Eradicating poverty without growth: can it be done?

Keetie Roelen: Hello everyone, good afternoon, thank you for your warm applause and welcome. Thank you for joining the second of our OU Global Development Annual Lectures. My name is Dr Keetie Roelen and I'm a Senior Research Fellow in Poverty and Social Protection here at The Open University and also Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Development. I'm very proud to be hosting this second lecture together with Giles, who is Professor here of Social Science and Global Studies. Now at the OU we have been doing research into international and global development for over five decades, and colleagues from across the University have been, and continue to do, significant work to understand and engage with economic, social and political processes of development, and how to advance social justice and human wellbeing. Groups include the Innovation, Knowledge and International Development (IKID) group, as well as the Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD) and others, and together we offer a vibrant community for research that crosses disciplinary silos, methodological divides and geographical boundaries. As we work with communities across the world, our research on global development also cuts across all three of The Open University's Open Societal Challenges, which are Tackling Inequalities, Living Well and Sustainability. 

Now, this lecture series celebrates our work and demonstrates how we are engaging with current debates, including how to advance human wellbeing without exhausting our planet's resources. This afternoon we welcome UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier de Schutter, to deliver a lecture on “Eradicating poverty without growth: can it be done?” 

Before we begin, some housekeeping. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A session, and that includes questions from here in the audience as well as online. For those of you who are here in the room, there will be refreshments afterwards downstairs. As Babette has already mentioned, if you're on the BlueSky platform you can engage with us through the hashtag #OUtalks. If you are joining online, you can also provide your questions via YouTube or via email. I will now hand over to Giles to introduce our speaker. 

Giles Mohan: Thank you. Thanks, Keetie. We're delighted to welcome Professor Olivier de Schutter, who has a very wonderful CV. A lawyer by background, trained at Louvain, works at Louvain, SciencesPo, is also affiliated to the Global Law School at New York University. He holds a master’s from Harvard, a PhD from Louvain. He's taught everywhere, many places in the US, Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, also very touching for me, he taught at the University of Leicester, I live in Leicester, also the College of Europe, so a very prolific and wide-ranging teaching background.

When he was at Berkeley he helped to launch the Berkeley Food Institute, and in 2013 was awarded the prestigious Francqui Prize for contributions to international human rights law. Professor De Schutter has published extensively. I went on his ResearchGate page, and I've never had to scroll through so many pages of publications. It's incredible. We're delighted that we have such an esteemed colleague to speak to us today. It gives me great pleasure then to welcome Olivier. Thank you. 

Olivier De Schutter: Thank you very much indeed to Keetie and Giles for their very generous introductions. I very much look forward to our exchanges this afternoon. The departure point for the topic that I propose to address at this Global Development Annual Lecture is a report that I presented a bit more than a year ago to the United Nations in my role as Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, which, as you know, consists in providing governments with recommendations as to how to combat poverty based on the studies, consultations, research I do with the support of NGOs, unions, social movements with whom I work. 

The report I presented in 2024 to the Human Rights Council is titled “Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth”. The idea of this report came from the realisation that we needed essentially to expand the policy toolbox that governments are relying on to combat poverty, in order to reduce our dependency on growth, and we have to be more imaginative to identify ways to combat poverty without going through increasing the GDP as a precondition for everything else. The report essentially tries to convey four messages which I would like to summarise, looking forward then to the comments and critical feedback I'm sure to receive.

The first message of the report is that until now the chief tool that we've been using, the main way we've been approaching the fight against poverty, is by growing the economy and then redistributing the benefits of growth. In this context, eradicating poverty is really a three-step sequence in which you start by increasing monetary wealth. You then tax corporations and the better-off households, and with the public revenue you manage to collect through taxation, you redistribute by financing public services and social protection. That has indeed, for many years, been working, stimulating demand and thus growth by maintaining the purchasing power of the middle class, and creating a tool grounded in Keynesian economics to overcome the business cycles.

However, this model of combating growth is now reaching its limits and even, it might be said, is beyond its selling date. The first reason for this is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for governments to tax corporations and the wealthiest households because of the facility or the easiness with which these actors can escape taxations, and because states are in a competition with one another to attract investors, and thus to reduce tax on corporate income in particular. States have to be competitive in a globalised economy, reducing their ability to collect public revenue through taxation of wealthy households or corporations. Of course we could enter into the details of this, but there are many figures that could illustrate how it is becoming more difficult for states to control those actors, avoid aggressive tax optimisation strategies, or even outright tax evasion.

The second limit is that the welfare state itself is not able to reduce poverty as much as it might because it has been forced to gradually target its support on low-income households in particular, at the risk of creating more exclusion and at increasing the obstacles that people face in having access to social rights. 
I dedicated a full report to the issue of non-take-up of rights in the area of social protection, trying to show that the more governments try to target support on low-income households, the more they impose bureaucratic hurdles, conditionalities, forcing households in need of support to fill in online forms and to collect documentation they may find difficult to bring together. In other terms, the welfare state is not fully fulfilling its role in combating poverty, not reaching always the poorest households that most need to receive public support.

