“It’s a question of fairness,” Barroso argues, “It is time for the financial sector to make a contribution back to society”, pointing out that tax payers have contributed more than €4,000bn in guarantees to the banking sector to support it through the crisis. Now is the time, he argues, for the industry to repay its debt. OccupyWallStreet, the self-proclaimed “leaderless resistance movement” is at one with Barroso in asserting their common cause, “that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%”. Moreover, whilst Barosso might normally claim the high ground in being a pragmatic, policy-focused sort of guy, he (and others) should listen carefully to, and might just learn from, the movement’s policy specifics.

OccupyWallStreet’s proposed list of eight demands is a work-in-progress developed through  the best ‘open innovation’ process that money can’t buy. Prudent banking is number one on the list, the separation of investment and commercial banking functions to protect retail, that is your and my, deposits. Remove the angry language, and the proposal is essentially the  same as those advocated by the UK’s Independent Comission on Banking, reported recently in the ‘Vickers Report’. Prosecuting those in the investment community who broke the law comes in number two, hardly a radical view in theory, although in practice more of challenge than one might like as banks seek to do backroom deals to settle mortgage mis-selling.

Reversing the US Supreme Court decision allowing businesses to contribute as much as they want to political campaigns comes in number three (corporate influence is also the topic of proposals six and seven). Again, policies in this area are hardly a brain teaser for anyone concerned with the corporate capture of the US political process. Little England, albeit at a wee scale, increasingly suffers from the same affliction, with the recent Bureau of Journalism report revealing the dominance of The City in the roll-call of Conservative Party donors.

Fulfilling the wishes of the investment community’s greatest guru, Warren Buffett, is the so-called ‘anti-capitalist’s’ fourth demand. Demanded here is a Buffett Rule that rich individuals and corporations pay as much tax as Joe Worker, not the current business-as-usual as recent research has highlighted. The fifth demand is for reform of the regulator of the financial market, the Securities Exchange Commission, to reduce bias, political interference, conflicts of interest and to ensure adequate competencies and policy instruments. Although perhaps a little loosely framed, it would be hard for any self-respecting investor, let alone a correct-thinking politician or a civil activist, wanting anything less or different.

And the eighth and final demand is for the corporation’s right to be treated as a ‘person’ in the eyes of the law to be repudiated, a long-standing concern of civil activists regarding what they see as the misuse by business of the US Constitution (those wanting to understand this better to see the relevant section of the film, The Corporation, offered here courtesy of YouTube).

Anyone concerned with responsible business and sustainability should take note of these demands. The bottom line is that they make a lot of sense, whilst lacking the slickness of corporate or Oxfam-style branding, language and graphics. Resetting the behavior of the financial community, effective regulatory oversight, separation of the political process from corporate interests, and the application of the law of the land, are hardly contentious propositions. In fact,  they are pre-requisites to advancing private investment in the transition to a sustainable economy and public policies that reward innovation and leadership rather than protecting incumbent businesses.

So who is listening to the folks camping out in downtown Manhatten. Barroso, one suspects, is not focused on these demands, although he should be as Europe struggles to protect itself from traders seeking to short not just its debt but its very future.  President Obama, likewise, should call out the root cause of his shortcomings at the polls, but is otherwise engaged in retaining Wall Street support for his re-election campaign. Ed Miliband, the UK’s Labour Party leader, should be interested, but in seeking to position himself in the centre, he might ironically see the eight point proposals as too-close-for-comfort to his conference speech on ‘asset stripping’ businesses. France’s President Sarkozy has championed some interesting causes, including the financial transaction tax in his role as chair of the G20, but his political star may in any case be in the acendency.  And the more recently, empowered BRICS leadership, Hu, Putin, Rousseff, Singh and Zuma, appear to have little appetite for any fundamental reform agenda of either financial markets or the international corporate community at a time when their nations’ future dominance of these economic arenas seems increasingly assured.

And what of us, informed and active, democracy-loving citizens, surely we are the ultimate global driver for change. Angry perhaps, but citizens are not yet joined at the hip in sufficient number with an agenda to match. And so far, no serious political alternative has emerged to harness such anger at the ballot box, to provide democracy’s way of asserting Darwin’s edict that only the fittest, most able to go the long distance, should survive. Time will tell if such a political process will emerge, democratic or otherwise.

OccupyWallStreet, meanwhile, and its emergent look-a-likes in other countries, should be seen as an innovation hub, working at the critical upstream nexus of politics and economics. Far from ridiculing and rejecting either its open process or its trenchant policy recommendations, progressive business and political leaders should welcome both as investments in tomorrow’s sustainable economy.

