Arquivo de etiquetas: Desenvolvimento Sustentável

Círculo de Sementes

Círculos de Sementes

É um projecto de FredericaTeixeira & Pepa Bernardes iniciado em Outubro de 2012 no  sequência de um apelo internacional da Vandana Shiva apelando à Libertação das Sementes.

Na sequência as autoras organizaram um Workshop de Sementes mas ddicidiram que não bastava

Depois de pesquisarem o que estava a ser feito por ONG’s, grupos informais, empresas, associações, agricultores, instituto e da vontade de partilhar conhecimento introduzimos as Oficinas de Recolha e Conservação de Sementes.

Da necessidade de existirem pessoas a multiplicar e partilhar estas preciosidades num contexto local juntámos o conceito de Círculos de Sementes,para que a energia de cada um desse força a Todos unimos tudo numa Rede e o resultado.

Um Círculo de Sementes 

  • Consiste em reunir um grupo de Amigos, em que cada um se inscreve para multiplicar e guardar Sementes de uma ou mais Culturas.
  • Cada elemento escolhe uma cultura, semeia, cuida, colhe, limpa, seca e armazena as Sementes.
  • Nos encontros todos partilham as suas Sementes e a informação que tem sobre as plantas que escolheram.

OBJECTIVOS DA REDE

Criar uma Rede de Círculos de Sementes por todo o País, Redescobrindo, Recolhendo e Partilhando Variedades Antigas e Tradicionais deste Valioso Património que são as Sementes & Realizar acções de sensibilização e partilha de conhecimentos sobre Sementes e Soberania alimentar. Continuar a lerCírculo de Sementes

Cultura e Dignidade Humanan LXXVII – Direitos Humanos e Economia

As políticas macroeconómicas serão de uma grande importância para a formação das políticas públicas e privadas. As questões em torno do papel da macroeconomia e da sua relação com as outras políticas sociais são assuntos crucias. Atualmente a teoria do crescimento económico é olhada como uma questão chave, que arrasta as outras políticas sociais. As políticas socias são olhadas como necessitando de contribuir para o crescimento económico ou par ajudar aqueles que estão marginalizados da riqueza e bem-estar do desenvolvimento a dele beneficiarem.

Será essa visão correta ou poderemos pensar na questão nos termos de como é que o crescimento económico poderá suportar a política social. Colocar a política social em primeiro lugar ajuda a compreender a necessidade de ter crescimento económico. Mas para entender a forma como a transição de poderá dar, é necessário pensar sobre as políticas macroeconómicas necessárias.

O que é realmente a política macroeconómica. Normalmente a política macroeconómica surge com algo que é um assunto de especialistas. Na verdade a política macroeconómica faz parte da nossas vidas e todos respondemos aos seus desafios, como também contribuímos, pelas nossas ações, para a sua formulação e análise. Por isso não é algo exterior a nós, mas sim algo que necessitamos de ganhar consciência para moldar e nela influir.

Uma área chave da política macroeconómica é o emprego. Como criar emprego decente, que permita aos indivíduos viver com dignidade e com uma recompensa justa. A questão da pobreza em um assunto que atravessa todo o planeta. A questão do tempo de pobreza é outro assunto relevante. Algumas vezes as pessoas são pobres de tempo e ricas em dinheiro acumulado, outras vezes são pobres em tempo e dinheiro. E é necessário pensar nestas coisas ao longo do tempo de vida.

Como criar empregos decentes com salários decente. Isso é algo que não é apenas um assunto do mundo em desenvolvimento ou dos países menos desenvolvidos. É também um assunto do mundo ocidental. Dos paíse do centro. Através do mundo, as pessoas estão a trabalhar em jornadas de trabalho muito intensas e mantem-se na pobreza. Uma coisa é preocupar-nos com os apoios sociais e transferências financeiras para minorias e desfavorecidos, mas em muitos lugares, aquilo que é reclamado é o pagamento justo pelo trabalho feito.

Isto é um importante desafio que nos deve levar a olhar para outro aspeto da politica económica.Por exemplo, ao olharmos para as formas de pagamento, não podemos deixar de olhar para a economia de cuidado.

Cada vez mais a economia dos cuidados faz parte da economia formal. Muitas mulheres estão envolvidas nesta atividade de cuidar dos outros. Com o envelhecimento da população esse setor vai crescer. Em muitos dos pasíses ocidentais, essas pessoas são migrantes com poucos direitos, a ganhar beixos salários, deixando os cuidados dos seus próprios parentes, a outras mulheres das suas comunidades.

Isto é um grande ponto de discussão. Mulheres com poucos direitos a tomarem conta de outras pessoas, com outras pessoas a tomar conta das suas famílias, por vezes as filhas mais velhas. A cadeia dos cuidados sociais protagonizados pelas mulheres é uma parte da economia formal e informal que é desempenhado pelas mulheres.

Este trabalho das mulheres, a reprodução, o trabalho doméstico e o trabalho dos cuidados aos outros não surge nos dados da economia. Isto é necessário alterar. Pois uma mulhere não poderá ir procura um rendimento for a de sua casa, se esse rendimento não cobrir as despesas de poder pagar a alguém o trabalho doméstico que ele deixa de fazer. No fundo a mulher assegura a reprodução da força de trabalho, a reposição demográfica, sem que essa trabalho seja valorado pela economia.

Não ter nenhum valor monetário na economia, numa sociedade onde a mulher é maioritária onde por vezes a sua igualdade com os homens não é reconhecida, é ter uma economia destorcida.

É então necessário alterar o modo como a economia valor o trabalho feminina. É necessário assegurar que a mulher tenha oportunidades para encontrar trabalho decente e um salario decente na economoa folmal. Para que isso seja possível é necessário que haja programas de promoção da igualdade de género. A promoção da autonomia da mulher é uma forma de de promover a igualdade de mulher, de contribuir para a agenda dos direitos Humanos, de promover a inclusão social e de criar sociedade e economia mais sustentáveis.

Com a alteração do papel da mulher na sociedade é também necessário terminar com a violência sociológica sobre a mulher. Isso implica mudar normas e atitudes. São alterações que tem que ser enfrentadas. A partir da economia, é possível pensar a mudança social.

Cultura e Dignidade Humanan LXXVI- Caminhos para os Direitos Humanos e Desenvolvimento Sustentável

Atá ao momento o relativo falhanço da inclusão das vozes dos grupos minoritários e excluídos da Agenda dos Direitos Humanos poderá ser um fator que poderá colocar em risco os Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável. Essa continuidade não é um cenário plausível para atingir os ODS, pois manter essa situação implica não alcançar a necessária Dignidade Humana dos diferentes indivíduos e comunidade. Igualmente implica manter esses grupos por mais tempo, excluídos dos processos de desenvolvimento sustentável. Então encontrar forma de incluir esses grupos nos processos de desenvolvimento, será uma dos primeiros desafios dos novos caminhos para o desenvolvimento sustentável.

Um segunda questão, que é necessário compreender, é a necessidade de descolonizar os nosso modos de problematizarmos as políticas e a construção da normas legais. A maioria dos estados do mundo (cerca de 80% ) sofreram, de uma forma mais ou menos intensa, mais ou menos longa, uma experiencia colonial. Os seus sistemas legais, de base tradicional, foram quebrados por essa experiencia colonial que sofreram. Isso em si não é um problema, mas significa que em diferentes estados, e em diversos cenários culturais estão a ser aplicadas experiencias legislativas e regras criadas a partir das tradições legais de um pequeno número de estados. Ao fim de algumas dezenas de anos de independência da maioria destes estados existem muitos desafios para construir comunidades multiculturais, multilinguísitcas e inclusivas das questões do género e das minorias.

É necessário aprender com estas experiencias para expandir o conhecimento te+orica e procurar modelso que possam ser desenhados para criar uma arquitetura legal mais adequada. Manter o foco dos Direitos Humanos nas experiencias de um pequeno números de estados, não contribui para atingir os objetivos. É pois necessário parar de pensar que há uns estados que têm as respostas e que podem exportar as suas experiencias, para estados que sejam uns meros consumidores das ideias aplicadas por outros.

Um terceiro elemento que é necessário considerar são os modelos de proteção social. È necessário compreender que o mercado falhou na sua proposta de incluir toda a sociedade. O funcionamento dos mercados não permitem incluir as minorias e os grupos de desfavorecidos. Manter uma aposta no mercado implica manter estes grupos nessa situação e perpetuar a descriminação para o futuro. A questão dos modelos de proteção social é controversa. Não são consensuais em todas as sociedades e coloca questões fundamentais aos estados. Mas apesar de tudo, a questão dos modelos de proteção social são crucias para os processos de planeamento socioeconómico, na questão dos Direitos e da inclusão social nas diferentes comunidades e dentro dos estados.

Uma questão fundamental neste domínio é o processo de acesso à terra e o acesso ao financiamento para a agricultura. É uma questão controversa no âmbito dos ODS. Nos ODS para a agricultura, está estabelecido que é necessário desenvolver os processos de arrendamento de terras, de forma a ampliar as superfícies disponíveis para produção alimentar. Todavia é necessário entender a forma como os camponeses trabalham no setor agrícola. Se os trabalhadores agrícolas continuam a ser assalariados sem direitos eles ficarão invisíveis na Agenda dos Direitos Humanos.

De igual forma é necessário ter em atenção a questão do acesso aos processos de financiamento. Se a a tendência atual é desenvolver de forma alargada a mercantilização das trocas, é necessário pensar como é que as comunidades podem ter acesso aos processos de financiamento. A trocas reguladas por finanças implica que seja necessário ter em atenção o processo de acesso aos recursos e aos fatores de produção. Eles não podem ser fatores de exclusão para as comunidades mais desfavorecidas e com recursos mais frágeis. Não se trata de criar modelos de gestão coletiva, mas apenas de acentuar que este dilema existe no campo da Agenda dos Direitos Humanos. Se as comunidades marginalizadas estão em desvantagem, se estão longo do acesso ao Estado e aos processos de formação de capital, algo é necessário fazer, para equilibrar a equação de forma a permite incluir todos nos sistemas de trocas. Por outro lado, se estes grupos marginalizados e desfavorecidos estão hoje muito dependentes das ajudas do Estado, a visão predominante do sistema liberal, de diminuir a intervenção do Estado na sociedade, poderá conduzir estas comunidades a situações complexas. Se aumentar o acesso aos recursos e aos meios de produção, em princípio diminuirá as necessidades de ajudas diretas do estado. Com a diminuição direta das ajudas do estado, estas comunidades, sem ajuda para o acesso á terra, ficam completamente desprotegidas

Uma última preocupação que é necessário ter em atenção, é a necessidade de registar os nascimentos. Poderá ser uma questão trivial em muitos países mais desenvolvidos, mas para atingir o desenvolvimento é necessário que todos estejam incluídos nos sistemas de estatística. Só assim é possível torna e ganhar visibilidade para todos. E ser invisível para um sistema é hoje estar fora da agenda dos Direitos Humanos, do seu acesso e do seu contributo para os desafios globais que enfrentamos.

