Element 1: Channels That Communicate Public Opinion to the Government

If a government is to be trusted by the people, it needs to be able to respond to the concerns of the majority with regard to what I have defined as the basic rights of life. It needs to be guided by insights into the effects of its decisions (or lack of them) on the majority’s quality of life. In the democratic mainstream, this is accomplished through competing political parties, the free press, an active civil society, and regular elections. Representatives are meant to be the vehicles for public opinion, ensuring that it is reflected in the writing of legislation and policy; if public opinion changes and the views of representatives do not change with them, then an election would lead to a government more in line with public preferences.

In a democratic system, the channel between the government and the people is meant to be the free press. The media help ensure that politicians know what their constituents think, feel, and believe, as well as inform them of the consequences of their decisions. On the other end, the press ensures that the public knows the preferences of the politician, and the actions he or she is actually taking (so that they can connect a policy change with a change in conditions).

There are limits on its effectiveness, as the “marketplace of ideas” can be less open and free than people think. Media consolidation driven by business interests ends up allowing a few voices to dominate the airwaves and can make it difficult for alternate views and opinions to exist on a financially viable and sustainable basis. Vested interests can also flood the airwaves with messages that support their point of view, drowning out criticism and other opinions. Politicians can become the cronies of certain media empires, as has happened in the US and the UK.

One nonelectoral mechanism to communicate public opinion to the state is to have an extensive network of local government officials accountable to their communities. This ensures that government institutions actually know what conditions are like on the ground. They know what people think and believe, and how they are affected by government policy. They may also be able to respond to problems faster than more centralized government departments.

This is a mechanism for communicating public opinion that is not contingent on whether or not a state is democratic. Both democratic and nondemocratic states can have a large and integrated yet distributed body of government officials who are aware of how local communities are faring.

Element 2: Spaces for Robust Debate on Policies

To ensure that states evaluate all the available solutions, governments should create and support spaces for open and robust debate. Such spaces help build consensus as to what the problem is, what its causes are, and what solutions will be most effective. So long as debate occurs, whether it does so in the public sphere or within governing and legislating bodies does not really matter.

Democracies generally focus on external debate, which they consider a badge of honor. Solutions are debated in the media, which influences voters and the representatives they elect. Open legislatures also feature debates between multiple parties, which inform the public of the preferences of various legislators. The hope is not that external debate is an objective process or that those engaging in it are acting free of self-interest but rather that enough people are involved so that these distortions come out in the wash.

However, these external debates can be colored by political partisanship. Good ideas can be dismissed, and problems may even be denied entirely, if doing so avoids granting the “other side” a win. It can turn objective facts into cultural arguments, which are harder to resolve.

Debates can also take place within governing institutions. Governments can have discussions on policies and policy outcomes on an objective basis. This has the benefit of avoiding political partisanship: people are allowed to propose and criticize ideas and policies without fear of letting one’s political opponents win (though factionalism can exist in single-party systems as often as in multiparty systems).

The risk with relying on entirely internal debate is that it can close off the government to ideas from outside the paradigm. Governments, like any large organization, can suffer from groupthink and bureaucratic infighting where certain points and opinions are dismissed or, worse, never even considered. Governments—democratic and nondemocratic—have long been surprised that their assumptions about the world had no basis in reality whatsoever. Governments would need to make sure that they actively seek outside expertise, highlighting other points of view.

Element 3: Multiple Sources of Expertise and Planning

States need to have multiple sources of expertise as they develop policies. This is especially important for strong states in the era of sustainable development, as they will need to first understand the science, economics, and web of interconnections. More forceful intervention throughout the economy requires a level of economic planning, regulation, and control that is missing in most states today.

Thus there need to be many different agencies—each well funded, well staffed with qualified professionals, and empowered with significant authority—to monitor, plan, and regulate different sections of society and the economy. These bodies must be isolated from the day-to-day politics of the government, in order to ensure that they can work without interference from political interests.