The focus on climate finance has delivered practical results, including significant financing for REDD+, funds associated with carbon markets, and additional international public financing for adaptation. Although falling short of what is needed, these results are tangible and significant. Over time, however, practice on the ground has progressed largely independently of either climate finance or the associated principles of responsibility and accountability. Ambitious renewables programmes from Morocco to China and South Africa, and broader green growth strategies from South Korea to Brazil exemplify how green growth and development are becoming the lens through which our responses to climate change are, and need to be framed, designed and implemented. Such a reframing remains fundamentally about how to advance mitigation and adaptation rapidly and effectively. But the lens shift is more than new words to describe old needs and solutions.

Economics, rather than just financing, is the crucial difference. Much of the work done to date on ‘low carbon growth plans’, for example, remains centrally about least cost mitigation and adaptation, how to avoid or solve a problem as cost-effectively as possible. Such plans, with notable exceptions, do not take account of the potential and additional challenges associated with the economic dynamics of investing in green. Policy debate about mitigation is rarely placed within a broader economic analysis, and so remains the preserve in most instances of ministries responsible for the environment, energy and finance.

Reframing the conversation towards green growth and development is more than a change in words, opening up new financing opportunities, because of the economic and broader policy objectives that are addressed as a result. Energy security concerns in Europe make attractive the potential for tapping renewables generation in Morocco, and so impacts its openness to investing in, and paying a premium for such energy. Economic growth and related employment gains from localising parts of the global value chain in renewables – manufacturing, servicing and in some instances research and development – underpins policy-led initiatives from Ontario to South Africa, and an openness to put public funds on the table, often with the prospect of seeing much of it return through increased tax revenues from the resulting increased economic activity. Concessionary finance, especially debt, must be made available for mitigation not only from climate-focused funds, but those focused on export and investment promotion where industrial joint venture opportunities exist, as they increasingly do.

Finance to address “only” climate will likely be a moderate proportion of the funds needed and available to pay for the transition of economies onto low carbon trajectories. Reality on the ground is that finance for green growth and development is already, and will continue to come in many shapes and forms, from reconfigured international development assistance through to profit-hungry private equity. That does not mean that economic opportunities, and associated national self-interest, will always and everywhere exist. And negative impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities will remain a core issue that needs to be addressed with new public monies from the international community. But even in such cases, specialised climate finance is so far playing a relatively small, remedial role, and the challenge and opportunity is to leverage what is out there to better effect. That is, to remain within a ‘climate finance’ paradigm is self-limiting given what needs to happen on the ground and starts emerging in some countries’ programmes, and given what could happen if such cases were leveraged through replication elsewhere.

The opportunity and need is to allow for innovations in financing that take advantage of national self-interest and international co-operation within the framework of international accountability that underlies the negotiations. Treating them as alternatives, or worse still as mutually exclusive, narrows the scope for action and reduces the potential of the negotiations to advance change on the ground.
Advancing such an approach in practice could be helped by three steps. Firstly, exemplary national actions need to be better understood, especially the pathways along which such ambitious, nationally-led initiatives, leveraging international co-operation are being built in practice. Several initiatives such as the World Economic Forum’s Critical Mass initiative, are already active in this learning space, but more is needed. Secondly, is to determine how such initiatives are already, and can best be supported by mechanisms being designed through the climate negotiations. And thirdly, in rapidly maturing the work on low carbon plans to reflect more fully the economic opportunities and dynamics and the associated financing opportunities, ensuring a focus on how best to achieve maximum leverage from scarce public resources.

Davos is a spectacle to behold, always threatening to reflect our worst Darwinian inclinations. Copenhagen, on the other hand, was meant to reflect humans at their best, open to collaboration for the public good. And yes, you have guessed it (you smart, cosmopolitan blog readers), life has its way of inverting the expected. Copenhagen actually demonstrated humans’ capacity to be petty, narrow-minded, and deeply tribal. far from being focused on the public good, it was focused on the private gain of vested interests largely not in the room, whether they were businesses, parochial politicians or even short-sighted populations of citizens who should have known better.

