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Institutional deficiencies are hindering African efforts to transition to a green economy framework. In the lead-up to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), this issue is gaining attention and needs to be addressed if Africa is to be able to achieve its sustainable development goals.

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Before the presentation of a report on institutional and strategic frameworks for sustainable development in Africa was even over, almost every hand in the conference room was up, vying for the attention of the Chair.

Tasked by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the “Africa Report on Institutional and Strategic Frameworks for Sustainable Development: Summary for Policy Makers” was launched at the Seventh Session of the Committee on Food Security and Sustainable Development (CFSSD-7) and the African Regional Preparatory Conference for Rio+20, held in October 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

From the tone of the questions and comments flowing from the floor, one could sense the frustration and despair of most of the experts, who happened to be national focal persons or key members of national councils of sustainable development (NCSDs) or related bodies. It became apparent that their sentiments echoed the negative scorecard for the progress of institutional frameworks for sustainable development in Africa outlined in the report.

Their despair stemmed from the fact that most are concerned about the current demise or dormancy of their respective NCSDs. Those fortunate enough to have NCSDs that are still in operation are nonetheless saddled with inadequate institutional, technical and financial capacity to support their national sustainable development agenda. For Africa, these deficiencies are hindering a transition to sustainable development via a green economy framework.

The UNEP report “Towards a Green Economy” defines a green economy as “one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities”. A green economy is buttressed by three major pillars: (1) low-carbon technology, (2) resource-use efficiency and (3) socially inclusive growth.

Such a framework is of particular relevance to Africa. The severe poverty and environmental deterioration across the region are in many ways linked to a high dependence on the exploitation of natural resources in inefficient ways for livelihood activities, which entrench cycles of underdevelopment. A shift to a green economy framework could provide Africa with tremendous opportunities to benefit from the region’s rich endowment in natural resources as it strives to pursue sustainable development.

Achieving the benefits of a green economy, however, will require African governments to put in place the right institutional framework, of which the NCSDs will be pivotal. Thus, rectifying their current flaws is imperative.

Given that the two core themes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) are (1) a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication and (2) the institutional framework for sustainable development, the flurry of attention on the upcoming conference could provide a conducive environment in which Africa can make real progress towards these goals.

The role of NCSDs in promoting a green economy

It may be helpful to reiterate what Nitin Desai, the former Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, noted about NCSDs at the First International Forum of NCSDs in April 2000, in New York:

“The National Councils for Sustainable Development…almost mirror the CSD’s [Commission on Sustainable Development] mandate (trustee of the “Spirit of Rio”) at the national level. They monitor the state of affairs in national sustainable development efforts; keep sustainability as a key national priority; enable broad-based partnerships towards sustainable development; generate participatory processes in national sustainable development decision-making; and ensure that sustainable development actions taken in their countries are in harmony with each other as well as in harmony with similar actions taken by other countries in their regions and around the world … A missing link for the CSD since its creation has been its lack of direct connection with national sustainable development coordination mechanisms and efforts. National Councils for Sustainable Development … have the potential to help close this gap.”

NCSDs were, therefore, intended to play a key role in pursuit of the goals of Rio+20. African governments should develop their national institutions to best take advantage of green economy initiatives.

Problems with the current institutional framework

The current troubled situation of NCSDs in Africa should not come as a surprise. An earlier report released in 2005 also by the ECA, “National Councils for Sustainable Development in Africa: A Review of Institutions and their Functioning”, warned that the current institutional crisis was bound to transpire if the critical deficiencies were not dealt with expeditiously by African governments.

There are four major reasons why the current institutional framework for sustainable development in most African countries may not work for green economy governance.

Dominance of environment-related issues — The green economy framework forges greater convergence between the three pillars of sustainable development: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability. Within African NCSDs, however, there is a predominance of environment-related mandates and activities.

For these institutions to be relevant to current governance challenges for a green economy, they should be given broader mandates and should be provided with adequate resources and capacities to develop and coordinate activities covering all three pillars of sustainable development. Currently, only about 9% of the NCSDs fall into this category.

Excessive centralization and exclusion of non-state actors — The report noted the excessive government control of most of Africa’s NCSDs, with a majority of NCSDs are either chaired by or located entirely within the office of the Prime Minister, President or Vice President. While this may demonstrate political commitment, the practice has great potential to politicize sustainable development issues as they become entangled in highly centralized bureaucratic systems.

Representation and participation of equally legitimate non-state actors is limited; only 36% of the NCSDs are multi-stakeholder entities and most lack representation from the private sector or academia. Furthermore, most NCSDs are without adequate decentralized institutional structures and have not established financing mechanisms to generate additional funds, depending instead on government budgetary allocations and donor funding to run their activities.

The green economy framework is results-focused in terms of increasing innovation for new low-carbon production technologies; increasing productivity from the efficient use of resources; recycling, reusing and reducing waste; and increasing the potential for employment from “green” jobs, alternative income and socially inclusive growth.

This may require stakeholders to come together with diverse resources and capabilities (investment, technologies, capital assets, knowledge, etc.) for collective action. For the NCSDs and related institutions to be relevant, their representation and participation structure should be broadened to cover competent private actors.

Insufficient capacity to integrate diverse mechanisms — The green economy framework seeks to integrate other sustainable development mechanisms, such as Agenda 21. This could be a welcome improvement considering the current proliferation of mechanisms, some of which overlap or duplicate the objectives and activities of others.

For example, the green economy framework touches on socioeconomic development, conservation and environmental management, as does Agenda 21. In addition, it incorporates environmental management, low-carbon technology and renewable energy of the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. The green economy framework also embraces the low-technology, renewable energy, resource efficiency and sustainable lifestyles, cities and societies of the Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) initiative. NCSDs in Africa need to have adequate capacity to coordinate and merge these diverse mechanisms.

Less relevant structure and mandate — The changing dynamics of the multilateral diplomacy have made the structure, composition and mandates of the NCSDs and related state institutions in Africa less relevant to the current context and to the vital elements of a green economy governance such as multi-stakeholder networks, informal partnerships, collaborative and collective action for sustainable development.

The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (Rio+10 Earth Summit) highlighted the significance of networks and partnerships for environmental governance and sustainable development, which the current structure of NCSDs does not aptly support.

A network that emerged from the Rio+10 conference that may be relevant for green economy governance in Africa is the Marrakech Process, designed to support the implementation of projects and strategies on SCP. This is a global and informal multi-stakeholder process in response to the call by Chapter III of the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI). Africa was the first region to develop a 10 Year Framework of Programmes (10YFP) on SCP (in March 2005).

There currently are 13 African countries with national cleaner production centres (NCPCs). These NCPCs have played key roles in mainstreaming SCP policies in their nations and in replicating best practices for SCP across the continent.

Although these NCPCs are multi-stakeholder networks, and in some countries have not yet received political support and commitment from their national governments, the processes they have initiated over the past seven years to mainstream SCP policies and to encourage the development of sustainable technologies could serve as a solid foundation for national initiatives to establish networks and partnerships for green economy governance.

As this is an area in which solid progress is being made, it is important that leaders recognize the need to consolidate and integrate this initial success into their broader sustainable development agendas and institutional structures. The involvement of NCPCs in any national institutional arrangements for green economy governance, such as NCSDs, cannot be overemphasized.

Rio+20 as an opportunity for African governments

There is overwhelming evidence that current institutional arrangements for sustainable development governance in most African countries are deficient. The paradox of Africa having enormous wealth in natural resources and yet being the poorest continent with worsening environmental degradation may still be the case 20 years from today. Without the appropriate governance structures, Africa may enter Rio+40 with the same moderate results in terms of sustainable development.

The green economy framework could, however, offer African countries an opportunity to bypass the inefficient, resource-intensive and environmentally harmful development pathways of most developed countries and leapfrog onto a sustainable and efficient development route. To do this, African countries should take advantage of Rio+20 preparatory processes to establish governance structures that are relevant to the current context and to the vital elements of a green economy.

Addressing the deficiencies of NCSDs will be key in this process.

In the recent UNU-WIDER Working Paper No. 2012/8, “The Politics of Inequality and Redistribution in Latin America’s Post-Adjustment Era”, Kenneth M. Roberts explores how the region’s dual transitions to political democracy and market liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s set the scene for this new politics of inequality.

