Category: Talks

Weeing with the Foreign Secretary

jembendellLeave a comment

hands upLast week, during a nervy pre-speech wee break, then UK Environment Secretary, David Miliband walked in to use the adjacent urinal. “Ah, Dave, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about water privatisation…” I didn’t say. Introductions in toilets aren’t my thing. We were sharing another platform that day, giving plenary talks at the Development and Environment Group of BOND on the topic of development in a resource constrained world. Mr Miliband has been key in promoting sustainable consumption in the UK; often talking of the need for us to live within the means of our One Planet. Now that he has been promoted to Foreign Secretary we will hopefully hear of the need for One Planet Politics, that recognises the limits of and the unity within our one planet and the timeline within which we need to secure progress. No longer “foreign” secretary, but a leader of global relations.

In my talk I asked the audience the following simple questions.

  • Hands up if you work in international development (all hands went up)
  • Keep them up if you work on that in part due to a commitment to the principle that everyone everywhere should have the opportunity to thrive in harmony with others, to self determine their lives without harming others. (all hands stayed up)
  • Now keep them up if you think that everyone everywhere, all 6 billion, could live like we do? (all hands came down).

I argued that the only way to ignore this paradox is if one works on international development due to a charity mentality, focused only on helping out some unfortunate people a bit. But if we are committed to universal principles about the dignity of everyone then we have to address this resource consumption issue, and find ways for people to develop in resource light ways, and reduce our own consumption to create resource space for others. Thus the environmental challenge is central to a rights-based approach to development.

panel

My paper “The Consuming Issue for Development” follows below.

Information on DEG and the event, with links to follow up activities is at:

If, after reading the paper, you have any comments on the consumption challenge, please share them below. Oh, and yes, he washed his hands.Clean hands, cleaner world?

 

 

Miliband: Clean hands, cleaner world?

 

The Consuming Issue for Development

 

The climate challenge is a consumption challenge. Most of our emissions result from the products and services we consume. To tackle the humanitarian and economic crisis of climate change we must promote cleaner energy generation but also reduce the consumption of resources as a whole, both at home and abroad. Yet today humanity consumes fives times as much as fifty years ago. If everyone lived like the British, ecological footprint calculations suggest we would need three planets to support us. Indian middle classes have a higher per capita consumption of carbon than the average Brit. So it’s likely that if everyone lived like the new Asian middle-classes, the success stories of development, we would need at least three planets.

Does international development assistance arise from a commitment to the principle that everyone should have their basic needs met, live in freedom with dignity and pursue their aspirations? In that case it would appear that international development assistance has been based on a lie. Because it would be physically impossible for all the world’s poor to achieve higher wellbeing in ways as resource-intensive as the new Middle Classes in Asia and elsewhere. Resource-heavy development is, by objective measures, only a possibility for a minority or for the short-term. Therefore it is an elitist and undemocratic view of social progress. So how can all of humanity live well in a way that will endure? Our challenge is to find ways to improve human wellbeing within the limits of the Earth’s resources; to stop living as if we have another Planet to go to. That is the only authentic approach to a universal principle of social development.

As the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) policy framework for sustainable consumption recognises, we can no longer focus only on managing the specific impacts of consumption, such as avoiding certain areas or controlling types of pollution.[1] Instead, we must reduce overall demand for resources. That does not mean more efficiency, but demand management. For instance, more efficient fridges can mean fridges that are cheaper to run, and thus multiple fridge households and no reduction in overall resource demand.

This should not mean reducing wellbeing. Instead, it means a reduction in the actual resource through-flow of economies. This will require the ‘dematerialization’ of systems of production-consumption (i.e. physical efficiency of those systems), and the ‘optimization’ of systems of production-consumption (i.e. better management, planning, and changed attitudes and behaviour in those systems). This requires a shift in economic paradigm from the linear ‘take, make and waste’ approach to resources to a circular ‘make and remake’ approach.

Such a shift will need strong leadership from government and business. It is a common misconception that sustainable consumption is about shopping by individuals. In fact personal shopping is the least important factor in sustainable consumption. Business is the biggest consumer of resources, and can provide alternative products and services, and government is the biggest guide of this. The UK’s Sustainable Development Commission’s Sustainable Consumption Expert Roundtable report ‘I Will If You Will’, demonstrates not just that the individual consumer is not to blame, but that governments and business must themselves initiate and facilitate broad change.

Poor people want jobs not hand outs. Thankfully the sustainable consumption challenge could create mass employment opportunities. The European Trade Union Confederation has found that “less dependence on natural resources can be coupled with more intensive use of labour.”[2] To achieve a low-carbon high-employment economy, governments will need to shift taxes from employment to resources and help people gain skills for a sustainable economy.

In many cases, the poor may need to increase their consumption of resources to improve their quality of life. This means rich consumers must reduce their consumption rapidly towards a more fair allocation of resources, both within and between states. For any increases in poor people’s quality of life to endure they must be based on more resource-efficient solutions. It makes little sense to help people today by ruining their, and our, tomorrow. Thus redirecting resource consumption into more sustainable infrastructures and products is key. For example, the same amount of energy might be required to build a train system as a system of airports and roads but the former will create a level of mobility with less ongoing energy demands.

