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Madame President; Dear Members of FIG Council and General Assembly;
Dear colleagues and friends.
2017 is thirty years from the date when I was appointed as United
Kingdom delegate of Commission 7 by my member association, the Royal
Institution of Chartered Surveyors, RICS.
It is twenty seven years from the date of the first FIG Congress I
attended; Here in Helsinki under President Juha Talvitie. It was a
remarkable Congress; A transformative event.
The FAO and FIG relationship was formalised in 2002 when President
Bob Foster joined me in Rome for the signing of the Memorandum of
agreement between our two organizations.
My wife Judith and I arrived in Helsinki over the weekend. Without
even thinking I checked my i-pad for directions and the myriad of other
spatially-related details that so ease our travel those days and
dramatically reduce the friction of distance.
Twenty-seven short years have transformed the world, have transformed
how we live, have transformed how we relate to space and how we make
decisions. Surveyors, working creatively with an increasingly diverse
range of partners, have been at the heart of these transformative
changes. And FIG has been and continuous to be the heading light as a
forum in this accelerating global transition. This technological
transformation has of course heralded and is helping to enable profound
political and social transformation, including in relation to tenure and
property rights.
FAO’s proudest achievement in this field has been its involvement
with partners, including especially surveyors, in the development of the
Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure. This
unprecedented global agreement was identified in FAO’S 70TH Anniversary
publication two years ago as among the 10 greatest achievements of the
organization in its first 70 years of existence.
This, dear colleagues and friends, is no mean achievement!
I and FAO would like to thank FIG, particularly my friends and
colleagues from the Commissions – especially Commission 7, together with
my formative member association, the RICS, and all of FIG member
associations for their farsighted support and commitment to the
Voluntary Guidelines.
It was no coincidence that among the first of the major regional
consultations on the Voluntary Guidelines was the FIG and UN-HABITAT
partnered consultation at the FIG Regional Conference in November 2009
in Hanoi, Vietnam. Surveyors are very much at the meeting point between
what is happening in spatial technology and what is happening around
tenure and property right. They are closely linked, with the former
being increasingly a powerful enabler for the latter. It is precisely
these technological spatial transformations all around us that are
slowly enabling the achievement of the politics and social agendas of
properly recognising, recording and safeguarding peoples’ legitimate
tenure rights using the strength of the Voluntary Guidelines. Such
transformative agendas will never be quick or easy, but with guidance
stakeholders like FIG and its member associations, your strong ethical
positioning, and working with many key partners including FAO and UN
Habitat, this agenda will surely be driven forward.
It is indeed a crowning honour to be awarded this distinguished
appellation as an honorary ambassador of the federation! But I confess
to feeling a bit of a fraud.
Dear colleagues and friends, it is after all you, every single one of
you, who are the honorary ambassadors of the Voluntary Guidelines. It is
you who are lynchpins of the global partnership that nurtured them and
gave them life who have the responsibility of continuing ambassadorial
duty. The Voluntary Guidelines are and always revising our Guideline, a
true public good.
I wish you all FIG, and the member associations, continued success in
this, as in all of you important endeavours.
Madame President, ladies and gentlemen of the FIG council and General
Assembly, may I offer you my salute and my deepest thanks. I am more
touched than I can say.
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