Democratizing Canadian foreign policy? NGO participation for the Copenhagen summit for social development and the Beijing conference on women

Abstract

In 1995 the UN convened two major international meetings: the Copenhagen Summit for Social Development – the first ever global summit on poverty – and the Beijing Conference on Women – the largest conference in UN history. In keeping with the Liberal Government's 1993 campaign promise to democratize the Canadian foreign policy‐making process, government‐sponsored mechanisms were established to facilitate NGO preparations for both the Summit and the Conference. The article compares and contrasts these two sets of mechanisms and assesses the extent to which they facilitated meaningful NGO participation that was taken seriously by government decision‐makers, and offered real opportunities for influencing policy outcomes. It concludes that each set of mechanisms facilitated extensive NGO participation by diverse groups from across Canada and benefited both the Canadian government and the NGOs. The mechanisms did not enable NGOs to affect Canada's broad objectives or the guidelines for its official negotiators. There were, nonetheless, differences in the degree to which the NGOs in each case were able to affect outcomes. Whereas the mechanisms established for the Copenhagen Summit enabled the NGOs to influence the precise wording proposed by the Canadian government negotiators at the Preparatory Commission meetings, the Beijing mechanisms did not result in NGO influence over either the direction or substance of Canada's official policies. Both cases illustrate the need to situate studies in the context of more macro‐level trends in Canadian policy‐making.