Human development, sustainability, and agency

Sustainability transformations

• Despite multiple scientific warnings about human impacts on ecosystems, decades of insufficient action have heightened the risk of irreversible tipping points in the Earth’s systems. Our current decision-making systems are geared to propel unequal economic growth, concentrated wealth accumulation, and unsustainable consumption. Moreover, insufficient progress on fulfilling the SDGs has been further undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic, while geopolitical tensions and conflicts are derailing prospects for global cooperation on global challenges. Although technological progress continues to enhance our (creative and destructive) capabilities, there is a mismatch between current challenges on the one hand, and the response from institutions and the behaviors of actors on the other.
• It is becoming evident that technology alone along with existing institutional arrangements cannot respond and bring about a sufficient degree of change. Scaling up the transformation of our society to sustainability requires coordinated action of key actors. At the heart of the challenge is that current socioeconomic-environmental systems facilitate a skewed distribution of power and constrain the agency of many actors.

Industrial development and energy transition

• A new uncertainty complex highlighted in the HDR can be viewed as a cultural and structural emergent property (theorized by sociologist Margaret Archer). From the environmental history perspective, side-effects of the fossil-fuel based economy may have led to the uncertainty complex highlighted in the HDR, which now constrains the agency of all humans. This can be changed by changing the properties of structures. In this sense, energy transition can be a powerful tool to enhance agency.
• Industrial development must be inclusive and sustainable as a means to achieving human development, rather than industrial development being an end in itself.
• We must not frame climate policy as constraining agency. A well-designed climate policy must lead to improved agency. Transformation to sustainability will only be successful if the old system is replaced by a better one.

Digitalization to enhance agency

• Preferences and social norms can be shaped by giving people better options. This is where digitalization, if implemented well, can harness many co-benefits such as car-sharing options rather than car ownership.
• Digitalization may also be used positively to facilitate public discourse. For example, according to multiple surveys, an overwhelming majority around the world is concerned about climate change, but we are trapped in pluralistic ignorance. Most people think others are not concerned about climate change, and this is a barrier to action and agency. This is where technology can help to co-ordinate and unleash human agency.
• While harnessing technologies, we need to relearn to treat our machines for what they are: tools to boost our own agency, not masters to which we delegate our creativity and ability to act.

Institutions

• In addition to collective and individual agency, we need to consider proxy agency, meaning that individuals, in their role as representatives of institutions, can wield great influence. Support is needed for new types of organizations that facilitate positive actions through these proxy agents, while simultaneously harnessing the power of social learning to affect real societal change.
• Improving institutional capacity informed by context- dependent notions of justice and fairness is indispensable for enhancing agency to tackle challenges such as climate change mitigation.
• Polarization reduces collective agency. Investment in public spaces of discourse is crucial to fostering interconnectedness.

Who are the key agents of change?

• Change agents or social innovators are embedded at the interface of structure and agency. Large interventions in the public sector are indispensable to enabling change agents, and other actors need to provide legitimacy for change. We especially need to empower the change agents tackling inequality and poverty, as they simultaneously contribute to human development, enhance agency, and foster resilience to global warming.
• The empowerment of women is essential as an end in itself. In addition, it is a co-benefit for catalyzing economic and human development in general.
• Nutrition and healthy environments are preconditions for human agency. One example is the concept of ‘One Health’, conceived by the World Health Organization. Very capital-intensive measures to adapt to climate change may actually make societies more vulnerable to climate-change induced and other disasters. This calls for a more holistic conception of human development.
• With respect to the agency of scientists: we need to find new ways of synthesizing scientific insights and embedding science in decision making. At the same time, we need to avoid mixing ideology and science. While normative framing is inevitable, it should be transparent, and questions asked should not predetermine the answers. Science communication should focus on highlighting the trade-offs of different solutions rather than prescribing specific policy options.

International organizations and a multi-polar world

• International organizations are more relevant than ever in the current context of insecurity and uncertainty despite their imperfections and skewed power relations among countries, as they provide a platform for dialogue and building bridges. This also underscores a need to reform these institutions to tackle complex global challenges.
• It is essential to learn from successful examples of multilateral processes such as the Montreal Protocol.
• International climate negotiations have shown that there are mechanisms in place that bring countries together, and that the lack of progress is not because the UN framing is dysfunctional but rather because countries are polarized and in this multi-polar world, the role of the UN is both more difficult and more important.