One problem in many democracies is that they focus on putting out fires in the short term; this is understandable, as it is the short-term crises that tend to topple sitting politicians. Longer-term problems tend to call for more complex, comprehensive solutions that require some groups to sacrifice before they benefit, which is unpopular in the short term. Solutions, if developed at all, are meant to put off the day of reckoning—until it is too late. Long-term problems are left to fester until they become crises, leading to suboptimal solutions developed under tight circumstances.

Governments that are insulated from short-term swings in popular opinion can focus on the long-term planning that is necessary to solve long-term problems.

That being said, governments shouldn’t be so insulated from conditions on the ground that they don’t consider short-term consequences at all. People, rightly or wrongly, do judge the performance of their governments according to short-term concerns. Ignoring them will weaken the accountability of the government, in that people will not believe that the government cares about their concerns.

Element 4: A Long-Term Goal beyond Just Keeping the Government in Power

Governments need to have a long-term goal aimed at the betterment of society, beyond just keeping themselves in power. A “national project” tends to orient the expression of state authority toward some useful end, rather than have it exist for its own sake.

Democratic systems have an added wrinkle, in that there are multiple parties competing against each other for power. If political parties are focused on keeping themselves in power, they will not cooperate with the other side, even if such cooperation might benefit the country in the long term.

The lack of a long-term project in nondemocratic states leads to a pure focus on patronage, bribery, and coercion, as the state drifts away from helping the people and toward helping those in power. In democratic states, the lack of a long-term project leads to gridlock and stagnation. Neither are good for the optimal running of the strong state.

Another reason to have a long-term, national guiding project is that, without one, it is difficult to ask a population to make sacrifices for the future. Governments often claim that short-term sacrifices and struggles are needed in order to achieve some long-term goal, but they often leave this goal undefined and unclear. Worse, governments that lack a guiding vision may just end up not doing very much of anything, with leaders resorting to lofty and meaningless slogans.

Finally, a long-term national project around the critical challenge of sustainability helps bind the population together, which can be especially important for ethnically and religiously diverse populations who risk exploding over resource access issues. By presenting an image of the country in the future, a long-term and universal national project can overcome these divisions.

You can see the benefit of a long-term national project by comparing Singapore and Hong Kong. Both are largely free-market cities, with advanced economies, a general avoidance of regulation, and high quality of living. However, since independence, Singapore’s governance has preserved a long-term agenda of improving the economic development of the city to First World levels (if not beyond). This has driven long-term strategies to improve the delivery of health care and housing, including quite aggressive government intervention and management of certain sectors of the economy.

By contrast, Hong Kong’s government has lacked a long-term project for what the city might look like in the decades after its handover to China. There are various reasons for this—one of which being that the government’s unsteady legitimacy has left it unwilling to make bold promises or choices. But this ultimately means that Hong Kong’s government is usually concerned about the next crisis, and lacks a long-term agenda to guide its policies, thus fueling discontent among its population, mainly the young. It ends up not doing much of anything, letting crises fester rather than tackling them.

Element 5: Competent Institutions and the Rule of Law

Institutions help stabilize government practices and make them less prone to being overruled at a later date. These need to be bodies in which trust, legitimacy, and accountability can be invested by society. These institutions must be separate from the actual individuals who run the government. Things are done to support the institution (which has its own objectives) rather than to support the people in charge. They are run by competent people, some of the best in the country, who are looking to serve.

Even the Chinese Communist Party itself can be seen as an “institutional check” on the ambitions of Chinese leaders. The most uncharitable view one can have of China is that leaders are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the Communist Party. But the party is still a body that exists, with goals and interests, outside of individual politicians. Pure dictatorships, by contrast, merely act in the interests of the dictator.

Democratic institutions are probably less effective overall. Even good, mature democracies tend not to be very good with long-term radical change, as it would lead to mass public disruption—and thus massive public unpopularity. But, assuming elections and institutions are respected, a democracy may be less likely to “go wrong,” at least in the short term. A government that is really terrible will, in theory, be booted out of office. Thus the accountability and legitimacy relationship is less reliant on any government’s performance in any one instance. Nondemocratic states, by contrast, rely entirely on the state’s performance.

