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Globalization, civil society and governance: Challenges for the 21st century
Anil Agarwal
Anil Agarwal, the Director of the Centre for Science and Environment in India, died on 2 January 2002. Anil had planned to contribute to this book – reflecting on the two years he spent at IIED, helping to develop its information and media service Earthscan, before returning to India to set up the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi in 1981. He and his colleagues at the Centre set so many new standards. Their first State of India's Environment: A Citizens’ Report in 1982 inspired many other national reports – yet this and the subsequent editions (including the 1999 two-volume edition) still remain among the best of all national assessments. Their fortnightly journal Down to Earth remains the essential journal for keeping in touch with environment and development concerns in Asia (and elsewhere). Their documentation of global environmental negotiations (for instance in the two seminal volumes, Green Politics in 1999 and Poles Apart in 2001) not only keep all those interested in these negotiations informed but also point to their weaknesses and inadequacies.
This text is included as a memorial to one of the world's most inspiring and innovative environment and development specialists. Its key themes – of the ways in which conventional development does little to support those suffering from ecological poverty, of the need for development solutions that strengthen and support civil society – are ones that have always been central to IIED's work. Anil helped to ensure that this was so. He also remained an active adviser and supporter of IIED's work, after his return to India. This text is drawn from a lecture he delivered at NORAD's Environmental Day held in Oslo on15 December 1998, organized by NORAD and the Norwegian Forum for Environment and Development. Special thanks are due to Sunita Narain, his long-term co-author and colleague at the Centre for Science and Environment, for suggesting this text.
INTRODUCTION
It is impossible to talk of the 21st century without recognizing the backdrop of the phenomenon of globalization. The term ‘globalization’ is usually used to denote ‘global economic integration’, which despite all its problems, contradictions and criticism, now appears to be inevitable, built as it is on the backs of an irreversible ‘technological globalization process’ and an increasingly integrated global communications systems. This process will increase world trade and, hopefully, global wealth, too. But with global wealth, production and consumption growing, environmental problems created by one country will increasingly cross over national borders and affect the people, economies and ecologies of other countries. It is, therefore, inevitable that there will have to be a harmonization of global ecological laws. Since the mid-1980s, this process of ‘global ecological integration’ or ‘global environmental governance’ has, in fact, gained considerable strength and momentum, and numerous international environmental treaties have already been developed and many more are in the process of being developed.
Since economic concerns are often in conflict with ecological concerns. There is sufficient reason to argue that some form of ‘global political integration’ is also necessary to ensure that the global market works in the best interest of the public and that global regulations ensure that the market works for the global common good. But this is unlikely to happen in the near future. Nations will be extremely hesitant to hand over sovereignty, especially in a world in which military and economic power and, hence, political power is highly concentrated. The United Nations is likely to remain for a long time, as it is today, a Federation of nation-states, largely reflecting the agendas of different nations, and often veering towards the agendas of the more powerful nations. The ‘global political integration’ of the form represented by the United Nations suffers from the weakness that it is not built on principles of ‘global democracy’ which give equal political rights to all citizens on Earth.
While this, too, may become inevitable over time, it is clear that in the immediate decades of the 21st century the processes of global ecological and economic integration will proceed far faster than the process of global political integration. In such a political vacuum, it is absolutely vital to develop a key element of ‘global democracy’, namely a powerful global civil society which can ensure that the trade-offs between ecology and economy and between the interests of the empowered and the disempowered are decided within the full consciousness of a global debate, dialogue and mass awareness.
In the ongoing process of globalization, the processes of economic and ecological integration are already happening. However, without global political integration, we must develop and strengthen a global civil society. I see human society in the 21st century, at least in its early decades, grappling hard to strike a balance between two critical trade-offs: between economic development and marginalization; and between economic development and natural integrity.
Let us try and understand the implications of each of these two challenges.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND MARGINALIZATION
There is now ample evidence to show that the globalization process is going to bypass or neglect at least a billion people for several decades until they pick up the capacity to integrate themselves with national and global markets. The human condition, as far as these marginalized people are concerned, is, to say the least, abysmal. Lack of access to even basic necessities like safe drinking water, adequate food and health care means that almost a third of the people in the developing world have a life expectancy of just 40 years. As noted by Gus Speth (UNDP's former Administrator), ‘For them, poverty is a denial of the most basic of all human rights: the Right to Life.’
