Remembering Kenneth Good (1933-2020)

Remembering Kenneth Good

My good friend, Ken Good, passed away yesterday, 2 October 2020 at the ripe old age of 87. He had a long career as a Professor of Political Science, teaching in a wide variety of settings. We spent 7 years together at the University of Botswana. He was the author of many articles and books with a consistent focus on democracy, development, and social justice. He is perhaps most well-known for his book Diamonds, Dispossession and Democracy in Botswana

I first met Ken Good at Rhodes University in South Africa. It was 1994 and he was spending the day with us in the Politics and International Studies Unit, then directed by Roger Southall. He delivered a paper, the topic of which has long been forgotten. But not the man. When we next met, it was 1996, this time in Gaborone, Botswana, where he was a Professor in the Department of Political and Administrative Studies. This time, the shoe was on the other foot, as I was giving a paper about prospects for democracy in Nigeria. At the time, I was working in Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria for Adebabyo Adedeji at his African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies (ACDESS). Ken’s primary area of interest is democracy in theory and practice. He helped organize the event and the large room was packed to the rafters. The temperature was also up — this was February, mid-summer in the sub-continent — and so was Ken’s tail. He loved nothing more than a frank discussion about prospects for democracy anywhere. I spent the night at his home, met his young daughter Clara, and we drank Irish whisky and talked politics long into the night. Later on that year, when I left Nigeria, it was to take up a job at UB, largely because of the prospect of working alongside Ken Good. 

I consider Ken to be a friend, mentor, and inspiration and will remain so in death as he was in life. When he was unceremoniously kicked out of Botswana, I had moved on to the Okavango Research Institute in Maun, so didn’t have regular contact with him or any of my colleagues in the department. Nevertheless, several students approached me regarding their plans to organize protests in support of him and I offered them what I hope was ‘wise counsel’. T-shirts were printed up and marches were organized, but as is not untypical of the Botswana government, their minds were made up and he was deported once and for all. That was 15 years ago, so the memory fades and plays tricks.

I think of him often and use several of his publications in my graduate seminar at the University of Waterloo. We had one abiding argument between ourselves. For Ken, ‘critique is its own justification’. I am quoting him directly. Tell truth to power and let the cards fall as they may. He was very good at drawing lines in the sand, lines he would never cross. In contrast, my argument was that having laid out the critique, what is your advice for action? Critique was not enough. There must be a plan to move forward — and by forward I mean in a progressive direction, a direction that improves outcomes for all affected stakeholders, no matter how difficult or divisive the issue. A revolutionary at heart, Ken had little faith in reform. You had to choose a side and fight for what you believed is right. In his case, he only ever and always stood on the side of the oppressed, the marginalized, the dispossessed. He had an obsession with the Spanish Civil War and what might have been. I believe that in his teaching he tried to prefigure preferable futures and encourage the students to move beyond received wisdoms and dominant discourses, be they national or global. Don’t buy their bullshit, as he might say.

When I think of him, what first comes to mind is his serious nature. As the saying goes, he did not suffer fools lightly — or at all for that matter. Not that he wasn’t fun. Fun for Ken was a good argument about serious things — generally accompanied by good food and good drink. He loved intimate dinners. When the party got beyond 4 or 5, he tended to shrink away as the face-to-face element was generally lost in a more boisterous atmosphere. He loved to read and his house in Gaborone appeared to rest on a foundation of books. He was always pressing upon you a new book that he found of particular value. He loved nothing more than to have you come by his office and sit for an hour to discuss important matters of the day. And he always put the news of the day into a theoretical framework, filtering it through his political philosophy. Everything had its place. There were lessons to be learned everywhere and always. 

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a curmudgeon is ‘a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man’. No doubt, some people feel that this was an accurate description of Ken. From my point of view, when he was like this — as he often was — it was generally for good reason. He had time for neither frippery nor frivolity. Surrounded by the shallowness of consumerism that had engulfed post-1994 Southern Africa, he railed against pointless distractions. I have fond memories of him unceremoniously walking out of dinner parties that he felt were a waste of his time. With a wave of his hand, he would rise and bid us good night. You could only shake your head and respect him for his unwavering convictions. Being a man of principle only too happy to call you out as warranted, was bound to make him an enemy or two here and there. It got him thrown out of Botswana. How many people have the courage to say what they believe despite the likely consequences? As I said, he gained and deserved our respect.

He dubbed me a ‘Canadian lumberjack’ and said that I was ‘more larrikin than Larry’ — a larrikin being ‘a mischievous young person, an uncultivated, rowdy but good hearted person’, which I took as a complement and an indicator of his equally mischievous and good hearted nature. Under that gruff exterior was a big-hearted man. He had wonderful nicknames for all the rogues that ruled the region. Calling Mangosuthu Buthelezi, ‘Brutalezi’ for example. The toilet at his house in Gabs was adorned with newspaper clippings and photos pasted to the wall — a veritable look inside the head (and heart) of Ken Good. And when I imagine his head and heart, I see quite clearly that Kenneth Good was indeed very good. I will miss him very much. He will never be forgotten.

Larry Swatuk, Doctors Brook, Nova Scotia, 3 November 2020

On Elephants - White and Otherwise: Critiquing dominant discourses about natural resources

Larry A. Swatuk

The New World Disorder

In this essay, I offer not only a critique of dominant discourses regarding natural resources governance and management, but of my own life as a ‘pracademic’. I have spent more than 3.5 decades working on questions of the environment: can environmental cooperation lead to wider peace? Can CBNRM bring benefits to local people as well as to biodiversity and national economic wealth? Can transboundary park management yield multiple benefits? Can forest co-management result in poverty alleviation and environmental rehabilitation? Can peace parks foster peace?

Underpinning each of these questions were a set of assumptions: that agency could influence structure; that small local steps could lead to system wide changes; that ideas wield power. My own theoretical starting point is a blend of Neo-Marxist (i.e. Gramsci, Cox), constructivist political economy/ecology (Watt and Peets among others). 