Competence is core to the idea of the strong state. The ability to govern, devise sound economic and social policies, and implement policies effectively and without recurrent mistakes is a central part of the social contract between the government and the people, and thus core to the strong state. This strength is instilled by a high level of institutional competence. It does not necessarily have to be the Singaporean or German model, but a basic level of competence is foundational. Without it, states resort to coercion, fear, and bribery to enact its objectives, or simply do not act at all.

Competence explains why single-party nondemocratic states like China and Vietnam are stable (even though they are not perfect by any means) compared to what we normally consider to be dictatorships. Dictatorships are, in general, incompetent: they do not deliver better living standards for their people, so they have no social contract with their populations. Dictators thus have to resort to force. By contrast, China and Vietnam have built competent administrations and institutions, and actually achieve better conditions through calculated and tough decisions in the interest of the majority. Thus populations are comfortable with these governments, even without direct popular representation.

Competence also goes beyond just the government to be a feature of society. Japan’s government seems quite weak, with a quick succession of prime ministers over the past decade. Yet the country has fostered a culture of competence that pervades its institutions, which helps to keep the country running effectively. Perfection is sought in all aspects of life (and creates some other tensions), but things work. It’s a culture where the train company actually publicly apologizes when a train leaves the station early. The commitment to seek perfection creates a collective culture of competence, which is the glue that holds Japanese society together.

But competence is not just grown in advanced, comfortable societies. Vietnam has built social competence in the face of adversity, in the aftermath of three major wars. Vietnam had to build competent institutions because it had little choice: without them, the state would surely have collapsed.

Competence is built through education and systematic nurturing of talent, which creates a population of highly skilled, publicly motivated people who can be drawn on to run the country. Institutions need to be highly respected and thus attractive as places to work and serve the public, to ensure that the best people are chosen.

There are perhaps two forms of competence. The first is leadership competence: the ability of a political leader (or body of leaders) to set priorities and effectively administer the government. The second is institutional competence: the ability of government bodies to anticipate, analyze, plan, and implement policies.

Each influences the other. Singapore is a good example. Lee Kuan Yew was clearly an extremely competent leader, building a small city-state unceremoniously ejected from Malaysia into an effectively First World country with world-class services. But all his work would have been for naught if he didn’t demand and foster the growth of institutional competence (in this case, based on meritocracy); a new, less competent leader could have lost Singapore’s advantages. But Singapore’s good institutions allowed the city’s success and competence to persist beyond the end of Lee’s time as prime minister.

But institutional competence is not invincible. Strong institutions can survive mediocre leaders, but truly disastrous leaders will eat away at them. We have started to see this with Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak, whose political survival in the face of blatant corruption has threatened to make a mockery of Malaysia’s whole government and its until now fairly competent institutions.

Institutional competence comprises four components:

1.   Administrative expertise

2.   Public policymaking

3.   Leadership

4.   Meritocracy

Administrative expertise is the ability to set up state structures that are led by individuals who are qualified and experienced. They are teams who are able to minister and manage a department and execute on decisions. It’s a tax collection department that can design appropriate tax systems and find and collect revenue, or a pollution regulator that conducts regular inspections to enforce the law without fear or favor. Without this expertise, institutions are “paper tigers,” unable to fulfill their obligations.

Public policymaking is the process through which institutions identify issues needing new policies and have experts able to design options to address legislative needs. Institutions thus require setting priorities and deciding on the best way to achieve them, and competent ones will have systematic ways to monitor conditions on the ground and figure out the best solutions to problems.

Leadership refers to the need for the head of the institution to embody its values and ideals. An agency head who is not respected either within the institution or by the wider society will be hamstrung in his or her efforts to manage and monitor society. Talented civil servants will become disillusioned and leave for the private sector, while the institution’s public reputation collapses. However, a strong and respected leader at the top can enhance the effectiveness of the agency.

Finally, meritocracy means that the institution has a process for finding and hiring people on the basis of talent and capability, rather than political connections or meaningless status symbols.

One can easily think of how institutions in the developing world may lack one, if not all, of these components, thus rendering them incompetent: a stinging charge, but a true one that must be faced.

