From Global Compact to Global Contract

The Tällberg Foundation supported the conference on the theme “A Global Contract Based on Climate Justice – The Need for a New Approach Concerning International Relations.” The conference took place in Brussels on November 11.

The goal of the conference was to create a stimulating environment for dialogue in order to inform Members of the European Parliament and other stakeholders such as civil society, public institutions and the business and financial sector of the necessity for a Global Contract based on Climate Justice.

The conference took place in the European Parliament in Brussels on 11 November 2008. Tällberg Foundation vice-chair Anders Wijkman (MEP) was one of the hosts, and speakers included Ashok Khosla, Caroline Lucas, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and other former Tällberg Forum participants.

Bo Ekman, Chairman of the Tällberg Foundation, held the following speech:



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Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, esteemed colleagues,

I will speak of what my heart is full.

I have to tell you I had a dream; a kind of a nightmare. I was jolted back to consciousness in my bed at the Arctic Hotel in Ilullissat on Greenland. I had dreamt that all of you and all of the world’s leaders had been negotiating with the Greenland ice to stop melting.

The intent of the negotiations was to strike a Greenland protocol; a contract with nature to behave and to adapt. You, We, put all our capability and capacity of force behind our arguments - 27 000 nukes to begin with. Then all the military, political, financial, economic and religious power that humanity has amassed.

Negotiations were tough. Nature decided to stonewall. Responded in defiance.

In 1998 the Jakobshavn glacier moved with the speed of 18 m/day, in 2007 36 m/day and in 2009 at 48 m/day.

We tried every trick of the negotiating trade. We even threw in a self-imposed financial meltdown and an economic depression. Nothing worked. Where has all our power gone?

You know, that we know enough about the escalating destabilization of the climate and ecological systems. Will we fix it? Can we fix it? Yes, we can.

Nature has of course always been an interdependent, adaptive, complex, self-regulating web of subsystems; always in flux. Assuming that the same high degree of system’s stability and predictability also would prevail for the next 10 000 years made us design – in cold blood or in good faith, whatever - tightly interdependent systems for value creation. The demise of a Ford or a GM will strike against thousands of communities. But governance is still basically one of national and regional independence serving national interests, not the interests of the whole.

The fragments – be they a nation, a corporation, a party, a movement – to which we belong we perceive as “the safe havens.”

But I am a living species. I am anywhere, anytime, everywhere in motions set by other parts of the systems and in parts by myself. In flux. Always.

To think, speak, act and do in the interest of the whole is taboo (or just “poetry”) to the fragmented person, to any beholder of a stake-holder interest.

Yes, the ombudsman will say, the whole is important: but not now, not with the problems that we have ahead, with the pressures that are on me, on us.

This is the very mechanism of how an interdependent, interconnected world has left us incapable of grasping the whole of our dilemma with living on Earth.

15 years ago we hoped with Robert Cooper for the “breaking of nations”. Today we experience “the return of history and the end of dreams” as Robert Kaplan puts it. Stakeholder interests are diverging - North-South, rich-poor, Muslims-Christians, missiles in Kaliningrad and in Poland over energy resources, over water, over fisheries, over space to grow one’s economy.

The big one in climate politics is governance of the commons; of the interest of the whole. No one is elected to represent the commons. The interest of the whole is not defended by a strong set of laws and means for their stringent enforcement. The globalized political and economic landscapes are next to lawless. The land itself is under restless, violent and escalating exploitation. SEI tries to define the planetary boundaries - air, water, oceans - that human activity must not transgress.

The Tällberg Foundation has for years advocated the need for systems solutions to systems problems. In the 1990’s the roots of the Global Compact were developed out of this philosophy, out of Tällberg workshops such as “Is the business of human rights also the business of business”. The Global Compact is a mechanism of soft governance. It had its roots in the hopeful spirit of the 1990’s when there still was faith in the self-discipline, the moderation, the benevolence and wisdom of markets. Politics let go.
Now, we know better.
Kyoto did not work.
Doha did not work.
The Baltic Sea agreements did not work.
The present governance of the financial systems did not work.
The MDG’s do not work.

A Global Contract must be based on principles of hard governance, on the discipline of implementation. I’m afraid that the Copenhagen agreement is negotiated under the assumption that there are a zillion exits out of the lair.
Martin Wolf writes a brilliant analysis in FT on the principles and the real-politik of the forth-coming summit in Washington on governance of the global financial systems. He does not mention with one word the environmental crisis.

But the fact is that the world has “double pneumonia”: A financial/economy crisis most likely to tip over into depression, an environmental crisis most likely to tip over into disasters, for many more people than presently.

However we can not cure double pneumonia by curing one lung at a time. We have to cure them and the whole bodily system in its integrated context. Interdependent problems require interdependent solutions.

But our governance system is based on principles of independence and not on the interdependence which constitutes the economic, political and environmental reality of our time. Our pathetic governance is surreal.

We need systems thinking to spin systems doing. The present applications of sovereignty and nationhood are outdated. The EU is a beacon of hope.

Climate justice will require that the laws of human society have natural law as its point of departure and fundament. Reinvoke Aristoteles, Grotius and Jefferson! We have to constitutionally define the planetary boundary conditions for human economic activity.

We should work towards having all nations adopt a common preamble of their constitutions that declares us as inseparable parts of the wider, natural, economic and security systems. Citizens of all nations should be provided access to a wider identity, to a wider “we”.

This would help legitimize agreements and policies that will require everyone’s participation in solidarity with the welfare of everyone and of the Earth, in equity and in climate justice.

I have little faith in us reaching a solid agreement for all future at COP15. I have even less faith in its perfect implementation. If not we the humans will tell, nature will.

But of course we can fix it. Move from the Global Compact to the realism of hard governance, of a Global Contract with distinct and forcible articles. Also national behaviours must become subject to common laws, principles and to enforcement mechanisms.

The very concept of sovereignty needs to be put up for debate and for adaptation to the real world.

The current set of mega-crises – will as every such cataclysm in history give birth to new philosophy, new thinking – new doing and new hope beyond a system that has failed so many.

The very first thing we have to do is to rethink our thinking. So did FDR, so did Churchill, so did Keynes. Rethinking our relationship to the planet and to nature, and hence to economic policy, to technology, to learning and to governance/security – and to ourselves.

We shall not stay reactive to the flow of events. It is for us to be pre-active to a vision that will give the answer to the final question: How on earth can we live together? – we the humans and we with nature.


Bo Ekman
Speech held on November 11, 2008 in Brussels