The third obstacle we face is that as a result of this way of addressing poverty, states are really being blackmailed by corporations because states rely on the continued prosperity of the major corporations in order to collect public revenue. You want the economic actors operating under your jurisdiction to prosper, to thrive, because otherwise you will not have any ability to tax the revenue that they make, and thus to provide services to the population. This explains why there is this sort of unhealthy relationship between the corporate world and governments, governments who are reluctant to regulate too much and to tax at too high levels because otherwise these actors will say that they will not create as many jobs, and they may even be forced to relocate the production process.

We face these limits. The message number two in the report is that in this context a focus on GDP growth as a means to combat poverty, as a precondition for redistribution, is becoming counterproductive. I put forward in the report three reasons for using this term of counterproductivity of growth. The first reason is one that you are well familiar with. In fact, we've been discussing this for 60 years almost. Since the 1970s we have critiques of growth that in particular start from the finding that growth means more resource extraction, more waste and pollution that the ecosystems cannot absorb. These are the messages from the work presented by a group of MIT scientists, led by Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows for the Club of Rome, and published under the title “The Limits to Growth”. At the same time, or shortly thereafter, economists such as Tibor Scitovsky from Stanford University or Fred Hirsch published books that showed that growth was not making us happier, that growth was also meeting social limits in the sense that the more society becomes more affluent, the least you can by consuming new stuff distinguish yourself from others, and thus achieve the kind of felicity, the kind of happiness that stems from your ability to class yourself better on the social ladder. To be more precise, the more consumption levels increase, the more positional goods matter, goods that allow you to position yourself vis-à-vis the neighbour, vis-à-vis the siblings, vis-à-vis the in-laws, in order to be able to achieve social status. In fact, those findings from the Club of Rome, from economists such as Scitovsky and Fred Hirsch, lead us to present, if you wish, a point at which the environmental impacts of growth become more and more difficult to ignore and more and more important per unit of production produced. At the same time the benefits of increased growth, of increased units of consumption made possible through growth, is gradually diminished. We reach a point at which the two curves meet. That is the point at which growth becomes counterproductive, or as expressed by Herman Daly, one of the early founders of ecological economics, becomes anti-economic. That was his expression in the 1990s.

You are, of course, very familiar with the first problem with growth that I've mentioned. Economics textbooks usually present the economy as a relationship between firms and households. The firms recruit a workforce that is paid wages allowing households to buy whatever is produced by the firms spending the salaries that they use. But, of course, that relationship is to be embedded within the ecosystems that provide the resources, that have to absorb the waste, the pollution, including greenhouse gases, and that is increasingly becoming unsustainable. The more the economy grows, the more we are crossing planetary boundaries and imposing on the ecosystems that they provide resources and absorb the waste. They are simply unable to cope with the rate at which human activity, economic output, has been growing.

Of course, we in the UN still believe very much in green growth, in the idea that technologies, green and clean technologies, will allow us to produce more at a lesser cost for the environment. But the most recent studies we have show that green growth is really a myth. One study I would like to refer to, it's one of those recent studies, is by Jason Hickel and Jefim Vogel – “Is green growth happening?” They studied across 33 countries whether it was possible to grow the economy, to increase the GDP, without increasing at the same time the environmental impacts They concluded that only for a handful of industrialised countries, those that already have a very high ecological footprint per capita, only then was absolute decoupling of growth with greenhouse gas emissions possible. But greenhouse gas emissions are only one of the many planetary boundaries that scientists have identified, and moreover, that decoupling only concerns a small number of industrialised countries, those that already live far beyond the biocapacity of the Earth. This graph shows that if we wanted to move towards a just distribution of the sacrifice in order to remain within the carbon budget that scientists tell us we have, we would need to go much faster towards decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions. So even if we only pay attention to that single ecological limit or planetary boundary, we would not be succeeding. So that is the first critique of growth and the first reason why I describe growth as having become counterproductive in rich countries, the economies of which are already obese.

The second critique is that in the name of growth we've been pressuring not only the ecosystems, but also the women and men that make the economy. This is a graph that shows how the rates of depression, anxiety have actually increased as countries have become richer. Of course, if you look at the horizontal axis moving from the left to the right, you move from less wealthy to wealthier countries. What is really striking here is that the richer the country becomes, the higher the rates of depression, obesity seem to be. In other terms, we are creating the conditions of a burnout economy, that is the title of one of the reports I submitted to the UN, because we impose on women and men working in the economy to be ever more productive, competitive, and we introduce technologies that increase the pressure on them, rather than relieving them from the pressures that the economy exercises. In fact, there is growing evidence that rich societies face mental health problems that have much to do with the obsessive quest for growth and for improved productivity at work. You are familiar, of course, with the work of Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. They published in 2009 the first edition of “The Spirit Level”, subtitled “Why Equality is Better for Everyone”. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson come from the public health community. They show in their work how mental health problems in particular have been increasing as societies that grow, that are more affluent, but have become more unequal. This is one of the graphs that they use, although it's not a graph from the 2009 book, showing how the more unequal societies on the righthand of this chart, the UK, the US, Australia, experience higher rates of mental health problems than societies that are less unequal, such as the Scandinavian countries or Japan or indeed Keetie, the Netherlands. What this shows is that if we create more affluent societies, richer societies, with higher GDP per capita, but with rising inequalities, people will be less healthy, especially they will develop these syndromes of depression, anxiety that I have already illustrated. Why is that? Well, the studies we have show that the main reason why depression, anxiety increase as societies become more affluent without reducing inequalities is that people fear social comparison. They fear they will be falling behind. They fear they will be looked down upon by those who class themselves slightly better on the social ladder. This goes hand in hand with a loss of a sense of community. If you have a very unequal society, your social networks will be less strong. The social links between people will be weakened. Social capital will be eroded, to borrow from the terms of sociologist Robert Putnam. As a result people will grow depressed, anxious, because of this fear that they will perhaps make progress, but not quite as much as a neighbour, the sibling or the in-laws. That is what is shown in these studies, including from Richard Lighty, that try to explain the correlation between inequalities and mental health issues.

