Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics - Globalization Challenges for the Millennium: Ethical Imperatives and Ethical Dilemmas

Globalization Challenges for the Millennium: Ethical Imperatives and Ethical Dilemmas

Global Crises

The Claremont community is renowned for its unique commitment to transdisciplinary exploration; where better to reflect about critical global issues, and above all on how they are interrelated? While my topic is far-ranging and of somewhat numbing complexity, it has central and practical importance for each and every one of us. The challenge is to explore why these topics are so central and how they engage us from our different vantage points.

The classic Chinese character for crisis has two parts - representing danger and opportunity. Likewise, my story has its dark side, focused on danger and problems, but also an underlying hope that much can be done to address them. Crisis is a common focus for agendas in international meetings today; many focus on the dangers of terrorism, Iraq or Afghanistan, or the less visible but probably deeper dangers from poverty, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, or environmental degradation. Few global meetings today do not echo steely and grave statements to the effect that we live in dangerous times, in a dangerous world. Yet we also live in wonderful times, of life and opportunities beyond the imaginings of our great grandparents. The basic fatalistic paradigm that saw poverty and other ancient scourges as inevitable is crumbling, and can, if we will it, give way to new visions of a world with opportunity and justice for all people These are, in many senses, the worst and the best of times. We need to marshal great determination and the hope born of optimism as we look ahead, for as Edmund Burke remarked, the world belongs to the optimists: the pessimists are merely spectators.

My comments are organized around five questions that I and my colleagues wrestle with daily. The first two are linked to a simple personal story, and suggest three further questions. At the core is a central question: why, in the global community, is there such a wide gap between rhetoric and real action, and what we can do, individually and collectively, to address it?

· Why is there still such misery in the midst of plenty? What do we do in the face of a world so far out of balance? And why are the problems of poverty so persistent despite promising starts and earnest promises? Why so many disappointments over the decades?

· Beyond endemic poverty, how should we approach the vast inequalities in the world?

· How does the call for social justice and less inequality mesh with the desire for creativity and entrepreneurial spirit?

· How far and how are the challenges of poverty and of globalization related? How do we balance global goals for more equality and better living standards and rights with the parallel goal of social and cultural diversity, which we so cherish in our own lives?

· What is our individual, community and corporate responsibility for these very global challenges?

These reflections are cast first and foremost in terms of ethical challenges, though each challenge is also rooted in questions for economics, technology, and virtually every discipline. I address many complex debates about international development only in passing. The complexity of the linkages among issues, perhaps most dramatically those that weave together the issues of poverty, security, freedom, and terrorist threats, emerges with particular starkness when the issues are thus framed. My central argument is that the interlinkages and the moral imperatives involved call us to look to new forms of interdisciplinary action, whether in intellectual approach or in practical terms, through inter institutional partnerships. This calls for new approaches to dialogue and engagement, looking towards a new kaleidoscope of alliances that is critically needed and that is taking shape in many areas.

Visiting Niger as a World Bank official some years ago, we went to a school with 170 children in the first year class, one teacher, one book, and no furniture. The children were making heroic efforts to learn in the hot, bare classroom; the teacher was also, heroically, using various devices to try to keep the attention of the group and pass on at least some knowledge. Yet these children were the lucky ones; almost 80 percent of Niger’s primary school age children were not attending school at all at that time. Two weeks later I visited schools in Washington D.C., for my own son. These classrooms were bright, clean, and full of learning materials, with small groups of well cared-for children and dedicated teachers able to focus on each child. The contrast lingers as a haunting memory.

Question 1: Abject Poverty and the MDGs

The first global challenge emerges starkly from the story: we live in a world badly and dangerously out of balance and we need to fight the enormous poverty that persists to this day. The numbers are brutal and frightening. To cite a few: some 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day, and close to 3 billion live on less than $2 a day. More than 115 million children are not in school: two-thirds of them are girls and 40 million are children with disabilities. Over 40 million people are HIV positive, and over 3 million people died of AIDS in 2003. The numbers go on and on, but they paint a picture of great misery and unnecessary and premature death; they reveal that billions of people have little to no opportunity to lead a decent life and develop their potential. The case of children who have no chance to receive schooling is among the most poignant, as it reflects so clearly the missed opportunities that poverty spells.

