Até 2018, 100 corporações transnacionais (CTNs) retinham 60% do capital acumulado na economia oceânica. Petróleo e o gás offshore em conjunto com transporte marítimo representaram 86% dessas 100 corporações.ⁱ Com o objetivo de recuperar os níveis pré-pandêmicos, prevê-se que os investimentos em petróleo e gás offshore atinjam USD 155 bilhões este ano, mais que o dobro dos investimentos previstos em energia eólica offshore até 2025.ⁱⁱ Outros setores também estão se expandindo rapidamente. O turismo de cruzeiros está em forte recuperação, permitindo aos clientes escolher entre aulas de ioga no Pólo Norte e acampamentos nas dunas do Qatar.ⁱⁱⁱ A aquicultura, atualmente a indústria alimentícia de maior crescimento no mundo, tornou-se um alvo de investimento lucrativo para fundos e especuladores negociando títulos verdes ou apostando em esquemas de “financiamento sustentável da dívida”.^iv Em termos de dinâmica de investimento agregado, no entanto, a sala de controle da economia global dos oceanos permanece firmemente sob o domínio dos setores de energia fóssil e navegação.

Estatísticas e relatórios econômicos recentes sobre a economia dos oceanos trazem uma perspectiva austera sobre o aumento de um pequeno número de CTNs em um espaço do qual dependem cerca de 3 bilhões de pessoas para sua subsistência. Porém, mesmo isto não é suficiente. Entre os principais CTNs globais, o poder corporativo vem gradualmente se consolidando, mostrando um forte aumento de vários quase-oligopólios. Pouco antes da pandemia, o setor de transporte de contêineres se consolidou em três mega-alianças, comandando juntos cerca de 80% do comércio global de contêineres.^v Mesmo quando as cadeias de fornecimento globais ficaram sob pressão constante desde 2020 – levando alguns a anunciar o fim da globalização como a conhecíamos – a Maersk, líder dinamarquesa em logística, anunciou seus maiores ganhos de todos os tempos no primeiro trimestre de 2022.^vi Não menos importante para Maersk, isto se segue a um ano recorde de fusões e aquisições globais,^vii impulsionado por injeções financeiras provenientes de bancos centrais e aquisições governamentais financiadas por dívidas. É desnecessário dizer que a proporção da economia oceânica controlada por um número cada vez menor de mega CTNs está em ascensão ainda mais acentuada.

Mas talvez seja mais preocupante a questão da participação acionária e das conexões interligadas. Um olhar atento revela que os 100 maiores CTNs estão profundamente interligadas, mascarando estruturas de propriedade por trás de uma complexa teia de matrizes e subsidiárias registradas em centros financeiros offshore especializados no setor.^viii Além disso, BlackRock, Vanguard e State Street, que são apenas três dos cinco maiores gestores de ativos do mundo, todos sediados nos EUA – foram responsáveis por 24% das ações dessas corporações.^ix BlackRock, o indiscutível número 1, recentemente quebrou a marca de 10 trilhões de dólares em ativos sob sua administração.^x À título de comparação, o produto interno bruto (PIB) combinado da zona do euro em 2020 foi avaliado em 13 trilhões de dólares. Tal acumulação de direitos dos acionistas e de conhecimento interno permite a estas empresas definir os termos e condições sob os quais grande parte da economia oceânica opera e o curso futuro que ela traça. A direção atual deste curso pode ser extraída a partir da proposta da BlackRock do ano de 2022 para acionistas relacionada ao clima, que especifica que a BlackRock usará seu poder de voto dos acionistas autorizados para dar prioridade aos interesses financeiros de longo prazo e, ao fazê-lo, “apoiará proporcionalmente menos [propostas climáticas] nesta temporada de representação do que em 2021, pois não as consideramos consistentes com os interesses financeiros de nossos clientes a longo prazo”.^xi

Image by eridelrivero from Pixabay

As implicações políticas desta extraordinária concentração de propriedade e controle de capital não podem ser ignoradas no ano em que o ministro norueguês da Cooperação Internacional ^xii chamou de ‘Ocean Super Year’ (Super Ano do Oceano) termo cunhado pelo Fórum Econômico Mundial; uma referência a uma série de grandes cúpulas internacionais e corporativas a respeito de variações sobre o tema de uma economia oceânica sustentável e o 40º aniversário da Convenção das Nações Unidas sobre o Direito do Mar (UNCLOS). Durante os últimos seis meses, foi convocada uma série de reuniões, com destaque para a The Economist’s World Ocean Summit (evento virtual), a One Ocean Summit em Brest e a Our Ocean Conference em Palau. Sem surpresa, um tópico transversal tem sido a financeirização da economia oceânica e a expansão das finanças como uma cura ostensiva para os muitos males ecológicos e sociais do oceano. A recente Conferência do Clube de Lisboa, por exemplo, foi concluída com comentários instrutivos do Enviado Especial do Secretário Geral da ONU para o Oceano:

“…estamos confiantes de que as finanças começarão a fluir na escala necessária para permitir a transição global para uma Economia Azul verdadeiramente Sustentável… o dinheiro impõe o tom, e se o CEO da BlackRock falar à favor de seguir o fluxo enquanto ele serve, a viagem para nosso destino de uma economia líquida zero está parecendo cada vez mais auspiciosa”.^xiii (Peter Thomson, Enviado Especial da ONU para o Oceano).

A seguir está a Conferência Oceânica da ONU a ser realizada em Lisboa de 27 de junho a 1 de julho. A minuta final da declaração dos líderes negociada antes da conferência reforça um novo mergulho na financeirização dos oceanos, como incentivado pelos vários eventos corporativos de preparação. Entre uma série de promessas, os líderes se comprometem a:

“[e]xplorar, desenvolver e promover soluções inovadoras de financiamento para impulsionar a transformação para economias sustentáveis baseadas nos oceanos, e a ampliação de soluções baseadas na natureza[…], inclusive através de parcerias público-privadas e instrumentos do mercado de capitais, […], bem como integrar os valores do capital natural marinho no processo de tomada de decisões e abordar as barreiras de acesso ao financiamento”.^xiv

No entanto, enquanto os governos usarão os muitos eventos paralelos da reunião para forjar laços mais fortes com os setores empresarial e bancário em uma tentativa de ‘curar o mar’, os movimentos sociais estão alarmados com uma sucessão inigualável de ‘garras oceânicas’.^xv A escala dessas garras, muitos temem, é agravada pela captura corporativa dos processos decisórios dentro do sistema das Nações Unidas. ^xvi

A grande expansão é, portanto, a questão de como a presença esmagadora de interesses empresariais e financeiros na conferência afetará a tomada de decisões democráticas na governança global dos oceanos. Em outras palavras, como podemos interpretar a participação proeminente de atores que estão simultaneamente na vanguarda do frenesi, atual do “investidor azul” em torno da fronteira oceânica “inexplorada”? Será que sua liderança ajudará a resolver urgentes crises ecológicas, nutricionais e sociais? Ou será que isso facilitará uma intensificação dos confinamentos de recursos, uma exploração orientada pelo valor do acionista e uma marginalização das populações que dependem dos oceanos para viver? Em último lugar, mas não por isso menos importante: podemos esperar que a Conferência Oceânica da ONU aborde estas questões e preocupações de uma forma significativa e equitativa, que se traduza em mais do que uma nova rodada de “azular” compromissos?

