The Sustainable Development Goals: leading to a "global Brexit"?

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Although the concept of sustainable development was first clearly expressed in the report Our Common Future, published three decades ago, (with earlier precedents) the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) paid little attention to sustainability. Of the ten MDGs, the seventh, which relates to environmental protection, was a spectacular failure. Hastily conceived, and almost overlooked by Mark Malloch Brown, then administrator of the United Nation Development Programme, this Goal sought to “ensure environmental sustainability.” One of its targets was to “integrate principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes” and “reverse the loss of environmental resources.” While its other targets (improve water access and the lives of slum dwellers) are more on track, the failure of the main theme is extremely serious, threatening not only to worsen the lives of future slum dwellers, but to destroy civilization within a century.

In a welcome re-awakening of high level concerns that development must be sustainable, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) took effect in 2015. Claimed by its supporters to herald a new phase of international development, the 17 SDGs exhort all countries, rich and poor, to work towards genuinely sustainable, inclusive development. Critics contend, however, that the SDGs demonstrate profound cognitive dissonance, and provide a façade behind which global injustice will continue, and where “eco-social” determinants of universal human wellbeing will deteriorate.

The SDGs, in fact, are riddled with cognitive dissonance. Their reliance on conventionally defined economic "growth" is a fatal flaw. They remind me of the false promises that globalisation would bring health and prosperity for all. For example, SDG 8 endorses rapid economic growth, including at least 7% per annum in the least developed countries. But economic growth is not, as far as I can tell, defined to include externalities, negative and positive. Can this be achieved without undermining the natural environment, and thus undermining human development?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to me are a fantasy, conjoured by elites living safe within the global fortress, in order to reassure themselves of their own morality and compassion, and to reassure the poor that all will be well. (Not that the poor are likely to have ever heard of the SDGs). 

The problem with living inside a fortress (rather than the kind of world the SDGs imagine, and which, to be fair, many of its promoters work for) is that, eventually, the walls crumble. Well before that point, mentality changes within the fortress, as people think more and more of defence rather than assistance; other people become threats rather than potential friends. This is certainly the case in Australia and the US, as support for migration falters. 

A fairer world is actually safer, happier, less fearful, and healthier. But how do we make it fairer? The SDGs need a path to be partly realised, as well as a less utopian framing, which would make them more credible. Such a path is barely sketched. It cannot be achieved in an intensifying fortress world. It requires more academic honesty about limits to growth, and its implications, including for freedom.

Could the arc of the universe bend toward justice?

Somehow, in this dark night, we have to find some light. Martin Luther King is said to have said "the arc of the universe bends toward justice” (mentioned in this video). (This phrase is attributed to abolitionist Theodore Parker, writing in 1853.) One glimmer of hope I have is the knowledge and increasing realisation that globalisation and neoliberalism have failed.

While a reformed, moderated form of economics and power distribution currently seems unlikely to emerge, I doubt this would have arisen in a US administration led by Hilary Clinton. Were I a US citizen, I would have voted for Bernie Sanders - but neither the power elite nor the people in the rustbucket states were ready for that (though this article claims Sanders would have defeated Trump in these states. It also shows a tweet by Trump where he seems to indicate he regarded Sanders as a more formidable opponent).

--> Perhaps four years of Trump's erratic behaviour will erode his support, even in the rusty states, away from the US coast. Perhaps Senator Elizabeth Warren (who seems to have some characteristics of Sanders) will then be elected. Perhaps Marine Le Pen's influence will wane and Angela Merkel will hang on.
Both the UK and Germany show evidence of understanding that poor eco-social determinants underpin the growing refugee crisis. Germany is acting through the UN institutions. Britain, however, seems to be acting more via its own intervention. Both approaches have a place (and China's too) - but it is also essential that the US play a better role. This will not happen with the US government under President Trump. The big US aid groups such as the Gates and Clinton Foundations are also neoliberal; perhaps the backlash  against globalisation will cause them to reconsider. Let us hope!
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About the author: Adjunct Professor Colin Butler is co-founder of two development-promoting NGOs, each of which promote old fashioned strategies for development such as health care and education. In 2014 he became the first Australian IPCC contributor to be arrested for climate disobedience.

