ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: With Brics comes opportunity to make the multilateral system more equitable

I go through a benign schadenfreude whenever the topic of global public goods is raised in discussions about international co-operation. This schadenfreude is benign because passages are laden with trapdoors of hubris and self-senses of importance. My reaction is probably more correctly a sigh of unsurprise.

I spent almost a decade studying, in some detail, the UN Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) policy proposals for managing international co-operation and globalisation through the prism of global public goods. I may have mentioned this in this column previously. The initial proposals were published by the UNDP in 1999, at the end of the “decade of globalisation”.

My concern at the time was about global inequality. I did not think inequality could be addressed through liberal capitalist political economy — liberalism encourages competition and competition leads to winners and losers. This is surely a topic for another discussion.

So, about a decade ago I walked away from dealing directly with the topic but kept an eye on the areas the UNDP identified as part of a multidimensional crisis of globalisation, what would over the past couple of years be renamed a “polycrisis”.

As leaders of the Brics bloc meet in the Russian city of Kazan this week there is talk of “interlocking crises”. Call it what we will — a polycrisis, interlocking crises or a multidimensional crisis — the main point is that individual crises are almost never discrete.

With the initial global public good proposals the interlocking crises included conflict (peace and security); communicable disease; market volatility/financial instability; justice and inequality; culture and environment; basic human rights; the environment and education/information.

It had become clear by 1999 that crises in each of these areas had caused enormous transnational instability, with disproportionate effects on rich and poor countries. The UNDP was correct, at the time, that these crises were an outcome of liberal capitalist globalisation. Except, of course, it would not refer to capitalism.

Nevertheless, we are in a situation today where over the past 25 years, since those first initiatives to secure policies through the economics paradigm of “public goods”, there has been violent conflict in Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the US, Syria, Mindanao, Yemen and Palestine, among others. Global communicable diseases such as the Ebola, Zika and coronavirus have blighted communities across the world.

In 2001 the Taliban destroyed Buddhist cultural heritage sites. In 2003 US invading forces destroyed heritages sites, including ancient towns dating back to the early second millennium BCE, and left behind a booming trade in looted artefacts.

There have been reports that over the past year or two the Israeli defence force has destroyed libraries, cultural centres, universities and places of worship (such as the 12th-century Church of Saint Porphyrius) and, according to the UN Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation, the Russian army has targeted or destroyed 351 protected Ukrainian cultural heritage sites, while the invading military forces have looted Ukrainian art and artefacts.

The global financial crisis of 2008 was the most destructive worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. The global climate crisis does not appear to be receding. Carbon dioxide levels are now at the highest level and 2023 was the hottest year on record.

Four years ago the World Wide Fund for Nature reported that the world population of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians have experienced a decline of an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016, and that a sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is in process.

The world has seen historically unprecedented enrolments in educational institutions around the world, but the outcomes disproportionately benefit wealthy countries. The revolution in information and communications technology has opened access, which has made more information available to more people, yet the global digitisation index of 2024 (a private company initiative) shows discrepancies. SA is the highest-ranking African country on the index, in 43rd place.

To the extent that “global justice” exists there has been an increase in court cases brought before the International Criminal Court since its establishment in 2002. While most Africans celebrated the court’s creation, the euphoria rapidly decreased when it seemed to hold Africans and Asians, and Europeans and North Americans, to different standards of justice.

Each of the above was part of the UNDP’s multidimensional crisis in 1999. In short, the initial global public good framework has, empirically, been a failure. My basic contentions have always been that global public policymakers wrongly assumed there was a harmony of interests among 7-billion people who agreed on excessive individualism and a culture of consumer capitalism.

Hidden behind thickets of algebra and mathematical modelling there is also the whispered belief that getting to macroeconomic agreement among economists was enough, and that “the market” would do the rest.

As the leaders of Global South countries in the Brics bloc meet in Russia to discuss the future of the multilateral system this week, it is worth remembering that a generation (25 years) of failure of the initial global public good model, with orthodox economics at its core, may be sufficient reason for retreating from the liberal political economy, and foregrounding a more state-led political economy.

Unless, of course, there is eternal wisdom in doing the same thing over and again, and hoping that it will succeed some day.

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.