21.2: Human Security in World Affairs: Opportunities
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What, then, would constructive solutions and effective human security policies entail under those circumstances? In this section we review the suggestions made by the chapter authors and venture some ideas of our own, moving from the global level through the national to the local. We will focus mainly on ways to address overshoot and to achieve sustainability. Other avenues toward human security that reach beyond the merely sustainable will be discussed in the final section.
Opportunities at the International Level
Globalisation presents the paradox of power relationships being redirected, reinvented and modified under the banner of a misguided vision of development that leads to inevitable collapse, which will affect both victims and beneficiaries of globalisation (Lewis, 1998). Some major manifestations of globalisation, notably the increased movement of goods and people and the hyperconsumption in OECD countries, contribute massively to the emission of greenhouse gases; yet other aspects provide opportunities. The two causative areas, economy and technology, also provide the opportunities for the two major actors, international corporations and international intergovernmental institutions. Some analysts consider corporate social responsibility an important factor towards making use of globalising processes to increase human security. On the other hand, many of the threats to human security also involve corporations; as organisations they are not actually capable of sentiments like responsibility or empathy, which renders the phenomenon fortuitous at best (more on corporate responsibility in Section here). This leaves us with intergovernmental institutions, and the example of the UN shows both how much has been accomplished, and how much more could be. The SDGs represent the first concerted effort by the international community under the auspices of the UN to pursue sustainable human security worldwide. This represents a huge step forward—or at least it would, if the goals did not contradict each other, if they were reconciled with the demands of Donut Economics (Raworth, 2017), if they took into account global overshoot, and if they recognized the pervasive inter-species injustice and our war against nature. The accomplishments and shortcomings of the SDG agenda are discussed in Chapter 3.
Much intergovernmental initiative seems continually thwarted by the opposition of a few influential maverick countries—which raises the question to what extent the principles of national security and of sovereignty hinder such global efforts towards sustainable human security; and could those principles also be of help? Many states obviously do a passable job at ensuring their own citizens’ human security, and some present stellar examples of international leadership. But is that sufficient reason to allow states so much autonomy under the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols as to enable them to opt out of the process or to hijack its outcomes, to the extent of claiming the right to use nuclear weapons if their ‘survival of the state’ were threatened? If citizens are expected to put up with the legal system around them, why cannot states live up to the same expectation, especially if it benefits their citizens? The present situation amounts to human security by subscription, which allows those states off the hook whose citizens probably most require the commitment. A prestigious body of academics has proposed for the UN to switch from consensus rule to majority rule (Biermann et al., 2012).
The recently proposed Responsibility to Protect (R2P) regime might also help alleviate this difficulty by sufficiently weakening the hegemony of the sovereignty principle. It might still not have enough teeth in the absence of a global law enforcement branch with powers that override sovereign states and bypass the veto in the UNSC. In Chapter 18 Jeffrey Morton and Samantha Maesel express some optimism in the light of recent trends towards supranational regulation. Likewise, Chapter 6, Chapter 9 and Chapter 20 indicate a slow movement by the international community towards a more communitarian perspective on human security, at least in legal terms. Wilmer’s account of nonviolent means for conflict resolution in Chapter 19 expresses the hope that the shared challenges loom large enough to unify the international community to render major armed conflicts less likely.
However, it is equally clear that there are influential groups that would not regard it in their interest if armed conflict simply went out of favour. Those interests are distributed much beyond the US military-industrial complex (which is still the largest supplier of arms) into key industries of virtually all developed countries. Few would dispute that the world’s major armament industries have both the motivation and the power to jeopardise any major swing towards pacifism in world affairs. On the one hand, they thus threaten human security, while on the other those new intergovernmental regimes are unlikely to work without a measure of enforcement—which requires some military muscle. Chapter 5 and Chapter 10 make it clear that the competition among countries for ever scarcer resources will intensify, which might well lead to a reversal of the humanitarian gains made since WWII. The danger lies equally in the possibility that the policing gets out of hand, leading towards a ‘Fortress World’ type future (Raskin, 2016) with extreme inequities, and in the possibility of intensified global anarchy.
