Top down isn't working

I begin with a bold statement. Global governance has collapsed. Geopolitical governance is broken. Global financial systems and global supply chains are breaking. The UN is unable to stop the genocidal massacre of women and children in Palestine because the most powerful country in the world is unwilling to. Countries are harming Nature’s systems with their ambitions to climb GDP rankings, which are supposed to be indicators of their level of development. Even within the richest, so-called democratic countries, citizens do not trust their governments to govern them equitably. The pressure of economic exploitation is breaking the ability of Nature’s system to sustain itself. Humanity is now facing an existential crisis with depleting fresh water sources, degraded soils, and runaway climate change. Powerful nations are empowering their armies with more technologies and artificial intelligence. The present danger is that more wars in the future will kill people even faster than climate change will.

Do we need more evidence that top-down solutions for global problems have failed? As Albert Einstein and others said, “Continuing to solve problems with the same way of thinking that has caused them is madness”.

Let’s think scientifically for a moment. There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals. All of them must be addressed faster. Moreover, none of them can be solved by themselves because they are interlinked with others. Each of the SDG’s is not manifested in the same way everywhere. Problems of environment and climate are not the same in Alaska and Barbados, or in Uttarakhand and Kerala. Problems of livelihoods are quite different in the slums of New York and rural Bihar. Therefore, all problems must be solved locally. And, everywhere in the world, at least 7 of the 17 problems of the SDGs must be solved urgently.

Forecasters estimate that the SDGs will be achieved only by 2087 if we persist with the present top-down and siloed approach of problem-solving, whereas the aim was to achieve them by 2030. Let’s do some mathematics. How many different combinations can there be of 7 problems at a time taken out of 17? 94 million! The problems of the 17 SDGs are manifested on the ground, and they take different shapes everywhere. Clearly, one size solutions developed by global climate scientists or global health experts will not fit local realities everywhere. We need a new paradigm of problem-solving. Local, community led, systems solutions are the way to solve global systemic problems of inequality, social disharmony, and environmental degradation.

The Earth on which we all stand is Common Ground. The established paradigms of governance and management have too much “I” and too little “We”; and too much competition and too little collaboration. We must follow a new path, so far less taken, to realize the Promise of our Commons, which the established ways of thinking and acting have converted into the Tragedy of the Commons.

A new systemic way of thinking and acting must be spread around. This will require an “unlearning” of the un-systemic ways of solving problems and organizing that have become universal. In the established way of organizing on scale, systemic problems are broken up into parts with specialists, and resources, dedicated for solving individual problems separately. However, solutions in silos harm other parts of the system. Solutions to grow the economy with man-made infrastructure destroy the environment. Solutions to save just the environment by removing human beings living in forests, or animal grazers in pastures to build renewable energy infrastructure, destroy livelihoods. Solutions for increasing the productivity of agriculture by applying more chemicals and replacing farmers with machines, have reduced the productivity of soils and so more chemicals are required. Meanwhile the farmers displaced are unable to find employment in manufacturing because, simultaneously, humans in factories are being replaced by robots to increase the productivity of factories!

Let us pause our rush to set global targets and programs to save the world based on old theories that have caused the harm we must prevent. We must stop the God of GDP exploiting Nature and human beings to feed the growth of the greedy economic machine; instead, the Economy must be made to serve Society and Nature. The “green” and “caring” economies, which economists say will create employment in the future, will require “informal” community ways of working which create good societies, to replace “formal” factory ways of working which are required to produce outputs efficiently and grow economies. ?

This paradigm shift will not be easy, because power must shift from the top to common people. Modern governance systems maintain the class structure of the Hindu caste system. Knowledge power lies with academic experts on pedestals (the Brahmins of knowledge), not farmers and workers on the ground with practical experience. Political power is with Kshatriyas (powerful officials on the top of government systems) not the common people. Economic power lies with traders and accumulators of financial wealth (Vaishnavas) and not with those who produce value with their labor. Paradigm changes are never easy because wealth and power accumulate in a process of “cumulative causation”. Those with wealth and power use it to lobby for rules that make it easier for them to grow their wealth and power. They use their wealth and power to support research, convene conferences, and lobby for policies that endorse their ideologies. Those who challenge them are shut out. Thus, paradigms of ideas become locked-in hard.

The keys to change a paradigm must be found outside the echo-chambers of the paradigm. There is hope. Leaders of the commons are convening, learning together, and enlarging a non-violent movement of change from below. Leaders on top who want to support reforms that benefit India’s disempowered masses should listen to these change-makers and learn from them. Hundreds of them gathered in a “Commons Convening” in the Ambedkar International Institute on August 27-29. Here was proof on the ground that the bottom-up paradigm of cooperative change does improve the lives of everyone in the community and repairs harm to the environment that the expert-led paradigm of growth has caused. These role-models of transformational change reveal the right way to make India Vikshit by 2047. Such ideas must be adopted by the powers on top and spread around faster to scale up outcomes. Otherwise, Vikshit Bharat will be just another glorious vision in vain, like India@75 before it, and claims to double farmers’ incomes and provide employment to all.

(Published in The Tribune September 4 2024)

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/top-down-approach-has-come-a-cropper/