The 21st-century human society will, therefore, have to address itself to the following critical question: do we forget these marginalized people until they learn to integrate themselves with the rest of the world, or do we do something for them meanwhile? Will the 21st century be marked by a world that remains compartmentalized between extremely rich and extremely poor people, or will it become a humane world in which nobody goes to bed hungry and nobody has to die young because of lack of basic needs?
This question is obviously as important a national concern for several nations on Earth as it should be of global concern. The neglect of the marginalized will clearly lead to mass distress and starvation, social violence and wars, and distress migration within and between nations. The 1980s and 1990s have seen these problems on a massive scale in several parts of the world. If we further recognize the fact that most of these marginalized people, especially the rural poor, live in highly degraded lands – in Africa, Central America, South Asia and China – then the emerging problem of global warming and the resulting climate instability will make life for the world's poor even harder in the decades to come. The answer to this problem is obvious: if the market cannot reach the marginalized, we must at least do something to help them to help themselves.
But first we will have to get rid of a lot of the mental cobwebs of the 20th century. Economic growth has dominated the human mind in the 20th century to an extent that everybody sees everything in the economic context. Economists, for instance, have come to see poverty almost exclusively in economic terms. But by the end of the century, this one-track mindset is starting to be questioned. The UNDP, for instance, with the help of some better thinking economists like Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq has begun to argue that the per capita income cannot be used as the sole index of wealth or poverty. It has developed a Human Development/Deprivation index that factors in a number of other indicators to measure literacy, child health and other important concerns of human life. But even economists like Sen and ul Haq have failed to recognize the problem of ‘ecological poverty’ that affects most of the world's poor. It is these mental cobwebs that the 21st century will have to clear with great care and commitment.
‘Ecological poverty’ can be simply described as the lack of a healthy natural resource base that is needed for a human society's survival and development. The 20th century's economic and demographic transformations, including its colonial phase, has left nearly a billion people with a highly degraded resource base and, hence, high levels of ‘ecological poverty’ which today prohibits them from helping themselves to improve their economic condition. Healthy lands and ecosystems, when used sustainably, as they were for millennia, can provide all the wealth that is needed for healthy and dignified lives. The benchmark lifestyle need not be the one of modern New York or London which has come to dominate the minds of the intellectual leaders who today speak from the mounts of Oxford and Harvard, distant and cut off from large parts of the real world.
The 21st-century challenge lies in empowering and mobilizing the labour of the marginalized billion to get out of their ecological poverty, create natural wealth, and develop a robust local economy based on that natural wealth. It means that natural resource degradation must stop and natural resource regeneration must start. As soon as possible. Experience worldwide shows that natural resource regeneration and management demands community participation. Experience in India during the 1970s and 1980s has repeatedly shown outstanding economic change in rural communities wherever they have organized themselves to regenerate and manage their resource base. There has been nothing more heartening in the entire world in the last two decades of the environmental movement than the transformation that these communities have been able to achieve. On the other hand, bureaucratic resource management systems have invariably failed or have been totally cost-ineffective, which makes them irrelevant in the world of the poor where financial resources are limited.
This means that good governance, built on people's empowerment to deal with the problem of ecological poverty, is going to be critical for addressing the problem of economic development and marginalization in the 21st century. Civil society can help to push this process by doing a number of things. I will draw attention to the following four which I consider to be most important.
Firstly, civil society must spread and share knowledge that inspires people to act. The way the world's knowledge and communications systems are organized, dominated by the Western-urban-upper-class mindset, means that they will inevitably marginalize the best efforts because no attention is being paid to them. These systems will notice a change only when it reaches a large scale and impact. They will totally disregard many, many other smaller struggles to change. It is wrong to think that the poor and marginalized are not trying hard and struggling to change their fate. They are, every day. It is just that we are not prepared to notice. This is a problem that is not merely restricted to the knowledge-communications systems of the developed world. The 20th-century knowledge-communications systems of the developing world have disregarded the struggles of the marginalized with as much impunity, if not more. This ‘mental poverty’ is, in fact, at the heart of the problem, and must be addressed if ecological poverty is to be challenged.
