The pandemic was an example of a crisis for which we needed to act jointly and quickly and which, in turn, exposed the fragility of the economic, ecological, and collective resilience of our societies. In terms of green and digital transition, the pandemic worked as an accelerator. But the climate crisis was already giving us warning moments, but the national governments decided not to prioritise it as the green transition is not an investment from which direct, short-term results could be seen. Therefore, the intangible public goods of collective resilience systems are fundamental, and the more we integrate that knowledge early on, the better prepared we will be to deal with any crisis.
At first impact, we might expect that environmental grants are the solution to a digital and green transition; however, this is not enough, we also need a social contract between the state, its citizens, private and public institutions in order to articulate a greener and more inclusive agenda.
For example, the Horizon Europe programme has two clusters to support projects for the green agenda, with a budget of ca. € 3 billion. Nevertheless, private and public entities will have to work together to make sure that these investments are reflected in future benefits for society, such as a reduction in the prices of green energy and food, or ensuring that resources are available for the next generations, to give some examples.
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Therefore, one of the main keys to achieving such a difficult contract is to change the way we perceive our natural resources and ecosystems, from a public good to a common good. To understand why this is so fundamental, it is important to keep the two ideas distinct: the common good “refers to those facilities—whether material, cultural or institutional—that the members of a community provide to all members to fulfil a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests that they have in common” , while a public good is “a particular type of good that members of a community would not possess if they were each motivated only by their own self-interest” 1.
Following those definitions, we can see that our ecosystems and natural resources have been treated since the industrial revolution as a public good, and later, considered as an element of both human rights and economic development to advancing decolonization in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, our current ecological catastrophe, shows us that the public good vision has failed. We always arrive too late: instead of preventing catastrophes, we have had to find new ways to solve them as emergencies, meaning a greater investment of money, time, and, in some cases, irreversible damage. Parallelly, this ecological catastrophe has its roots in colonialism, where unequal power relations between and within developed and developing countries continue to define the causes and consequences of climate change. Specifically, colonialism destroyed communal ways of life and knowing-being. It gave rise to the idea that all territories found across the globe were resource for the colonizers. It was a genocide and ecocide, which was entangled with the privatization of the global climate commons.
On the contrary, if we treat the natural world as a common good, then it becomes everyone’s responsibility to maintain it and to preserve our planet. Up to now only a few bodies or actors have been in charge of preserving it, including scientists and civil organisations; however, it is necessary to devise a regulatory/ decision-making system in which responsibility is shared more broadly, without seeking political or any other kind of gain and with more equitable interactions between private companies and local communities, and countries.
Under the common good scope, we need to reconfigure how we consume and use our resources, create green policy-making as having planet-level consequences, and reorganize our social relations into a place without borders and hierarchies of regions with power. It is true that local actions need to be taken to generate global change, but these actions need to go hand in hand with a coherent strategy regarding resource and ecosystem usage across the rest of the planet.
FIRST CASE OF NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AS A COMMON GOOD AND ITS CONSTRAINTS
Norway, in 2016, became the first country to ban deforestation and removed from its market any product that came from the indiscriminate felling of trees, demonstrating that it would only support markets of companies and industries that had environmental and sustainable initiatives for the country, and with that being able to design a green circle in the global economy. But the initiative didn’t stop there, because the highest rate of deforestation on the planet does not occur in this geographical region, but rather in Africa and Latin America, where Brazil tops the list.
Therefore, Norway took other initiatives alongside its policies, such as the “Joint Declaration of Intent” to cooperate with the governments of Germany and Peru in 2014. Through this initiative, Norway has contributed to Peruvian efforts in the design and implementation of public policies at the national and regional levels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This was implemented through a payment by results mechanism, whereby Norway would disburse money to Peru for each target met.
Unfortunately, even with these initiatives, in a year marked by national immobilisation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Peru’s forest loss in 2020 was the highest so far this century, exceeding the amount of forest lost the previous year by 54,846 hectares. Importantly, the data suggests that the largest proportion of deforestation is due to illegal activity, and this does not mean that managing natural resources as a common good has failed, but that the same problem must be tackled from different angles, since, in this case, the strong roots of colonialism have created a socio-economic urgency in overexploited countries.
In other terms, the colonisation of resources brought rapid socio-economic and technological change for the colonisers, but the colonised suffered the consequences of the over-exploitation of their land beyond the natural consequences. Colonisation also caused the over-exploitation of native workers and control of the economy and administration of the states, to ensure that the colonised country was made a consumer nation for colonisers manufactured goods, and thus create systematic over-exploitation and forcing the colonised country to live under a debt-ridden economy all the time.
In addition, there are three important determinants of the relationship between colonialism and deforestation: corruption that is facilitated by the often remote areas, the inability to invent resources and the low pay of officials; property rights regimes, and the quality of the rule of law and political stability.
DEVELOPING A PROJECT UNDER THE COMMON GOOD SCOPE
While environmental grants such as the ones created by Save Our Species, Horizon Europe, and Interreg, among others, are in charge of accelerating the twin green and digital transitions, it is our responsibility as project developers and innovators to develop a project doing prior research on what ecological needs/crises are out there, as well as on how we can design the project to attain the most benefit, how we can ensure the project is going to enrich the future, how we can make it feasible for everyone, etc. An example of this type of project under the common good scope was the development of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, which, even if it didn’t produce by the highest immunity, took into account other global access factors as priorities.
In this particular case, the Oxford University researchers, which were mainly financed by the U.K. Government and the European Commission, negotiated that the prices had to remain accessible and that the storage temperature couldn’t be so low that it wouldn’t be accessible in the Global South. Also, to make sure that their intellectual property rights couldn’t be abused, they signed up to the patent pool, which is a very important mechanism in terms of collective intelligence. This is an example of what it means to invest in a benefit for all and this leads to a new design of an economic model, that proposes as a primary goal a healthy planet to be able to offer a good life for everyone.
CONCLUSION
This article has covered the benefits of treating our planet and its resources as a common good to make better use of the environmental grants and achieve a real change. However, there
is still a long way to go, and important problems to solve regarding the relationship between the common good and social justice, the creation of mutual concern about the current ecological catastrophe, the incorporation of the basic requirements of morality in decision making, and the very socio-economic system that has brought us to this moment.
For similar articles, check out our FUNDED edition here.
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