Há anos a conferência está em preparação. O processo foi iniciado por uma resolução da Assembleia Geral da ONU em maio de 2019.^xvii A resolução estabelece as regras para o processo preparatório e a convocação da conferência, incluindo as oportunidades para a sociedade civil de potencialmente moldar as agendas da conferência. O Presidente da Assembleia Geral elaborou uma lista de atores não-estatais a serem envolvidos nas principais sessões de planejamento. Enquanto essa lista exclui movimentos sociais e sindicatos de trabalhadores estabelecidos, as CTNs, bancos, organizações conservacionistas e filantrópicas figuram de forma proeminente.^xviii A resolução também incentiva “… o setor privado, instituições financeiras, fundações e outros doadores… a apoiar os preparativos para a conferência através de contribuições voluntárias” como um meio de preencher a lacuna do financiamento.^xix

Em termos gerais, as políticas de exclusão escritas neste processo atestam as limitações democráticas do “multi-stakeholderismo ” (multipartidarismo)’^xx –

um desenvolvimento na governança global que os movimentos sociais há muito criticam como desmantelando gradualmente os fundamentos democráticos do sistema das Nações Unidas. No período que antecedeu a Cúpula das Nações Unidas sobre Sistemas Alimentares de 2021, por exemplo, mais de 1.000 movimentos e ONGs de todo o mundo assinaram uma carta denunciando a aquisição corporativa da cúpula:

“A Cúpula de Sistemas Alimentares da ONU não se espelha no legado das Cúpulas Mundiais de Alimentação passadas [da ONU], que resultaram na criação de mecanismos inovadores, inclusivos e participativos de governança alimentar global ancorados nos direitos humanos… A próxima Cúpula de Sistemas Alimentares é um exemplo ilustrativo da maneira como as plataformas lideradas por empresas, em estreita cooperação com governos e funcionários de alto nível da ONU, pretendem usar as Nações Unidas para apoiar e legitimar uma transformação dos sistemas alimentares favorável às empresas e, ao mesmo tempo, promover novas formas de governança multipartite para consolidar ainda mais a influência corporativa em instituições públicas em nível nacional e da ONU”^xxi

Seguindo os passos de seu precursor de 2017, espera-se que a Conferência Oceânica da ONU em Lisboa produza uma torrente de compromissos voluntários. Mais de 1.400 tais compromissos foram assumidos na última conferência, tornando quase impossível rastreá-los de forma coerente, quanto mais independente. Esses compromissos deveriam contribuir para a linha de fundo “triple win” (vitória tripla) da Agenda de Sustentabilidade da ONU: simultaneamente benéfica para a economia, o meio ambiente e as pessoas. Um estudo da Divisão da ONU para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável sugere que os compromissos financeiros somam um total de 25 bilhões de dólares para programas plurianuais. ^xxii Embora isto possa parecer inicialmente uma enorme soma de dinheiro, ela se reduz em comparação com a magnitude dos investimentos que preservam o status quo em projetos tradicionais de “economia oceânica marrom “. Por exemplo, a ExxonMobile acaba de anunciar seu objetivo de injetar US$ 10 bilhões em um único empreendimento de exploração de petróleo na costa da Guiana.^xxiii

Dito isto, há também fortes razões para duvidar que quem faz promessas desta vez conseguirá estar à altura destas nobres aspirações. A análise da ONU reconhece que “a natureza diversificada dos compromissos apresenta certos desafios para acompanhamento e monitoramento” e que não existem mecanismos para garantir que os compromissos “…[não terão] impactos negativos sobre outras iniciativas e partes interessadas, por exemplo as mais vulneráveis” ou para garantir a participação de grupos sub-representados.^xxiv A ideia de compromissos voluntários para atingir metas de sustentabilidade não é novidade. Os compromissos multipartidários para o desenvolvimento sustentável foram introduzidos na Cúpula Mundial sobre Desenvolvimento Sustentável (WSSD) de 2002 em Joanesburgo como um mecanismo para complementar os compromissos assumidos pelos Estados membros da ONU.^xxv

Contudo, após 20 anos desses compromissos voluntários, não existe essencialmente instrumento  algum para garantir sua contribuição para a agenda da sustentabilidade; o monitoramento continua sendo um grande desafio; e embora os montantes totais comprometidos possam parecer impressionantes, eles continuam insignificantes em comparação com as agendas de investimento dos maiores CTNs.

Governos, líderes empresariais, organizações filantrópicas, ONGs ambientais e outros se reunirão em Lisboa sob o lema “Ampliar a ação dos oceanos com base na ciência e inovação para a implementação do Objetivo 14”.^xxvi As questões que eles discutirão abrangem desde a pesca, aquicultura, compensação de carbono e áreas marinhas protegidas até energia renovável. Entretanto, o maior elefante da sala – petróleo e gás – e outros desenvolvimentos altamente contestados, como a mineração costeira e em alto mar, foram relegados para a agenda do evento paralelo. Além disso, a participação dos movimentos sociais será marginal, com organizações da sociedade civil (OSC) de muitas partes do mundo lutando para participar. Embora alguns movimentos de pescadores tenham sido convidados, as profundas assimetrias de poder e informação entre essas maiorias marginalizadas em “uma ponta da mesa” e os atores corporativos e estatais na outra, sugere que sua presença servirá apenas para cumprir tabela da agenda “participativa”.

Global Justice Association tweet @GlobJustAssoc

Os movimentos sociais estão entre o diabo e, literalmente, o profundo mar azul, com a opção de participar – e, ao fazê-lo, emprestar legitimidade à conferência e seu caráter multipartite, ou de boicotar, resistir ou defender “do lado de fora”. Dada a fidelidade da mídia corporativa existente, esta última implica claramente o risco de ser ignorada ou descartada como “não-cooperativa”. Nesse mesma verve, segue por exemplo, a cobertura fragmentada do Tribunal Popular Internacional sobre o Impacto da Economia Azul realizada em seis países do Oceano Índico em 2020.^xxvii

Esta série de tribunais forneceu documentação aprofundada, incluindo o depoimento de testemunhas, dos efeitos devastadores recebidos pelas populações costeiras e pescadores através do recente expansionismo da economia azul; questões que estão quase totalmente ausentes do projeto de declaração dos líderes de 2022.

