Grappling with power imbalances

[Celerity]

In a world of interlocking crises, Jayati Ghosh finds an antidote to despair in the potential of popular mobilisation for a new eco-social contract.

https://socialeurope.eu/grappling-with-power-imbalances



We are living in a world fractured in many ways, facing varied but inter-related and increasingly severe crises which are now reinforcing one another. Yet serious global leadership is lacking: most governments seem obsessed with short-term measures to deal with very specific national concerns, rather than co-operation and engaging with substantive strategies to tackle the looming existential threats to humanity.

The inertia, clunkiness and simple inability to cope of the multilateral institutions set up in the mid-20th century (after another period of global crisis) is now painfully apparent. Even more recent international initiatives to deal with global problems, such as the Conference of Parties (COP) addressing climate change, which is about to have its 27th meeting in Egypt, seem to be failing to deliver any significant decisions or breakthroughs—despite the urgency and the necessity that they do so.

All this is enough to reduce many to despair. But instead we need to think about why governments persist in clearly disastrous policy choices and whose interests those choices serve. In particular, we need to recognise the power imbalances, globally and within countries, which are reinforcing what may otherwise appear to be socially irrational and unjust policies. Only then will it be possible to force any real change.

Important recognition

There is some evidence that this is now more widely recognised, even in international policy discussions. A recent report from the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development makes this critical question—the need to address power imbalances—clear in its very title, Crises of Inequality: Shifting Power for a New Eco-social Contract. The analysis begins with the important recognition that the current explosion of extreme inequalities, environmental destruction and associated increased vulnerability to crises of different kinds are not the result of ‘flaws’ in our economic system—but stem directly from it.

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