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Australia
in the Context of a Sustainable Asia: One of the things we are trying to lift ourselves above is the doom and gloom surrounding any discussion about sustainability. I am hugely optimistic that we are making progress. Nevertheless, we have a huge amount of challenges to confront. The other qualification I always like to make in these kinds of discussions is that I am no expert. I like to think that I can share with you some thoughts and some experience gained from travelling and from the privilege of working extensively in the region. My talk is called 'Beyond bulldozers, biotech and broadband'. Bulldozers, because of my childhood in Malaysia where I remember the thing that got me thinking about the environment was how poorly educated, poorly managed people caused a huge amount of destruction, using very simple, but powerful, mechanical tools. And broadband, because, in the last two or three years, I have been fascinated by the hubris surrounding information technology and how it is going to save the world. And biotech, as we all know, promises a lot; at the same time, there is a significant ethical debate surrounding it. To put my remarks into context, I would like to start with a few quick facts about Asia. It is worth remembering that 35 per cent of the world's poor live in this part of the world, a region with exceptional diversity, but one that is poorly governed. To my friends in Asia, I apologise if I offend anyone but that is not the intention. We also have a situation in which one in three people in the region is without access to safe drinking water; one in two with no access to sanitation; and all against a backdrop of escalating social unrest. Worldwide, you just need to put your ears to the ground and you will hear the drum beat of unrest. Disfranchised people everywhere are getting angry, very quickly. We can just accept that as the future—and resign ourselves to that sort of reality—or we can do something about it. Ultimately, doing something about it means asking ourselves if we really care. Those are very simple sentiments, but we all have to dig deep, particularly within business and in governments, and decide what are we going to do about it. I think that you all know that the forces shaping the future, in terms of the pressures on governments and businesses, are clearly the economic imperatives, the political agendas at any time, and the social aspirations of people. The sustainability agenda has evolved over the last 15 years around a better understanding of the need to manage economic development, the impact on the environment, the role of technology, et cetera, to deliver the sort of quality of life we aspire to. I often have a huge problem with the words 'environment' and 'sustainability', partly because the sustainability debate has been hijacked by people who think it is all about the environment. I think it is very important that we say, 'Hey, actually sustainability has very little to do with the environment solely.' I fundamentally believe that the sustainability debate is about the socioeconomic decisions that we take via the political process, using the institutions we have in place to govern us. Environmental outcomes are a result of these socioeconomic decisions. I can give you plenty of examples about why that is so. We often deserve the environment we get because of the socioeconomic decisions that we take or we fashion. I think we need to put the environment focus aside and not treat it as the central theme of sustainability discussions. We can all talk about sustainability, but I like to always think of sustainability as part of the human condition. We all want happiness; very few of us achieve it; it is a moving target. It is also quite useful to view sustainability as something to do with the consistency of decision making. Once we have decided where we want to go, sustainability is about understanding the implications, knowing how we will do it, and managing the outcomes. I also have difficulty with the concept that there is some ultimate sustainable future. What is it? Again, I think that it is a question of semantics; but the language we use, and therefore how we inspire people and direct them to the changes that we seek, is very important. But, it is the quality of life that people seek ultimately, and therefore consistency in the way decisions are made, which will shape the form of sustainability we live with. Here are some simple concepts for business. Sustainability for business is essentially about doing business today as if you intend to be around tomorrow. I have had the opportunity of working with many CEOs; a lot of CEOs, if you get them privately, say, 'Listen, I agree with all of this but no-one pays me to protect the world. No-one pays me to think about 10 years from now. If I can get the yacht next year because I will get a bonus of $1 million this year, I will usually make the appropriate or obvious decision.' That is, I want my bonus irrespective of sustainability considerations. Self-interest is a very powerful human trait. This is part of the dilemma of trying to philosophise around doing things today as if you intend to be here tomorrow. The other important thing, which is hard to articulate politically and correctly, is acknowledging that we have to cater for self-interest. This includes self-interest in business and self-interest in the individual decisions we all take as human beings. I think there are no absolutes in sustainability. There are only choices that invariably create outcomes in which there are winners and losers. Again, we all like to talk about winners in win-win situations. There are very few situations of this sort. There are most times only winners and losers. Part of the challenge of sustainability is to try and make the people who lose today feel that they have not lost everything and that they can come along slowly. But we must understand that there are no absolute winners and losers; ultimately, to some extent, we need to try to think about and strive for the concept of fair shares for all. So, underlying all this is managing the tensions of equity. My talk is about the orientation of technology but it is worth remembering that sustainability is about a process of change. It is about the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the nature of