Julio Godoy

HELSINKI, Sep 16 2005 (IPS) — Two leading institutions have teamed up to find ways of taking the ‘Helsinki Process’ forward.

The Helsinki Process launched by Finland and Tanzania in 2002 is a multi-stakeholder approach that seeks to bring together governments, civil society and business to find agreements and take decisions on development.

The agreement between the two institutions emerged from a conference held in Helsinki earlier this month to take the process forward.

The institutions, the Celso Furtado Celso Furtado International Development Policies Centre based in Sao Paolo in Brazil and the Brookings Institution based in Washington in the United States mirror the idea of links between the developed and the developing worlds evident in the Finland-Tanzania partnership.

Finland is also launching a partnership with the Brazilian centre. Finland’s foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja met Brazilian minister for agrarian development Miguel Rossetto in Helsinki to launch cooperation between the Helsinki Process and the Celso Furtado centre.

Rossetto, who was Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s delegate at the conference said the Celso Furtado Centre’s research objectives are aligned to those of the Helsinki Process.

The Brazilian government launched the Celso Furtado Centre “to support the multilateral process of search for solutions to the world’s problems, especially those related to poverty and underdevelopment,” Rossetto said.

Secondly, he added, the centre wants to encourage the participation of civil society in the assessment of problems related to poverty, and in developing solutions. Thirdly, he said, “the political agenda identified with a critical assessment of the process of globalisation to overcome global inequalities and injustice is at the core of the Celso Furtado Centre’s research programme.”

All three objectives are shared by the Helsinki Process, Erkki Tuomioja told IPS. The Brazilian government is among a dozen countries considered “friends of the Helsinki Process.”

Strobe Talbott, head of the Brookings Institution, supported this position. “I as an individual have been member of the Helsinki Process since its conception in 2002,” Talbott told IPS.

He said that although specific areas of cooperation between the Brookings Institution and the Helsinki Process have still to be defined, the Brookings Institution could “raise awareness in the U.S. society of the advantages of multilateralism and of diplomatic cooperation to solve problems related to globalisation.”

Such awareness is rising in the United States “after the humanitarian catastrophe provoked by the Katrina hurricane in the southern part of the country, which puts into focus the questions of climate change and the capacity of state institutions to deal efficiently with such disasters,” Talbott added.

Talbott spoke of Iraq as another subject bringing the value of multilateralism and diplomacy back to the political debate in the United States. “I think the U.S. is already moving away from unilateralism and towards more international cooperation,” he said.

Several scholars at the Brookings Institution act as advisers to the Helsinki Process. The institute has also produced a number of papers on the subjects the Helsinki Process focuses on, such as health and governance within the context of the Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2000 to cut poverty and to improve health and education.

Carlos Tiburcio Oliveira, senior advisor on social and international affairs to Lula told IPS that the Celso Furtado Centre would publish academic work on the problems associated with globalisation and underdevelopment from a point of view of the South.

The centre is named after Brazilian development economist Celso Furtado who died last year. Tiburcio said the centre was named after the late economist to honour his work on the problems of underdevelopment.

“Furtado produced extraordinary academic work, which was seminal to many aspects of underdevelopment, and it is a pity that not all his books have been translated into foreign languages,” Tiburcio added.

The centre will prepare translations of Furtado’s books into English, Spanish, French and other languages, he said.