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It is Monday 27 June 2016 and I’m on the early morning train from St. Pancras, London, to Sheffield. This is the first Monday after the momentous referendum result delivered the Brexit verdict. The radio in the taxi to the station broadcasts the slightly hysterical chatterings of the radio hosts and guests speculating about what happens next, reflecting a consensus amongst the financial elites that this is bad news for the UK economy. George Osborne, the Chancellor, has been silent for four days, having led the charge against Tory MPs supportive of Brexit – he’s due to make a statement at 7am.

Brexit leader Boris Johnson, the brash former London Mayor who many regard as Cameron’s successor, struck an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone before 7am by calling on Brexiters to reach out to those who voted to stay – probably not much use to those in the financial district who want more details on what happens next as they put in play plans to manage the fallout.

Last night at a dinner party I sat next to a Japanese national who has lived in the UK for 18 years and works for a fish import company – as the pound tanked, he has to pay more for his fish, and this gets passed on to the consumer. He hires Czechs and Rumanians to do the heavy physical work of handling the fish because, he says, British workers are not prepared to do that kind of work. He insists he pays foreign workers the same wage as he would pay a UK national. Another person at the dinner table was an Italian University lecturer – despite a letter from his University management on Friday that nothing will change, he now has no certainty about his future, nor did his Scottish colleague who teaches photography know what is going to happen to all the European students who pay good money to study his course in the UK. The Italian’s toast was “to Great Britain which is getting smaller by the day!”

As a South African, why a country would so willingly self-inflict such economic damage is deeply baffling. How a political leadership gets itself into such a mess at this time in global politics is even more baffling. And after just returning from a week in the USA where the inconceivable possibility of psychopath Donald Trump becoming President is now seriously being considered (according to polls, if the election took place now, 50 million Americans would vote for this utter ignoramus!), I cannot help ponder what this means from a South African perspective at exactly the moment when the Zuma leadership is doing all it can to disappear South Africa off the global stage wearing a ‘junk status’ label. A world run by Boris and Donald will have little time for a pimple of a country on the Southern tip of Africa that cannot be relied upon to steal money discretely. Maybe there are ways that may be helpful for us to understand what is going on.

What South Africans might find hard to realize is that the Brexit referendum was initiated by David Cameron to counter pro-Brexiters like Boris Johnson in his own party, and to head off defections to the right-wing UKIP party. It was inconceivable for him that the British people would vote to leave the EU – and so a referendum to outmanoeuvre his opponents in his own party and thus ensure for himself a second term seemed like a clever move at the time. That it has backfired is probably one of the more dramatic political miscalculations in the recent history of British politics.

True, UKIP emerges stronger having transformed the economic hardships of the growing number of poorer people suffering the negative consequences of the kind of globalization reinforced by the EU and enforced by austerity economics into jingoistic insanities like “we want our country back” (as if being ruled by Whiteahall is any more democratic than rule by Brussels!). But Boris Johnson could emerge from all this as Prime Minister. He and his cabal would be the real winners. Why does’nt he care for the EU and its economic advantages? Well, to answer that you need to understand that when he was Mayor of London his strategy was to attract investors from Asia, oil rich states and tax havens into a bizarre string of iconic property development projects that have transformed big chunks of London into playgrounds for the rich and laboratories for the architectural glitterati. This is what Guardian newspaper journalist Oliver Wainwright talked about at his Next Talk at the #IABR two weeks ago in Rotterdam – a talk entitled “Sell-out City”.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of people who voted for Brexit were older, poorly educated, lower income, non-metropolitan English and Welsh white people whose conception of ‘little England’ got stuck somewhere in the 1950s when the empire seemed stronger than ever. They were joined by a bizarre mix of baby boomer professionals and business people who seem fixated on sovereignty and obsessed with their privileges. 70% of young people voted to remain in the EU – not surprisingly, they hate the idea of their futures confined to this tiny grey island whose heyday has long passed. I mean who would want to oppose being free to work in Italy, or Southern France or hi-tech ultra-productive Germany?

