The world's population needs a more influential role in its own governance, working closely with elected officials to build a safer future, writes Dr Bronwyn Kelly.
WORLD-RENOWNED economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has recently completed a speaking tour of Australia hosted by the Australia Institute. He’s been expanding on aspects of his new book, The Road to Freedom, in which he shows how neoliberalism promised freedom and prosperity but ended up reducing our freedoms and increasing inequality.
According to Stiglitz, the world is waking up to the failure of neoliberalism and particularly to its most devastating impacts on our chances of achieving a sustainable future on the planet. “We are finally beginning to understand that we are crashing headlong into our planetary boundaries,” he says.
And not a minute too soon, because as Stiglitz also says:
“Time is not on our side. The climate crisis won’t allow us to ignore the way unfettered capitalism [neoliberalism] has pushed us beyond our environmental limits; and the inequality/populism/democratic crisis won’t allow us to ignore how democratic ideals are being torn asunder. The collision of the two represents an especial threat.”
For Stiglitz, climate change and attacks on democracy and freedom – which he says have never been greater in his lifetime – are both existential threats. That they should have risen up simultaneously is a disaster that will speed up extinctions — including our own.
It is indeed a disaster that democracy in America is in tatters, just at the point when the world needs the U.S. and other major powers to take the lead on saving the planet as we have known it in the Holocene. Stiglitz’s response is, “We must adapt. We have no choice.” And he is succinct in stating what that adaptation needs to look like.
He advocates a new form of capitalism that he calls “progressive capitalism”. But in case that sounds oxymoronic, he qualifies it by presenting it as a new type of economy based on social justice principles, by which he means the principles we need to make our democracy work in ways that advance the interests of society as a whole. In short, to fix the climate crisis, we first need better democracy.
This is likely to be as true for Australia as it is for America. Our democracy may not be as degraded as America’s but it isn’t set up to help us achieve a sustainable existence on the planet either. Australians have so little influence and power in their democracy that their votes count almost for naught in elections compared to the buying power of corporate donors to the two major political parties.
And between elections, the voices of everyday Australians continue to count for naught. This arises from the fact that the Australian Constitution accords electors no power after they have voted and therefore no power to counter the influence of lobbyists. In Australia’s form of governance – a constitutional monarchy, not a constitutional democracy – laws are made by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. We are in the same predicament as Americans.
For Stiglitz, the solution is to define what sort of society we want to create and he aspires to the idea that there is a common agenda among the peoples of the world that favours social justice and equality.
Stiglitz believes:
‘...there is broad consensus on many of the key elements of what constitutes a good and decent society and on what kind of economic system supports that society.’
For instance, he assumes that we will form a consensus that a good society ‘must live in harmony with nature’ and ‘allows individuals to flourish and live up to their potential’. This just and fair society of equals would also have an economic system that ‘would encourage people to be honest and empathetic, and foster the ability to cooperate with others’.
This is an evocation of John Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” aligned with Adam Smith’s theory of the moral norms that may be developed by an “impartial spectator”. It suggests that those nations that can use democracy well (or at least better) can establish economic transformations that will fairly and safely overcome the depredations imposed by 40 years of neoliberalism, perhaps just in time to avert the worst of climate change and war.
What Stiglitz doesn’t do, though, is provide more than a glancing overview of what might be necessary to organise society and our democratic processes to make the shift from neoliberalism to the economic arrangements that will support a sustainable existence for humans on the planet with the levels of wellbeing and security that we will all need in the face of those aspects of climate change that we are already too late to avoid.
Life is likely to get worse for most of us before it gets better, but it is more likely to start getting better sooner if we consider democratic reform as the prerequisite to reversing the damaging trends of our recent history. This includes stopping what we can in planetary heating and stopping the wars that are a large contributor to climate change.
Because military emissions contribute huge amounts of greenhouse gases to our atmosphere, there is no possibility that climate change can be stopped without large-scale disarmament across the world. And there is no possibility that wars can be stopped without worldwide democratic reform.
There is a sequence to success against the perils of war and climate change and it starts with acknowledging that the peoples of the world need to be empowered to play a far more effective and influential role in their own governance and to use that power to work more closely with those they elect to describe the society and future they want and build a plan of the safe paths towards it.
Australia is in a position to demonstrate how that can be done. Our democracy, such as it is, is not yet so degraded that we have reached the point where we cannot agree on the future we want. And our institutions – particularly in civil society and universities – are not (yet) so starved of funds that they have neither the skills nor capacity to help Australians work together to stop climate change and war before time runs out.
We can still organise ourselves to bring influence to bear on governments. However, there is resistance and a big skill deficit in respectful community engagement in the Federal Government and public service.
This is where the National Integrated Planning and Reporting process developed recently for use by all Australians in charting a safe course to a better future comes into play. This fully open, community-driven, long-term national planning process is helping Australians to use their democracy better to gather the speed we need to stop climate change and war before time runs out, and to begin the process of building the better society that we believe we can achieve.
It’s helping Australians build a fully inclusive, coherent plan of safe paths towards a sustainable future on the planet. The plan is called Australia Together and issue 8 has just been released.
Australia’s governments aren’t planning for a better future. But Australians can. Find out more about Australia Together and how to become involved here.
Dr Bronwyn Kelly is the Founder of Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP). She specialises in long-term integrated planning for Australia’s society, environment, economy and democracy, and in systems of governance for nation-states.
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