Now I'd like to relate that to the work done by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Angus Deaton, of course, is a Nobel Prize winner in economics, famous for his work on public health. Angus Deaton documented very well how in the course of human civilisation, we've been impressively improving health outcomes. People live longer, people are much healthier today than they were 60 years ago, a century ago. However, the recent work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton that they present in a book called “Debts of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”, this work shows that there is one exception to this rule. There is one part of the US population that actually is witnessing over the past 30/40 years a decrease in life expectancy, worse health outcomes. This is unprecedented in the history of human civilisation. Except for exceptional periods of war and epidemics, never have we witnessed a decrease in life expectancy, except in the US, for one part of the US population, basically white men who do not have a university degree, who did not attend college. That is what they show. The reason why we have one group of the US population, less qualified white men who witness or experience this decrease in life expectancy, is because they resort to self-destructive behaviour. They commit suicide. They drink too much alcohol. They abuse drugs, particularly opioids. This is one topic on which Angus Deaton has worked a lot. Why do they do this? They do this because they feel redundant in an economy in which the automation of tasks, robotisation, is threatening jobs, in which companies tend to outsource production to low-wage jurisdictions so that people feel threatened that their jobs may not exist in the next few years. They feel totally hopeless and powerless in the face of both globalisation and technological change, so they resort to these self-destructive behaviours. I believe this is again one very high price we pay for our quest for growth by increasing or improving productivity.

The third reason why growth is becoming counterproductive is because it leads us to make policy choices in the name of boosting the GDP that in fact create the very exclusion and the very marginalisation that growth was meant to address in the first place. The OECD itself published in 2020 a report titled “Beyond Growth: Towards a New Economic Approach”, in which they say very clearly that whatever progress is expected from higher GDP, and I quote from the report, “can often be harmed by the ways in which it is generated, particularly for those on lower incomes and in more precarious work and where private consumption is prioritised over public goods”. What does the OECD mean by this? Well, we hope that GDP increase will lead to wage increases, in other terms that workers will benefit from salary increases as a result of the economy becoming more affluent. We hope that with GDP growth public services will be financed and social protection will be more protective. We hope that more jobs will be created that will be more interesting and decent. We hope that we'll be able to finance environmental measures such as investments in public transport, in renewable energies, or in the installation of buildings. But in fact, in order to create this growth, we make policy choices that undermine the very ability for growth to deliver its promises. We flexibilise labour markets. We create a business-friendly investment climate, liberalising trade, trying to attract investors by lowering taxes and reducing the regulatory burden on corporations. We introduce technologies that will save labour, increase work productivity perhaps, but as a result destroy jobs at the same time, requiring ever more growth to compensate for those losses as a result. For all these reasons, we need, and that is message number three in my report, to think differently how we can combat poverty.

The report tries to make a number of recommendations in this regard. We are now building, and I'll come to this later, a broad alliance of unions, NGOs, scientists trying to work in this direction. So this is very preliminary and sketchy. But in the report itself I address four areas in which new ways of combating poverty can be explored. The first of these messages here, as regards the potential alternative ways to combat poverty, is to focus on combating inequalities. Now I have a limited time so I can't be very detailed on all these policy prescriptions, but I do believe that in a post-growth approach to eradicating poverty, working on reducing inequalities is absolutely vital for a number of reasons, the most important of which, in my view, is that, and the most difficult to explain of which, is that the more a society is unequal with some very rich people with high levels of income and many poor people, the more the productive system will be inefficient in serving social needs. Why is that? Well it is because the market does not respond to social needs. The market responds to demand as expressed by the purchasing power of the richest. Markets are plutocracies. Think of markets as huge auctioning processes in which you vote with the dollars you can put on the table to command the use of resources. This is why the best paid architects will not develop social housing units. They will build grand mansions with swimming pools. That is why the car producers will propose very powerfully engined cars, rather than more modest cars that consume less fuel perhaps. This is why nurses and teachers and doctors are paid much less than private bankers or traders. Private bankers, traders, they have very rich clients that can command those services, not intellectually super interesting, but very well paid, despite those jobs being toxic for the economy. So the first reason why inequalities are a major problem, to put things very simply, and I'm sorry if this sounds like a bit oversimplifying issues, is it leads to an economy that is not very good at satisfying the needs of people in poverty, at the same time that it's quite good the economy at serving the desires, as frivolous as they may be, of people who are rich enough to pay for the services and goods that they cater to. Enough for inequalities, but there will be more to say.