Cultura e Dignidade Humana LXXV – Uma visão para o futuro dos direitos humanos

Olhando para a Agenda do Desenvolvimento Sustentável e para os consensos estabelecidos para os próximos 30 ou 50 anos, é necessário ter presente algumas questões. Vamos olhar para seis dessas questões:

A primeira relaciona-se com o maior enfase na questão dos Direitos Individuais do que nos Direitos Coletivos. É necessário hoje ter presente que atualmente a violação dos direitos coletivos e as violações coletias tem hoja um impacto muito mais vasto na maioria da população do mundo. I não haverá uma agenda dop Direitos Humanos eficaz se não existir uma agenda eficaz de direitos coletivos. Se o Desenvolvimento Sustentável implica uma atenção à sociedade, é necessário não criar áreas de menor incidência sobre os direitos coletivos.

Em Segundo lugar é necessário acentuar a ligação entre os Direitos Políticos e Sociais com os Direitos Económicos e Sociais.Não é possível focar a atenção no corpo dos direitos civis, sem acentuar a sua relação com os direitos económicos e sociais. A ideia de indivisibilidade dos direitos humanos é crucial para entender a formação da Dignidade Humana, na sua completude, como expressão política, económica e criativa.

A Terceira questão é a ideia de que será necessário diminuir a dependência da afirmação dos direitos pela via da afirmação jurídica, para afirmar mecanismos de ação social afirmativa pelos direitos. Essa ideia, de favorecer ações afirmativas, será o qie melhor convirá ao novo Sistema de Desenvolvimento Sustentável, que procura ultrapassar a distância no acesso dos mais variados grupos a direitos económicos, sociais e culturais, que apesar de serem portadores, ao nível individual, carecem de formas de expressão por fragilidade no enunciado e na afirmação da palavra.

Acentuar a reivindicação de direitos por via da advocacia, implicaria criar estruturas e organizações que poderão não ser as mais adequadas para servir grupos minoritários ou mais afastados do poder. Da mesma forma que não basta confiar ao legislador a elaboração de regras de governo económico e social que visam conduzior a sociedade para o “Desenvolvimento Sustentável”, estruturas burocráticas de direitos poderão correr o risco de excluir as vozes que pretendem representar. As vozes das mulheres, por exemplo, apesar de serem maioria, não são as mais ouvidas nos parlamento que existem no mundo. A voz das minorias, que por serem minorias, não podem esta adequadamente representadas, etc. Aplicar regras no desenvolvimento sustentável, implicará certamente aumentar o risco de exclusão dos grupo minoiritários, pelo que será então necessário aumentar as ações afirmativas, para equilibrar, os sistemas de representação com os sistemas de participação.

Quarta preocupação, é o de considerar a vista sobre os Direitos Humanos muito mais significativo do que apenas um nome. Nos últimos sessenta anos tem existido uma grande ênfase no uso dos Direitos Humanos com um valor e no uso desse valor como reflexo da ação dos estados, por vezes como uma forma de avaliar os seus comportamentos a partir dos seus valores. Como resultado, a questão dos Direitos Humanos tornou-se num instrumento de medição do grau de violação desses direitos. Os direitos humanos tem constituído um mecanismo de regulação para definir os limites da ação do estado. Mas essa situação não pode permanecer apenas assim. É necessário avançar para a criação da sociedades sustentáveis e os Direitos Humanos podem ser um instrumento para a sua construção. Para que isso seja possível, é necessário criar parceria entre os organismos do Estado, da sociedade civil e seus atores, para a aumentar a interação de forma a melhorar a configuração deste Direitos, torna-los mais efetivos, e sobretudo, monitorizar a sua aplicação.

Temos verificado que nos anos mais recentes, aqueles que se têm constituído como paladinos da luta pelos Direitos Humanos, desenvolvem por vezes praticas, internas e externas, que envergonham e violam a teoria dos Direitos Humanos ou outros direitos. De certa forma perdeu-se o discurso de enfase nos Direitos Humanos e por vezes a agenda dos Direitos Humanos não surge como especialmente atrativa para criar comunidades sustentáveis.

A Quinto preocupação sobre a base da interpretação dos Direitos Humanos. Nos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento do Milénio muitos dos processos tiveram por base orientações sobre os Direitos Humanos. Várias Instituições e organizações internacionais falaram sobre os Direitos Humanos, mas isso não se traduziu em práticas significativas que incluíssem os Direitos Humanos nas sua visão e objetivos.

A Pratica dos Direitos Humanos ainda não é compreendida como uma necessidade dos grupos minoritários e marginalizados. A nossa ideia é colocar em destaque esta questão essencial de que a questão dos direitos Humanos é vital para assegurar o futuro dos grupos minoritários e dos mais desfavorecidos. Para prosseguir com a afirmação da dignidade humana para cada indivíduo, é necessário que todos estejma comprometidos com isso.

Os grupos minoritários, marginalizados, os povos indígenas, os trabalhadores migrantes e os refugiados, as mulheres em algumas sociedades, pela sua própria natureza têm que ter um processo que assegura a afirmação da sua voz. Todos estes grupos necessitam de ser empoderados para ultrapassarem as suas posições de desvantagem relativa.

Se construirmos uma base de aproximação com base na reificação dos Direitos Humanos sem estes grupos e suas comunidades nos nossos objetivos, não criamos energias positiva suficiente para assumir os desafios que enfrentamos para ultrapassar essas violações.

Finalmente um sexta e última preocupação, relaciona-se com uma certa sobre relevância dada ao Estado como ator principal na política mundial. Os Estados são organizações essenciais e são os estados que criam as regras e se envolvem, mais ou menos nesses processos. Na arquitetura dos princípios dos direitos humanos e do direito internacional estão baseados na ideia dos Estados como parceiros, mas tem emergido algumas formas que permitem melhorar a sua implementação, como sejam as pressões da sociedade civil. Por essa razão os estados não podem ser apenas os únicos atores nesta equação. Necessitam de incluir outros atores, as organizações empresariais, que podem mobilizar recursos e envolver-se mais na vida das comunidade, mas a sociedade civil e as suas organizações são parceiros cruciais.

A abordagem dos direitos humanos tem vindo a dar muita atenção à sociedade civil e essa tendência tem vindo a subir. Nós temos de encontrar uma forma de afirmar a vontade da maioria da sociedade, das minorias e incluir as vozes daqueles que tem dificuldade em se sentar à mesa.

Estas seis procupações enunciadas são cruciais para a questão da construção duma Agenda dos Direitos Humanos no âmbito dos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável. Argumentamos que a sua não concretização e a simples continuidade dos mecanismos e estruturas existentes existentes, não permitirá ultrapassar a descriminação entre os diferentes grupso no futuro. Essa situação não conduzi a sociedades sustentáveis e não o permitirá no futuro.

Será possível imaginar um mundo onde os grupos marginalizados e as minorias tenham voz. Onde as mulheres, mais de 50 % da população, tenham um papel significativo na condução do mundo. Apenas com a inclusão destas vozes será possível pensar a construção dos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável. Para isso é necessário construir uma agenda de questões relevantes e assegurar que essa agende continue na ordem do dia al longo deste tempo

Carta final do Seminário Nacional clama pela proteção à Mãe Terra

Carta final do Seminário Nacional clama pela proteção à Mãe Terra

01/11/2016

A luta contra a exploração irresponsável dos recursos naturais do planeta por parte dos grandes capitalistas e suas consequências sobre as mudanças climáticas é o principal destaque da carta-resultado do Seminário Nacional realizado pelo Fórum Mudanças Climáticas e Justiça Social (FMCJS). Confira a íntegra do documento:

Seminário Nacional do Fórum de Mudanças Climáticas e Justiça Social

PRECISAMOS REESCREVER O FUTURO

AGORA!

Viemos de todos os estados brasileiros, do Distrito Federal, das comunidades indígenas, quilombolas, ribeirinhas, da agricultura familiar, das cidades, dos movimentos sociais e populares do campo, das florestas, das águas e das cidades, todxs violentadxs por projetos extrativistas e de infraestrutura como hidrelétricas, termoelétricas, energia eólica e nuclear, transposição de rios, mineração, pecuária, extração de fontes fósseis (convencionais e não convencionais), expansão da monocultura e do agronegócio, agrotóxicos, projetos de créditos de carbono, desastres ambientais que geram migrações forçadas e projetos urbanos que expulsam comunidades. Em Brasília, no Seminário Nacional do Fórum de Mudanças Climáticas e Justiça Social, de 25 a 28 de outubro de 2016, refletimos sobre as mudanças climáticas, socializamos os gritos, nos fortalecemos para enfrentar os mega-projetos patrocinados pelo sistema capitalista, por meio de corporações e governos que atentam contra a vida da Mãe Terra, de suas Filhas e Filhos.

Motivadxs pela espiritualidade dos povos da floresta, das águas, do campo e das cidades, em uma só voz denunciamos as faces desse desenvolvimento perverso, que produz o Ecocídio, o Etnocídio e o Genocídio da Mãe Terra e alimenta o capitalismo financeirizado, globalizado e agressivo. Denunciamos a falácia da “Economia Verde”, que mercantiliza e privatiza rios, oceanos, florestas, o ar e a Mãe Terra, expulsando suas filhas e filhos em favor de projetos que produzem morte cultural, econômica, social e organizacional de povos e comunidades tradicionais, camponeses e comunidades urbanas.

Somando-se à voz dos povos originários, a ciência revelou que chegamos a uma nova época geológica, chamada de ”Antropoceno”. Nele, a humanidade, com uma responsabilidade bem maior por parte dos mais ricos e que mais consomem, tornou-se uma força indutora de impactos profundos e irreversíveis em escala global. Impactos que incluem a 6ª grande extinção de espécies da história terrestre, um domínio destrutivo sobre a maior parte das terras e da água doce, a acidificação dos mares, a destruição da camada de ozônio. Incluem, sobretudo, uma radical mudança do clima da Terra provocada pelo aumento exponencial da concentração dos gases de efeito estufa pela queima de combustíveis fósseis, desmatamento, etc. São frutos envenenados de uma economia da morte.

