# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:54 AM

Reading Douglas Alexander's speech I was reminded of a time in 1996/7 just before/as Labour was coming to power.

At that time I was the joint coordinator of the "Britain in the World" component of the NEXUS virtual think-tank, an outfit set up to inform the Labour Party's thinking, which included at least one Miliband in its core.

The Britain in the World group was a bit hamstrung by the fact that there were two factions, one of which was keen to emphasise global social justice and the other of which was interested more in UK competiveness and impacts of globalisation on the UK. So, a new group on Global Social Justice was established, with Clare Short kindly providing endorsement and a quote for the web-site which still lingers on the web at http://www.netnexus.org/theme/global/Default.htm

The challenge then as now is to demonstrate that (in part because of the collective action problems around global issues and their regulation) UK interests and global social justice and sustainability are two sides of the same coin. This is something that the policy coherence for development agenda and - in the real world - issues of climate change and human security, make clear.

Of course there is and will be a political battle/debate about the meaning and content of "justice", perhaps especially as regards global social justice. This will require think-tanks, researchers and policy-makers to be clear and rigorous in their use of the language of "justice". Otherwise - as with the "Trade Justice" campaign which the Tories said they agreed with because for them justice was about free markets - the language will be appropriated by politicians of all sides and its potential will be lost. Put simply: the language of "justice" should be about providing a radical edge rather than a mushy centre ground.

One final thought ... there is much potential in linking ideas of justice to ideas of "good governance" and accountability. In a way, justice is one of the things (outcomes?) you get when relationships are accountable. This might be something for DFID and others to explore and might be a way of ensuring that justice-talk doesn't become a mushy apple-pie-and-motherhood centre ground.

Alan Hudson

# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Thursday, February 14, 2008 1:57 PM

We do not even begin to achieve social justice as described by Simon Maxwell in our own country let alone globally. In Britain we are entitled to alter disribution factors and Governance factors for our own society because in spite of its defects our Democracy allows those who vote to partcipate. Are we entitled to do this in other people's countries? The achievement of Social justice inevitably involves the political and ethical backgrounds and ambitions of the people of those countries or at least their current leaders. We are therefore right in the middle of politics of those countries which we have decided need development or which have asked for development. This kind of thinking has led DFID policy on Governance in to some programmes which are highly political and are unsustainable because they attemp to promote values held in DFID at least on to politically inexperienced people, many of them illiterate. I think we can define what we think makes up global social justice and we should compare our thoughts with other countries, as a useful accademic exercise but to use it as an excuse to meddle in other countries governance used to be called neo colonialism and much resented.

Bowen Wells

# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Sunday, February 17, 2008 9:17 PM

I think one important additional element to stir into the mix is the increasing relevance of a quartet of heavily interlinked scarcity issues - climate change, energy security, food and water scarcity - to questions of global social justice.

Why do they matter for questions of social justice?  First, simply because they're increasingly emerging as some of the most important obstacles in the way of achieving the MDGs.  Climate may already be on our radar screens - but have we internalised the IEA's finding last December that for oil-importing low income countries in Africa, ALL of the  aid and debt relief increases of the last 3 years have already been offset by pricier oil imports?  Similar trends apply on food and water.

That means that for donors, the challenge of building resilience to the effects of scarcity trends - and the risk of shocks that they carry with them - increasingly needs to become core business.  This isn't just about technical measures on climate adaptation or disaster risk reduction.  Resilience is more fundamentally about the robustness of governance systems at decentralised levels - and it's not yet clear that donors really know how to build it where it doesn't exist.

As well as resilience and adaptation, there's the political economy issue of fair shares to scarce resources for poor countries and poor people.  We already know that for the rural poor in developing countries, the kind of corruption that hits hardest is more likely to be about access to natural resources like firewood, water or grazing rights than about graft in public procurement.  Increasingly, though, we need to apply the same logic to transboundary resources.  As development advocates, we're already scrambling to make the argument as to why many first generation biofuels are taking food out of poor people's mouths; or to explain why poor countries, as the lowest per capita emitters, deserve a fair share of any future 'safe global emissions budget'.

At a political theory level, these issues are especially important for centre left policymakers.  Why?  Because while a concern for justice is nothing new for the left, applying justice in the context of a world of finite limits IS new.  The one thing left and right both agreed on throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was that growth could and should be perpetuated indefinitely.  Now that it's clear that there are some resources - *crucial* resources like oil, food, water and atmospheric space - where indefinite expansion of consumption won't be sustainable, the centre left's historical concern for social justice finds itself in a totally new context.


