Jeffrey Sachs on Global Cooperation

Suppose we knew the technical answers. How do we get to the global change that's necessary? ... We need cooperation for global scale technological change. We've not exactly done that before in any large way. And we of course need cooperation on an ethical basis also. The most important [points] in my mind are:

First, recognizing, honoring, and acting upon the fundamental insights of human rights as embodied in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It said that the right to food, to health, to shelter is a universal human right. It also said there are international obligations to meet those human rights. In essence, it said that basic needs are basic rights. But of course, we're nowhere close to that on the planet. …

The second is population policy. I believe, first of all, we need a view about stabilizing the global population. We need a view about universal access to contraception and family planning. And we also need a view which doesn't exist right now about migration – because we drew these artificial political lines in the sand, against nature and against human nature. We call them national boundaries. And when climate changes or precipitation falls or others disasters hit, making some part of the world unviable, when an island goes under water, as will happen, people have no protection in the world today because there is no responsibility of countries to absorb populations from other countries. And that is an untenable position for the 21st century, because we're going to have mass migration induced by mass demographic and ecological change. …

Third, and quite basically, we need new systems of “pipe fitting and pipe connection.” We need advanced degrees in international organizational plumbing. How do you make the UN, a private company, a local community, an academic institution work together, where each is putting in its piece of the solution, in a way which makes sense – for an international diplomatic organization, a profit making firm, a local community and a national government? We don't have answers for that. …

And finally, the challenge of new kinds of governance. This is a little bit different from the plumbing, because I'm thinking of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the institutions in their own right. It's pretty clear we don't have this worked out right now. We have different ideas about governance. The idea of the private corporation is that it's governed by its shareholders. That's the U.S. idea. In some places in Europe the idea is that there should be stakeholders at the table. The workers might be at the table in the German model. In other countries there may be public representatives. I'm sure that we're going to move to a corporate governance model that has more of a board than just this supposed shareholder representatives, because that model is actually failing and failing badly. The managers end up owning the board rather than the other way around, so the shareholders even don't have protection. But it's no good for companies, in the long term, or for society that other stakeholders are not more actively represented in the actual formation of policy of these institutions.

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