The diverse field of international NGOs such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and Amnesty International shows considerable potential to help with global security regimes, particularly in their influence on everyday decisions of citizens aided by electronic social media. As the international version of civil society, they, too, play an important role in globalising processes and have accomplished much in exerting grassroot pressure on reticent governments. If their number and power continue to grow as they have over the past decades, those organisations and social networks represent significant opportunities for swaying the prime actors towards sustainable human security, and particularly towards the kinds of legal reforms suggested in Chapter 16, Chapter 18 and Chapter 20. Sustainable human security is achieved once the activities of societies and countries produce impacts and performances that can be localised in the sustainable operating space described by Kate Raworth’s Donut Model (2012)—below environmental boundaries and above sociopolitical minima.
To summarise the prospects for global initiatives, the chapter authors have identified two major obstacles that limit opportunities towards sustainable human security. The first was the lack of international consensus and the absence of means to reign in dissenting countries and to enforce regimes. The international order is fundamentally anarchic, as Morton and Maesel point out in Chapter 18. Any step towards regimentation of national conduct requires inordinate amounts of effort by individual committed countries. The second obstacle arises from a serious blind spot with the most powerful decision-makers in recognising priority problems. As Chapter 6 and Chapter 18 show, international law and the agenda of the UNSC cover almost exclusively the socio-political and economic pillars of human security; even collaboration on health security is not universally accepted, as the US-American withdrawal from the WHO showed (in the middle of a pandemic, no less). Environmental security is governed to a much lesser extent or not at all by any internationally recognised legal regime, least of all the sustainability imperative. In comparison to Syria, Iran, and the state of the world economy, environmental security and sustainability issues are relegated to sideshows in security debates. The successive high-level conferences at Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, etc. indicated the world powers’ unwillingness to compromise what they perceive as their national interests for the benefit of sustainable global environmental security, even in the face of overwhelming consensus among the experts (Brito & Smith, 2012; Brundtland et al., 2012; Ripple et al., 2017).
What would be required to ensure sustainable global environmental security is a concerted effort to secure the minimum acceptable amount of welfare for the greatest sustainable number, in the form of a universal agreement on global goalposts and equitable burdens. Staying below the maximum sustainable impact (which can be expressed as a maximum footprint) gives a per capita goal of 3.6 gha that could provide moderate comfort for a population of about 3 billion, but decreasing because of overshoot.[7] Based on the observations made in the preceding section, three strategies would help humanity move towards the goalposts of sustainability: (a) increasing the equity of impact, (b) halting (and then reversing) population growth as quickly as possible and (c) preparing for incidents of partial collapse.
The practical problems with those strategies are obvious. On the one hand, numerous international NGOs represent vision, responsibility and initiative towards sustainable human security at the global level (albeit not very democratically)—what Bosselmann in Chapter 16 refers to as the global civil society, represented by platform documents such as the Earth Charter (Earth Charter Initiative, 2012) and the Earth Manifesto (Mosquin & Rowe, 2004). On the other hand, the chapters on governance and international law clearly suggest that the goal of international equity is thoroughly unpalatable to the governments of developed countries as well as to transnational corporate powers, and it cannot be enforced anyway under the current global order. Fertility is being addressed worldwide mainly through the empowerment of women but family planning programmes still face the opposition of powerful religious and cultural prejudices, spearheaded by collusive governments (Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2009). The benefits in terms of fertility reduction trickle in much too slowly compared to the progressive damage being caused by worsening overshoot. [8]
In view of those obstacles the prospects for timely and effective intergovernmental action seems rather dim. International development aid, too, is hampered by that blind spot to the sustainability imperative (Lautensach & Lautensach, 2013). The pitfalls of the conventional development paradigm were discussed in the preceding sections. Also, as Clements and LaMonica point out in Chapter 8 and Chapter 14, respectively, prioritising the building or re-building of centralised state institutions in developing countries seldom provides enough support for human security. The global imposition of democratic mechanisms of empowerment is also likely to create new problems in some developing countries because it destabilises market-dominant ethnic minorities, which often leads to violent upheaval (Chua, 2004, p. 12). In a nutshell, the handicap arising from linear models of development and unidimensional notions of progress jeopardises success of many well-intentioned efforts at improving the lot of the world’s poorest. Social change is driven by technological advances (as proposed by Schumpeter, 1950, pp. 81-87), environmental change (as described by the field of environmental history, discussed in Chapter 11), and by shifts in dominant ideas (Kuhn, 1962), which makes linearity seem a rather far-fetched notion (Bowers, 1993; Rees, 2017). The real opportunity of ‘development aid,’ then, is to recognise that many developing countries can make their inhabitants more secure within the context of a hybrid state of the kind Clements advocates in Chapter 8, but incorporating a locally sustainable economy. This would be most relevant for countries rendered ‘fragile’ by the effects of adverse environmental change. The upshot, however, suggests that the sovereignty principle is not entirely dispensable after all.
