PROSPERITY dwells far from the desperate fields where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battles. But it dwells even farther today when battles are as theatrical in nature as they were never before. The planet has become an enigmatic dice with paradoxes so artistically intertwined that reimagining a transformative architecture for human development in 21st century is existentially important. A complex web of interdependence on one side, the highest level of strategic fortifications since 1945 on the other; a huge cultural mobilization due to 3.6 % of the global population living outside their native countries on one side, the populist waves drilling deep down the divides of totems, taboos, steeples, mosques, flags, armies, and passports, actuating deglobalisation tendencies, or deplanetization in some cases, on the other; a new era crossing the mark of hyper globalisation where 5.3 billion people connect, feel, and respond using mobile broadband networks, and a humongous international trade bill that accounts for 60% of the global GDP on one side, whereas, 225 trillion dollars global debt stock followed by a torrent of hikes in interest rates to combat inflation in the low and middle income countries, pernicious patterns of economic disparity, uncertainty, insecurity, gaps in human agency, citizens’ mistrust on institutions and national governments, on the other side; slivers of hope in international collaboration like establishing effective supply chains during the fight against Covid 19 pandemic which saved millions of human lives, or the Ukraine grain deal before its suspension in 2023 that averted wide spread food insecurity, or the consensus on Loss and Damage Fund and global clean energy investment worth $1.8 trillion to compensate 3 Billion people at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on one side; whereas, the millions displaced, dead, and wounded in state conflicts, war clouds on Eurasia, the boiling Middle East, the poor and unstable Africa, militarization of ocean corridors, melting northern pole, ailing ecosystems, water shortages, food insecurity, all on the other side. The unpredictability of the world systems alarms against the superficiality of the 20th century’s architecture for human development in the rapidly flipping contexts—the contexts where opinions are realities and perceptions are policies.
What are the possible tactical modifications a new transformative architecture requires to realign the trajectory of paradoxical global interdependence? First, the regionalization of operational strategy. The post-cold war development architecture is firmly situated in legal formalism, regulations and standardized literature, and therefore, it lacks tactical precision and overlooks the wisdom of origins. For instance, the microclimate technique for seeding used by Peru’s farmers and their morality solutions they follow under the Andian Cosmo-vision of life, or a Himalayan pastoralist solutions to fight against poverty by community sharing and water insecurity by glacier grafting method, or the domestic economic solutions in West Bengal that boosted households’ incomes when people started selling sustainable bamboo brooms in local markets by using heirloom knowledge passed down through generations to them and survived during the Covid 19 lockdowns. Regionalization entails boosting B2B collaborations in low income countries under liberal investment regime with transparent transfer of capital and skill, pooling in institutional funding for small and medium enterprises, reforming local governance, and decentralization of development literature, programs, and advocacy campaigns. Regionalization means taking a perspectival approach towards development, crafting adaptive resilience models to damp down the impacts of geo-strategic and climatic shocks, embracing diversity and turning it into an opportunity. All OECD countries have reached or surpassed their pre-2019 HDI values, whereas only 49 percent of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) could have achieved that. This disparity of resilience has not only crippled the life quality of large human populations in their native countries but a major source of massive immigrants cascading sharp rise in unemployment, inflation, systemic racism, populist politics, and xenophobic violence in the host countries.
Second, modern architecture needs a bottom-up cultural thrust to amplify sustainable solutions embedded in the informal social structures. It can be achieved by reorganizing informal social networks and developing strategic partnerships with them to encounter the dynamic conflict drivers operating deep down in the societal processes. Such networks can be local citizen assemblies, cultural bodies, humanitarian associations, people of art and music, literary groups, socially responsible corporate clusters, academia, travellers, professional clubs, and all those who own this globe beyond the barriers of passports and politics. These are the people of the third dimension–capable to translate disputes into a different frame of evaluation where the human mind starts breeding consensus and magnifying solutions. UNFCCC’s collaboration with visual artists during the 60th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition to use arts and entertainment for a transformative climate action is one good example. Such strategic deformalisation will provide a back-up support to reduce the efficiency gaps in the performance of the United Nations and Bretton Wood Institutions due to their financial, logistic and political limitations.
Third, the modern development architecture needs a drastic shift in its communication paradigm. Formal press releases, handouts, speeches, and emails are not sufficient to inject that kind of a constructive rigor, enterprise, and impetus for hope in young generations that are exposed to an explosion of unedited information propagating anxiety, frustration, denialism, fatalism, leaving little space for agency and imagination. Rightfully, The UN Secretary General, Antonio Gutierrez called social media ‘a forest of red flags’. Capitalists use it to glamorize ultra-consumerism, populists to create political spins, and fear mongers to galvanize polarization. For example, some 320 broadcast channels operate in Kenya only, making it harder for the authorities to regulate the violent televangelism in a Christian majority country. In short, the complexity of the conflict matrix has become mind-blowing in the age of hyper connectivity. It casts shadows on the evolution of the social thought process by dislocating its emotional centre for gravity in the battles of perceptions. The EU AI Act is a positive regulative action but not enough. Unlike the 20th century communication paradigm that is still dipped in the sluggish verbosity and shallow political correctness of the forgone New World Order, the modern mind needs more real time, direct, simple, and attractive reinforcements for perception management through social media and Artificial Intelligence.
These three modifications, in my view, are minimally important for the successful execution of the ambitious plans that aim to bring the off-tracked world back on the deadlines of the Sustainable Development Agenda. The recent Human Development Index report and the COP 28 Global Stocktake together validate that despite all optics of consensus, there is a terrible miss in the efficiency of global systems. Neither the business as usual, nor the fantasies of deglobalisation will work. It is all about designing a transformative architecture to better manage the complexity of global interdependence and make sure an equitable delivery of public good while cutting through the gridlock of geo-political constellations. The hopeful path forward is complicated although, but not impossible.
—The Author is a columnist and member of UNFCCC global team. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan)
