The Professional commons has a great honor to invite Mr. Laurence Brahm to give a talk on “Genesis of Himalayan Consensus”. To learn more about the Himalayan Consensus, please refer to the link http://www.laurencebrahm.com/himalayan-consensus/himalayan-consensus
Laurence Brahm is a global activist, international mediator, political columnist and author. He is the leading advocate of a fresh development paradigm – The Himalayan Consensus – an innovative approach to development. The Himalayan Consensus emphasizes empowering people with local pragmatism in place of broad sweeping globalized ideology and theory. If you have interest to come, please register by the following link.
Detail
Date: 24th May 2010
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Room B6605, City University of Hong Kong (Kowloon Tong Campus)
Topic: Genesis of Himalayan Consensus
Language: English
Profile of the speaker : Laurence Brahm
Member of The United Nations Theme Group on Poverty and Inequality, Laurence Brahm is a global activist, international mediator, political columnist and author. He is the leading advocate of a fresh development paradigm – The Himalayan Consensus – an innovative approach to development. The Himalayan Consensus emphasizes empowering people with local pragmatism in place of broad sweeping globalized ideology and theory.
The Himalayan Consensus evolved from Brahm’s years embedded as a central government advisor in Vietnam and Laos in the early 1990s, during which Brahm vociferously opposed the “shock therapy” policy prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. During these years, Brahm drafted the overarching financial reforms and accompanying policy legislation that led to economic take-off and continues to serve as the development framework for these countries to this day. Two decades later, Vietnam and Laos are examples of the success of Brahm’s policy advice, in contrast to the graveyard status of the “shock therapy” method.
Brahm went on to advise Cambodia, Mongolia and ultimately China’s economic tsar, former Premier Zhu Rongji, during the critical years that Zhu supervised China’s transition from planned to market economy, creating the economic miracle China has today. A member of the inner circle of Zhu’s economic advisors and a trusted personal friend to several of China’s leaders, advice provided by Brahm was regularly sought behind China’s state-owned enterprise, banking, and monetary reforms that paved the way for China’s entry into the WTO in 2001. During these years, Brahm coined the “China Century” theory which juxtaposed the doomsday “China Collapse” view held by certain scholars in the West. Brahm also documented the reforms that he personally witnessed in his biography of Zhu.
Following China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, Brahm considered his work on economic and monetary reform policy in Beijing to be finished, as the reform process would now be magnetized by global integration through the WTO as opposed to being driven by policy decision-making of individual leaders.
Brahm shifted his focus from coastal China to the western regions, moving to the Himalayan Plateau and seeking alternative economic experiences relevant to rural poverty alleviation and environmental protection as opposed to urban industrialization. At this point, Brahm’s previous work as alternative developmental advocate evolved into that of a global activist.
Since 2002, Brahm has refused any further engagements with multinational corporations as investment advisor and strategist and moved from Beijing to Lhasa, where he began an extensive program of heritage building restoration, microequity empowerment for marginalized women and the handicapped, medical outreach programs (including establishing clinics in monasteries and campaigns to rid blindness among nomadic and poor populations), and the first free education Montessori school in the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Brahm’s extensive writing and film documentation of experiences on the Tibetan Plateau during the years 2002-2006 emerged in a book trilogy of Himalayan travelogues: Searching for Shangri-la, Conversations with Sacred Mountains, and Shambhala. These were followed by a fourth book (New Age Sutra) and two art heater films (Searching for Shangri-la and Shambhala Sutra). These works expressed Brahm’s multifaceted concerns over environmental protection, ethnic identity, poverty alleviation, income gap redistribution, and promotion of world peace.
From 2006 onward, Brahm embarked on integrating different experiences across the Himalayan range from Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan to Bangladesh and then Sri Lanka, weaving his experiences into a new paradigm that calls for prioritizing environmental protection, ethnic diversity, and cultural sustainability in the context of the Himalayan Consensus. In March 2009, the concepts of the Himalayan Consensus were crystallized in Brahm’s latest book, The Anti-Globalization Breakfast Club: Manifesto for a Peaceful Revolution, published by John Wiley & Sons.
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