Na Conferência Oceânica de 2017, os dois principais movimentos mundiais de pescadores – o Fórum Mundial dos Pescadores (WFFP) e o Fórum Mundial dos Pescadores e Trabalhadores da Pesca (WFF) – que representam mais de 100 organizações de pescadores e 20 milhões de pessoas de todo o mundo que dependem do setor, defenderam que o curso atual era um claro apelo à “captura do oceano”: a captura do controle por atores poderosos sobre decisões cruciais, incluindo o poder de decidir como e para que fins os recursos são utilizados, conservados e gerenciados”.^xxviiiNão obstante, eles optaram por não participar da última conferência, resumindo o dilema em uma declaração conjunta:

Durante as últimas duas décadas e meia, houve uma mudança gradual de um modelo de governança baseado nos direitos humanos com o Estado como defensor de direitos e que têm obrigações perante os detentores de direitos humanos (ou seja, o povo), para um sistema muito mais vago baseado em “parcerias” facilitado por meio de diálogos multipartidários.^xxix

As observações anteriores levantam uma antiga questão, mas agora particularmente acentuada: como e por quem os oceanos devem ser governados? Será o papel da ONU continuar a busca de parcerias de “partes interessadas” através de compromissos voluntários? Ou os Estados membros da ONU deveriam recuar do multipartidarismo e redefinir as prioridades dos acordos negociados entre os Estados-partes que reivindicam os princípios da Carta das Nações Unidas e da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos (UHDR)?

Ao abordar estas questões, é importante levar em consideração a distinção crucial entre “partes interessadas” e detentores de direitos. A primeira significa uma abordagem na qual quem puder afirmar uma “participação” no processo será capaz de falar em nome de um grupo de múltiplos interessados. Por outro lado, os titulares de direitos abrangem aqueles para os quais a realização de seus direitos humanos está inextricavelmente ligada às suas reivindicações costumeira e socialmente definidas ao espaço e aos recursos costeiros e marinhos.^xxx

Levar a sério o estado piramidal e oligopolístico da economia global dos oceanos implica necessariamente que a abordagem multiparticipativa adotada pela conferência de 2022 ajudará a enraizar politicamente as desigualdades econômicas em detrimento dos titulares de direitos marginalizados.

Ao em vez de os chefes de estado se reunirem para endossar as propostas apresentadas pelo setor privado, a Conferência Oceânica da ONU deve facilitar diálogos abertos e transparentes que reconheçam adequadamente aqueles que tem a perder com a concentração de poder na economia oceânica. Para começar, isto poderia ser um retorno ao espírito das negociações que levaram à UNCLOS nos anos 70 e 80, onde compromissos em um grande número de frentes políticas, econômicas e ecológicas foram negociados entre estados e alianças de estados, e onde a presença de movimentos de libertação e observadores da sociedade civil foi mais do que um exercício de manter as aparências. A negociação em andamento de um instrumento vinculante para a conservação e o uso sustentável da diversidade biológica marinha de áreas fora da jurisdição nacional – o Tratado BBNJ – poderia ter reavivado este espírito. Mas além de revelar questões de transparência em sua última reunião em março de 2022 – da qual os observadores foram excluídos – também exemplifica outra questão, a da fragmentação da governança oceânica. ^xxxi Novos processos muitas vezes substituem os arranjos existentes, dividindo o oceano em uma miríade de domínios ecológicos e políticos que requerem imensos recursos para documentar e monitorar.
O resultado é uma arquitetura de governança obscura que dá tanto às CTNs tecnicamente bem informadas quanto ao grupos multistapartidários espaço de manobra extra, ao mesmo tempo em que sobrecarrega a capacidade das OSCs e movimentos sociais de manter o ritmo. Para certos setores, a escolha mais prudente seria reforçar os arranjos existentes. No contexto da pesca, por exemplo, a tomada de decisões deveria ser devolvida à Organização das Nações Unidas para Alimentação e Agricultura (FAO), o órgão da ONU onde as Diretrizes Voluntárias da ONU sobre Garantia da Pesca Sustentável em Pequena Escala (VGSSF) foram originalmente negociadas e endossadas. De fato, os movimentos de pescadores articularam estas “diretrizes propriamente ditas baseando-se nos princípios fundamentais da ONU de justiça, respeito, direitos humanos, tolerância e solidariedade e nos padrões e princípios internacionais de direitos humanos”. Os movimentos reiteraram a importância de levar a sério o VGSSF e outros instrumentos de direitos humanos da ONU:

“Seu desenvolvimento [VGSSF] se assemelha a um processo legítimo e democrático liderado pelo país, e as próprias diretrizes baseiam-se nos princípios centrais da ONU de justiça, respeito, direitos humanos, tolerância e solidariedade e nos padrões e princípios internacionais de direitos humanos”. Expressamos nosso reconhecimento e apreço pela administração da FAO no processo de desenvolvimento das Diretrizes da PPE”.^xxxii

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM/swiss-image.ch/Photo Michael Buholzer (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A cada ano, o controle da economia global dos oceanos está sendo consolidado nas mãos de um número cada vez menor e maior de CTNs e instituições financeiras. Naturalmente, a concentração do poder econômico resulta em uma centralização do controle sobre o espaço marítimo, tecnologia e conhecimento proprietário oque intensifica as contradições econômicas.^xxxiii

Através de décadas de fusões e aquisições, 60% das atividades econômicas estão agora nas mãos de apenas 100 empresas, enquanto em termos de receitas o setor de petróleo e gás é seguido pelo transporte marítimo – incluindo atividades portuárias -, turismo, pesca industrial e energia eólica marítima. Novos investimentos em larga escala dos mais valorizados CTNs na economia oceânica, como a Saudi Aramco, Petrobrás ou ExxonMobile, e apoiados pelos principais gestores de ativos, aumentam a já intensa pressão sobre os recursos e aumentam a competição sobre o espaço marítimo. É dentro deste processo de reinvestimento de capital e acumulação voltado ao acionista que os pescadores de pequena escala, a mão-de-obra assalariada e as populações costeiras estão sendo excluídos da participação econômica e da tomada de decisões, muitos têm perdido o acesso aos espaços dos quais sua subsistência depende.

