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| Pix Credit HERE |
Sustainability, like pollen, is very much in the air north of the Equator. It is sticky and meant to fertilize just the right receptacle to produce from this connection those fruits or encapsulations that can be consumed by others the seeds of which, then excreted, or unconsumed and rotting can fall to earth, in either case giving rise to new life.
And so it is that the great pollinators in the German Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, has offered itself up as just that sort of receptacle from a mass of well curated pollinators. The Ministry tell us so:
As part of Germany’s G7 Presidency, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs will host a digital conference on sustainable value chains on 6 May 2022. The aim is to give new impulses to the international debate on a binding standard in the field of business and human rights. The conference will feature discussions with high-level representatives of the G7 countries, international organisations, trade unions and employers, civil society, as well as renowned experts. What would be the added value of an international binding standard or instrument on business and human rights? What are crucial success criteria for broad acceptance? What can the G7 contribute?The Conference is as valuable for its theme as it is for the curation choices made in the hopes of successful fertilization leading to the production of fruit that, consumed by the great state actors attracting these pollinators, might then be "processed" into new regulatory Lebenswelt (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (English 1970); Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (German1936)). This last point is important, though unlikely to be valued much among the pragmatic set that inhabit that great nexus point between academics advisors, and public intellectuals with the great machinery of the contemporary administrative apparatus whose business it is to consume knowledge especially crafted --like pollen specifically aligned with a specific species of plant--what these instruments of knowledge production produce.
In cooperation with the ILO initiative Alliance 8.7, the conference will also deal with two of the most severe human rights violations in business operation and value chains that require urgent action: child labour and forced labour. (Press Release; Conference Website)
It is in this sense, especially, that conferences of this sort are critically important. Not so much for what is presented (though of course what is offered up is quite interesting and usually valuable in itself), but rather for the way that both the curation of presenter and presentation suggest the needs, ambitions, and knowledge managerialism of the state (in its role as conference organizer) to get from the offerings of providers (bringing with them the prestige (eg the "good" or "impressive" genetic markers) to the fulfillment of the ambitions of those who seek to translate this pollen into regulatory fruit. This Conference offers much in the way of fruitfulness. There is an orchard of possibility here--from the specific interventions, to the prosopography (interlinkages and connections) of those involved, to the semiotics of the project of narrative building and regulatory foundation shaping.
Links to the Workshop documents follow, along with the Program.
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