PLENARY SESSION
REBUILDING TRUST: AN AGENDA FOR GOVERNANCE11 October 2007
The central message of this opening session and indeed the whole of this year’s Women’s Forum could not be clearer, and it was summed up by the forum’s founder Aude Zeissness de Thuin in her welcome speech. “Trust is the backbone of our societies,” she told delegates adding that without trust, the institutions and principles on which societies are built will crumble. All three speakers came back to this theme repeatedly and also stressed that trust is very delicate. “It takes years to build up trust. It takes seconds to break it,” said Moderator Maria Livanos Cattaui. Anne Lauvergeon, of Areva, the world’s leading nuclear power company, recognised that industries like hers had a role to play in ensuring people trusted key actors and institutions in society. Transparency was the key in today’s modern, international business environment, she said. “We all like to explain what we are doing when things go well, but we must also be open when things are not going well,” she said. The complexity of modern societies and in particular the sheer volume of information which bombards all of us on a daily basis was also seen as contributing to a perceived crisis of trust in many countries. “There is so much complex information out there. It’s just too darn hard to understand things,” said Laura Liswood, a senior advisor with Goldman Sachs. “Pretty soon you throw your hands up in the air and say I like the colour of that guy’s tie, so I’m gonna vote for him.” Ayo Obe, Chair, of the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy agreed that citizens around the world are now faced with more information than ever before. But this should not be used as an excuse to give up on their democratic responsibilities, she insisted. Democracy gives ordinary people “responsibility and power,” which they must have the self confidence to use and use wisely, she said. Obe explained that in Africa in 1990 there were just four countries that could have been described as multi-party democracies. Today the number has risen to 34. This is clearly a major achievement but it has brought with it new challenges, she argued. Returning to Liswood’s point about voting for the politician with the nicest tie, Obe said that there was a danger in many democracies, that people were letting obsession with personality and trivia get in the way of making important decisions based on the political issues that really matter. “Trivialisation diverts attention from the issues and it is the responsibility of the citizen to make discerning choices. They need to take matters into their own hands,” she argued. Obe said she believed the best way to restore trust in democratic societies was to concentrate on building political systems based on respected and effective institutions rather than placing too much emphasis on personalities. “Putting one’s trust in individuals is not a long term strategy for building a society,” she added. Liswood agreed, arguing that the personality-centred political culture in her home country, the USA, was stifling serious political debate in many areas. Citing the example of likely Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, she argued that very little of the public debate surrounding the former first lady’s bid to run for the Whitehouse concerned her political programme. “It’s all about should she have stayed with her husband or not, or is she the kind of person I’d like to have a beer with,” said the Goldman Sachs analyst. Summing up the debate, all three speakers argued that ordinary citizens, and in particular women, needed to have more trust in themselves and in their ability to make wise decisions about the people they choose to run their societies. “We need a lot more trust and confidence in ourselves and we need to demand respect from the people we put forward to lead us,” said Obe. “We need enough self doubt to question our decisions but enough confidence to move forward,” argued Lauvergeon. Women in particular needed a healthy dose of this self confidence, said Liswood. “Men feel like they are fully confident to make a decision when they have 25 percent of the information. Women only feel confident when they have 75 percent,” she said. On the question of whether this meant she felt men should become more cautious or women just a bit less so she, perhaps deliberately, remained unclear.
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