In summary, we need a ‘Global Step Change’ in consumption. We must step:

  • more lightly, by reducing the total level of resource consumption involved in meeting our needs and aspirations;
  • more carefully, by reducing our demands on sensitive ecosystems and exploited people;
  • in the right direction, by increasing the proportion of resources that go into creating enduring means of meeting human needs in resource-light ways;
  • together, by increasing our support for others to meet their needs and aspirations through stepping forward more lightly, carefully and in the right direction.

Hilary Benn’s ‘Preface’ to the 2006 White Paper acknowledged the interconnected and interdependent nature of our global society and the scale of global challenges faced. The full implications of this are now beginning to be realised. They include achieving sustainable consumption in the UK, to reduce Britain’s pressure on the atmosphere and other countries’ resources, as well as to create incentive for sustainable innovations in factories and farms around the world. They also include achieving sustainable investing and banking, so that finance flows to sustainable enterprise around the world. As the Development and Environment Group (DEG) of BOND commented on the White Paper, it is time for DFID to play “a stronger leadership role at home in representing the interests of the world’s poor.”

Assuming we can agree that changes in the development model are required:

  • What are the most appropriate roles of civil society and government in bringing these changes about?
  • How should government spending (as defined in comprehensive spending review and public service agreements) be adjusted to reflect the challenges identified?
  • Could DFID call for a rapid intellectual and practical retooling of the worldwide international development community to integrate the climate challenge into all their work? Could it require organisational strategies for that retooling as a prerequisite for any future grants?
  • How might DFID draw from its experiences with British companies through groups like the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) to encourage sustainable innovation in the supply of products and materials from the Emerging World to British companies? How might it engage private financial institutions in this regard?
  • Could DFID actively support efforts to achieve more robust global environmental governance, such as a World Environment Organisation to replace UNEP?
  • What other processes are there that we should be aiming to influence to reflect our positions?

 

[1] UNEP (2001), Consumption Opportunities: Strategies for change, a report for decision-makers. Geneva: UNEP.

[2] http://www.etuc.org/a/3356 and http://www.etuc.org/r/753

If I can Make it There (by video), I’ll make it Anywhere…

jembendell3 Comments

I’ve never been to New York. I even lived in America, but never made it to the 2nd largest financial centre in the world (London rules). So an invitation to launch my new UN report at the UN HQ was great. Kinda. I had just been in the pub with a colleague from WWF talking about climate change and his concerns about flying. It’s the fastest growing form of carbon pollution, and by making it far easier to whiz around great distances it means we maintain personal and work relations over greater distances… and so lock ourselves into a new pattern of pollution. Argh! I couldn’t go and launch my book on ‘NGO accountability’ and in the process add more crap into the atmosphere… I’m working with WWF, for God’s sake.

UN Launch

Already at +0.6 degrees, human-caused Climate Change is causing water and food shortages, increased storm damage, and river bank erosion, leading to millions more refugees. Hundreds of thousands of plants and animals are now under threat of extinction. Scientists say we have to keep climate change below 2 degrees otherwise it will go beyond our control. That will require a halving of global carbon emissions in the next 2 decades, which means that people like us (presuming you are in the consumer class) have to cut our emissions by over 2 thirds right now.

Yes, that’s unlikely. Especially when much of our emissions come from products from companies whose actions we don’t directly control. Which means our current form of civilisation is unlikely to see out this century. So why bother? Two reasons. First, we have to try, and if we slow the pace of damage the suffering will be less. Second, because I want us to be worth saving. There are various sides to the human character, we are all saints and sinners in different ways at different times. I have a hope that the loving, caring, thoughtful side of human character is our defining one. Climate change is a symptom of us losing touch with who we are, as part of nature, and results from the desire to consume stuff, as if more stuff makes us who we are. With this view, the means for combating climate change also become the ends.

This is not to say there are difficult balances to be struck. Some blithely say “my work to save the world offsets my emissions”. In some cases they may be right…. but whether someone’s policy or advocacy work stops tonnes of carbon being tipped into the air is impossible to judge, by them or anyone else. And the time and effort to work it out would be a wasteful exercise. To make the right decisions about this people need to understand the challenge, and be working on this for the right reasons. No flight is essential. But there are also other ways to reduce your own carbon emissions such as not running a car or keeping your heating down. Ultimately, personal lifestyle change is not the whole solution. I could fall under a bus and reduce my emissions to zero, but that wouldn’t change climate change one bit. We need major changes from industry and government to meet the challenge. But living more lightly and consciously on this planet is consistent with a demand for systemic change from business and government, not a replacement for it.

It’s for this interest in the way to live that I worked on NGO accountability. I think debates about accountability could help NGO staff to connect with a common purpose in promoting collective benefit. It’s time for NGOs to begin describing themselves not in terms of what they are not (such as non-governmental and not-for-profit), but in terms of what they are commonly for. There’s many ways to describe this common ethic, which is about expressing oneself in ways that help rather than hinder others’ expression, and the basis for all of Life’s expression – our planet. I also hope that by engaging in questions of accountability, NGOs will become clearer about issues of power, given how unaccountable power in society underlies many social and environmental problems that NGOs address.

