11 minute read
The New Normal in Governance
Mr Arun Maira, thought leader, author, and former member of Planning Commission of India and former India Chairman of Boston Consulting Group.
Over the last 15 to 20 years, we in India were travelling along happily, living in the fastest growing free market democracy in the world. Our growth rates were just short of China's but ahead of all other large countries in the world. Many of us were on this bus of growth. We had our safety belts on and the bus was moving fast, sometimes slowly, but nonetheless moving well.
We were doing well and enjoying the ride: We were even being served French wine and Swiss cheese! Then, the bus suddenly stopped. We were surprised to see people falling off the bus; they had been riding on the bus rooftop, clinging on to this bus of economic growth. We weren't even aware of them!
Two meters on the dashboard
What the passengers (inside the bus) and those driving the bus (the government) were looking at were two instruments on the control panel. One of them was the GDP meter. We wanted it to keep rising from one trillion dollar to two trillion dollars, and make it five trillion dollars by pressing the accelerator. The other instrument that some of us looked at was, what I call the RPM meter—the Stock Market meter, which showed us how the stock market was going up and down as we pressed the accelerator, just like an RPM meter, to help us make judgments about the money that we could invest in stock market investments. Using these two meters, we thought that that we understood how everyone was doing. May be, it was some indication about how the people in the bus were doing but not about the vast majority of our countrymen, who were not inside this bus. They fell off the bus when the economic growth story stopped.
When I was in the Planning Commission as a member, we invited organizations—think tanks around the world—to help us consider how well India was doing with respect to not just the economic growth, but also the care of the environment as well as the inclusion of the billion people of India in the economic growth. Scientifically, this was called the SEDA framework: the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment framework. It pointed out that India fared the worst amongst all ASEAN countries, BRICs countries, and all the other countries in the subcontinent. For every unit of growth, we were destroying the environment more, creating less jobs and having reduced income growth than even Nepal and Bangladesh and certainly much less than many other countries that we would like to compare ourselves with.
17 SDGs to be tracked
We have to rethink as to how we govern social and economic systems not just in India, but in the whole world. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) have shown the world a few years ago that we need to pay attention to 17 instruments—not just the GDP or the Stock Market instrument. It is very difficult to pay attention to 17 instruments at one time. This is the challenge that we have with global governance today. The Covid crisis has also shown us what is wrong with our present government and expert-led models of improving systems. We are at this moment paying a lot of attention, as we need to, to prevent the medical problem from becoming worse and to finding solutions to the medical problem, one of which is physical distancing to prevent the spread of the pandemic. That is the right solution that our doctors have pointed out to us. The consequence of this good solution has been that other systems are breaking down. Our people, while being prevented from dying from Covid, are dying due to other illnesses for which they cannot get treatment since all resources are diverted towards the care of people infected with Covid. With the stopping of the economy, people are beginning to die due to starvation; they don't have income to buy food. Solutions, therefore, must look at all aspects of a system.
Secondly, we must also look at the future consequence of our actions. Reducing the effort in disease prevention has caused schools to close. All over the world, alarm bells are ringing about the effect of interrupting children's education and how that is going to impact their lives in the future. So crisis solutions in one part of the system can damage other parts too. It can also damage the health of the whole system and this is the challenge we have in management.
Need to unfocus
We are used to managing by focusing and dealing with the problem very efficiently, but now we need to unfocus. We need to look at many things together. As humans, we don't know at the moment how to govern complex systems. Einstein said very famously that when one is confronted with a crisis —an insoluble big problem—then, trying to solve it by pressing harder on the very method which might have caused the problem, is madness. When we think about what we need in the future, let’s not keep thinking of just government. We have to think of governance. What we see now is evidence of the clash of the scientific way of thinking and the natural way of being.
More and more about less and less
Science is a way of thinking; nature is a way of being. Scientific thinking breaks reality into parts; nature brings things together to create life. The European Enlightenment—the first enlightenment in the 17th Century—broke knowledge into parts, into silos, specialized disciplines, in which one got to know more and more about less and less. Since Newton's time, 30 to 40 specializations have been developed in Physics. Then, we have Biology and Chemistry, each broken up into parts. In Social Sciences, even within Economics, we have so many schools, and there are so many other social sciences. We are getting better and better at knowing more and more about less and less.
Narrow domestic walls
To use the expression of Rabindranath Tagore, a poet and a philosopher who was the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize, we could be ‘breaking up the world into fragments by narrow domestic walls,’ by our thoughts and actions. The walls have come up not only between people in societies but between scientific disciplines too. Nature brings people and things together, creating life. We need new ‘enlightenment,’ because we suffer from not only the Covid crisis but also ecological and civilisational crises. We need to come, as Tagore said, to a situation ‘where the clear stream of reason flows and it is not lost in the dreary desert sand of dead habits’ and outdated thoughts.