More on scarcity trends:
http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/Wilton_Park.pdf

More on global food security:
http://globaldashboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/Food_presentation_to_PMSU.pdf

Alex Evans

# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Tuesday, February 19, 2008 1:48 PM

Global social justice and growth: two big agenda items

Global social justice and growth are themes that have received much attention in recent months.  The recent prominence of global social justice in the UK international development arena has been highlighted by Simon Maxwell’s blog (above).  The recent prominence of growth in the UK development arena is highlighted by (and can be partly attributed to) Shriti Vadera’s focus on growth while International Development Minister (see her speech titled ‘Growth and Poverty Reduction’) and Paul Collier’s analysis in his high-profile book The Bottom Billion.

Neither are new concepts. Neither are new to development. But what is interesting, for me at least, is that these two themes have regained prominence at the same time.  

Given this, I would advocate pursing both in partnership, rather than in parallel.  This is possible.  Sen has shown us (in Development as Freedom, for example) the benefits of combining political theory and economics to the analysis of development challenges.  But often, themes or agenda are pushed separately, along paradigmatic and disciplinary lines.  There is a danger that the global social justice agenda will be pushed by political theorists/political scientists/sociologists (and social development divisions and departments of governments and development agencies) and the growth agenda will be pushed by economists (and economic development divisions and departments of governments and development agencies), with little cross-pollination of valuable ideas and strategies.

There are numerous examples of this somewhat blinkered agenda-pushing.  As Maxwell highlights, the Millennium Declaration was located in a general framework of rights and justice and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) focus on goals which aim to narrow disparities between the rich and the poor across a range of indicators (income, hunger, health, education, etc).  And although increasing the incomes of the poor is a key aim, growth does not feature explicitly in either the framework or the MDGs, and as a result, the Millennium Declaration has been critiqued for ignoring the central role of growth in development.

Those pushing the growth agenda can also be found guilty of sidelining issues of equity and just distribution.  A recent example of this was Professor Danny Quah’s take home message of ‘growth at any cost’ at last week’s ODI seminar on the role of growth in development (part of the current ODI/APGOOD meeting series ‘Pushing growth up the development agenda’). Growth-related inequalities, and strategies to reduce these, were sidelined in both his, and Lord Adair Turner’s, presentations.  This is despite the fact that inequalities have been found to have growth-hindering effects.

The presentations of Richard Manning (former Chair of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee) and Professor Andy McKay at a recent seminar at ODI on growth and poverty reduction demonstrates a line of analysis that takes into account both the global social justice and growth agendas.  Surely this more ‘hybrid’ approach is necessary and useful, given that in reality, global social justice and growth (and the things they comprise) don’t occur in isolation, but rather in association?

My aim here is not be philosophical, but rather to observe that global social justice and growth have recently regained prominence on the development agenda. We perhaps need to remind ourselves that both matter, as they are both instrumental in achieving sustainable development; and, importantly, we need to advocate for interaction and dialogue between each agenda and debate.  Some people will push one agenda more than the other. They will use different evidential bases to support their position.   This is fine.  But let’s make sure there is space for inter-disciplinary and cross-programme thinking about how to pursue global social justice and growth in partnership, rather than in parallel.  Perhaps the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts?

Kate Higgins, Poverty and Public Policy Group, ODI

# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Friday, February 22, 2008 2:13 PM

I really hope that people do start taking more of an interest in ethics and complement their discussions of the means to an assumed goal, such as gender equality, with a defence of that goal. Such an addition seems pretty rare to me. Instead the importance of such goals is taken as given. Yet surely no debate about the best means to a goal can even proceed unless we have clarified and rationally justified the intended goal? Without such clarification, debates may be illusory – for they may concern means to entirely distinct ends and ensuing debates will be talking cross-purposes. Another worry is that if assumed goals are misplaced, any discussions over how best to achieve such goals will be irrelevant to achieving what actually matters.

Consider some casually assumed goals, such as equality. If equality really is the ultimate goal, desired for its own sake, then consistency demands that we be satisfied by any circumstances in which equality obtains, even if it means that everyone is brought down to some very low level. But would we really applaud everyone being equally blind and equally poor? Such an outcome hardly sounds like an ultimate goal. Hence perhaps equality is not unconditionally desirable, but only desirable when it is conducive to something else of value, such as increasing the fulfilment of human rights. But why are such rights important? Is it because a cluster of representatives from UN member states signed them as being such or is it because some supernatural being deemed them important? But why should we take any notice of their preferences?

