Bold words, weak vision

Timed perhaps as a new year gift to the world, the UN secretary-general put out in December 2014 a boldly worded document, ‘The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet’. As a call to all countries to respond to the political, economic, and ecological crises we face, the document lays out a new agenda for the future and steps towards the same.

Ending poverty and inequality, tackling injustices of various kinds, ensuring health and inclusiveness (especially of women and children), sustaining the planet that sustains us, and achieving economic prosperity for all: these are the ingredients.

But are the vision and the strategies laid out sufficiently transformative?

The report comes at an opportune time, for the UN member-states will soon start negotiating the final Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for adoption at a special summit to be convened in September 2015. These SDGs will then replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which ran 2000 to 2015, as the pre-eminent negotiated framework for development across the globe.

The SDGs mark a welcome shift towards considering ecological sustainability as a fulcrum of all human activity, which was missing in the MDGs. Additionally, there is greater focus on the scourge of inequality than before. A number of other progressive features are contained in a draft negotiating text produced by the Open Working Group in July 2014.

Unfortunately, though, there is little reason to be optimistic that the call for transformative action will be heeded. The call itself is not transformative enough, and those controlling the globe have shown little appetite for transformation. The repeated failure of climate negotiations in the last few years is a clear sign of the latter, as is the increasing inadequacy of the UN itself as a multilateral forum for peace and harmony.

Unbridled global capital, and overbearing state power backed by militarism, continue to cock a snook at the basic principles of equality, human rights, and ecological sustainability. Will this change because of the post-2015 SDGs?

The secretary-general’s report has a number of strong points. It strongly stresses sustainability, equity and justice, and the need to: mobilise diverse cultures and respect the worldview of ‘mother earth’ present in many traditions; integrate economic, environmental and social goals (the MDGs having missed such integration); protect the life-support ecological processes we all depend on; develop alternative measures of progress (beyond GDP), including subjective well-being; carry out innovative resource-raising through global taxes on environmentally destructive activities and on financial transactions; base actions on the best available information and data, publicly accessible; make business and companies more socially and ecologically accountable; remove fossil fuel and agricultural export subsidies; take strong steps for monitoring and assessing progress towards meeting SDGs.

The message of transformation could have been punchier had it contained an analysis of the structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequities, which include centralisation of state power and capitalist monopolies. Without such a diagnosis, it is inevitable that the prescriptions will not be transformative enough. Falling short

The report’s call for more accountable and participatory governance is welcome, but does not go the distance. Then, although it makes a clear call to ‘preserve the Earth’s life-support systems for future generations’, the report continues to promote economic growth as the means to reach prosperity. Human activity has already crossed several planetary limits; we need global degrowth, along with radical redistribution so that peoples thus far deprived can gain without further threatening the earth.

Increasing livelihood security, access to basic needs, health and learning, and other human needs can be decoupled from growth per se . But this also needs drastically cutting down the consumption levels of the global North, a point conveniently glossed over by every UN report on the post-2015 agenda.

Coupled with the above, there is no acknowledgement of the inherent unsustainability and inequities of economic globalisation in its current form. This would have led the report to advocate localisation of economies to cut unsustainable transportation, empower people to be in control of their own lives, democratise markets, and provide a stable basis for global socio-economic and political relations.

Unfortunately, like all the post-2015 reports, this report contains an assumption of unilinearity of technological and economic progress.

It is still about facilitating technology and financial transfers from industrialised (‘developed’) to other (‘developing’) countries, and not recognising that there is a lot the latter can teach the former about sustainable ways of living.

While the report has a welcome assertion about making private corporations more accountable, it does not explicitly state the need for full public control over business; public here does not necessarily mean the state, but rather communities and citizens in general including through producer-run operations. This is the only way to ensure that business behaves responsibly, since otherwise there is a tendency for crony capitalism to prevail, as one sees today even in ‘socialist’ countries like India and China.

In its recommendations for making the UN “fit for transformation”, there is continued reliance on the nation-state as the primary locus of decision-making, and no words on how to restructure it so that non-state actors have greater say.

Ideally, a new global assembly of peoples that brings on board all partners needs to be envisaged; understandably the UN secretary-general would be overstepping his mandate if he were to recommend such fundamental restructuring, but surely he could have asserted how UN forums could be much more open to decision-making inputs from non-state actors, respecting humanity as one.

Perhaps most important, the report contains a basic flaw that every post-2015 report has had: no statement of the ethics of human well-being and development.

We need universal agreement on basic values: empathy, compassion, respect, solidarity and cooperation, restraint and simplicity, and so on. Of course these cannot be forced on anyone, but a global movement to even articulate them could be one powerful antidote to the greed, hatred, and envy that drives our socially and ecologically destructive behaviour.

The writer is with Kalpavriksh, Pune