A New World Order: Grassroots Movements for Global Change
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A NEW WORLD ORDER This book begins by identifying a global problematique, a coincidence of four sustained factors: war, insecurity and militarisation; the persistence of poverty; the denial of human rights; environmental destruction. The conventional policy approaches to these problems are analysed through a rigorous critique of the three main United Nations reports of the 1980s, those of the Brandt, Palme and Brundtland Commissions. Attention is turned from the flawed and partial solutions of these reports to the individuals and organisations involved in policy and action at the grassroots level. Peace and security, human rights, economic development, the environment and human development are all discussed. The author argues that if the root causes of crisis lie in Western scientism, developmentalism and the construct of the nation state, it is only through the success of democratic popular mobilisation that a new world order, based on peace, human dignity and ecological sustainability, can be created. The coherence of the theoretical approach and the range of case-studies and profiles—from the Grameen Bank to the Chipko Movement and Petra Kelly to Amnesty International—should ensure a diverse readership from academics and students of development, the environment, war/peace studies and international relations to those involved in new social movements for change. Paul Ekins has written widely on economics, the environment and development. He is editor of The Living Economy: A New Economics in the Making. He is a Research Fellow at the Department of Economics, Birkbeck College, University of London. A NEW WORLD ORDER Grassroots movements for global change Paul Ekins London and New York First published 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 Paul Ekins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic. mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-98959-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-07115-1 (Print Edition) CONTENTS Foreword vi Acknowlegements viii Introduction 1 1 THE GLOBAL PROBLEMATIQUE 3 The military machine 3 The holocaust of poverty 5 The environmental crisis 7 The denial of human rights 8 2 THE NEED FOR NEW APPROACHES 11 Three UN commissions 11 The Palme Report 12 The Brandt Reports 17 The Brundtland Report 21 Interdependence and sustainable development 24 3 PEACE THROUGH PUBLIC PRESSURE AND REAL SECURITY 29 The power of public opinion 29 From national to global security 40 Conclusion 44 4 IN DEFENCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 45 Women 50 Indigenous peoples 55 Conclusion 59 5 CONTRASTS IN DEVELOPMENT 61 Damming the Narmada 61 v Another Development 68 6 DEVELOPMENT BY PEOPLE 77 The progressive market 87 Conclusion 93 7 ENVIRONMENTAL REGENERATION 95 Damage Limitation 97 Regeneration 103 Reforming consumption 106 Conclusion 110 8 FURTHER ASPECTS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 113 Health 113 Education 122 Housing 125 Spiritual and cultural renewal 130 9 CONCLUSION 135 Appendix 1: the Right Livelihood Award and its recipients, 1980–90 141 Appendix 2: addresses of principal organisations metioned 145 Bibliography 151 Index 159 FOREWORD by Jakob von Uexkull Founder and Chairman of the Right Livelihood Award Today it is easy to be a pessimist. Despite conferences and action plans, many indicators of human welfare are on a downward trend. The global environment continues to deteriorate. The per-capita income of the poorest countries has fallen in recent years. Many ‘expert’ predictions thirty years ago—promising us by now a disease-free world of plenty—can be held up to ridicule. For those so inclined it is also still possible to be an optimist, believing that the next scientific/ technological fix will usher in paradise on earth. Nuclear fission might have developed a few unforeseen problems but nuclear fusion will finally provide energy too cheap to meter. Biotechnology will correct nature’s insufficiencies and genetic engineering will produce a race of healthy, optimistic humans. Past Cassandras can be rubbished for their mistaken predictions and their concerns about limits to growth attributed to ‘misguided, middle-class anxiety’ (The Sunday Times, 13 January 1991). So either nothing can be done—or everything will be all right if we stay on course. But there is a third less complacent but more exciting alternative: like William James, we can be possibilists. To be a possibilist means accepting the very serious diagnosis of the state of our world now agreed on, not just by ‘radicals’ but right up to the top of our international organisations. Mostafa Tolba, Director-General of the United Nations Environmental Programme, simply says that the life-support systems of our planet are collapsing. It means challenging at every turn the Julian Simons of this world who are still ‘disputing the various alarming estimates of tropical deforestation, species extinction, eroding topsoil, paved over farmland and declining fisheries’ (The Guardian, 28 December 1990). But being a possibilist also means rejecting the self-fulfilling pessimism of those who tell us that we must of necessity pollute our environment, poison ourselves and consume the future for the sake of short-term greed and comfort, because such is human nature. This book provides ammunition for possibilists. If the pessimists were right, the work described would be ‘contrary to human nature’. If the optimists were right, it would be irrelevant. But these initiatives are not picturesque niches to escape to in case things go wrong. They are part of another global trend, clearly incompatible with the conventional wisdom of both optimists and pessimists. They force us to make a choice. For you cannot both poison and save the environment, you cannot simultaneously empower the people and the multi-national companies, you cannot combine local self-reliance with the primacy of global ‘free’ trade. The major components of the present order identified by Paul Ekins—scientism, industrial developmentalism and nation-statism—tolerate no other gods. It is easy to believe that we can have the best of all worlds because the dominant system is flexible enough to pay tribute to almost all the ‘alternative’ paths described here. But the gap between theory and practice grows wider daily. The Brundtland Report has been hailed, despite its contradictions, as the most radical document to come out of a grouping consisting of representatives of the global elites. But Mrs Brundtland herself is now working hard to make Norway a vii member of the EC, an entity which stands for much of the short-sighted growthism condemned in her report. When challenged on this point by a Danish MEP, ‘all she replied was that the single market is really a unique opportunity for Norwegian trade and business’ (Notat, Copenhagen, 25 November 1988). The World Bank is another example, as this book describes, of more and more bank-financed ecological horror stories combined with the proliferation of new environmental staff, policies and action plans. The dominant path occupies so much space and absorbs so many resources that alternatives rarely stand a chance. Funding to develop renewable energy resources continues to be heavily squeezed by the old commitments to nuclear power. In the Third World ‘bad aid’ destroys self-sufficiency and thus the basis for ‘good aid’. Quite often the major costs of changing course are not the environmentally sound, less disruptive and much cheaper alternatives, but the costs of ‘counter-development’, i.e. the work needed to block—and sometimes dismantle—the huge, harmful products of bad aid. In many countries, to be seen as an ‘enemy of progress’ is not just a recipe for ridicule but a threat to life. Cultural imperialism has been so successful that valuable indigenous initiatives in the South are often completely blocked unless they have been recognised in the North. That is why the Right Livelihood Award (‘the Alternative Nobel Prize’) was established—to provide an alternative to all those honours which only recognise what falls within the paradigm of the modern Western worldview. Also, if our most important needs today are not new technological fixes but new social values and institutions, making better use of knowledge we already have, then these priorities need to be reflected in what our society honours and supports. Professor Hans-Peter Dürr, one of the Right Livelihood Award recipients profiled in this book, has often remarked on the very different possibilities of obtaining funding for his various activities. While his work on elementary particle physics has never been short of money—often from sources which understand very little or nothing of what he is doing—his peace research and environmental and social innovation work have always been starved of funds. For years it has been clear that most people, even in the rich countries, would prefer a ‘greener’, gentler world, want greater control over their lives, and fairness for the poor and future generations. But how do we get there? From the ‘experts’, little can be expected. Futurists Joseph Coates and Jennifer Jarratt in a recent study of the work of major futurists conclude that Potential impacts of the greenhouse effect and other global environmental problems are not given detailed attention.