To get a grip of accountability, we need to be clear on the type and means. There is bad type of accountability. “I was just following orders” they say in war crimes trials. But there is a good form of accountability to the intended beneficiaries of our work, and others we affect in helping them, if they have less power than those beneficiaries. In my dossier I call this ‘democratic accountability’, which is a situation where people affected by decisions or indecisions can affect them. An organisation can either promote or hinder democratic accountability by i) helping hold powerful organisations to account to those they affect ii) so long as when doing this they are accountable to affected 3rd parties with less power iii) so long as those 3rd parties are accountable in the same way. Once that bigger picture is established of the type of accountability needed, then we have to focus on the means. Too much has been done in this field that is about binding us up with paper and reports, or creating new hierarchies of reporting to people who don’t know how to be agents of downwards accountability. Instead, effective accountability processes need to encourage people to connect with their sense of purpose, be reminded of it, encouraged to explore it and what it means, to be clear on the WHY not just what and how. So I’m pleased at WWF a colleague of mine has launched a project on what the organisations beliefs are. That’s more important than additional form filling.

Last week I had lunch with someone from an international environmental organisation comprised of NGOs and governments, and she said they only just had video conferencing installed – and she didn’t even know where it was. As I walked out through their car park full of 4x4s, I thought if organisational accountability is seen in terms of paper, not people, and doesn’t encourage us to be more authentic and reflective in our work, then it will hinder us in meeting the challenges we face.

Thanks Elisa and NGLS for making it possible for me to walk the talk. As ol blue eyes almost sang… New York, New York, If I can make it there (by video), I’ll make it anywhere…

The UN webcast of the launch is at: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/specialevents/se070119.rm

The report is at: http://www.un-ngls.org/site/article.php3?id_article=202

The UN did their own press release, edited version follows:

As NGOs Multiply, Study Urges More Public Scrutiny, by Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 22 (IPS) – Just after the coastal regions of South and Southeast Asia were devastated by a disastrous tsunami in December 2004, hundreds of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) descended on Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives armed with relief supplies — and good intentions.

The massive humanitarian effort, according to a new study, was “testimony to the skills and power of many NGOs.”

“But it also heightened concerns about opportunities for the misuse and abuse of humanitarian funds,” says the 102-page report, titled “Debating NGO Accountability”, released here.

Within months, says the study, there were complaints in Sri Lanka about corruption in aid distribution, and the lack of strong political will on the part of the government to address the challenge. A series of about 30 articles in U.S. newspapers also raised the issue of ethical failures — including “sky-high salaries of top executives and expenses for offices, travel and perks” — while disputing the motives of some of the so-called humanitarian missions. “They highlighted conflicts of interest, failures to adhere to an organisation’s mission, questionable fundraising practices, and a lack of transparency,” says Dr. Jem Bendell, author of the study, which was commissioned by the U.N. NGO Liaison Service (NGLS).

Tony Hill, coordinator of NGLS, points out that the heads of 11 leading human rights, environmental and social development international organisations publicly endorsed the first global accountability charter in June last year — perhaps as a result of the increasing number of scandals involving charitable organisations. The organisations that signed the Charter included ActionAid International, Oxfam International, Amnesty International, CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Transparency International and Save the Children Alliance….

However, Bendell, an associate professor at Griffith University Business School in Australia and director of the consulting firm Lifeworth, argues that “accountability” in itself is not simply a good thing, as it so often assumed. Rather, he says, it must be clear that groups must be accountable specifically to those that are affected by their decisions and actions. It is this concept of “democratic accountability” that lies at the heart of the study, and will allow NGOs to continue to develop as effective and important actors in the international arena, notes Bendell, who is currently advising the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the world’s largest environmental organisation, on strategic development…

Asked if all international NGOs should sign the charter, Bendell told IPS: “Yes, it would be great for every major international NGO to sign the Accountability Charter.” He said the charter provides a basis for NGOs to come to a greater awareness of their common purpose in promoting public benefit, not private profit. “We need innovative approaches to be shared amongst charter signers, to find out the least bureaucratic and most meaningful mechanisms for promoting coherence with the human rights and democratic principles it states,” he added.

Yet these NGOs can only be as effective as their donors allow, he pointed out. So the study “emphasises the importance of the accountability of donors to those they identify as their intended beneficiaries.” He also said that too much money is spent on pet causes and political meddling, and not at all responsive to the needs of people affected by the giving. “And too much of these funds are generated from investments in companies and financial products with damaging impacts on society.”…

Asked about government regulation of NGOs, Bendell said that charity law and tax law are key mechanisms that governments use to regulate NGOs. “We would benefit from more sharing between governments on the best practices in these regulations to promote vibrant civil societies, with NGOs that are accountable to their intended beneficiaries and broad principles of human rights,” he added. (END/2007)