'Creative coalitions' could step in where governments fear to tread: Lamy

Creative coalitions of countries, cities and companies could hold the key to progress on pressing issues such as climate change, in the absence of consensus among nation states, international thought leader Pascal Lamy told a public lecture hosted by UTS.

With national governments more focused on daily preoccupations than the long term, and regional bodies limited in their ability to respond to what are global challenges, a "third avenue" was needed to achieve change.

"We have what I believe is a growing global governance deficit," said Lamy, the former Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, now chairman of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations.

Lamy has been in the country as a guest of the Centre for Policy Development to discuss the commission's report, Now for the Long Term. His public lecture was co-hosted by the CPD and UTS Business School's Centre for Management and Organisation Studies, and Lamy was joined by a panel comprising Professor Roy Green, Dean of UTS Business School, former West Australian Premier Geoff Gallop and City of Sydney Chief Executive Monica Barone to discuss the report in an Australian context.

"If we look at challenges like climate change, like financial regulation, like cyber security, like immigration, like taxation, we all understand that these are challenges we have in common," Lamy said.

"We all also understand that if we don't … find the necessary political energies and structures to provide some convergence, then chances are these challenges will remain unaddressed, hence endangering the future of our world."

But the current international system of governance, where action could only result from roughly 200 sovereign states converging, was "in serious doubt, if not trouble".

The Oxford Martin Commission has proposed what it calls a C20-C30-C40 coalition. This would bring to the table 20 countries, 30 multinational companies and 40 cities with the aim of tackling climate change.

The report's plea for decision makers to focus on the long term chimed with the members of the discussion panel.

Professor Green said the report challenged the idea that countries with resource-based economies, like Australia, need only think in the short term. But working against the long-term view was the short-term political cycle, "which we have in spades in this country," Prof Green said.

In the corporate sector, the tyranny of quarterly reporting predisposed companies towards short-term thinking and against contributing to creating value for society.

"Even universities are affected by this, because of our precarious funding," Prof Green said. "These are the places where you would expect long-term thinking to occur but the incentives are now working against us doing that."

Professor Gallop, a parliamentarian for 20 years and now Director of the Graduate School of Government at the University of Sydney, said governments still had an important part to play.

"Politics is the process by which we come together with our various views, interests and values to create a better community in a peaceful way" and traditional international organisations should continue to have a role alongside the suggested creative coalitions, he said.

City of Sydney CEO Monica Barone welcomed the report's acknowledgment of the importance of cities, as the level of government with the most direct link to the community.

Sydney is part of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and Barone said the most recent summit of mayors had focused on what she described as "the leadership challenge". While local government had been left in the corridors in past rounds of climate talks, "we want to be in the room" from now on, she said.

Finally, Lamy called for an attempt to be made to find a "bedrock" of common values as the framework for addressing the urgent challenges the world faces.

"We have to adjust to globalisation in a way that creates some sort of common view of what we are after," he said.

"I know that the notion of 'citizens of the world' is something of a dream, and there will be much water under the bridge before people feel they belong to a region, to a nation and to the planet, but one of the ways to get there is probably to activate, more than in the past, a debate about these issues. This is the role of civil society, this is the role of faith movements, this is the role of academic and other institutions."

More information:
The report, "Now for the Long Term," is available online: www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/down … or_the_Long_Term.pdf

Provided by University of Technology, Sydney