The ultimate limits on what the sustainable state can do are political will and competence. The former is the ability to agree on a long-term vision for society and a willingness to make the tough decisions and suffer the trade-offs needed to implement that vision. The latter is the ability to actually follow through on those decisions, including pushing back against vested interests.

Some states have the will, but not the competence to follow through. India is an example: both the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party agree on the need to tackle sanitation, river pollution, corruption, and further economic development. Despite this bipartisan agreement, however, India has been unable to implement further changes. India has large reserves of very competent people, including in the government, but not enough to overcome the systematic institutional failings that are typical challenges in such a large country. China, by contrast, has over the last ten to fifteen years striven to move the government institutions to the next stage of competency by installing young, energetic, and competent administrators and technocrats across the country.

Other states have managed to build high levels of competence, yet currently lack the will to do anything with it. The US is an example of this phenomenon. American institutions are extremely competent, attracting bright people who want to work for the betterment of society. The country could tackle some of its most serious social problems in a short period of time. However, its political institutions are trapped in a vicious cycle of animosity toward the other side (often aided by vested interests) and have been unable to agree on a long-term vision for the country, meaning that the government is stuck.

An example of the importance of institutional competence—and the length of time needed to build it—comes from the misguided US policy of “de-Ba’athification” after its invasion of Iraq. Once Saddam Hussein had been toppled, the Americans enacted a policy whereby all public sector employees with ties to Hussein’s Ba’ath Party would be removed from office, then barred from any future public sector employment. Several observers at the time argued that such a policy would be hugely disruptive. Even the State Department and the CIA, at the time, argued for a less extreme policy of “de-Saddamification,” rather than removing Ba’ath Party members en masse.

The dire predictions were borne out almost immediately. The mass removal of public sector expertise meant that the Iraqi state quickly lost the ability to provide even basic public services, which contributed to the breakdown of Iraqi society into the mess we see today. Iraq has still not been able to recover the institutional competence it lost due to the US invasion.

Where competence is low or absent (or not given priority), the state fails, even in the absence of extreme events such as war or famine. It can struggle to provide even basic government services, which drastically lowers people’s faith and trust in the government. Pakistan is an example: low institutional competence has significantly weakened the social contract, even though the country has (fortunately) not suffered any extreme conflicts, natural disasters, or climate events.

These arguments do not simply apply to nondemocratic or developing world states. These observations are just as relevant to emerging and established democracies as well, which can be prone to capture by vested interests.

In an increasingly globalized world, democracies would seem to be having a tough time strengthening themselves, let alone becoming sustainable states. The short electoral cycle makes it difficult for politicians to take a long-term view or make unpopular decisions, for fear of losing office. Yet the electoral system provides popular legitimacy and accountability, and there are the moral and philosophical reasons and arguments for why a society would want to keep a democratic government.

I am not an expert in democratic political theory, but here I offer a few suggestions on how a democracy could become a strong, sustainable state while preserving the democratic values it holds dear.

First, democracies need to have clear lines of accountability, which can be muddled by unruly coalitions and protections for the minority party. In these systems, political parties, whether they are minor coalition partners or opposition parties, have an incentive to be disruptive and obstinate. Democracies around the world can be rendered ineffective. But partisan gridlock can also benefit the party in power: if the party’s policies never come to pass, its leaders will never actually be held accountable for the changes they want to make. Stronger majorities, whether achieved by removing procedural barriers such as the filibuster or by using runoff voting, enable democratic governments to get things done while also ensuring that, if things go wrong, people know exactly who is to be blamed.

Decision-making bodies should still be designed to embrace and allow for bipartisanship, so as to reduce damaging petty politics and also because having multiple stakeholders invested in a solution will ensure continuity after power changes hands. But when this does not work, mechanisms should allow the elected government to act decisively if an obstinate minority party is blocking reasonable, or even routine, decisions.

Accountability must also be deepened among the people. Many democracies have shockingly low voting rates, especially among the poor and the young: the former because it is too difficult to vote, the latter because they have yet to turn voting into a habit. If democracy is so cherished on the basis that it creates checks and balances, then a strong democratic state should make voting as easy as possible: more polling stations, lower barriers to voting, and more ways to vote, even electronically if need be. But this should be backed by mandatory voting, so that every person engages with the political process. This would strengthen the state and give true legitimacy to democratic elections and the elected leader.

