Can new forms of cooperation based on cultural innovation help us develop new solutions to the major challenges of the 21st century—HIV/AIDS, environmental crisis, poverty and social inequality?

Jean-François Rischard

My answer is a passionate ‘yes’. And I have detailed ideas on how. Here’s my story, in a nutshell.

The planet is entering a very dangerous, tight margin period during which it will have to solve a number of make-or-break global problems, for many of which we have less than 20 years left to act. In this context, the biggest obstacle we face is the clash between (i) the territorial instincts and short-term electoral horizons of the world’s 200-odd nation-states and of their politicians, and (ii) the non-territorial, long-term nature of these make-or-break planetary problems. We have a few years to get this lethal, solutions-paralysing clash out of the way—unless we want to meet the sad fate of the inhabitants of Eastern Island. There are three conceivable tracks for doing this, only one of which has a chance to work in time:

  1. a first, feeble track which one could label as the “improvements to the status quo” track (e.g. marginal reforms of the UN Security Council, new voting structures at the IMF…) which won’t suffice, given the magnitude and urgency of the problems at hand;
  2. a more potent track that would consist in setting up a world government that puts nations-states under pressure to behave in more planet-minding ways, which however won’t work and may not even be feasible at all; and
  3. a third, new methodology track based on cultural innovation, which may just be the thing that can work for us, and in the time that’s left to act.

Here is an illustration of how this third track would work—interestingly, it both uses and produces cultural innovation.

It starts by recognizing than when the environmental damage curves are suddenly shooting up almost vertically after millennia of slow rise and as navigation is getting tricky and tight, you’re better off with the best available expert global problem-solving rather than with the wisdom of the crowds, let alone filtered up through 200 nation-states giving precedence to territorial and short-term perspectives. And thus, borrowing from a half dozen cultural innovations from the most experiment-rich new culture—the culture of networks—this track would set up permanent global issues networks or GINs (one for each burning global problem [such as contagious diseases, global warming, deforestation, international financial stability, biotechnology research, poverty reduction, fighting terrorism, and so on. There are about 20 urgent global problems of that kind, that must be solved through collective action by the 200 or so nation-states of the world.]) comprising the best available world experts from governments, business and civil society.

Then, using a cocktail of new methodologies described elsewhere [For details, see High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them, 2002, Basic Books, N.Y., by J.F.Rischard.] , these GINs would go through three phases with stepwise increasing membership, during which they would—working in a kind of Nobel Prize-anticipating atmosphere—lay out the detailed solutions pattern that corresponds to the effective tackling of the problem at hand for the sake of all humanity; spell out the precise norms and standards that would coax the nation-states and other key players into the direction of these solutions; and then rate all of them year by year against these norms and standards. [Which represent, in a way, the global functional ethos for the problem in question.] In that last phase, the GINs would name-and-shame the laggards, blacklist those that act like rogue states (especially when multi-issues ratings are taken into account), praise improvers, and so on—in such a way as to charge up national politics with reputation effects (including public embarrassment) and voter awareness and information effects.

This is where this third track would not only make use of available cultural innovation, but would produce some of it in turn: it would help create the beginnings of global citizenship—not in a wishful, omnibus sort of way, but by building it up global issue by global issue, and in highly pragmatic and visual issue-by-issue terms. Voters the world over would see—thanks to the planetary dashboards and the diagnostic work of the GINs, and much more clearly than they do now—how big and pressing the main planetary issues are, where their current government crew stands viz. their solution, which countries and other actors are playing ball and which ones are rogues. They could then act up in the next election, pressure political candidate to think bigger, form global movements or even parties around issues, start boycotts. [And so could pension funds, multinationals, or even groups of more virtuous governments (e.g. penalizing others that are free riders or rakes).]

What would be going on here is fundamental. Think of three layers of citizenship, under a heading that you could call “new politics for a dangerous age” (rather than the “new internationalism” many evoke, only to miss the point by extrapolating democratic principles to the global level where they don’t work). These “new politics” we so badly need would have each of us be a global citizen first (think of a white passport that would say that), then secondly a national citizen (think of today’s passports with their various colors), and then last only a local/tribal/religious or other group-belonging citizen (think of something else than a passport—more like a club membership card). Today’s politics have the order precisely the other way around: ludicrously, we are first local citizens, then national citizens, and lastly global citizens, if at all.

And here’s the key point: we will avoid the fate of Eastern Island if we build up the white passport at the global end, and the value of the club memberships at the local end—the two go together well—while honouring our national passports as what they are: mere organisational documents, which tell which of the 200 nations-states you are jurisdictionally attached to (and that you’re free to also feel sentimentally attached to as well). Seen in that light, the third track is precisely a way to build our global identity and our local identity at the same time, instead of hoping that salvation merely comes from the intermediate national identity level.

How does building our global identity go with building the local identity at the same time? It’s this: when it comes to the national vs. local/tribal/culture interface, the latter is a rival system to the former (example of sharia law in Canada), whereas no such tricky rivalry exists between the top global identity level and the local. Actually, when it comes to the key task of building up the global level, one can and should look at the local, the tribal, the culture level as a font of innovation, that is, as an asset to build on.

Jean-François Rischard, former VP of the World Bank, author, Paris, June 10, 2005