David Miller

I agree that that Miller’s four principles of social justice are quite attractive but I’m not so sure about his views on global justice.  I can’t recall exactly what he says in the IPPR book, but in other works (e.g. “National Self-Determination and Global Justice”) he explicitly denies that global justice is national social justice on a larger scale. Instead he maintains that because conceptions of justice take different forms in different societies the demands of justice likewise vary. He concludes that we have greater obligations to our compatriots than the global poor, to whom we have only minimal duties. But if, as he maintains, the relevant applicable principles of justice are determined by context, which is determined by what people believe, then Miller appears to claim that whatever people believe is just is just (in that context). Without any kind of legitimating requirements for such beliefs, it seems that Miller would declare racism just so long as anyone thought so. But this seems to misunderstand, and fail to refer to, what we mean by ‘justice’. So perhaps we should reject his account for being conceptually inadequate.

Amartya Sen

Sen’s philosophical theory seems to be motivated by his concern that happiness isn’t sufficient and that other things are morally relevant. But I’m not convinced his examples reveal the counter-intuitiveness of utilitarianism.

‘Consider a very deprived person who is poor, exploited, overworked, and ill, but who has been made satisfied by is lot by social conditioning (through, say, religion, or political propaganda, or cultural pressure). Can we possibly believe that he is doing well just because he is happy and satisfied?’ (1985, p. 12).

But the utilitarian wouldn’t sanction this scenario either. This is because the utilitarian isn’t satisfied with people just being happy, they want happiness to be maximised. So if this person is exploited, such that their employer can afford to provide better pay and better working conditions, and if doing so would make him happier, then the utilitarian would campaign for exactly that.

On the other hand, if higher pay and a shorter working day don’t make this person happier but instead cause them horrendously tormentuous misery then I’m not sure I’d want those changes. But Sen would. He has this list of things which are good for people, even if they don’t think so. He, much like a deity, just says they are good.  And it’s not obvious, to me at least, why these things are good. In virtue of being quite so top-down, Sen's paternalistic approach, of telling people what is good, strikes me as worrying.

However, I won’t deny the intuitive appeal of Sen’s theory, for it does seem to identify some things which we value, but it fails because it identifies that which we value instrumentally and then dresses these up as ends in themselves. Unlike Sen, I’m not so convinced that ‘the ability to meet one’s nutritional requirements, the wherewithal to be clothed and sheltered, the power to participate in the social life of the community’ (1979, p. 218) really are good in themselves, irrespective of whether people agree. I suggest that it makes more sense to think of these capabilities and functionings as being instrumentally good because they increase that which really matters to people, namely well-being.

Some people may dismiss this philosophical discussion about means and ends as an irrelevant distraction, but I think that identifying and in turn justifying our answers to the Big Questions is important and has real implications for policy choices. We need to be clear about our main goals about what is instrumental to achieving them. Failure to do so is to neglect justice, to neglect what it is to make the world better, but what’s the point of debating the means before we’ve justified our goal?

The Non-Identity Problem

An issue relevant to all those who are keen to develop a theory of justice is the so-called ‘Non-Identity Problem’, which holds that policy choices that lower the aggregate welfare of future persons are not worse for those persons that do exist, because those persons would not otherwise exist. This relies on the following premises:

• Our existence is extremely contingent;
- If I were not born within a month of when I was in fact born, I would not exist at all, instead there would be the product of a different sperm and egg;
- This means that different policy choices bring different people into existence;
- For example, if different government intervention on climate change results in people doing different things than they would otherwise, some people will meet and reproduce with different people, resulting in some different future people. Over a course of three hundred years, that big government intervention will have resulted in totally different future people.

• To bring someone into existence is not worse for them than non-existence, at least if their lives are worthwhile.

Taken together these two claims suggest that even if a policy choice results in  whoever exists in the future having worse lives than those people who would have existed had an alternative decision been made, that choice cannot be said to harm those people that do exist in the future. This is because those people would not have existed at all if it wasn't for the choice that was actually made.  But this means that intuitively wrong policies, such as that of a risky energy policy, which releases radioactive waste in three hundred years time and thereby destroys the left arm of all those who then exist, does not harm then, and might even be said to benefit them This is counter-intuitive: it suggests there is nothing wrong with choosing this risky policy.

