6

Change that works, sometimes

Richard Sandbrook

Where to begin? The answer cannot be at the beginning for that would lead to a chronological discourse that is not intended. Rather, with an incident – for events illustrate the crazy life led by those concerned with ‘change’.

The incident was in Vancouver in 1976 shortly after I had joined IIED. The institute members were there in force – all eight or nine of us to organize a ‘high-level seminar’ to give the UN Habitat Conference a lift. Barbara Ward was the host. She had just completed the book The Home of Man and was busy on a crusade for clean water for all that incidentally led to the ‘international drinking water decade’. Barbara was many things including a publicist. I was asked to help to get a ‘demo’ – a march for water – underway, and to ensure that Margaret Trudeau (wife of the then Canadian Prime Minister) agreed to carry the statutory bucket on her head. But it was not the only demo in town. An old friend, the late David MacTaggert rang to see if I could get any of Barbara's glitterati onto the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior; I agreed to try. One of the seminar grandees was Margaret Mead of anthropological fame. She was an enormous woman in many ways – larger than life, with a long stick that she always carried as her trademark. I spoke with her PA and it was pencilled in for the following Saturday.

On the day in question I was woken at six by the PA and asked to attend on Margaret ‘at once’. There she sat on the edge of the bed –legs wide apart with stick in between. ‘Who are you to put me on a boat? Barbara's boys don't run me!’ On and on she went. Then came the classic line as she prodded me with the stick: ‘You think I am being unreasonable don't you? Well, I have been through menopause and I don't bloody care any more!’ She went on the boat just the same – always intended to, I'll bet.

Barbara could operate in the same vein when put upon: without fear or favour; blunt, yet with a sweet smile. (I recall her telling Mrs Marcos at the same event that she did not deal with cobblers much less crooks!) But between these two great women, Ward and Mead that is, was a common thread. They both firmly understood the importance of the natural resource base to livelihoods and the relief of poverty. They correctly argued that life for the poor becomes impossible without a robust system for conserving resources while using them for economic gain. Environmental stewardship and sustained livelihoods are, in all subsistence economies (and many more) the two sides of the same coin – you cannot have one without the other.

ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT AND IIED

From Barbara's perspective, it was an absurdity that the environment and development issues ever came to be separated, much less seen as opposing. Perhaps this view developed because so much of the environmental movement originated in North America. Here, there is so much land per head of population, such productive soils and so many areas of kind climate that the idea of wilderness areas set aside just for nature's sake becomes a possibility. But in most other parts of the globe this can never be done on an extensive basis – unless the population was to crash or the land became equitably shared across the board. Land is the key resource and its distribution the all-important issue. Few realize, for example, that the top four places in the league table for population per unit of productive land are occupied by Bangladesh, Taiwan, Holland and the UK.

Little wonder that a major part of the thinking around the global environment in The Netherlands and the UK centres on the ecological and resource footprints that they have elsewhere. For poorer countries, the preoccupation is to find ways to build a diaspora economy to relieve the pressures on the land at home; in effect to create a footprint elsewhere too. Or take Brazil, where 80 per cent of the productive land is held by a mere 3 per cent of the population –no small wonder the forests disappear. This sort of thinking led Barbara to concentrate on how to make an interdependent world work with some semblance of social and economic justice and equity. She could see we could never turn the clock back to autarchy – even regional autarchy without conflict. So how to make the inevitable work? She was a ‘free’ trader but also a true cynic about unregulated markets. The tradition lives on.

I joined IIED straight from Friends of the Earth in London in 1976. I had co-founded FOE-UK after university – in many ways as an extension of the student politics of the 1968 era. I left FOE to join ‘Barbara's boys’, as some called us (there were in fact three men and three women by that stage) because I wanted to extend beyond the shores of the UK. FOE had been active in the Stockholm Conference in 1972 and then in the foundation of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). I went to UNEP for all the early meetings on behalf of FOE. Thus I vividly recall my first visit to Kenya in 1974 with David Brower – FOE's real founder (the archdriud of the environmental movement). It seemed to me to a heaven within a hell. The wealth of the UN crowd, the expat Brits, some in the Asian community, surrounded by a sea of poverty and wretchedness. How could all this be reconciled?