As mudanças climáticas já aumentaram em 1,2oC a temperatura do planeta desde o início da era industrial, provocando efeitos extremos, tais como furacões, secas, tempestades, ondas de calor, elevação crescente do nível do mar. Ameaçam a vida de milhões de seres humanos e de outras espécies. É o maior desafio jamais posto diante da humanidade. Precisamos agir para deter essas mudanças. O causador destas aflições é o modo capitalista de desenvolvimento, que prioriza o lucro e a acumulação, e não o atendimento das reais necessidades materiais e imateriais da humanidade, que confunde desenvolvimento com mero crescimento físico. Estamos perto de esgotar os bens naturais e é urgente determos a voracidade do crescimento capitalista. Constatamos que, sem superar o sistema do capital, o Planeta mergulhará no caos e a vida nas formas conhecidas desaparecerá. Para viver, precisamos de alimentação boa e saudável, beleza e amor, e não de alimentos e água contaminados, pobreza e egoísmo. A produção contínua de desigualdades sociais e a destruição de comunidades humanas e seus modos de reprodução ampliada da vida tornam o sistema insustentável. De quanto tempo a fração privilegiada da humanidade vai precisar para descobrir que não se come dinheiro nem se bebe petróleo?

 

O predomínio antagônico do homem sobre a mulher e sobre a Mãe Terra, de nossa espécie sobre as demais, do capital sobre o trabalho, da riqueza material sobre a não material, da ilusão de que a técnica resolve tudo, e das corporações sobre os povos da Terra anula o sentido participativo da democracia. Reconstruir as sociedades humanas de baixo para cima começa com a organização de comunidades intencionais onde as pessoas vivem e trabalham. Produzir e consumir localmente; partilhar solidariamente nossos excedentes; promover saúde coletiva; garantir espaços de mobilidade ativa, ferrovias para passageirxs e cargas, e transporte público includente, multimodal e de qualidade; assegurar terra para quem dela necessita para viver e trabalhar; universalizar a permacultura, a agrofloresta e a agroecologia; acolher os que sofrem as mazelas espalhadas pelo capital; receber refugiadxs climáticxs com braços, portas e fronteiras abertas para a partilha; construir uma economia do suficiente (bens materiais), e da abundância em qualidade de vida – lazer, comunicação, artes, amizade, amor, felicidade, criando o ambiente político, social, natural e espiritual propício para que cada pessoa desenvolva sempre mais plenamente seus potenciais individuais e coletivos – este é o sentido maior da vida humana.

A economia da vida promove a descentralização do poder político, econômico e cultural, e a valorização da unicidade (comunidade da vida que habita a Casa Comum) e da diversidade humana e biológica. Promove o empoderamento das comunidades para planejarem e implementarem o seu próprio desenvolvimento de forma autogestionária,  solidária, sustentável, e articuladas entre si em escala sucessiva até o âmbito nacional e global. Com a posse compartilhada dos bens produtivos e o planejamento participativo superam-se os riscos da superprodução, do descarte e da especulação; em vez da privatização, o cuidado e a partilha dos bens comuns. A matriz energética se reerguerá num modelo descentralizado de produção e consumo da escala comunitária até a nacional. A educação para a vida ensinará valores e métodos da partilha dos bens produtivos e da troca solidária, ou doação dos excedentes, da reciprocidade voluntária, da restauração e da conservação dos ecossistemas.

O futuro escrito pelo capital é de destruição e morte, mas já está sendo reescrito na sabedoria representada pelos povos originários e demais comunidades tradicionais, e por outras formas de comunidades intencionais, como comunidades camponesas, ecovilas e ecocidades. Aprendamos com eles o modo de vida simples, compartilhado e rico de tradições ancestrais, o seu cuidado com o meio natural e a sua espiritualidade enraizada na Mãe-Terra, na perspectiva da construção de sociedades do bem viver!

 

Brasília, 28 de outubro de 2016

The decision chain of natural resource management (II)

Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University

  1. What are the key policy decisions that governments must get right to successfully turn resource revenues into sustainable development?
  2. What makes good revenue management particularly challenging?

So where we left off, we’d got the revenues. Those revenues are the main product of resource extraction and the main opportunity from resource extraction. There’s a lot of fussing about adding value to iron ore or something like that. That, in my view, is a sideshow. The main issue is using the revenues from resource extraction well, and that is really difficult because that is the thing that has most commonly gone wrong. There are, there are two big reasons why things go wrong. The first is that the revenues are volatile, and they are not sustainable. They only last at best as long as the resource is still available.

So volatility and temporariness of the revenues. The second big difficulty is converting those revenues into assets that are as productive as possible. So let’s take those two issues in turn. First, the time profile of the revenues. So key feature is that they’re volatile. Commodity prices go up, commodity prices go down. That’s been true for a century, boom, bust. If you track public spending around revenues, then public spending will have booms and busts, and that is terribly inefficient. In fact during the supercycle, it was often much worse than that because what governments were tempted to do, often pushed into it, because they were accountable to citizens who didn’t understand the right issues. Governments were tempted to go and borrow on the strength of these revenues. And so public spending soared during the supercycle disastrously.

A country like Ghana went out into the world’s sovereign bond market, borrowed two billion dollars on the strength of an oil discovery. And then the government spent it. So we had a huge public spending boom. Precisely the opposite of what the government of Ghana should have been doing. The country that just got this right is Chile.

Chile had a big copper boom. It didn’t push public spending up like a rocket. It recognized that copper prices were temporarily high, and so quite a lot of the revenues needed to be parked. The only way to park them is temporarily to park them abroad in a parking fund, a stabilization account, which just smoothes public spending so that when the copper prices came down, the government of Chile was able to carry on spending at a sustained level.

So you had a phase where revenues were higher than spending, followed by a phase when spending was higher than revenues. You pulled down the money you parked in the fund. That’s very sensible, but it’s quite rare. It’s quite rare mainly because citizens don’t understand the issues properly and push governments to spend as much as possible, as fast as possible. And in order to win elections governments then try and do that. Governments that do that need to lose elections, not win them. So much for dealing with volatility. The other time-related feature of resource revenues is that they are fundamentally unsustainable. They are going to run out. There are two ways in which they run out. The most obvious one is that the physical supply of the resource can get exhausted. You got a small oil field, it’ll be extracted over the course of a couple of decades, and then there’s none left.

By about 2002, Zambia had run out of copper. It was very lucky that the copper price went up, and it discovered some more, deeper copper. But as of 2002, it looked as if that whole copper game in Zambia was over. So we’ve got the risks of exhausting the resource physically, we’ve got the risks, a second layer of risks of obsolescence.

For example, until 1920, half of Chile’s revenues, entire government revenues, half of them were provided by nitrates, the tax on nitrates. And then in 1920, a German scientist discovered how to make fertilizer synthetically, and that was over. The price of natural nitrates collapsed, and the rents disappeared. Half of government revenue disappeared overnight and never returned, because of technological obsolescence.

So that’s always a fear with natural resources. The revenues are fundamentally unsustainable. And so you cannot afford to spend them as if they were normal sustainable tax revenues. They’re not. So when you do, you have a much higher proportion of revenues devoted to assets, if the revenues are coming from natural resources. So that when the revenues run out, you’ve accumulated other assets, which can generate equivalent revenues.

And so you need a high rate of saving into assets, whether those assets are domestic investment or foreign assets. I call them savings, but savings in this case covers domestic investment. And it’s a tragedy that most poor resource rich countries have had very low savings rates from natural resource revenues. Indeed, during the supercycle, many poor countries, the government actually had a negative savings rate. It used the revenues to borrow, and then it spent the borrowed money on consumption. Ghana would be a good example. You borrow two billion, what you do with that two billion, you put up public sector wages 50%. And so people consume it. And people vote for that, because they don’t understand that what they’re doing is fundamentally undermining their children’s future.

The oil and the gold that were providing the revenue boom should have been used to build a better future for Ghana’s children. It should have gone into education, into infrastructure, into a whole range of assets. And it didn’t. Fundamentally that’s a fault of citizens, not of government, because citizens didn’t understand the issue. So we’ve dealt with volatility. We’ve dealt with the fact that the resource is fundamentally unsustainable and needs to be converted into assets.

And now we’re going to come to the question, what assets? And there’s a big glamorous temptation here which is Norway. Norway, the richest country in the world, has created a sovereign wealth fund into which it puts part of it’s oil money. And that sovereign wealth fund is invested in abroad in countries like China, Brazil, America, whatever.  That’s a very sensible thing for Norway to do, because Norway already has more domestically invested capital per person than any other country in the world. Norway is awash with infrastructure, with factories, with schools, with universities, all the things that invested capital buys that makes the future more productive. And having run out of good things to spend on, as investments within the country, it’s sensible for Norway to invest in China or Brazil or America. The typical poor country is absolutely not like that. The typical poor country is desperately short of domestic investment.

And so creating a sovereign wealth fund and putting the money abroad is really foolish. And yet the glamour of that Norwegian model has meant that, for example, Africa is the fastest-growing region for the creation of sovereign wealth funds, parking money abroad. There’s not much money parked there, because African governments haven’t tended to save very much. But to the extent that they’ve saved, they’ve saved abroad rather than domestic infrastructure. That’s the wrong thing to do. Poor countries desperately need electricity generation, better ports, better roads, better education systems, better health systems. All these investments. And so the priority is to first get a much higher savings rate out of resource revenues and then channel it into domestic investment. Finally, there is a big but. If you’re going to spend a lot of money on domestic investment, you need to build a capacity to do domestic investment well. And I call that, investing in investing.

Building the capacity to manage a domestic investment process. Otherwise what you get is glamorous white elephants that are useless. The president looks out of his limo and says, build a highway to my village. Build a cathedral here. I’ve been to Cincinnati, and they have a racetrack. Let’s build a racetrack. Stupid investments. And so you have to plan investments, select them correctly, implement them correctly and then evaluate them to see what investments turned out to be good and what investments turned out to be bad and then learn from failure.

The IMF’s got an index called The Public Investment Management Index, which is quite a useful way of just checking: how does your country seem to do on these public investment management processes? So just to wrap up, the biggest mistakes during the supercycle were in converting revenues into sustained prosperity. And instead, a lot of countries, the resource supercycle was used to throw a party.

Governments went out into sovereign bond markets, borrowed, and used the money to for something that was ice at the time, but has bequeathed debts to the future. And instead, what should have happened. First, build the capacity to invest domestically. Then, have a savings strategy where a lot of the revenues are devoted to investing in the future. Some of the revenues are used to smooth the commodity cycle, the booms and busts, and then certainly some of revenues can be used for consumption, but in a sustained way.

A few countries in Africa, Botswana’s an example, in Asia, Malaysia’s an example, have actually managed that process of using revenues for sustained consumption rather than throwing a party. And that’s why Botswana and Malaysia are both now upper-middle income, prosperous countries, unlike the countries they were 40 or 50 years ago. Thanks very much.

The decision chain of natural resource management (I)

Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University

  1. What are the key policy decisions that governments must get right to successfully convert natural resources into revenues and economic opportunities?

Hello, I’m professor of economics at Oxford University, and I work predominantly on Africa.