Market reforms and rising inequality: the 1980s and 1990s

Market reforms spread across Latin America when the attempts at import substitution industrialization (ISI) collapsed in the debt crisis of the 1980s. (ISI is a policy aimed at aiding a country to reduce its foreign dependency by augmenting local production of industrialized products.) Governments across the region cut back their already limited redistributive measures, introduced during the populist-ISI era, which were viewed as wasteful and undermining market efficiency by market reformers. Governments pursuing market liberalization also slashed tariffs, privatized state-owned industries and public utilities, lifted price controls and subsidies, and deregulated labour, capital and foreign exchange markets.

These market reforms had three main implications for the politics of inequality. First, the combination of economic crisis and market restructuring altered the regional class structure by shifting employment from the formal to the informal sector of the economy. Second, these changes created impediments to collective action, thereby increasing the political challenges facing unions. Finally, this weakening of class-based collective actors helped shield neoliberal technocrats and policy makers, now in the ascent, from societal pressure, thus allowing them to experiment with social policies that were more compatible with free market principles.

Efforts to achieve greater growth and efficiency through market liberalization did not suffice to alleviate the region’s chronic problems with underemployment, inequality and poverty. In fact both the proportion of people living below the poverty line and the GINI coefficient, used to measure a county’s income inequality levels, rose between the 1980s and 1990s. The new economic model adopted by Latin America left the region with a “social deficit”; low wages and a lack of secure employment were central elements of this.

Democracy and the repoliticization of inequality

The failure of market liberalization to deal with the crisis of poverty, inequality and underemployment did not mean that these problems would inevitably be turned into political issues. In fact many of the social and political actors who had traditionally politicized such issues were not well positioned to do so during the period of economic adjustment.

The strength of labour unions was in decline and their ties to political parties had been eroded. The left was on the defensive due to the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Bloc, and in many countries it was the historically labour-based populist parties who took the lead in imposing structural adjustment policies.

However, while in the late 1990s over 70 percent of Latin Americans expressed support for free trade and in the aggregate placed themselves slightly to the right-of-centre on the ideological spectrum, there was growing discontent with other aspects of market liberalization. There was a high level of support for a state role in economic and social welfare activities and for the public control of key resources.

It is, therefore, not surprising that as democratic regimes became increasingly consolidated and the scourge of hyperinflation was extinguished, the political dynamics in the region shifted. This shift of political dynamic coincided with the economic downturn at the end of the twentieth century and expressed itself in two distinct ways: first through an outbreak of social protests, and second through the unprecedented election of 15 different left-leaning presidents across 11 countries in the region between 1998 and 2011.

The most explosive patterns of social protest occurred in those countries that had experienced bait-and-switch patterns of market reform, and which were therefore left with no major institutionalized left-wing party into which discontent with the process of liberalization could be channeled. The mass protests that erupted in countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia culminated in the traditional party system being outflanked on the left, leading to the rise of new populist or leftist movements seizing power, rewriting national constitutions and refounding state institutions. As a consequence of the bypassing of the traditional party system, the social policies introduced in these countries tend to be characterized by decisive breaks with macroeconomic orthodoxy.

However, not all the leftist electoral gains in the region were due to a bypassing of the traditional party system. In countries where a conservative military regime (Chile) or political parties (Uruguay, Brazil and El Salvador) led the process of market reform, and where a major party of the left remained in opposition, it was through these parties that discontent with market liberalization was channeled. Even in countries such as Mexico, where leftist parties have not captured political office, they have gained in strength and forced conservatives to pay greater attention to social issues.

Consequently, the broad pattern across the region is that equity gains have been made under some conservative as well as leftist governments. In these countries, where the opposition between left and right has been contained within the traditional party system, the policies introduced have generally been compatible with macroeconomic orthodoxy, although reforms have occurred on the social policy front.

Clearly, the Latin American “left turn” has not spawned a singular “model” of social and economic development that could be counterposed to that of neoliberalism. Instead, it offers a diverse array of policy tools for tackling social problems of poverty and unemployment, some of which are compatible with neoliberal orthodoxy and others that lead away from it.

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This article originally appeared in the April issue of the WIDER Angle newsletter.

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The gross violations of human rights in Latin America and Eastern Europe under authoritarian regimes created growing popular anger that finally exploded in mass revolts and demands for change, bringing the regimes to an end. It was a bottom-up process: a gradually rising discontent of ordinary people, who in the aftermath of the changes, made continuous calls for justice and accountability for the perpetrators of human rights violations, and simultaneous calls for compensation for the victims of these violations. The demands for justice and compensation faced initial reluctance, partly because political forces connected to previous regimes remained powerful and influential.

The processes of transitional justice have been controversial and complex, zigzagging from extreme demands for severe punishment to similarly unacceptable calls for blanket unqualified forgiveness. Transitional justice has had to perform a balancing act: paying full respect to grievances — traumatic, deeply emotional and divisive — while also taking into consideration strategies for societal reconciliation and future stability.

Complex transitions

One inherent complexity of transitional justice is the blurred demarcation between victims and perpetrators. In armed conflicts, the evolution of international humanitarian law crystallized a distinction between combatants and non-combatants, between victims and perpetrators, between individual and collective responsibilities, and between the architects of violations, the commanders and rank-and-file executioners. In post-authoritarian transitions, however, there is no such clear distinction — almost everybody suffered from authoritarian regimes, but not many can point a finger and establish the guilt of a particular state official.

Ironically, the same individuals may simultaneously be identified as “silent supporters” and as “hidden victims” of the same regime. In Eastern Europe, many talented workers were accepted as members of the Communist Party as a kind of “reward” for their good work, but remained hidden dissidents. In 1989, such people became “ex-Communists” overnight, facing potential stigmatization even without having being privileged in any sense by the Communist regime. In contrast, people who were not Communist Party members prior to 1989 could suddenly think of themselves as “heroes”, pretending they were “victims” and demanding unwarranted privileges.

Another difficulty in assessing transitional justice arises because the highly sensitive and emotional nature of mass crimes has to be “de-emotionalized” when parties enter into legal proceedings. Justice means dealing with evil in a civil way, and facing inhumane acts with a humane approach. Judgments in courtrooms need to be reached through undisputed evidence and respect for the rights of the defendants. For victims and relatives who have experienced deep trauma in the past, these legal niceties might look cold, impartial and indifferent to their suffering. However, justice and accountability mechanisms are guided by broader societal needs in addition to the need to redress the suffering of the victims.

To add another layer of complexity, the processes of transitional justice often involved investigating and prosecuting not only former junta or ex-Communist leaders, but also, paradoxically, democratically elected officials who came to power after the transitions started. The first Slovak Prime Minister, Vladimír Mečiar, was investigated for destroying secret documents. Andrei Lukanov (ex-Prime Minister of Bulgaria) was arrested for embezzlement; the charges were later dropped, but, in a sad irony, he would have been safer in prison. Instead, he was murdered outside his house.

The first democratically elected President of Brazil, Fernando Collor de Mello, was forced to resign because of corruption charges and impeachment threats from the Senate. Carlos Menem, ex-President of Argentina, was arrested on charges of arms-trafficking; he was exiled to Chile and investigated later on embezzlement charges. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (twice President of Bolivia) was forced to resign and is facing charges for extrajudicial killings and crimes against humanity. In what is probably the most notorious case, Alberto Fujimori (ex-President of Peru), after extradition from Japan and a landmark trial, received the maximum 25-year sentence for grave human rights violations committed during his term in office.

Democratically elected leaders in Eastern Europe have also received prison sentences. Yulia Tymoshenko (ex-Prime Minister of Ukraine) received a seven-year sentence for abusing her powers of office in a gas deal with Russia, a sentence that provoked widespread suspicions of political bias. Adrian Năstase (ex-Prime Minister of Romania) received a two-year sentence for corruption; his defense also appealed against the sentence, claiming this was an act of revenge by a political rival.

A major lesson derived from the Eastern European and Latin American experiences is the importance of detaching the justice process from the battle between political parties at elections. If political parties use power for revenge or as a tool to win elections, the justice process becomes distorted. Transitional justice needs to remain neutral; if left in the hands of politicians, it may be exposed to political manipulations. Even when exercised by the judiciary, justice may still be influenced by a post-authoritarian over-emphasis on the condemnation of dictatorial regimes and fall short of offering compensation, particularly in poorer countries.

