< Back - Article List - Next > 2.1. Anil AGARWAL : GLOBALISATION, CIVIL SOCIETY and GOVERNANCE,
the CHALLENGES FOR THE 21st Century - an in-depth article highlighting
the realities of globalisation and the challenges that it is bringing
for civil society to act. A case-study is made on Norway. Lecture delivered at NORAD's Environment Day held in Oslo on December 15, 1998 and organised by NORAD and the Norwegian Forum for Environment and Development Preamble 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. I see the 21st century human society grappling hard to strike a balance between the following two critical trade-offs, at least in its initial decades, until hopefully they get permanently resolved, which however looks unlikely. The two critical balances that we have to strike are:
Let us try and understand the implications of each of these two challenges. Economic development and marginalisation The 21st century human society will, therefore, have to address itself to the following critical question: Do we forget these marginalised people till they learn to integrate themselves with the rest of the world or do we do something for them in the meanwhile? Will the 21st century be marked by a world that remains compartmentalised between extremely rich and extremely poor people or will it become a humane world in which ensures that 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 marginalised will clearly lead to mass distress and starvation, social violence and wars, and distress migration within nations and between nations. The 1980s and 1990s have seen these problems on a massive scale in several parts of the world. If we further recognise the fact that most of these marginalised 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 marginalised, 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 mind-set 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 that measure literacy, child health and other important concerns of human life. But even economists like Sen and ul Haq have failed to recognise 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 economic and demographic transformation, 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 millenia, 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 today come to dominate the minds of the 20th century 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 mobilising the labour of the marginalised billion to get out of their 'ecological poverty', create natural wealth, and develop a robust local economy based on that natural wealth. It means 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 have repeatedly shown outstanding economic change in rural communities wherever they have organised themselves to regenerate and manage their resource base. There has been absolutely 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 marginalisation in the 21st century. The 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:
It is very important to understand and appreciate this role of the civil society. The way the world's knowledge and communications systems are geared they will inevitably marginalise the best efforts because there is simply no attention being paid to these efforts whatsoever, dominated as much as these systems are by the Western-urban-upper class mindset. These systems will notice a change only when it reaches a large scale and impact. The neglect will, therefore, totally disregard many, many other smaller struggles to change. It is wrong to think that the poor and marginalised are not trying hard and struggling to change their fate. They are, everyday. It is just that we are not prepared to notice. And 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 marginalised with as much impunity, if not more. This 'mental poverty' is, in fact, at the heart of the problem and unless it is addressed in a very big way, the challenge of 'ecological poverty', especially the 'ecological poverty' of the marginalised, will never be addressed.
There will be more answers available in this disempowered 'knowledge base' of the poor, especially the rural poor, for addressing the problem of marginalisation 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 marginalised. 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 rural poor and prevents them from creating economic wealth. Economic development and natural integrity 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 ecosystyems and generate huge amounts of pollution. During the 1970s and the 1980s, Southeast and East Asia grew at a rate that was 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. And a city which is not yet gasping for air is rapidly heading in that same direction. '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 realise how stupid and ignorant I was. 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 ten-fold. 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 something the Eskimos have never touched. The spread of endocrine disruptors through the global ecosystem and global sperm count decline have emerged as deeply disturbing and as yet poorly understood global problems. The prospects truly look massive and frightening indeed but like any problem facing humanity, it is my firm belief that there is none that cannot be resolved. But we need to ask ourselves an important question: If the West has realised that economic growth brings heavy pollution, then why haven't industrialising countries like India, China, Thailand or Indonesia not learnt that lesson? The scale of pollution in Asia is clear evidence of the fact that they have not done so. There are numerous reasons for the inadequate attention that is paid to pollution in the industrialising nations. I will recount a few.
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 - rather a killing - doing so. The speed with which urbanisation, industrialisation, agricultural modernisation and population growth are all 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.
This poses an additional problem. The urban poor and the lower middle class constitute a highly price-sensitive segment of the emerging market. It wants Western lifestyles but it is only able to invest in cheap technologies. The extraordinary growth of two-wheelers in the Asian urban market, built upon the discarded and heavily polluting but cheap two-stroke engines, 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.
Why would anyone want to disturb a dream especially when it is just coming true?
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 In the years to come, the nation-state will come under growing pressure from two different directions. One will be economic and ecological globalisation. 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 Organisation and global environmental treaties, for instance. And, in order to deal with the second, it will have to give over 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 that will be required to ensure that global economic development does not leave a lot of people marginalised and uncared for and prevents an irreversible and highly damaging assault on the integrity of natural ecosystems. Role of the Civil Society These groups today work at local, national, regional and global levels. Greenpeace is an environmental group that 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. But let us take a brief look at the state of the national civil society in the developing world. While the civil society is quite strong in the Western world, it is only beginning to grow now in the developing world, especially now that electoral democracy is being embraced as a principle of governance by more and more nations. In Southern countries where the civil society has become strong - in India, for instance, which has had a long tradition and history of citizens' groups, encouraged, in fact, in no small measure during the Freedom Movement by Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation - it has exhibited special strengths in the following two tasks:
But even in these nations, the civil society remains weak in the following areas:
Furthermore, the role of the Southern civil society in terms of its engagement with the emerging global economic and environmental governance still remains extremely marginal. As a result, many Southern environmental concerns like land degradation and desertification, the environmental rights and needs of the poor, and others 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 the Southern civil society. The concern about equitable sharing of the atmospheric space has been widely shared but the ability of Southern groups of make effective interventions in the negotiating process has been extremely limited. As is inherent in the existing situation, national support for the civil society remains small 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 recognise that in the emerging situation described above, if the civil society is not strong, governments will get far more influenced 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 Organisation have today become far more important than the negotiations for global environmental conservation. And, of course, there are no negotiations going on or are even foreseen to deal with the problem of global marginalisation. The role of a small country like NorwayNorway, like Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, is a small country. What role can it play in bringing a mega-global process into balance? I personally believe that it can play a very important role. Norway is a small country. It has a small amount of money to influence the global process. It should use it for the maximum catalytic effect. I have a few suggestions to make.
I say this also because as a small nation, Norway is not threatening and its role will be much more acceptable than say that of the more powerful nations like USA or the United Kingdom, and whose leaderships have often shown a lack of global vision by trying to shape the world exclusively in their favour.
In 1987, when Mrs Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway, had come 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 had 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 powerful nations. These countries must continue to play this role.
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 the civil society in determining development and governance. Around that time I had set up 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 considerable 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, howsoever limited their global role may be as yet, has also forced national governments to dialogue, debate and discuss with their own civil society. The small Western democracies should continue to play this role as aggressively as possible. < Back - Article List - Next > |