My personal sympathies lay with the oppressed. My personal position as a Canadian-born, educated white male has long given me access to a wide variety of entry points, many of which are not available to people of colour, of a particular class or caste, or gender: as an advisor to different governments and government departments, as a representative of a rural CBNRM forum, as an educator of youth across the Global North and South, as a Board member of NGOs and tertiary organizations, as a trainer of trainers in conflict resolution, and as a researcher/practitioner increasingly disembodied from his ‘field of study’. 

Life in Schizodemia

Part of my problem has to do with self-policing. As an academic, I am faced with earnest, hope-filled youth on a daily basis. Moreover, I am in a School of Environment, Enterprise and Development in a Faculty of Environment. Every one of my students believes that human-induced climate change is about to put an end to this little ‘Enlightenment project’ first undertaken by a sub-set of Europeans some two plus centuries ago. They don’t put it this way, but they are seriously depressed — and the pandemic, which has brought into relief every pathology of the current system — exacerbates that sense of impending doom. Moreover, I am a professor of international development, which means that these young environmentalists also want to end poverty and increase the world’s gross national happiness. So, I feel compelled to emphasize a story based on agency: that no matter how many problems there are, this will always keep you employed. That the poor have no time for our pessimism. These are my ‘go-to’ statements meant to galvanize the flagging morale of our youth. 

Theoretically, I have introduced them to critical theory, and tell them that change is not a managed, linear process toward progress, but a result of constant struggle, and of fighting for what you believe in, and that there is just as good a chance that we will reverse course as we will proceed as hoped. But these statements which are meant to be provocative are drowned out by the ‘can do’ nature of my university. Where innovation and creative destruction, where an app and a start-up will save the world. And maybe they will, who am I to say? But scaling up will be no easy feat. Moreover, our School is embedded within the SDG ‘system’ through the SDSN - the sustainable development solutions network. We therefore stand at the epi-centre of liberal do-goodism where, if we can just get enough money together all will be fine. As Jeff Sachs told us at the launch of SDSN Canada, ‘make friends with a billionaire’. 

So, not only am I surrounded by liberal dogma, I peddle it myself either indirectly through my silence and self-policing or directly through my over-emphasis on agency as opposed to structure.

What’s so bad about liberalism you might ask? Speaking at an organization and to an audience where many are calling for the decolonization of the academy, of pedagogy, and of the curriculum, the answer might be obvious, but it is always good to remind ourselves from time to time. About 25 years ago, I taught a course on political theory at the University of Botswana. As I said to them then, it was a course about DWEMs - dead white European men - and their ideas and the challenge for me was how to show the universalism of some of these insights to young Batswana residing in a country that was at the time designated the embodiment of the liberal ideal in Africa. There is much to be said about liberalism but for brevity’s sake and in support of my argument here, let me make three points. 

One, late 20th C liberalism served as the handmaiden of Western political and economic power. Perhaps the ideas of John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith stand on their own and resonate with many people in the continent. But the delivery of late 20th C liberalism in Africa was a disciplinary enterprise. This sounds contradictory: how can notions of liberty be associated with oppression? Quite simply, when you are told that we have reached the end of history, as Fukuyama put it, then you crowd out any new or contrary ideas. Perfected over the 1980s and 90s, these cross-conditionalities of governance, far from assisting a continent reeling from the debt crisis, reaffirmed the continent’s position as raw material provider for the factories of the world. One cannot understand the problems and possibilities for natural resource management without understanding Africa’s position at the margins of the global political economy. 

Two, liberalism has long been critiqued as a Western way of knowing one’s self in the world. In this world view, the individual is the centre point of being and knowing. This contrasts with non-Western world views which emphasise the community. Ubuntu is a good example of this: a person is a person through other people. Contrast this with Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase: ‘there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.’ This is a very Hobbesian view of social relations it seems to me: that a Leviathan - a government - is necessary in order to keep us from the unavoidable harm we cause others and ourselves through the pursuit of our personal interests. Forty years of Thatcherism has badly undermined any sense of us as being persons through other persons, of community, of society, of a greater social good. It is no accident that Apple named it the ‘I’ phone. This selfish way of behaving has undermined almost any collective social project, and where socialist sensibilities exist, these are being routinely undermined by the logic of liberalism: the state must be minimized, people must be free to pursue their own interests. It is I, me, mine. 

Third, in line with the first two points above, liberal democracy has hollowed out the meaning of political engagement, and of the relationship of the state to civil society. Liberal democracy is tantamount to voting once every four years after which those in power ignore the citizens and do as they wish. This government has four years to loot the state - looking after yourself and your family, as Thatcher would have put it - before the citizenry is once again ‘free’ at election time (as Rousseau put it) to throw them out and put in place yet another set of kleptocratic ‘rulers’. At the same time, liberal economics commodifies everything. If you want something preserved, such as a public park, you must find a way to make it pay for itself. Otherwise, the land will be turned over to condo-development. Resistance to these models of political and economic liberalism will be disciplined and punished. The bond rating agencies will ruin a country’s credit rating, should it aim to put people before profit. The IFIs will cut off any loans should governments resist privatizing state-run enterprise. 

It is not only Africa that has suffered at the hands of classical and Neo-liberal dogma. One must remember that structural adjustment was first visited upon the UK and the U.S.A. before it was forced on the Global South. To reiterate: liberalism is a disciplinary force that emphasizes the individual above the collective, and capitalist enterprise above all else. The role of the state, therefore, is to facilitate capitalist enterprise. The global impacts of this philosophy are clear and increasingly challenged by scholars and some state-makers. COVID-19 has brought the pathologies of early 21st C liberalism into broad relief: those most negatively impacted are the poor, the immune compromised, women, and people of colour. They are all of those pushed to the political and economic margins of the neoliberal global political economy. 

This is the largely unstated and unacknowledged framework into which ‘natural resource managers’ step. It is the elephant in the room. It is the same world, occupied by the same array of people. Why, then, do we expect our environmental management attempts to succeed? Let me turn to a discussion of the largely liberal set of concepts and frameworks for natural resources management on offer, and to highlight some of the so-called ‘white elephants’ that they have constructed.

Concepts and Frameworks (in no particular order)

The language of resource management and governance revolves around the core idea of benefit-sharing and multiple ‘wins’, arguing that a successful management strategy will ensure resource sustainability, social equity, and economic efficiency. More crudely: people, planet, profit. In other words, the environment will not be harmed but in fact biodiversity will be enhanced; use of the resource will not be a zero-sum game, but benefit all stakeholders despite their manifestly different interests, positions and world views; and be cost effective, so not causing a financial drain on anyone’s bank account, perhaps even turning a profit. I’ve listed some of the central concepts, frameworks, goals and methods below. 