For Boris Johnson, rising inequality is a sign of progress and the unhappiness that comes from exclusion is then usefully blamed on the “loss of sovereignty” to faceless EU bureaucrats and the inflows of nasty Europeans with strange un-British habits who get jobs at companies like my dinner partner’s fish import company. Boris Johnson has no patience for an ailing, austerity stricken, welfare-oriented environmentally sensitive (well, sort of) overregulated Europe – he has unleashed the base animal spirits of global capitalism in dramatic style in London, and tasted the sweet fruits this can bring to a brash new politically ambitious globally networked class of property developers, architects and financiers and their friends in all sorts of shady places. For Boris, the message will be simple: forget about the EU, look much much further East, and to the tax havens, so that he can do for the rest of Britain what he did to London. And if Donald becomes President, well then all bets are off – kleptomaniacal capitalism will literally ‘trump’ democracy in the heartlands of what used to be called the ‘free world’. All Zuma needs to do is hang on a bit longer so that the world catches up with him.

Every year for the past 15 years I have shown a documentary to my students called End of Suburbia which is about the consequences of oil peak. Towards the end oil peak analyst Richard Heinberg talks about the longer-term implications of rising uncertainty as the old predictabilities of the fossil fuel era start to come to an end. At one point he predicts that we can expect voters in richer countries to respond to uncertainty by voting for maniacs. As I watch Donald Trump mouth off his endless list of outrageous insults, prejudices and delusions, and as I watch Boris Johnson manipulate populist sentiment to misdirect the unhappiness of the victims of his approach to economic growth, I cannot help recall Richard Heinberg’s prescient words. The irony should not escape us: to displace the old political elites that have dominated American and British politics since the end of WWII, these maniacs must exploit the fears and prejudices of the poorer sections of their respective societies to get elected.

Saner voices like Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Democratic Party’s Bernie Saunders could get drowned out by this extremely dangerous right-wing populist political cocktail with ramifications that no-one can really predict. But there are already rising forces of resistance: a petition with over 3.5 million signatures, calls for a second referendum, subtle hints from the finance sector to avoid the worst, and even Boris looked shell-shocked on Friday and it is very clear he and his ilk have no plan. Quite simply, the Brexiters did not expect to win – if only the results were in reverse with only a small majority voting to remain which would have discredited Cameron enough to enable Boris to emerge as the man to keep the EU honest and UKIP at bay. Now he has to clean up the mess, and this is a lot riskier than he envisaged. And imagine the calls he is getting from his mates in London’s financial district!

None of this analysis should be interpreted as a wholesale defence of the EU. To be sure, its role since the onset of the economic crisis has been revealed. Even the IMF has recently conceded that the Greek crisis was mishandled because the interests of the banks counted for more than the livelihoods of Greek citizens. When Deutchebank pulled the plug out of the Greek banks after the Greeks elected a left-of-centre Government, it was clear who really holds power in the EU. Freedom of movement for capital within the EU – with much of this, ironically, managed from London – has made it possible for German banks to drive up debt levels in the EU peripheries (Portugal, Ireland, Greeces and Spain), creating debt-based dependencies that have fuelled German growth.

At the same time, hard won human rights and environmental regulations have been achieved at EU level that are binding in EU member states. Whole swathes of environmental law applicable in the UK now can get repealed after the UK formally withdraws from the EU. Europe-wide labour regulations will also get repealed. Both these realities matter. To argue, as some leftwing political leaders and analysts have done, that Brexit makes sense is to ignore this more complex reality. Breaking up the EU is not the way to ensure a more progressive outcome.

Notwithstanding the problems with the EU, this is the most inappropriate moment for the UK to be weakening the EU. In a world made increasingly insecure by the rise of racist right-wing populism in the USA that could put Trump in the Whitehouse, by the increasing support for right-wing parties and neo-Nazi movements in Europe, by the increasingly aggressive stance of the Putin regime in various global theatres of conflict, by the fragmenting conflicts across the Arab world (from the degenerations of the North African spring to the Syrian civil war, to upticks in Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories), the rise of resource conflicts and climate change disasters in many regions, and the looming threat of another global financial crash, this is when a broad democratic consensus in needed in Britain that reinforces the EU as a powerful economic bloc that could potentially act as a global stabiliser. This would mean forming alliances with other democratic parties, especially in the EU peripheries, to re-orient the EU away from its gradual drift into a proxy for anti-welfarist austerity economics. If Brexit does not happen and if the young people of Europe rise up to say ‘enough-is-enough’, then the crisis triggered by last Friday’s referendum might have triggered something positive.