However, my first job with IIED had nothing to do with any of this. I was asked to get a ‘marine programme’ going because as a marine biologist of sorts I was interested. This was at the time of the ‘Law of the Sea’ negotiation – the longest intergovernmental negotiating process ever known to that point, lasting a little over five years! We set about it on two tracks. One was based in the IIED US office in Washington DC, and the other in London. The lawyers had the brief in the USA, and the marine scientists in London. What an education it was – all at once I was able to appreciate the rules-based approach of the Americans in contrast to the fudge of the Europeans (or perhaps certain Europeans) I saw that science could be mightily abused by all sides, and just how powerful the industrial lobby was as it pursed deep-sea mining rights alongside distant-water fishing alongside whaling. All this was done – initially as a joint FOE/IIED venture – as we came to grips with that perennial conference process. Resulting publications included Towards an Environmentally Sound Law of the Sea (1974) and Critical Environmental Issues in the Law of the Sea (1975).

At the time IIED was still very small. It had moved from the USA, with Barbara, to London in 1973. Initially the office was housed in the flat of Barbara's first lieutenant David Runnalls who had been with her since she was at Columbia University in New York. Then it moved into Mortimer Street to enjoy the hospitality of the Margaret Pyke family planning centre. Barbara had been the star of the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, with the book Only One Earth, and was thus able to attract help from all manner of luminaries in the emerging world of environment and development. I was lucky indeed to be asked to join in.

In retrospect I realize how my joining IIED – and indeed my previous experience in the FOE family (that I have never really left) – was privileged. We all were and are lucky to have chanced to work in environment and development. I suspect that many who read this book will also belong to the environment and/or development crowd, and will thus appreciate the point. The ‘not for profit but for change’ community is a worldwide club and basically very friendly. It attracts people who are committed but also usually able to laugh at themselves and with others. They know they are lucky even if they are not as well off in financial terms as many others. But what a sacrifice – as they travel the world, attend some of the most interesting of debates and discussions, meet brave and intelligent people in the most diverse of situations. Let's hope that the multicultural and international approach long continues and that the sense of privilege never disappears either. When that happens, the interests of those less fortunate somehow get left behind in the pursuit of personal and institutional gain. It is all too easy to have an organization that trades on the back of the very people it claims to help. I mention this because IIED staff have always been more privileged than most. To understand this is essential to understanding the organization's history.

Three things explain why the place is lucky. First, it works in an area that has, from the start, been in demand not least by those with sources of funds. Initially this applied to the big and foresightful US foundations, then gradually the whole of the OECD aid community became involved. So strong and flexible has this support been that, despite some notable hard times, IIED has never had to appeal for funds from the public; not that a research institute would find much public support in competition with aid charities. It has only once ever employed a fundraiser as such. Second, the mission of IIED from the start – to promote sustainable development – has become so widely accepted as a general societal aim that it has been able to ride a wave of political and journalistic sympathy. Third, because of the ‘access’ that Barbara Ward gave it initially (and staff have maintained ever since), IIED is a very creative and satisfying place in which to work. The target audience is often reached at the highest level. It is no wonder that it has always attracted the very best of staff. Three stories illustrate this.

BANKING ON THE BIOSPHERE AND AID REFORM

One of the early recruits to IIED was Brian Johnson. He was an academic from Sussex University who had begun a small institute concerned with the study of international organizations. After working on and off for IIED Brian finally joined in the fray at IIED in 1978. He and Bob Stein (who ran our tiny US office left in Washington DC when Barbara moved to London) set about examining the environmental bona fides of the international finance institutions, and particularly the World Bank. This was a classic study – published under the wonderful title of Banking on the Biosphere. Connections counted. Barbara was a guiding light to Robert McNamara who was the then head of the Bank. Because of this, Brian and Bob were given complete access to the Bank's staff and procedures, and because the Bank had (and has) pull with all of the regional development banks, the IIED researchers were allowed in there as well.