The good news is that for perhaps the first time in human history a powerful consensus has developed that the global community must ensure that all people, everywhere, have a minimally decent standard of living. The Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, were affirmed by every head of state at the Millennium Summit at the United Nations in September 2000; it issued a clarion declaration affirming the unified goal of overcoming the scourge of poverty. Again at the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in March 2002, voice after voice joined a chorus of agreement and determination to meet these goals by 2015, the target date.

The eight goals include halving global poverty, and touch on education, health, water and sanitation, environment, and gender equality. The MDGs challenge the global community to do what is needed to achieve the goals, based on a covenant, that involves trade reforms, more development assistance, better governance including citizens’ participation in determining their own destinies, and good, honest use of development funds. As Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, says again and again, today “there is no place to hide”, because everyone had so clearly agreed to act to address the problems of poverty. The imperatives are clearly before us.

We can take real satisfaction from this sense of common purpose that echoes in so many quarters. Many institutions, notably the United Nations and the World Bank, are expending extraordinary efforts to build systems for accountability down to the community level, to monitor progress, in the full public eye. Campaigns are being organized to mobilize support. At a recent meeting on February 16 in London focused on the Millennium Development Goals, with Gordon Brown (British chancellor of the exchequer) and Jim Wolfensohn as keynote speakers, there was a chorus of support from Bono, lead singer of U2, Irish musician Bob Geldorf, the stars of Comic Relief, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, church leaders, politicians, business leaders, academics and NGOs. This meeting also resonated with a remarkable consensus that the MDGs are a vital moral and practical imperative.

Today, however, worries runs deep, because the sobering fact is that we are failing as a world community on most of the goals. The current prognosis is that most will not be met, especially in Africa but also in other parts of the world. And the goals are in many senses minimalist, for most of us far too modest, setting too low a standard. Bono is one of many who argue that history will judge us severely for this failure: that “we saw the African continent break out in flames and stood around with watering cans.”[1] The reasons for the dismal prognosis are somewhat elusive. Is it a question of insufficient resources and knowledge? Clearly no.

The current estimate is that meeting the eight MDGs would cost an additional $50 billion a year, including $3-5 billion dollars for education. We are reminded again and again how far the global community - particularly the United States- remains from a goal set 34 years ago of committing to 0.7% of GDP as development assistance. The argument that the resources are not there surely wilts against some facts about the actual use of resources:

Thus, it seems fair to say that we HAVE the resources to make sure that children in Niger can achieve the MDG vision: the chance to complete primary school, and to have enough to eat, clean water, basic health care, and a job. We also HAVE the know-how – many countries and communities have achieved miraculous progress. Surely, we HAVE the common sense of purpose to achieve the MDGs and to assure each child at least a minimal standard of education.

We must ask why the school system had so failed in Niger (and of course elsewhere, including in parts of the United States) and what needs to be done to improve it. The reasons go far beyond a simple lack of resources, to complex political, social, cultural and economic influences. Unless we recognize and address the many intertwined roots of both poverty and inequality, we cannot not succeed in our common goals. In this effort, we need the inputs of virtually every discipline and approach, including psychology, literature, religion (faith traditions have grappled with poverty since the dawn of time), physics, engineering, and others. All offer clues to understanding and elements of solutions.