As we South Africans engage each other in search of political solutions to our current multiple governance crises, we must realize that we only have each other in a world that is fast becoming increasingly unstable, crisis-ridden and insecure. Many South Africans who left for greener pastures or shipped their cash off-shore in search of better profits are fast discovering there is nowhere to run to anymore. The rest of the world is not an easy place to be. A stable, democratic, uncorrupted, socially progressive and ecologically sustainable South Africa could well attract all sorts of   innovations, initiatives, investments and talented people from all walks of life. Such a South Africa could build on positive trends in Africa, giving leadership to what could become the African century as the ‘old world’ goes into terminal decline.

Mark Swilling, between London and Sheffield, 27 June 2016

At the Gordon Research Conference in Vermont, with (from right) Heinz Schandl (Conference Chair, IRP member and employed by CSIRO in Australia), Janet Salem from UNEP (Bangkok and formerly IRP Secretariat) and Esther van der Voet (IRP member from The Netherlands).

Just attended a Gordon Research Conference on Opportunities for the Critical Decade – Decoupling Well-Being from Environmental Pressures and Impacts that took place in Stowe, Vermonth, USA (near Burlington). I delivered the keynote at the first plenary – my talk was entitled ‘Anticipating the Governance Implications of Global and Urban Transitions: A Long-Wave Perspective’. Gordon Research Conferences have been going since the 1950s, and they are regarded as highly prestigious events in the natural science communities in Europe and the USA. Grants are given to particular scientific communities to hold conferences that must be organized in a specific way over a 5 day period and all proceedings are strictly confidential – what we call Chatham House Rules these days. The format works well: each speaker has 40 minutes followed by 20 minutes of discussion, and there are two or three speakers per session. Afternoons from lunch to 4pm are free for networking and informal discussions, and from 4pm to 6pm everyone meets to walk through posters by postgraduate students in order to discover the emerging new work by young scientists. I found the format refreshing, spacious and nourishing. I loved have 40 minutes to fully elaborate my thinking, and 20 minutes of discussion directed at my input, and I loved hearing others do the same. So different from the 10 minute panel format, or the pure discussion format that seems to be favored these days. Nothing wrong with these formats, but they do prevent one from really getting exposed to deep thinking by a recognized expert wrestling with new ideas. Presenters are specifically encouraged to talk about unpublished work, and to explore what may be unresolved. One speaker, for example, talked about his attempt to develop a forecasting instrument, and then used his talk to show how he failed. Most refreshing indeed. This conference was part of series of Gordon Research Conferences on industrial ecology started by Tom Graedel (Yale) about a decade ago. A Chair and Vice Chair are elected each year, and the Chair sets the theme and invites the speakers, but cannot him/herself be a speaker. I cannot recall when I last attended a conference where I learn something new from every speaker, especially in this in-depth format. Most of the speakers addressed research and issues that were new to me, although everyone shared a commitment to sustainability. So this was a really rewarding experience. I loved the fact that there were a number of members from the International Resource Panel, now meeting in a non-UN format – they included Heinz Schandl, Esther van der Voet, Sangwon Suh, Anu Ramaswami, Tom Graedel and Edgar Hertwich.

Also took time to drive around for a day before the conference and two days after – Vermont is so incredibly beautiful. Mountainous like the Western Cape, but one drives past miles and miles of forest. I did a forest walk in the Rutland Forest in Southern Vermont, and visited the Whole Systems Design permaculture farm run by Ben Falk (who wrote the book Whole Systems Design) in the Mad River Valley just south of Burlington. And then last night enjoyed Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace – a wonderful pedestrianized mainstreet brimming with buzz, street performers, music and restaurants – reminded my of The Ramblas in Barcelona, or the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, or Piazza del Campo in Sienna. Just love those kinds of spaces. And before that walked the shores of Lake Champlain as the sun set, enjoying the sailing boats, skateboarders and guitar singers. There is a gentleness and unpretentiousness about Vermont that I appreciate. In a world threatened by Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, this peaceful place in the far north east of the USA was a welcome way to spend a week.