The result was a softly spoken but nevertheless damning indictment of the environmental record of the international financial institutions. This book was in a way the first of the ‘bank-bashing’ reports that followed from such persistent campaigners as Bruce Rich, Catherine Caufield and Jim Barnes. As a direst result of Banking on the Biosphere, all of the banks signed up to a declaration to do better but more significantly created the Committee for International Development Institutions and the Environment (CIDIE). This was never a very functional club as it was superseded by an OECD group with more direct access to the treasury votes – but it still exists in a revised form. It is still one of the places where the reformers meet and push matters forward. It has, along with so much more, led to change and improvement.

One can ask how important IIED was in all this – a question almost impossible to answer. But the banks were keen to claim their environmental progress publicly, and IIED encouraged them into it. With all good political change the change agents have at some point to bow out and let the powerful claim the credit. I cannot count the times I have felt ‘there goes another politician claiming he has had another (IIED) idea’. (If only we were called IIDEA – the International Institute for Development and Environmental Affairs.)

This work on the international financial institutions was a new gold seam for IIED. No sooner was the study done than we worked with the bilateral aid agencies too. Sweden, Holland, the USA, the UK, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany allowed us in to ‘audit’ them in the same way. What followed was a bit of a race to the top as each tried to show that they cared for the environment more than the next. International competitions of this sort have always been a key campaign method of the environmental community, and this was no exception. Much of the change was procedural – concerned with environmental impact assessments and the like – and a little with systemic and strategic issues too. But we failed in those early days to get the real poverty and environmental issues onto the agenda where they mattered. The urban issue was all but ignored. ‘Livelihoods thinking’ was still to happen. The agenda was all too much concerned with trees and wetlands, elephants and savannahs, important as these are.

OUR COMMON FUTURE

From their beginnings in the early 1970s, IIED had enjoyed a very special relationship with UNEP, and again Barbara was responsible here. She had been the star of the Stockholm Conference in 1972 and was closely aligned with Maurice Strong who had run the event and then founded UNEP. As a UNEP groupie, I used to attend every governing council and busy myself with NGO coalitions to push the governments forward. Out of this era came the Environment Liaison Centre (now Environment Liaison Centre International (ELCI)), and Earthscan (located in IIED) which was the ‘privatized’ information arm of UNEP run by Jon Tinker. Both institutions now continue to prosper – one as one of the largest activist NGO coalitions in the world, and the other as the largest publisher on environment and development.

However, by the tenth anniversary of UNEP (by then under the direction of Mostafa Tolba), all the veterans of the process were feeling that governments were going nowhere fast on living up to the wider challenges of Stockholm. Something had to be done. It was two other great Canadian friends of Dave Runnalls and IIED who really deserve the credit for what happened. Bob Munro and Jim MacNeill – with IIED – mobilized to set up a global commission to examine why the environment and development issue was so stalled in the UN. (The answers are much the same today – isolated environment ministers; a lack of joined-up UN governance; issues of genuine international inequity but used to hide downright poor government; ignorance of private flows, and so on.) UNEP was a small agency with no executive power – we used to wonder how we could possibly put the world's environment to rights when UNEP had fewer professionals than most of the larger NGOs in the business. Nevertheless, out of the UNEP tenth governing council came a resolution to establish the so-called Brundtland Commission with Jim MacNeill as its tireless secretary.

