Resilient People Resilient Planet - Another report not worth reading

"Now more than ever, leaders need to focus on what matters most - the long-term resilience of people and the planet - the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability urged in its report presented today to UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon in Addis Ababa. The 22-member Panel, established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity, was co-chaired by Finnish President Tarja Halonen and South African President Jacob Zuma. The Panel’s final report, “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing,” contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible."

This is how the press release for the launch of the report of the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability present it. Unfortunately, the report doesn't really say almost anything how sustainable development can be mainstreamed into economic policy, and even less how it can be mainstreamed in the actions of economic agents, i.e. investors,  companies, workers and consumers.

There are multiple layers of problems here. The first layer is that very little has happened since the Rio conference 1992.

"A quarter of a century ago, the Brundtland report introduced the concept of sustainable development to the international community as a new paradigm for economic growth (my emphasis), social equality and environmental sustainability. The report argued that sustainable development could be achieved by an integrated policy framework embracing all three of those pillars. The Brundtland report was right then, and it remains right today. The problem is that, 25 years later, sustainable development remains a generally agreed concept, rather than a day-to-day, on-the-ground, practical reality."

The second layer is that as you can see above, economic growth was seen not only as possible but actually as a part of, a precondition for sustainable development. So one of the main expression of unsustainable development (an uncontrolled growth) is seen as a condition for it.

And the third layer is that the underlying analysis is flawed. Neither the Bruntland report nor this report has understood that it is the underlying economic drivers that destroys the environment and creates poverty (read for instance my posts Poverty, Property and Profit and Beyond Sustainability). Well, they do admit it to some extent, but they believe those things can be fixed by tweaking the system rather than changing the system. So we should have more green consumerism (recommendation 11); we should develop new indexes for measuring progress, over and above the GDP (recommendation 39), better sustainability reporting from companies (recommendation 32).

The report is full of language that makes the weak recommendations even weaker, expressions such as "explore a range of measures", "step up their efforts", and the "Panel calls for a process to explore the concept and application of the critical issue of equity in relation to sustainable development". The reports is full of jargon and wishy-washy language such as "Governments should use public investment to create enabling frameworks that catalyse very substantial additional financing"(recommendation 36).

When it comes the what really counts, how economic agents ACT, the reports is very weak: businesses "should seek to align their business practices with universally accepted principles concerning human rights, labour, environmental sustainability and the fight against corruption" "should seek" to align is far from "must", or "shall" or even from "should", and, of course there are really very few measures suggested leading in this direction.

In general, even if the report itself says: "to achieve sustainability, a transformation of the global economy is required.  Tinkering at the edges will not do the job.", this is where the report really falls short. It does call for and end of subsidies for fossil fuel and it does call for increased internalisation of costs, and it calls for some regulation, but it is still only on the level of tinkering, in the same way as the other major UN effort towards Rio, the Green Economy report.

Greenpeace writes the following

"Its mandate was clearly recognized: “efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other social and economic targets are hampered by the inability to agree on decisive and coordinated action in national and multilateral fora.”  Yet in the end the politicians did what they always do – they kicked the tough issues down the road for someone else to deal with and bowed to what they thought could get agreed.  No wonder there’s a leadership vacuum."

Is Global Democracy Possible?

Yesterday I participated in a lecture and debate with Jan Aart Scholte, from Building Global Democracy, organised by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. It was an interesting event and there was a lot of discussion afterwards. One of these "talks" that is so valuable for development of new ideas and perspective. Mr Scholte likened the global governance structure as a donut, with a large number of actors and nothing in the middle. Having said that he also didn't call for some global government to be put there in the middle. He also made a point of that business are not at all anti-regulation, on contrary they love regulations as long as they are made in their interest. I thought about the WTO as a perfect such example. The whole reasons to set up the WTO is to make rules that are good for business.

The most interesting aspect from my perspective is what other forms and institutions we can develop for governance than the (nation) state. Some people have a tendency to overplay the role of the nation state. They are called sovereigns but hardly ever are they sovereign. There are also on the national level a lot of other institutions that are competing with it for power. First we have the market, see my posting below. I don't think anybody disputes the strength of "the market" as an institution. But we have many more. In Sweden our municipalities have a certain degree of self-rule, i.e. the national government can't boss them around. Then we have a myriad of cooperatives or other ways that people associate to "govern" things that are important for them, e.g. a church, a landscape, water pipes or housing. Of course, in theory the nation state could forbid all these things, but in doing so it would both loose legitimacy and the foundation for its own existence. In addition nothing would work properly if all initiatives outside the state are oppressed. That is why dictatorships are not only bad from a democracy perspective, they are also bad for business and development.

Today, also national governments are subject to international regulations and standards that they have to obey. Many of them are actually set by non governmental organisations. That is in particular the case for standards. They are by and large developed outside governmental structures. But it also holds true for technology in general and many business arrangements.

Realising that the nation state is only one of many forms for governance and seeing the existing reality in global governance, i.e. a whole pot of intergovernmental organisation, private sector organisations, business associatons, civil society, international courts etc., it becomes clear to me that a discussion about global governance can't look only, or not even mainly into the WTO and the UN. They surely have their role, and there is a lot to be done to make them work better. The UN system has increasingly engaged civil society, and I have personally participated in various UN processed and events (such as the Johannesburg summit 2002) as a civil society representative. The WTO falls even short of that. Already national governments are increasingly loosing legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens and intergovernmental organisation certainly have even bigger problems with legitimacy. e.g. the EU has a major legitimacy problems towards the citizens of the EU member states. This is one reason, but there are many more, for why I believe intergovernmental organisations will not be the most interesting actors for global governance in the future (I now think in decades and not in years). I believe we can see more interesting things for governance and democracy develop outside of those inter-governmental organisations, in the same was as we see more interesting innovation in governance outside the nation state.