Concepts/Frameworks: 
MDGs/SDGs
IWRM
CBNRM
WEF Nexus
TFCAs
Peace Parks
REDD/REDD+

Goals:
Benefit sharing
Peacebuilding
Poverty alleviation
Biodiversity preservation
Sustainability
Sustainable Development
Environmental Justice
Resilience

Methods:
Adaptive management
Co-management
Ecosystem services
Stakeholder engagement
Ecotourism
PPPs/PPCPs
Entrepreneurship
Social enterprise
Multiple-use systems

At the heart of every one of these frameworks, goals and methods is the idea that the circle may be squared, that incommensurate interests, belief systems, capacities can be brought into alignment for multiple 'wins'. That everyone can be made better off through the application of money, technology, human ingenuity and good will. 

Peace Parks

Let's just take the example of 'peace parks', which are transfrontier managment areas - transfrontier in the sense that they are managed by two or more sovereign states in a sort of 'sovereignty bargain', to quote Keck and Sikkink. Who could be against a 'peace park', against 'peace'? The World Commission on Protected Areas (Sandwith et al., 2001: 3) presents a long list of possible benefits:
 

• Promoting, celebrating, and/or commemorating peace and cooperation among people;
• Building trust, understanding, reconciliation, and cooperation between and among countries, communities, agencies, and stakeholders;
• Preventing and/or resolving tension across community or national boundaries, including over access to natural resources;
• Promoting the resolution of armed conflict and/or reconciliation following armed conflict;
• Supporting long-term co-operative conservation of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and natural and cultural values across boundaries;
• Promoting ecosystem management through integrated bioregional land-use planning and management;
• Sharing biodiversity and cultural resource management skills and experience, including cooperative research;
• Promoting more efficient and effective cooperative management programs;
• Promoting access to, and equitable and sustainable use of natural resources, consistent with national sovereignty; and
• Enhancing the benefits of conservation and promoting benefit-sharing across boundaries.

 
As suggested by this long list, ‘the orientation in conservation and development is always future positive’ (Buscher, 2013: 107), revealing an almost unshakeable belief in the benefits to be had from peace park establishment irrespective of the complexity of the undertaking. Make no mistake, however, at the heart of the movement for TBCA establishment is conservation. For Ali (2010: 25), ‘Transboundary conservation is an essential part of meeting the goals of ecological regionalism. Since natural systems transcend political borders, management approaches must also aspire to transcend physical and cognitive barriers.’ Natural landscapes are overwhelmingly fragmented by human land use decisions and practices. Thus, TBCAs are regarded as one means of recovering the natural rhythms of flora and fauna while reaping anscillary benefits such as trust-building and encouraging habits of cooperation among and between often antagonistic sovereign states (Conca and Dabelko, 2002).

In no particular order, the dominant drivers behind TBCAs seem to be:
 

• Biodiversity preservation 
• A symbol of positive existing inter-state relations 
• A symbol of potentially positive future inter-state relations 
• Enhanced formal state(s) control of border regions 
• Enhanced global governance of a ‘bioregion’ 
• Direct response to an on-going conflict or security threat 
• National economic wealth creation through tourism development 

 
What should be clear about this list is the near total absence of the interests of those who inhabit the physical spaces where the park is intended to be established. Peace parks are, in the first instance, the result of deals made by powerful state and non-state actors in the interest of ideologically driven concepts: conservationism; nationalism; developmentalism; regionalism. It is not that these ideals are inherently problematic; rather, their grand articulation – i.e. global public goods; bioregional preservation; national economic development; regional integration – like elephants, crowd out the needs and interests of those on the ground, at the place of the proposed intervention. In this way, peace parks mark a continuation of the struggle that conservationists have faced for decades: what to do about local people (Adams and McShane, 1996)? As Duffy (2001: 6), paraphrasing Neumann (1988), puts it: ‘[C]urrent demands from local communities for the power to control, use and access environmental resources are not the same as plans for local participation in externally driven conservation schemes and commitments to local benefit sharing’. 

 

What I am saying here is that conservation is no different from any other land use decision, and as such it is rife with a political economy of power: who gets to do what where.

Because it is about an incontestible global good - e.g. 'peace' or 'biodiversity preservation' - and future positive in relation to 'poverty alleviation' and 'job creation' as well, the dominant discourses of conservation choose deliberately to cast themselves somehow as above politics, and so are artificially severed off from it. So what to do?

My Own Analysis

I was reading a review of Kurt Andersen’s new book, Evil Geniuses: the Unmaking of America. The review was written by Anand Giridharadas, who is the author of among other things, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He describes Andersen’s book as ‘a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change’, and immediately I thought: that sounds a lot like me: desirous of radical change, but afraid of what I would lose in the endeavour. 

As a radical moderate, I put great stock in Bob Cox’s advice to avoid ‘cynical politics’ - i.e. get it while you can - and pursue instead ‘clinical politics’. In some ways this echoes John Holloway’s argument in Crack Capitalism: watch for openings and then occupy those spaces. Holloway thinks that if all of those interested in radical change occupy enough of the cracks emergent in the capitalist world system, then a new world is possible. It is up to us to prefigure that world, i.e. to imagine what it will look like, and then pursue strategic measures to realize it. In the same way, Cox argues that opportunities emerge in world order and we must be clinical in our actions, ready and willing to act in a meaningful way. 

I also mollify myself by saying that not everyone can ‘heighten the contradictions from the inside’, to paraphrase Marx. It matters (perhaps in some small way) that I have the opportunity to be in the room where some of these concepts are worked out, some of the methods are debated, and some of the goals are shaped. I need to take the opportunity to press the case for radical revisioning as opposed to simply limited reforms. At the same time, I must guard against the possibility that as Irving L. Janis talked about in his seminal study, Victims of Groupthink, that I may be the domesticated dissenter - the tolerable radical. 