Em uma aparente negligência desta realidade econômica, a Conferência Oceânica da ONU cria a ilusão de que ambos os lados estão no mesmo nível, quando os “interessados” nomeados são convidados para a mesa em Lisboa. Ao endossar uma abordagem multipartidária, a conferência procura avançar os objetivos de sustentabilidade da ONU, encorajando os participantes a assumir compromissos voluntários. No entanto, embora a conferência possa ser recordista em termos de compromissos financeiros, resta saber se estes atingirão a agenda do ODS para “que ninguém fique para trás”. Tendo em mente que ainda não existe um mecanismo funcional para garantir a adesão aos compromissos e que o monitoramento continua sendo um grande desafio, as chances de que a próxima rodada de compromissos voluntários contribua para respeitar, proteger e cumprir os direitos humanos e as necessidades econômicas da maioria. Quando o Enviado Especial da ONU para o Oceano levantou grandes expectativas para a conferência de Lisboa no início deste ano, com sua referência ao “CEO da BlackRock falando a favor de seguir o fluxo enquanto ele serve “,^xxxiv ele também reafirmou a fé da conferência no multipartidarismo e nos compromissos voluntários. Mas este curso é exatamente o que mais de 1.000 movimentos e ONGs advertiram em sua carta condenando uma conferência similar da ONU em 2021, referindo-se ao impulso da ONU para “… a governança multipartite para consolidar ainda mais a influência corporativa em instituições públicas em nível nacional e da ONU”.^xxxv Para que a governança dos oceanos se torne um desenvolvimento justo e transparente, o reconhecimento dos desequilíbrios econômicos dentro da economia global dos oceanos e a consequente distribuição do poder político será o primeiro passo essencial. Garantir que a Conferência Oceânica da ONU não se torne apenas mais uma grande ocasião de “azular o panorama” dependerá, portanto, de líderes estatais e outros tomadores de decisão que abordem urgentemente as falhas profundamente enraizadas no processo político atual.

This week, members of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) will hold their annual conference and assess ongoing attempts to reform the controversial agreement. Amidst growing concerns that the ECT undermines urgent climate action, its corporate profiteers, the ECT Secretariat, and others are spewing propaganda, promoting falsehoods about how the treaty attracts clean investment and how its ‘modernisation’ will fix any flaws. Cut through the rhetoric with our myth-busting guide to the ECT’s world of dirty energy, highway robbery, and corporate abuse.

Governments must take urgent action to tackle the climate crisis. Above all, they need to move away from coal, oil, and gas, and towards a renewable energy future. Much of the world’s fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground if we want to prevent runaway climate change.

But governments which phase-out coal, end gas production or stop new oil pipelines to keep fossil fuels in the ground could be held liable for billions in damages under the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). The ECT allows foreign investors in the energy sector to sue governments for decisions that might negatively impact their profits – including climate policies. UK-based oil and gas company Rockhopper, for example, is suing Italy over a ban on new offshore oil drilling. Finnish/German coal company Fortum/Uniper is threatening to sue the Netherlands for phasing out coal. Claims take place outside of existing courts, in shadowy arbitration tribunals run by three private lawyers.

Governments have already been forced to pay out enormous sums. Pending ECT claims total around US$28 billion. The actual figure could be more than twice that amount since pay-out information is publicly available in only 24 out of 51 cases. But US$28 billion is a staggering sum – equivalent to the estimated annual cost for the African continent to adapt to climate change.

Opposition to the ECT is growing rapidly. In October 2020, the European Parliament voted to end the ECT’s protection for fossil fuels. In November, 280 parliamentarians called on the European Commission and EU members to “explore pathways to jointly withdraw”. In December, over 200 climate leaders and scientists echoed that demand calling the ECT “a major obstacle” to the clean energy transition. Behind the scenes in the Council, EU member states like France, Spain, and Luxembourg, too, have raised the withdrawal option if the ECT cannot conform to the Paris Climate Agreement. Belgium has even asked the European Court of Justice if the ECT is at all in line with EU law.

But powerful interests want to prevent countries from leaving the ECT – and even expand it to new signatory states. And they will say anything to succeed. Let us guide you through some of their key myths and “alternative facts” so you can easily unpack the spin on the ECT.

ECT supporters say the treaty attracts investment. Their claim: by allowing foreign investors to sue states outside of their ‘biased’ domestic courts, the ECT makes a state a safer and more attractive investment destination. According to the Secretary General of the ECT Secretariat – which is not just an administrative body, but a driving force behind increasing support for the treaty – the ECT can “play a key role” when it comes to the “huge investment in sustainable energy sources” that is required by the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

There is no clear evidence that agreements such as the ECT actually attract investment. In 2018, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded in a review of available studies on the issue that “little robust evidence has been generated today”. A recent meta-analysis of 74 studies found that investment agreements’ effect on increasing foreign investment “is so small as to be considered zero”.

“There is still a lack of evidence that the ECT has a positive impact on flows of investment in any sector, including the renewable energy sector.”

― Kyla Tienhaara (Queen’s University) & Christian Downie (Australian National University)

The existence of investment treaties like the ECT is also not among the 167 criteria that Bloomberg New Energy Finance uses to assess a country’s attractiveness for clean energy investments. On the contrary, countries like Brazil and India, which never ratified or recently terminated such treaties, are amongst the top destinations for renewable energy investors. Clean energy targets and tax incentives are amongst the factors that really attract renewable energy investors to these markets.

Faced with public opposition to the ECT, its Secretariat, corporate lawyers, and fossil fuel lobbyists have mounted a spirited defence, arguing that the treaty actually helps combat climate change. With 60 per cent of ECT suits filed by renewable investors over reduced support for clean energy, they claim the ECT holds countries accountable to their climate promises. To quote an advisor to Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom and former staffer at the ECT Secretariat: “[The] ECT today first of all protects renewable energy sources… from unilateral worsening of investment climate by host countries.”

While most recent cases under the ECT pertain to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, this does not make the ECT a tool to combat climate change. The opposite is true.

The ECT protects existing energy investments – most of them in fossil fuels. Even during 2013-2018, when financing of renewables was unusually high, they comprised only 20 per cent of investments covered by the ECT. Coal, oil, and gas investment on the other hand made up 56 per cent (see this analysis by a former staffer at the ECT Secretariat). This reflects global trends where, in 2019, only 18 per cent of energy investment was in renewables while fossil fuels comprised 52 per cent, a staggering US$976 billion (the remaining share went into electricity grids, nuclear power and energy efficiency). On top of that governments support fossil fuels with enormous subsidies, estimated at an annual US$5.2 trillion globally and US$289 billion in the EU.

“The ECT is a serious threat to Europe’s climate neutrality target and more broadly to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.”