The International Resource Panel (which I have been a member of since 2007) has just released a new report called Food Systems and Natural Resources. Launched last week in Nairobi, one of the co-lead authors, Maarten Hajer, suggested that a tax on meat might be worth considering if we want to ensure food security for all while sustaining ecosystems that make food production possible. The fact that this report is focused on Food Systems and not Food Security is significant: it signals that the problem is not about food production, but rather about the highly problematic way that the global food system is structured and organized. The following is from the abstract of the report:

“Food systems are at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a historic global
commitment to eradicate poverty and hunger while ensuring healthy, prosperous and fulfilling lives.
The food we grow, produce, consume, trade, transport, store and sell is the essential connecting
thread between people, prosperity, and planet. We therefore need ‘resource-smart’ food systems.
Food systems crucially depend on natural resources: land, soil, water, terrestrial and marine
biodiversity, minerals (essential nutrients for crops and animals) and fossil fuels. The use of these
natural resources goes beyond primary food production, e.g. fresh water for processing and biomass
for packaging or cooking. If we want ensure all people have safe and nutritious food, in appropriate
amounts, these natural resources need to be managed sustainably and used efficiently, while
reducing environmental impacts.
The food sector is globally the dominant user of a number of natural resources, particularly land,
biodiversity, fresh water, nitrogen and phosphorus. Food systems, and food production in particular,
are also a major driver of a number of environmental impacts, such as the loss of biodiversity, soil
degradation, water depletion and greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, the people who directly or
indirectly manage our food systems are also the largest group of natural resource managers in the
world and could become critical agents of change in the transformation of current consumption and
production systems.”

Download the report here: -Food_systems_and_natural_resources-2016Food_Systems_and_Natural_Resources.pdf-1

Summarizing the first day….

Yesterday was the first of a three day exploration of the dynamics of urban change from the perspective of an amazing group of change agents from several countries. They were from South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil, China, Uganda and The Netherlands. Edgar Pieterse gave a challenging and inspiring keynote, delivered with passion and precision. His message was that there was beauty in dissonance – a challenging message in consensus-oriented The Netherlands and a reflection of endemically conflict South Africa. Case studies were presented by the change agents from different parts of the world, with Zahira Asmal talking about her work as a publisher of stories of SA cities, and me reflecting on the iShack initiative. The case studies were all about inclusion in fast changing urban environments: informal settlement upgrading in Rio, the people who live underground in Beijing, coalitioning to build livelihoods in Bandung, building a market amidst new highways in Kampala and neighbourhood-based cooperative initiatives in The Netherlands to resist exclusion via gentrification.  Guided by skilled facilitators who kind of replicated in real time live form what we have come to expect in our new website-based learning culture – multiple messaging, rapid shifts in environments, changing angles on the same theme, hyperlinks to related conversations. I summed up at the end building on two ideas: Maarten Hajer’s opening proposition as we face mounting global crises we are less and less able to trust states to address these challenges, resulting in the rising of the energetic society of multiple change agents; and Edgar’s suggestion that the change agent needs a range of connected capabilities – ethicist, artist, hacker, designer and bureaucrat. Still working out the ideas, I ventured into an academic discourse that lost quite a few in the group, but nevertheless what I was trying to grapple with is a way of understanding the new phenomenon of the change agent who plays such a key role around the world. I suggested that we needed to get away from a focus on the heroic individual as depicted in the work of the Ashoka Fellowship, Skol Foundation and many others involved in replicating the model of the heroic individual entrepreneur drawn from the capitalist myth within the social entrepreneurship space. I also suggested that network theory places too much emphasis on the constitutive role of the network and insufficient emphasis on the actor. I then proposed an alternative which is about discovering the DNA of the change agent’s practices, and in particular how they activate purpose-built networks. How do these networks get constituted? Are there inner and outer rings? How do they overlap with other networks? Who gets included and excluded? How are decisions made by the change agent to activate this or that part of his/her networks to achieve different ends? How to network-based actions translate into more formal representations, negotiations and deals? What kind of trust gets built? What are the reciprocities? What threatens them? These questions emerged from a discussion between Edgar, Maarten and myself during the break and they are clearly worth exploring in the future if we want to replicate what change agents do as part of building up an energetic society.

