tl;dr: Doing sustainability science requires transgressing science, politics and ethcis – and Jeffrey D. Sachs is a role model how to achieve that with integrity and professional excellence
Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbank, 9 November 2017
Dear honoured guests, dear ladies and gentlemen,
Dear Wilfried Stadler and the entire GLOBART team,
Dear Sonia and Jeffrey Sachs:
More than 6 years ago, in the springtime of 2011, the 17th International Sustainable Development Research Conference was held at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York. The conference topic still appears timely to this very day: »Moving Toward a Sustainable Future: Opportunities and Challenges«. I had been to other conferences in the US before, but this was my first sustainability conference in North America and I was curious how my colleagues there framed sustainability and its related issues, where commonalities might be, where differences are, what we can learn from each other.
The first day, however, was kind of a culture shock for this German scholar here: Nina Fedoroff, a US molecular biologist, kicked off the conference by arguing that organic agriculture was not a significant part of a truly sustainable food system and the way forward to feed 9 billion people would be genetically modified organisms. Klaus Lackner, an energy physicist, followed shortly, advocating large-scale energy infrastructure projects including nuclear without any reference to alternative, more decentralised solutions. To me, the entire discourse appeared to be stuck in a loop that I thought European sustainability research had left behind a couple of years ago.
While still feeling puzzled, the last day rolled along and suddenly Jeffrey Sachs appeared. He had flown in from the Middle East the night before but was fresh and energetic. His keynote was called »Beyond the Tipping Point: Global Governance in an Era of Environmental Upheaval« and brought a certain urgency to the conference. From the outset it was apparent, that this man would not beat around the bush when it comes to sustainability and the future of our planet. He made it very clear to us researchers that, despite our best efforts, the world was not moving towards more sustainability – and that this is only partly due to science. True, doing sustainability research is probably the most complex undertaking in the history of science so far; it requires a close cooperation between different disciplines from very different academic cultures. It also requires a very critical reflection within each discipline about their underlying assumptions and ideas. But most important of all: science is not enough.
Jeffrey emphasised this when he talked about vested interests, business and political power, and the inner-workings of the media industry in the US. Unless researchers do not take into account the powers beyond their institutions’ doors, they will always fail to see their findings implemented. Back in 2011, Jeffrey Sachs pictured the US as a blocker when it comes to battling climate change and implementing sustainability, with a political-industrial-media complex preventing and undermining any real progress. Maybe, just maybe you, dear Jeffrey, thought to yourself in 2015, when President Obama was among those who secured the Paris Agreement on limiting human-made climate change to well below 2 degrees, that things might take a good turn in the end after all. But, well, then you guys across the Atlantic Trumped it huge last year!
It was fascinating for me to read your latest thoughts on the dangerous collusion between Big Money and Big Data, on targeting voters very specifically with messages they were most compelling to favour. The US Republican presidential campaign in 2016 provides many insights how data can be used get across the most distorted and unreal political messages and change voting patterns, if you are able to throw enough money at it.
Back then in 2011 you had one hopeful example for us: regional cooperation of countries for sustainability, with the European Union as a role model for achieving ambitious sustainability oriented policies and setting global standards. I cannot imagine how puzzled you must have felt that some of us Europeans would so carelessly vote to exit this great project. This European in front of you is still puzzled.
In the end, I do remember your conclusion: that in order to tackle sustainability and build a better world for the many, not just the few, we need a global knowledge framework linking science with politics and ethics. Science alone is not enough. For you, Jeffrey, this was clear on that day in May 2011, although I believe your insight came at the end of a steep learning curve over your own involvement with politics.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Jeffrey Sachs is an economist. This alone would not be remarkable. But more than 30 years ago, he chose to step beyond the safe walls of academia and get involved with politics, blurring the lines between his work as a researcher and actively consulting governments of countries in difficult economic situations. He became famous for his fieldwork as a »clinical economist«, as he called himself, in the 1980s in South America and in the 1990s in Eastern Europe. For an economist, this was dangerous. Not because of all the things that might and eventually did go wrong in the field – but because of how other economist might perceive this. I can only try to imagine how some of the »real economists«, who stayed safely back home, raised a brow or two about someone from economics, the crown jewel of all social sciences and so proud of its abstract mathematical modelling prowess, who went outside academia and actively attempted to change the world for the better. Probably the same people gleefully commented on Jeffrey‘s failures with Russia in the late 1990s, but this reveals more about those who gloat than about the man who actually tried to do something.
Economics is a strange beast – and economists are probably even stranger ones. Economics is the only scientific discipline, apart from theology (if you like to call that a science), that calls its history »dogma history« – as if it constitutes a belief system. Even stranger than this is the habitus of those practicing the discipline, suggesting that this particular social science is somehow »harder« or more »objective« than others: economics as the physics of social sciences. This self-image has been firmly established and reinforced since the neoclassical turn in the late 1800s, with Alfred Marshall naming the discipline, in the title of his textbook, not »Political Economy“ as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx had done – but just plainly »Economics«. Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes notwithstanding, economics has prided itself from being somewhat aloof from the messy world of social action, especially from politics and power. And Jeffrey himself most likely realized this years later, that situations like for example in Russia could not be solved by applying his best economics, but would require taking into account domestic politics and culture, the political-industrial complex, as well as geopolitics between the US and Russia at that time. Economics without politics is just an intellectual board game; it needs to open its view beyond the models towards the reality of the political economy, which is the true object of its inquiry. When Jeffrey forcefully advocated linking science with politics and ethics back in 2011, this was probably a result of that insight, just as his clear view on power structures, vested interests and asymmetries in our public discourse.
