Manifesto - The Global South House

GLOBAL SOUTH
at the CENTER

A MANIFESTO FOR A NEW FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE FOR CLIMATE, NATURE AND PEOPLE

We come together at The Global South House to enhance the visibility of our socio-environmental justice philanthropy from and for the Global South. As a diverse funding ecosystem spread across the geopolitical Global South, we are active in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Spanning multiple biomes, languages, and cultures, we represent our peoples, communities, and movements.

Across all our diversity, we strengthen the efforts of Global South communities as they confront and adapt to climate change, promote social justice, and preserve and restore ecosystems that are vital to life on Earth.

This Manifesto is an urgent call to multilateral institutions, civil society, funding partners, and both public and private sectors to take coordinated action by implementing measures that effectively lessen inequalities and asymmetries in access to resources and decision-making. We must work together to build a new financing architecture that supports climate, nature, and people and is grounded in racial and gender justice, transparency, and dignity.

STRATEGIC ROLE OF SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL
JUSTICE FUNDS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

It is essential to acknowledge and affirm the value of the strategic role of socio-environmental justice funds from the Global South. Our practices are characterized by:

Innovation, effectiveness, and scale

Our funding mechanisms are democratic, accessible, and transparent, cutting through traditional bureaucracy to ensure that resources reach directly the people who, every day, create locally led solutions to major global challenges. We are able to mobilize and distribute significant amounts of funding quickly and efficiently, maximizing impact at scale.

Proximity

Born out of the territories and social movements, we act to ensure that our communities are represented in resource allocation decision-making processes. The most resilient, efficient, and innovative climate, environmental, and social solutions already exist, rooted in the ancestral knowledge and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, traditional and marginalized communities, youth, women, and other historically excluded groups. We are a mechanism connecting them to financial resources.

Risk and cost reduction

Our governance and accountability practices are based on transparency and trust. We develop efficient management models, enabling us to work in partnership with public and private funders and mitigate risks and costs related to resource allocation and use.

Adequate responses to needs

To identify needs and respond effectively, we develop innovative Monitoring, Assessment, and Learning models, with indicators and metrics that measure what truly matters to the communities involved. We thus assess the effectiveness of our actions and engage more genuinely with funders, multilateral mechanisms, and governments.

Intersectionality

Embracing the complexity of the identities and contexts within which we work, we adopt an intersectional approach to problems and their solutions, ensuring that resources reach historically marginalized groups and supporting their struggles for equity and human, social, and territorial rights.

Our vision is aligned with the local and global movements that inspire us, as expressed in the Letter of Rede de Fundos Comunitários da Amazônia (Letter from the Amazonia Community Funds Network) and the #ShiftThePower Manifesto.

We advocate for a quality financing architecture that is:

More legitimate

Prioritizing the voices of communities most affected by climate, environmental, and social crises in structured and responsive ways within their governance frameworks.

More responsible

Embracing shared responsibilities for implementing more agile financing solutions over the long term and with less bureaucracy.

More just

Pursuing the imperative of historical reparations for the processes of colonization, while continuing to fight against racism and gender inequality that still shape the unfair and unequal distribution of resources.

More diverse

Integrating contributions from a wide range of socio-environmental justice funds from and for the Global South — activist, independent, community-led, Indigenous, quilombolas, feminist, youth, and others — while also strengthening innovation and learning networks, and ecosystems that are essential for building this collective strength.

More solidary

Affirming its commitment and respect for communities most affected by climate, environmental, and social crises, which have historically been on the front lines of defending the climate, nature, and life.

This is why
our call is urgent:

To collectively construct a financing ecosystem for climate, nature, and people grounded in active listening, mutual trust, solidarity, and direct support for solutions already flourishing in the territories: an architecture that truly contributes to fair and equitable solutions.

Socio-environmental justice funds are already signposting the way ahead. We therefore call on global philanthropy to recognize the power of this vision for our shared goal of protecting nature and people. The Global South House is the platform where we are building this path together, through collaboration and with determination.

GLOBAL SOUTH at the CENTER