• Funds Needed to Promote Global Governance / Excerpts from Comment by Prof. Peter P. Canisius,
  
  

Funds Needed to Promote Global Governance / Excerpts from Comment by Prof. Peter P. Canisius,

President, German National Commission for UNESCO

To bring about global governance we probably have to change a few things and for this we need money. The standard phrase today is 'we have no money'. But this is true only in exceptional cases. There is money but it is wrongly used. So we have to reallocate the funds.

I heard a beautiful story the other day: When a considerable sum of money was allocated to the German Ministry of the Interior for so-called internal security, the person responsible for procuring the funds said: "This will enable us to bring so many hundreds of new policemen with all the infrastructure." A very courageous colleague got up and said: "You are entirely wrong. You have to use 50 per cent of the funds for new policemen and the rest 50 per cent to educate the people not to hit at each other."

Now, this brings me to Albert Einstein who said no problem can be solved in the spirit it originated. And we need a radical change in thinking to bring about what we are trying to do. We will have to invest more money out of the rare money we have, to bring about and to transport the information. I still have Pat's words in my ears who said information does not reach the people because it is not understood. We need locally annotated understandable information which calls for the co-operation of the journalists with the people at the local level to discuss in which way the information is to be formulated to reach the people.

It is not the journalist's knowledge about things and I don't believe in the story that science journalists have to be scientists. No, it is those that bring the information. You have to formulate it in the right manner and to do so you have to communicate with the people who know what can be brought home to the recipient of information. That kind of communication is the beginning of global governance. So this should be realised. By doing so, you will be stimulating global governance and developing procedures of integrating everybody in what is to be done tomorrow.

My plea would be for rethinking - remember what Einstein said - allocating our funds in the right direction, making the information readable and at the same time starting the communication. With all the convincing force I have, I am inclined to say it cannot be done the way we have done it so far. This is the challenge. Think of all those people who produce much worse things than the values we have to transport. And how much do they invest scientifically in what we call public relations? Our values are much higher than those products. So let us invest in marketing them.