United Nations Summit of the Future: reclaiming the ‘silver bullet’

22-23 September, New York

If you put the phrase ‘no silver bullet’ into the search bar of Google Scholar, you get referred to about a quarter of a million entries from across almost every academic discipline. Broadly defined as there being ‘no single or easy solution to a complex problem’ the phrase, a metaphor derived from the shooting of werewolves and vampires in folklore, has gravitated from being just a mantra to the status of a full-blown cliché. But as many of us gravitate towards the United Nations in New York this weekend for the ‘Summit of the Future’ it is worth challenging ourselves a little about what we really mean.

A key premise of the whole Summit is that the world is highly complex and systemic. Everything is highly interdependent and linear approaches to any problem will be constrained by unresolved issues elsewhere. This is self-evidently true. Just follow the global trade discussions over there, questions about the reform of the global financial system somewhere else, and then climate change over here and you will understand why negotiators are so fatigued. When speaking to the economist Jeffrey Sachs earlier this year, the science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson mused as to whether his book ‘The Ministry for the Future’ part inspired the UN’s naming of the Summit. The silo-ed thinking of governments, UN agencies, businesses, academia and civil society is clearly part of the problem as the world starts to feel the consequences of a plague of self-inflicted harms, such as extreme weather, increasing conflict, and depleted soils.

As the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) limp towards their 2030 finishing line, it is important to reiterate that they were designed in many ways to be 17 silver bullets. It would be hard to argue that these targets, such as the full elimination of extreme poverty, education for girls, sanitation and clean water, biodiversity, and saving the planet from uncontrollable global warming, were not all intrinsic goods in their own right. The response that then comes from the ‘no silver bullet’ brigade is that the term relate more to ‘the means’ than to ‘the outcome’. "Of course, outcomes need to be independent and measurable, but it is the achieving of them that requires a complex set of interventions throughout the system" they would say.

But to me, this is a misreading of ‘systems thinking’, having done a fair bit of research on the subject for my new book on the Just Transition. Yes, the full complexity of systems has to be embraced, and a myriad of interventions have to be aligned to avoid ‘bounded rationality’ (as the economist Herbert Simon once put it). But the systems-thinking gurus from the 1990s, such as Dona Meadows, would also encourage us to also think about how the system as a whole, or at least parts of it, can be leveraged. ?This is where silver bullets can enter back into the equation (what a terrible mixed metaphor, sorry). In systems-thinking terms you do not need to prove or even accept causality in order to focus on specific unitary interventions. Evidence from a range of applied social sciences would suggest that sometimes single factors can have a dramatic effect in hyper-connected systems. This is where it might be useful to dust off ‘Tipping Point’ or some of those early podcasts by Malcolm Gladwell. But the trick in any dynamic system is not to think that the potency of any silver bullet will last for long – every idea has its time and place.?

One thing we have all learned about the SDGs over the past ten years is how interdependent they are. In other words, some goals are the means for enabling the others, and so to separate ‘means’ from ‘outcomes’ in any absolute way is a fallacy. So, what then are these ‘systems-leveraging silver bullets’ I am saying we should load up on? Am I allowed to suggest more than one silver bullet? Am I not stretching the metaphor, somehow cheating? Not really. ?If there is more than one werewolf, then you need more than one bullet. Here are some ideas that are already embedded (or noticeably absent from) the draft text of the ‘Pact for the Future’ – the key proposed outcome document from the Summit:

• Democracy in global finance is a silver bullet. ‘Transforming global governance’ can start with the international financial system and listening to the demands of the ‘Bridgetown Initiative’, in particular how poorer countries can have equal voice and equal drawing rights within the International Monetary Fund.
• The Just Transition is a silver bullet. The $10 trillion a year required in order to meet global development goals, of which about half will be directly climate related, requires guardrails (i.e. its governance and delivery must be just and equitable) as well as financial innovation (much of it will be need to be ‘blended finance’ but some of it can’t and shouldn’t be).
• Human rights are a silver bullet however inconvenient this might be. Leaving them off the table when discussing issues such as the Global Digital Compact or global security is a sure recipe for future repression. Likewise, intergenerational justice must be key lodestone for any Summit that claims to be protecting the future.
• International trade is a silver bullet. Without functioning global markets and international trade, we will never get to Net Zero by 2050 or reach many other goals. Full traceability down international supply chains is not a silver bullet, it is important but ancillary that has some unintended consequences. A decoupling of global trade is in no one’s long term interests.

These will be some of the questions in my head and we sit on the balcony of General Assembly listening to how each country leader, government minister and UN agency speak on Sunday and Monday. William Faulkner once said that the “past is not dead, it is not even past”. Perhaps equally “the future is not science-fiction, it is already here”.

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