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Choice is the real public interest

The opportunity to hear expert opinions on matters related to work, even if they're not directly part of it, is alluring to a lot of us, I'm sure. And so when the World Bank's point man on environmental issues, Dr Robert Watson, came to talk at the Reid Center in NASA Langley, I took the opportunity to duck out from my desk for a while and hear what he had to say. I admit a certain bias here, in that the World Bank has not, in my view, fared well in its stated intention to further development in the Third World, and has slid further into the den of political decision-making.

Still, I'm an environmentalist of sorts myself, and Watson is a man whose job it is to combine the best of the worlds of development and environmental regard. He'd been at Langley in years past, and was involved with the science of climate monitoring and analysis, and in the new avatar, might well have insight of good value, I reckoned. He didn't disappoint either.

It is not often that one meets a person whose understanding of the technical language and subtlety behind a particular scientific position is matched by his ability to understand, indeed articulate, the implications of his learning for society at large. Watson spoke clearly, in language that assured everyone that the Bank was very much interested in the findings of monitoring programmes, and genuinely interested in assuaging the environmental impact its funding has when combined with the pace of development in many countries. I left feeling heartened that he holds the position he does.

The ambiguity that permeates economists' view of global change, however, couldn't be erased from his talk entirely. The simple truth is, lots of people think that global climate change is not taking place, and even amongst those willing to concede that it may be, there is the lingering question as to whether any changes we now observe might be merely natural oscillation in the earth's climate, of the type that has always existed. While admitting that the evidence points to the conclusion that climate change is indeed taking place, and further still, relating industrial activity to some of the change, he still offered the optimistic view that catastrophic changes in global or regional climate could be avoided.

Then came Boulder. At the annual meeting of a science team charged with studying Arctic climate in all its facets, the opening lines contrasted with Dr Watson's optimism. Nearly everyone who spoke the first morning at the Colorado event was certain that climate change is real, and that in particular regions in the high latitudes, changes have been rapid. Clearly, in this gathering, anyone waiting on the verdict would find herself in a minority, a tiny one at that. Of course there is climate change, and one needn't look at icebergs the size of Rhode Island to know that; even without them, there's a lot of good reasons to put Malthus back on the radar, by this view.

Heating, cooling, a little rain here, more drought there, what's the difference, you say? Surely we humans have the ingenuity to move beyond the obstacles that come up, and to surmount the natural disasters that threaten at every turn?

Maybe, maybe not. There are two different matters working here. On the one hand, as any chemist will tell you, there are rates at which certain processes operate. These determine how long a particular element or compound will remain in a part of the natural cycle. Dumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, for example, might be the sort of thing that we could regulate better, but even if we did, the resulting impact on atmospheric processes could last decades, possibly centuries. Dr Watson himself suggested that a warming of the oceans, if triggered beyond a point, could continue 600 years, and wipe out most of the Maldives.

And if the barrage of climate change issues, and the consideration of social implications from them, seemed disturbing, the feeling was heightened by my reading for the fortnight. Alex Counts' Give Us Credit is the enthralling story of Mohammed Yunus's microcredit lending programme in Bangladesh -- the well-know Grameen Bank -- and an adaptation of its lessons for application in crime-ridden poor neighbourhoods in Chicago. Transcending cultural worlds far removed from each other, empowerment through microcredit has transformed the lives of many, to a degree that seemingly larger and more powerful institutions -- like the World Bank -- have been unable to.

Indeed, as Counts recites, the Bank attempted a combination of political and economic persuasion to get itself included in a programme that had shown itself to be vastly superior to its armchair economics, possibly from a sense of shame. I couldn't help but think of that while a number of people, including friends of mine, spent part of the week protesting against the World Bank and IMF's policies in Washington DC. By now, suits being disgraced by activists (and, unfortunately, accompanied by a number of clueless others) is par for the course, and Seattle seems doomed to repeat itself without significance. Some people protest, hardly anyone listens, and what's worse, even those who might aren't quite the people capable of changing matters much.

One can't help but feel that overarching policies designed in Washington and Geneva will have decidedly negative impact on the lives of people in faraway places. We live in a world dominated by institutions that wield enormous power, but repeatedly, we have observed their capacity for furthering positive change to be limited. On the other hand, much smaller organizations, and even individuals with vision and purpose, have achieved much within their ability to influence things, and have done without the sort of lucrative positions typically associated with planning programmes.

And yet, if Dr Watson is representative -- and I know at least a few others in similar positions who are genuinely concerned about climate change and its impact on the relatively poor -- the inability of large programmes does not stem from a lack of intent. What's going on?

Perhaps there's a lesson in all this that we would do well to take forward. Ultimately, development is inextricably tied to believing in peoples' abilities to make choices for themselves and for their futures. Contrary to the view from citadels of economic theory, people often know how best to help themselves. All the learning in the world cannot displace the native wisdom of those whose lives we strive to empower through development programmes. The first step, then, is to recreate in the lives of the poor the very substance of our own relative prosperity -- choice.

It has always been a long road from believing that one knows best how to change the lives of the poor to accepting that they might very well know this themselves. But it doesn't have to be.

Ashwin Mahesh