Advocating Solutions

The habitat field is replete with “wicked problems.” They are often, at once, economic, environmental, social and political. Who holds the key to a solution?

Economist Milton Friedman famously remarked: “The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.” The earlier essayist Henry Louis Mencken, a skeptic of economic theory, is attributed as observing: “There is always an easy solution to every problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), the great conciliator, advocated that, for people (i.e., Muslims) to achieve a just solution, their affairs are conducted by consultation among them (42:38).

These quotes point to more than one key to the habitat challenge: Problems are complex, such that just and durable solutions require participation beyond the confines of authoritarian institutions. This issue of Land Times embodies this principle, and its reports are also replete with habitat problems and advocacy toward just solutions.

This principle is exemplified in the fourth round of the HIC-HLRN Land Forum, which gathered civil activists and experts in Tunis from 26 countries, including eleven states and a mosaic of peoples from the MENA region, seeking new approaches to enduring habitat problems. In a related context, the World Social Forum assembly during this period has proffered alternative solutions that ambitiously foresee another possible world.

In the MENA region, some of the most intractable habitat problems arise from impoverishment and dispossession by military force. Reporting on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Western Sahara and Palestine’s recent Land Day events advocate an end to both these causes and their punishing consequences.

The report on the UN Human Rights Council’s response to the recent fact-finding report on Israel’s settler colonies identifies the problem and the directly responsible parties, but its authors fall short of assuming their own responsibilities, or posing any solution. The final session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine proffers an alternative “road map” for the UN and its members to repair the problem they have created.

Despite the findings of habitat destruction in the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, that problem remains without a solution in sight, as fate resides with the UN political body of the Security Council.

Both the report on the country mission to Israel/Palestine by the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing—Raquel Rolnik’s second in the region (see Land Times No. 2)—her study on the global crisis in security of tenure both inventories the problems and begins to advocate solutions yet untried.

The collective reporting of Egyptian civil society to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in April speaks volumes about the causes, consequences and alternatives to unchanged policy in a state that inherited persisting natural challenges and man-made problems. The case of the World Bank involvement in that country’s built environment poses yet another example of attempted solutions that generate additional habitat problems. The current review of the World Bank’s safeguards seeks correction on a global scale.

In addition, the deliberations of stakeholders including the Food and Agriculture Organization, indigenous peoples and the humanitarian aid communities reported here continue to provide a rich catalog of habitat problems and innovate just solutions. The needed consultation among them operationalizes another maxim for advocacy from Eldridge Cleaver, a figure who personified transformation: “You`re either part of the solution, or you`re part of the problem.”