IIED could claim no less than six of the Commissioners as past or present Board members. But it was Gro Brundtland who was the star. She never met Barbara (who died in 1981) as far as I know, but they would have loved each other. Here was a new champion aided and abetted by a strong commission and an equally strong team under Jim. Needless to say he came to IIED for help. This began a fertile time for us. We had by then pioneered work on the greening of economics (of which more later), and to relate the green agenda to the social field. IIED had a stable of researchers who knew their sectors: Duncan Poore for forests, Gerry Leach for energy, Jorge Hardoy and David Satterthwaite for human settlements and cities (Camilla Toulmin, Gordon Conway and David Pearce came later).

We wrote the initial drafts of three chapters in the report Our Common Future and contributed to many more. Always the thesis was the same – there is no need to be negative about the world if the energy of the human spirit is realized in circumstances where the incentives to safeguard the environment are in place. Property rights, human rights, economic rights, educational rights are all precursors to the positive response and responsibilities! The Brundtland report was a spectacular success in our terms – and as they say the rest of that story is history. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, the new jargon of ‘sustainable livelihoods’ emerged, but it was a decade and more before this idea began to take off as a guiding idea.

As all this energy was applied to others, IIED was not so fit itself. Several things came together to cause a crisis. As Barbara was dying, William Clark had agreed to take on the IIED presidency from her in 1980. William was also a journalist at heart, having worked at the Observer newspaper in its Astor days, and then as McNamara's head of external affairs at the World Bank. William had no idea on joining IIED how much money we expected him to raise. But he could not do it. It was just not his forte nor his style. By now, IIED had some 30 dependants spread across its London and Washington offices. The most active and growing programme was Earthscan under Jon Tinker. It was a cuckoo's egg in the nest, for, by the time Jon left in 1986, it generated over 40 per cent of the budget. To cut a long story short, William too fell ill with cancer and in 1984 resigned.

The Board under Robert Anderson, the ever-visionary oil baron, and without any discussion, asked me in an open meeting to take over. Suffice to say I refused. It was not our style to manage in this way – Dave Runnalls was my peer and senior, Jon Tinker was special too as were all the rest of the team. The Board then (as so often happens in the charity sector where trustees do not always relate to management realities) decided to appoint on its own. Brian Walker was their choice.

Brian inherited a very demoralized staff in 1985. He joined us as the former head, of ten years’ standing, of Oxfam UK. He was known for his boldness of stroke (he took Oxfam into Vietnam and Cambodia when all thought it mad) and for his management style. Not everyone at IIED got on too well under the new direction. Within months the cracks began to appear between Brian and the Washington crew under Dave Runnalls (culture across the Atlantic is different), and with Jon Tinker who was by now his own boss. What followed can be only described as a very expensive break-up of the amalgam of structures that made up IIED hitherto. Jon and his team moved out en masse to form Panos, taking a large measure of the European aid support with them. Dave and his team merged with the new World Resources Institute in Washington, and Brian and a much reduced team were left in London rattling in a building we had recently leased. It was not a happy time.

THE FORMATION OF THE DAC ENVIRONMENT GROUP

But we were busy at what we were meant to be about too. Bob Geldof had turned to Brian and the team to help organize the spending of the Band Aid money. This was a triumph of NGO cooperation largely due to Brian and Lloyd Timberlake – the one member of Jon Tinker's team who had not changed ships. As the Brundtland report took off, so the pressure grew on IIED to promote it – eventually to the point where we needed to have an event that capitalized on it in the UN. By now the trend for celebrating the major conferences of the 1970s with repeat runs 20 years on was well established. (In fact the cycle is now down to 10 years and even 5 in some cases.) Maurice Strong and Nitin Desai were called in to mobilize the process for what became known as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

A little before this, a group of like-minded aid officials who variously handled the ‘environment portfolio’ had begun to get together to discuss a formal intergovernmental process to accelerate their work. The movers and shakers were the likes of Mats Segnestam of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), Jill Hanna of UK Overseas Development Administration (ODA), Frits Schlingemann of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS) and Hans Peter Schipulle of the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) Germany. They invited Mike Cockerell of IUCN and me to join in to get the terms of reference right and to progress the whole operation within the framework of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. This ‘club’ became one of the most creative that I have ever belonged to. It was a unique atmosphere in which formal process gave away to informal friendships and debate. It became a key part of the run up to the Earth Summit.