We conclude again that limited collapse is all but inevitable: the current state of international (dis)order renders unlikely the timely success on the two strategies of increasing socioeconomic equity and reversing population growth at the global level. Even catastrophic scenarios are not likely to change quickly enough this scene of general disunity and corruption of influence, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated. With that dismal prospect on the sustainability front comes the sobering conclusion that initiatives in the socio-political, economic, and health-related pillars of human security cannot achieve much lasting success at the international scale. This follows from the primacy of environmental security as the underlying condition for lasting human security as argued in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. The conditions for the transition to Earth democracy and ecological citizenship, as explained by Bosselmann (Chapter 16), seem unlikely to come about in time, considering the rate at which the crisis is worsening. We are left with the hope that sovereign states or blocs of states might take the initiative. One encouraging phenomenon arose in 2018 with the advent of impactful protest movements like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Sunrise (Scharmer, 2019).
Opportunities at the National and Local Levels
We now summarise the potential of regional and national levels as possible arenas for progressive initiatives towards sustainable human security. Human security has been proposed as the main raison d’être of the nation-state (Pitsuwan, 2007). It stands to reason that many place their hopes in the state for progressive initiatives towards sustainable human security by providing the necessary guidance for behaviour change (e.g. Orr, 2018).
Criteria and requirements for improving human security at the national level are explicated in several chapters: resource management and coping with scarcity in Chapter 10; dominant views of nature are discussed in Chapter 11; the importance of the rule of law, conflict resolution, human rights, understanding of overshoot and other criteria are discussed in Chapter 6, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 4, and Chapter 3, respectively. Table 21.1 summarises those criteria and requirements and compares their fulfilment at the global and national-regional levels. From the juxtaposition of the two levels, notable differences become apparent in terms of the unmitigated exercise of self-interest, short-term priorities, chauvinism, the lack of enforcement and solidarity, the absence of requirements for effective resource management, and mitigation of scarcity. These differences partly explain the shortfall at the global level as summarised in the preceding section; but they also indicate some positive potential at the national-regional level.
The worldwide trend towards increasing socioeconomic inequity and disparity includes developed as well as developing countries and seems particularly reticent to mitigation. It has created a new class of aristocrats who wield enormous power behind the scenes and outside of electoral politics (Piketty, 2014). The World Economic Forum (2020) considers this trend a grave danger for human security. Reversing it through legislative change may well lie beyond the power of any democratic system.
| OBSTACLES | GLOBAL LEVEL SolutionS | NATIONAL/REGIONAL LEVEL SolutionS |
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Mental Habits and Ideological Traps
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Social Traps (Chapter 10)
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Criteria for Effective Resource Management (Chapter 10)
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Risk of Conflict (Chapter 10)
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Four Objectives that Promote Sustainable Human Security Regionally
Given the poor international consensus on virtually all important issues, and the extent to which sovereign governments still dominate and define what is possible in the political arena, competent administrations empowered by sufficiently engaged and enlightened electorates could accomplish much at the national level in terms of the four sustainability objectives of efficiency, restraint, adaptation, and structural flexibility (Lautensach, 2010). This applies to both developed and developing countries. We will summarise the four objectives here briefly.