Yesterday I spoke at the launch of the 1 Climate Club at a rally in a stadium in Halle, Germany, organised by the Evangelical Church of Westphalia (see link below). This public event followed a three-day meeting between researchers from the Wupperthal Institute (Germany), Teri and Teri University (India) and the Sustainability Institute (represented by myself, and I was accompanied by Paul Hendler and Morgan Pillay who did the background research). The initiative to establish the 1 Climate Club came from the Evangelical Church of Westphalia because this Church has committed it’s members to living in a way that is compatible with a sustainable world. This means reducing carbon emissions from the German average of 10 tons per capita per annum to 2 tons. However, it also means that its members must ensure that their savings are not invested in fossil fuels and then get invested in funds that invest in renewable energy. The Church has its own bank, and this bank works closely with other ethical banks, namely GLS and Triodos. These three banks have agreed to work with the Wupperthal Institute, Teri and the Sustainability Institute to design a global grassroots fund that will make it possible for any saver to ensure that their money is being used to invest in renewable energy. The 1 Climate Club will be a coalition that mobilizes support for this initiative and conducts research on how it can work in practice. Paul Hendler and Morgan Pillay have written up a scoping report on the South African context to support this initiative. I came away from the meeting realizing that there is plenty of funding of renewable energy, even in South Africa. The real challenge is therefore not money, but finding bankable projects. There is inadequate capacity even in Germany to identify and package viable renewable energy projects that have positive social benefits at the local community level. This confirms our experience at the DBSA. It will, therefore, be necessary to find grant or soft money to cover the costs of project preparation and this is where the 1 Climate Club will play a key role. The Evangelical Church of Westphalia then included the launch of the club into a wider rally involving over 6000 people that focused mainly on the challenge of refugees and how Christians must do whatever they can to support the refugees and oppose policies that prevent refugees from coming into Europe. It was an inspiring event, motivated by a desire to break cycles – Germans do not want to feel responsible for doing to others what they did to the Jews less than a century ago. The Libertas Choir from Stellenbosch conducted by Stellenbosch Professor Johan de Villiers performed during our session and then last night they were joined by 1000 members of Choirs from around Westphalia, plus a symphony orchestra, all conducted by Prof de Villiers, in a moving tribute to the world’s peacemakers – Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, Mandela, Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa. It was a deeply inspiring and uplifting choral symphonic experience. Made me proud to see our choir and conductor at the centre of it all.

Talking at the launch of the 1 Climate Club in Germany, 7 May 2016 – starts with a song by the Libertas Choir from South Africa who were invited to perform at the event

Contrasting Sao Paulo’s ‘connecting the dots’ initiative and the ghost city of Orso in China: two exhibits at the ‪#‎IABR‬. One of the most disturbing documentaries I have ever seen is looping its way around at the #IABR exhibition in Rotterdam. It is about a city in Mongolia that was built using wealth created by coal mining profits. Problem was, the city was not built for people – after completion, it was a ghost town. So to resolve this, government authorities launched a campaign to evict farmers from their land in the surrounding region. The documentary is about the incredibly tragic process of relocating these illiterate farmers into gleaming apartment blocks, some without even knowing whether or not they had jobs. Most had to be taught how to flush a toilet and switch on a stove. And as they lose their connections with the land, so dies an ancient culture of agricultural production. What is left if a museum in the city of how people used to live. And all this in ten years! Contrast this with the ‘connecting the dots’ initiative by the Government of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This is a deeply urban city built by the powerful confluence of households who built settlements, investors who built formal areas and massive public infrastructure investments. It is a place of complex and old urban cultures. Connecting the Dots is about reconnecting the city to the ecosystems that produce the food that the city needs. The aim is to restore these connections in a way that boosts the production of healthy organic food that then gets supplied to the working class and urban poor via canteens scattered across the city. Disconnecting people from the land to copy of caricature of urbanism in China is not the model that should be followed in Africa. We should learn from Sao Paulo who realize the value of these connections, and are even prepared to invest in re-establishing them. Most African cities remain connected to their food producing hinterlands, but this is being broken by South African supermarkets that are mushrooming in African cities – they capture the middle class spend, and important their food from around the world, especially South Africa. This is a recipe for disaster. African cities must stop South African supermarkets entirely or force them to buy local, following the example of Sao Paulo.

Attending the 15th International Winelands Conference – this year’s theme is Governance of Transitions in a Complex World. This conference happens every two years and is hosted by my home department, School of Public Leadership. I’m doing a keynote this afternoon in a session on the Sustainable Development Goals in a world in transition. Also presenting two papers in the parallel sessions tomorrow: (1) Global Transition, urban change and the emergence of new modes of governance, and (2) Green Growth and Cities in Africa. Megan Davies will present another jointly authored paper entitled Exploring institutional hybridity and urban learning in the governance of sustainability transitions in Stellenbosch.

Our masters programme has a module called Globalization, Governance and Civil Society. I have decided to teach this module this year myself in order to focus the module on alternative economic theories and approaches. While searching around for inspirational material I came across this amazing interview with James Hillman. He addresses the psychological dynamics of greed, denial and beauty and in so doing questions the usefulness of terms like economy and sustainability. I agree with him – the aesthetics of beauty needs to be the point of departure for a new world order, and therefore, a new economic theory.