The natural resources are the biggest opportunity for rapid development that many poor countries have. And the supercycle of the last ten years has been the biggest opportunity that they’ve had in history. And for most of them, it’s been a missed opportunity. And so it’s really important, society by society, to discover what went wrong and what is needed to be understood in order for next time to go better. And there will be a next time. So, I’m giving two lectures. One will look at the challenge of discovering natural resources, getting them out of the ground, and getting them into revenue.

The next lecture will look at what you do when you’ve got revenues, turning them into something that is sustainable. Because the revenues themselves are only temporary.

If you look at what went wrong during the supercycle, most of the problems occur in that second half. It’s using revenues for sustained development. And so, of the two lectures I’m giving, the more important one is the second one. But as a matter of logic, we are going to start with that process of discovering natural resources, getting them out of the ground, and turning them into revenue And that’s what we’ll deal with in the rest of this lecture.

So the first step in that is discovering your natural resources. And in most poor countries, this has gone badly wrong. The key evidence for that is, as of a few years ago, the typical poor country, if we look at how many resources it had discovered per square kilometer and compare that with how many resources the typical rich country had discovered per square kilometer, the poor countries had only discovered about one-fifth as much.

That’s not because there’s less down there under the ground. These are random geological processes of millions of years ago. They’ll be the same. It’s because the discovery process, which depended upon investment and prospecting in discovery, has gone wrong in poor countries. There are various reasons why it has gone wrong. We just haven’t got time to go into them. But I’ll tell you one key solution to the problem, which is that we need public geological information.

There’s a strong case for international public money, aid money, to be used to prospect the geology of poor countries so that poor countries know what they’ve got. And the World Bank now has launched a one billion dollar campaign to try and raise money for a comprehensive geological prospecting of Africa. And I think that’s the right way to go.

So that’s the first step of discover what resources you’ve got. Then we come to the next link in the chain, which is taxation. The key feature of natural resources, gas, oil, gold, whatever, the key feature is not the resource itself, it’s the money it generates.

So it’s easy to get fixated about some particular natural resource, what should we do with iron ore or something? But really what’s coming out of the ground predominantly is money. But the money in the first instance accrues to the companies that are managing the process of resource extraction.

Usually you need international companies because they have the skills, the core competence, the finance, in order to manage the extraction efficiently.

But then there has to be a taxation process, which takes the, what economists call the rents, which is the difference between costs, including reasonable return on capital, and the total revenues that are generated from natural resources.

Those rents have to be transferred to the government. To give you an example, the typical barrel of oil at the moment sells on the world market for about $60. It might cost about $30 to get it out of the ground, to discover it, to pay the labor costs, the capital costs, the return on risk that companies take in. And the difference between the $30 of cost and the $60 of the barrel, that’s the rent.

And those rents need to be taxed and transferred to the government. If we look at other commercial activities like manufacturing, or services, for the most part those activities don’t generate big economic rents.

And the distinctive feature of natural resources from a point of view of taxation is that there are these big rents, which have to be taxed.

And so the design of a tax system has to be specific to natural resources. You need a different tax system for natural resources than you do from the rest of the private sector. It also has to be geologically specific because the rents on oil are vastly higher than the rents on say, coal. And so you need a lot of information about costs.

Now that takes us to one of the big problems in designing a good tax system, which is asymmetric information. The companies have much better knowledge than the government. And so the government has to devise a system which gets around that asymmetry of knowledge. Partly that’s a matter of the government hiring-in expertise.

You don’t need expertise all the time, but you certainly need expertise at the stage of negotiation and design of a tax system. So you can do part of the solution by just buying in expertise that works for you, but you can also design a system which reduces the problem of asymmetric information. And that system is structured competition.

I’m a very strong believer in auctions, in selling the rights to resource extraction through a transparent process of an auction. Companies tend not to like auctions precisely because they force them to compete with other companies that have just as much information. And so a government which knows nothing can still benefit a lot as long as knowledgeable companies are competing against each other in a structured way. And so an auction flushes out, it reveals, the true value of the resource as a result of this competition between informed companies.

A lot of governments sell resource rights sequentially by the first company to get off the plane and get to the president and negotiate. And that’s precisely the wrong way to do it. Gather the field of three or four respectable companies, and then run an auction.

Let’s turn from taxation to the other upstream issue which is how to deal with the local environment, the local situation.

The resources are discovered somewhere, not everywhere. And that locality has some rights, but not absolute rights. The resources are under the ground. The local community that lives on top of the ground didn’t put the resources there. And so it’s not really right to think of the local community as owning the resources. They didn’t create them. Nobody created those natural resources. And so who should own them?

In most contexts it’s sensible to think of the largest group possible as owning them, which is all citizens of the country, both present and future. And so the rights of the local have to be balanced against the rights of the national.

That’s suggests to me that the locals shouldn’t have a right of veto, saying, unless you do things the way we like it, we won’t let you extract, but they do have rights to extract in such a way that protects the environment and gives them proper compensation for any environmental damage. And the local population has to be confident both that it’s participating in the benefits in a fair way, the national benefits, and that any of the environmental damage that it suffers, it’s getting rapid and fair compensation for that damage.

Resource extraction in a locality is also an opportunity for benefits in the locality. Probably the biggest single benefit is economic spillovers from the resource extraction. Old-style corporate social responsibility tended to be the resource extraction company would build a couple of schools, build a clinic.

That sort of thing. I think that resource extraction companies shouldn’t be in that sort of business. Providing schools and clinics is the responsibility of the local government, not of the company. And the company shouldn’t try and do things that’s the responsibility of local government.

It might be sensible for the company to work with local government to build the capacity of local government to deliver those services, but it’s basically a government job. What the company can do is share its infrastructure. If you’re running a mine, you’ll need a railway, you will need electricity. And at very little extra cost, that railway and that electricity generation can be designed not just to benefit the mine, but to benefit all the people living along the line of rail and all the people in the vicinity of the electricity generator.

So the company could do a local electricity grid and sell it, electricity at cost which will be very much cheaper to small businesses in the locality. In the places I work in, electricity is terribly scarce and terribly expensive.

It’s individual diesel generators. And so if you have reliable, cheap electricity in a locality, that’s a huge benefit to local companies. So that’s the first part of the decision chain. Discover resources, tax them, and deal properly with the locality where the resources are coming out. What we’re now going to turn to is the more important second half, which is how to convert those revenues into something that’s sustainable.

Challenges and opportunities of oil, gas, and mining

Lecturer: Jeffrey Sachs

Thought-provoking questions:

  1. Why do oil, gas, and mining play such an important role in sustainable development?
  2. What are the unique challenges that oil, gas, and mining present in the context of sustainable development?Jeffrey Sachs, Director, Earth Institute and Sustainable Development Solutions Network

In this chapter we’re going to talk about specific challenges of the mining and extractive industry sector. When you have a large mining sector or a large hydrocarbons sector or coal sector, it really shapes the nature of the economy, and it leads to particular challenges and distinctive kinds of economic performance. Of course in general it’s on the whole good to have mineral resources or coal, oil, or gas resources as major inputs to the economy, major inputs to economic development to countries that are bereft of these resources, have major challenges of producing other goods that they can export in order to be able to import these vital commodities. But having a lot of these resources also really does shape the economy and paradoxically can lead to massive problems as well.

So what are the distinctive challenges associated with the extractive sector? First, extractive resources, coal, oil and gas, which will be my focus in this chapter, are finite. They are depleting. You run out of them. So, many countries live high on the hog for a while, they’re living very, very well until the resources start to disappear because they’ve been mined out, they’ve been extracted, and economies sometimes go into a tailspin.

First lesson with finite resources is the need for an inter-temporal strategy. In other words, a strategy that looks across time, that says, today I have the resources, but I know twenty, thirty, forty years in the future, I’m going to have depleted these resources. I have to smooth the consumption that I get from the income from these resources so it’s not all used up at once and then collapse.

Now many countries don’t live that way, but the smart ones do. One of the exemplars of thinking ahead with the finite nature of these resources has been Norway, which has accumulated massive amounts of wealth from its gas sales and exports, knowing that when the gas runs out it’s going to have accumulated financial wealth that can be used in the future.

There’s a second very important challenge, it’s called a curse indeed, that comes with natural resources. I’ve been involved in the study of the “resource curse,” as it’s called for around twenty years. Because way back

then, colleagues and I noted that many of the resource rich countries, despite their wealth, were actually doing quite poorly. It’s a paradox. It should be a benefit, but it can be a curse. We looked into it.

There are two big reasons associated with this resource curse. One is called the Dutch disease, that the wealth that comes from these resources and the consumption that results from that wealth leads to a demand for lots of domestic, non-traded goods and pulls resources away from other internationally traded goods that otherwise would be competitive for example, the manufacturing or the agriculture sector.

So a heavy big mining sector, though it gives wealth and consumption, can draw resources away from technologically dynamic sectors, such as manufacturing. But there’s another part of the resource curse that surely is at play and that’s politics, not economics, because when you have a highly valued resource, an oil reserve, could be a diamond mine, it could be some other very valuable mineral resource, that’s a kind of natural rent.

In other words, in a way, income for free. And when you have that kind of rent, it seems like this great fountain of wealth, of course it leads to dreams of wealth and it can lead to internal conflict. Politics becomes a scramble. Who controls the oil, controls the wealth. Even countries fall into civil war over fighting for these very valuable resources, or international war. It’s no accident that the imperial powers, the U.K., France, and others focused a lot of their attention on the Middle East in the 20th Century, cause that’s where the oil is. It’s no accident that the United States has repeatedly, seemingly endlessly been at war in the Middle East, because in its interpretation, it’s keeping the oil lines open. In others’ interpretation, it’s grabbing for oil that belongs to somebody else.

But this is a curse. It can lead paradoxically to devastation, even of economies, the kind of Midas touch that goes seriously awry.

There’s a third dimension of the extractive sector that should be noted and that’s what it can do to inequalities of income and social exclusion. Have an indigenous group living in some part of nature discover oil or gas or diamonds under that indigenous population’s area and watch what happens. In country after country, throughout history: whoa! Swept aside. Conquered, pushed away. That’s our resource. So these mineral resources, because they’re so valuable, create inequalities, injustices that we have to keep our eye open in the 21st Century. It’s indefensible what’s happened so often in the past and until today in the mineral sector, and it’s a reason why the mineral sector is often the site of so much conflict.

A fourth decisive challenge of the mining and extractive sector more generally is the environmental challenge. Mining almost intrinsically means moving lots of earth, often deforestation, use of many industrial chemical processes that are highly toxic and highly polluting. Often regions are devastated by companies that don’t take care of the environment in which they’re operating.