Second, civil society must argue for appropriate global and national policies that help the marginalized to help themselves. Third, civil society should work with disempowered communities to develop and demonstrate participatory natural resource regeneration. Fourth, civil society must teach (I would rather use the word ‘force’) all those who are today ‘empowered’ with modern knowledge to respect the poor, their own survival strategies, technologies and management systems.
There will be more answers available in this disempowered ‘knowledge base’ of the poor for addressing the problem of marginalization than there will be in the empowered ‘knowledge base’ of the 20th-century paradigm. Though, of course, this does not mean that the latter cannot make a useful contribution to the economic growth of the marginalized. In sum, I would say that there is absolutely no reason why anybody should go hungry. But if that problem has to be addressed, the 21st century will have to deal with the ‘mental poverty’ created by 20th-century governance and knowledge systems before it can start reducing ‘ecological poverty’ which marks the lives of the world's poor and prevents them from creating economic wealth.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND NATURAL INTEGRITY
It is the fervent hope of governments today that globalization will create economic wealth. Let us hope that that is indeed what will happen and that this economic wealth will touch even those who have not yet reached the living standards of Western populations. But few people realize that the Western economic model, built on highly energy- and material-intensive technologies, has proved to be an extremely ‘toxic model’. The postwar economic boom immediately landed cities from Tokyo to Los Angeles into devastating air pollution problems even as all aquatic systems began to be poisoned to death. Having learnt from this mistake, Western societies have conducted themselves with much greater discipline with respect to the environment and have also invested substantially in relatively environment-friendly technologies. Even then, the battle is far from won. Huge amounts of toxins still enter the global ecosystem as a result of economic processes, and the disruption of the global carbon and nitrogen cycles still continues to throw a pall over humanity's future.
As Western-style economic growth takes into its sweep more and more masses of humanity, it becomes important to ask: what will this do to the integrity of the world's natural ecosystems? The answer looks frightening. The processes of wealth generation will clearly put increasing pressure on natural ecosystems and generate huge amounts of pollution. During the 1970s and 1980s, Southeast and East Asia grew at a rate unprecedented in human history. Today, this region is also the most polluted on Earth. Literally every city is gasping for air – from Taipei to Delhi. ‘Hydrocide’ – that is, murder of aquatic systems – is widespread across the region. In India, innumerable small streams have today been reduced to toxic drains.
Very few people understand the speed with which Western-style economic growth brings pollution. In 1986, when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had asked me to address his Council of Ministers on the environmental challenges facing the nation, I had advised the country's leaders that rural environmental problems – because they affect many millions of poor people – are far more important than urban environmental problems. Ten years later I realized my mistake. I had no clue about the speed with which the pollution problems would grow and Delhi, my home, would rapidly turn into a toxic hell. Studies carried out by the World Bank now tell us that when the economy (GDP) of Thailand doubled during the 1980s, its total load of pollutants increased an amazing tenfold. A study conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment for India shows that when the Indian economy doubled in the recent past, its industrial pollution load went up by four times and the vehicular pollution load by eight times.
These are very disturbing figures. What happens to the pollution load when the rest of the developing world – from South Asia to South America – begins to emulate the economic growth of Southeast and East Asia? The whole world may find itself being poisoned to death – just as the hapless Eskimos are today suffering from unbelievably high levels of PCBs, DDT and other persistent organochlorines produced and used by the rest of the world but which the Eskimos have never touched. The spread of chemical wastes that are endocrine disrupters through the global ecosystem, and global sperm-count decline, have emerged as deeply disturbing and as yet poorly understood global problems.
The prospects appear frightening indeed, but it is my firm belief that any problem facing humanity can be resolved. However, we need to ask: if the West has realized that economic growth brings heavy pollution, then why have industrializing countries like India, China, Thailand or Indonesia not also learnt that lesson? The scale of pollution in Asia is clear evidence of the fact that they have not done so. I would highlight four reasons why inadequate attention is paid to pollution in the industrializing nations.
First, the economic and demographic transformations that the rapidly industrializing developing countries are going through are unprecedented in human history. In terms of scale and speed, the Western experience is almost irrelevant and, thus, offers very few prescriptions even though there is a huge global knowledge industry which makes a living – or rather a killing – doing so. The speed with which urbanization, industrialization, agricultural modernization and population growth are taking place in and around cities like Delhi or Bangkok makes the management of a city like London or Paris look like a puny intellectual task. It is not surprising that national leaders across the developing world are failing to address the problem.