Another lesson is that the collective memory of the past may never be fixed or frozen forever, contrary to what has often been believed. History can be re-investigated and even rewritten, but it is necessary to avoid doing this on the basis of political or nationalistic interests. In this context, the past can be understood as a social schism between victims, who suffered, and perpetrators, who enforced authoritarian ideologies. Interestingly, however, the majority of people are situated in between. In many states this large group — neither victims nor perpetrators — was influential in balancing the historical claims.

Assessing effectiveness

Another complexity lies in analysing the effectiveness of transitional justice and establishing benchmarks to evaluate its success. One can think of three parameters to judge effectiveness: comparison with the ideal; counter-factual comparison (Would an alternative mechanism have served justice better?); and empirical comparisons (Were people satisfied?). This is a good start for thinking about effectiveness, because various elements of justice are difficult to quantify: forgiveness, reconciliation and apology are abstract notions that cannot be easily assessed.

The book After Oppression: Transitional Justice in Latin America and Eastern Europe measures effectiveness — the extent to which justice mechanisms contribute to the broader satisfaction of goals, rather than to whether or not countries have been effective in setting up various mechanisms. Even if all possible mechanisms are initiated, justice might not be properly served. Effectiveness is highly dependent on the agents of implementation — whether society has made collective demands for justice, and to what extent the newly elected authorities have agreed to address the legacy of the past regime.

Time and cost considerations are also part of the effectiveness evaluation. Generally, the ability to derive maximum gain in the shortest possible time and at minimal expense defines effectiveness in any enterprise. For the analysis of transitional justice, however, time and cost are more complex categories.

The time factor

Time is a critical element, particularly in the case of trials, where both the evidence and the availability of witnesses are crucial. Human rights abuses require proper and impartial investigation, but this often takes time. The challenge is to find the best balance between “not too fast” and “not too late”. One has to avoid overly expeditious processes and harsh sentences that deviate from the rule of law, fair trial and due process.

However, unnecessary delays may result in obsolete or destroyed evidence, which is impossible to reconstruct. Windows of opportunity could be short and should not be missed; soon after a regime change the justice initiatives are likely to be better supported and effective.

Time may work against transitional justice if victims do not see the perpetrators investigated and prosecuted, when perpetrators are deceased or unfit to stand trial, or when the cases against them have exceeded the statute of limitations. Experience (for example, in Chile) suggests that the pursuit of justice can be deferred and may mature when political circumstances are more favourable. Time can also play different roles for different mechanisms. For example, truth commissions, memorials and historical records are necessarily less time sensitive than trials and can have an effective role even decades after the transition.

The cost factor

As with time, the cost factor when applied to transitional justice does not operate in the same way as in the business world. The high costs of justice may add to victims’ feelings of bitterness — tribunals have been criticized for being expensive, and suggestions were made to distribute funds as additional compensation instead.

Cost-effectiveness can be improved by greater efforts to strengthen domestic justice reforms. Countries with a strong rule of law are more likely to provide an environment conducive to cost-effective justice initiatives. However, there are difficulties. Often, new governments are unwilling to accept far-reaching mechanisms that might jeopardize their legitimacy or stability. Or, even if political will exists, there may not be sufficient funds and capacity.

This highlights yet another shortcoming: even if perpetrators end up in jail, victims may remain dissatisfied if governments or courts fail to offer reasonable compensation. Truth and reconciliation commissions may serve as a better model for compensating victims. However, compensation for large numbers of victims may exceed the capacity of transition economies.

Interestingly, it is often ignored that compensation may be measured in ways other than money, for example by the therapeutic element of non-material fact-finding and forgiveness. Addressing the cost factor also necessitates a consideration of the high cost of alternative impunity and the consequences of failing to punish atrocious crimes committed by a previous regime; the duty of governments is also to invest against future violations.

The local context

The justice mechanisms should be transparent, credible and locally owned. They should investigate past violations, reconcile divided communities through restorative techniques and attempt to establish a common narrative of the past.

The experiences in Eastern Europe and Latin America help to contextualize transitional justice both as a duty and as a results-based exercise, providing empirical, regional and local background to compare and judge effectiveness. Not only is there a need for justice, but there is a need for justice to promote peace, reconciliation, human rights protection, accountability and the establishment of social trust.

In Latin America there have been more cases of truth commissions, trials and amnesties, whereas in Eastern Europe purge laws, the opening of secret files and property restitution prevailed. High-profile prosecutions in one country have had an impact on neighbouring countries.

Although there is no standardized approach to transitional justice, generally neighbours can develop similar affinities with justice mechanisms. Nonetheless, transitional justice processes still have to be contextually appropriate and tailored to the specific needs of each society.

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Unemployed? Frustrated in your job? Can’t stand your boss? Then you may want to start your own business. You will not earn as much as you would have in your old job (assuming you had one); you will work much longer hours; you will face hassles with banks, tax authorities, officials and fickle customers; cut-throat competition may cause you bodily harm.

Don’t despair — on the contrary, starting your own business is likely to make you a happier person.

That is one of the salient facts from the scientific literature that emerged from a recent workshop on happiness and entrepreneurship organized by UNU-MERIT and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance in partnership with the Maastricht School of Management, ERIM and Erasmus University of Rotterdam, and held in Rotterdam on 13 April 2012.

In a paper titled “Life satisfaction and self-employment: a matching approach”, Alex Coad and Martin Binder showed, using a 10-year panel dataset from the UK, that entrepreneurs (the self-employed) enjoyed significantly higher life satisfaction than people who were in wage employment. “In our analysis we found that individuals moving from regular employment into self-employment … experience a positive and significant increase in life satisfaction, that actually increases from the first year of self-employment to the second.”

Although they are laughing, entrepreneurs are not laughing all the way to the bank, because the average earnings of self-employed persons in the UK are lower than that of salaried employees. Their average earnings are, for instance, much less than the earnings of bankers. It means the non-pecuniary benefits of being an entrepreneur compensate for the downsides mentioned.

What do these non-pecuniary benefits entail? It is the type of work that entrepreneurs do that matters. In a paper on “Determinants of job satisfaction: a European comparison of self-employed and paid employees”, José María Millán and co-authors confirm that entrepreneurs enjoy greater job satisfaction in terms of work than salaried employees:

“Self-employment has advantages in providing autonomy as compared to paid employment. Self-employed individuals are in charge and therefore capable of (re)defining their work, suggesting that introducing entrepreneurial aspects (i.e., autonomy, independence, etc.) to paid employed jobs may help to increase the job satisfaction of paid employees with their respective type of work.”

Starting your own business can, therefore, make you happier. It will make you even happier if you employ people. Moreover, there is a positive correlation between how entrepreneurial a society is and its national level of happiness.

Consider the following graph, taken from a paper I co-authored with José Ernesto Amorós and Oscar Cristi and presented at the workshop. It clearly shows that countries that score well in terms of Global Entrepreneurship Development Index (GEDI) also score well in terms of happiness. The causality is likely to be bi-directional.

There are two caveats to the above.

First, the results refer to the entrepreneurs and the employed on average. Entrepreneurs are a heterogeneous group. Joachim Merz and Tim Rathjen presented a paper based on the German Socio-Economic Panel which finds that even though poor entrepreneurs may earn incomes above the (income) poverty line, they are often still poor in other dimensions of well-being, such as time – i.e., entrepreneurs are often “time-poor” compared to the employed.

Second, economic cycles impact negatively on entrepreneurs’ happiness. In their paper, José María Millán and co-authors find that although entrepreneurs are more satisfied with their jobs in terms of the type of work they do, they tend to be less satisfied with respect to the security it affords. This may be particularly troublesome during economic downswings, such as during the current economic malaise in Western economies.

According to the International Herald Tribune, there has been a significant rise in suicides amongst entrepreneurs in European countries most affected by the economic crisis, particularly where social protection measures have been eroded by the fiscal austerity pandemic: “in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling ‘suicide by economic crisis’”.

For increasing national happiness, the policy prescriptions for labour market reform and human resource management are clear: Employees should be treated more like entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs more like employees.

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This article originally appeared on 16 March 2012 on the UNU-Maastricht blog.

This is fine as long as the main objective of these conferences is the exchange of the latest scientific results. However, in the case of global environmental change programmes working at the crossroads of science and policy, the key objective is to get scientific results and conclusions out to the policy community and the public at large.