The three other areas that I explore in the report as regards prescriptions are taxation, consumption and work. Taxation. One major problem with thinking about post-growth economics is that we need, of course, to finance the services that the state provides to the population, health, education, transport, social protection, of course. The question, of course, is obvious. Where will the money come from if we don't have growth? A legitimate question. Part of a post-growth economic development model should be about fiscal reform in order to tax less work and income from the productive activities, and should tax more the accumulated wealth and the ills of the economy, such as fossil fuel extraction, consumption and production of tobacco, alcohol, and so on, and of course financial transactions that lead the economy to go through boom and bust cycles and high levels of speculation. There are ways in which we have to rethink where the public revenues for the state will come from if we want to address this challenge to continue to finance the public services. We need to increase the level of funding available without having to depend on growing the economic output infinitely.

As regards consumption, there are ways in which we can do much more to tackle excessive consumption by controlling advertising or taxing the advertising industry much more, by avoiding planned obsolescence strategies and basically reducing the need for consumers to buy new stuff on a regular basis simply to keep up with the changing fashions. As regards work, we certainly need to think about how to value better the work of those nurses, doctors I mentioned earlier. We certainly need to give workers a greater say in the strategic decisions of the companies, because they will take into account much more the impact on local communities of what they produce and how they produce it. They will also have a better bargaining position therefore, to claim better wages where the productivity allows. We need to expand the social and solidarity economy, the non-profit sector if you wish, make it the rule rather than the exception. So there are many areas in which work could be done to develop the idea of a post-growth policy to eradicate poverty.

However, and I would like to close with this, there is no blueprint. Post-growth macro-economics still need to be invented. My understanding or my sense is that scientists from the natural sciences have been alerting us to the unsustainability of infinite growth for 60 years. Economists are just now, over the past 10 years, starting to think about the macro-economic implications of a world without growth. They don't have all the answers yet. Politicians remain still entirely stuck in 20th century thinking, in which the only differences between the left and the right were how to create growth. Fiscal discipline and business-friendly investment climate for the right, Keynesian demand-driven growth for the left. They also oppose themselves as to how the benefits of growth should be distributed between workers, the state and the shareholders of companies. But they converged on the most essential idea, which is that without growth nothing else is possible. I think we need to educate politicians to be more imaginative, to find solutions beyond the current growth-obsessed model of development. But, of course, we need economists to provide solutions. This is why we are now launching within the UN system with a view to influencing the next generation of development goals, 2030-2045, a reflection as to how we can move beyond growth. The easy part is moving beyond GDP because many governments and scientists have grand proposals about measuring wellbeing and not using the GDP à la Simon Kuznets as a measure of progress, that much is easy to achieve. But what is much more difficult to achieve is changing our consumption production models in order to be less growth dependent. I said there is no blueprint for a simple reason. If we want, as Kate Raworth suggestively tells us, to remain within the safe and just space that allows us not to cross planetary boundaries, while satisfying the social needs. You're familiar, of course, with the doughnut economics metaphor. We have to be aware that countries start from very different positions. The US, for example, on the righthand of your chart, exceeds almost all planetary boundaries, lives completely beyond the biocapacity that the Earth can endure, but they satisfy most of the social needs of the population in the US. But countries such as Malawi, on the left of the chart, is in a completely opposite position. They don't trespass any planetary boundary, but, of course, the social needs of the population in Malawi are very much unsatisfied for the moment. If we put countries on the chart, we see that some countries would need to move towards the top and to grow to be able to mobilise resources for development when they are too poor to invest in health centres, in schools, in infrastructure and so on. Other countries, however, should move to the left coming from the right, because they are living quite beyond what planetary boundaries should allow them to do. They should really reduce their environmental footprint. The trajectory of, say, the Central African Republic, or Uganda or Nigeria, is certainly not comparable to the one we can expect from the US, Canada or Australia.

This is why we need each country to define its own development pathway, and that's what we are trying to do now. We launched a call for contributions that allowed us to collect some more than 160 contributions to the question - how can we eradicate poverty without growth? We are now mapping all the policy proposals we received. There are actually more than 160 because some contributions contain dozens of policy proposals. We order them across five themes that you see appear here - social protection, public services, how to organise work in the care economy, how to promote new economic models, particularly the social and solidarity economy, how to manage natural resources and finally, how to organise trade, how to address debt, how to reorganise the north-south relations in order to ensure that reducing growth and moving to a steady state economy in the north can go hand-in-hand with promoting development in the global south. We know that some measures can be taken in the short-term, some in the mid-term and some in the long-term. This pathway thinking I think is crucial to understand that the search for a post-growth economy is not only about a grand vision for the future, a utopia, if you wish. It is also about the small steps that can be taken in different areas to move towards that vision being gradually realised. In other terms, this is not about architecture. It's about music in which every note counts that moves us to this vision.

Let me take an example in the world of work. We received a number of proposals that can be ranked from better valuing care work, those teachers and nurses and doctors I mentioned, to introducing an unconditional basic income scheme so that income is detached from the duty to be a productive worker. Then we have other proposals. Workplace democracy which I mentioned. A job guarantee, a topic to which I dedicated a report to the UN. Reducing working time to allow people to flourish. To develop community activities. To have a better balance between personal and professional life. All these proposals may seem contradictory, but in fact they can be complementary if we see them as different steps of a sequence that would lead us to reorganise work. Work can be a tool for individual emancipation and for people feeling useful to society and having a fulfilled life. Work can, with the job guarantee, also satisfy societal needs that are unmet. That's the idea of the job guarantee. But gradually we have to move away from a dependency on work and move towards less work-centred societies. All these proposals if they are seen as complementary, as mutually supportive and as aligned across time in a sequence, that's what pathway thinking is about, can be indeed discussed together as part of a scheme, of a plan.