To build on the specific case of Niger, the onion layers of reasons for the education crisis in the early 1990s included Niger’s historical legacies, including its colonial past and some of the discordances and bitterness it left behind, debates then raging about the respective importance of higher versus universal primary education, poor relations between government and teachers, cultural barriers to enrollment of girls, ethnic conflicts in some areas that limited all social services, corruption in many parts of the government, and the country’s geography, with many children living in remote areas that were simply hard to reach. Perhaps most fundamental, though, to my mind, were nagging questions and doubts that hid behind the pro-education rhetoric then used by virtually all the country’s leaders. Questions lurking in the shadows – powerful impediments to efforts by both Nigeriens and outside partners to improve education - included: “What is formal education for?” “What purpose is there in educating rural children, especially girls, when no job awaits them?” “What values will children learn in school that may undermine their culture?” “Will education not destabilize power relations in our society?” Until these questions are addressed, the passion of leaders, communities and families that is needed to ensure excellent universal education will remain illusory. These questions are also crucial to the question of what is involved in “scaling up” development – reaching a scale of action and intervention that will truly make a difference in improving lives of billions.

I am convinced that education should be the “priority of priorities”, but highlight that education not only cannot but should not be seen in isolation. Hungry children cannot learn, a child who is sick may not even survive to school age, and will not do well at school, education when there are no jobs is a flimsy reed, and roads are needed to bind communities and allow economic growth. But education is a starting point, a core goal from which the other imperatives of social welfare and progress can radiate.

Development, poverty alleviation, and social justice do not lend themselves to simple recipes and judgments. Those engaged in development work have learned humility the painful way, through disappointed dreams and tough lessons. I am convinced that we now have a much richer appreciation of what can work and of the many interlinking, but we need to maintain a sober sense of the complexity of the challenge, even as we keep before us clear and uncomplicated moral imperatives and the determination to succeed.

We would be hard-pressed find a moral argument against the basic premise implicit in the MDGs: that there is a common global responsibility to ensure a bare minimum quality of life for all people. The answer to the first question thus seems blindingly simple: we need to muster the resources, talents and wills to achieve the millennium goals, and hopefully to exceed them.

Question Two: What of Inequality?

My tale from Niger suggests a second global conundrum: the vast gulf of inequality that separates the opportunities for a child in Niger (and so many other countries) and the opportunities we in the developed world can offer our own children (that I saw so vividly in visiting Washington, DC preschools).

The challenge of ensuring a minimum standard of living, including education, is straightforward, morally and even technically. Few would argue that the children in Niger do not deserve a much better chance at education. But the question of how much inequality is just, and how to achieve some standard of fairness, is one with which the human community continues to wrestle. To quote Bono again, the notion of equality can quickly become boring, and the wrenching experience of forced equality is closely tied to the bitter experiences of the communist era. Some level of inequality seems inevitable, and has positive dimensions, especially as it is linked to diversity, freedom, and entrepreneurial spirit. Inequality exists even within families, certainly within communities. However, it is perhaps starkest today in the enormous gulf that separates prosperous nations, particularly the United States, from the world’s poorest countries. Today these inequalities are visible to all, appearing starkly as news images on television screens, and they generate much anguish and considerable anger. Discussions of poverty and responsibility for dealing with the misery of the very poor quickly merge into debates over the perceived gross injustice of the wide gulf in living standards and opportunities.

To my mind, the solutions to this problem, morally as well as practically, remain elusive, and we do well to recognize that these are not easy questions. Defining some minimum standard of living for a community sharing common values and history is complex but not all that difficult, though even in a city like Washington, DC, where I live, we wrestle with how to ensure the welfare of the homeless and of children in deprived homes. It is far, far more difficult to define how much inequality is fair, and how much is too much, though again, current levels of inequality worldwide and in some particularly unequal societies are so vast that they offend the most sketchy notions of justice.

The cry for social justice that we hear from so many quarters, especially from many religious leaders and institutions, is closely tied to these conundrums of inequality. Many institutions, including my own, are wrestling with the practical significance of the concept, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and what a “rights-based approach” to development entails. At one level such an approach establishes the concept of a “floor” or a “safety net,” but at another the notion of shared, equal rights to opportunity goes far beyond the minimal standards set out in the MDGs. This is an area where we all need help in setting and following our moral compass.

