10 October 2024 – Why are you involved with The Club of Rome?
I’m honoured to be a member of The Club of Rome. It’s a community of people who are dedicated to changing our world for the better. A community that puts people and planet at the heart of their systems thinking. So, it is an amazing peer group, and I look forward to working with many of those that I haven’t met to date.
What does a just transition look like for workers around the world and does systems thinking have a role to play in that?
Just transition is a commitment to ensuring that as we attempt nothing short of a new industrial revolution, we fairly transition workers in vulnerable industries out with three guarantees: a yearly pension support for older workers who can retire or for those bridging retirement age by retiring a little early, reskilling support for younger workers with income support and redeployment and investment in community renewal while transitioning the whole community into new energy and industrial settings.
If we look after the interests of workers – if government, communities and employers take responsibility for community renewal, then new industries can be co-located with clean energy and provide stability and growth into the future. Done well, this is systems thinking at its best. It is about integrating planning commitment to rights and skilling for workers, to redeployment in new industries and the associated social licence.
One of the most difficult things in our world today is the question of social licence. People have lost trust in all institutions after repeated failures of the top-down approach to support fair transitions. People are not just lacking in trust, they are oppositional. If you take a different approach, if you start with a systems approach that says we are going to co-create the future and plan jointly, we are going to look towards committing to a new generation of social licence where just transition is at its heart, you establish that commitment from workers and communities right at the outset. This is good for both the employees and their communities and also good for project managers and those investing in the project – there is no opposition or delays to execution of plans.
A new generation of social licence is particularly important for indigenous communities given our model of using the lands of indigenous people, often without their permission for drilling, exploration or for land acquisition. It is now increasingly recognised that as landowners and traditional custodian of lands in many of our countries, indigenous people are not just stakeholders, but they’re equity shareholders and need to be involved from the beginning. We need new models of thinking, new models of planning and new models of financing to ensure just transitions for workers and their communities.
How can The Club of Rome become more involved in driving labour-focused global changes?
The Club of Rome has had an incredible capacity to drive policies that shift the thinking of governments, people, employers and those in their community. I was privileged to be involved in an advisory capacity for Earth4All and the publication that indicated that our whole society and our economy needed to be rethought, that we needed five major turnarounds to ensure that people and planet were at the centre of prosperity.
One of the greatest threats to our stability is the existential crisis of climate. But it is also about inequality. Our current economic model has generated such inequality that it’s a threat to our future that is neither sustainable nor stable. Earth4All is a great example of the kind of work The Club of Rome facilitates. It also provides advocacy that influences government policy and the way we think about employment arrangements and distribution of wealth so that our societies can become more equal with initiatives such as universal social protection, minimum wages and rights that guarantee a capacity to bargain for a fair share of profits and productivity.
How do we tackle the rising global unemployment and mistreatment of workers?
There are in fact a lot of jobs in the world. Our biggest issue is where those jobs are located and irregular development around the globe. We need a new model of development that allows for people to genuinely co-create a future. Right now, the skills aren’t there, and we have a huge deficit in skills globally in terms of meeting that challenge. If we focus on a climate economy, where planetary boundaries are absolutely respected, then nature is part of the solution so that climate, nature and people are at the heart of the way we tackle the design of the future. But if we don’t change our economy, we will continue to see a world that doesn’t generate jobs for everybody, that doesn’t provide basic stability and opportunity and certainly doesn’t distribute wealth equally.
There is so much opportunity in a world that’s in transition, but when it’s also in a context where our democracies are breaking down, where people are feeling less and less freedoms, where they can’t depend on a guarantee of human and labour rights, of political rights and freedom, then we have to start by rebuilding political legitimacy from the ground up. If people are involved, if it’s about the planet, both the climate crisis and nature, then you can engage people in the development model that will meet the test of their aspirations for their communities.
Where do you think we can draw the most inspiration to build a resilient society during the next decades of change?
If people aren’t at the heart, then we will fail on all other ambitions. In a world that is so fractured, it is key to involve communities in the design of their future, ensuring just transitions. There’s no doubt that climate is the existential crisis. We are seeing damage to nature that is irreparable increasingly in too many parts of the world, the loss of lives and livelihoods already from extreme weather events, but we also know that if you can’t build confidence in people, then the despair becomes social unrest. We’ve got more conflict in the world today than we’ve ever had before. We’ve had a growth in the numbers of autocratic, if not dictatorship-led regimes.
People need to know they can build their own democratic legitimacy, to feel confident that a development model will be inclusive of and faithful to their aspirations and that they too can share in a prosperous future. Because we have the same demands for time immemorial. People want to know they have a capacity for survival, they’re respected, have rights, can have a good job, can provide for their children, can save and invest for a future. And their descendants will have the same opportunities.
The challenge is having government, employers, investors, trade unions and community all involved in the design of not just future economies, but future societies that provide the sort of support required for resilience, whether it’s health, education, social protection or good climate-friendly jobs. Resilient communities have confidence and feel engaged in the design and implementation of a future they can trust in.
How do we prioritise both sustainability and people’s interests when they conflict?
There are very few areas where people and the planet are in conflict. The conflict often comes from our dominant economic model that is exploitative of both people and the environment, whether it be land or nature or the carbon emissions or the greenhouse gases we allow into the atmosphere that’s destroying the stability of our climate.
If we don’t put people at the heart, we’ll fail to tackle other areas of crises. We must start by building democratic legitimacy in our development model. That means in high-income countries in transition as well as where they failed to share prosperity – in low-income countries.
With just 7% of existing aid invested in social protection, every country could have a basic social protection system. Even without increasing desperately need aid, if you used 15% of existing aid, you would have systems that ultimately would build their own sustainability. We must change the model because more than 60% of the world’s people have no social protection and we see modern slavery inherent in our supply chains. We can simultaneously address the threats to the very nature of our climate while we change our societies. This is by ensuring just transitions that are built through the new generation of social license where people feel like they’ve got a stake in the future.
How do you believe The Club of Rome can influence governments to put people and the planet at the forefront of progress today?
The Club of Rome is such an incredible collection of people who make up many communities, but a common community as well. With the policies, discussion, debate and inclusion of people in The Club of Rome, the ideas developed can be fostered and promoted into governments and institutions. I think you can trace this back over generations with the generational commitment to change with all the values that The Club of Rome promotes. At its heart, The Club of Rome is about democracy and social inclusion. We need not just this organisation, but institutions all around the world that are committed to the same set of values with enquiring minds, research and the academic support that’s vital for people who are activists in trying to affect change.