Think of Shell and the Niger Delta. Shell operated for decades and decades and decades in the Niger Delta. It’s a polluted mess with massive amounts of cancer and poor health of the population. And Nigeria wasn’t able to defend itself in the face of this kind of environmental destruction. But of course that story is repeated in many parts of the world with deforestation, pollution, poisoning, destruction of habitat. And then when it comes to coal, oil, and gas, we know we have another very, very big environmental problem and that is that intrinsically when carbon-based fossil fuels are burned, they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

And bad luck from the chemistry. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It means that while it lets in the solar radiation, it traps the outgoing infrared radiation from the earth and warms the planet. We have now raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere so much that we are dangerously warming the planet and disrupting the climate.

Well, the fossil fuel industries, the coal, oil, and gas industries need to take note. They need to be part of a sustainable world economy. And that means that when you add all of this up, the resource curse, the governance challenges, the social exclusion that can come, the depleting resources leaving the future bereft of resources if one doesn’t take care, and the environmental challenges.

All together, it means that the extractive sector is really at the heart of the sustainable development challenge. Sustainable development means a holistic approach to our society, which takes into account not only the desire for economic development, but also social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

We believe that the mining sector and the fossil fuel energy industry need to become leaders of sustainable development to operate themselves sustainably and in recognition of responsible management to ensure that the ways that they operate and the patterns of their production and use of their products fits within a world in which economic development is accompanied by social justice, fair treatment, and environmental sustainability.

We’ll return in another chapter to the meaning of the climate challenge for the energy sector.

Natural Resources for Sustainable Development I

Introdution

LISA SACHS: Welcome to the course. I’m Lisa Sachs. I’m the Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. PATRICK HELLER: And I’m Patrick Heller, the director of Legal and Economic Programs at the Natural Resource Governance Institute.

LISA SACHS: Natural resources can be transformative for developing countries. Oil, mining, and gas can generate vast sums, in many cases larger than official development assistance or other forms of national income. If managed prudently, natural resource wealth can have a substantial impact on a country’s sustainable development efforts. And In addition to the capital flows, natural resources can have many other direct and indirect benefits for an economy, but those benefits are far from automatic, and in fact, in many cases, natural resource wealth has not transformed into long-term sustainable development. That’s because there are many real challenges associated with resource-based development. Many of these deposits are located in places with pre-existing governance constraints and major development challenges. There are economic challenges with managing volatile revenues, technical complexities with managing these large-scale projects. There are real risks of environmental and social disruptions and impacts. There’s a vast web of stakeholders with many different interests. And in many cases, these agreements are shrouded in secrecy, among many other reasons.

PATRICK HELLER: And that’s why we are here. Over the course of the weeks to come, we are going to be looking at the specific challenges that oil- and mineral-rich countries face in trying to convert their resources into national development and some of the strategies that have helped some countries succeed and turn these resources into engines for long-term development. This course is a joint project of the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment, which Lisa runs, the Natural Resource Governance Institute, where I work, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And it has been developed with support from the World Bank.

Over the course of the coming weeks, we’re going to try to look at all of the major elements of natural resource management and examine the particular policies and strategies that countries have used to try and get the most out of these industries.

So after this week’s introduction, we’ll begin next week by looking at the political economy factors that have caused problems in so many natural resource-rich countries, including the risks of corruption and the challenges of opacity in the management of public resources.

From there, we’ll turn to discussion of the fundamentals of how the oil and mining industries work and the implications of those industries in their structure on the decisions that companies make about where to invest and the decisions that governments make about what companies o choose.

Next we’ll dive into the legal frameworks governing the extractive industries: the legislation, regulation, and contracts that set the terms of relationships between the state and companies, and also condition citizens’ expectations about how their institutions are going to function. A key element of this framework is obviously the fiscal package. Now, as Lisa mentioned, one of the major ways in which national resources can benefit an economy is quite simple. It is through taxation. The company exploits the resource, sells it, and the state gains some benefits through taxation or other fiscal tools. So we’ll spend a week going in-depth into these fiscal tools and some of the challenges that go along with them.

From there, we talked about the benefits or some of the benefits that can accrue from the natural resource sector. We’ll talk about one of the most important risks, and that’s the risk of environmental damage or social disruption in communities near a mining or oil project.

So we’ll spend time looking at the specific kind of challenges that have risen and some of the strategies for dealing with them.

From there we’ll spend a week looking exclusively at the issue of artisanal mining. This relates not to the big mega-projects that are often talked about in the international press, but small projects that are typically run by citizens of the country itself or small- or medium-scale local enterprises. This can provide a real opportunity for communities and for private companies near the mining site, but there are also particular challenges that go along with this as well.

Next, we’ll look at the issue of natural resource revenue management. So, as I mentioned, these resources, if well taxed, can generate big flows of money to the budget. And that can be really important. It can help a country spend on its biggest development needs and can really help the government drive forward a strategic plan for economic management.

The problem in a lot of countries is that the size of these revenue flows can be disruptive to the overall economy and that their volatility can create problems that mean that public expenditure is actually less effective than it was. So, we’ll spend a week looking at these challenges in particular and again some of the strategies that countries have put in place to try and minimize the risks.

From there, we’ll have a specific focus on the issue of local content. And what we mean by local content is the furnishing of goods and services, including employment, to local individuals, to local industries, to local businesses.

It is a way that a country can develop benefits from the industry that aren’t totally dependent on taxation but that actually promote the flourishing of the private sector.

And then finally, we’ll take a look at the issues of how to move beyond extraction. So how to convert an extractive economy into a more diversified economy that is more sustainable for the long-term.

One of the challenges that go along with extractive industries is that a country can become too dependent and the extractive industry becomes the only game in town. What we’ll talk about in this last substantive week will be what a country can do to turn itself into not an economy that will be dependent forever on extraction but one that has a broader range of economic opportunities.

Throughout the course, we’ll be trying to look at all of these questions through a variety of lenses. The lens of strategy, so how does a government make fundamental decisions about what it wants and how does it consult in order to make those decisions?

The lens of policy, so what kinds of rules does the country put in place, and how does it enforce those rules?

The lens of institutions, what are the public agencies that are responsible for executing the strategy, how well are they constructed, and how well do they function?

And finally we’ll talk about communication between the government, its citizens, and the companies that are operating there, because it has been shown over and over again that even the best-laid plans, the best-developed strategies, don’t take a country toward a path of long-term sustainable development unless there is clear communication and a regular sharing of information about how the sector is being managed in the interest of citizens.

LISA SACHS: This is a twelve-week course. Each week has about four to six chapters, totaling an hour. The chapters are taught by leading academics and practitioners from around the world with diverse expertise in fields of natural resource governance. In addition to the chapters, there will be required readings and additional readings and a number of interactive elements as well, including discussion forums, exercises, Google Hangouts, and quizzes to test what you’ve learned.

This course is open to anyone. It does not assume any prior knowledge or expertise in the field of natural resource governance.

Some of the weeks will cover quite technical topics, but in those weeks, we’ll provide additional materials and guidance to help you master even those technical topics. Throughout the chapters, the readings, and the exercises, we’ll expose you to a range of different viewpoints and perspectives in order to generate some critical thinking and debate about the range of complex issues and challenges related to natural resource management.

PATRICK HELLER: Okay, now that we’ve gone through that introduction, let’s get started with the course.

This week you’ll have the opportunity to listen to two of the pioneers of the field of natural resource economics: Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and Paul Collier of the University of Oxford. Professor Sachs is at first, and he’ll take things back to the very beginning, back to the Paleolithic era, and we’ll trace the influence of the mining sector and ultimately of oil and gas on the global economy almost throughout human history.

Now what this will help us do is to think about how deeply ingrained natural resources are in the fundamentals of how the modern economy is functioning. From there, Professor Sachs will go into some of the foundations of what has made natural resource management so tricky. Why so many countries seem to have fallen short of their potential. And he’ll start to talk about some of the opportunities for improvement and some of the success stories that have risen above the broader challenges.

After that, we’ll turn to Professor Collier, who will examine natural resource governance through the lens of a decision chain. What the decision chain is, it’s a way of looking at everything that happens from the moment that a natural resource is in the ground undiscovered and undeveloped all the way through to when it is developed, converted into money, some of that money is captured by the state, and the state tries to manage it effectively, and to convert natural resource revenues into a vehicle for sustainable long-term development.

So the decision chain has four basic parts. It begins with the discovery process and the decision about whether to extract a resource or not. The second stage relates to taxation and the frameworks that govern the relationships between companies and the state. The third stage relates to the management of natural resource revenues and in particular the goal of avoiding volatility. And then finally, the chain looks at investing in sustainable development, so how to convert the revenues and the resources into a longer-term path.

And this decision chain that Professor Collier will talk about is embodied and is featured in the Natural Resource Charter, which is one of the documents that was included in your packet of materials.

And it’s a resource that I would encourage you to go back to over the course of the weeks to come, because it provides additional detail and a lens of analysis on which the various technical topics can be viewed. It is one of several resources we have shared with you. Others include the World Bank’s Extractive Industries Sourcebook and Columbia’s Five Pillars to Sustainable Development. We’ve included all of this in your materials, because we think that it provides a way to supplement what you’ll hear in these lectures and to really dive deeper into the issues that interest you the most. And with that, on to Professor Sachs. Enjoy the course!

ulture and Sustainability in European Cities

culturaecidades

Edited by Svetlana Hristova, Milena Dragićević Šešić, Nancy Duxbury

European cities are contributing to the development of a more sustainable urban system that is capable of coping with economic crises, ecological challenges and social disparities in different nation-states and regions throughout Europe.

This book reveals in a pluralistic way how European cities are generating new approaches to their sustainable development, and the special contribution of culture to these processes. It addresses both a deficit of attention to small and medium-sized cities in the framework of European sustainable development, and an underestimation of the role of culture, artistic expression and creativity for integrated development of the city as a prerequisite to urban sustainability. On the basis of a broad collection of case studies throughout Europe, representing a variety of regionally specific cultural models of sustainable development, the book investigates how participative culture, community arts, and more generally, creativity of civic imagination are conducive to the goal of a sustainable future of small and medium-sized cities.

This is an essential volume for researchers and postgraduate students in urban studies, cultural studies, cultural geography and urban sociology as well as for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the specificity of European cities as hubs of innovation, creativity and artistic industriousness.

Routledge Studies in Culture and Sustainable Development

Series Editors:culturaedesenvolvimentosustentavel

Katriina Soini, Joost Dessein

Culture as an aspect of sustainability is a relatively new phenomenon but is beginning to attract attention among scholars and policy makers. This series opens up a forum for debate about the role of culture in sustainable development, treating culture and sustainability as a meta-narrative that will bring together diverse disciplines. Key questions explored in this series will include: how should culture be applied in sustainability policies; what should be sustained in culture; what should culture sustain; and what is the relationship of culture to other dimensions of sustainability?

