simon zadek

Tomorrow’s history is rarely created by extraordinary moments, it is merely punctuated by them.

Copenhagen will be seen as a failure of vision, leadership, and compassion. The Copenhagen Accord, ‘noted’ in extra time at COP15, will be stuck with the Sudanese’s naming as a “suicide pact”. And President’s Obama, Hu and many others, however they speak to their domestic constituencies, will have been party to this failed attempt to strike an ambitious deal.

Tomorrow’s history, i suspect, will profoundly disagree with this finger pointing diagnosis.

Studied history will point to Copenhagen as the last serious attempt to use 20th century techniques to arrange our 21st century affairs. Seeking consensus between 193 sovereign states through a zero-sum negotiation process was always going to be a fool’s errand. It failed because it handed exclusive rights to national governments, leaving 99% of the energy of business, civil society, cities, and the youth (just to same a few) as frustrated bystanders (see them in my Walk through Babylon). It failed because it sought to secure a “one for all, and all for one” consensus, unworkable even in the relatively simple world of trade. It failed, finally, because of its use of old style negotiation techniques where we have learnt so much from the “deliberative” approaches of communities and business in envisioning change and creating unlikely pathways to achieving it.

For Copenhagen to serve us well, we must learn from it.

It has failed because our global commons can no longer be managed by top-down, government-led, compliance focused, publicly-funded agreements between nations. Presidents and prime ministers, along with legions of negotiators, have been complicit in this by playing, frankly, their well-defined allotted roles in appealing to their domestic political constituencies (accountability) and in seeking re-election (whether in democracies or not). Who can blame folks for doing what we ask them to do, even if in the last hours we demand that they shift gear and behave as if they were chosen to lead in saving the global commons (which they were decidedly not).

Two things need to, and can happen now.

The first of course is to deal with climate with the right people where the action is. Whilst not wishing to trivialize today’s pain, we can deal with climate more effectively by catalyzing ambitious national action leveraged with international co-operation. We can get a better global deal, but only once nation’s have whetted their appetite for low carbon growth and development through action, not theory. This is not, as i have repeatedly argued, downgrading expectations, but upgrading them by leveraging where the real energy for change lies, and then uploading the results into a far smarter global deal going forward ( see my Revising Plan A).

Second concerns our global governance arrangements. Reforming global governance has been an esoteric topic for many years pursued by policy analysts, academics and international bureaucrats offering unintelligible diagnostics and incremental and largely technocratic recommendations. Copenhagen, and its potentially ghastly implications, makes this obscurity unacceptable. In the last two decades we have in fact already invented far more effective ways to do business internationally, from how we do global health through public private partnerships to building the hadron collider in CERN (it works now, but the amazing thing about it is how the global scientific and political community made it happen, not merely that it is ‘about the origins of everything’). We do not need another Commission made up of those who have presided over our failing global institutions, we need fresh blood and urgency in surfacing today’s institutional innovations and working out how to make these work in practice.

COP15’s real legacy.

Coming back, then, to climate. We should surely be disappointed by the final deal. But we are now poised to have to invent an alternative pathway in moving forward. John Maynard Keynes, the most extraordinary 20th century economist, argued that ‘our challenge is not to invent new ideas, but rather to let go of old ones’. Well, if he was right, and i suspect he was, then COP15’s greatest contribution to the public good may be to bury, once and for all, our outmoded ways of doing global governance. Such an achievement, whilst sad to contemplate today, may turn out in tomorrow’s history to be an extraodinarily important legacy that served us and our children well in decades to come.

My piece, ‘Revising Plan A’, published a couple of weeks ago first on OpenDemocracy.net and then on ChinaDialogue.net, has generated some heated responses, covered now on various forums including ChinaDaily.com. With 48 hours to go before the end of the Copenhagen talks, i thought it relevant to offer a couple of reflections based on my original argument and the current situation.

My argument, in a nutshell, was that any top-down multilateral agreement relying for success on sovereign abatement commitments and international public finance funding credibly verified outcomes is doomed to failure. Instead, i argued, we need to rely on the power of national interests, supported where possible by international co-operation. Of the many national interests that might exist, I argued, growth and development comes top on everyone’s list, so ‘low carbon growth and development’ should and will be the touchstone of success in climate management.

Respondents to my argument (which can be read through the linked articles) told me that I should not be so pessimistic, that some international agreements worked, and that national self-interest would not do the job alone (apologies if i have missed the breadth and nuance of the arguments).

Being right is not the point, but getting it right most definitely is.

If Plan A was indeed a conventionally-understood strong deal in Copenhagen, then we have underachieved. If this was the only way to save us from ecological meltdown, then such underachievement is indeed a disaster unfolding. My take is different: first, we will under-achieve in conventionally understood terms (too little legally binding commitment, too little public money); second, we are not doomed if we catalyze self-interested action, raising its timely ambition through international support. India’s solar drive, China’s extensive investments in low carbon growth, Europe’s carbon trading framework, and Brazil’s action on deforestation are all unilateral moves that work better through international co-operation.

My point is not that national, self-interested actions are instead of, but rather than that they are the heartland of real change. Hence the article’s title ‘Revising Plan A’. They might be effectively catalyzed by international action, but they are also in danger of being distracted by them, especially in weaker countries which could end up with yet another generation of rent-seekers rather than wealth creators.

Driving low carbon growth and development does require action on adaptation, which does require public as well as private money, and in some cases international public finance. Technology transfer is not going to be enhanced through a global climate deal, but does have to be facilitated through technology and country(ies) specific deals. Reducing deforestation and land use changes (REDD+) is hugely important, and will benefit from a strong international component, but even here money will flow mainly bilaterally when push comes to shove.

So far from being pessimistic, I am wildly optimistic. The difference is that i am looking somewhere else for my optimism, where real communities, domestic politics, national government actions, and private money rule the day. One last thing: a stronger global deal can be induced through action on the ground. That means that we need a political agreement now that does not ‘freeze’ the deal, then we need 1,000 days of intensive nation-level action to show how this stuff can work at scale. Then we can re-visit the deal and I warrant the appetite for more and stronger will be greater as Chinese, US, European and Indian economic interests converge on not just the logic but the practice of low carbon economics.