The literature abounds with proposals how the efficiency could be increased with which resources and energy are consumed. This would increase regional carrying capacity, minimise harmful environmental impacts and it would buy some time. Efficiency is a major factor in the development of resilience. Countrywide increases in efficiency would require profound and widespread technological innovation, the elimination of many government subsidies, which are becoming unaffordable anyway, and changes in cultural practices. For example, towards improving energy efficiency, Dessus (2001) suggested that governments provide the right infrastructure choices (e.g. public transport), re-model the manufacture of energy-consuming machinery, and help developing partner countries avoid the mistakes made by the developed ones.
The rate of consumption of resources will have to be restrained in developed nations. Cherry Tsoi argues this in Chapter 9 on the example of GHG emissions. This will not be possible without adequate legal incentives to make do with less and counterincentives against overconsumption. More importantly, it would require a profound restructuring of the culture of consumerism and a reassessment of what constitutes growth, progress, sufficiency, and quality of life for individuals, for communities, and for entire societies. This amounts to an all-out effort to elevate the performance of a society, and ultimately of all of humanity, above the socio-political boundaries in Raworth’s (2017) Donut Model. The state is in a position to equalise consumption and to address the disparity in people’s capacities to cope with resource scarcity. Restraint would also have to extend to reproductive habits, which presents an altogether different challenge for health care policy. For example, infertility or low sperm counts would no longer be considered a cause for medical intervention, nor would medical budgets cover costly reproductive technology. Restraint is an important component in the agenda of Deep Adaptation (Bendell, 2011).
Reform efforts will have to facilitate adaptation of political, social and technological practices to the new conditions created by the crisis. This includes the scarcity of certain resources (e.g. metals), pollution and the resulting unprecedented health hazards (e.g. UV levels), reduced biodiversity and the associated destabilisation of ecosystems, and problems related to extremely high regional population densities (McKibben, 2010). For instance, national health care systems will be required to adapt to the predicted cancer epidemics which would certainly overtax their health care budgets, and re-focus towards preventive and palliative care. [9] The precautionary principle is particularly significant for the design of proactive adaptation measures (Myers, 2002). Taking into account the prospect of limited collapse imposes some changes on the agenda of adaptation, which is addressed in the Deep Adaptation agenda.
Efforts toward adaptation, efficiency and restraint would require structural flexibility of political and economic institutions of countries. The eco-socialist school of thought focuses particularly on such a wide-reaching programme of structural reform with specific focus on mitigating the worst of the environmental crisis (Curry, 2011). Their main argument states that global capitalism represents the major culprit in the crisis and that therefore in its present form it cannot be part of the solution (Kovel, 2002). In the absence of global reforms, capitalist economies could be adapted in a top-down direction at the national level. For example, Sala-Diakanda (2001, p. 107) suggests six structural changes towards food security of developing countries, surpassing the SDGs in foresight and insight: Produce staple crops instead of export products, re-orient development policies towards rural communities, eliminate discrimination against women, re-enforce productive traditional values, reform anachronistic agricultural practices, and develop a long-term vision for the future. Other proposed agenda include the reduction of food waste, the rationing of petroleum products, a switch to zero carbon energy, and the restoration of ecosystem services (Rees, 2014; Brown, 2003; Monbiot, 2007; Cumming & Petersen, 2017). The main objective of such reforms is to discontinue the system’s addiction to growth, to work towards implementing a steady-state economy (Daly, 2013), and to develop resilience—all primarily at the national level. The kind of structural change required for those measures obviously transcends the political and reaches into the cultural realm.
Developing Countries: How Much Room for Sustainable Human Security?
