Global Witness’s annual reports on the killings of environmental defenders are but one, awful, indication of the social injustices that can accompany the extraction of natural resources from the subsoil and from forests. The struggle for social justice in these environments has become yet more difficult under COVID, all the more so given the impacts of COVID on indigenous populations in many of these environments. These challenges seem likely to intensify downstream of COVID in the face of economic reactivation policies, closing civic space, the search for energy transition minerals, and a politics of urgency that risks undermining a politics of social justice.
In this talk, Anthony Bebbington explored some of these trends and the challenges they present to civil society and to philanthropies that support civil society. He referred especially to the experience of the Ford Foundation, while also making a broader argument.
On this topic
Beata Javorcik
Globalisation after COVID: Business as Usual, or Not?
Kristalina Georgieva
Challenges of recovery, climate change and inequality
Pascal Lamy
A post-Covid world: the scene for developing countries
Kandeh Yumkella
COVID-19 and the urgency of the African energy transition
Francis Fukuyama
Economic and political development: the importance of institutions