Oxford Martin School

On 20 October 2009, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, spoke at a packed lecture hall in Oxford University's Museum of Natural History. The lecture on 'Repairing Economic Governance' was a tremendous opportunity to hear from one of the world's leading economic advisors and to discuss the challenges involved in governing globally important issues. You can watch a video of the lecture on the 21st Century School site.

The theme of the lecture was how to meet the challenge of creating effective global governance in a world which does not want a global government. Prof Sachs began by exploring some of the many global crises which international institutions have proved unable to tackle. The financial crisis was the most current example, but he also considered the failure to achieve any real movement on climate change, after more than 17 years of effort and the failure of the international community to meet the millennium development goals, despite the fact that a coherent, practical strategy was agreed in advance.

Prof Sachs argued that the key problem was that global governance is 'an order of magnitude' more complex than national government, requiring a more sophisticated set of institutions. He then set out the main challenges which such institutions would have to deal with:

• Managing the current instability of the global economy and putting in place a regulatory system to ensure that this cycle is not repeated.
• The transition from a US-centred world to a multi-polar world, which means that more effective forms of global governance will be necessary.
• Building a sustainable global society, while still encouraging economic development in poorer countries.
• Financing global public goods; e.g. regulating greenhouse gas emissions, containing emerging diseases and ensuring sufficient food supplies.

Having set out these main challenges, Prof Sachs asked what obstacles might be preventing the international community from overcoming them:

• National government is broken. Focusing particularly on the US, Sachs highlighted the role of lobbyists in the political process, arguing that this was the greatest challenge to effective global governance.
• The public has very little understanding of global issues. These problems are complex and the general public is assailed by information on so many subjects, that it is hard to break through the background noise.
• There are no institutional systems to bring expertise to bear on these global issues. Experts will often be given a chance to have their say, but their knowledge is not systematically applied to these challenges.
• It is extraordinarily difficult to create a system of global governance in a multi-polar world and we currently do not have the institutions to make this work.
• There is currently no 'global ethic' to provide a joint understanding of why we are tackling challenges such as poverty, climate change and disease.

Expanding on this last point, Prof Sachs argued that to produce the stability, collective action and long-term strategies necessary to tackle global challenges from climate change to poverty, it would be necessary to identify a shared 'global ethic' – that is, we need a place for ethics and moral values, not just financial bottom-line assessment, in our global decision-making processes

The discussion following Prof Sachs' lecture touched on a wide range of issues, from the effectiveness of international aid to the need for a completely new set of international institutions, and from the frequency of recent financial bubbles to the lessons that might be drawn from China's rapid economic growth.

We invite continued discussion and comments below.