We speak of the five plus one pillars, because apart from the five pillars I mentioned, it is of course important to plan the transition with adequate indicators, independent monitoring of progress, participatory mechanisms that will allow to hold governments accountable if they deviate from the multi-year action plan that they give to themselves, and that is indeed part of the proposals that we are now developing.

Let me close by saying that there's a huge challenge out there and questions that are still unanswered. I say this with great humility, and the list indeed may be incomplete, but there are at least four major blind spots in this search for a post-growth model of development that can eradicate poverty without exploding entirely the planetary boundaries.

The first challenge is that most of the economy still relies on private companies, corporations that are profit-seeking, and that must grow in order to reward the shareholders. They have to expand their market share, have a longer list of clients and year after year reward shareholders for their trust. So at the micro-economic level it's a challenge. It's in fact a duty to grow that individual enterprises are encountering. This is why the social and solidarity economy, what you call in the UK the third sector, is so important.

The second challenge is that many countries today, all countries in fact, face very high levels of public debt. Indeed, 3.4 billion people on this planet live in countries that spend more on servicing the debt than they invest in healthcare or education. African countries particularly pay very high interest rates on the money that they borrow in order to refinance their debt, as you know. Completely unjust, but that's the way it is. So how can you manage the debt burden if you don't grow the economy? Without growth the debt burden is much heavier even on economies and much more difficult to meet. I'm afraid, because it's a very strong lock-in, that without debt forgiveness and debt restructuring, without a grand compromise on debt, we will be unable to move towards a less growth-dependent model of development. That is true also for rich countries, although the debt burden on them is less heavy given the size of their economies, so that's another major challenge. It's made even worse by the fact that public debt is more than in the past owned by China and by private creditors who have no interest in any debt restructuring of any sort.

The third challenge is to make post-growth a decolonial project. I'm connecting here to the Global Development Annual Lecture of last year. Very clearly the growth we have today is extractive and exploitative. It's based on the plundering of the resources of the Global South, for which we do not compensate really the countries that we plunder, and it's based on the exploitation of a cheap workforce in low-wage jurisdictions. That is how we grow. That simply cannot be allowed to continue. I'm delighted to note that in my presentations to the UN, developing countries were very, very open to the idea of rethinking development without growth, because they now understand that growth is not working for them. It actually perpetuates a post-colonial division of labour between the north and the south, between resource-rich countries and countries that have the capital and the technology, and it is not working for the benefit of low-income countries' development in particular. In fact, in many cases, it is locking those countries into unsustainable development models, as when they have to maintain their workers poor in order to remain competitive in global supply chains.

The fourth challenge is in our minds. We have been trained to think about progress as more consumption. We've been trained to think about happiness as more wealth, and we've been trained to think about degrowth or post-growth as meaning sacrifice, as meaning impoverished lives, when in fact our lives could be richer, more enjoyable, better balanced between professional and personal parts of our lives, and more convivial based on more solidarity and richer communities with stronger social ties. But it's a very hard sell if we've been hardwired to think about having to fear scarcity and to think that more is always better.

That is what I would like to conclude with. If you want to know more you can take a look at this book which is in Open Access and describes this in greater detail, especially worth the read for the foreword that I owe to Kate Raworth. Thank you very much indeed. I look forward to our discussion. 
Keetie: Thank you, Olivier, for a very rich and thought-provoking lecture. Before we move to Q&A, we have the honour to be joined by Kavita Ramdas who's going to offer some reflections. Kavita is a globally recognised advocate for gender equity and justice, and currently a senior advisor for the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF). That follows a long-standing career in philanthropy and civil society. She is also a member of the Centre for Study of Global Development Advisory Group which we're very honoured with. So Kavita, the floor is yours.

Kavita Ramdas: Salaam namaste. It's very nice to be here with everyone. Olivier, thank you for your comments. I really appreciated them. In many ways they made me think of the presentation that I gave at this University in June of this year after having spent six months as a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Germany, where Kwame and I got to know each other. So my warm thanks to Kwame for inviting me and for welcoming me to be part of this advisory group. 
I think my comments in that talked about three F words, and maybe that's a good place for us to start. I'm a feminist and the three F words that I began my talk with in that discussion were around framework, funding, and then why I believe feminist movements offer an alternative. I think you did a very good job of exposing exactly how problematic the existing framework is, not just for wealthy societies, but for all societies. I think the underlying logic of that framework which we refer to as ‘development’, but has essentially defined the world order, not just since the end of the Second World War, but for many years since essentially colonialism defined how you would accumulate capital. I think we have a situation in which the logic of capitalism actually needs to be called out for what it is, and that is actually core to what we are seeing right now. Growth is growth as defined by a capitalist logic, and so that is a profoundly important piece for us to understand. I think the notion that the current model of development is inadequate, which you so brilliantly described, and inadequate in so many different ways, is built into the assumptions around “what we were”, and I speak as someone who grew up in a so-called developing society. I noticed we were actually much more highly developed before the British came to undevelop us. But that's just a small aside, that was also true for many other societies which were colonised in order to, as Olivier described, have extractive resources.

