Chairholder’s Remarks at IDDRI’s 20th Anniversary Conference on Planetary Governance

Remarks on the occasion of IDDRI’s 20^th Anniversary Conference on Planetary Governance

October 12, 2021

By Professor Shiv Someshwar

Friends, I am so very happy to be here at the 20^th anniversary celebrations of IDDRI, a profoundly important global institution. I will keep my comments brief, since it is really IDDRI’s party!!

The ongoing pandemic has revealed in brutal detail the limits of multilateralism. Covid has made clear the fault lines that run deep, that had been quite evident for participants from the Global South in the various COPs of climate, biodiversity and desertification all these years.

Neither the Bretton Woods institutions nor the UN were structured to respond to the life demands of a networked and highly unequal world. The World Bank and the IMF, the Bretton Woods institutions, were set up in 1944 to help rebuild primarily a shattered Northern Hemisphere. Morgenthau, the US Treasury Secretary and an architect of the Bretton Woods institutions, viewed them as key to ensure global economic interactions, with of course the US at its heart.

The UN, an institution far larger in scope, was founded in 1945 to “maintain international peace, cultivate friendly relations between countries and promote social progress, better living standards and human rights.” Environmental issues, you’ll know, came much later, well after countries making up the Non-Aligned Movement had refused a proposal for a UN conference on the environment to be held at the request of Sweden. It took a better part of several years, and the stellar work of Mahabub Ul Haq and Gamani Corea, that NAM countries agreed to attend, in what came to be the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.

Following these brief forays on power and its manifest working, I make the following 4 points:

1. We should not confuse, say improvements in biodiversity of a place, or climate change adaptation, as being central to the work of the Bretton Woods institutions. Economic progress, specifically the advancement of GDP, remains their primary reason for being.
2. The UN is controlled by its member states. Despite its architecture, the unequal nature of power in the real world gets reflected in key institutional decisions, despite best intentions.
3. Neither civil societies nor markets are structurally integral to these institutions. They remain outsiders, as non-state actors invited on occasions.
4. While both sets of institutions, and I mean the Bretton Woods and the UN, have earnestly gone about voicing alarm at say the climate emergency and the 6^th Great Extinction, the limits of current multilateralism is revealed in their inability to ‘walk the talk.’

Hence, I urge all of you attending this conference to consider the real world of limits and fragility, and of power and its callous use; and as you work your way through ideas and solutions, not to base discussions on idealized versions of society and the world, or to seek outcomes that depend on the altruism of others. Just as multilateralism cannot be secured by a gun, neither can its fruits be realized by the promise of a white dove.

Yes, dialogue is essential. But as important are your voices to create a global agenda that reflects the values of inclusion, diversity, fairness, empathy and respect. That reflects the diverse political, social, environmental and economic contexts you come from.

As we have learnt from the Covid Pandemic, good intentions alone do not get people the vaccines they desperately require. We need to be clear-eyed on outcomes we seek, and not focus on promises, and be clear on the pathways for securing them. There can be no better institution than IDDRI and its global partners to initiate the shepherding of this discourse.

Thank you. I hope you have a very fruitful conference.