Probing a little deeper into the complex topic of inequality, I have personally come to focus sharply on education in my own answer to the question of what an operational notion of social justice might entail. If we as a global community could ensure that each child is genuinely able to receive an excellent education - not just at the primary level, not with 170 children in a bookless class, but excellent and supportive instruction that offers each child a real chance to excel - then we might be well on the way to a global foundation for social justice. An inspiration here is a wonderful quotation - that has its root in an Abrahamic tradition[2]:

“You see things that are and you ask ‘why’? I dream things that never were and I ask, ‘why not’?”

Surely the notion of a foundation level of education is a dream to which we can truly aspire.

Question 3: How do we mesh encouraging creativity and entrepreneurial spirit with providing fair opportunities for all?

I pose the next question mostly as a challenge to business and social entrepreneurs to reflect on a conundrum emerging from dialogue about poverty. The American paradigm views entrepreneurship, creativity, growth, and prosperity as tightly linked, and our acceptance of inequality in life outcomes - whether for individuals or communities - reflects our sense that it is an essential, probably inevitable concomitant of freedom, progress, and invention. Economic growth is seen to depend critically on factors that fuel an entrepreneurial spirit.

However, assumptions around the power of financial incentives and free enterprise are not universally shared, and at a minimum engender considerable unease in many quarters. Some label unrestricted free enterprise as worship of the market, a goad to selfish pursuits, and a force undermining traditional values and group solidarity. New thinking - building on European traditions of a welfare state, discussions of the right to social services, efforts to set clearer standards for social welfare and monitor and apply them, and dynamic changes regarding corporate social responsibility - reflects a growing awareness that the magic, invisible hand of the market needs public and private tempering action as well. As an illustration, during a continuing dialogue involving the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Council of Churches about our respective work on poverty, one participant was indignant when others referred to health clinic patients as “clients”. She thought the term undermined a hard won right to health care that is unrelated to financial and market “signals”. As another illustration of these dilemmas, two speakers at a recent meeting referred to the same “dream”: that every Chinese household would have a car and a refrigerator. For one, however, the goal was positive, symbolizing vast improvements in welfare, while for the other it represented a catastrophe in the making - a victory for greed and market-fed demand, and a disaster for the environment.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen highlights the need for ethical roots of economic thinking and the importance of balancing economic liberty and its cousin democracy with thoughtful and effective measures to curb the blindness and negative facets of a free market system.

Question 4: How does globalization relate to poverty and the MDGs? How do we balance global goals for living standards and rights with the desire for social and cultural diversity?

Against the backdrop of a remarkable festival of global sacred music, a feast of cultures from Gospel choirs to whirling dervishes, the annual Fez Globalization Symposium brings together people diverse in their outlook on global issues and solutions. After hearing dramatically different views one year, ranging from globalization as a vampire sucking blood from the world’s poor to glowing and hopeful futuristic visions built on technological progress, I had to prepare a summary to introduce the symposium the following year. My presentation took the form of a two-sided canvas. On one side were the dark images of globalization: greed (in the form of a dollar bill and images of obesity), war, terrorism, garbage, including Coke and McDonalds wrappers, and environmental destruction. The other side showed the color and light of globalization, with diversity, music, food, exploration of different cultures, and our daily opportunity to engage with people from around the world. My point was that these radically different pictures are part of the same reality.

When critics of globalization list what they see as its woes, near the top of the list is the contention that economic globalization is leading to greater poverty and a widening gulf between rich and poor. In fact, much thoughtful analysis and many formulations of data suggest the contrary: that the numbers of people living below the crude global measures of poverty (notably $1 or $2 per capita per day) have almost certainly declined. By many measures inequality - overall and among nations - has also probably declined.[3] But the passionate perception remains that globalization, abject poverty, flagrant social injustice, and a momentum in the wrong direction are tightly linked.

Concern in many quarters about the enormous economic, military and cultural role of the United State and about the perceived uniformity of global culture aggravates this situation. A related set of critiques turn around the weaknesses and inequities of the “architecture” of global governance, which seems to offer a weak buffer to the power of rich nations and multinational companies.