One of the first well-known examples in scientific management of nature relates to forestry. In Germany, a same type of trees was planted in rows, applying scientific methods to improving them and counting them easily. We introduced management methods of improving productivity in nature. Our forests survive because they have variety in them—different types of trees, bushes and grass. They work together and sustain the whole forest; the Amazon is not managed by the scientific ways of man. In scientific agriculture, we plant one type of crop in a big field, use machines and appropriate fertilizers and pesticides for that crop to improve productivity. But as we have learnt in our own country, with wheat and paddy, by using uniform crop practices we destroy the soil and even change the local weather pattern in parts of our country. So the scientific approach about doing the same thing in a large scale, with standardization, kills the beauty of complex systems and the way they sustain themselves.
Scientific population management is about taking the best man and the best woman and letting them to procreate and then put their children into special nurseries where they are fed the best food, so they will grow into superior men and superior women. This method of spreading what we consider the best and forgetting the rest destroys the civilization and nature too.
We have to change this paradigm. We have to change from the mechanical way of organizing things (which is overpowering nature) to the natural way, following it in organizing our own society. We have to change from man's way of thinking, which has been overpowering woman's way of thinking for centuries now. We have to change from trying to impose formal methods like management systems to overpower organic and informal systems, which people use to earn their livelihood and manage their own communities. This is a crisis we have in India right now, where, we denigrate the large informal sector that we have and stigmatize it. We look down upon it even though that sector has, in it, a great resilience. People with very little resource and support from the formal system sustain themselves in the informal sector.
The changing global order
Even before Covid, globalization was breaking up. Countries have been reacting to the global system of trade management because their people were losing jobs and their incomes were being destroyed for the benefit of allowing trade of goods and money to flow around the world. Of course, more recently, geopolitical tensions have been breaking up the global order. In Covid, physical realities have broken the flow of products around the global supply chains. This is not going to change in a hurry. We have to stop now and think more about local rather than global solutions. This is the realization that we have come to, in the world today, seeing the complex problems of inequity of social systems, destruction of soil and forest, water contamination and so on. We can’t apply uniform solutions for water contamination or forests. All systems come together locally and create a local reality. So if you have to solve and improve on all the indicators of the SDGs, then the people of Kerala must find their solutions for their society, their environment and their health systems as they are now doing. The people of Tamil Nadu must find their own. The situation of Kerala cannot be the solution for Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland or the desert lands in the Thar Desert. It comes again to our misconceived approach of managing large complex systems with strong central governments and large scale, centralised, private sector and NGO organizations. They take power away from people; we must object to it on both scientific and ethical grounds. We need local system solutions, developed and implemented by communities, to global systemic problems of health, livelihoods and care of the environment. We must change the theory of change. We should not be looking to scale up a standard solution everywhere, but we should scale up the ability of people everywhere to find their own solutions in their own communities. This was Gandhiji's way of giving freedom to the people, to make people the masters of their own lives, their own communities and their own solutions.
When the capital migrates…
So here we are—back to the people in the bus and many people outside the bus. Many of us inside the bus were beneficiaries of the form of globalization prevalent at the turn of the millennium, in which those who had capital kept investing and increased their returns further. By this system of free flow of capital, the wealthy kept growing faster and faster. Therefore, the distance between those who have wealth and those who can only work and get income from work, has increased so high in the last 30 years. Probably 50 people in the world today own as much wealth as half of humanity. This is unsustainable and unethical. Globalization has been making life easier for migrant capital to go wherever it liked, but we've been making it very hard for migrant workers who cannot even find a home anywhere. We need new forms of business enterprises. As teachers of management and managers, we must develop enterprises in which workers will create the wealth for themselves and not, by their work, create wealth only for remote investors, many of whom don't even know where their wealth is being invested. For them, the enterprise is a just a stock market ticker. The condition of people working in it is not of much concern to them.
The spinning wheel—the symbol
I come to Gandhiji again. His Chakra, the spinning wheel, was a symbol. It was a vision of enterprise by the people, producing things for the people, and which were also owned by the people. We need deep democracy that is government by the people, of the people and for the people. We have a conceptual crisis in governing complex and dynamic social systems. Again, to quote Einstein: “We can't keep applying the same institutional ideas and hope to solve civilisational and ecological problems that we don't know how to solve today.” We create more problems by keeping on applying our present ways of getting things done. We need to rethink how we manage and govern business enterprises as well as cities and countries.