Books in the series will have a variety of geographical foci and reflect different disciplinary approaches (for example geography, sociology, sustainability science, environmental and political sciences, anthropology, history, archaeology and planning). The series will be addressed in particular to postgraduate students and researchers from a wide cross-section of disciplines.

Please contact the Editor, Khanam Virjee (khanam.virjee@tandf.co.uk), to submit proposals.

Series Editors:

Katriina Soini, University of Jyväskylä and Natural Resources Institute Finland

Joost Dessein, Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research (ILVO) and Ghent University, Belgium

 

The Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals- V

Is Sustainable Development Feasible

Is sustainable development feasible? Can we elaborate sustainable development goals and carry them out in time? In this confusing and confused and distracted world, where the world is running very powerfully off course in many ways, climate change, the 6th great extinction, cities in danger, food supplies under threat, massive dislocations, widening inequalities of income, high youth unemployment, politics not working very well. Is it even conceivable that we can get on course? It’s not an empty question. It’s a very deep and real concern, and, some of the most important thinkers in the world have some expressed some very, very serious doubts. 3 authors have recently, all whom I tremendously admire, have in a way made me shutter in a way with their their pessimism. Jane Jacobs, who has passed away, was one of the worlds greatest urbanists. And champions of vibrant sustainable urban areas. In her last years of life, wrote a book called Dark Age Ahead. It was ooh, a troubling book to read from such a wonderful thinker who argued that we’re not making it right now and not only on the wrong track but that the tendencies continue to worsen. Communities are fraying public spirit disappearing. Higher education dysfunctional in what it’s really teaching bad science phony science that elevated and crowding out real science. Governments not responsive to real needs, but responsive to vested interests. A culture that is somehow distracting us from the central challenges that we face, all of the things we’ve seen and led Jane Jacobs what a marvelous and wonderful and influential thinker to this kind of very great pessimism. Who could rival the pessimism of the title of, of Martin Reese’s book. A great astronomer, Sir Martin published a book Our Final Hour, Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century? Well, the title tells it all, that this is a message, conditioned and saying yes of course there is a way out but how dangerous are circumstances. And the great ecologist the pioneer of the interconnectedness of global ecosystems, James Lovelock the inventor of the Gaea theory of the interconnections of the abiotic and biotic features of the Earth’s systems. Wrote in, in his recent book, The Revenge of Gaea, where he declared that we’ve already lost it, we’ve passed the planetary safety margins so far, that major parts of the world are doomed to disaster. Afterwards, he pulled back a bit and said maybe that is too pessimistic, too horrifying a thought. But I think we do make a mistake if we are glib, easygoing, saying that all of this is pretty straightforward. A small tweak here, a small change there and we’ll be on our way. Sustainable development is, simply speaking, the greatest challenge, the most complicated public policy challenge that humanity has ever faced. Climate change alone has that characteristic but add in these other challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world, of a great extinction process under way because of human domination of ecosystems, over extraction from oceans and land resources, the massive illegal trade that we talked about. These are science-based issues where there’s not enough public literacy worldwide in the scientific underpinnings. These are issues of tremendous uncertainty. Even the most refined models of climate are models of great uncertainty because there are many gaps in our understanding of how Earth systems work, and perhaps many intrinsic uncertainties in a perhaps chaotic non-linear underlying system. This is a multi-generational problem which oh, we’re just perhaps completely unequipped in tradition to think about. We have to think ahead many generations. We’re talking about parts of our economy like energy, transport, infrastructure. Food supply which go to the core of our economic life and they need major technological overhaul. There are powerful vested interests like big oil which I have referred to on many occasions which have hindered clarity and progress on implementation. There are long lead times in rebuilding our infrastructure because the life expectancy of the infrastructure of a power plant is a half a century, of our buildings, often a century or more. And we have very limited space left partly because we have, in a way, frittered away the last 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit. And one could argue we’ve been on notice for decades longer than that. We mustn’t give up hope. Partly because we have identified very specific ways through our backcasting and road mapping. Of which we’ve only touched the surface, but illustrated those two processes of how we can get from here to where we need to be. We have identified technologies that can decarbonize the energy system, and lead to tremendous energy efficiency. We have identified technologies that can economize tremendously on land, raise agricultural productivity, reduce the fluxes of nitrogen and phosphorous, and the kind of poisoning of the estuaries that they cause. We’ve shown how cities can plan ahead, and design infrastructure which makes for a much higher level of well being. In other words, these are opportunities within our grasp. Not pie in the sky, not fanciful science fiction of the 23rd century, but things that we know how to do where the costs are absolutely within reach. And in many cases such as wind power, for example, where the costs are already close to the alternatives of fossil fuels where we already have, as I’ve mentioned before with the term grid parody or near grid parody, with these renewable energy sources. So we can already see ways through the back casting and the road mapping, the identification of the pathways of how we could succeed in the sustainable development goals just as the world has made tremendous progress in the millennium development goals. I also believe that despite the cynicism, the darkness, the confusion, the miserable politics, in my own country and internationally on many of these issues, that we can make a breakthrough. Even though it looks as if the political systems are unresponsive, things can change. And the most important message that I would give is that ideas count. Ideas matter, and they can have an effect on public policy far beyond anything that can be imagined by the hard bit and cynics who say, that idea isn’t backed by the money. It’s not backed by the power, the influence, the insiders, the elites, so you don’t stand a chance. Because throughout history ideas have been trans-formative. And I think about some of the greatest movements in history of transformation of the last two centuries that have accompanied our journey of modern economic growth itself. First the end of slavery, which was a massive social movement. Perhaps the first of the social activist movements of it’s kind in modern history. In England in the home of the industrial revolution, led by William and by William Penn. The younger, the prime minister, who was also the classmate of Wilbur Force. And by other brave leaders, who took a campaign to end slavery that seemed completely, deeply embedded in the colonies of the British Empire. It took them more than a couple of decades, and there was a lot of cynicism, a lot of skepticism, a lot of dirty dealings, but in 1807 the British Empire abolished trade in slaves, and in 1833, abolished slavery in the British holdings, and ideas triumphed. It wasn’t economic interest. It was ideas and morality that in the end was the underlying force of change that led the way. We think about the struggle against colonial rule led by Gandhi and by many of his contemporaries in Africa and in Asia. And Gandhi was up against the British Empire. It seemed like an impossible struggle. And Gandhi also of course, invented and led the non-violent approach to social action and social change in a unique way. And one would’ve bet in 1910, or 1920, or 1930 that Gandhi would have been long forgotten by now and the British empire would have continued to rule over the subjects of India or of Africa. And of course, it is Gandhi’s leadership of ending the colonialism that we regard as the correct, moral answer for our age. And one that inspired the civil rights movement, the human rights movement and much beyond. And ideas played a role so powerfully that the interests were in the end completely overwhelmed. The human rights movement followed on. Eleanor Roosevelt in championing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we know that that wonderful document the moral charter of the United Nations does not exist in its full reality in the world we know that it is violated massively everyday. And that millions indeed billions of people live without the basic rights civil, political or the economic, social, and cultural rights that are theirs as human beings and reflected in the Universal Declaration. But we know that the Universal Declaration has changed the world and it has expanded the reach of human rights. It has expanded the recognition and cognizance of human rights, and those human rights ideas have empowered major initiatives like the Millennium Development Goals which have turned into real results on the ground, and so ideas, again, playing an enormous role. And those ideas of course inspired the civil rights movement and were at the 50th anniversary at the  half century mark of the civil rights era in the United States and Martin Luther King’s remarkable leadership. Again, nonviolent, inspired by Ghandi, empowered by notions of human rights. As President John Kennedy said about the civil rights movement that it raises issues as old as the scriptures and as clear as the United States constitution. It was a moral issue and ideas and morality paved the way for great breakthroughs, not finished by any means, but important breakthroughs lead by ideas. And the women’s right movement and gender equality which is playing such a magnificent and crucial role in enabling the world to get on a path of sustainable development is another idea of our time. It’s been hundreds of years in the making, but it’s had great advance in recent decades. Often, in the least likely places in the world, because of the most brave people. And that brings us to the ideas of our time. The idea that we could end extreme poverty, now an official idea of an official system institution like the World Bank. And soon I think that will be at the core of new set of sustainable development goals. And the idea of sustainable development more generally as a world commitment to a safer and more prosperous and more just planet. Now to get there in all of these ideas there has had to be an underpinning of ethics, and when we talk about moving to global sustainable development goals. We’re talking also about the need for a shared global ethics. And it is heartening that many of the world’s religious leaders coming together already two decades ago in the Parliament of World’s Religions. And then in many meetings since then, have declared that the world’s religions share a common ethical underpinning, which makes it possible, even in a highly diverse world to think about the concept of a shared ethics that could underpin a shared commitment like sustainable development goals. Among those shared ethics is the one that I have emphasized: primum non nocere. First do no harm. This is sometimes expressed as: Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you. The golden rule, or as it’s expressed sometimes in its positive way, do unto others which you would have them do onto you. That golden rule is the underpinning of all great religions. It is a measure of equality, of fairness, of process, of mutual responsibility. That can be an underpinning for a global, ethical effort that makes it possible for the world to take the ideas of sustainable development and to turn them into practice. Skeptics have said throughout the ages that ideas can’t win. But all of the examples that I’ve indicated have stressed the opposite. One of the darkest figures of modern history a mass killer in fact Joseph Stalin famously said in the 1930s when he was besieged by a French Diplomat to give more space for religious freedom for the Catholics in the Soviet Union. Stalin famously answered, the Pope? How many divisions has he got? And that was real politics of one of the most brutal practitioners of real politics in real history. But we know that Stalin and his system are gone. It was Pope John Paul II that played such a role in fact in the end of communism in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union and that made possible a rebirth of human rights in those regions. Stalin was given his answer. And another great action, half a century ago I think gives us a lot of practical example and inspiration today. And that was a quest of president John Kennedy in 1963. To make peace with the Soviet Union months after the world nearly came to nuclear annihilation in the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Kennedy succeeded in negotiating a peace treaty with the Soviet Union in the form of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty where both sides agreed to a major action to step back from the nuclear arms race. And more importantly to ease the tensions that have brought the two parties to the brink of nuclear war. And what is absolutely astounding for me and inspiring is that Kennedy used ideas, not power, but ideas to bring about this mutual accommodation and this advance of peace. And it’s worth listening to his words because thy can teach us today about how sustainable development can be achieved. President Kennedy gave a speech on June 10, 1963 which is called his Peace Speech. It’s a speech about values, human rights, and ideas. And the most important idea is the idea that humanity can solve its problems peacefully and can live together because what we have in common is so much more important than what divides us. Let me read you some of the message of Kennedy’s peace speech. And I quote, he says that no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Mans reason, and spirit, have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again. I am not referring to the absolute infinite concept of universal peace and goodwill, of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature, but on a gradual evolution in human institutions, on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems. This is important. Sustainable development is a process, a way of solving problems. A way of solving problems peacefully and globally addressing our deep common needs using our science and technology, our know how, and our shared global ethics to get there. Kennedy was grappling with a divide between the United States and the Soviet Union, a divide of deep values, political systems, and nuclear arms pointed at each other. But his message was that because we have common interests, we can resolve our problems peacefully. And he had an absolutely magnificent way of describing those common interests that resonate today. He said, and I quote again. So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those difference can be resolved. And if we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal. Well, what a way to describe our fate on a crowded, shared planet. We are all breathing the same air. It’s now got 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. It is a threat to our well being, to our future survival. We all cherish our children’s futures, and we know what needs to be done. After Kennedy made that speech,he went on his final visit to Europe because he was assassinated soon afterward. Signed the Peace Treaty, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and few months later, he was gone. But when he visited Europe, one of his great stops was visiting his own family’s home country of Ireland. And he spoke magnificently in the Irish parliament. And he had words there that also are extremely important for us. He said to his Irish countrymen as it were, this is an extraordinary country. George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life. Other people, he said, see things and say, why? But I dream things that never were, and I say, why not? It is that quality of the Irish, Kennedy goes on, that remarkable combination of hope, confidence, and imagination that is needed more than every today. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, says Kennedy, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not. Kennedy got his peace treaty signed, he set the world on a path for stepping back from the nuclear brink, the partial nuclear test ban treaty was signed 5 years afterward which was part of his idea of the practical step-by-step process. We are going to need that kind of practical step-by-step process. But we’re going to need, as Kennedy said, to look beyond the skeptics and the cynics. They have every reason to point out our difficulties. But we’re going to need to look forward to what needs to be done and to find that pathway to achieve it. In Kennedy’s last speech to world leaders, in the United Nations, in the fall of 1963, just after the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed. He ended his speech with absolutely remarkable words, which must be our words today. And again, I quote, Kennedy telling the world leaders assembled at the general assembly. Archimedes, says Kennedy, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends, give me a place where I can stand and I shall move the world. My fellow inhabitants of this planet. Let us take our stand here in this assembly of nations and let us see if we, in our time can move the world to a just and lasting peace. Now it’s our turn to see if we can move the world to sustainable development.

The Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals- IV

Principles of Good Governance

As you know by now, I like to consider, sustainable development as having four major dimensions. There are the traditional three; economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. But those three, require, all, in all cases, the underpinning of a fourth aspect and that is good governance. And so I’d like to put good governance alongside the first three as the total package that’s needed in order to achieve sustainable development. When we move to the sustainable development goals, good governance is going to play a central role in the achievement or the failure to achieve the sustainable development goals. So it behooves us to think clearly about what we really mean, by good governance. The first thing that I, I would emphasis is that governance is about the rules of behavior, especially in organizations, not only about our politics or our government, but about major organizations that are key actors in the success or failure of sustainable development. And that includes our companies. So, when I speak of good governance, I’m thinking about good governance of the public sector government, and good governance of the private sector, especially the large, multi-national corporations, so good corporate governance. It’s clear there are many, many kinds of governments around the world and many different rules of behavior, different constitutional uh,or sets of principles. And it would be futile and absolutely in any event unworkable to believe that there is one set of political rules for example that will dictate how the SPGs are to be implemented. The world’s governments in any event won’t have it that way. Nor uh,is it correct to think that there’s only one way or if there is that we would find it uniquely. Rather, we need a set of principles rather than a cookie cutter that says you must have elections on this date and it your Parliament or President or Prime Minister or, or or judiciary must be organized in the following way. That won’t fly. But what can work, I believe, is to emphasis certain principles of behavior for the public sector and the private sector. First is accountability. Governments and business need to be accountable for their actions. Businesses are in part accountable to markets, but they’re also accountable to the court of law and they need to be accountable to the court of public opinion as well. Governments are accountable to their citizens, in elections when they are democratically or democratically organized. Governments need to be accountable even in non democratic systems or systems that others would consider to be non democratic to the achieving of the objectives that they take on. So, by accountability, I mean not a specific set of election rules, though some are better than others. But rather the idea that government’s will adopt goals and they are responsible for following through and reporting, on being clear about the measures that are needed to achieve them. On public assessments of progress or failure of progress towards those goals and that should be true across all variety of political systems. That requires a second feature in my view also that transcends a specific pattern of voting or organization of the executive or the legislative branch of government. Or, similarly, corporate organization, and that is transparency. We, as citizens, we, as market participants, we, as human beings intent on achieving sustainable development Can only hold government and business accountable for their actions, if we can know what those actions are, know what the behaviors are. And that means that we have to resist secrecy. We have to resist the institutionalization of secrecy in the form of tax and secrecy havens around the world that allow politicians, political parties, governments, crooks to hide their money to hide their proceeds, to hide their behavior behind walls of secrecy. Even when they’re behavior has huge impacts On the success or failure of the globally desired objectives of saving the planet or ending poverty. So transparency is a core feature and governments of all different political systems have a responsibility in my view towards transparent behavior. Third is participation. The ability of citizens and of stakeholders, these of the business, to participate in decision making and here there are of course many different views about this and many different ways of participating. Elections are a kind of participation, but they must not be the only kind. The ability to participate through, public discourse. Through, public deliberations. Through hearings on regulation, are all extremely important. And similarly, businesses need to confront. Through institutional means and clear processes and rules, they’re stakeholders not only, the shareholders in a company, but also the workforce, also the suppliers, the consumers and good businesses have a multi-stakeholder approach. And in some countries like Germany where there’s a principle of co determination workers even when they’re not shareholders have a formal, legalized, right and responsibility for participation in corporate decision making. A fourth aspect of good governance that is part of accountability, I would say, but more specific is what’s called the polluter pays principle. And this is that all of us need to clean up after ourselves. When we are imposing costs on others not reflected in market prices. When companies pollute water ways, when they pollute the air. When any of us as individuals or as businesses put carbon dioxide into the air we need to bear that cost to internalize the externality as economists call it. But meaning in a more usable language that we need to reflect the full social costs of actions in our decision making. Consider a business, thats operating in a poor country and the poor country has very week environmental standards for example. Is it the quote,’ right of the business’ to pollute a local village even if it’s not against the law? Is it actually in so, some extremist views, I would say, the responsibility of the company to pollute that village because it’s not against the law and it’s the responsibility of the management to maximize the profit of the shareholders? Many of us would think that’s an outlandish view, but it’s actually a view that some free market purists mistakenly take, mistakenly in my view. Or would we say that it’s actually the responsibility of the business not to pollute the village even if it’s not illegal. Because there is a responsibility of, of polluters paying or bearing the social costs of what they do. It’s closely related to an, ancient and very important doctrine in Latin known as Primum non nocere. Primum non nocere in latin means, first do no harm. And a principle of good governance in my view is first do no harm. Even if the law, for whatever reason, allows you to impose costs on others It is a responsibility I would argue,not to do so because our higher responsibility is an ethical responsibility, First, do no harm. Don’t try to find every loophole or every escape valve that allows for pollution for imposing costs  for destroying other species, destroying habitat. Because it is allowed because a company can make money from it. Finally I would say good governance includes in a general sense a commitment to sustainable development. A government that says after the STPs are elaborated. We don’t care. That’s not our agenda. That’s just the United Nation’s agenda, is an example of bad governance, if such an event happens. Governments have a responsibility to the planetary needs. National governments have a responsibility to the planet. It’s not good enough in an interconnected world, it’s not feasible, it’s not viable in an int, interconnected world, for politicians to say, I’m locally elected, it’s not my responsibility to undertake measures that maybe benefit others, but not my own. I, my own constituents. And so good governance I would also argue is a responsibility towards a sense of universal commitment and universal participation to sustainable development. If one government or another says we’re the only way to organize things you have to follow our constitution, we’re lost, because that will not happen. But if these basic principles of accountability of commitment to sustainable development of transparency, of the polluter pay principle of participation, of Primum non nocere, first do no harm, can be universally adopted in some approximate form, we can make important headway of governments working far more effectively together, and businesses playing a responsible role in their position in the world system.