― Open letter of over 280 Parliamentarians from across the EU

By protecting the status quo, the ECT acts like a “bodyguard for the fossil fuel industry,” according to some media analysts. To implement their climate commitments governments will have to close coal mines and power plants, cease oil and gas operations, decommission new fossil fuel infrastructure and cut subsidies. But once they get serious about this, investments in dirty energy will drastically lose value. Investors can then resort to the ECT and demand steep compensation – as Fortum/Uniper did with its threatened €1 billion claim against the Dutch coal phase-out. Estimates put the potential cost of such claims at a minimum €1.3 trillion by 2050 – a strong financial incentive for governments to slow or weaken urgent action to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

The ECT Secretariat claims that “the majority of all investment disputes under the Treaty are brought by small or medium enterprises (approx. 60%).” According to its statistics 261 SMEs had filed ECT cases by October 2020, while only 7 had been brought by large corporations.

The statistics of the ECT Secretariat are based on a flawed definition of SMEs. It considers as SMEs companies that are neither amongst the world’s 250 largest energy corporations, nor the 100 largest non-financial multinationals. Hence, several large corporations that have sued governments under the ECT have been classified as SMEs, including Swedish energy giant Vattenfall (with 20,000 employees and an annual profit of almost €1.5 billion). The European Commission, on the other hand, defines SMEs as enterprises with fewer than 250 employees and an annual turnover of less than €50 million.

In addition, many companies, which the Secretariat labels as SMEs, likely belong to large corporations and rich individuals. Take the ‘Dutch’ companies Charanne and Isolux Infrastructure: they sued Spain under the ECT, but are mere letterbox companies owned by Spanish businessmen Luis Delso and José Gomis. The two men were once among Spain’s richest people but are currently under investigation for alleged corruption. Letterbox companies (firms with few if any employees set up to shift profits and avoid paying taxes) have filed 10 of the 11 cases where ‘Netherlands-based’ investors sued Spain over the country’s cuts to renewable energy subsidies.

“Whatever one thinks of investor-state dispute settlement – this is not a system that is much used by genuinely small claimants to obtain justice.”

― Journalist Luke Eric Peterson who covers investor lawsuits under treaties like the ECT

There’s another category of ECT users in the statistics: holdings and investment funds. They make up over a quarter of ECT claimants, often manage huge amounts of money and/or are part of giant corporations. Consider RREEF investment fund, for example. It is part of DWS, one of the world’s biggest asset managers. RREEF belongs to German financial giant Deutsche Bank and manages over US$700 billion investments globally. RREEF also sued Spain over the country’s renewable rollback (notably, while investing in coal and gas, too). In 85 per cent of the 47 ECT suits against Spain, the claimant was a financial investor such as RREEF. On the other hand, the 60,000 Spanish families, genuine SMEs and municipalities, which were also badly affected by Spain’s cuts to renewable subsidies, were hung out to dry. They had no right to file ECT suits as only foreign investors have access to this parallel justice system.

According to ECT proponents, foreign investors have little chance to get justice when being treated unfairly by host states – because not all countries ensure “that the rule of law is applied by domestic courts… in an impartial and independent way,” writes EFILA, a lobby group for law firms that collect millions in fees from their clients’ claims under the ECT and similar treaties. Arbitration under the ECT, on the other hand, ensures “investors’ independence from possible pro-state bias in the courts”. (Andrei V. Belyi, former staffer at the ECT Secretariat).

In reality investors can already access legal and financial protections when they go abroad: they can insure themselves against political risks like expropriation via private insurance, guarantees by the World Bank or insurance offered by home governments. They can also negotiate project-specific contracts with the host state, determining how and where to solve potential conflicts. Foreign investors are also entitled to seek compensation for alleged wrongdoings in national or international courts – just like everyone else.

When Swedish energy company Vattenfall was unhappy with Germany’s exit from nuclear power, for example, it sued the German government in the country’s highest court. The court found the nuclear exit to be constitutional but ruled that Vattenfall and others had a right to limited financial compensation for certain government actions relating to the exit. Despite this access to justice, Vattenfall continued its parallel €6 billion ECT suit – gambling it will walk away with a larger windfall.

One reason the ECT is much more lucrative for investors than regular courts is that its tribunals can award damages for anticipated profits companies expect to lose. In most courts, anticipated loses are not subject to compensation. Another reason is a “highway robbery” method used to calculate the “grossly exaggerated” compensation payments in investment arbitrations, as prominent investment lawyer George Kahale has stated.

An instructive example of a large ECT windfall is the case brought by shareholders of the former Yukos oil company against Russia. While an ECT tribunal ordered Russia to pay a staggering US$50 billion in compensation, the European Court of Human Rights, which the investors invoked in the same matter, awarded only €1.9 billion in damages – less than 5 per cent of the ECT award.

Amidst growing opposition to the ECT, a process to ‘modernise’ it was launched in 2018. The treaty’s profiteers and supporters say the negotiations will make investor lawsuits under the ECT “far more difficult” (law firm Winston & Strawn) and “provide states with the necessary scope for measures to implement the energy transition” (State Secretary at the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, p39). In short: modernisation will fix the ECT’s flaws and transform it into “the Greenest Investment Treaty of them All” (Kluwer Arbitration blog).

There are strong indications that modernisation will not tame the climate-killing ECT:

First, a revised ECT may never see the light of day. Any changes to the agreement require unanimity. But ECT signatories such as Japan have stated on all negotiation topics that they don’t want any amendments. An internal European Commission report from 2017 already deemed it “not realistic” that the ECT will ever be amended. Yet, to bring the ECT in line with the Paris Agreement and thwart the danger of its investment protection provisions, a complete treaty overhaul is needed.

“It is unlikely that Contracting Parties would reach an agreement to align the Treaty with the Paris Climate Agreement.”

― Masami Nakata, former assistant to the ECT Secretary General, on ECT modernisation

Second, what’s on the negotiating table fails to live up to the promise of a climate-friendly ECT. No signatory state has proposed removing its dangerous investment arbitration mechanism. No state has proposed a clear exemption for climate action (“climate carve-out” in legal language). And no ECT member wants to promptly exclude protection of fossil fuels from the modernised treaty. An October 2020 European Commission proposal would protect existing fossil investments for another 10 years and many gas projects until 2040. That gives polluters another 20 years to obstruct the clean energy transition with costly claims.

Third, flowery language on states’ “right to regulate” will not prevent ECT suits against climate action. The key question under the ECT is not whether states have a right to regulate. They do. ECT tribunals have confirmed that. The key question is whether states violate the ECT’s investor privileges when regulating. In other words: they can regulate however they want – but somewhere down the line states can be ordered to pay billions if a tribunal decides a regulation was ‘unfair’ to an investor. Re-affirming the right to regulate in the ECT, as the EU plans, while keeping its investor privileges intact, will not shield public policies from costly and potentially successful lawsuits. This also means that the risk of regulatory chill – governments avoiding claims by appeasing corporations with less regulation – remains, including in the context of the climate emergency.