This philosophical problem, with practical relevance for today’s debate on climate change, doesn’t pose a problem for those who maintain that we ought to maximise well-being (‘utilitarians’) quite simply because the choice of risky policy does not maximise well-being. It would be better, in so far as it would maximise well-being, to choose a policy that is safer, so that there would be no mass outbreak of left arms falling off bodies. The utilitarian can show the moral wrongness of the risky policy because they are only concerned with well-being and not which particular person experiences that well-being.

However, this Non-Identity Problem does appear damaging to those theories of justice that maintain that a necessary condition for the morally wrongness of an act is that it is bad for someone (this condition is called the person-affecting restriction and is postulated by most rights-based theories). Suppose we interpret ‘bad for’ as ‘harms’ and define that as making someone worse off than they would otherwise be. If the risky energy policy is a necessary condition of an agent’s existence and to be brought into existence is to be benefited, which, according to the person-affecting restriction, is not to be wronged, it would then seem that the risky policy does not wrong anyone. This is counter-intuitive.

Another problem for rights-theorists, such as Sen, is that if people have rights then presumably they can also waive them, say for some preferred benefit to whatever the right supervenes upon. Now, surely in the case of the risky policy future people would want to do just that? If they consider their lives to be worthwhile, they would rather waive their right to not have their arms melted off than not exist at all. If a waived right cannot be violated and thus that person not wronged, this would seem to pose a problem for those rights-based theories that allow rights to be waived.

Because these non-consequentialist theories cannot show that these non-identity cases are morally wrong, which seems counter to our conviction that they are wrong, and because there does not appear to be a logical difference between intergenerational and contemporary justice, I suggest that such theories are less plausible than we might otherwise suppose.  

One option for the rights theorist is to incorporate into their own framework the utilitarian’s concern with aggregate welfare. But why bother? Why not just reconsider utilitarianism?

References:

Miller, D., (2000) “National Self-Determination and Global Justice,” in Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Sen, A., (1979) “Equality of What?”, delivered at Stanford University, as part of The Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
(http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/sen80.pdf)
Sen, A., (1985) “The Standard of Living”, delivered at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, as part of The Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
(http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/sen86.pdf)

For more on utilitarianism, Peter Singer is the most accessible and his 1972 article should be on the national curriculum.

SINGER, P., (1972) “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3.

For more on the Non-Identity Problem see the debate between Woodward and Parfit:

Parfit, D., (1984) “Reasons and Persons”. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Parfit, D., (1986) “Comments” in Ethics, Vol. 96, No. 4, pp. 832-872.
Woodward, J., (1986) “The Non-Identity Problem” in Ethics, Vol. 96, No. 4, pp. 804-831.
Woodward, J., (1987) “Reply to Parfit” in Ethics, Vol. 97, No. 4, pp. 800-816.

(The articles are available at www.jstor.org and Parfit’s book is available at www.oxfordscholarshiponline.com).

Alice Evans

# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Monday, March 24, 2008 11:31 AM

When we consider what might be distinctive about a development agenda governed by a global counterpart of David Miller's 4-headed conception of social justice, the natural points of comparison besides the Millennium Declaration include, as Simon Maxwell says, the 2006 World Development Report, 'Equity and Development', and no doubt also various types of rights-based agenda. Among Miller's principles, the one that appears to constitute a further addition to what is implied in any of these others is the fourth, a principle of 'fair distribution' of economic and other resources that goes beyond his second principle, of universal entitlement to a social minimum, but also goes beyond his third, equality of opportunity, in that it has to do specifically with 'outcomes'. Where the Millennium Declaration speaks of equality (as cited in the post above) this is, concretely, equality of opportunities. The Human Rights covenants don't attribute to people any rights to equality with others in respect of outcomes. And the WDR defines 'equity' in terms of two 'basic principles' much like Miller's second and third, viz equality of opportunity and 'avoidance of deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels'. It thus looks as if it's Miller's principle of fair distribution that's the distinctive one in the development context. (His first principle, of 'equal citizenship', concerns the other department, so to speak, of social justice besides equity/fairness as regards resources, namely the assurance of civil and political rights.)
But I wonder how much of a difference from the other three models this would amount to in practical terms. Take equality of opportunity in particular. In some contexts, of course, there can be full equality of opportunity consistently with huge inequalities in outcomes - as in a random lottery. But when the opportunites at issue are people's social and economic opportunities over their lifetimes, it's surely much more doubtful whether these could ever become equal in a setting of hugely divergent outcomes. Outcomes inevitably affect opportunities; and perhaps similar points can be made about their impact on other dimesions of social justice. Miller himself has some remarks about domestic social justice which seem to me (though he might disagree) to remain valid when given a global application: '...very large inequalities...are likely to corrode equal citizenship, since money buys access to power; to exert upward pressure on the social minimum, as people compare their living standards to those of the wealthy elite; and to make equality of opportunity harder to achieve, since money buys educational and other advantages. They also weaken the sense of community that encourages people to support social justice in their daily lives.'
(It's also worth noting that one primary measure of progress towards equality of opportunity is given by outcomes. To quote from the WDR: '...we rely on evidence of highly unequal outcomes across groups defined by predetermined circumstances - such as gender, race, family background, or country of birth - as markers for unequal opportunities.')
I wouldn't like to say what this possible interdependence between equality of opportunity and fair distribution of outcomes would mean, if it's genuine, for the feasibility of either on the global scale, but it seems to me worth further consideration just because there's surely more widespread support for seeing the former than for seeing the latter as a constituent part of social justice. It may be that fair distribution is actually just as much required.
Let me tack on a reading-recommendation regarding the general topic: chapter 5 of Martha Nussbaum's 2006 book Frontiers of Justice is entitled 'Capabilities across National Boundaries', and argues that justice demands the provision of a worldwide social minimum defined in capability terms.

