Conference “Time Zones”

Deceleration

In light of the global acceleration of economic and cultural processes, most participants stressed the need for deliberate slowness and continuity: “Stamina constitutes a merit of its own” (Martin Bröckelmann-Simon, Misereor].

• Only a long-term engagement can guarantee the basis for trust and thus the necessary reliability. It allows a prompt and speedy reaction in times of crisis. Only a continuing presence can ensure an adequate local embedding of the development cooperation and thus the optimal use of resources.
  
  

• Development needs time, to carry people along, if it aims to be more than just a technological importation in the sense of “transfer of hardware” (Father Wolfgang Schonecke, Netzwerk Afrika Deutschland e.V.). If changes affect social, cultural and religious spheres, development can only be sustainable if mentalities are taken up: “It takes two generations, in order to really affect change” (Edmund Grosch, Deutsche Lepra- und Tuberkulosehilfe e.V.).
  
  

• Prof. Wolfgang Eichwede (Universität Bremen) called for humility, Germany and the other industrialized nations had needed several centuries for a controlled development – and that without consideration of the social and ecological effects.

Two critical positions were articulated:

• In the opinion of many participants the parlous social and ecological state in many regions could not tolerate a deceleration of efforts at improvement.
  
  
• The speed of development processes escapes the influence of development cooperation that can only be selectively active and does not command the necessary resources. It can modify development only situation dependent and has to otherwise subordinate itself to the existing global time structures.

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