I also put great store in Cox’s heuristic device of the constellation of social forces: how is power laid out in a social formation? What sorts of power are being wielded? Cox speaks of ideational, material, and institutional forms of power. Without doubt, ideas matter. Just think of all the resources that have been given over to the pursuit of the driverless car. The constellation of social forces will shift as forms of power change. Does the coronavirus offer us an opportunity to fundamentally alter this constellation? At the start of the pandemic, I was hopeful that it would. But as the pandemic has played out, rather than draw us together in common cause, it has made clear how deeply neoliberalism has altered the global social fabric. 

What then should we do with all of our environmentalism? Our dreams of sustainable development through poverty alleviating ecotourism? My wife, who has a PhD in urban planning, argues that if we are going to do this kind of work, we have to be constantly self-reflective, especially as privileged Western white people. Self critique matters, without doubt. But one doubts if those with the resources - those at the centre of the constellation of social forces - reflect at all. Liberalism offers a concise and seemingly sensible world view for those who are already doing just fine. Social media happily reinforces not only their rightness and goodness, but the evils of alternative explanations. There is little room for manoeuvre. My own approach is to search for cracks and to pursue clinical politics at whatever scale possible. As for the Anthropocene, I am back to Gramsci: the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

 

The SDGs and the global pandemic

The SDGs and the Global Pandemic

Larry A. Swatuk, PhD, University of Waterloo

To paraphrase Shakespeare, 'SDGs, SDGs, Wherefore Art Thou, SDGs?' The Sustainable Development Goals were meant to act as a global roadmap to sustainable, equitable, efficient, and just forms of development by the year 2030. What the coronavirus pandemic shows us is that we are more likely to end up in violent conflict than we are to eliminate any, let alone all, of the 17 global goals.

Let's break down the pandemic in terms of goals themselves. SDG 17 revolves around cooperation and collaboration. In order to achieve the global goals, we must work together. What the pandemic has shown us that states have run off madly in all directions, often working at cross-purposes, happy to point a finger rather than lend a hand. Without collaboration there will be no end to the pandemic and without an end to the pandemic the world will spiral down toward dysfunctionality rather than up to a higher state of sustainability. A good deal of the problem derives from the barriers set up to ensure that SDG 9 (Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation) will fail. SDG 10 focuses on reducing global inequality; however, for more than three decades the world has moved toward worsening inequality, with greater concentrations of wealth at the top than at any time in history. This impacts SDG 8 (the world of work), where neoliberal globalization has allowed corporations to outsource their dirtiest work to the Global South (from textile manufacturing in places such as Bangladesh and Dominican Republic, to commodity production and processing such as palm oil across the Tropics to sweatshop production of higher end commodities in places such as Vietnam, China and Mexico). This process has created the 'rust belts' across middle-America that are ripe for nationalist picking (Make America Great Again) and driven much of the labour across the Global North into white (high finance, insurance) and blue (McJobs; gig economy) collar services. The pandemic has exposed the frailty of a system built on mass exploitation. The UN estimates that more than 130 million people may be driven into poverty by 2030 (SDG 1) as a result of the pandemic. Personally, I think this number is low by a factor of ten. It also exposes the frailty of a global economy reliant on just in time production, and of Western economies so dependent on constant demand and consumption: tell everyone to stay home - without a plan - and the result is 30 million Americans unemployed in less than two months. 

Perhaps the most telling failure aside from unemployment, is the failure of the global food system. SDG 2 speaks to achieving no hunger, yet while there is more than enough food produced around the world to feed everyone, some 40 milliion Americans - the richest economy in the world - are forced to use food stamps to stave off household hunger. Elsewhere around the world, people are playing a sort of roulette: starve and stay at home, eat and risk contracting covid-19. Following on from SDG 2 is SDG 3 related to health. What coronvirus has exposed with shocking clarity is the complex array of social factors that lead to some being relatively secure (with the U.S. President being tested daily and requiring anyone who comes in contact with him to wear a mask) to those who are compounding acute health problems (COVID 19) with chronic problems (most related to inadequate nutrition and poor diet in fact). The prospect of famine looms across the Global South while European and American farmers slaughter their animals unable to get to market in the millions.

SDG 4 concerns education for all, yet the pandemic has brought all education to a virtual standstill and pushed tertiary education institutions around the world to the brink of collapse. With the prospect of students unable to travel to their institution of choice in the Fall, not only are universities facing bankruptcy but so are towns and cities (SDG 11) around the world. The knock on effects of the pandemic illustrate quite clearly how all SDGs are intimately integrated. 

SDG 5 is about gender equity, and what the pandemic is showing us is the way in which women are most seriously affected in so many different ways: women are most at risk as they work 'essential services', most nurses and many doctors are female and struggle with the absence of PPEs; the lockdowns have exacerbated problematic gender relations, heightening women's exposure to domestic violence. The list goes on as 'stay at home' means women's role in agriculture, education, health care etc. is under acute pressure so jeoparizing household livelihood security, for example. 

Water and sanitation for all (SDG 6) is a lofty goal, but when protection from the virus requires you to wash your hands frequently with warm water, it is clear that perhaps one billion people are inadequately prepared for this. States have long ingored the sanitation side of water provision, and farmed out water provision to private sector and NGO actors in urban and rural areas. This abdication of responsibliity for providing citizens with equitable access to enough water of appropriate quality has heightened the pre-existing gross inequalities (and therefore insecurities) among citizens due to class, race, gender, caste, age and other cross-cutting variables (SDG 10).

The global economic slowdown (indeed, the UN estimates that the world economy will shrink by 3.2% in 2020) has crashed demand for fossil fuels so challenging governments to think creatively post-pandemic. Yet, the oil industries are lobbying hard for government assistance to help them survive (as if their pockets aren't already deep enough). What will governments do? Will they pursue orthodox bailouts of the very industries that are assembling the landscape for not only the pandemic but other system stressing crises to manifest, or will they use this moment to push beyond carbon, supporting research and development not only for renewable energy but new forms of wealth creation (SDG 9), aiming to build jobs in a new economy (SDG 8), not an old one? As 'shovel ready' projects are being contemplated, the jury is out.