The loss of freedom in our ecologically-constrained world

In 2015 we published a paper called "Implications of ‘structure versus agency’ for addressing health and well-being in our ecologically-constrained world" in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, (Vol 8 pp 47-69). It's behind a paywall, but one of its key points is that as limits to growth tighten, freedom for all will be reduced.

Here are three examples, simply from today's radio:

1. Free speech in Britain: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown just stated (on Late Night Live) that in the UK if a university student should mention Western hypocrisy over human rights they risk being reported to the British authorities. I tried to verify this (it is so Orwellian) but so far with no success.

2. Information about financial risks: I today watched a documentary called "We as a people will become afraid of the ocean' about the inexorable sea level rise and its effect in Florida. At its end, Professor Wanless (Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami) warns that, perhaps by 2050, many people from Florida will become like Okies - that is, wandering the US, penniless, looking for a home, having lost their assets in Florida (no doubt with profound global financial flow-ons). Yet, today, property prices in Florida continue to boom. This illustrates another loss of freedom - millions of investors, collectively, are walking into a gigantic financial trap, due to the "echo chamber" of a poor understanding of science (and limited education). They lack the freedom to know what is going on - even though they think they are making independent decisions.

More encouragingly, residents of Florida in November 2016 voted against an amendment, supported by the big utility companies, which would have slowed the solar transition which is happening, despite the collective incomprehension of climate change in the US and many other places.

3. The Philippines: The president of this overcrowded, desperately unequal country has himself killed numerous people without proof, or court, ushering 6,000 copycat crimes and desperately overcrowded jails. To what extent is the drug epidemic a symptom of this overcrowding and inequality? And, what has happened to Catholic morals there? Pope Francis, so good on the environment, did try to suggest that people need not breed like rabbits (after a visit to this benighted country). Slowing population growth in climate change vulnerable places, such as the Philippines, would also be good for adaptation.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also speculates (in her interview) on how easily the world could slide into World War III, something I have also repeatedly warned of (eg). And this interview was first broadcast months before the election of Donald Trump.

What can be done?

Like Yasmin, I am pessimistic. But the rise of Bernie Sanders, the failure of the Florida power companies to get their way, and the falling price of solar are rational causes for hope, as is social media, and people like Xiuhtezcatal Tonatiuh. As I recently mused, the excesses  of capitalism have released demons from the netherworld, as Marx long ago predicted. If enough people see the risk we face we could again see a fairer world unfold. But with Trump filling the Washington swamp with members of the 0.1% who deny health care, social security, climate change and environmental protection, we could easily stumble into WIII.
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** Our abstract read: "The long-standing debate in public health and the wider society concerning the implications of structure and agency for health and well-being generally concludes that structure powerfully influences agency, and does so unequally, exacerbating social and health inequities. In this article, we review this debate in the context of increasing environmental degradation and resource depletion. As the global population rises and environmental resources per person shrink, conflicts over the underlying factors contributing to human health and well-being may intensify. A likely result of nearing limits is a further constraint of agency, for both rich and poor, and greater social and health inequities, including gender inequities."

A sorcerer out of control? Inequality, Trump, Brexit and reasons to avoid despair

This is the draft editorial for the 50th issue of BODHI Times, the periodic newsletter of the NGOs BODHI and BODHI Australia. I hope the newsletter will be published in early 2017.

In 1848, Karl Marx published the first issue of a slim (23 pages) pamphlet, called The Communist Manifesto. Within it is the famous phrase “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

This sentence, written so long ago, mesmerises me. It suggests that the forces of capitalism, beyond a threshold, are like a demon, and that capitalism itself (and the society that depends on it) can become victim of the spells which the excesses of capitalism have released. I am not a Marxist, nor a communist, but I do believe in a much fairer global society than we now have. It was partly my attraction for greater fairness that made me study medicine, focussing especially on the health problems of low-income settings – including in 1985 when I spent 10 months away from Australia, as a senior medical student, mainly learning about health problems in Africa and South Asia.

