We share the perspective described by Glada Lahn and Ruth Townend for Chatham House.
We can imagine the most diverse architectures of governance of planetary processes but the reflection on what the word ‘growth’ should mean, within the framework of a critical rethinking of capitalism, is fundamental.
The increasing complexity of what is happening, and the risks associated with it, demand new creative talents. Using critical thinking when talking about growth means first of all coming back to reality, looking realistically at the damage that the current economic system has caused and continues to cause in our societies. The issue is not of today but has run substantially through the decades since the end of the bipolar equilibrium.
We have already written that we recognise how, in this phase of globalisation, millions of people have emerged from material poverty. But today, after a pandemic and with an ongoing war (let us also recall the long-term effects of the 2007-2008 financial crisis), the issue evoked here arises as a strategic one, for the collective security and for the political-structural sustainability of the planet.
Inequalities, as we know, arise from wrong political choices, of a policy that – over the last thirty years – has ceded its sovereignty to an economy of unlimited growth. We see the results today, in the de-generative megacrisis we are experiencing.
Inequalities we see have been fuelled by an economic system that has led us into a perilous vortex of unsustainability. The time has come to introduce new cultural and operational paradigms and, at last, to start thinking strategically beyond the dominant linearity and into the depths of the complexities of evolving worlds.