And Davos…well it is what it says on the tin, in one moment abstracted from any sense of reality, at another exhibiting the human ego at its most profoundly revolting. Yet it somehow unlocks the participants’ passion, innovation and a will to imagine and take risks. In muddling up the public good with private gain, it evokes much of what is amazing about our species and without doubt explains how we have survived to date (for better and worse). It is in Davos that investors in green technology have the stage,

yes aching for public subsidy if they can get it, but in truth knowing that they will fund the low carbon economy if it is going to happen. It is in Davos that the Chinese business community schmoozes with Western Governments and vice versa. It is on these snowy hills that more irreverent potential is discussed than could be dreamed of in any formal multilateral procedure.

Yes, a Managing Director of the World Bank was right when she reminded us at Davos that the farmers we were discussing were not in the room. And who knows what complex political equation Strauss Kahn from the IMF was making when he supported Soros’s proposal to unlock capital to fund climate management. And it is slightly crazy making when Sarkozy proposes to rewrite the rules of capitalism (better than his Italian counterpart though), and it makes you wonder when Davos declared itself ‘green‘ on the back of a half-hearted labelling of carbon-spewing, attending SUVs. But frankly such weaknesses are chicken-feed when compared to the cynical nonsense that stalked the corridors of the Bella Center in Copenhagen just weeks before.

You may well despair, and I might join you for an accompanying drink when you do, but Davos is more about our future than Copenhagen will ever be in bringing more of the right people to the table, and providing more opportunities for the deal making that is needed to safeguard our children and theirs in turn. We can bemoan the elitism, the false dawns too often announced and then neglected forever more, and the fly-in humbug of much that is said and neither meant nor even heard. But through this there is an authenticity in the demonstration of real power, truly extraordinary wealth, unbelievable innovators (for whatever reason and end), and a will to grasp the world as it is and shape it into the future. The tens of thousands leaving Copenhagen were angry, burnt out, and deeply exhausted. Those leaving Davos will be tired, often confused, but in the main better informed, connected and able and willing to act.

Have I drunk the Davos Kool Aid for too long to have any remaining sense? Well maybe, self-diagnosis is not humankind’s speciality, far from it, and I am no exception to the rule. Certainly Davos exhibits in technicolor more than it resolves what I called in an earlier blog this week sustainability’s very own Valley of Death, in a nutshell our ‘struggle to innovate at scale in a timely way in addressing the world’s toughest problems‘. But its more likely that the solutions lie lurking beneath the canapes at Davos than the decrepit cheese sandwiches of Copenhagen if only because the folks in the former are actually treated with respect, treat each other in the main with respect, and have a will to live rather than just survive.

Billions of words, quite literally, will be spoken and even on occasion heard about these all-important topics. But are they an ‘all-sorts’ collection, or do they provide the backdrop to an X-ray of our current needs and options.

It is less than 600 hours since we passed into this second decade of the new millennium, and we are already struggling to keep up with momentary events. We have witnessed yet another horror in Haiti and, despite the inevitable shortfalls, a clear show of all that is good in our international community, compassion and response. And we have seen the spectacle of American democracy punish Obama through the ballot box, which could drive him to embrace a more populist economics, and an unseemly parochial politics, as witnessed already in Clinton’s pronouncement on internet freedom in support of Google’s tangle with the Chinese. And on that topic, we have seen China emerge from Copenhagen in a very different frame of mind, less inclined to pursue its designed humility of recent decades, and more willing to exercise their muscle by laying down the law, certainly their own, and increasingly the international rules of the game.

Davos 2010 is framed in no small part by the results of our collective efforts since its predecessor. Davos in January 2009 was a conversation about two fundamental needs, to drive economic recovery through strong fiscal stimulus and a guided, rescued financial sector, and to secure a strong global climate deal in Copenhagen.

Positively, the global economy did not crash and appears now to be on the mend, largely because of China’s economic resilience and our collective fiscal stimulus. Also, the financial sector did not crash, and much of it is now emerging from its own Y2K in rude health, indeed some would say too rude by half. The good news is that the greatest recession in history has, we hope, done its worst, and we are alive to tell the tale.

Copenhagen was a mess, and the outcome less than most desired or, for climate deniers and carbon profiteers, feared. Positively, however, low carbon economics did move into the mainstream. There is no doubt that China, India and Brazil understand that if their time has indeed come it will have to be a ‘low carbon moment’, and they are readying themselves, more than most of the North Atlantic incumbents, to win in this arena come what may.

The ultimate fall-out from the events of 2009 is yet to come. On the economy, the West has now acquired a debt hangover of almost unimaginable proportions that could go down in history as the pivot on which global economics finally swung east and southwards. On climate, it seems we are heading for a 3-4 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures, a cause for huge concern unless the emerging scandals around the IPCC wrongly convince us all that it was all a self-serving fuss about nothing. Crucial is how we pick up the pieces of last year’s exhausting melodrama, which brings us to the topic of governance.