Examples of island states illustrate how the contingencies of sustainability could inform national human security policies in developing countries (Lautensach & Lautensach, 2010). In January 2010 a major earthquake displaced about 2.3 million Haitians (almost one quarter of the total population) and killed or injured over half a million. The UN’s relief programme, following the conventional development paradigm, focused on the restoration of the island’s economy and entirely ignored the obvious physical limitations imposed by climate, soil conditions, environmental trends, population dynamics and simply the geographical size of the island (UN Office of the Secretary-General’s Special Advisor 2012). Even though the country’s isolated situation reveals those limitations quite unequivocally, discrepancies are evident between official development priorities and ecological limits. (See Extension Activity 1.)
The example of Haiti illustrates a disconnect between ends and means in conventional development aid. Many international aid efforts are in fact meant to function both as disaster relief and as development, to help the recipient country help itself, at least in the long term. Well intentioned as they often are, their benefits seem to manifest mainly in the short term and hardly address the wider context or the long term. What measures the average developing country should take at the national level in order to ensure the sustainable security of citizens is addressed in Chapter 5, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10. They address as broad contingencies resource scarcity, chronic economic downturns (including the collapse of export markets), increasing population pressure and global environmental change. It hardly needs to be pointed out that those contingencies are seldom given adequate attention in aid programmes such as the one implemented in Haiti.
Many developing countries show characteristics that act in their favour. Most of their inhabitants carry the memory of frugal lifestyles, the kind that disappeared in Europe with the WWII generation. The capacity for frugality and restraint will be of enormous help in face of the coming collapse events; surely the level of food waste in Somalia is already minimal! Acting against that potential benefit of frugality is the trend towards increasing socioeconomic inequity, shown by the growth of affluent middle classes who are working hard to forget the frugality of their forebears in pursuit of the ideal of ‘Western’ affluence. The example of rising meat consumption in developing countries with its detrimental consequences for food security, biodiversity, and emission quota speaks volumes about the counterproductive interpretations of ‘development’ under the CDP. The growing inequity within developing countries also illustrates how the use of national averages can mislead quantitative analyses.
Most developing countries in Haiti’s situation are at risk of becoming failing states, which means that their survival depends largely on external aid, as Strydom (Chapter 6) suggests. That means that much responsibility will rest on the countries that weather a global crash. At the regional and multilateral level, groups of such determined countries could make a decisive difference, depending on how much clout they can muster internationally. They would decide which faltering states are worth defending or supporting and which should be allowed to disappear. This touches on Raskin’s (2016) ‘Fortress World’ and ‘Eco-communalism’ scenarios, under which global regimes are enforced through trade embargoes and other sanctions; but it also indicates opportunities for counterhegemonic, collaborative self-sufficiency in developing regions.
Addressing the Cultural Foundations
Given that neither geographical expansion on this planet, nor boosting procuring efficiency, nor resource substitution offer much room for the further increase of the human carrying capacity, it seems clear that resource scarcity is beginning to act as a major brake on the growth of national economies (Dobkowski & Wallimann, 2002; see also Chapter 10). Increasing scarcities not only bereave corncucopianism of the last vestiges of empirical justification, they require people to unlearn myths about what constitutes progress and to replace them with new beliefs and values.[10] As several authors in this text have pointed out, resource depletion and the tragedy of the commons are consequences of psychological and cultural determinants of consumption behaviour. In Chapter 10 Richard Plate discusses perception bias, cognitive disabilities, and counterproductive mental habits that contribute to the unsustainable use of resources. Cultural differences in value priorities also affect our treatment of natural ‘resources’ to a crucial extent. This begins with the question what constitutes a resource for us, and what gives us the right to harvest, mine, deplete, and exploit it to our heart’s delight.
The significance of the cultural context relates to observations by several chapter authors (e.g. Chapter 3 and Chapter 11, also Table 21.1) that the global environmental crisis, and the tragedy of the commons in principle, really represent crises of human thinking. They therefore cannot be addressed without some fundamental changes in the human psyche (Jones, 1993; Rees, 2017). This points to other factors that tend to sway people towards unfair consumption behaviour—attitudes such as selfishness, tribalism, ethnocentrism, chauvinism—behaviour that was selected during our evolutionary past and gave rise to powerful myths; mental habits such as wishful thinking, self-deception, groundless optimism, weakness of will (akrasia), and the social traps discussed by Richard Plate in Chapter 10; and certain moral ineptitudes such as denying one’s moral responsibility [11] and lacking moral scruples (Lautensach, 2010).