The recent Planet under Pressure conference in London — organized by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (the Secretariat of which is hosted by UNU in Bonn), the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, DIVERSITAS and the World Climate Research Programme — was in this respect a significant success. It reached not only the scientific community, but also policymakers and, most importantly, the general public. Through a large number of media outlets from all over the world, the conference became a platform for dialogue between four key stakeholder groups: science, policy, industry and youth.

Substantial contributions to Rio+20

Three key qualities of the conference stood out.

First, it was a truly multi-disciplinary gathering in which discussions on climate change and ocean acidification were held alongside debates over poverty and inequality, and incorporated participation from both natural and social scientists.

The second major feature was the level of policy-relevant discussion. This included nine policy briefs developed and published especially for the event on issues ranging from food security and the green economy to human well-being, all fostering lively discussions on site.

Third, a comprehensive outreach strategy helped the message to get out beyond the conference walls and into the broader public. More than 220 unique stories were published in more than 10 languages and over 20 countries.

Media reporting on the conference’s key aims and outcomes was predominantly reached in top international print, online, radio and TV outlets, and ranged from well-known scientific journals like Nature and New Scientist through widespread coverage by newsrooms like AFP, Reuters, Xinhua and EFE to prestigious media outlets such as BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian and Deutsche Welle. Most of the media reporting positively reflected upon the conference as a substantial and key contribution to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) process from the scientific community.

A key rallying call from Planet under Pressure was the need for research to focus on how to move towards global sustainability over many fields and at all levels. Interconnected thinking and interdisciplinary research are needed to bridge the gaps between science and policy as well as science and the public. Sessions on the green economy were, therefore, of high relevance to the discussion and well-frequented parts of the event.

Measuring wealth beyond GDP

One particularly well-attended session was the pre-release of the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR). The report provides a measurement framework that will allow nations to evaluate not just the overall wealth of their society, but also the sustainability of their growth patterns. The IWR has been developed since 2010 by the United Nations University – International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme.

This provides a far more accurate and comprehensive picture of overall wealth than the most commonly used indicator today, per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI) computes the changes in the productive base of a country (i.e., the collection of capital assets a country owns, including natural capital, human capital, produced capital and social capital).

The first IWR, which will debut in full at the UN Rio+20 summit in June, will describe the Inclusive Wealth of 20 nations representing 72 percent of world GDP and 56 percent of the global population, over a period of 19 years. The report will be provided to national governments biennially, allowing them to assess the transition to a green economy, in order to create productive and sustainable economic bases for the future.

Interest in the IWR during the conference was particularly high, as the report promises to be a tool that countries can actually use.  With this report, the scientific community is proposing a concrete instrument with which nations can measure whether they are using their natural resources in a sustainable way, and whether their economic development is moving in the right direction — i.e., if they are investing intelligently in the “right” capital.

As noted at the conference, the IWR found that although most countries are now on a sustainable track, they are just barely so. Brazil and India, for instance, pay a particularly high price for their rapid economic growth. Between 1990 and 2008, the wealth of these two countries as measured by per capita GDP rose 34 percent and 120 percent, respectively. At the same time, however, the IWR found that natural capital assets per capita, from forests to fossil fuels and minerals, declined 25 percent in Brazil and 31 percent in India.

Thus, when measures of natural, human and manufactured capital are considered together to obtain a more comprehensive value, these countries’ Inclusive Wealth rose in the range of 18 percent in both cases over that time.

These examples illustrate why IWI can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the long-term economic progress made by countries, including crucial aspects of the system such as natural capital.

A new shift towards inclusiveness

Planet under Pressure provided a platform for both dialogue and debate among the scientific community, policymakers, private sector and general public, as well as a model for future events in the area of global environmental change. It marked the beginning of a new shift towards inclusiveness in addressing the most pressing issue facing the world today, and we look forward to building upon this success in the coming months and years.

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This article first appeared in Our World 2.0 on 30 April 2012.

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During the last month, three democracies in Africa witnessed incumbent presidents exit office in very different ways. The most dramatic was in Mali, where a coup by the military resulted in the ousting of President Amadou Toumani Touré only one month before that country was due to hold elections. In neighbouring Senegal, a potentially violent election resulted in the incumbent Abdoulaye Wade peacefully leaving office after 12 years and handing over power to his former prime minister and erstwhile protégé, Macky Sall. At the other end of the continent, in Malawi, President Bingu wa Mutharika’s controversial tenure in office suddenly ended in early April with his death from cardiac arrest.

The fates and legacies of these three presidents illustrate varying aspects of Africa’s democratic trajectory since the 1990s, when many of countries in the region underwent transitions to multi-party regimes.

Mali

Ever since Touré militarily deposed the autocratic Moussa Traoré and then headed a transition committee that led to multiparty elections in 1992, when Alpha Oumar Konaré was elected president, Mali has been viewed as a democratic success story. The presence of a vibrant press and civil society, along with a peaceful electoral turnover from Konaré to Touré in 2002, reaffirmed this perception. The military takeover in March 2012 was therefore unexpected, and contradicted the claims of some scholars of democratic consolidation that coups become less likely once countries have had at least two decades of multi-party rule.

The immediate catalyst for the coup was the lack of resources for the military as they combat two main types of rebellion in the northern region of the country. The first has been the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) led by Tuaregs who believe that they have been discriminated against politically and economically, and who want to establish their own nation-state. Indeed, inequalities between the north and south on a wide variety of socioeconomic indicators are woefully large.

At the same time, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb has taken advantage of vast, uncontrolled areas of the north to engage in a wide array of criminal activities. Setbacks to the Malian military against these rebels had prompted widespread discontent among the public, highlighted by marches in the capital of Bamako prior to the takeover by Captain Amadou Sanogo. Nevertheless, while many did not approve of the Touré government’s handling of the rebels and were becoming increasingly discontented with a perceived increase in government corruption, the coup was not broadly supported by Malians.

Senegal

Like Mali, Senegal has had a long-running, albeit currently low-level, secessionist conflict in its southern Casamance region, which is linguistically and religiously distinct from the rest of the country. However, Senegal remains noted for being the only country in West Africa never to have experienced a military coup. The army has always retained its neutrality, regardless of the degree of political crisis facing the country. This remained true even in the run-up to Senegal’s 2012 elections, when a number of large-scale protests erupted in the capital of Dakar over electricity cuts and rising food prices as well as Wade’s questionable political maneuvers.

For instance, in June 2011, Dakarois protested against Wade’s attempts to reduce the winning threshold for presidential elections from 50 to 25 percent and to introduce the office of vice-president, largely believed to have been created for his son, Karim. In January 2012, more violence erupted when the constitutional council approved Wade’s bid to run for a third term in office, despite his age (86), stoking fears that the elections might destabilize the country entirely. Wade’s actions reflected an underlying trend of his 12 years in office, which was characterized by an expansion of presidential powers and the launching of populist (but not necessarily effective) initiatives, such as Plan Jaxaay for victims of flooding, Plan Takkal to reinvigorate the electricity sector, and the Grand Agricultural Offensive for Food Security (GOANA) to combat high food prices.

Yet, Senegal’s opposition parties have remained relatively feeble at representing a distinct alternative. In fact, a social movement called Y’en a marre (“Fed Up”), which led a series of protest meetings, was widely viewed as more effective at mobilizing disgruntled Senegalese than the opposition. While clearly anti-Wade, opposition parties have not proved very good at highlighting their own policy orientations or how they are different from each other. The decision of many members of the Benno Siggil Senegal coalition to run their own campaigns in the first round of the elections rather than support Moustapha Niasse, who had been elected as the coalition’s candidate, illustrated that many were more motivated by personal gain than by the desire to present a united front.

Notably, despite widespread discontent with Wade, the turnout for the second round of the 2012 elections was only 55 percent, which was the lowest in over a decade. Macky Sall, who led Wade’s 2007 presidential campaign, nevertheless obtained a resounding victory with almost 66 percent of the votes. Yet, he will need to institutionalize his four year-old Alliance for the Republic (APR) party and allow a wider range of leadership within it in order to avoid repeating Wade’s mistakes.

Malawi

As highlighted in the recent UNU-WIDER working paper “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Limits of Foreign Aid on Malawi’s Democratic Consolidation“, lack of party institutionalization has also proved a key feature of Malawi’s politics. President Mutharika first entered office in 2004 as the candidate for the United Democratic Front (UDF). Yet the following year, after a dispute with the UDF’s leader, Bakili Muluzi, Mutharika defected and formed his own party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). By launching the Fertilizer Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), which aimed to help predominantly maize-producing smallholders, Mutharika was able to increase support for his new party and subsequently won the 2009 presidential elections with two-thirds of the national vote and a majority of seats in the national legislature.