The last 12 months has deprived us of any remaining trust in our collective ability to do the right thing or to get it right in practice. Yes, we saved the bankers from their own folly, but once rescued they have returned to their old ways. And yes, the huge fiscal stimulus did help, but in so doing we have mortgaged our children’s futures, and done nothing to prevent a rerun of the housing and consumer booms that helped to cause the problem in the first place. And on climate, we must hope that self-interested national economics drives us along a low carbon growth pathway because the fractured international relations emerging from Copenhagen will not provide the framework for more conscious collective action in the future.

Davos 2010 should be about reinventing global governance. Our experience of Doha (remember Doha?) and Copenhagen (remember this even if you want to forget it) say it as it is – our way of handling international affairs is simply bust. We have to fix our approach to climate and trade, but also a ton of other cross-border stuff from energy security to arms proliferation and terrorism. The UN, frankly, hardly passes the ‘laugh test’ these days, the G8 is well past its sell-by date and the G20, MEF and now BASIC remain at this stage immature manifestations of our governance problems rather than emergent approaches to solving them.

To give due where it is warranted, the WEF has recognised that the real agenda is about global governance in launching a major initiative at Davos 2009 entitled the ‘Global Redesign Initiative’. This was the frame for its Dubai-hosted ‘Global Agenda Councils’ meeting last November, and in fact will be softly humming (hovering up knowledge and insights) in the background throughout the predictably chaotic discussions on the Magic Mountain this month.

Global governance is of course not just about what happens globally, in fact quite the reverse. We must all be concerned that the US courts appear intent on strengthening the corporate lobby, just as deepening restrictions in China reinforce unhelpful, populist nationalism. National developments profoundly impact our capacity to build effective international governance.

Crucially, we have to face up the intimate relationship between effective global governance, and enabling corporate governance. Despite brave attempts (by collective initiatives like CERES and private initiatives such as the Al Gore-Chaired Generation Investment Management, our efforts to balance the public good with private rights have been less then effective. In the main, they have been undermined by the narrow, Anglo-Saxon fiduciary approach that privileges private shareholders whose representatives, fund managers, have in the main little interest in the real economy let alone our future. Let us not forget that it is the corporate community in the US, driven by short-termism embedded in their interpretation of fiduciary accountability, that more than any other driver has undermined that nation’s capacity to act with others internationally on climate change.

Climate change and financial regulation, definite topics for Davos 2010, need to be seen as two sides of the same coin, and that coin can be best understood as being about economic not ‘global’ or even national governance per se. Our greatest challenge in addressing climate change is to channel finances into low carbon growth and development. Although we might well need some lubricating public funds for this, the overwhelming proportion needs to come from private sources, as Project Catalyst and others have pointed out. The greatest impediment to such an investment in our very survival is the short-termism of the bulk of the international investment community that leads them to discount the value of a future economy and so rationalise their unwillingness to invest our funds according to our undoubted needs.

Economic ownership must be part of the global governance agenda, and not just because of the unruly behaviour of Messrs Putin and Chavez. ‘Corporate responsibility’ has squeezed some additional public value from today’s dominant economic model, certainly. And public policies can make a difference when they can get to the statute books and be effectively implemented, probably more so in China today than in the US and maybe even Europe. But its not enough, and in the cases of climate and capital markets, way too little too late. Yet today’s re-emerging force of public ownership, through sovereign wealth funds, state-owned enterprises, public-private partnerships and renationalisation, remains a desperately immature alternative that will not contribute to a new social contract without more open minds, serious design innovation and effective political engagement. We do not want to go backwards towards a 20^th Century model of public ownership. But today’s approach will not do, and we need to build new forms of capital ownership and stewardship that secure the public interest and private rights at an historic time that requires unprecedented innovation in governance and economy.

Davos 2010 should be about global governance, with a focus on its national and corporate underpinnings. It should see Copenhagen for what it was, not a disaster but the clearest possible signal of the need for radical change in how we organise our affairs. Similarly, financial regulation should not be seen as an organ of retribution, but a more fundamental move to reassess the nature of capital ownership and how associated power is exercised. Resurging public ownership and the up-swelling of all forms of public-private partnerships should be welcomed as the most important experimentation in organising our economic affairs since Hayek’s disciples won the ideological battle of the 1970s and thereby changed our lives and our understanding of ourselves.