SANTIAGO, Chile, CMC—The first regional conference of parliamentary committees of the future ends here on Friday, with political representatives from various countries and experts from regional and international organizations sharing experiences on increasing and improving capacities for legislative foresight and anticipatory governance.
The two-day event, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), aims to increase legislative foresight and anticipatory governance capacities by establishing a network of future committees from the Latin America and Caribbean region’s parliaments.
Furthermore, it seeks to explore and compare legislative foresight capacity worldwide and in Latin America and the Caribbean, which represents a unique opportunity for ECLAC to help establish an initiative aimed at strengthening the capacity of parliaments in the region to anticipate and address future challenges.
ECLAC’s executive secretary, José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, said that the lack of capacities for foresight, strategic reflection, long-term planning, and program implementation is one of the main obstacles to overcoming the long-term structural tendencies that characterize Latin America and the Caribbean and moving towards a more productive, inclusive, and sustainable future.
“That is why, at ECLAC, we are convinced that it is not enough to identify the areas where there are gaps and make a list of aspirations regarding what to do. We must talk about the ‘hows,’ such as how we can promote the significant transformations that the region’s development models need.
“We at ECLAC see this conference as a unique opportunity to help establish an initiative aimed at strengthening the capacity of the region’s parliaments to think about the future and incorporate this thinking into current work.
“We firmly believe that countries’ foresight and strategic capacities are indispensable and must be organized to ensure ongoing activity in which the diverse political forces with parliamentary representation participate,” Salazar-Xirinachs added.
Chair of the Chilean Senate Committee on Challenges of the Future, Science, Technology and Innovation, Juan Antonio Coloma, praised ECLAC’s initiative to create a network of committees to exchange experiences and take on the challenges ahead along with the existence of spaces for reflection such as this one, which can enable us to have a better future.
“Political phenomena were reflected upon based on matters of contingency alone. But in an ever more complex world, the immediacy of what is urgent makes us lose perspective about what is happening in the future.
“The world we are going to build must have that capacity to listen to science and have time to reflect on what is approaching and view it as an opportunity. That is why we want to create spaces for international collaboration on these issues,” Coloma indicated.
Following the opening ceremony, Salazar-Xirinachs gave a presentation entitled ”Rethinking, reimagining and transforming: The “whats” and the “hows” for moving towards a more productive, inclusive and sustainable development model.”
He reiterated that Latin America and the Caribbean are regions caught in three development traps: low economic growth, high inequality and low social mobility, weak institutional capacities, and ineffective governance.
“Between 2014 and 2023, average growth in Latin America and the Caribbean was 0.8 percent. This is below the two percent at which it grew in the lost decade of the 1980s. Low growth is not just a current problem, but instead reflects the region’s low trend growth in GDP,” José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs said.
He said to promote major transformations in development models, ECLAC has presented a catalog of 10 gaps or structural challenges that constitute a list of 10 priority areas, which includes low, volatile, exclusionary, and unsustainable economic growth, with little formal job creation; limited fiscal space and high financing costs; high inequality and low social mobility and social cohesion; insufficient regional economic integration; weak education and vocational training systems; and high gender inequality, among others.
“But it is not enough to make assessments and indicate what to do to tackle, in their full magnitude, the development challenges that characterize countries. Special attention must be paid to how to do it.
“That is why ECLAC is working more intensely and systematically on how to improve public policy governance, how to improve institutions’ technical, operational, policy and perspective (TOPP) capacities, the issues of social dialogue and the political economy of reforms, and financing,” the UN official said.
He also reiterated that using productive development policies, 11 significant transformations are needed in the development model to create a more productive, inclusive, and sustainable future – including quick, sustained, sustainable, and inclusive growth.
He proposed a portfolio of sectors to drive the significant productive transformation of productivity, inclusion, and sustainability from industry to services and information and communications technology (ICT).
“These must be managed through institutions’ TOPP capacities, which are necessary for driving major transformations in the development model,” he added.
The First Regional Conference of Parliamentary Committees of the Future continues on G\Friday with sessions on “Global and Latin American regional outlook for the main geopolitical and geostrategic trends: Implications for the work of Latin America’s parliamentary committees of the future and the role of parliamentary committees of the future in responding to emerging challenges.
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