This enlarged mandate, however, emboldened Mutharika to adopt an increasingly personalistic form of leadership. In the wake of the 2009 elections, Malawi witnessed suppression of the opposition and of academic freedoms, intolerance for dissent within the DPP, and a series of legislation that aimed to reduce the independence of the media and marginalize the rights of minority groups.  At the same time, the country began experiencing a severe shortage of fuel and foreign exchange due to dwindling earnings from tobacco exports coupled with the global financial crisis. Despite the pleas of donors to devalue the currency, Mutharika resisted since this would increase the cost of imported fertilizers for the FISP.

Disputes with the donors along with disgruntlement over Mutharika’s increasingly autocratic leanings culminated in urban protests in July 2011 organized by a wide array of civil society organizations and opposition parties. The death of approximately 19 protesters at the hands of the police and army only further fuelled popular discontent and convinced donors to withhold budget support. In the wake of Mutharika’s death, there is scope to help Malawi recover from its recent political and economic crises. Yet, the DPP has witnessed large-scale defections and a number of former cadres joining the recently established People’s Party of the new president, Joyce Banda. The lack of commitment to the late president’s party only highlights how poorly it was institutionalized and how strongly it depended on his leadership.

Growing commitment to democratic values

Collectively, these recent events reveal the uneven road to democratic consolidation in Africa. Key challenges include the persistence of socioeconomic inequalities within countries, high levels of centralization around presidents, relatively weak opposition parties and low levels of party institutionalization.

Nevertheless, the lack of a power vacuum in Malawi after Mutharika’s death, Wade’s concession to Sall in Senegal and the quick restoration of civilian rule in Mali inspire optimism about the growing commitment to political institutions and democratic values within the region. Most significantly, popular protests against democratic infringements in all three countries highlight that this commitment is most vigorously upheld by African citizens themselves.

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Energy is a fundamental necessity for life, let alone a vigorous society or civilization. This fact has been recognized by humans for a very long time — Sun, Wind, Fire and Water (in the form of rivers and waterfalls and rain), worshipped by most cultures, are manifestations of energy in one form or the other. The main difference between pre-industrial times and the present day is that we have restricted our worship only to Fire, neglecting the others almost entirely. Why this became the case, and as humanity again pays due attention to the other Gods again, what entities must again return into our moral equations, is what this essay tries to describe.

Sun, Wind and Water are, by nature, non-constant but rhythmic entities. The sun is up every day, but disappears during the night, winds change according to seasons, some rivers dry up in the summer and others flood during the rains and still nobody understands perfectly how the rains come and go.

Other important aspects of these sources of energy are that they are diffuse and not easy to store. Sunlight, wind and flowing water cannot be stored by themselves, but must be converted to some other form that can be stored. Such entities are normally called “fluxes”, and they are the most natural form in which energy is present around us. Even the purest form of energy that we know, electricity, is a flux and has to be converted to chemical energy in batteries before it can be stored.

The fact that these sources were hard to handle and diffuse (or not concentrated) was counterbalanced by the fact that they are, for all practical purposes, eternal. A European sailor planning to come to India to trade had to plan his visit to catch the monsoon winds, but he did not need to fear that these winds would stop some day. If today is cloudy, you can sun-dry your vegetables tomorrow. Pre-industrial society’s entire existence revolved around recognizing this variability and developing means to “harvest” this energy. Economic, social and cultural activity revolved around this ebb and flow of energy. Agriculture, wind/water mills were among the primary methods of harvesting this flux of energy, converting it into stocks of energy (in food grains) or using it immediately.

The main issue with these “gods”, as mentioned above, is that they are quite moody. Thus, those human activities that had to happen without break, everyday, like cooking for example, could not depend on them. It was Fire that came to our rescue.

Constant movement

Before moving on to the miracle of fire, it is necessary to analyse the moral universe of a person in a pre-industrial society. By necessity, a lot of objects in the world needed to be incorporated into her moral decision-making, the way she would decide something was “good” or “bad”. The rhythms of nature that manifest themselves in the movement of the sun, the seasons, flowering of plants, migration of animals, fruiting of trees were very important. Any activity that did not fit into this rhythm was not desirable. Restrictions on grazing, fishing, hunting, leaving land fallow, plucking flowers and fruits at certain times in the year are all indicators of the consciousness that humans depend to a very large extent on natural cycles over which they have no control. Therefore, any decision on the goodness or badness of any activity depended on the season, the time and the natural environment we found ourselves in. This was not due to altruism or an abstract love for nature, but due to sheer necessity.

Fire is unlike others in this pantheon. Rather than being energy in itself, it is a signature of a source of energy. Not only that, it indicates the presence of a highly concentrated source of energy. Sunlight in itself cannot become fire, but when concentrated through a lens or a mirror, it can become a very destructive fire, as Archimedes discovered. Fire also yields easily to his worshipers, you can switch him on and off at will, once you have mastered the art. Therefore, it was but natural that those human activities that required constancy were built upon the foundation of fire. As long as there was fuel available, fire was there, regardless of time, region or season.

It is therefore not surprising that Prometheus, the one who gave fire to mankind in Greek mythology, is treated as a great champion of mankind. If gods are defined to be the masters of humanity, then fire, in giving us greater control over our own destiny, made us gods. The fundamental reason for this capacity of fire is that it depends on stocks of energy already stored and not the eternal fluxes that surround us at all times.

Not only was constancy attractive to the trader, but also to every section of humanity: constancy implied security and it increased the natural capacity of humans to build upon their ancestor’s work.

As humanity grew from being primarily agricultural to also indulging in trade and commerce, the prominence of fire grew very rapidly. The reason for this lies in the very nature of trade and commerce — it is the movement of things, people, ideas and cultures and all movement requires energy in one form or the other.

Controlling trade to some extent means controlling the energy that drives it. For this reason, initial trade (and, by implication, industry) was driven by animal and human (slave) power, firewood and sail boats. Mankind was making the move from harvesting energy to “mining” it from forests, animals and other, more unfortunate humans.

From the point of view of the enterprising businessman or trader, constant movement (of something or other) was required — movement implied trade and trade implied profit. Not only was constancy attractive to the trader, but also to every section of humanity: constancy implied security and it increased the natural capacity of humans to build upon their ancestor’s work. In this sense, it is a hallmark of civilization itself. This demand for constancy was at odds with what we had to work with — seasonal winds, disobedient labourers, lazy slaves and rapidly depleting forests that simply did not grow back as fast as we wanted.

It is from this point of view that the shift to coal (and later to oil) must be seen. It reduced the necessity to include the multitude of objects that previously entered our moral equations. Mankind could finally look inward and achieve magnificent progress without too many worries about what was happening in the non-human world. This was the era in which both the pessimists and the optimists, when discussing the future of the world, were simply discussing the future of the human species. Nature did not matter, for sooner or later we would completely conquer it anyway.

Fossil fuel-based transport, electricity to drive industries and homes, pesticides and fertilizers, which made agriculture less of a gamble, all combined together to provide the constancy we wanted and ensured a period of unparalleled prosperity and population growth. A mining civilization had more or less replaced the harvesting one. Fire was now our one and true God.

With fire came a profound shift in the way we worked and viewed the world. Farmers who could previously grow certain crops only at certain times of the year, could now grow them all around the year. People who previously aligned work and leisure with the sun and seasons now relied on casual leave, medical leave and government holidays. We began to work all year round, eat strawberries all year round and live in houses that were maintained at 27°C all year round. Corporations set up branches all over the world, so that the sun never set on their empires, forcing people to stay awake when they are supposed to sleep and vice-versa. Like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, we had to keep running to stay in the same place. Constancy was showing us that it was not all great, after all.

The severe jolt

It is therefore not surprising that, gradually, what was “good” and “bad” was decided by taking ever fewer objects into consideration, the logical conclusion of which came to be enshrined in the Homo economicus. To be fair, a life driven by coal and oil does not provide one with the time to do otherwise. Nothing but a severe jolt to the sensibility of humans could shake them out of their breathless but optimistic race towards an ever-receding perfection.