If we acknowledge that politics influences everything that a science dreams up, how much more is that true for something we might call »sustainability science«? Sustainability entails at least three different elements: First, it provides an imperative to use resources in such a way that they remain usable for you and others in the long run; second, it implies a global form of social justice to institutionally ensure that the needs of the future and the world‘s poorest are not compromised; third, it requires a dramatic change towards an economy that is embedded within societal and natural boundaries and not disconnected from it. The change that is required by following sustainability is pushing against many vested interests that are all to eager to corrupt our best efforts. That‘s why sustainability is not just a science; in order to really pursue it, it has to be a form of politics and, most of all, a kind of ethics for our globalized age of the risk society – to borrow a term from Ulrich Beck. It is precisely in this Bermuda triangle of sustainability that Jeffrey played a decisive role in the past and continues to play it today.
On behalf of then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, he chaired the UN Millennium Project from 2002 to 2006, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs. Jeffrey’s own work in economic development, especially in Africa from 1995 onwards, was part of the groundwork for the MDGs. The spirit of these goals was bold: to reduce extreme poverty and hunger globally, to ensure safe access to natural resources and a healthy natural environment for everyone. Jeffrey was strongly arguing for the impacts of the MDGs, on how they helped to markedly reduce poverty for instance, or for increasing schooling rates in developing countries. To quote you, dear Jeffrey: »Global goals helped to galvanize a global effort.« And to quote you quoting John F. Kennedy for how goals achieve this galvanizing of efforts: »By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it and to move irresistibly towards it.«
This is even more so when it comes to the successors of the MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. Jeffrey is currently an adviser to UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres and an advocate for the SDGs. They are even bolder, more daring than the MDGs. What always touches me when I read them is the first goal: not to reduce extreme poverty – no, to end it once and for all, until 2030. The same with hunger: end it – no one on this planet should suffer from hunger and fear of starvation. For me as a scholar, your arguments about the epistemic qualities of goals like the SDGs are most fascinating. Such great goals, you said, »spur epistemic communities – networks of expertise, knowledge, and practice – into action around sustainable development challenges. When bold goals are set, those communities of knowledge and practice come together to recommend practical pathways to achieve results.« Such a great mobilization of actors and knowledge is of course a political process. Ending poverty and hunger, battling climate change, adapting an economy to the realities of a finite planet, are not scientific goals; they are political goals – and more than that: they are providing a normative global framework, the baseline of global sustainability ethics.
These global baselines, this ethics of sustainability – as it is codified very clearly with the SDGs and how to measure their implementation – is now one of the last grand ideas to unite all countries from both the global north and the south. It might as well be the last idea standing. I already referred to the situation in the US as well as in the UK, to Trump and Brexit. The election of Donald Trump, just as the referendum result for taking the UK out of the European Union, are signs for crumbling ideas, for deteriorating global vision and responsibility, for a diminishing of trust in ourselves and in our ability to turn the boat around and steer the world towards more sustainable futures. As much as we might empathise with feelings of being overwhelmed by the world, with resignation in the light of all the challenges around us (and believe me, as a sustainability scholar I am used to many frustrations for a long time now!) – the replacement of cosmopolitan globalism that is currently on offer is an ugly revenant from our past: Nationalism and the fear of the other – might be an attractive escape route for some, especially for those who ruthlessly exploit for their own political gains; but the world won‘t go away, climate change won‘t go away, and sustainability cannot be achieved by closing borders or by turning inwards.
I do have some hope that the rise of nationalism, along with authoritarianism, can be contained. In Europe, we are struggling along, but we have not fallen. Anglo-America appears to be more in peril; maybe it suffers from some sort of post-imperial stress disorder, who knows? To me it becomes imperative today that the SDGs and all processes connected to it, including the COP process and following through with the Paris Agreement – Hello to our friends in Bonn at the climate conference! –, they all remain on top of the political agenda and we as scholars need to increase our efforts to assist in pursuing them: in our research, but also in our outreach to politics and the rest of society. This of course requires something that you are not being taught at university and surely not in research projects: courage. The same courage Jeffrey Sachs showed when he first entered the political minefield of consulting governments, but even more so when he understood that consulting is not enough, that scholarly activism is much more needed when it comes to sustainability. In Germany, we are discussing how economics can be a transformative science for adapting and changing society towards sustainability. Transformation research might be a dirty word for some, especially for traditional economists. But science, especially economics, has always been transformative. Scholars like Keynes or Hayek wanted to change politics, wanted to transform society. And even if you don‘t want to have any part in this, if you want to confine yourself to a Weberian »Wertfreiheit«, doing value-free science – you cannot. Just as we cannot close our borders and turn away from ourselves, as scholars we cannot live a professional life free of becoming normative, of getting our hands dirty. A science like economics is always deeply normative and thus transformative.
And now, dear Jeffrey, dear guests, the connection to GLOBART and the reason why you are being honoured tonight with the GLOBART award hopefully have become clear. GLOBART states as its mission to »encourage people to implement their own ideas, share their thoughts and make an effort for a sustainable society… to encourage sharp minded, critical and energetic people, to tell stories of success, to give the architects of the future a stage and to inspire them and others of putting their ideas into reality.« Given the critical junction that we collectively find ourselves in; a time in which global temperatures and global tempers are rising at an unprecedented rate; and the centre is dangerously close to loose its hold, people like Jeffrey Sachs are needed to keep pushing the rock up the hill regardless, to remind us that hope is not lost when you dare to transgress your own boundaries, to act as a role model of compassionate activism while at the same time remaining an outstanding scholar in your own field. Professional excellence, moral integrity, and compassionate activism: these are the ingredients for truly transformative sustainability scholarship and I am deeply honoured to hand over the stage to Jeffrey Sachs!