SAFAD Annual Seminar
University of Cranfield
Thursday 6 May 2010
Development: What It Should Mean
Crispin Tickell
1. I expect that you at Cranfield know better than most what
“development” could and should mean. At the same time “development”
has become a cover word for a rich variety of meanings.
2. The uses to which SAFAD puts the word are above all practical: to
help reduce poverty; to provide volunteers for work in doing so; and to
entrench a common ethos of social and environmental responsibility
within Britain and beyond.
3. These are admirable aims, and in the days when I was personally
involved I fully shared them. More than 20 years ago I was the
Permanent Secretary of the Overseas Development Administration, now
the Department for International Development. At that time I visited at
least three of the main countries in which you work. Between 1994 and
2000 I chaired the Government Panel on Sustainable Development with
the same broad aims. In the international vocabulary “sustainability”
gradually replaced “development” but the best interpretation for both was
once defined on the BBC as “treating the Earth as if we intended to stay”.
4. One of the underlying development assumptions for many economists
was that industrialization in one form or another should be the model for
all. Hence the much used, and essentially artificial, distinction between
“developed”, “developing”, “under-developed” and even “over-developed”
countries. In my view this is fundamentally flawed.
5. In my days at the Overseas Development Administration, I adopted a
different approach:
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One way was to work out programmes of help for countries
according to their specific geographical and other
circumstances. The principle was to help them to help
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themselves, and make best use of their own resources.
We avoided any application of universal criteria. In other
words we aimed for what we might call "appropriate
development" (the very phrase used in SAFAD).
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Another was to bring in environmental impact assessments
of all projects to know what was feasible and beneficial
over the long as well as short term.
6. Let us now look at the bigger picture. I think we must recognize
that the current situation of our society is unique. Other societies and
civilizations have collapsed before, for environmental and other reasons,
but the circumstances of today are new. They go back to the beginning
of the industrial revolution some 250 years ago.
7. In September 2009 the magazine Nature published an article by
Johan Rockstrom and others identifying nine scientific stops or boundaries
which human would cross at their peril. Three had already been crossed:
climate change; loss of biodiversity; and interference with nitrogen and
phosphorus levels. The other six were: atmospheric ozone depletion;
ocean acidification; use of fresh water; changes in land use; chemical
pollution; and atmospheric aerosol loading.
8. But these stops, however important, are only part of the story.
are some others:
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Human proliferation: one animal species out of control;
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Degradation of land, consumption of often irreplaceable
resources, accumulation of wastes;
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Dependence on energy from diminishing stocks of fossil
fuels, whose combustion is doing increasing damage to
the atmosphere;
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Destabilization of climate world wide so far with unknown
results, including sea level rise and increasing food insecurity;
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Following on from that, changes in the distribution of water,
and pollution of both salt and fresh water;
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Destruction of other species and damage to ecosystems,
also with unknown results, especially for human health.
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9. These factors, together and separately, affect everything we do, and
above all why we do it. We live in a consumer society, and thinking
differently means thinking about consumerism and the role of markets.
10.
What are my priorities?
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First we must recognize that whatever you may hear from
some politicians, there is no such thing as a free market,
and never has been. All markets operate within rules,
whether explicit or implicit, which together constitute a
framework which, if it is any good, should be in the public
interest and to the public good;
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We have to rethink a lot of economics: how we measure
wealth, welfare and the health of the human condition.
At present we continue to fail to bring in externalities and
true costs in our system of measurement. As has been
well said, markets are marvellous at fixing prices but
incapable of recognizing costs. The shortcomings of
“growth”, GDP/GNP etc are at last being recognized,
together with the artificiality of much cost benefit analysis;
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New efforts are being made to establish new more rational
systems of measurement: for example:
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the Human Development Index;
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the work of the New Economics Foundation;
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the Commission established by President Sarkozy
and chaired by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen
whose recently published report suggested new
methodologies.
11. The importance of the environment is critical in all aspects of
progress, change and development. First we should recognize that the
economy is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. The
damage we are now doing to the Earth requires a profound change of
mind. Already some of the message is coming through from
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governments, universities, corporations and local communities. The
focus has been on climate change but climate change has to be seen in
the broadest context:
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We have the Fourth Assessment of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of 2007
which, although criticized on one or two details, well
lays out the science;
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We have the Stern Review of the same year, and
subsequent work on the social and economic impacts;
and of course Al Gore in his book and film
“An Inconvenient Truth”;
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There was the report of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) announced in March
last year which laid out the foundations of what was
called a Global Green New Deal.
12. It was against this background that the conference on climate
change (COP 15) took place in Copenhagen last December. The results
were, as everyone knows, disappointing, although it was not the disaster
it has sometimes been portrayed. Some positive measures have already
come out of it. An important lesson from it is the difficulty in persuading
the whole international community to agree to a wide variety of politically
difficult commitments and actions. One of the lessons we may draw is
the need for what has been called plurality of agreements, in other words
groups of countries which can agree among themselves on certain
measures, and later try to fit them within a global famework.
13. The proposals for a Global Green New Deal, which has since been
discussed among the G20 leaders, is a good example. This brought out
the practical implications of what development could and should mean:
to stimulate economic recovery, create employment, reduce poverty, and
lessen dependency on fossil fuels, in short to tackle environmental
degradation of all kinds. According to an article in Nature of 8 April, the
G20 account for two-thirds of the world’s population, 90% of global
economic activity and at least three-quarters of global greenhouse gas
emissions.
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14. So far the G20 may have failed to deliver on their promises at their
Pittsburgh meeting in September 2009. But the directions they aim to
follow in the future are now clearer than ever. So far as initiatives in
green technology are concerned, the world leaders are now China and
South Korea, and the rest of the world, including the United States and
the European Union, are behind. The emphasis has been on solar, wind,
transport and other renewal energy systems. All governments face a
major responsibility in determining the right incentives and disincentives
within their countries, getting rid of perverse subsidies, and of course in
working so far as possible within a coordinated global framework.
15. Before I conclude I want to mention an enterprise in which I am
involved which brings out the sheer scale of the problems facing the
Earth. In geological terms the Pleistocene epoch of the ice ages was
followed some ten thousand years ago by the Holocene epoch. The
Holocene has been marked by relatively warm conditions in the climate of
our planet. Now it is proposed that the Holocene should be followed by
an Anthropocene epoch to mark the extraordinary changes begun by the
industrial revolution some 250 years ago. These changes were caused by
one animal species - ourselves - which has transformed the condition of
the surface of the Earth. That is where we are today.
16. A final word on SAFAD. One of the most difficult tasks which SAFAD
has undertaken in the past is to persuade the public in general and
individuals in particular of the kind of crisis now facing the world and of
the role that we must all play in doing something about it. I commend
the Global Green New Deal to you as one of the somewhat neglected
papers in this story, and a powerful guide to development in the best
sense of the word. We need to be articulate and sometimes courageous
in persuading people of the nature of the problems we now face, and of
the urgency for corrective action. SAFAD is already playing its part above
all by showing what can be done in practical terms.
17. I am sometimes asked: What’s in it for me, my university, my
business, my society? In the long run the answer is simple. Survival.
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