Here we face a tangle of issues, facts, perceptions, fears, and debates, closely tied to those concerning how to tackle global poverty and inequality. Perhaps even more important are the complex links among fundamentalist religious beliefs, anger at social injustice, instability, terrorism, and poverty and inequality. Poverty and terrorism are not directly linked: most terrorists are far from poor, and almost all poor people are certainly not terrorists. But there are linkages nonetheless, in the combination of misery and anger that is fed both by deprivation and lack of real prospects for improvements in life and in the sense of profound injustice in the way opportunity is distributed today in the world.

These complex phenomena cannot be easily resolved, in fact or perception, but I focus on three important avenues in seeking ways forward.

First, it is vitally important that we reason and act in ways that suggest not only that “another world is possible” (the motto of the World Social Forum which met in Porto Alegre in 2002 and 2003 and Mumbai in 2004) but also that “other worlds are possible”. We are not - as development specialists, business leaders, or Americans - working toward a single model for the world. Rather, we would like to see a range of social and political systems grounded in different cultural systems and values. The best example of the challenge may be gender roles, which provoke clear tensions between visions (like my own) of improved status for women and equal education of girls, and others that regard changing roles for women as a fundamental erosion of traditional values.

What is needed to navigate these waters is a willingness to approach the concerns that underlie critiques of globalization with real respect and genuine willingness to look at different paths and outcomes while remaining true to the core ethical values implicit in, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Second, multisectoral and transdisciplinary approaches are critical to moving forward in globalization debates. The changes the world is experiencing are too often seen in economic terms, but they have countless facets, including information technologies, social change, migration, and environmental consequences. The role of religious organizations and networks in shaping views of these developments and responses to them is enormously important, while music and sports may similarly provide bridges that can help overcome barriers.

Third, we can progress only through a rich, thoughtful set of dialogues that help participants span gulfs in perception. I view dialogue in a broad sense - as an essential path to better understanding and respect as well as a means of translating rhetoric into action. But what is really involved?

When we engage in dialogue, we need to bring a willingness to understand the perspectives and assumptions of others and how they will see us, which can be sobering. We also need a willingness to be transformed.

Above all, dialogue requires willingness to tackle difficult issues. A first stage can entail identifying common ground and areas where participants agree. Hans Kung, the Swiss theologian, has performed a wonderful service in highlighting the many common elements among major religious traditions and merging them into a common global ethic[4]. In the dialogue between the World Bank and the World Council of Churches, we have built a solid foundation by highlighting the significant ways our mandates are grounded in a common passion to fight poverty. But to address the sources of tension, and develop real solutions that build on differences, we need to examine the difficult issues that lie beyond the “common ground”.

Question 5: What is our individual, community and corporate responsibility for these very global challenges?

The earlier discussion indicates well my view that global poverty presents an absolute moral imperative for each and every one of us, and that we need to devote much more thinking and action to addressing inequality and cannot simply and implicitly assume that some day the rest of the world may “catch up” to the United States. We need to reach out creatively, dynamically, constantly, as global citizens, seeking both to help and to transform ourselves as global citizens. Further, we need the best and strongest minds and souls to wrestle with these problems; we need anger, caring, passion, social mobilization, and sober intellectual analysis. Finally, we need to bring all these attributes to bear in a kaleidoscope of partnerships that exploit the talents and resources of diverse actors.

What are these partnerships? The most obvious - already occurring in a host of inspiring combinations - enlist government, business, and civil society. Equally important are religious organizations, because they play a critical role in ensuring social welfare, but also because they are central actors in defining the ethical parameters of what we do and where we are going. The arts have critical roles to play, firing visions and imagination, as do universities, by providing the intellectual grounding and helping inform and mobilize young people for their roles as citizens in a different kind of world.

What kinds of partnerships do I have in mind? I highlight four inspiring examples.