Those behaviour determinants need to change, and they are modifiable (Rees, 2014, 2017; Orr ,2018). The state can help with that but the onus is on individuals, families, and communities. In a democratic society such drastic incentives towards behaviour changes could not succeed without sufficient electoral backing or at lest acquiescence, which in turn relies on the development of certain conducive attitudes in societies and individuals. In the absence of such groundswell support, resource management laws and regulations based solely on biological considerations often fail because they did not take into account cultural obstacles (Johannes, 2000).
Culturally contingent behaviour determinants are primarily passed on and perpetuated within cultural groups through formal and informal education. Much of that education takes place through what educationists refer to as the null curriculum and the hidden curriculum, which tend to be intransigent to control or modification (Contenta, 1993; Bowers, 1993). [12] Nevertheless, educational reform presents a huge, largely untapped, potential opportunity for changing the behaviour of coming generations towards sustainable living (Bowers, 1993; Orr, 2004; Lautensach, 2010, 2018b). This is because among all the influences that contribute to the development of values and beliefs in a young person, formal education alone is carried out as a meticulously designed programme, constantly monitored, and under centralised control. The UN recognised this in their Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) and their SDG #4, but without addressing the cultural priorities discussed here. In contrast, the media have largely abandoned their educational responsibility as will be discussed below.
Effective education reform follows three groups of agenda (Lautensach, 2010, 2018b): The transmission of counterproductive beliefs and values has to be stopped; educational shortfall in areas vital to sustainability has to be mitigated; and the learner must be liberated from constraints that prevent him/her from taking independent action. Those agenda are covered by six major educational aims: re-defining progress, replacing anthropocentrism with ecocentrism, remediating crucial skill gaps, imparting a vision for the future, eliminating parochialism, and empowering the learner to take action (Lautensach, 2010; 2020). Those outcomes have been subsumed under the concept of environmental literacy (Orr, 2004) but their significance extends to all aspects of human security.
The empowerment of the learner can benefit from some of the contributions made by the Freirian school of liberation paedagogy (Freire, 1986). However, in contrast to the Freirian focus on sociopolitical constraints, the kind of reform we discuss here aims at the constructive critique of the conceptual constraints presented in consumerism, in the ideology of economic growth, and in the anthropocentric value base. Beyond these agenda of liberation, the reform is directed to favour the development of a communitarian ethic of ecocentric holism, and to finally enable the education system to accomplish what it is envisioned and obligated to do – to empower the learner to build a better world (Jaeger, 2012). Empowerment also protects against propaganda. A glitzy campaign of massive public divertissement of the kind that was financed by BP in the wake of the Deep Water Horizon Gulf oil spill could only have had its desired effects inasmuch as that public had been suitably undereducated and misled, preferably for several generations.
Despite its potential, educational reform is not a universal remedy; in the context of the crisis it can only serve to buy time and to empower future generations to avert the worst. Yet it is a powerful tool for reaching the ‘unaware, unconvinced, and unconcerned’ (Raskin, 2016). It could make the difference between Raskin’s scenarios of ‘Breakdown’ versus ‘Eco-communalism’ or ‘Fortress World’ versus ‘New Sustainability Paradigm’—huge differences in terms of overall human security and welfare. It can also change values and deconstruct stereotypes. [13] Without a modicum of ecocentric valuing, the last nature preserves might fall to our ravenous appetite for ‘resources’ when shortages really begin to bite. Thousands more of endangered species will disappear like African ‘bushmeat’ in exchange for a few months of extra time. Education also has been valued for its contributions in the development of values, worldviews and requisite civic skills—learning that does not necessarily promote environmental sustainability but that certainly contributes to human security. In the concluding section of this chapter we shall explore those aspects of human security that do not rely on environmental sustainability.