Much of the global economy depends on the high functioning inter-connectness of 'global cities': transportation hubs; technology centres; and simply concentrated areas of consumer demand. Many cities too are hotbeds of coronavirus infection. The way urban spaces have been organized illustrate not only the way the virus can proliferate, but also how, under pandemic lockdown, the city is a also a hotbed of problems of mental health: absence of green spaces; poor walkability. Global South mega-cities are another sort of extreme, where 'sheltering in place' means having zero ability to social distance. It also links to food insecurity (SDG 2) and poverty (SDG 1) since slum dwellers must engage in piecemeal work, mostly in the informal economy, for day wages in order to feed themselves and the family. To shut this down is to guarantee not a pandemic, but starvation and most likely citizen revolt.

Enter SDG 16 again, on good governance. It is clear that too may governments have used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers, clamp down on dissent, and institute new mechanisms of citizen surveillance that may have short term utility in monitoring the pandemic, but more worryingly, longer term utility in fostering anti-democratic practices.

The pandemic provides us with a glimpse behind the curtain of preparedness in relation to a global system wide shock. How we respond now will tell us a great deal about how we will deal with coming climate shocks. This pandemic provides the world with an opportunity to not merely respond to a global threat, but to critically reflect on the preparedness of our so-called systems to cope with shock and not only bounce back but return in a better, more-prepared form for the next shock down the road, i.e. climate change (SDG 13). In disaster risk reduction speak, this means building back better. It doesn't mean building back as it was before, but learning the lessons of the crisis, and making the necessary changes. The world is on course for the greatest cut in carbon emissions ever. The planet is getting a bit of a breather. Life under water and on land (SDGs 14 and 15) are in some cases recovering from consistent over-exploitation by human activity. We are ready for the great reset. Will we learn our lessons well?

This brings me back to SDGs 17 (cooperation) and 16 (peace, security, governance). As I said at the outset, we are now faced with a choice: pull together and flourish, or pull apart and perish. The early indications are not good. The world's states and peoples have committed to Agenda 2030. The SDGs should be front and centre in discussions about moving forward, in addressing the pandemic, in adjusting our current systems, and in building back better. But in the cacophanous clamour of short-term state-specific crisis management, those voices calling for coordinated medium term thinking are unheard. Perhaps the SDGs can serve as a platform from which to launch the great global reset. 

The Pandemic and Prospects for Transformative Change

The Pandemic, the Global Political Economy, the Climate Crisis and Prospects for Transformative Change

Larry Swatuk, PhD, University of Waterloo

Introduction

The global response to the coronavirus pandemic reinforces three important facts about how we have organized the contemporary world of humans. First, by dividing up the world in terms of sovereign states, each theoretically responsible for its own well-being, we guarantee competitiveness, secrecy, suspicion and duplicity as the foundation of human interaction. Second, by fostering capitalism as the universal means for satisfying human wants and needs, we have embedded selfishness, greed and exploitation (of people and things) in the interest of shareholder profit (not planet or people) as a fundamental organizing principle of exchange. Third, in encouraging, over four decades, a type of capitalism that limits state involvement (in terms of regulation and direction) and nurtures company-led global economies of scale through expansion of both production and finance, we have turned the world into a casino with a few big winners and a great many losers. In this world, it is the big winners that increasingly make the rules.

In relation to the first two points, it took 2 world wars, a global pandemic, the Great Depression and numerous national revolutions to recognize that such a system needed to be managed if the calamities of the first half of the 20th Century were to be avoided. Yet, in relation to the third, we find ourselves moving in the opposite direction: away from cooperation, away from collaborative management toward those very practices that led us into world war more than 100 years ago.

It should come as no surprise, then, that China and the U.S. blame each other for the spread of the virus. It should come as no surprise that the U.S. president attempted to purchase patents, labs, and scientists related to vaccine development. It should come as no surprise that in the absence of global demand, the entire edifice of globalized neoliberal capitalism has been rocked on its heels. And, happily, also it should come as no surprise that the natural world has taken this opportunity to recover from constant exploitation, the result being cleaner air and lower GHG emissions, increasing biodiversity, forest regrowth, built up fish stocks and so on.

Without doubt, the system - of states, of capitalism - is to blame. But this system was built by and has been reinforced by us humans, billions of us. Whether you are the President of the United States stripping out legislation designed to preserve the natural environment (paradoxically, the very foundation for human life), or just a simple citizen (who pays their taxes and stops at red lights), consumer (‘my, aren’t these good inexpensive!’) or investor (‘Your portfolio is spread across a mix of A, B, C so you should be good for retirement’), we are all responsible in our different, individual ways for building and reinforcing this system. Thus, although we are not equally culpable, we are certainly accountable to each other to make things better.

Let me put this plainly: the emperor has no clothes! The corona virus pandemic has stripped away any pretence of a global economy that serves anyone but the few in their avaricious rape of the planet and healthy disregard for humanity in pursuit of pointless capital accumulation. Things must change. While I am not optimistic, in the balance of this paper I will attempt to map our way out of this dead end journey toward self-destruction. Lessons from history - not just around environmental issues or climate change - are very clear; positive social change may emerge from crisis if (i) elites and citizens are both negatively impacted either by a return to the status quo or a continuation of the post-crisis world; and/or (ii) citizens organize as social movements and civil society organizations and push elites in directions they would not normally travel, with the suffragette movement being one such example.

Back to Normal? No Thank You!

Amid all of the early clamour around the return of the welfare state (e.g. through guaranteed incomes), of collapse of the oil markets and the move ‘beyond carbon’, suddenly there has been too little conversation about embedding the social/environmental-good in a post-corona economic/social opening. While there was some public discourse around devising a ‘new normal’, about learning the lessons from covid-19 and applying them to the climate crisis, for example, ever since states have begun ‘easing out of lockdown’, the conversation has quickly flipped back, almost exclusively, to ‘getting back to normal’. Far from a new normal, it seems, ‘back to normal’ will be, in most instances, back to business as usual. And, in some cases, what will be carried forward are the least desirable elements that were put in place as emergency measures, states’ increased capacity for citizen surveillance in particular. Many people have discovered a shared humanity through the pandemic and lockdown, but the means for collective well-being are only stop-gap measures and there is no indication that they will be embedded in new and lasting policy and legislation. Worse still, civil society’s involvement in the response to pandemic has been guided in the direction of passive compliance: we, the government, will take care of you; your job is, in the words of Nova Scotia’s Premier, to ‘stay the blazes home’. There have been important interventions by the media and some civil society groups to highlight the weaknesses of society now unmasked by the pandemic (e.g. the abysmal self-management of old folks homes), and by the potential consequences of particular policy actions (e.g. isolation resulting in heightened instances of domestic violence; that shelter in place means nothing for the homeless). There needs to be much more concerted and concentrated engagement by civil society to push governments and businesses in directions they are loathe to go.