Second, democracies should consider longer terms for their politicians: perhaps somewhere between six to eight years. Short terms mean continuous election campaigns and wasteful politicking, leaving only a short time to get anything done. Long terms can enable leaders to make an impact and voters to really understand their objectives. These longer terms can be balanced by strict limits—for example, only one or two terms, which would also force politicians to develop their ideas and policies in future leaders, growing a new crop of political talent.

Third, the independence of the civil service and the institutions of the state needs to be further insulated from political pressures or interference. Legislative meddling in the civil service, from appointing leaders wholly opposed to the ministry’s mission to slashing their budgets, can leave government officials hobbled and demotivated. If they leave for the private sector, the government is deprived of much-needed competence. In addition, the increasing trend of revolving doors in democracies needs to be halted, even with legislation, to help strengthen the state so that it is not usurped by private interests over time.

Many democracies have informal norms that discourage meddling in the civil service, but these norms are not as strong as firm rules. Democracies should consider institutionalizing and legislating many of the behaviors that protect the civil service.

Fourth, democracies need to tackle the issue of money in politics. In short, it is too expensive to run, and sometimes even hold, office. Politicians are either beholden to wealthy donors and corporations or must be independently wealthy themselves. Thus politics reflects the elite of society, rather than the full range of individuals and social groups found within democratic society. Many democratic leaders are unable to make decisions on long-term sustainability issues that affect lobbyists and corporate donors.

Campaign finance laws, public financing, and even benefits for politicians (such as government-provided housing) can both limit the ability of the wealthy to influence politics and make it easier for people from all walks of life to run for and hold office without the help of private interests.

Fifth, democracies need to be wary of media consolidation, which can get to the point where media outlets are large enough to become kingmakers. News Corporation, Fox News, and its associated entities are the archetypal example, with its newspapers and news networks fueling right- wing politics in the UK, the US, and Australia.

The media landscape needs to have enough competing voices to ensure that no single outlet gets too big, and that a viable, objective competitor exists at a price affordable to all (if not free). Democracies should set firm rules to ensure that no one media outlet dominates the airwaves. When they get to a certain size, they can be taxed at a different rate, with the revenues used to support public media: not-for-profit media outlets, supported by government funding yet completely independent, with strict rules about objectivity, fairness, and breadth, and with a clear mission of informing the public. These outlets provide an easily accessible way for everyone to stay informed, especially as the whole industry is disrupted by the rise of the internet and social media. And with social media that have run amok, democracies will need to properly regulate these companies if they are not to be further manipulated and weakened.

Sixth, democracies need to revisit their constitutions (if they have them). These constitutions were written decades, if not centuries, ago, in a much different context than we are living in today. Democracies need to be willing to reconsider how their governments and societies should work, and develop a new narrative for how democratic structures should operate in a more constrained future.

Should legislation concerning sustainability be protected from changes for a set period of time longer than a party’s term in office, to ensure that long-term goals are completed? Should an independent body to evaluate a leader’s performance be created, with the ability to take action if need be? How should authority be split among the city, the countryside, and the national government in order to best manage resources? These and other questions will need to be answered by democracies as we move further into the twenty-first century.

The previous sections have described a few of the mechanisms that will serve to ensure that the strength of the state is oriented toward the benefit of the majority. The strong state in an era of constrained resources will end up intruding into the lives of populations to a much greater extent than in the past, and therefore must have strong institutions, and all the necessary checks and balances to make a viable state to ensure that the government remains legitimate and accountable.

Strong states will need these institutions as they start their most important task: redefining prosperity and rights in an age of constrained resources. This task will require managing the expectations of a population who may have come to expect a consumption-driven lifestyle with high resource consumption as the end result of development. It will require asking people to sacrifice in the short term to ensure a sustainable level of resources for future generations. States will need every tool in their arsenal as they work to alter how their societies and economies operate.

Chapter 8 will discuss these redefinitions in more detail.