Since 2012 the ECT Secretariat has been putting great effort into expanding the geographical reach of the agreement to countries in Africa and the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Many hope  joining the ECT will attract investment to end energy poverty among their people who often lack access to electricity for basic needs like cooking. This hope is actively nurtured by the Secretariat who has repeatedly asserted “the Treaty’s potential… to attract foreign investments to the energy sector” and to “eradicate energy poverty”. A promotional document on Africa and the ECT even suggests: “Perhaps the key to unlocking Africa’s investment potential in order to guarantee universal access to energy and to overcome energy poverty is the Energy Charter Treaty.”

For countries keen to increase energy investment, joining the ECT is unlikely to produce any benefits (see myth 1 above). Likewise, there is no evidence ECT membership reduces energy poverty. However, its downsides are clear and particularly severe for low-income countries:

Countries joining the ECT risk a flood of costly investor lawsuits. Globally, the ECT is already the most used treaty for investment arbitrations and companies from ECT member states are the heaviest users of the system. 60 per cent of all 1061 known investor-state cases worldwide (633) are from companies whose home state is a member of the ECT – the vast majority of them EU states.

“The ECT privileges… interests of foreign investors over the societal and economic interests of the host state and national stakeholders who have no rights under the system.”

― Yamina Saheb, energy expert and former employee at the ECT Secretariat

With corporations seeking compensation not just for actual cash invested but for future anticipated losses, states can be forced to pay huge amounts in damages unless they prevail in an ECT suit. Governments have already been ordered or have agreed to pay more than US$52 billion in damages from public coffers – more than the annual investment needed to provide access to energy for anyone globally who currently lacks it.

The ECT can also restrict governments’ ability to fight energy poverty and regulate investments so they contribute to national development. Several Eastern European countries have already been sued under the ECT because they tried to curb energy companies’ profits and lower electricity prices for consumers. Under the ECT, large energy companies can also sue governments if they decide to tax windfall profits, force companies to hire local workers, transfer technology, process raw materials before export, or even protect natural resources, among other things. Hence it becomes harder for states to minimise the social and environmental costs of foreign energy investments while maximising their benefits to the local community.

Notably, once a country joins the treaty it is vulnerable to ECT lawsuits for at least 26 years – even if subsequent governments decide to leave. While any state can withdraw five years after ECT accession and withdrawal takes effect a year later, it can still be sued for 20 more years for investments made before the withdrawal (see the next section).

ECT defenders claim that for signatory states to leave the treaty is “nonsensical in terms of avoiding compensations” (Andrei V. Belyi, former staffer at the ECT Secretariat). Due to the ECT’s sunset clause, which allows investors to sue a country for 20 years after its withdrawal, they argue that reforming the ECT is the only way to tame it. As Carlo Pettinato, one of the European Commission’s negotiators in the ECT modernisation talks put it in a debate (minute 23’00): “Even if today we walk out because we don’t like [the ECT], we’re stuck for 20 years with investors under the current rules… We don’t want that. We want to change it, we want to reform it.”

Notwithstanding the ECT’s sunset clause, leaving the treaty does significantly reduce a country’s risk of being sued: because the provision only applies to investments made before withdrawal, while those made after are no longer protected by the ECT. At a time when the majority of new energy investment is still in fossil fuels, not renewables, this is important. The sooner countries withdraw, the fewer new dirty investments will fall under – and be locked-in by – the ECT.

“If governments want to be seen as leaders on climate change then they need to step away from investment agreements that tie their hands and continue to protect fossil fuels at the taxpayers’ expense. Withdrawal from the Energy Charter Treaty is an essential first step.”

― Open letter from over 200 climate leaders and scientists

Withdrawing from the ECT is not difficult. As soon as a country has been a member for five years, it can leave the ECT at any time by simply giving written notification. This is true for nearly all of the treaty’s 50-plus members, including the EU and its member states. They could withdraw from the ECT immediately and be part of a global trend: according to UN data, 2019 was the second year where more harmful and outdated investment treaties were cancelled than newly concluded. Italy has already taken that step with regards to the ECT and withdrew in 2016.

If multiple countries withdraw together, they can further weaken the sunset clause. The withdrawing countries could adopt an agreement that excludes claims in their group – before they jointly leave the ECT. Such a declaration would make it difficult for investors from those countries to sue others from the group. This is not unreasonable. EU member states already reached such an agreement in May 2020 on some 130 bilateral investment treaties they had signed amongst each other. If EU member states took a similar step with regards to the ECT, the majority of the cases under the treaty – currently, 66 per cent of all cases are from EU investors against EU member states – would no longer be possible in the future.

Two political groups in the European Parliament have already demanded that the EU withdraw from the ECT (see here and here). In November 2020, more than 250 Parliamentarians from across the EU and different political parties called on EU member states to “explore pathways to jointly withdraw from the ECT” if provisions that protect fossil fuels and the ECT’s investor-state dispute settlement mechanism are not deleted in the modernisation negotiations.

As these negotiations are likely to fail because of widespread disagreement between member states and are unlikely to produce any results that will change the ECT’s deep-seated problems, countries should consider promptly withdrawing from the ECT. Given the urgency of tackling climate change and accelerating the energy transition, there is no time to lose.

Our webinar Taking on the Tech Titans: Reclaiming our data commons explored who owns our data and why it matters, the relevance of data extraction for countries in the Global South, and the impact of COVID-19. What strategies, structures and institutions are needed at national and international levels to confront Big Tech and advance digital justice?

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Ben Hayes

Ben Hayes, TNI Associate, Founding director of AWO, a new data rights agency gave an introduction that addressed what makes the issues around big tech so important in the current climate. COVID-19 has crystallized the intersection between corporate power, state power, technology and rights. In the last decade, this area was characterized by Edward Snowden’s revelations in the early 2010s and the extent of government surveillance and the global state of surveillance infrastructure. In the last few years, we’ve gained a growing understanding of the power of big tech companies, the business model of surveillance capitalism and how it is affecting – or has the potential to affect –  almost every element of social and material life in ways we don’t yet fully understand. COVID-19 has married state surveillance, corporate power and surveillance capitalism in stark ways. We have seen private companies like Palantir and Google shaping government responses to the pandemic, granting states access to data on our populations in extraordinary ways. Discussions about immunity passports and government access to data in COVID tracing apps are concerning the data rights community.

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Ben Tarnoff

Ben Tarnoff, tech worker, writer and founding editor of technology magazine Logic, opened the discussion by offering his insights into how the present crisis is intensifying the power of big tech and how that intensified power will in turn have major consequences for data enclosure and extraction. Currently, a substantial share of humanity is living under some form of lockdown order. A clear consequence of this is a sharp increase in global internet usage anywhere a lockdown order has been implemented. When China locked down Hubei in January, mobile broadband speeds dropped by more than half due to network congestion. In Italy, home internet use has increased by 90 percent and global internet traffic is about 25 to 30 percent higher. Subsequently, we have also seen surging use of cloud services as the infrastructure that sustains the services people are using is taxed by the increase in users. As of late April, Synergy Research Group estimated that the cloud industry has already spent more money on data centers this year so far than in the whole of 2019. Two of the largest cloud providers, Amazon and Microsoft, have some 50 new large scale data centers under construction globally.