institutional arrangements for policy formulation, and making sure they are consistent with future, as well as with present, needs. I will focus on the issue of the orientation of technology. All would agree that technology provides huge opportunities with regard to the promise of sustainability. The most obvious ones are those related to the efficiency revolution, the eco-efficiency revolution, and the way we can use technology to make our lives better. You have heard lots of examples about this in the energy sector, et cetera. But, even in technologically advanced sectors we can be a lot more efficient than we currently are. We all think we are very good in terms of the ways we have applied technology to meeting the needs of modern life, but there are huge barriers in many areas to becoming more efficient, because of vested interests and other forces at play. The other key area where technology has a big impact is in the management of natural resources. We find examples in the use of technology for the more efficient use of the resources we exploit and, clearly, in conservation as well. Pollution control is another area where technology can play a key role in making sustainability operational. Other areas are: fighting the disease of waste and helping with those quality of life enhancements which, ultimately, sustainability ought to seek to deliver—be they for the more privileged, or for those who are in less privileged positions. Efficient household appliances, mobility in the urban areas, et cetera are also delivered by innovations in technology. Very importantly, information technology can help facilitate sustainability objectives—particularly, in the public sector where so much of sustainability is misunderstood because information is just not available. Some of the work we have done for the Hong Kong Government particularly looks at how cross-sectorial decisions can be enhanced, and how information can be used to facilitate sustainability considerations. The most important issue is making information available to decision makers—at the right levels, at the right time—so that they can use it to make informed decisions. I think information technology is a very powerful tool in this regard. When the NGO movement uses information efficiently to inform people about the actions of governments and business, their strategy, again, to a large extent, is to put pressure back on the private sector and the government, using IT. So, technology, in all these ways, can help us do more with less. So, broadly speaking, what are the specific areas technology can help with in meeting the sustainability challenge? In the sustainability challenge, those issues that are amenable to technology solutions would be hunger, malnutrition, illness and health, deterioration of the biosphere, the energy crisis, and depletion of resources. We can use technology to help us in those areas—and, clearly, the whole area of rural and urban management issues, which is one of the biggest challenges in Asia. By the year 2020, three-quarters of Asia's population will reside in urban areas. If any of you have travelled in Asia, you will know that, if you had a choice, you would not live in most Asian cities. They are badly managed and there is a poor quality of life, et cetera, but many people do not have the choice. As the rural to urban drift speeds up, there is a huge need for technology to alleviate living conditions and provide basic needs. For technology to fit into that context, we will need public sector reform—and therein lies the whole question of affordability. On the other hand, those issues related to the sustainability challenge but not amenable to technology solutions are those of the erosion of human rights. You might say, 'What does that have to do with sustainability?' I will let you ponder that question. Consider the rise in violence, the dislocation of international trade, the failure of weak policies, and the arms race and threat of war. These are not amenable to technological solutions, but ultimately influence the way people live and their quality of life. In fact, some of them are facilitated by technology. Those are the political objectives of sustainability. A word of caution on technology, and this is one of my main themes in this talk. Technology in the wrong hands may damage the environment. We all know there are numerous examples. It can be destructive. It produces difficult ethical choices—what I call the slippery slope. It can create economic exploitation, alienate the individual, waste resources, need large capital resources (something that is scarce in developing countries) and destroy local cultures. This is the moral intellectual challenge we have to consider about the role of technology and sustainability. Apart from the difficult ethical choices, most of the other problems are not ones of technology, per se, but about the type of technology. There is a huge debate about appropriate technology that has been going on for many years, and continues today. There are numerous examples of the application of technology in this part of the world that have resulted in abject failure, and lots of white elephants of well-intended technological transfers that have helped nobody. So the moral intellectual challenge is pretty big. We must constantly seek to understand the implications, even though in business this is often difficult. With regard to the question of technology for sustainable development, I think a couple of the other speakers talked about it and raised their concerns too. We must understand the social impacts. We must understand the cultural context. At the same time, I do not think we should pander to the sort of cultural pretext that some people use to prevent the introduction of new technologies or innovation. Clearly, there is also the issue of burden shifting: one man's technology is another person's burden, and we must understand that. We need to also understand and appreciate the political agendas that help facilitate or introduce unconstructive technology. I would say that there is no such thing as a technology vacuum. Everything in our global economy, whether we like it or not, is connected. So, a prerequisite for technology solutions is strong institutions. One of the biggest problems in the Asia-Pacific region is weak institutions. We need to strengthen these, as we must have conditions which engender a strong civil society. We cannot have societies in which there is a breakdown of law, uneven playing fields, et cetera. We must have robust educational frameworks in which technology can be applied. Public awareness must increase, as part of the background in which technology works to improve quality of life and to create a civil society. We must also have political will—and we must have good, strong technology transfer arrangements. The software, in my view, is much more important than the hardware. Corporate ethics and governance are vital ingredients in the successful transfer of technology in business. There are numerous examples of corporations, particularly multinational corporations, making decisions to get technology introduced into countries. If they had better governance and better ethical considerations, they might not have made those decisions which have impinged on reputations and earnings. In governments, greater accountability and transparency remain a pressing need, whilst still remaining elusive. All governments have huge bureaucracies and a significant potential for corruption. We must manage the tensions and understand the political objectives of governments, to have a chance to get technology to work for sustainability goals. But, very importantly, an imperative is to fashion behavioural change through policies as well. There are three technological spheres for sustainable development in the Asia-Pacific region. The one that I think we all worry about is the challenge of the commons—forestry, fisheries, water resources, biodiversity. Technology can play a huge part in meeting this challenge. Another sphere that will be a challenge in the future is that of urban issues. Eighty per cent of the population of Asia will face living in very, very bad urban conditions; there are great opportunities to use appropriate technology to improve the quality of life. Technology can help but we will still need strong governments and competent institutions. And then, there is the issue of poverty alleviation. I am not sure if wealth creation is the better word to accurately describe the pressing problem. I do have a slight problem with the suggestion that, if we create wealth, we are addressing the sustainability issue. I believe these three spheres overlap, and have to be tackled simultaneously. Finally, a quick word on barriers to the effective use of technology. These barriers are poor education levels; weak institutions and decisions being made at the wrong level of competence (both in governments and in the private sector); weak enforcement of legislation; and, last but not least, corruption. Perhaps the biggest barrier to sustainability in the Asia-Pacific region is weak, inept and corrupt governments. Other barriers, regionally and globally, include the geopolitics of power. We must never forget that many still believe that 'might is right'—and that they will continue to exert that might. There are formal global institutions that are somehow perceived as existing to reinforce these views. This is not a criticism of all of them; but, there are lots of things in the way these global institutions make decisions, which have to do with rather archaic views of development. They need to be challenged in a constructive way. Huge sunk costs and vested interests remain barriers too, and the lack of innovation in funding sustainable development technologies remains a big gap. I believe the financial institutions really need to enter the 21st century, and hopefully they will very soon. Turning to technology incentives in investment, it is, hopefully, clear that incentives are very important to get the technology in the right place, at the right time, at the right price. Incentives, therefore, must be aligned with the appropriate outcomes that we want. These outcomes are clearly defined by the leaders we choose to make the decisions we want; they must be made accountable by ensuring that these principles are factored into the decision making process. Investment priorities, in my view, need to match the reality of the sustainable development challenge. This is the major transition of our times. How do we get those who control capital to make sure that sustainable development objectives, which can be fairly ambiguous at times, are aligned? And how do we get these people working together? This very important point is often overlooked, as people involved in sustainable development tend to just criticise outcomes. Part of that challenge, with respect to the private sector, will be a need for better governance and disclosure. There is an initiative at the moment to try and get all listed companies in the London and New York stock markets—particularly oil, gas and mining companies—to disclose the amount of money they are putting into developments in developing countries. The reasons are, firstly, to get all the stakeholders and shareholders to understand how their money is being spent (fairly, ethically); and, secondly, to get people in the developing countries where these investments are made to understand what their governments are doing with the money that they are being paid. Again, it is not progressing very far as yet, but it is a part of the process of trying to make local politicians and governments accountable for the deals they make with multinationals. The objective is to try and get corruption a bit more out of the way, in terms of getting these investments in place so that they benefit a larger segment of the community. I conclude by making one point: so often, contemporary opinion in the world of politics, business and the media—the opinion that you and I often share and buy into—is detached from enduring human realities and needs. Three-quarters of Asia remains poor. We, you and me, are the minority. Our opinions, which are quite often reflected in politics, business and the media, are so detached from the real world; we need to understand that. Fundamentally, technology needs to understand and
deliver two things: ultimately, people want to be secure; and, people
want to have social identity. If we can use technology to deliver
on security and social identity, we might make some progress towards
the promise of a future sustainable Asia—an Asia in which,
perhaps, many more Asian people can share in the spoils of the wealth
of the region. |
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