David Mitchell

# re: Global social justice as a new focus for development policy? @ Tuesday, April 29, 2008 1:06 PM

Is it possible to consider Global Social Justice without considering Global Environmental Justice?

Consider these four propositions:

1) The poor are the group most directly dependent on their environment for their livelihoods. Thus their ability to exercise their capabilities is grounded in environmental access, often more than in exchange entitlements.

2) Current Geo-politics is clearly oriented to ensuring access to natural resources that are in danger of becoming scarce. So the powerful are ultimately concerned with securing their rights of environmental access.


3) Climate change is the largest injustice in human history, and can only be adequately understood in terms of usage of a scarce common resource, namely the sink capacity of global carbon cycles.

How can any distributive politics for the 21st century ignore environmental justice in the face of all this?

Nussbaum has certainly started thinking in this direction:

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Bwi8VD8pDZEC&dq=nussbaum+environment+justice&pg=PP1&ots=MbktwMMCZR&source=citation&sig=biHvMzvPS_-keeLLlRzR107rIQQ&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.co.in/search?q=nussbaum+environment+justice&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1&cad=bottom-3results#PPP1,M1

And intreaguingly, Sen started out thinking about entitlements to food, which clearly refers to environmental access.

With human resource consumption calling into question the adequacy of various natural resources, the question of what is held commonly by all humans becomes increasingly relevant.

The climate change debate turns on this. The most widely accepted proposal amongst governments around the world,  Contraction and Convergence (www.gci.org), turns on the idea of Carbon Sinks as a common resource, to be shared out equally to every human on the planet.  


But Carbon Sinks are not the only resource reaching its limits, so this way of thinking needs to be generalised to other resources, in order to underpin a meaningful sense of substantive rights.


You cannot really conceptualise rights in a way that is relevant to the poor, without considering rights of access to the environment, which tends to imply that environment as some form of commons.

Consider for a moment the impact of climate change on the distribution of food supply. The IPCC predicts collapsing food supplies in the tropics, whilst temperate zones may well enjoy increased production.

How do you safeguard the right to life in such a scenario? Through systems of international social protection.  But how do you ground such a system of protection? Well one good way is to do so via a sense of environmental justice, with rights granted based on an awareness of the Global Commons.

It is only in such substantive moves that a meaningful global social contract can take root. Thus the central issue for any form of global constitutionalism, which is ultimately what Global Social Justice alludes to, is via a sense of environmental justice, which in turn is based on species recognition: We all have a claim on this planet, because that is what a right to life implies.

Daniel Taghioff

# Europa: Hacia una pol??tica de desarrollo com??n - La repercusi??n pol??tica e intelectual de las contribuciones financieras de la UE | Foro AOD @ Thursday, August 28, 2008 9:30 PM

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# The seven principles for a global 're-boot'. @ Monday, November 10, 2008 5:28 PM

The World Economic Forum's Summit on the Global Agenda  has just ended in Dubai. By both luck and judgement, the meeting was well-timed to contextualise current crises and look ahead. The big debates were on this being a time of great risk, but also an

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