BIC Explores New Patterns of Relationships Among Social Actors to Advance Social Development

“Experience around the world clearly demonstrates that social development advances most effectively when the efforts of governing institutions, local community groups and individuals reinforce one another rather than duplicate or detract.”

Bahá’í International Community (BIC) Representative Cecilia Schirmeister offered this observation during an opening segment of the sixty-forth session of the United Nations’ Commission for Social Development, which concludes this week. 

Schirmeister, who appeared as a featured speaker on a high-level panel discussion, “From Promise to Progress: Advancing Social Justice through Coordinated Action,” added that, “The worldwide Bahá’í community is seeing that in places where the relationships among the individual, the community, and the institutions are animated by partnership, collaboration and coordination, development is more responsive to the population’s needs.”

An overarching theme of the BIC’s engagement at the Commission was to explore how these key social actors can develop more constructive relationships and learn to collaborate more effectively in the shared endeavor of cultivating prosperous societies. 

The theme was explored in a side event the BIC organized, entitled “Strengthening Coordination Between Government, Communities, and Individuals: Local Narratives Across Different National Contexts,” which included speakers from the government of Kenya, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), as well as two members of the BIC’s delegation to the Commission from the Canary Islands. 

Jane Muyanga, Director of Kenya’s National Social Protection Secretariat, emphasized the need for development initiatives to reflect the aspirations of local populations, and the importance of ensuring that a community’s developmental path not be determined by a small number of activists or outsiders alone. 

Fernanda Pavez Esbry, with the Division for Inclusive Social Development of UN DESA, noted that different stakeholders have a variety of strengths and capacities, and stressed the need for development processes to draw on the comparative advantages of each. 

Neda Badiee and Alejandro Sarmiento González, two Bahá’ís from the Canary Islands, shared experiences arising from grassroots development and community-building efforts in their home country. Those early efforts have grown to encompass several hundred ongoing social and economic development activities, sustained by hundreds of volunteers and collaborating organizations, involving more than 3,000 participants across four islands. 

“This growth demonstrates how a local community can collectively arise to advance aspects of its own social development when governing institutions, community groups, and individual citizens learn to work together as part of a shared endeavor for the betterment of all,” Badiee said. 

Further details and lessons learned from those grassroots efforts were conveyed in the BIC’s statement to the Commission, titled Coordination for the Common Good: Governing Institutions in Partnership with Community Action and Individual Initiative (also available in Spanish).

“Patterns prevalent around the world today often set the stage for transactional encounters, in which community representatives request resources that governmental actors bestow or decline as they see fit,” the statement says. 

It goes on to explain that individuals and community groups all around the world, like those in the Canary Islands, are seeking instead “to explicitly explore with government officials, through reflection and consultation, how those three main types of social actors are understood today and what new, more collaborative kinds of relationships might be created among them.”