THE 60th summit of the 53-member Commonwealth, a most diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural group of very unequally developed nations, gets underway in Port of Spain on Friday amid high expectations for consensus on a range of global issues.

Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma has identified major agenda issues in terms of lingering crises-economic, financial, food security and global warming.

Another matter expected to trigger spirited deliberations will be the establishment of a network of electoral management bodies in member states within the context of strengthening democratic processes and good governance.

For all the protestations-comparatively quite feeble-against the social, economic and political policies of the host Government of Prime Minister Patrick Manning, the Port of Spain Summit stands in sharp contrast to the political tension, disturbances and security concerns that marked the three-day summit in Kampala, Uganda in November 2007.

Indeed, Prime Minister Manning, who had successfully bid in Kampala to host this 60th summit, may be on good grounds in his proud display of optimism, compared with the Fifth Summit of the Americas he hosted some eight months ago.

For a start, short of another bit of political somersaulting as occurred in Kampala, the very challenging issue of climate change could get a significant collective boost in Port of Spain-ahead of the international conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in ten days time.

Those more familiar with the culture of Commonwealth summits have come to view them with scepticism and cynicism in terms of their ability to convert rhetoric into reality for the estimated two billion people of the ’family of Commonwealth nations’’.

Within this family of nations -with all their current problems of man-made and natural disasters-there are those committed to democracy, good governance and the rule of law who coexist with some very corrupt and repressive regimes, all this amid massive social and economic disparities.

Now a development of historic significance is about to take place in Port of Spain within this group -the expected formal acceptance of Rwanda as the newest Commonwealth member.

The membership application from President Paul Kagame was first considered at the 2007 Kampala summit and resulted from the Rwandan government’s outrage at France for its alleged complicity in the mind-boggling massacre in 1994 of approximately one million Rwandans during the tribal blood-letting of Tutsis and Hutus.

A coincidence of much relevance is that scheduled to be in Port of Spain for this summit that is to settle Rwanda’s membership issue is France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French leader is one of the very high profile, powerful non-Commonwealth leaders expected to participate in sessions of the three-day summit on issues such as the current international financial and economic crisis and the phenomenon of global warming.

As clear evidence of his own commitment to mobilise international support in meeting the challenges of climate change, the host of the Copenhagen conference, Danish Prime Minister Lokke Rasmussen, has also confirmed his attendance at the summit, which is to be declared open by Her Majesty the Queen, who used to be the symbolic head of state of Trinidad and Tobago.

Prime Minister Manning may have unwittingly introduced his call for the summit to consider ways by which civil society could have ’a greater say’’ in the fostering and protection of democratic processes.

He and his Caricom counterparts may do well to remind themselves of their own collective failure to pursue initiatives from the Caribbean Community’s 2002 ’Encounter with Civil Society’’ and, more precisely the Caricom Charter of Civil Society.

Nevertheless, at the wider level of all Commonwealth leaders, it would be good to learn, at the conclusion of the summit in Port of Spain, of the progress, the achievements spawned by the Commonwealth Foundation’s ’democracy project’’ that resulted in the very informative publication, seven years ago, Reviving Democracy-Citizens at the Heart of Governance.

Perhaps, along with our own Caricom Charter of Civil Society, this publication on ’Reviving Democracy’’ should be made available to all Commonwealth leaders.