First, Stephan Schmidheiny, a remarkably successful and visionary Swiss entrepreneur, and the AVINA Foundation have set out to help improve global education through a deep and thoughtful partnership with the Jesuit Order. This partnership builds on the remarkable Fe y Alegria educational system which took root in slum areas across Latin America. Business concepts now promise to help multiply and make still better their work.

Second, the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic lay organization born of student movements of the late 1960s, is linking its work as a friend of poor communities with peace negotiations and now all-out engagement in the war against HIV/AIDS. Sant’Egidio mobilizes partners from poor communities, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies, international organizations, and banks with a passion and insight born of long engagement with communities.

Third is the remarkable three-decade-long international partnership among West African governments, pharmaceutical companies, NGOs, international organizations, and communities to combat river blindness and now other diseases of poverty (which some term “end of the road” because they occur out of our main line of sight, far away). This partnership has shown how creative efforts to link such partners can spawn the flexibility, endurance, and determination to succeed.

And fourth, the Aga Khan Foundation, by supporting local initiatives and working with women and religious leaders, helped build a pre-school system across East Africa. This system bridges gulfs between secular and religious education and has brought concrete opportunities for many people and communities.

Countless other examples of creative partnerships across unlikely boundaries come to mind. These include micro credit programs drawing on multiple resources to offer a chance for millions to fulfill dreams and purchase necessities, a Danish dentist who mobilized an eclectic coalition to help transform dental care in Madagascar, where most children were losing teeth by age 8, a student who spurred local groups to create a mobile health clinic for homeless children in Calcutta, and companies that, in various combinations, are pushing the frontiers of what technology can bring to the poorest communities. This is the stuff that dreams, and progress will be made of.

I close with a combination comment and question. These problems are straightforward and compelling at many levels, but they have also left a longer trail of rhetoric than enduring action and results. This outcome reflects endless competition among priorities, shallow commitment, and the sheer magnitude of the challenges. Many people are moved but have little idea what they can do, so they turn to other aspects of daily life. This suggests that a central issue is communication: reaching people on the nature of the problem and on what they can and should do.

I leave you with a final puzzle, two wise yet contradictory pieces of advice, both surely true.

The first came from two artists who participated in the recent London meeting on the Millennium Development Goals – Bono and Bob Geldorf. What you need, they said, is a melody, repeated again and again, that captures the imagination of the young and others, that conveys a simple message conveying they can do. “Drop the debt” - the slogan of the Jubilee 2000 movement – had these qualities.

This is good advice, and a major challenge is to make global poverty as compelling as the global the environment, for example.

However, another piece of advice also echoes, this one from Oscar Arias, the wise leader and former president of Costa Rica, who is passionate about world peace. Nothing, he said recently, “could be more reckless than oversimplification of the truth”[5].

Like the many tales about the blind men and the elephant they set out to discover, we constantly confront aspects of global issues and partial solutions, yet the whole problem and the complete answer remain elusive. As we navigate among insights from our experience, from research within and across many disciplines, from the visions of prophetic leaders, and from the passions of our friends and critics, we need to recall this two-sided advice – to ring simple melodies again and again, while remaining wary of thinking we have the whole answer and the truth. We are still at the early stages of what will prove a long journey.

[1] Bono at Conference on Making Globalization work for the very Poor, London, February 16, 2004.

[2] Both Bobby Kennedy and Robert McNamara used this quotation. It comes from Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, and is spoken by the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden.

[3] The basic facts are set out in a recent paper by Richard Newfarmer, prepared for a dialogue engagement with the World Council of Churches. Annex 1 includes a series of tables that set out a line of argument on how poverty has evolved and some critical issues. The main point, though, is that however accurate these figures they go against strongly held and very different perceptions.

[4] Hans Kung prepared a booklet for an exhibition on the Global Ethic at the International Monetary Fund in September 2003, entitled

[5] Speech by Oscar Arias October 9, 2003 at Walking the Talk Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica