Challenging convention: four routes to sustainability

Sustainability is the major issue for mankind in this 21st century; it is difficult to argue otherwise, albeit that some do. Carbon and climate change, water shortages, plastics in the oceans, air quality and health, profligate consumption, huge differentials in wealth, poverty and modern slavery are a catalogue of the issues faced on a global scale.

The explosion in world population from less than 3 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion in 2019 and with a forecast from the UN of 9.7 billion by 2050 has been sustained by increasing efficiency in food production and rapidly improving healthcare. Global poverty has declined dramatically as the graph shows. But it is still up to 10% of global population or nearly 800 million as defined by those living on $2 per day or less according to the World Bank.

Source: Our World in Data/Max Roser

Extreme weather events have doubled to c. 700 per year since 1985 according to the Met Office. The people displaced by such events were numbered at 7 million in just the first half of 2019 as reported by the New York Times.

The success of medical science and food production alongside the desire and ingenuity of mankind to be warm, make and consume ‘things’ and travel has come with consequences for sustainability and civil conflict of varying degrees of severity. 

Failure as a consequence

It is possible to argue that these undesirable consequences of success are leading us towards systemic failure of ‘business and politics as usual’. It is a failure that has been slow to emerge into full view. It is a failure that is inevitably ignored by those trying to run things the old way and who benefit from that status in the short term.

This is a challenge for humanity and governance with unprecedented scale and complexity and where any debate is overshadowed by national self-interest, the status quo in terms of power structures and just plain denial and ignorance.

Of all the factors that are ‘brakes’ on change, the combination of denial and ignorance is perhaps the basis for inertia. But, the impact of the Extinction Rebellion has demonstrated a real hunger for information and change among a growing section of the world’s population. The risk is that the methods deployed by XR to make its points (demonstration, disruption and shaming) may be counter-productive to its ultimate goal.

A Challenge of my own

Into this nexus comes the Trans-India Challenge. It started as a small personal adventure to bring some fun to India, and ourselves, by driving a Morgan 3-Wheeler car across the country and back, raising money and support for rural regeneration and sustainability.

India has been in my blood since I was a boy, due to family history. Recent visits have left me in love with the people and the country. Having decided to undertake this strange adventure, I felt it also presented an opportunity to make a difference and the search was on for an organisation to work with. 

The lines of enquiry on rural regeneration and sustainability kept returning me to Goonj www.goonj.org. It was particularly exciting that to learn that Goonj has a business model that uses recycling of clothing as part of its mix. Finding Goonj and its disruptive, ‘circular economy’ approach has turned The Trans-India Challenge from simply an unconventional personal adventure in support of a great organisation. It has become a platform for discovery and challenge of convention as new ideas and discoveries have come into focus; the start of a wider journey of discovery uncovering new perspectives on the troubling global condition.

Unconventional ideas

Challenging convention to create sustainability has become the theme; using the journey and its particular challenges and experiences to develop a conversation about the wider challenge for humanity. 

For me at least, connecting to Goonj, understanding its journey and exploring the implications from academic literature and the media, has surfaced some big new ideas. These support the idea that robust challenge and debate is needed over how things are done.

There are four central ideas that have collided to provide a fresh perspective: circular economy, complexity, micro-interventions and dignity with respect.

1.             Circular economy

In the context of humanity’s rate of consumption of natural resources and the environmental impact of waste and by-products of our methods of production, the circular economy has to be embedded in our ethos of design for production, consumption and disposal.

The diagram from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation highlights three strands of action: Regeneration, Design and Use.

Source: Ellen MacArthur Foundation

It appears to me that this will create an entirely new profile of employment, as the societal value of work that protects the environment is properly funded in what has become a throwaway society. Things will need to be made to last longer with more sensitive use of materials and which can be recovered and reused.

2.             Complexity

The second big observation is that the global system of production and consumption is hugely complex; undesirable outcomes with societal costs are increasingly frequent and unexpected. Consumers can gain little insight into how their choices may impact the earth and governments have no toolkit to accurately determine effective policy choices. The embedded complexity is not just about the means of production and consumption but also the human interactions on self-interest versus global good and interpretations of information on choices.