Putting People Before Profit; or the reverse?

However, without focused and consistent civil society engagement, there will be debt-rescheduling not debt forgiveness (which is good for banks and stock/bond markets, not so much for people). There will be a drastic reorganization of blue and white collar labour leading to rationalizations and job losses. Smaller and independent businesses will be gobbled up by those with deep pockets. Political debate at national level will involve an unhealthy mix of victim blaming (both national and global) and how to get people back to work. Getting economies ‘going again’ will mean a return to what we already know how to do (carbon-based; resource-intensive) and so the breather that the Earth has taken will come to an end.

To understand the potential for citizen-led post-corona action in support of humans and nature, let’s take a deeper dive into the contemporary world order.

Pre-Corona: Contradictory Forces

The pre-corona world was already deep in crisis: environmental, social, political, economic. In response to perceived causes of these crises, a set of resurgent nationalisms emerged in key states across the world’s regions: Brazil, Turkey, India, the UK, the US. These nationalist responses have been bubbling up across much of the world for some time, partly in response to 2008 financial crisis and its ripple effect, and partly in response to the collapse of a variety of North African and Middle Eastern states leading to mass migration to European destinations. The nationalist/anti-globalist response coincides with a retreat from a variety of mechanisms put in place to manage geopolitical and other aspects of world affairs. So, while the world put in place the MDGs, followed by the SDGs, as well as the Paris Agreement, too many states have struggled to meet their development and climate targets. The US federal government has pulled out of the COP process altogether while, at the same time, rolling back national legislation pertaining to environmental health and sustainability. The nationalist movement, for some reason, appears to be anti-environment with many governments, in support of their own or international transnational corporations, happily plundering indigenous lands and tropical forests (across Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia) in support of a mythical ‘national economic growth’.

In response, numerous non-state or supra-state actors have emerged in support of global and regional environmental governance and human rights: global governance think tank/policy advice entities (CIFOR; IWMI; SEI; SIWI), UN allied entities (environmental peace building) and IGOs (FAO, UNESCO, UNDP), civil society groups/social movements in support of planetary stability (International Rivers; Global Witness), city coalitions working toward green growth, circular economies and low impact development (C40; 100 Resilient Cities). These are all positive, and stand in stark contrast to states dragging their feet on nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to lowering emissions to name just one example. Also, there are significant Nationalist-Globalist struggles over common property (the Amazon and Congo as 'lungs of the planet') and indigenous lands (oil; mines; dams; forests) that draw together all of these state, private sector and (local, global) civil society organizations in struggle not only over resources but discourses and narratives. Shaping the narrative is as important as capacity to act, when it comes to resource use conflicts.

Thus, the pre-covid world presented a highly uneven landscape. There were very poor outcomes for resources and the people dependent upon them. Self regulation is clearly not working (e.g. eco-labelling, community forest alliances, conflict minerals groups). At the same time, there is continuous roll back of environmental supports at national level by the U.S.; a sort of ‘one step forward, one step back’ set of actions by China (both nationally and where state owned enterprises are active across the Global South); and mostly negative outcomes across Modi’s India, most perniciously the concerted attempt to roll back the Forest Act which gave power to scheduled tribes to manage local forest, and the renewed fight over Kashmir. None of this bodes well for properly addressing shared, national, regional, global environmental crises and meeting the SDGs by 2030. Until the pandemic hit, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere stood at more than 400 ppm, demonstrating an unabated upward trend over the last 50 years. At the same time, global biodiversity, for example, varied inversely with CO2 emissions. Prior to the pandemic we were well on our way to what Elizabeth Kolbert labelled, ‘the sixth extinction’. Recent figures show that CO2 emissions may drop by as much as 8% this year, primarily due to the impact the virus has had on the global economy. According to Simon Evans of Carbon Brief, in order to reach carbon neutrality, global emissions must drop by more than 7% every year of this decade. That is, some 2800 MtCO2 in 2020 alone. Can we continue on this non-carbon intensive path in the new normal?

During Corona: Madly off in all directions

As stated above, the very nature of the global political economic system has ensured a fragmented response to the pandemic. States have established their own policies and practices, in many cases mimicking one another, but not working in a seamless coordinated way. Given that the virus rises and falls at different rates around the world, early recoveries, such as that in China, have not been universally applauded but regarded with suspicion and jealousy, particularly by the U.S. The most successful models of containment have been state-directed social distancing orders (e.g. shelter in place; lockdown), shutdown of non-essential businesses (the definition of which varies from state to state), the rapid acquisition and distribution of personal protective equipment for frontline workers, the rolling out of necessary equipment (such as ventilators). Where PPEs and ventilators have been in short supply, successful states have purchased equipment from outside sources and encouraged/supported domestic industry to shift production where possible to the manufacture of needed commodities to fight the pandemic. All states have instituted some sort of waiver on recurrent costs for businesses, employees, established incentives for companies to keep paying their employees, and instituted guaranteed income supplements under a wide variety of criteria. Sweden - a small country, with a strong social welfare system, a social culture of pulling together for the greater good, and resources to commit to getting a unified message out to the public, high levels of testing and tracing - has been the sole outlier, choosing a commitment to science and technology above draconian practices of extended and total lockdowns (as have occurred in many other places). Some pundits argue that we are ‘only in the 2nd inning of a 9 inning game’ - an American baseball metaphor meant to implore us who are all tired of ‘lockdown’ that it is early days yet, and the struggle is only just underway. This reminds me of the Portuguese saying ‘A Luta Continua’ - the struggle continues - which is often followed by vitória é certa although in the case of Covid-19, victory is far from certain.