One by one, every resource that humanity has mined over the past few hundred years has either withered away or stood up in revolt. The first signs came when the humans being mined for their energy and skill revolted under the banners of communism and socialism. The frenetic movement that characterizes our era moved diseases, plants and animals to places where they were not known, not always with good results. Agriculture is currently under siege by stubborn insects that simply refuse to be eradicated, no matter what is thrown at them. The oceans are nearly empty of fish, and the sky full of gases that threaten to heat our planet beyond the capacities of our best air-conditioners. When you play with fire, it is unlikely you won’t get burnt.

Slowly but surely, and somewhat reluctantly, humanity is beginning to realize that an inward looking civilization simply cannot survive forever. Those unsightly trees and insects will always have to be part of our culture, no matter what we do. The first few steps towards this consciousness have been taken (somewhat ironically) by identifying the rhythms of the Sun, Wind, Water and Life itself. Scientists are mapping out what are the best places to harvest solar energy, what areas of the world have high wind energy potential or hydroelectric potential, and what places have large biodiversity. Modifying crops to suit local circumstances, using biological control for pests, understanding the response of ecosystems to our activities are under way. In essence, what was known before, and conveniently forgotten, is being painfully relearnt in a more “scientific” manner. Our moral universe is slowly but surely being reclaimed from the wasteland to which it was condemned for the past few hundred years.

The survival and prosperity of all life must be embodied within our notions of justice.

However, as we are making this shift, a very fundamental contradiction arises — our civilization, still predominantly a mining one, wants to be driven by technologies that belong to a harvesting civilization. We demand the constancy that we have been used to for many generations, and which we idolize as the epitome of civilization, but we hope this constancy will be driven by technologies that are moody, uncontrollable and unanswerable to anyone.

This contradiction is manifesting itself in many contemporary debates and concerns: Can organic farming feed the world as it is designed today? How can solar thermal plants run round the clock? How can we design an electricity grid that is smart enough to provide constant power supply when connected to solar and wind installations? How can we design newer batteries and fuel cells to shelter us against the vagaries of the Sun, Wind and Water? What are the “sustainable” pollution levels that our skies and oceans can tolerate?

That we can go back to a completely harvesting society is a pipe dream, similar to the nineteenth century dreams of infinite progress and complete social equality. But it is equally apparent that unless our moral decision-making does not encompass at least a larger part of our natural and social environments, we cannot achieve what we cherish and aspire toward. The energy industry has always sought to modify consumer behaviour through prices. However, given that the largest consumers are those that are also the most affluent, it is questionable how effective this strategy will be in the future. It is unlikely that a person living in a house with an A/C, goes to work in an office with an A/C and travels in a car with an A/C will even relate to the symptoms of global warming.

Moral decision-making must include a notion of duties towards other beings, human, non-human and even non-living. Some actions must be performed simply because we consider them to be our duty towards others. Our moral universe must not be one forged in Fire, but also kissed by the Sun and caressed by the Winds and Water. Most importantly, as these elements come together in the glorious phenomenon called Life, the survival and prosperity of all life must be embodied within our notions of justice. Our happiness and survival depend on an intricate web of causality that encompasses everything from simple molecules to the well-being of the vast oceans. May it never be thought of otherwise.

 ♦♦♦

This article was first published in the inaugural issue of Dimensions, a new publication from the IHDP.

Living downtown in a city that consistently finds its way onto lists of cities with the highest cost of living, however, did not come cheap. According to Daniel, “when Johanna became pregnant, we knew we couldn’t afford an apartment with enough space for all of us”. On an earlier hiking vacation, they had passed through a small village and had stopped to visit the garden in the local cloister. At the time, Daniel’s eye was caught by the adjacent lot overgrown with weeds.

As Johanna’s pregnancy advanced, Daniel thought again of the overgrown lot and bought a bus ticket back to the village.

“The garden was still there, but there was no one to clear the weeds from the next lot. I talked with the owner of the land, applied for a government grant, and we moved into a nearby vacant farmhouse two months later.”

He soon cleared the land, planted peppermint and an array of other herbs, and within two years had the land certified organic and started producing his own line of herbal tea mixes. Since then, he has operated a small one-room shop on the cloister grounds, expanded sales of tea and vegetables to a number of local fairs and markets, and started raising goats.

After giving birth, Johanna got a part-time job at the town’s nursery and started organizing a theatre group at the local church.

“At the time, it was a big change, but now I can’t imagine it any other way. When I was young, I always liked the idea of living in the countryside. It has been much simpler and much happier than I imagined.”

Urban–rural migrants lost in the flood of rural–urban migration

Why consider the story of Daniel and Johanna? After all, statistics show that the largest migration in human history is currently underway as people move from the countryside to urban centres. According to current models, the future is cities — bigger, denser, more populous and more externally dependent on resources and energy than ever.

At a recent symposium on Sustainable Urban Development: Challenges and Issues in Developing Countries, co-hosted by the UNU Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) and the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, it was pointed out that experts expect the number of people living in urban areas to grow from 3.4 billion to 6.3 billion by 2050, an 85% increase. Speaking at this event, Aban Marker Kabraji, Asia Regional Director of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, pointed out that “while cities cover a mere 2% of land space worldwide, they consume a whopping 75% of the resources”.

The massive scale and the rapidity of this shift in human civilization have fostered broad generalizations of an inexorable movement of people from rural to urban areas.

Daniel and Johanna are not alone, though. Recent reports from the Republic of Korea (ROK), for example, show that in 2011 there was a 158% increase in the number of households leaving cities to settle in rural areas. One explanation given by ROK Agriculture Minister Suh Kyu-yong is that city dwellers are increasingly packing up and moving to the countryside “to seek a quieter life”. Just as there are a number of commonly cited drivers of rural–urban migration, however, it likewise seems logical that the reasons for households moving in the other direction are more nuanced and differentiated.

Considering the fundamental changes in human civilization that are forecast for the coming decades, are these urban–rural migrants the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, or just exceptions to the prevailing rule? And what role can these urban–rural migrants potentially play in supporting ecosystems and fostering resilience?

The important role of rural populations in preserving biodiversity

Humans can play a crucial role in maintaining and even increasing the biodiversity of their surroundings. There are many places around the world in which people have interacted with their natural surroundings in a harmonious way for many generations, creating socio-ecological production landscapes (SEPLs). These dynamic mosaics of land usage and ecosystems/habitats provide sustainable livelihoods that are interlinked with local culture and community.

Terraced rice fields, for example, are home to a multitude of species, but depend on regular human maintenance. A recent survey in Japan recorded a staggering 5,668 different species living in rice paddies. On average, rice farmers in Japan are 66 years old, and the rapid depopulation of the country as a whole, and rural areas in particular, means that these biodiversity-rich SEPLs face abandonment and fundamental change.

A case study published by the Satoyama Initiative looked specifically at landscapes that had been abandoned around Machida City, a suburb of Tokyo. After observing a steady drop in the numbers of plant and animal species, a project was set up under local management to restore the landscapes through human intervention and make full use of traditional knowledge. In 1986 a baseline survey identified 591 different species in these areas, but by 2002, the landscapes had become home to 680 different species.

Likewise, forests left unattended — particularly planted monocultures — may grow denser as they age, leaving the forest floor without sunlight. Those thinned and managed in a sustainable fashion, however, let in enough sunlight to feed lush undergrowth, which in turn fosters a wide range of different species.

Such SEPLs require people to stay on the land to manage it in a harmonious manner. As such, there has been growing focus by urban planners, among others, on the impacts of this flow of people from rural to urban areas, while the Satoyama Initiative and others look at how to maintain healthy communities and ecosystems in the face of ageing populations and a lack of successors.

Is specialization antithetical to resilience?

With resilience a key focus of the upcoming IUCN World Conservation Congress, to be held in September 2012 in the ROK, it is useful to consider the implications of people moving to and from cities.

Perhaps it is most informative to look first at systems that demonstrate a lack of resilience. Coral reefs, for example, are characterized by dizzying levels of biodiversity, are visually stunning, and are recognized for the potential pharmaceutical value of their genetic diversity. At the same time, many of the organisms living in these environments are tremendously specialized: individual clownfish species, for example, have co-evolved with anemones in a symbiotic relationship that leaves each highly dependent on the other for survival.