That framework of a model that depends on extraction, on cheap labour, that depends on essentially a kind of subjugation, one piece that I felt was perhaps not explored as much in this was the prominent role of force and militarisation and weapons that actually make that kind of domination possible. It is also a worldview that is very contrary to indigenous worldviews and to feminist worldviews in many ways in which the notion of domination itself is challenged as a model for development. Why can you not live in harmony with the natural environment and with other humans? Why must one group absolutely and always dominate another? I think that is a conversation which we also need to have and I think there is... For me, I was saying to Olivier, I'm currently in a space where I'm actually remarkably hopeful about the fact that I think there is the possibility of us really questioning what this existing model is and whether or not we can figure out a different one and whether we have the imagination

As Olivier says at the end, do we have the necessary imagination? Why do I say that? I'm coming to you from New York City, where my glutes and my spirits have been improved by four months of canvassing and walking up and down six-flight walk-ups in New York City for Zohran Mamdani - a 34 year old who has just become a Democratic Socialist elected mayor in the largest city, New York. Also the second largest Jewish city in the world after Tel Aviv, where 45% of Jewish voters voted for the person who was being portrayed as a terrible, transformative, somehow magically both a communist and an Islamic fundamentalist who was going to impose Sharia law, but Americans never really worry too much about how these two things might be in contradiction. But I say ‘hopeful’, why? Because I think I would argue there is a radical reimagination happening right now. On this actually, I don't disagree that we need more work on macro-economics, Olivier, but I would say that feminist economists have been doing that work for a while. If you go to an IAFE conference, which is the International Association of Feminist Economists, Amartya Sen was a founding member and listen to some of their conversations, or if you read the new book by Verónica Gago, an Argentinian feminist who has written a brilliant book called Feminist International: How to Change Everything, you will see that even on questions of indebtedness, the Argentine feminist economists have already been thinking about what are the connections between indebtedness, our bodily integrity, femicide and the presence of militarism and violence as the form by which we impose this unjust and completely unsustainable model on our societies. I would think that the conversations and transformations that I have seen, I think also the question of morality. Why are people so unhappy? Because it is impossible to be happy in a society which is saying that it is absolutely okay to bomb children, to deprive them and starve them, as we have watched for two years with Gaza. Why did young people get up and protest and organise and have encampments? Because they saw long before the scholars said, “Oh yes, now we've studied it. Yes, in fact, it is a genocide”. The young people were telling us this two years ago in the encampments in Columbia and the encampments in universities all across this country and others, saying to us that there is something really wrong when you have this kind of lack of moral clarity, that what is true for one group of people cannot also be true for another group of people. That actually gives me great hope. I was saying to Olivia, and I will end with this, that the young people who were mobilising and canvassing to get Zohran elected, despite $22M being poured into that race by all kinds of billionaires, who are the epitome of that 1% who we are talking about, makes me believe that, in fact, people power does count for something. In fact, the young have much wisdom to share with us. I think they're also reminding us that while we are currently, and the UN still uses the nation-state as the model, actually the UN itself was founded with the words, “We the peoples of the world”, not “We the nation-states of the world”. The nation-states are inadequate for us to address the kinds of challenges and problems that we have today, inadequate to address that legacy of colonialism, and certainly inadequate to address the kind of happy and sustainable future we want for all of us. So I look forward to conversations and questions, but thank you, Olivier, for sharing.

Keetie: Thank you, Kavita. Thank you, Olivier. If we can move to the side of the stage. Thank you for very hopeful but also challenging reflections to Olivier's lecture. Now we have a little bit of time to come to your questions and observations as well as those online. We have two roving mics. Please keep your contributions short and concise.

Susan: Thanks so much. Thanks to you both. I thought it was so brilliant to hear the response as well as the really cogent and clear study. I just want to repeat, both of you have said none of these ideas are new, but the imperative is very real and present. I think also, I don't believe in blueprints, I think your principles of the rights-based economy are exactly the kinds that I would want to see, but the question is how we get there. It seems there's a bit of a conundrum, and I'd like to hear from both of you what you think would be the way forward. If I just very quickly summarise. It seems that what we need is redistribution. Redistribution of power, of resources, of decision-making etc. We want more popular power. But we can't have redistribution of resources until we have redistribution of popular power, and we can't get redistribution of popular power given the very, very skewed distribution of control over resources. I think the discussion just then about moving to what people need to do, the mobilisation of people is really, really important, because we are currently in a very dangerous world. I have hope, but I also have great fear, because we're in a moment of deep into imperialist rivalry. We have massive militarisation. We have a situation where we were told the debts were too high and we had to have austerity, but fiscal contracts can now be broken for increased rearmament. My question really is, you're talking about having states being held accountable, but when we've watched a genocide happen and a state that has not been held accountable for two years or stopped, we cannot rely on these institutions of governance in any way. The only thing we can do is rely on how we build the movement from below. This is where mainstream economics has a serious problem. Because the way in which economics as a study, its own ontology, is to remove all agency from people and society. So we need a complete break and a rethink. I would just like to hear from you how we're going to do that, because we have to do that now. Thank you very much.

Keetie: Thank you, Susan.

Kavita: Do you want to take a few more? 

Keetie: Yes, let's take a few, because we might only have one round. Helene, I was wondering if there's any questions online?

Helene: We haven’t yet.

Keetie: Okay, there's one here in the middle and to the right. Theo, Claire is moving your way.

