News

Last Friday [27 March] Volonteurope launched its Europe for the Common Good campaign in Riga, Latvia, with a conference entitled “A Vision of the Common Good for Europe”.

Volonteurope’s campaign is based on the belief that inclusive, just and sustainable communities result from common good ways of thinking and behaving, and that a common good approach is necessary to address the challenges facing Europe and the world.

But what does Volonteurope mean by a common good approach? To put it very simply, is sees it as working together towards a future that benefits everyone.

Volonteurope’s vision of the common good is inspired by the work done by “A Call to Action for the Common Good”, a UK initiative led by a number of civil society organisations, including its member Community Service Volunteers (CSV).

Volonteurope sees the common good as being underpinned by a set of principles, including fairness, inclusiveness, collaboration and sustainability. In turn, these principles rely on the existence of relationships. By relationships, Volonteurope means the ways in which actors from all sectors relate to one another. Relationships are central to the vision of the common good, an often undervalued asset whose power we need to harness.

At Volonteurope’s launch event on Friday, representatives from government, the private sector and civil society gathered at SSE Riga to debate this vision and to answer the following question: What is your vision of the common good?

Diana Pauna, Pro-rector of SSE Riga, placed volunteering and active citizenship at the heart of her vision of the common good, and spoke about the university’s efforts to encourage volunteering among its students.

This view was echoed by the Latvian Minister for Welfare, Uldis Augulis, who said that the Latvian government was drafting legislation that would help promote volunteering, and expressed his hope that the government would use the European Union (EU) presidency to work towards the common good.

For Juana Bengoa, from Volonteurope’s Spanish member Alianza por la Solidaridad, the common good is closely linked to the idea of common, or public, goods. As citizens of the world, she said, we are responsible for making sure that everyone’s basic needs are met, that they have access to food, water and healthcare, that they feel safe and are able to forge meaningful relationships. She stressed the importance of ownership in this process. Giving people ownership of common, or public, goods will empower them and create a sense of shared responsibility, she explained.

Dr Arnis Sauka, Director of SSE Riga’s Centre for Sustainable Business, brought a business perspective to the debate. Alongside sustainability, he cited self-interest as key to his vision of the common good. “There is nothing wrong with self-interest,” he said. “Some companies adopt common good behaviours, not out of a desire to help society, but because it is profitable for them to do so, it is in their self-interest,” he explained.

This led Oonagh Aitken, President of Volonteurope and Chief Executive of CSV, to bring up an article that was published in The Guardian newspaper recently about the unfair treatment of people working in the UK cleaning industry. “Parts of the business sector have no interest whatsoever in people’s wellbeing,” she pointed out.

How should we respond to this? For some people, like Dr Sauka, social responsibility should be woven into the very fabric of the business sector, and the state’s role is to incentivise common good behaviours using a carrot and stick approach. “Never take for granted that entrepreneurs are good, give them an incentive to be good,” he said.

For others, like Juana Bengoa and Dace Maulina, Director of the Latvian volunteering organisation Brivpratigais.lv, greater regulation is the answer.

Steve Wyler from “A Call to Action for the Common Good”, reflecting on the discussion about self-interest, said: “You can’t ignore self-interest, we’re not living in a world where everybody is a saint. Altruism does exist, but it’s not enough in itself. Self-interest can produce good outcomes, and it can produce terrible outcomes.”

Referring back to Juana Bengoa’s comment about the importance of ownership, he gave the example of a campaign that led the Scottish government to pass a law giving communities the right to acquire assets of community value. This campaign, he noted, was motivated by self-interest, but it had common good outcomes.

While the value of self-interest remained a point of contention, there was widespread agreement that the common good requires cross-sectoral collaboration and some sort of a paradigm shift in the way we behave, with many participants talking about the need to “work in a different way” and “change the way we live”.

Some participants warned of the dangers of looking for “universal” principles and pointed out that there would always be areas of disagreement. The Director of Social Platform, Pierre Baussand, who moderated the discussion, conceded that universal assent is impossible but insisted that we need to agree on some key principles. “Maybe ‘never leaving anyone behind’ is a good starting point,” he suggested.

Volonteurope’s goal, then, is not to impose an agenda but to open up a space for debate. The crucial questions are: What is our vision of the common good? And how can we make it a reality?

Perhaps what we need is a common good “test”, something with which to assess the behaviours of government, the private sector and civil society. Do they benefit society as a whole? Do they give future generations the chance to pursue their own prosperity? Are they environmentally sustainable?

As important as behaviours are, this campaign goes beyond putting pressure on key actors – policy-makers, businesses, civil society organisations – to behave differently. Europe for the Common Good is about telling a story of hope, of a positive future that is within our reach and depends on us. As Social Platform’s Pierre Baussand argued in his article on the topic, we need to combine principles with policy, ideas with practice.

As part of this campaign Volonteurope will collect best practices from across Europe and beyond on common good thinking. These examples will serve to inform its views on desirable behaviours.

Volonteurope’s next stop will be Sofia, Bulgaria, where it will be holding a conference on “Governance for the Common Good: The Role of the Enabling State” on 8 May 2015.

Full article.