It was very special for IIED as an independent policy institute (which was by now doing all manner of work for the European aid frame) to be invited to join one of the key policy fora in the business. Each meeting was an exercise in controlled excitement for me and Barry Dalal-Clayton (who normally accompanied me) to cope with. With the back-up of what was by now a strong IIED home team working with all manner of partners overseas, we had a wonderful opportunity to help steer the debate in ways that were consistent with our sustainable-development objectives – provided that we never looked for funding! On one occasion the Word Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was invited, and did just that. I recall the very excitable French delegate going apoplectic with their mistake and very nearly ending our privilege for good in the fall out.

But this was not a one-way street. We worked hard to represent opinions outside the room and to bring the NGO perspective to bear. In turn it was good to see how this group widened the perspective on the environment in the UN summit process – resulting as it did in the Agenda for the 21st century (Agenda 21) and the key conventions on Biological Diversity, Climate Change and eventually Desertification. Of course with hindsight we know that the failure of Rio was that no additional funds to speak of were delivered to pay for all the heady ideas that were agreed upon. But I suggest that was not the fault of the officials but of the economic downturn that was happening precisely as the Rio process took place (not that this is such an excuse either).

My conclusion from these three instances is that it is possible to be a radical from within just as much as radical from without! In no way is this meant to be a sideways glance at the campaigning NGOs, for without their media and hence politically motivating work very little would be possible from within at all. The wide spectrum of civil-society organizations is its innate strength. But the process of policy change is a constant back and fill – or stretch and secure. The running is made by a good media story from an NGO, the politicians take note, the officials get instructed, the policy shops fill in the details and the result is agreed. Then the process begins anew. But all this depends on some brave person starting the process of change in the beginning – and on many brave souls maintaining the momentum thereafter. It has been good to be involved with such folk.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE INTERCONNECTED AGENDA

It would be wrong to see IIED as just a servant of intergovernmental process – important though that has been. It is also, one hopes, a pioneer and innovator. For this reason it has always had a close relationship with the academic community, indeed attracting a good many academics to join as we never had the burdens of teaching to contend with. Perhaps one of the real contributions has been in making a place for bringing diverse disciplines to bear on a common problem. There is a great difference between a multidisciplinary institution and an inter-disciplinary one. IIED has always aspired to the latter but not without a deal of internal strife and tension at times.

The story of the three circles is perhaps most illustrative here. It was in 1984 that we were wrestling yet again with the idea of sustainable development. Time to have a unifying theory we all thought, and so one lunchtime four or five people turned up for one of those brown-bag affairs. I do not recall quite who started it off but onto the flipchart went three separate circles representing the economy, the environment and the social sphere. What sustainable development is all about is getting to a point where these three systems (for we were at the time deep into systems thinking) could overlap optimally. Thus, the overlapping circles were drawn. Then the next issue was how to reconcile the different language systems of the different disciplines involved. What – apart from mathematics –would do? What was the currency to be? Energy? Money? How could the trade-offs or compromises between the systems take place –what processes were needed?

None of this is exceptional to anyone who has taken part in university seminars. But what was different was that we resolved to write it up and follow through with popular promotion. That weekend, I was to address a group of Save the Children staff in York on the environment and development debate. So I tried it out on them and was somewhat taken aback by the result. Debate literally took off. We were onto something here. The idea of sustainable livelihoods happened in a similar way but was not to become a strong ‘currency’ until the late1990s.