Theo: Thanks very much for the inspiring lecture and the response. However, I'm tempted to make an observation which is that your critique was not exactly a critique of growth was it? It was a critique of the state that fails to redistribute growth. It was a critique of inequality. It was a critique of the quality of growth. But it wasn't a critique of growth as such. If my observation is correct, then it raises the question about post-growth. Is it really about post-growth or is it really about fixing the state, dealing with inequalities, making sure that we create a different quality of growth? Thank you.

Keetie: Thank you. We'll take one more and then we can collect some answers. I'm afraid we're short of time.

Speaker: Yes, I agree with the previous comments, which saved me some time, so I'll add a point. I'm glad that Olivier emphasised, firstly that the most affluent countries have the greatest potential, in principle, to move beyond economic growth, but, of course, have enormous political obstacles because of the vested interests. Secondly, that a key concept to do so is the social and solidarity economy, which may sound abstract, but it's the central concept of global networks with national affiliates, especially overlapping with co-ops or the co-operative movement, but only to some extent, and of course going beyond the co-operative movement. I want to ask, who or what is the collective subject that could gain the political power to expand that model of the social and solidarity economy and potentially displace the dominant form of economy and how to deal with the inevitable conflicts between those two models?

Keetie: Thank you. So some big questions.

Kavita:  Maybe I could respond to the first question on militarism and then Olivier can, maybe you want to speak to that as well. I think the issue of imagination for me is actually a very important one. I'm very happy that you ended with that question. Actually, that is why for me intersectional feminism is something that gives me a great amount of hope, not the colonised version of feminism that we've been hearing from Germany and Sweden and these places for the last few years, but a really radical solidarity form of feminist thinking. Recently the New York Times has been getting a lot of well-deserved flack for a lovely piece that appeared in the news that said why women have ruined the workplace. I think this is something we actually have to address. The failure of imagination is not like an accident. It's on purpose. You see, it's not just that architects build those high-scraping buildings because they think that people can pay for them and they aspire, which you were explaining, like who are the clients who can build that. It is that all of us in the so-called ‘undeveloped’ world were taught we have to be like the masters and we internalised it. Fanon talks about internalisation of oppression. We bought it lock, stock and barrel. We were told we had to wear western clothes. We quietly wore western clothes, even though Indian clothes are a hundred times more beautiful and better to live in in our warm cultures. I think what is really at stake here and why I said young people have given me so much hope, and why even on the issue of a horrific genocide which you absolutely and correctly point out, reveals the failure of existing institutions, profound failure of existing institutions. What has become clear is that the pretence has been ripped off. Like Rumi says, “The wound is where the light gets in”, and the light is like flooding in right now. We are seeing things clearly, unequivocally. They may have tried to silence, but they are seeing the connections. So when Greta Thunberg gets up and terrifies the Green Party in Germany by saying that there can be no climate justice on occupied territories, then the poor Fridays for Future is like, “Oh, she was so nice when she was a nice Swedish girl just talking about the climate. Why did she have to go and talk about Palestinians?” This is, I think, a reaction that gives me a great amount of hope about the potential for reimagination. I think it's very good, in a weird way, that Trump has stopped this whole business of aid. As Olivier said, we developing countries pay trillions more in debt servicing alone than any amount of philanthropy, your FCDO or your anybody else can give us. No question. It's not even close. Why do we have that debt to begin with? Because you all came and said to us, “You must have roads like us. You must have buildings like us. You must have...” So I think partially what is also happening here is as these existing structures are failing, necessity is sometimes the mother of invention. Within that state of disruption, other things are possible. That's why I gave the example of Zohran Mamdani's win. It was not like an accident. It was a hell of a lot of work. 50,000 volunteers in June, and by November when we had the elections, 104,000 people, in a country where it's not like France where people go to protest on the streets. Americans are loathe to do this. I've lived there for 40 years. It worked because people are tired and are done. That's what I would say to that. But Olivier, you have other questions to answer about the state

Olivier:  Thank you. Let me try to answer some of the questions we heard in the order in which they were raised. First of all, the conundrum. I completely agree with the diagnosis. Without redistribution of resources, we will not manage to meet the challenge, but that requires power to be redistributed. But it's precisely this unhealthy capture of political influence by economically dominant actors that is currently the lock-in. That is one of the striking features of the predicament we are facing today to the point of caricature in the US, of course. I think I have no great answer that will make you feel good, but maybe two hopes. One is that the progressives learn from the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism that is documented by Naomi Klein, for example. When there is a crisis, we must be ready with solutions. In fact in the progressive movement, there is an arc between those who care more about the environment and environmental sustainability, and those who care more about social justice. For example, unions have been trying to travel from one end to the other end, and now, as you just alluded to, the environmentalists try to move towards issues of social justice to form this alliance. Having a coherent plan to propose when the time comes, when the crisis hits that will allow to propose solutions will be necessary. We missed an opportunity with the COVID-19 pandemic because there was not enough readiness there and perhaps too many divisions amongst the progressive camp. That's my very unsatisfactory answer to your question.

