaded the organisation. Several UNU scholars thought it was even possible to ask whether the United Nations as it exists today is sustainable. One UNU scholar in particular proposed that a conceptual and practical reassessment of the organisation's strengths, weaknesses and structure is long overdue. Throughout the morning session, course participants and UNU scholars explored a variety of views about how the United Nations can best serve humankind in the future. We used three different perspectives of the United Nations: 1) as an actor, 2) as an arena, and 3) as a policy tool, and focused on five primary international actors: 1) states; 2) non-governmental organisations (NGOs); 3) market forces; 4) regional institutions, and 5) international organisations. By the end of the morning session course participants agreed that at the very least a practical reassessment of the United Nations' strengths, weaknesses and structure was required.
Day one: rising and fading powers: international order in transition
In the afternoon session we aimed at a better understanding of the process of international power transition and the challenges of ensuring peaceful change. Course participants agreed that the session was important and timely, as international politics is faced with the development of a new international order. Several UNU scholars believed the nature of this evolution hinges, to a large extent, upon an order set by the policies and relationships of the leading states. UNU scholars and course participants discussed the literature on the rise and decline of leading states, their leaders and on power transition, and agreed most of it fails to take into account the current recasting of the international order. Course participants attempted to fill this gap by examining how their leaders interact with each other to shape change. UNU scholars explored the meaning and consequences of the ‘passage de témoin' of power from fading leaders to rising leaders. Course participants compared cases of violent transition with those of peaceful transition, focusing on a host of issues which may influence the ongoing reformation of international order. These issues included: the material distribution of power and its effect on international stability; the convergence of ideas and the role of contested norms in negotiating a mutually acceptable outcome; domestic political preferences and the constraints they impose on states' behaviour; the timing and speed of power transition; and differences in states' strategies (such as power accretion versus power management) and their impact on transition.
Looking to the future, course participants agreed that lessons drawn from historical and theoretical inquiry are useful to examine the effects of strategies as well as the institutional consequences of a shifting of the distribution of power.
Day two: women networking for conflict prevention
The objective of both sessions on day two was to understand more fully how ethnic and religious conflicts have become a salient aspect of global development, threatening not only regional but world peace, and how developing ways to deal with these conflicts is one of the major challenges for women leaders. Course participants agreed that research on the effects of rising conflicts on gender roles and gender relationships has been very scarce. Gender perspectives are also lacking when strategies for conflict prevention, resolution and peacekeeping are being explored. Course participants agreed that a common conceptual framework and a methodology for research in this area was required, and that such a framework should provide answers to questions such as: What are the effects of rising conflicts on gender roles and gender relations? What is the role played by gender and gender relations within the cycle of conflicts? What mechanisms can be established to empower women to create alternative solutions for themselves as well as for conflict prevention/resolution? In what ways have the strategies/actions for conflict resolution and prevention used by women's organisations helped shape public opinion and national policy-making, etc.? How can women's experiences and activities be utilised within the framework of the wider UN agenda of international security and peacekeeping?
Second module
This module occurred during the conference itself. The academy convened meetings for course participants with senior leaders from around the world including Louise Frechette, Deputy Secretary-General to Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Commissioner for Human Rights, Catherine Bertini, Chief Executive of the World Food Programme, and Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan.
Third module
At the end of the conference, participants flew to Amman for the third module. This comprised eight days of intensive sessions, during which course participants presented and reviewed their research papers, which they had completed before they arrived in New York.
Each participant then underwent a personality profile through a strengthfinders survey undertaken by Jacque Merrit of the Gallup organisation. The aim of this survey was to identify each participant's individual strengths and to consider how these might be consciously crafted to further develop their leadership potential. The final four days were devoted to the central policy issue of the course: item g-2 of the Beijing Platform for Action, which relates to increasing the capacity of women to participate in decision-making and leadership.