In a relatively static environment, such specialization has allowed these organisms to efficiently exploit niches within the ecosystem. At the same time, it has rendered them highly susceptible to changes in their surroundings. Mass bleaching of coral has been closely associated with unusually warm ocean temperatures and rising water levels, both of which have been predicted as outcomes of global climate change. With coral literally providing the foundation of these ecosystems, and each organism within the system heavily dependent on the others, such events could cause the entire ecosystem to collapse. Collectively, these specialized organisms therefore constitute an ecosystem with a low degree of resilience in the face of global climate change.

Scientists have predicted that global warming will spawn a host of extreme weather events, which will test the resilience of ecosystems across the world. Couple this with the spread of invasive species, widespread habitat loss and ecosystem degradation, and the future looks grim for highly specialized organisms like the giant panda, which feeds almost exclusively on bamboo, or the five-needle Alberta pine, which relies entirely on a single species of bird (Clark’s Nutcracker) for seed dispersal.

On the other hand, organisms with less-specific diets and a greater capacity to cope with fluctuations in temperature and weather patterns may flourish in the future as more specialized competitors for resources disappear.

Are rural communities inherently more resilient than cities?

Turning away from coral reefs for a moment and focusing again on cities, it has been noted that efficiency is one of the keys to economic growth. Efficiency, in turn, has often been achieved through increased specialization. Many urban residents have a small range of highly specialized skills, such as accounting, legal advising, pediatrics, etc. They exercise these skills in an efficient manner, and rely on other specialists to meet the fundamental needs of their daily lives.

In many cases, urban residents lack even the most basic skills associated with securing food and shelter, and are successful due to (i) continued demand from society for their own area of specialty and (ii) the availability of other specialists who can provide them with food and shelter. The absence of either point would raise serious challenges for the individual.

It therefore could be argued that urban systems, filled with their highly specialized and externally dependent individual parts, lack resilience in the same way that a coral reef does. Following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, for example, more than 600,000 people left the capital Port-au-Prince in a mass exodus for the rural areas because food distribution networks had shut down and many people had lost any form of shelter.

This does not have to be a dire conclusion, however. For while evolutionary processes have shaped the specialization within a coral reef, it is recent economic and social forces that have shaped urban specialization. The giant panda cannot suddenly decide to diversify its diet, but people can always add to their skill sets.

Indeed it seems that the denser the community, the greater the pressure towards specialization. On one end of the scale, Robinson Crusoe alone on his island was responsible for every aspect of his daily survival. Further along the scale, a small group of pastoralists in the Sahara may have some areas of individual expertise, but each member of the group remains responsible for a broad range of different actions. At the other end of the scale are extremes like New York or Tokyo, where specialization has reached its zenith and it is possible to earn one’s livelihood solely from working as a pet therapist or wine taster.

In some cases, therefore, movement away from urban centres towards rural areas may come with an increase in resilience as specialization decreases and skill sets expand — as with Daniel as he moved away from the specificity of accounting and took on all aspects of starting an organic herb farm, raising livestock and marketing his wares.

If estimates hold true and the global population expands to over 9 billion people by 2050, including over 6 billion urban inhabitants, this means that over two-thirds of the world’s population could potentially be based in areas characterized by a lack of resilience. In purely economic terms, cities may represent paragons of efficiency, but the trickles of people leaving for rural areas may reflect some element of a universal human consciousness that resilience rather than efficiency may be the best survival strategy over the long term.

As of 2012 almost all nations have created policies to stimulate innovation. These are based on two theoretical rationales: i) a market failure rationale that says because of the danger of imitation, companies will underinvest in innovation and ii) a system failure rationale that says the source of underinvestment may lie outside the company (lack of venture capital, barriers to entry).

The latter perspective sees innovation activities as part of a system of knowledge generation, diffusion and use. Here, national innovation capacity is shaped by education and training systems, and the macroeconomic and regulatory context.

Both perspectives provide general rationales to stimulate innovation, but the policies are often mistaken or unnecessary. In many cases, they create windfall profits for recipients, providing push when pull is needed and, by being technology-blind (but not neutral), favour incumbents instead of challengers.

We face a double bind. Those who argue for policy coordination usually don’t say much about how this is to be done, while those who favour generic policies turn a blind eye to the need for specific policy to deal with specific barriers (in market entry, regulation, costs).

Themes for eco-innovation policy

I′ve chosen to write about this because discussions about eco-innovation are, in many cases, highly superficial or unnecessarily abstract. Here I present six of the 10 key themes for eco-innovation covered in a recent paper for S.A.P.I.E.N.S.

Theme 1: Eco-innovation policies should be based on identified barriers

To be effective and not wasteful, innovation policy should be based on identified barriers to particular types of eco-innovation instead of on abstract notions of market failure and system failure. Here are some examples from a 2011 Eurobarometer survey:

Source: Flash Eurobarometer 315, Attitudes of European entrepreneurs towards eco-innovation (Gallup, 2011). Answers are based on stated opinions of company managers.

 Theme 2: Preventing windfall profits

A drawback of financial support policies is that projects receiving support would also be undertaken in the absence of support. An evaluation in 2002 of the Dutch WBSO (Research and Development Promotion Act) fiscal scheme, consisting of a subsidy on researcher costs, revealed that in 72 percent of the cases where companies with more than 200 employees use the WBSO, the scheme had no impact on the carrying out of a project. For 4 percent only it was a deciding factor.

For smaller companies, the results are more favourable but still not very positive. For all class categories the deciding impact was below 25 percent.

Theme 3: Specific versus general support

Specific support for R&D has a bad name amongst economists, much more so than the generic fiscal support policies, for the reason that “government cannot pick winners”. Whilst there is an element of truth in this contention, we have just seen that blind innovation support can be wasteful too. Specific technologies such as algae-based fuels and organic solar cells suffer from specific barriers that no general support scheme can successfully address, which is why we need specific policies.

Specific support for specific technologies is not about picking winners but about dealing with specific barriers.

Theme 4: Balance of policy measures and timing

While R&D policy can help facilitate the creation of new environmentally friendly technologies, it provides little incentive to adopt these technologies. Adoption, so important for post-innovation improvements, calls for demand-side measures.

Pull policies do not make push policies unnecessary. The need for a balance between supply and demand measures is illustrated by the experiences with the EU emissions trading system (ETS) for carbon emissions. The ETS is the cornerstone of European climate policy, covering 10,800 industrial installations across Europe in four energy-intensive sectors. The total value of carbon trade amounted to 100.5 billion USD in 2008 and 118.5 billion USD in 2009. It was introduced in part because it was believed to stimulate innovation in low-carbon technologies. Yet it has largely failed to have this effect, according to evaluations.

Theme 6: Missions for system innovation

Among innovation experts, there is a discussion of whether persistent problems such as global warming warrant mission-oriented programmes. Superficially, the attention to missions seems like a return to the emphasis in the 1950s and 1960s on public goals to guide science and technology development.

There is, however, a big difference between the old missions about space and military technology and the new mission for environmentally sustainable development: the older projects developed radically new technologies through government procurement projects that were largely isolated from the economy.

Mission-oriented projects for sustainable development require the adoption of new technologies and practices across a wide range of sectors as well as changes in consumer demand and behaviour. This brings many actors into the process and will require a range of policies and customized solutions to deal with the many barriers. Innovation missions require policy coordination across sectors and levels of government.

Much of the current attention is on high-tech options such as advanced batteries for cars. But CO2 reductions can also be achieved through policies to reduce car-based mobility, through improved public transport, organized car sharing and intermodal systems of transport with an important role for bicycles.

Innovation policy should be more concerned with system changes than it currently is. Instead of being concerned with technologies, policies should be concerned with innovation, especially innovations that require a long period of development and long-term investment, which requires the involvement of many actors for their development, creating problems of coordination of interdependent activities and problems of appropriating the benefits.

Theme 8: Innovation portfolio

For sustainable development and green growth, it is advisable that government support be given to a broad portfolio of options — to widen the search process, which often is unduly narrow. There should also be a good mix between low-risk and high-risk projects.

By relying on adaptive portfolios, two possible mistakes of sustainable energy policy may be prevented: i) the promotion of short-term options resulting from the use of technology-blind generic support policies, such as carbon taxes or cap and trade systems (which despite being “technology-blind” are not technology neutral at all because they favour low-hanging fruit and regime-preserving change), and ii) picking losers (technologies and system configurations that are suboptimal) through technology-specific policies.

Policy learning and strategic perspective building

The case for eco-innovation policy is particularly strong: first because the benefits are undervalued in the market place, and second because power supply and transport are “locked in” to old technologies.