Gradually it became apparent that an ingredient missing from much of our work on sustainable development was good economics. So we approached David Pearce, round the corner at University College, London University (UCL) and he, Anil Markandya (from UCL) and Ed Barbier (from IIED) joined forces to form a new operation in the middle that we called LEEC (the London Environmental Economics Centre). That was a beginning that led to a succession of papers and books and projects that considerably expanded the field and the interest in environmental economics. Sadly, that group dispersed but the three circles, as the simplest way I know to communicate sustainable development as an idea, and the fertile field of environmental economics remain. Alongside this there has been a gradual coming together in IIED of the natural, economic and social sciences but through a wealth of field experience. What also has remained central to all of this has been a process that engages the differing perspectives from all sides so that trade-offs and compromise can be reached.

THE GROWTH OF THE DEVELOPMENT TRIAD

This talk of trade-offs does not suit the green purist. Understandably there are those who feel that a line has to be drawn, most particularly when it comes to disappearing species, ecosystems and cultures. In many circumstances one has to agree. Then the suggestion that everything can be reduced to economics is unacceptable to many, who rightly point out that it is the ethics of society that matter – indeed that was the very origin of the economics discipline. Taking this a degree or two further, one arrives at the new liberation agenda which is all about global versus local values. The principal target here is the complex and lonely superpower and all it upholds for its citizens; as the elder Bush intoned at Rio ‘no environmental or developmental fad is going to interfere with the needs of the American citizen!’

How was (and is) IIED going to cope with all this growing polarization centred on that catch-all word ‘globalization’? The question was made all the more poignant as the origins of IIED were in large part based on multinational leaders with Bob Anderson – of Arco oil (now a part of BP!) – Maurice Strong of, inter alia, Petrocan, along with Barbara Ward who was all that is Catholic and Oxford bluestocking!

It is fair to say that all through the 1970s and 1980s, IIED was quietly anti-corporate on both sides of the Atlantic. This began to change in 1987 by the time Gus Speth had taken over what remained of our Washington office and absorbed it into a corner of the World Resources Institute (WRI). In WRI and in IIED there was a gradual awakening that the private sector mattered to development outcomes, and sustainable ones to boot! We had both had to play with the timber industry, the food industry, not to mention the development industry with all its consultants and banks! To ignore the development triad – civil society, the governments and the private sector – was an incomplete answer.

Of course the difficulty is again in the differing language and values of the three sectors. IIED and WRI combined to produce the first edition of the World Resources Report but then followed separate paths. This was caused as much as anything else as by our relative poverty as an institute. WRI was born with an enormous multimillion-dollar endowment, and IIED had nothing but the annual grind of project financing. But culture too had its influence in the drift apart. It was enough having to cope with a new set of ‘corporate speak’ without doing it in the USA and in Europe all at the same time.

In Europe our real opportunity came in 1990 at a seminar in Lausanne. This was to address a challenge Maurice Strong had issued to get the ‘business community’ involved in the Earth Summit. I had arrived late at the event and was thus in the dark about who was there. In the first break I was with an old colleague – Hugh Falkener – using the wall in the manner that men do. I asked: ‘And who the h..l is this Stephan Schmidheiny anyway?’ My elbow was grasped and a voice said, ‘I am he.’ Despite the faux pas much common endeavour followed with the formation of the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD, now called the [Q]WBCSD) Eventually, after a few steps in between, we lent our star journalist Lloyd Timberlake to Stephan to help write the business book of the conference, Changing Course. I never got him back which was indeed a real loss to us but a real gain to the BCSD. But more followed between us.

At the Rio event in 1992, I was again teasing Stephan – this time in the presence of Erling Lorentzen. He runs the largest paper-mill in the world out of Brazil. Tempted by my cynicism he said, ‘Why not tell the whole paper industry how to be sustainable?’ This led to a very big project for IIED that was the called ‘the Sustainable Paper Cycle’. We had something to start with – an excellent forestry team under Steve Bass, economics under Josh Bishop and new ‘consumerism’ under Nick Robins. Together we spent a year and a bit assembling all the problems and possible ways out for this rapidly globalizing and growing industry.