The Proposal for Sustainable Development Goals- II

Goal-Based Development

The world’s governments have called for sustainable development goals and they are being negotiated in the United Nation’s general assembly. But does it really make a difference? Will a new set of goals somehow help the world to do what it hasn’t yet been able to do? To shift from a business as usual and increasingly dangerous path of economic development to a path of true, sustainable development. Well here, we can look at some evidence, and I think it is pretty powerful evidence. And that is to ask, what have the Millennium Development Goals meant for the world? The UN adopted, in September 2000 in the General Assembly, the Millennium Declaration including the Millennium Development Goals. And as we have talked about it at some length, those eight goals became the centerpiece of the development effort for poor countries around the world. Did they really make a difference? The answer seems to be yes. That there has been a marked acceleration of poverty reduction, disease control and increased access to schooling and infrastructure in the poorest countries of the world, and especially in Africa, as a result of the Millennium Development goals. They helped to organize a global effort. Why do goals matter? I think that the answer has many different aspects to it. First, goals really are critical for social mobilization. The world needs to be oriented in a direction, to fight poverty or to help achieve sustainable development. But if we don’t enunciate for ourselves that that’s important, it’s very hard in our very noisy, desperate, crowded, congested, overwhelmed world to mobilize a direction and a consistency of effort to achieve any of our common purposes. And so, stating the goals helps all over the world, for individuals and for organizations and for governments to say, yes we’ve agreed, that’s a good direction. There’s a second aspect that the MDG showed and that is peer pressure. When the MDGs were adopted by all governments, governments had to show we’re doing something. And even if they were not necessarily so inclined innately or deeply, to take on this effort, by being international goals they knew that progress was going to be reported, or the failure of progress, even worse, was going to be reported. And peer pressures came in where leaders at summit meetings, for example, or at the UN General Assembly, would say, how, how are you doing on the millennium development goals? What steps have you taken, what progress? I saw you didn’t make so much progress these past years. That kind of dynamic has been absolutely real. A third way that goals have mattered is in mobilizing what I’d like to call epistemic communities, or knowledge communities, to be little bit more prosaic about it. Epistemic communities are networks of expertise, knowledge and practice around challenges like growing food or fighting diseases or designing and implementing city plans. And when goals are set, those communities of knowledge and practice come together. I’ve watched how the goal to fight Malaria, for example, has helped to organize the world’s malariologists, that is, the scientists and practitioners who, as a career, and as a life calling, in many cases, have taken on the challenge of fighting malaria. By virtue of having that goal, that community rose up, said, we as a community of expertise and practice, need to do something about it. That’s extremely important because governments by themselves polit, politicians, elected officials certainly do not have the expertise that exists in these epistemic communities to guide action. And these knowledge communities can make critical recommendations of what actually to do. The MDGs mobilized epistemic communities in malaria control, in HIV AIDS, in safe health, in primary education, in access to water, in access to energy. How do I know? I watched it happen and I participated in some of it. When I was a director for, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan, we had the Millennium Projects under his auspices, which mobilized about 250 experts from around the world, of these various epistemic communities, to think through much, in much more detail, how the various millennium development goals could actually be achieved. And finally, goals not only mobilize knowledge networks, but they mobilize stakeholder networks as well. What’s a stakeholder network? By that I mean that if you’re fighting malaria in Ghana or in Tanzania or in Uganda, you need to get around the table community leaders, politicians, Ministry of Health, the scientific community, leading non-governmental organizations. Perhaps church groups that have a major presence and participation in the Public health sector, International organizations, Donor organizations, Foundations. It is a roundtable of constituents that needs to be pooled together. And that kind of multi-stakeholder process is essential for the complex challenges of sustainable development and of the fight against poverty, hunger, and disease, more specifically. That has happened by conscious design in area after area of the millennium development goals. And it is one of the clearest ways that the merest statement of goals, leads to improved outcomes. By bringing together these multi-stakeholder processes. I believe that to summarize all of this no one has ever put it better than President John F Kennedy. 50 years ago, in one of the greatest speeches of the modern presidency, which I will refer to shortly at somewhat greater length, because I think it is a, a, a model, also, for us. But in his famous Peace Speech in June 1963, President Kennedy had a word to say about setting goals, because he was interested, in that speech, in setting a goal of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. President Kennedy said, by defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it. That’s the essence of the importance of goal setting; helping people to see the goals. And by making them more manageable and less remote. By spelling out how they can be achieved, people can be led to move towards it and as President Kennedy said on that occasion, to move irresistibly towards the goals. So, what have been the accomplishments of the Millennium Development goals and what have their, been their major weaknesses. Probably the biggest accomplishments have been in the area of public health. Remember that three out of the eight millennium development goals are about health: reducing child mortality, maternal mortality, and the control of the epidemic, communicable diseases. And in all of those cases, the MDGs have made a very big difference. Why were they so effective in those areas? First, MDGs four, five and six could be stated in terms of specific, quantifiable targets. Reduce under five mortality by two thirds. Reduce maternal mortality by three fourths. You can measure. You can count. You can assess. You can compare outcomes with targeted pathways. And so, the ability to state goals clearly is very, very important. Second, you could make those goals seem more manageable and less remote by saying, here’s how malaria can be fought. Not just out of good will but out of long lasting insecticide treated bed nets. Under the deployment of community health workers. The use of rapid diagnostic tests. The use of Artemis and in combination therapies. In other words. That panoply of technical innovations that underpin a practical path to success. Third, there were specific funding mechanisms attached. Most importantly was the arrival of the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which was agreed in 2001, one year after the MDGs were adopted and put into motion in 2002. Pretty quick turnaround time. No doubt in my mind, my experience, I was there helping in that process, the MDGs made a very big difference to the birth of the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria. And many individual countries, and I’m happy to say the United States the leader among them, also took on national efforts motivated by this new will to solve these problems. The U.S. adopted in 2003 the PEPFAR Program, which was the emergency program of response to AIDS, where the U.S. has put in billions and billions of dollars to the fight against AIDS in Africa. And in 2005, the United States adopted PMI, the President’s Malaria Initiative. Also, motivated by this new public health will to achieve the millennium development goals, and PMI has played a major role alongside the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, in reducing the malaria burden. Finally, the MDG succeeded in those areas because of monitoring, measurement, evaluation and feedback to program design. Now, the MDGs did not work as well in certain other areas. In areas like sanitation the MDGs are lagging behind. There hasn’t been a global fund for clean water and sanitation the same way as there emerged the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and malaria. And where the international funding was not elaborated and increased, where the goals were not made to seem more manageable and less remote, through specific detailed plans of action. Where the epistemic communities did not organize quite as well or where the political leaders were more neglectful, the MDGs tended to lag. Public health, that came very high on the agenda. Education, surprisingly, not quite as high and not as well financed and with not the same dramatic progress as in public health. Agriculture, even a bit further behind, despite some nice words about fighting hunger while progress has been real, the mobilization of global efforts have not been as effective and the real change of, of policies and politics have not been as dramatic as public health. What this shows is that there’s nothing inevitability, nothing inevitable I should say, about stating a goal and having the good results achieved. Stating a goal, helping to make it seem more manageable and less remote, is the first step implementing a plan of action. Taking the feedback is the real, long-term, importance,  of what goals can achieve. And that kind of feedback mechanism is shown here in this very, very simple flow chat. The point that I want to make in this flow chart is that one starts with a set of goals and then with a way to address those goals. Next is to design policies that can implement that program of action. Next is that when the outcomes occur, to measure the feedback, and from the feedback to rethink, adapt the strategies in a continuing loop of policy, feedback, all under the, pressures and the motivation of a set of goals and a set of time tables. Now, when we turn to sustainable development, our agenda is even harder than the millennium development goals. And I can tell you the millennium development goals of fighting extreme poverty is pretty tough and very hard to get results in certain areas. But sustainable development goals will include not only the continuation of the fight against extreme poverty, but also the integration of that goal with several others, including environmental sustainability and social inclusion. So, we’ve got an even more complex set of challenges. And there are at least two aspects of sustainable development that make the problems yet more complicated. First, the natural time horizon for results is longer term. Decarbonizing the energy system is going to be a 30 to 40 year effort, even if we’re moving as fast as we can. Making our cities more resilient is a decade or more. Remember that our roads, our buildings, our power plants have a lifetime of of many decades. We’re often talking about power generation facilities that have a lifespan of 40 or 50 years. And therefore, there’s tremendous inertia in this system and there’s also, therefore, a tremendous need to be able to look forward, not to two years or five years but to 20 years or to 30 years. In setting the kinds of frameworks to actually achieve those ten sustainable development goals or their equivalent. There are two specific tools that will be important for translating SDGs into reality. The first of those tools is called back casting. I’d mentioned it before. Rather than forecasting what’s going to happen in 2040 or 2050, one backcasts to say, in 2050 we need to be in such and such location. We need to have such and such level of greenhouse gas emissions. Now, instead of trying to predict or forecast, we’ll start at our target and then move backwards to say how are we going to get to that target? How are we going to cut emissions by half by 2050? Back casting is quite different from prediction. If you look in the news papers, listen to a stock analyst. They’re, they’re guessing about the future. There not designing the future. Backcasting, even though it sounds backward, is about designing the future. Because it is starting at a future date and then working backward from the future date to the present to say, how can we get from here to there? It is setting that path. The second tool, closely related, is road mapping. Road mapping says, okay, we know where we want to be, we know where we start today. We can see the kind of trajectory. What does that terrain really look like? What are our big challenges? What are our technological barriers to overcome? If we are on a hike, we may have to cross a mountain range. If we are on a pathway of sustainable development, we may have to cross a technological mountain range. We have to get over the hump of intermittency of power. We have to get to power storage, we have to overcome the high costs of certain alternative energy possibilities. We have to pass the mountain range of a grid that connects North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, or connects the Dakotas and the Eastern seaboard of the United States, or the Mojave Desert and the population centers of California. In other words, we also need a road map for passing through difficult terrain. Now, this may seem to some people, especially to those steeped in free market economics, as a kind of planning that is impossible and is contrary to the market process. That is not correct. Why? Because in high technology industries, there is, as a norm of behavior in sophisticated industries, exactly that kind of road mapping taking place. And the most successful of all should be kept clearly in mind, it’s a great example and a great motivator for us. And that is the road mapping of Moore’s law. Remember Moore’s law because Moore’s law has created our world today. It is the information technology principle that the capacity of integrated circuits is doubling roughly every 18 to 24 months. Gordon Moore, who back in the 1960s when he enunciated Moore’s Law, was the CEO of Intel, the leading company in integrated circuits. And he noted at the time that for the past ten years or so, the number of transistors that could be packed into an integrated circuit was doubling roughly every eighteen months to two years. And that was doubling the capacity of, processing, the ability to store and, and, soon to transmit data. And cutting by half the cost of doing that because of the doubling of the capacity, in essence. And Moore, back in 1965 when he enunciated Moore’s Law said, there’s some headway ahead. This could go on another decade or two decades, more doubling, doubling, doubling. And of course that means a tremendous increase of the information capacity of central processing units or storage, or ability to transmit enormous volumes of information. All of that has transformed our world. The powerful point is that Moore’s law has continued roughly for half a century since Gordon Moore first enunciated it, and we’ve had roughly a billion fold improvement in the capacity to process, store and transmit information. And therefore, we live in a world of inter connectedness of information that was unimaginable at the time that Gordon Moore first enunciated this principle. But how was it suc, achieved? How did the industry succeed? Well, part of it was individual brilliance and genius of engineers and scientists. Part of it was the competition in the industry, but part of it was industry-wide road mapping. That’s the conclusion that I wanted to emphasize.  And one of the aspects of that road mapping is a formal process called the international technology road map for semiconductors, where leaders in the industry got together and said, what are our mountain ranges to cross in the future in getting the continuation of Moore’s law. How do we push ahead another two decades of this doubling of capacity of the integrated circuitry every two years? They road mapped the steps that were needed. They did it brilliantly and we know that they did it successfully. And that has transformed our world, but it also should tell the skeptics about looking ahead. It is possible to look ahead, not to know the future, but to plan on how to overcome certain obstacles to think ahead. To be prepared for the problems that will come and to take measures so that one can pass through the mountain passes and get to the next range, the next difficulty, because we know where we want to go in 20, 30 or 40 years. The final point of sustainable development that will be absolutely crucial is that like the millennium development goals, the SDGs will be a multi-stakeholder process. We need engagement across the public sector, the private sector, civil society, individuals and their own motivation, scientists and engineers in academia. In research centers, foundations, this is all a hands on, this is an all hands on effort this is the kind of challenge where humanity from every part of society is going to have to get involved. It may seem fanciful. We don’t want those planetary boundaries staring us in the face. We don’t want these risks coming so intensively and so rapidly, but that’s where we are. And that’s why the speed of action is so important. And why the multi-stakeholder approach, that mobilizes all parts of society, will be so vital. That’s a big round table. It’s a lot of discussion, it’s a lot of harmonization of different approaches. Some for profit, some not for profit. Some basic science, some very applied decision making. Some on the ground in communities all over the world, some training and educating the leaders of the future. But all of these interconnected parts of the global social network will need to be brought together in effective problem solving, decision making and implementation of the sustainable development goals.