Beside the positive evidence, there are numerous examples of the steps that should not have been taken. In the ‘games nations play’ with each other, projecting power is paramount. Weakness is to be avoided at all costs. For this reason, perhaps, China was unwilling to admit that a viral outbreak in Wuhan had spun out of control. Similarly, U.S. President Trump has stated that extensive and constant testing ‘makes us look weak’, perhaps meaning a behaviour typical of a people afraid of the dark (although he himself is being tested daily). Russia, too, refused to release any data in the early days, claiming that there was no problem, though it is quite clear now that the virus is rapidly spreading. These three superpowers, are not so powerful, having armed themselves to confront not a shared threat, but to confront each other. What is the value of nuclear weapons in the face of a pandemic?

Endless forms of misinformation and disinformation have circulated in an effort to deny and cast blame on others. Mimicking the richer countries, many states across the Global South have attempted lockdowns, while others have ignored the spread of the disease and resisted lockdowns altogether. When the world requires informed and stalwart leadership, what we find are strong men posturing while putting one wrong foot (Modi’s forced exile of migrant workers) in front of another (South Africa’s ban on alcohol and cigarettes) in front of another (Bolsonaro’s claim that coronavirus is ‘a little flu’ and that Brazilian’s ‘do not catch anything’) in front of another (Trump’s recommendation to drink bleach). Clearly, denialism coupled with a hyper-masculine form of bravado are no substitutes for careful testing, tracing, monitoring, and a commitment to the common good. Indeed, evidence shows that those states with the most effective responses to the coronavirus are either headed by women and/or have strong welfare systems in place. During the Thatcher era, a strong welfare system was derided as 'the nanny state'; under pandemic, it is those nanny states that have fared best. Research by McGill professor Henry Mintzberg also suggests that women leaders, such as those in Iceland, Finland, Germany and New Zealand, demonstrate a style of leadership that is more akin to collaborative management, rather than 'the buck stops here' style of leadership by the UK's Boris Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro etc.

Strong performers aside, what is the general capacity of governments to take effective action? Both Bolsonaro and Trump have wondered if the cure will not be worse than the disease, arguing that economic collapse will kill many more than this ‘little flu’ that one day, as Trump says, will ‘miraculously disappear’. While they both seem to be hinting at facing the full effects and somehow developing what is called ‘herd immunity’, the evidence shows that when those in political and economic power speak about ‘the economy’, it is an economy quite different from the one experienced by those most negatively affected by coronavirus. For the wealthy, their fear of economic collapse is two fold: (i) a loss of real wealth tied to the collapse of the real economy due to precipitous declines in demand for the goods and services they provide; and (ii) a loss of paper wealth tied to the financial casino of share prices. The former matters much more than the latter in terms of how the wealthy will be impacted in the long-term. Trillions of dollars in paper wealth come and go through the markets with little impact on the real world of the production and exchange of goods and services. It is this economy that the middle classes and below inhabit and participate in. In fact, as evidence of the 1990s 'Asian contagion' showed, this gambling has collapsed perfectly sound economies on the basis of the impression felt by mostly white men on Wall Street as to what forest fires in Indonesia mean for their investments.

Whereas many of us participate in the markets through investment of funds for retirement, we do not command those markets: we are spectators rooting for our team. But our team is not playing the same game as the real economy. They are hedging their bets, creating winners and losers through a herd mentality of their own. While the financial melt down of 2008 destroyed the lives of millions, those at the root of the ‘game’ emerged largely unscathed, ready to gamble again. Where many of us are hoping for a ‘new normal’ involving a world that is more socially just, environmentally sustainable, and economically equitable to emerge out of the ashes of the pandemic, those at the commanding heights of the world’s political economy will be more determined than ever to bring back the status quo ante.

The collapse of the real economy affects us all, but unequally. The lockdown in countries where the relations between citizens and the state are characterized by distrust - i.e. most of the Global South - means that people with inadequate housing cannot shelter in place; that communal cultures with lives largely lived outdoors have no where to go; that millions of undocumented people, often seasonal migrant workers, are now easy targets for state-fostered xenophobia; that those who work in the informal sector at piecemeal jobs for a daily stipend cannot work and therefore cannot survive. Literally, they cannot survive. As a colleague in Botswana said to me today: ‘We will either die of hunger [due to the lockdown and possibly a border shutdown with South Africa] or corona [if the lockdown is lifted and open borders maintained]. We better choose what we want. The sooner the better.’ In the world’s ‘rich’ countries, hundreds of millions of people teeter on the edge of economic and financial collapse. They are not the rich; they are not those making policy. For example, according to Tom Colicchio in an interview with NPR, prior to corona approximately 38 million Americans were dependent upon some form of food aid - that is more than one in ten Americans, in a country where Trump’s economic advisor, Richard Haslett, boasts ‘we have created the greatest economic system the world has ever known’. Today those who must line up for a food handout number some 80 million. If this is the case in the U.S., then just imagine what is happening in the favelas of Brazil, the townships of South Africa, the slums of India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and so on. In countries where ‘citizens’ regard the state as populated by those who rule over them, oppress them, tax them without representation or service delivery, how reasonable is it to expect either state capacity to construct a concerted pandemic response or citizens' belief in and support for ‘authority’ that has never helped them in the first place. Put differently, the pandemic has exposed the wide gulf that exists between the people and the state all over the world.

This picture is made worse by the fact that Global South economies are overwhelmingly dominated by the export of raw materials or lightly finished basic commodities for which world demand has entirely dried up. These states are being forced into the hands of international financial institutions where, without doubt, the lost decades beginning with the early 1980s' oil crisis are about to repeat themselves. In a world divided in terms of states, the response is sure to be ‘better you than me.’