In the USA the average consumption of paper per capita is over 300kg per year while in the ‘poor world’ it is less than 12kg – or was then. Just to be able to run an education system and the most basic of sanitary and packaging needs you need 40kg per capita per year. In effect, the poor are in a paperless world while the rest of us are drowning in it. The only way out – if the forests are to survive – are plantation and managed mixed forests. More industry, more land-take (but less forest destruction we ever hope) but more met needs and welfare. So, who can deliver this? Not NGOs, that is for sure. Not governments, from all experience to date. It will be a mix of the local, regional and multinational enterprise – hopefully one day operating to an agreed set of norms and incentives for the common good. Should all this be a globalized trade? Probably so, for the best solar collectors in the world are trees and they work best in the tropics (5 cm growth per day in some circumstances!) So why not encourage a developing world economy in all this that is free to export worldwide? (The same can be said of sugar, wine, and more!)

This experience led to another alliance with the ‘devil’ – no fewer than 30 mining companies. We took their shilling (along with some from elsewhere) to look at the mining sector and sustainability. The Mining Minerals and Sustainable Development Project was one of the largest yet for IIED, with a combined budget at some $9 million. Again, IIED tried to do the job with independence and integrity but this time it has been far more ambitious about reaching out to the various constituencies involved by working in regionally. The dilemmas have been the same. How do we get the standards of the industry up, promote a better system of governance within which the sector works, ensure that the benefits of the sector spread, and reduce the environmental and social impacts to as low a level as we can consistent with the legitimate needs of people for mined products? An ambitious call. At the end of the day it was a decentralized (or subsidiarity) model that delivered, built around the engagement of many constituencies and groups that acted as the ‘check and balance’ to the corporate bottom line.

Thus IIED lives in an ‘and-and’ world. To be useful in resolving the dilemmas we all face it still has to find ways to address the appalling environmental changes we have alongside the ever growing needs and wants of billions of people. The agenda has not changed but the opportunities are now much more open. It has to position itself as a trusted ally – when it agrees – of the NGO community, of officials and of business folk. It has to be rigorous in analysis, open in dialogue and process, and brave in what it attempts. It certainly has to shatter myths and pursue pragmatic solutions.

But serious constraints apply now more than ever before. The capacity of all parts of the development triad to cope with what is implied in sustainable development is very limited. There are all too few in government, civil society or the corporate world who understand the constraints of the other two. Most discussion is decidedly bilateral. Very few (including IIED) can bring rigorous science and economics and social science to the table. The cultural divides between rich and poor, and the different faiths and traditions, are as marked as ever. Thus an essential brokerage function remains open for IIED and its ring of fellow institutions. We have to understand the bottom-up reality, life on the ground for hard-pressed communities, and connect their needs with the top-down processes that are trying to meet those needs. Applying oneself as the trusted intermediary between needs and sources of supply is not such a bad place to be in such an iniquitous and disconnected world.

Barbara Ward was highly prophetic. She could see the stark choices long before words such as ‘globalization’ had ever entered the lexicon. In 1973 she wrote:

But there are a number of reasons that give us greater hope. The first is that some changes in our patterns of claims and consumption are inevitable. Under no conditions can unlimited growth and the trickle down economics postpone the problems of justice and solidarity for more than a decade or so. Under no conditions can we bolster our consumption by simply continuing not to pay for the pollution and waste it causes. Under no conditions can a world inhabited and carrying seven to ten billion people offer still rising standards to a minority and, at best, stagnation to everyone else. What ever we plan or think, the external realities of our limited planet are changing, and we shall meet the new restraints either with resentment, anger and revolt, or with dignity, patience and sharing.¹

And, as she added elsewhere, ‘we all have a duty to hope’.

NOTE

1   Ward, B. A New Creation? Reflections on the Environmental Issue, Pontifical Commission, Justice and Peace, Vatican City.