As well as increased internet use and demand for cloud services, we are seeing new demands for more invasive state and corporate surveillance. From contact tracing from mobile phone location data that has been particularly aggressive in Asian countries to monitoring body temperatures with thermal imaging and tracking the infected with facial recognition – something that has been explored in the US by Clearview AI. In addition, we can see greater surveillance of protesters and people engaging in any type of dissent or oppositional activity, particularly as uprisings are taking place around the world in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Having outlined the ways COVID-19 will accelerate digitization and give corporations and governments more opportunities to create more data about us and the environments we inhabit, Tarnoff went on to discuss why big tech are creating this data and what they are doing with it. When we talk about the tech titans and the possibility of reclaiming our digital commons we must understand how these commons are being produced in the first place and for what purpose. In order to do that successfully, we need to talk about capitalism since as long as capitalism has existed data has helped it grow. Bosses watching how workers work and rearranging them to be more efficient is a good example of how surveillance has generated information used to increase productivity. In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor made systematic surveillance of the productive process a key part of what he called scientific management – a set of widely influential ideas about how to increase industrial efficiency that is still visible in global industrial processes today.

That data has been useful for capitalism is nothing new, however, the scale and significance of data has developed thanks to information technology. Digitization has made data more abundant since it has become much easier to create, store and transmit. A small device can be attached to almost anything to stream data from it including shipping containers, assembly lines, gas turbines and the wrists of factory or office workers. The ability to extract information from the productive process in order to optimize it has reached a new level of sophistication. However, observing the productive process is not the only way we create data. More broadly we create data whenever we do anything that is mediated or monitored by a computer. This encompasses a growing number of activities around the world. Even if you are not directly using a computer or you are not aware of it, data could still be created about you with or without your knowledge or consent.

No single technology contributes more powerfully to digitization than the internet because it contributes to the flow of data and creates more of it. Everything we do online leaves a trace which in part is why corporations are so eager to increase the amount of time we spend online. At one level when we talk about big data we mean literal bigness – more data, bigger data sets – but big data also means that the data can be made more meaningful and yield valuable lessons about how people or processes behave or how they are likely to behave in the future. This is true because we have more data, faster computers and developments in fields like machine learning have given us better tools for analysis. Machine learning in particular is a powerful tool for pattern recognition that can be trained on data. The system learns the pattern and can then recognize that pattern in the future, with faces for instance.

The bottom line is that big data is driving digitization because any piece of information when combined with other information and analyzed or interpreted en masse may reveal actionable knowledge about the world. This information might teach a manufacturer how to make a factory more efficient, an advertizer what kind of things you might buy, or enable an intelligence analyst to map your movements or a drone operator decide where to drop a bomb. For these reasons digitization is becoming as important to capitalism as financialization was during and after the 1970s. As well as offering a new engine of capital accumulation, it gives states new tools for social control to help order populations to be more useful for the purposes of accumulation and manage redundant, rebellious and racialized populations.

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Vahini Naidu

Vahini Naidu, trade negotiator, Department of Trade, Industry and Competition in South Africa moved the discussion on to how big tech, largely concentrated in the North is seeking to consolidate its power at the expense of development in the global south.

Contrary to popular belief, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is still active. Despite one major developed economy actively seeking to dismantle the Appellate Body, the enforcement arm of the WTO, they are also aggressively advocating for digital trade rules in a trade agreement. The development agenda on eliminating agricultural subsidies and intellectual property rights is under discussion and the pandemic has reinforced the importance of this agenda for developing countries especially from a food security and industrial policy point of view. Advanced economies are also pushing their own reform agenda and negotiations in the WTO by aggressively pursuing rulemaking on e-commerce investment transparency and trying to eliminate any special preferences for developing and least developed countries. These are all highly contentious issues that the membership does not agree on.

The relevance of the WTO has also been reinforced by the rise in unilateral measures adopted by some advanced economies while developing countries do not have the legal capacity to justify their policies. Since July 2016, the US has tabled a submission attempting to refocus the existing exploratory work program on e-commerce to begin to examine the linkages between digital trade and economic development. This submission has listed 16 seemingly innocuous trade-related policies they wanted countries to adopt. A series of proposals by advanced economies soon emerged, branded as e-commerce for development despite not including any rules on development.

Since 2018, a group of members have decided amongst themselves to negotiate multilateral rules on e-commerce and currently, 84 out of the 164 members in the WTO have become formal signatories to these plurilateral negotiations on ecommerce. Critical to point out is that there has been a large influence from the international chamber of commerce, big tech firms and corporations involved in advancing their interest in the negotiations. A common theme in these negotiations has been to pursue a deregulatory approach to digital trade. The current text strongly favours rules that leave how they use, share, treat and commercialize technology and at their discretion, with a minimal role for state intervention. In the currently proposed text, there are very limited exceptions that have proven through WTO jurisprudence to be extremely difficult to prove, especially for developing countries.

Naidu emphasised that even though these negotiations are branded as e-commerce they also touch on internet governance, ICT matters, products, services, technology and digital trade. Big tech have demanded rules including not imposing any customs duties fees or charges on a digital product transmitted electronically and leaving electronic authentication to companies and consumers to decide how secure the electronic transactions should be. As we know consumers are not in a position to ensure this. Other rules include things like no member shall restrict or prohibit the cross-border transfer of information including personal information by electronic means if this activity is for the conduct of a business. Members are required to ensure cross-border data flows to facilitate trade in the digital economy and no member shall require the transfer of or access to source code software or to an algorithm expressed in that source code.

These are clearly extremely broad proposals and one must ask whether the WTO is the right forum to be discussing these issues. Several WTO members including South Africa and India have not joined this agreement and expressed extreme concern with how these negotiations have been conducted. South Africa believes that these multilateral rules on e-commerce and digital trade are premature. We have seen several challenges emerge from the current reading of the rules, the first that there are a range of unanswered technical questions relating to the ownership control management of data that will be critical for evidence-based policymaking. Other questions raised include if the gains outstrip the costs, if the net value generated is captured in the domestic economy or flowing out, and if there are employment gains or not.

There are a number of policy and technical questions still being analyzed from a South African perspective. The content of many of these current proposals for rules in this area also suggests a trajectory opposed to inclusive and equitable economic development. We are seeing rules that would permanently curtail governments ability to manage digital transformation by imposing a range of prohibitions across the board on customs duties, local content, localization, transfer, data flow and source code disclosure. These rules appear to be designed to lock-in the advantages currently enjoyed by corporations and countries that already lead the digital economy and suggest that many of the proposals aimed at facilitating digital trade would simply reinforce existing imbalances.