Let us not lose sight of those few places and cases where the response to the pandemic has been swift, focused, and mostly effective. The comparative evidence seems to suggest that what is working to contain the spread of the virus at a national level is the same that would be needed to fight climate change at global level and better manage global and regional commons as well as support one's ability to lead a dignified life:

• Placing the collective social good above narrow self-interest (despite abiding social inequalities)
•  Strong and unwavering support for well-funded science
• A clear, unified message regarding appropriate action
• A commitment to deep engagement with the public and private sectors to ensure appropriate knowledge mobilization
• Demonstrated state (financial, technical, human, resource) capacity for delivery on promises and meeting of targets
• Clear penalties to be applied for non-adopters in a non-partisan way
• A structured roadmap for progress, with transparency in terms of benchmarking, monitoring and assessment
• Action, assessment, adjustment, more action and repeat, suggesting a commitment to the long-term while acting in the short and medium terms

What to avoid is equally clear. In addition to the opposite of the points made above, three stand out:

• Mixed messages delivered in support of narrow self-interest
•  Lack of cooperation and collaboration (leading to a sort of ‘vaccine nationalism’)
• Politicization of action (e.g. ‘Trump cheques’)

Post-Corona: A better world for all?

In critically reflecting on the potential for a better world to emerge out of the pandemic, two well-known quotations come to mind. The first is from Albert Einstein: you cannot expect to find solutions with the same tools that created the problem in the first place. The second complements the first: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It appears that a majority of decision-makers are armed with an old notebook and a very large hammer. Without doubt, the pandemic and our responses to it reflects our world back to us as dramatically as a Diego Rivera mural. It shows to us that the dominant narrative of an end of history and the triumph of liberal political and economic systems is wildly exaggerated. Do we want a return to this world of radical inequality, social injustice, environmental collapse simply because it is the devil we know?

There are many calling for dramatic change. The pandemic shows us that people can be mobilized in mutual support and concern for fellow citizens. It also shows the potential of the state to operate in the greater good and that many things we have been told were ‘wrong headed’ - higher taxes particularly for the one percent; free basic income; regulation especially of  ‘essential services’ - are not only possible but beneficial to people and planet alike. We have also heard extensive discussions about how to ensure that ‘shovel ready’ projects must be green growth oriented; that companies can be retooled toward a circular economy; and that states and businesses can collaborate for broad social benefit not just narrow, shareholder value.

However, on the downside, there is too little evidence that the dramatic state interventions will be anything but short term. The fact that the virus will likely cycle around the world will increase the casino aspects of the world economy, especially the financial sector. In effect we may see post-corona actually being periodic corona, so turning the global economy into a giant roulette wheel. Short term winners will emerge in different places before relapses; this plays into the casino nature of the ‘paper economy’, ensuring that Wall Street (and, yes, many of us with our retirement funds invested) will have a roller-coaster ride making those with capital able to make it by the fistful and  keeping those without, who are mired in the real economy, on tenterhooks for the foreseeable future.

The barriers to positive change are well known:

• Fragmentation: the climate crisis affects us unequally and pops up in different places as does the virus (it’s like putting out forest fires)
• Competition: the sovereign state is designed to look after itself and selfishly compete with other states; while some states learn the lessons of cooperation and collaborative governance, others prefer to stand alone
• Neoliberal capitalism: decades of deregulation have left us completely incapable of coming together in a concerted way for collective social benefit; like the climate crisis, corona is creating opportunities within capitalism as well as perils and those playing the stock market welcome to the challenge of finding a winner amid losers
• Privileging the powerful: the global system is not designed to serve the weak, be they states or people or companies; it is designed to weed them out or gobble them up
• Winners and Losers: like climate impacts, coronavirus will benefit some (those who survived by acting quickly) and harm others, so creating difficulty for coalition building since impacts are uneven

Conclusion: Where to now?

Charles Dickens published his novel, Hard Times, in 1854, at the height of the first industrial revolution, marked by, among other things, the rise of Britain as global superpower. Beneath the historical fact of British imperial power, lies the equal truth of radical inequality within this ‘developed’ society. In the novel, Dickens articulates a world of vast inequality: between the owners (Thomas Gradgrind) and financiers (Josiah Boundersby) of the means of production and those who must sell their labour power to survive (Stephen Blackpool); the interrelationship between older (the nobility, landed gentry) and newer (the state, finance and industrial capital) forms of authority; the rise of people-power through unionism as an attempt to bring the rich to heel and improve living conditions for the working class; and the many, rural and urban alike, inhabiting the margins of industrial society. As world history demonstrated, it all got worse before it got better, ending after two world wars, in the great Keynesian and global governance experiments of the 1940s, 50s and onward. In many ways, we too are enmeshed in ‘hard times’, defined in two different ways. For a majority of the world’s people, daily survival is hard time. But for the few, those who have created the world that I have sketched above, it is hard times in the sense that to survive and thrive in this world you must be hard, heartless and ruthless. In many ways, this feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are powerful and in positions of authority and believe that success requires hard-heartedness, then by definition you make it so.

Global governance emerged out of the end the 20th Century’s ‘third years war’ (1914-45), punctuated by a global influenza pandemic in 1918. The architecture rested on the notion of active states each devoted to a national social project in line with a global social project designed around openness, cooperation, and the rule of law. It was a new world arisen out of the ashes of 100 years of hard times. We abandon these instruments of cooperation at our peril. We abandon the notion of a greater social good at our peril. Forty years of neoliberalism, which ceded decision-making authority to the Gradgrinds and Boundersbys of the world, laid the groundwork not only for the spread of this pandemic, but its ability to kill the Blackpools before all else. The pandemic comes at a propitious moment. It should give us pause to consider our next move: back to the hard times of the pre-pandemic global (dis)order, or forward beyond a ‘new normal’ toward an imagined community for all. In some ways, this pandemic constitutes a reasonable test for our willingness to reflect on our current directions and to change course toward a more sustainable, equitable and just future. It is 'pandemic light' - easily transmitted but not as virulent as others of its ilk. Will we be ready when the next strain emerges? How we respond today will largely determine how well-prepared we will be tomorrow.

Those interested in transformation must seize this moment to organize as never before. We must organize on behalf of the voiceless, the (deliberately) marginalized, the poor and the homeless. We must organize on behalf of ourselves. We must enlist the media in a broad conversation about what should stay and what should go. We need a succinct assessment of state actions taken in response to the pandemic. What worked and what did not? We need to engage decision-makers in this conversation, highlighting the positives without ignoring the barriers to change. We need a clear-eyed critique of how we prepared for and responded to a threat facing us all. This moment will not last. Indeed, it feels as though it is slipping away as the websites and air waves become cluttered with talk of returning to normal. The pandemic has opened spaces, no doubt temporarily, for dialogue. We must occupy them now.