Secondly, on growth, Thank you. I think it really helps me clarify the reason why I chose to speak about post-growth rather than degrowth. By post-growth I mean that the indicator of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, the total economic output during one year or one trimester in one jurisdiction, should not be our obsession. What I challenge is the idea that we must do that first and then look at the rest to compensate the negative impacts, to redistribute, to invest in renewable energies and so on. We can do a lot and be agnostic about GDP. Some things I very much want to see grow in the economy. Other things I want to see degrow absolutely. What the result will be on GDP, frankly I don't care too much, and I hope that one day we'll be able to just treat this as a fetish we can abandon. That's why I speak about post-growth. I agree that in theory we could measure the GDP in a way that is more sensitive to inclusion, equity, that is more sensitive to long-term sustainability and the erosion of natural capital etc, and have a measure of progress that, although it could be still called GDP if you want to call it that, that will be corrected by all that is wrong with it as it functions now. It's something we inherited from Simon Kuznets in the 1940s, and we still measure as something positive things that we would like to get rid of and we don't measure as contributing to the economy hugely important contributions such as unremunerated care work. That is, I think, the easy conversation to have with governments. The Pact for the Future adopted on 22nd September 2024 within the UN has one action, Action 53, to set up a high-level expert group that will provide alternative measurements of progress, alternative to GDP. That's very good. It's very important. But all, not all, but most reactions I got from governments when I asked them about, “What are you doing to move beyond growth”, was, “Well look, we are measuring progress differently. We have wellbeing measures”. But that is not enough. If you are racing towards a cliff, and that's what your... how do you call this in English, that's what it shows on your dashboard. It's not very useful if you don't use the brakes right? That is the problem we are facing. That's why I choose post-growth, but because I agree with you I don't use degrowth. Not only because I think some countries still must grow because they need to accumulate more resources to be able to cater to the basic needs of their population. Also because I want to move away from the growth versus degrowth debate to say, “Let's leave this aside, let's focus on what matters really to people”.

Kavita: Olivier, can I ask you a question about that? About the why some countries must grow? Because if we think about the planet as our unit and not the nation-state, then the whole discussion about the legacy of these colonial extractive spaces, and the reason I say that is what worries me about the notion of doing it within the given of the nation-state is that small island states that are about to disappear, for example, cannot figure out a magical way to grow to address the issues. But if we thought more expansively, this is an imagination question. Could we think more expansively about ways in which we share a notion of where growth has happened for the planet as a whole? Because all these rich countries didn't just get that money by themselves. They took it. They took it from so many other parts of the world. So is there a way that we can think creatively, not about saying some countries have to grow, but how we can actually redistribute not just within countries, but across countries? Is there a potential for us to be radical enough to imagine that?
Olivier: When I say some countries still need to grow, I don't assume necessarily that growth should be as usual, and certainly the kind of extractive and highly polluting type of growth we've been imposing on them is not the way to go. There are certainly certain industrial processes, for example, or reliance on certain types of energy that they could leapfrog if you wish to move towards something much more sustainable, cleaner, and more redistributive. But what I mean is that you cannot underestimate the claim of low income countries in particular, that they must be able to do more for their population for which they need to increase economic output.

Kavita: But they would be fine if somebody would be willing to redistribute their wealth. There is a lot of wealth in this part of the world that hasn't been very well distributed. It has been mainly one way.

Olivier: Yeah but sharing the resources without sharing production capacity and technologies does not seem to me to be the right way to go. That's my concern. That's why I think the charity-based MDGs of 2000, for example, were deeply problematic in this regard. Palliative economics is what one economist called that.

Let me just answer briefly the last question concerning, I'm not sure exactly how it was formulated, but it was where to start.

Kavita: Solidarity economy.

Olivier: I think what I would like to say is that I personally put many hopes in moving beyond the market and the state. For me the social and solidarity economy is about that. It's about not relying just on the price signals of the market, and the productivity increases it will allow, or the top-down bureaucratic might of state-led development. This is why I take solace in the growing discussion around the commons and local development by communities. I see the literature now blossoming around this issue. Together with my co-author, Tom Dedeurwaerdere, we published a book called “Towards the Enabling State” and I think the state can have a role not only in regulating and in taxing and redistributing, but also in creating a space for the local communities to invent. Many of the changes I personally dream about in a post-growth world, are changes that can be more easily achieved in local settings by local communities, by your regions if you wish, where people can create more easily a sense of solidarity between them and re-localise the economy. I think that is probably the hope I would like to express.

Keetie: Thank you both. Clearly there's a lot more to discuss, but we have very much run out of time. I'm going to hand over to Giles for some closing words and to thank you.

Giles: Yeah, I mean, fantastic. I'm sure plenty more questions. My mind's buzzing. I'm sure our students would love to watch all of this as well. I’ll try and stick that on some courses up and coming. Thank you to Olivier, a fantastic talk. Thank you to Kavita for really provocative thoughts again, so a final thank you. I think a really lovely reflection of the kind of work we've been doing at the OU for a number of years and trying to think about development in different ways. For everybody that's come we would like to improve our performance, if you like so there will be a feedback form that you'll get sent after the event. Please do fill that in and we'll endeavour to get things going.

We did hear that alcohol consumption can be a sign of unhappiness and poor wellbeing, but anybody that's here who would like a glass of wine, please do join us. Obviously not excessive because it's bad for your health and bad for society, but we'd like to welcome you in the foyer for some drink and nibbles and more chat. It just requires us to say thank you for supporting the OU and we will see you next year for the third Annual Lecture. Thank you.