‘Complex systems thinking’ is a nascent area of science, behaviour and computing. The technical challenge is to identify and classify the multiple connections, while the human challenge is deciding what are desirable outcomes. The idea that the world is hierarchical or sequential falls away when we take this view, as shown by this diagram designed as far back as 2009 by systems analysts ShiftN (this is included to illustrate complexity and not as invitation to study it in detail).

Source: ShiftN

Diagrams attempting to represent complex systems are large and involved, as can be seen. The conclusion is that a wait for decisive and broadly-based conclusions and policy interventions from this type of analysis may be a long one. But that should not deter the effort and does not invalidate more focused local actions.

 3.             Micro-interventions

The idea of micro-interventions is the big new light bulb for me in this journey. I was alerted to the work of Abhijit Bannerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kramer who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Economics for their research into understanding poverty.

The MIT News reported: “The work of Duflo and Banerjee, which has long been intertwined with Kremer’s, has been highly innovative in the area of development economics, emphasizing the use of field experiments in research in order to realize the benefits of laboratory-style randomized, controlled trials. Duflo and Banerjee have applied this new precision while studying a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty, including health care, education, agriculture, and gender issues, while developing new antipoverty programs based on their research.”

The idea of, and potential for micro-interventions, that improve well-being for the poor is a challenge to conventional macro-economic ‘trickle down’ thinking. Unsurprisingly, it has not been well received in all quarters. The implications of their discovery are that the poor are more likely to benefit from relatively locally focused actions and that the concept of GDP is scarcely relevant for someone living on less than $1 per day.

It is hardly surprising that the wealth divide is growing - people at the bottom of social scale are generally missed by top-down, ‘big picture’ economic policy making. This is because the micro-interventions that are the most valuable will be different in different places and the measures engage individual communities specifically - this was a core theme of the Nobel-winning research.

The primary objection to this model is that it is not scale-able or capable of being adopted by governments or authorities; how are they to channel the multiple billions in national currency to where it is most needed? For reference, the UK international development budget alone is ￡14 billion. I would argue that this is a ‘not invented here’ response, driven in part by a lack of organisational capability – or desire - to mount such programmes. The answer is “get to it”!

4.             Solutions with dignity

The MIT News continues: “The significance of Abhijit’s and Esther’s scholarship is not only that it has transformed the ways in which economists and policymakers think about and approach poverty alleviation, but that, at the core, their research is guided by deeply humanistic values. In their vision, the materially poor are at the centre, as are remedies for global poverty that actually work, that open doors for millions to education, health care, economic well-being, and safe communities - to the full promise of human life.”

The theme of their work is about dignity and respect for the poor and helping them to improve their condition rather than the top-down model of dispensing charity. It is a line of research that has emerged relatively recently.

In the same way, dignity and respect are central to the work of Goonj. The organisation does not use the language of ‘donors’ and ‘recipients’ as that implies a passive role for those being helped; rather, Goonj prefers the term ’stakeholders’. Goonj works to give communities a ‘hand up’ rather than a ‘hand out’. The Goonj teams engage with communities on their priorities, helping them to organise on initiatives such as water, drainage, sanitation, roads, schools and infrastructure.

And Goonj uses recycled clothing as a way to reward communities for their efforts. This can be directed at a range of purposes from clothes for warmth, manufacturing into blankets, conversion to pads for menstrual health and, in some communities, for re-manufacturing into giftware and commercial products. Used clothing and textiles, some 4,000 tonnes of it , is collected in cities, sorted for appropriate use and shipped to the communities.

A model to challenge convention

So, the four aspects of radical challenge converge in the Goonj model: the circular economy in practice based on specific measures that do not boil the ocean of complexity. Those measures are consistent with the Bannerjee, Duflo and Kramer philosophy of micro-interventions, being more effective than macro-economics in the relief of poverty. This breaks the subservient recipient paradigm. This is a new and challenging outlook which requires a new style of support resource and may encounter detractors who cannot get their minds around the new paradigm.

The Goonj model implements this vision. It works on the ground and is clearly supported by some key concepts from the academic literature. The questions are how easily can this model be adapted to new materials and recovery streams, as well as being scaleable to work with millions of people? India alone has 60 million individuals in financial poverty.

As we journey round India on the Trans-India Challenge, we will be setting up to try and answer those questions.

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