PSYDEH Speaks at National Roundtable At the Canadian Embassy, Mexico City
On March 22, 2019, PSYDEH was among four Mexican think tanks and NGOs invited by a delegation of Ottawa-based professionals from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) to speak at a roundtable on natural resource development and management in Mexico.
As the only truly grassroots non-profit present, we were honored to represent our 40,000+ sister organizations in Mexico. We explained during and after the event with a white paper the state of rural Mexican development, the current situation with civil society, and the need for our scalable program model to drive bottom-up, citizen-led sustainable development, including in Mexico’s indigenous communities. As Damon Taylor, Senior Advisor for PSYDEH writes in our white paper:
With the new AMLO administration, and as discussed during the roundtable, there is and remains a lack of clarity on what exactly to expect when it comes to natural resource development (NRD).
What IS CLEAR, however, and as discussed intelligently by the reputable Animal Politic in this piece is (a) this administration is cutting funding for civil society, (b) these cuts continue a trend started in 2018 (federal election year), and (c) Mexican civil society is already woefully supported by government, with inadequate and inconsistent financial investments and policies threatening their impact-making existence (see the last section of the Animal Politic article).
Why focus on civil society, here? If you gut civil society, where is the government watchdog? Where are those like PSYDEH who can organize and educate citizens and the communities needed to give voice to themselves and their fellow citizens/communities when effected by, or designing, implementing and evaluating, NRD projects?
In short, we don’t have a clear vision for the future of NRD. What is clear, however, is that Mexican civil society, in need of professionalization and more transparency to be sure, is being undermined and not strengthened. Sans a strong civil society, we don’t know if and how “sustainability” will manifest itself in NRD in Mexico.
PSYDEH learned from our NGO and Think Tank peers and Canadian government officials about myriad perspectives on how Mexican civil society has and can participate in policymaking and implementation at the local, state, and federal levels. Post-event, our friends at NRCan sent over an interesting presentation including shared areas of interest, including the need to information share and support (see our model) to help Indigenous communities partner on natural resource, infrastructure, and revenue-sharing projects
The other Think Tanks and NGOs joining PSYDEH at the table were the Mexican Ethos Laboratorio de Políticas Públicas and Reforestamos México and the global World Resources Institute Mexico. The Roundtable was sponsored by the Canadian embassy in Mexico City, Mexico.