Markets rarely help eco-innovation because prices do not reflect environmental costs. This is especially the case for green energy, hampered by the low cost of fossil fuels, long development “lead” times and grid connection issues. I, therefore, recommend specific support policies for green innovation beyond existing technological paradigms.

However, different types of eco-innovation require different policies. Incremental improvements of commercial products rarely need special support, as firms are normally able to produce and fund these. By contrast, radical and system innovations need much more support, especially radical transformative innovations. So I advocate strong support for transformative innovation, embracing not only financial but also institutional change in the economic and social world.

Regarding climate change and energy security, EU policy makers have broadly welcomed the concept of “mission” policies (without specifically using the word mission). There is, indeed, a need for mission policies, but the goal of such policies should not be about developing technologies but much more about ensuring the adoption of innovations. To avoid lock-in, these missions should be based on a portfolio of technologies backed up by adaptive policymaking, evolving with experience and critical self-evaluation.

To design and roll out effective policies, government officials need to fully understand eco-innovation barriers and innovation dynamics. Blind technology support, favoured by economists, generates little more than windfall profits and rarely sparks radical change. Meanwhile, the case for fiscal policies seems weaker than the case for specific focused innovation policies.

In my opinion, much more support should be given to transformative innovation. The above mentioned themes — which are clearly interlinked — help focus attention on relevant policy issues. Effective policy depends on effective governance, both of which depend on policy learning and building long-term strategic perspectives.

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This article was originally published on 22 March 2012 on the UNU-MERIT blog.

Highly skilled emigration is often associated with the idea of “brain drain”, with the loss of knowledgeable and trained members of society being historically viewed as having a negative impact on countries of origin. Since the late 1990s, however, a new rhetoric of “brain gain” has emerged, by which highly skilled members of the diaspora can play a substantial role in capacity building in the origin country through knowledge transfer, innovation and technological change.

In order to maximize the potential of the “brain gain”, an increasing focus is being placed on what can be termed as the “scientific diaspora”: a self-organized community of immigrant scientists and engineers who live in developed countries and who organize to have an impact on the development of their homelands, especially in the fields of science, technology and education.

Because of their familiarity with local customs, culture and language, highly skilled migrants can be in an advantageous position to transfer skills and knowledge back home. One method for facilitating this transfer is through the temporary return migration of members of the scientific diaspora.

The Temporary Return of Qualified Nationals (TRQN) project of the International Organization for Migration in the Netherlands, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aims to contribute to capacity building and knowledge transfer to countries of origin. The TQRN programme in Afghanistan was implemented in two waves: TRQN 1 and TRQN 2. The objective of both waves was to contribute to capacity building and knowledge transfer in Afghanistan.

UNU-MERIT researchers have analyzed the TRQN program in Afghanistan, focusing on the second wave, and conducted a series of interviews with the participants.

The brain drain in Afghanistan

After three decades of conflict, Afghanistan has seen a marked drain of skilled workers. In the 1980s and 1990s, educated and highly skilled migrants left the country for Europe, North America and Australia. According to the World Bank, the emigration rate of the tertiary educated was 23.3 percent in 2000. The continued conflict has led to the continued emigration of the highly skilled.

Although the country is officially in a stage of post-conflict reconstruction, Afghanistan still faces the challenge of attracting and retaining the highly skilled.

Because of a mix of factors over the past 30 years, the education system in the country is in a dire state and is clearly out of date. Additionally, Kabul has been experiencing extremely rapid urbanization over the past decade, and the population has grown at least tenfold. The processes of urbanization, combined with an increased international presence in Kabul, have led to steady inflation in the city. The increase in prices along with the prospect of better job conditions has attracted many remaining highly skilled Afghans to work for international organizations. The distortions in the labour market due to international organizations and companies have caused a drain of the highly skilled from both local firms and the public sector.

Furthermore, there has been a low level of permanent return of highly skilled members of the Afghan diaspora living abroad.

TRQN Netherlands-Afghanistan project

The second wave of the TRQN  project, TRQN 2, focused on three specific sectors: health, education and infrastructure development. TRQN 2 also focused on a “train the trainer” component, and all assignments were developed to act as training positions to further knowledge transfer and build capacity.

Participants are volunteers and received a living allowance and insurance for the duration of their placement, which lasted for three months.

A total of 42 interviews were conducted in the project, of which UNU-MERIT researchers further studied ten cases representing 15 interviews between September and November 2010. Participants were involved in various projects ranging from curriculum development, road building and infrastructure projects, and IT and technical assistance to medical training.

Health and education

One sector in which Afghanistan is particularly deficient is the health sector. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the skills deficiency has resulted in a severe under-supply of doctors, with a ratio of only one physician for every 5,000 people.

Hence, the contribution of TQRN participants to the health sector has great potential.

One physician discussed his experience as follows, emphasizing the Internet as a useful tool to aid in teaching that had rarely been utilized before: “The most successful… was the transferring of new methods of treatment which I learned in the Netherlands, transfer to doctors and also some lessons, some teaching through the Internet I made for them. And also use of good medicine, good quality, it was my success and also using of some equipment…”

In the education sector, the curriculums often needed to be updated. One participant noted this necessity: “They had a curriculum, but it was old system. But I revised it… a new system curriculum with a new technology.”

The changing, adding-to and updating of the curriculums were then transferred to other teachers so that their use could be expanded and continued. The language knowledge that participant teachers brought with them also helped to expand the horizons and the learning possibilities of the students. As the colleague of a participant explained in the host institution: “Translation of some books from abroad for the students; he is able to translate for them, for the students. We have a lot of books, useful books, but in Dutch and German language, so our students cannot use this. By the help of [the participant], we could translate them and they will use them.”

Infrastructure and engineering

Infrastructure and engineering were clear areas of focus for the TRQN project. These are areas in dire need of development in Afghanistan, as much of the infrastructure of the country had been destroyed during the years of war.

In one TRQN case the participant taught teachers how to utilize computers. This particular community, located in northern Afghanistan, had had the computers for over five years, but no one knew how to use them. The technological knowledge of the TRQN participant allowed the community members to utilize the computers and also explore the Internet for the first time.

One of the trainee teachers highlighted the impact of this experience:“Before we were writing by hand, but now we can able to type and read everything with a computer. That is the most important thing that we learned… Also using the Internet for work — that is a new thing here… We learn more things and new technology, and have a new view.”

Transfer of “soft skills”

“Soft skills” were transferred to improve management and professionalism within the work environment. Engineers were trained in how to function in the global marketplace so that they would not only be able to work in a specifically Afghan setting, but also with international organizations in an international setting.

“There was a great gap between [our skills in] office management, engineering documentation, technical documentation and site management,“ said one participant. ”I have trained them how to combine those things, and also some programs… I worked to bring them up to the level of international organizations, and in how to deal with those organizations, how to be a global engineer.”

Small innovations in working habits and norms can be brought back to Afghanistan from abroad and can lead to increases in the efficiency of work. “I have tried to teach them how they should proceed, how they should be honest, how they should be at work, how they should be punctual. For instance, ‘in Europe, they are starting at 8 o’clock, and finishing at 4 o’clock; they come to do their work, and there is a clear outcome… You should do it like this.’”

An ongoing impact

An important feature of innovation is that information stays in the country. In this way, participants tried not to just do the new work for the locals, but to oversee the process while the locals helped to create innovative change. In many cases, a “training of the trainer” concept was implemented so that the innovation could be spread to more people in less time. One participant moved all over Afghanistan to train 30 women and 30 men to train others.

While the long-term effects of the project can’t be known at this time, and several restraints have been identified, it appears that the TQRN project has made many contributions to Afghanistan and is highly regarded by participants, host institutions and the colleagues of the participants.

The motivation for most of the participants to return was simple. They felt that Afghanistan was still their home, and had a deep love and respect for their country. They also felt an obligation to help in its rebuilding. The TRQN project facilitated the conditions required to allow them to work in the country, such as a living allowance and insurance. Without these components, many of the participants would have not been able to return and contribute to innovation and change.

As we have seen, some of the smallest innovative changes can make the biggest difference. In most of the cases stated above, the innovation was not large and complicated, but it was indeed transformative.

In the words of one participant, “you can make a lot of impact there with just a small effort”.

More information about this study, in the form of a UNU-MERIT Working Paper and an IS Academy Migration Policy Report, can be downloaded in the sidebar at the right.