UNU/ILA invited five outstanding women leaders from around the world to interact with course participants and impart the benefit of their experience and wisdom to the course participants. Two former women mayors, Vicki Buck from New Zealand and Iman Ftaimat from Jordan, gave the course participants insights into how they broke through the invisible taboos and made history by becoming mayors at ages 33 and 26 respectively. Two internationally-known national leaders, Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, gave insights into two vastly different political cultures in which women might aspire to become influential and powerful, and how to handle this for the betterment of their countries while retaining their gender identity. And finally, for the ultimate inspiration of political dynamism at the national, regional and global levels of political leadership, the course was treated to someone who is, to put it quite simply, unique. Emma Bonino, former European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, is perhaps without peer in the world in her capacity to identify global causes, such as the international criminal court, capital punishment and AIDS, and to build transnational campaigns which can, through extraordinary effort, political courage and organisational skill, literally move the world along a better path.
Comment
On reflection, this course had a dual focus. The first was on women's leadership in the national context, with the advanced papers and the interaction with the political leaders. The second was on leadership in the global context.
We all know acutely well the challenges and shortcomings of the behemoths of our age – local, national and regional bureaucracies, or the global conference machinery that is a United Nations session. Problems of cluttered sovereignty, cultural and political differences, linguistic dissonance and financial austerity thwart the achievement of rapid progress, even assuming the actors can agree on what that concept means. Whether it is at a local, national, regional or global level, we have all despaired from time to time and in our different ways about the ability of our species to unite in a decision-making sense and move the agenda forward. Despite this, I remain an unbridled supporter of the United Nations and the global vision of unity and rational co-operation which it symbolises. The goals which the global conferences of the 1990s strove to achieve are noble and visionary ones. They deserve, and increasingly demand, support from us. The dramas played out in these conferences are, largely, removed from the level of banality that comprises much of the world's modern media.
There were many examples of leadership at the United Nations, before, during and after this conference, much of it behind closed doors and much of it confined forever to the individual memories of those few who were personally privy to the event. It is in New Zealand's interest to identify such leadership, to reflect on it, and seek to integrate it into the institutional wisdom that shapes the role of delegations representing New Zealand on the world stage in the future.
These global conferences pose the challenge of leadership at the highest level. We need to improve quickly and drastically if we are to do justice to the kind of local, national, regional and global problem-solving in the next few decades that we must engage in if we are to commence our redemption from the mistakes of the past century.
There is both an individual and a national dimension to the challenge of leadership at global conferences. Large countries dominate, committing huge delegations that can outpace and even intimidate smaller ones. A degree of restraint from national pride is necessary if national leadership for the global interest as opposed to the national interest is to be realised.
The individual challenge has to do with the quality of chairing in such conferences. Better chairing - involving more insight into the tactical manoeuvring of delegations, and an appreciation of what is reasonable and tolerable and what is not - is critical to the success of a one-week global conference. Without able chairing, the extraordinary battery of brackets that pepper a global document will not be removed in time. This requires insight, judgement, courage, negotiating and communication skills and a multi-cultural empathy.
Without this, the global agenda, fashioned so painstakingly through the last decade, remains in danger of fragmenting and losing ground.
There is also a clear underlying structural problem to our world community as it is presently configured. Hindsight, perhaps a century or two from today, will find it incomprehensible that our contemporary world should pretend to be able to arrive at global consensus through solemn negotiations between 188 sovereign entities. When one considers the difficulties of gaining agreement, for example, between two entities such as Māori people and the crown, it staggers the imagination that we should succeed with the United Nations. New Zealand needs a new way of thinking about how to go forward, if it is to facilitate change in a time of transition.
One means of doing this is to require national political leaders, not diplomatic representatives, to meet regularly, on all issues. It is no longer the case that national issues are too important to allow the head of government to travel to international meetings and attend to global issues. In fact, the reverse is now true. Recall the electrifying spectacles of the Rio Earth Summit, and the 1992 Security Council Summit, as early harbingers of what a world community, represented by legitimate national leaders meeting regularly, can do. And when it comes to conferences such as the 23rd Special Session of the General Assembly, this should involve the same national leaders, if not at the highest political level, at least at cabinet level, meeting regularly before and during the conference. Only in this way, will the individual rapport be built up that will result in a sweeping away of brackets and the substantive disagreements that they symbolise.
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