Second, the economic transformation is rapidly bringing large numbers of poor people into Western-style consumption patterns and lifestyles. This poses an additional problem. The urban poor and the lower-middle-class constitute a highly price-sensitive segment of the emerging market. This group wants Western lifestyles but it is able to invest only in cheap technologies. The extraordinary growth of two-wheeled vehicles in the Asian urban market, built upon the discarded and heavily polluting but cheap two-stroke engine, is a fine example of this phenomenon. In an electoral democracy, very few politicians will go against the desires of this segment of the electorate, which is extremely powerful because of its numbers and growing economic power. But this means that the economic transformation will remain dependent on polluting and environment-unfriendly technologies for a long time, and few political leaders will be able to do much about it.
Third, the political mindset will also tend to disregard these concerns because of its exclusive focus on economic development, which is only to be expected when a poor nation begins to grow economically. Why would anyone want to disturb a dream, especially when it is just coming true?
Lastly, given global economic integration, a nation's economic managers will also tend to focus on macro-economic concerns – issues like balanced budgets, trade balances and rates of foreign direct investment – rather than micro-economic concerns, which incorporate most environmental and quality-of-life issues. It is easy for an economic manager to say. ‘Well, if the micro-economics has to suffer while I am dealing with my macro-economics, then so be it.’
It is clear that all these trends and tendencies will continue to dominate until there is mass consciousness of the threats that this is posing to public health and to long-term survival.
THE NATURE OF THE FUTURE STATE
The biggest challenge of the 21st century will be the creation of a governance system able to deal with the two trade-offs outlined above. If this is indeed going to happen, then the nature of the state that emerged in the 20th century will have to change considerably, and it is heartening to note that indeed the world's governance systems are undergoing considerable transformation.
By the last decade of the 20th century, highly statist governance systems had either already disappeared or were rapidly changing. The current paradigm is a state built on electoral democracy and competitive markets. But this paradigm is inadequate to deal with the problems of the 21st century. If the two tensions that have been identified above are to be resolved adequately, the world's governance systems will have to change even further.
In the years to come, the nation-state will come under growing pressure from two different directions. One will be economic and ecological globalization, and the other will be natural resource management, environmental conservation and protection of quality of life. In order to deal with the first, the nation-state will increasingly have to give greater space to global governance systems – the World Trade Organization and global environmental treaties, for instance. To deal with the second, it will have to give greater space to local governance systems in which local democratic institutions are intensely involved in village and town governance. It is in this transformation of the governance systems that I see greater hope for those trade-offs to be adequately and consistently resolved, as required to ensure that global economic development does not leave a lot of people marginalized and uncared for, with irreversible damage to natural ecosystems.
The role of civil society
A powerful civil society can play a very important role in smoothing transition in the governance systems of the world's nations. In the industrialized world, civil society has helped to ensure that governance systems pay attention to the effects of economic development on natural integrity. The emergence of the strong environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and North America showed that electoral democracy alone was not adequate to bring about the desired political responses to deal with environmental concerns. In other words, ‘representative democracy’ was not enough. The environmental movement challenged the idea that elected representatives, once elected, could do as they wished on behalf of the nation.
The environmental movement forced Western electoral democracies to make governance much more participatory, and indeed there has been a remarkable growth of the civil society in the West involved with environmental concerns – with innumerable citizens’ groups forcing their leaders to make better trade-offs between environment and economic development. These groups today work at local, national, regional and global levels. Greenpeace is an environmental group started only in the 1970s but has today become a such a multinational behemoth that it is often jokingly pointed out that the sun never sets on the Greenpeace empire.
While civil society is quite strong in the Western world, it is only just beginning to grow in much of the developing world, especially now that electoral democracy is being embraced as a principle of governance by more and more nations. Civil society has become strong in some Southern countries. India, for instance, has a long tradition and history of citizens’ groups, encouraged not least during the Freedom Movement by Mahatma Gandhi. Where civil society is relatively well-developed in the South, it has exhibited special strengths particularly in critiquing government policies and development plans, and in opposing development projects.
