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.