It did not take long for me to decide that purely biomedical approaches (eg better drugs or more doctors) could have little impact on the health issues of what was then called “The Third World”. This understanding propelled me to a career in public health, but in 1997 an experience I had at the Ronald Ross Centenary conference convinced me that fundamental changes in economic and political power are needed even more than vaccines and interventions such as handwashing and more toilets. This experience was the realization while many in public health work for good health, far fewer work for the economic and social reforms which underpin health, which is also necessary (as are moral and spiritual change is also needed).

Friedrich Engels, the great colleague and sponsor of Karl Marx, had similar views. His book The Conditions of the Working Class in England, which documents the harrowing living conditions of the poor in the growing industrialised city of Manchester, during a time of scarcely regulated capitalism in the 1840s, is still recommended to students of public health.

Also in the 1840s, the great German physician, Rudolf Virchow was instrumental in the formation of social medicine. In 1848 he helped establish a weekly publication called die Medizinische Reform (Medical Reform). This publication is reported to have had headlines such as “medicine is a social science” and “the physician is the natural attorney/lawyer of the poor”.

The Gilded Ages

It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the end of the 1840s (also called the “hungry 40s”) was a time of social upheaval in Europe – laissez faire capitalism had raised economic growth, but also deepened inequality, and with it, the risk of revolt against elites. Much later, Hirschman, in 1982, argued that excessively unrestrained market forces (such as in the 1840s, the gilded age of the late 19th century, the 1920s and since about 1980) can undermine the moral values that are its own essential underpinnings, generating the satire “greed is good" in the 1989 film Wall St. Hirschman's arguments support the idea that there are great cycles in the world economy; not just booms and busts, but periods of self-restraint by elites, followed by a gradual forgetting of the consequences of too much inequality. This leads to the relaxation of rules and norms intended to reduce the risk of economic collapse, for example when US President Bill Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation.

The conjuring  

What happens when inequality runs out of control? It could mean revolution and regicide, but there were times when hyper-capitalism accepted greater regulation and self-restraint, such as during the Depression and following World War II. But those lessons have recently been forgotten, with consequences including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of nationalism in many countries. The recently (and still?) dominant ideology – neoliberalism – was doomed to worsen inequality, but it remains to be seen if these new regimes will do any better. These reactions could, as Marx foreshadowed, presage an out of control sorcerer, such as a period of neo-totalitarianism, but this is uncertain. Social media and search engines have apparently been manipulated by narrow interests, and it can be argued such dark methods paved the way for Trump’s election. 

However, this is not the 1930s in Europe and Japan. With vigilance, social institutions and civil society could lead to a more prosperous and fairer future, despite President Trump’s rule, despite the clear existence of a US "shadow state" as documented by David Talbot and many others. Trump's phone call with Tsai Ing-wen, not only gave hope in Taiwan, but must also have heartened Tibetans. 

The early signs of President Trump’s rule are disturbing, such as the proposed appointment of the Goldman Sachs and hedge-fund veteran Steven Mnuchin, for US Treasury Secretary. As Joseph Stiglitz notes,  the expertise he will bring to the job will be in tax avoidance, not constructing a well-designed tax system. Also of concern is the the appointment of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. But even on climate change the position is not hopeless. The drive toward renewable energy, including its declining prices, is now so strong that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industry will continue to decline. Note, however, that even if this occurs, greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise, and the rate of increase could even steepen due to reinforcing feedbacks, such as from melting tundra.

Irrespective of the effectiveness of politicians and the big, often neoliberal-minded development foundations (such as the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation*, and even the Wellcome Trust, which continues to invest in fossil fuels) groups such as BODHI and Aryaloka Computer Education   (cover story for newsletter) are needed to reduce inequality and give hope at the ground level. 

* According to the prolific author Professor Michael Hudson, the Saudi Arabian government has been a major funder of the Clinton Foundation, a view supported by a fact checking website.