But even in these nations of the South, civil society remains weak in two important areas: analysing scientific and technical issues, crucial in the context of the assault that economic growth will make on natural ecosystems; and, in making policy interventions. Over time, if civil society is able only to oppose projects, and not to get policies changed appropriately, it stands the risk of discrediting and marginalizing itself.
Furthermore, the role of Southern civil society in terms of its engagement with emerging global economic and environmental governance still remains extremely marginal. As a result, many Southern environmental concerns, such as land degradation and desertification, the environmental rights and needs of the poor, are getting neglected in the global environmental agenda. Western environmental groups try to represent the interests of all humanity but remain caught in a highly conservationist agenda, which should not be surprising given the economic levels of the Western world. Even on a major environmental issue like climate change, there has been extremely limited intervention from Southern civil society. The concern about equitable sharing of the atmospheric space has been widely held but the ability of Southern groups to make effective interventions in the negotiating process has been extremely limited. As is inherent in the existing situation, national support for civil society remains low, and Southern environmental groups are not able to raise adequate resources domestically for these high-cost interventions. On the other hand, few Western donors provide resources on a sustained basis for such efforts.
It is important to recognize that in the emerging situation described above, if civil society is not strong, governments will be influenced more by the powerful special-interest groups, especially economic interest groups, and this influence will become ever stronger with further economic growth. It is not surprising that negotiations in the World Trade Organization have today become far more important than the negotiations for global environmental conservation, and, of course, there are no negotiations going on or even foreseen to deal with the problem of global marginalization.
The role of small countries and NGOs
What role can small countries such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark or The Netherlands play in bringing a mega-global process into balance? An important one, I believe. Each small country has a small amount of money to influence the global process, and should use it for the maximum catalytic effect. Here are my suggestions on how to do this.
First, use aid funds for maximum political effectiveness in order to improve the governance systems of the globe and of the nations of the world. It sounds preposterous to ask a Western nation to intervene politically in the affairs of the nations of the world. But in a much more globalized world, it will not be as preposterous. Norwegians, like many Westerners, often love to point out that they don't want to impose economic development plans and programmes on developing countries through their development assistance programmes. But this is neither correct nor is there any need to be polite. In every possible way, from knowledge to technology, the West is determining and influencing the economic development of the South. A country like Norway should be frank and forthright and use its development assistance to bring about greater political democratization – at both national and global levels. Also, being a small nation, Norway is not threatening and its role will be much more acceptable than say that of the more powerful nations like the USA or the UK, whose leaderships have often shown a lack of vision by trying to shape the world exclusively in their favour.
Within the international community, therefore, the smaller European nations should act like NGOs. In 1987, when Mrs Gro Harlem Brundtland, came to Delhi to present Our Common Future to the Indian government and NGOs, I had the privilege to co-chair the NGO segment of the proceedings with her. I welcomed Mrs Brundtland not as the Prime Minister of Norway but as the leader of one of the world's largest NGOs. This is because small countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands have often supported concerns of equity and sustainability far more than the economically more powerful nations. These countries must continue to play this role.
Small countries such as Norway should have specific programmes to support and strengthen the civil society of the South to improve national governance, and to participate in the development of global ecological and economic governance systems. Small donor countries should also fight for the creation of a global fund to empower the globally marginalized to deal with their ‘ecological poverty’.
It might be useful for Norway, Denmark, Sweden and The Netherlands to study the role they have already played in the development of the civil society in the South. In the late 1970s, there was still very little acceptance of the role of civil society in determining development and governance. Around that time, I established the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. Some of the earliest voices in India that I could hear then which were emphasizing the role of NGOs were coming from UN agencies. Within the UN, there was growing pressure from the smaller Western nations to open up the system to NGOs. I remember a senior Indian UN official telling me at that time, ‘I can't understand these Dutch and Scandinavians. They keep telling us to involve NGOs all the time, almost as if governments are not important.’ In the mid-1980s, it was Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who tried to open up the government to NGOs for the first time.
There has been a sea change in bureaucratic responses to NGOs since those days. The steady opening up of the UN system and the multilateral development banks to NGOs, including Southern NGOs, however limited their global role may be as yet, has also forced national governments into dialogue with their own civil society. The small Western democracies should continue to play this role as aggressively as possible.