Naidu pointed out that many of these rules will constrain developing countries’ abilities to build digital capacities as we see a huge asymmetry in the development of e-commerce globally. Two countries account for 90 percent of the market value of 70 of the largest platforms [LINK to list for more info]. These problematic asymmetries and the digital divide will further reinforce global social divides as well as determine the countries that will be able to recover from the pandemic. Data is at the heart of this and we know that digital capacities are needed to build productive capacities, especially for developing countries, for sustainable and inclusive growth. The push by big tech to liberalize data needs to be scrutinized and there must be more focus on what is happening in the WTO for developing countries to begin to develop their own frameworks.

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Anita Gurumurthy

Anita Gurumurthy, founding member and director of IT for Change, in India went on to bridge the background that Ben Tarnoff laid out and the specifics that Vahini Naidu highlighted.

There are two key aspects of current capitalist production that are different from ten years ago. The first is that data has become a valuable resource and AI based on data is an important factor of production today. We have an entirely new way of economic organization and a new value chain stemming from how production and market exchange are managed through insights from data. There is a huge industry for annotating data that is being collected, sorted, arranged and processed continuously. This is the industry for intelligent production that is defining what we call the digital economy. It is no longer about one sector in the economy, data business is cross-sectoral. One example is companies buying stakes in others based on a long data game to seize the market, taking a broad view of how to expand their dominions based on data marriages. This is clearly evident since Bayer acquired Monsanto to marry pharmaceutical data with soil and seed data to control more than a third of the agricultural input market or Amazon acquiring Wholefoods to marry its online commerce with a booming offline market for organic food. Data has become key to modeling the entire supply chain from what is produced to how, where and when you will sell those products. Data-based intelligence determines productivity in the digital economy and this is the new capitalist model based on data value chains.

The second aspect of current capitalist production concerns who controls these new supply chains. As previously mentioned, platform companies are the leading firms controlling data value chains, companies that used the internet to build their initial business and soon discovered the power of data to develop the presence to model not just their own business processes but the market itself. Platform firms dominate the global business landscape today capturing nearly 60 percent of market capitalization and their power is growing at breathtaking speed. As Jack Marr said in an interview is took the Alibaba empire 15 years to achieve the numbers that Walmart achieved in 60.

The belief that the biggest problem is the capture of our personal data and the control of our behaviour through its enclosure only part of the story. Information about us and the world is combined into raw material for capitalism to create and expropriate value for itself. The deep invasion of our lives is problematic but how such invasion is translated into exploitation and injustices needs to be fully understood. The first step to confront the fictions and fake news that concern data.

The first incorrect assumption is that data is non-rivalrous and the supply unlimited. In reality, data as a unitary piece of information is meaningless, it acquires power only when it is relational or is seen in relation to other data. This is why data is a system resource enabling connections to be made at different depths and layers within a system. The big tech companies founded years ago were able to build these systems of connections thanks to the network effects of the internet enabling them to keep data locked up and unavailable to others. The data from which meaning and value can be generated not only for economic but also social and public purposes does not come with any authorship or creator rights. Big tech can simply mine it for profit. With this absence of property rights, we are seeing the de facto enclosure of data.

The second incorrect assumption concerns data flow. We are told that the data economy presents great opportunities through free data flows across borders – Bangladeshi data going to the US as easily as vice versa – and the internet has enabled a brand new frictionless economy. However, the data economy, very much like the knowledge economy, is far from frictionless when we consider how the early movers like Google and Facebook were able to capitalize on network advantage and the ability to expand markets at near-zero costs on the internet. Their platform infrastructures became the apparatus par excellence to gather and hold data and build data-driven economies of scale. It is hardly possible for a Bangladeshi firm today to build even a small unicorn startup that can attract venture capital funding, let alone another Google. In the intelligence economy where data insights are monopolized by a few firms, market structures grow to become unjust. 75 percent of the cloud computing market, 75 percent of patents and blockchain and 50 percent of spending on the internet of things is shared by the US and China. If data did not flow freely the grand economic rents that the big firms are getting would simply stop which is why the major powers are pushing the fiction that data cannot be claimed as a resource that belongs to people and their jurisdictions.

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Caroline Nevejan

Caroline Nevejan, Chief Science Officer at the City of Amsterdam and Chair of Designing Urban Experience at the University of Amsterdam was next to offer her perspective focusing on the role of big tech in the city and some of the challenges cities like Amsterdam face from the power of big tech and different models of using data to support democracy and citizenship control.

The fact that we have this new media does not just mean bad news, in principle it allows us to gain a new understanding of the world. For a long time, humans were the measure of everything. We were then able to measure blood pressure, distance and among other things but now because of data and the internet, we have a measurable humankind. We can know what many people feel, think and see, a potential we must pay attention to.

However, in our cities especially we have now moved into complex systems that mean we now live in communities where such systems have more agency than the people who live in the city. This raises the question of trust and how to design for participation and surveillance. In this new meta-design paradigm, every step you take on the way becomes a new form of participation or a form of surveillance, something we are struggling to know how to talk about.

Regarding data and big companies, as mentioned the financial economy used to make up a third and two-thirds was the sharing economy. In the last decades, big tech companies have invaded private lives as well as the sharing economy, financializing many elements of our lives that previously had nothing to do with money.

What we see simultaneously in the city is people’s data taken by big tech companies as well as payments with bitcoin for houses resulting in a whole market that the city is not involved in. The city is a place dependent on taxes to build schools, hospitals and roads so just as our inhabitants need to be here, so does their data. We are our data and by taking personal data as well as introducing an uncontrollable financial system that does not allow for tax-paying cities are becoming victims of big tech greed.

We see too much data from the privacy sector and as we lose our privacy we cannot doubt or change our opinion and thus democracy is at stake. Concurrently, we have too little data about what’s happening within companies and thus justice is also at stake.

The question is how do individuals deal with this. We see global efforts to invest in new architecture including creating digital commons, making new software, the Linux community and the open-source and blockchain communities. People are also protecting themselves with crypto to try to make their own lives outside the control of big tech. The Centre of Investigative Journalism offers excellent courses with strategies on how to do this. It’s vital to teach and develop new strategies to reveal hidden truths and create space where there is a limit to how far big tech can invade.

What we see is a tension between cryptography and the public domain. However, important legal instruments like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU are changing how the data market, companies, cities and governments behave. The  Right to Information Act (RTI) has also enabled positive changes in many countries but is now jeopardized because of digital technologies are not designed for transparency.

Where do we go from here and how can we work to find new ways to use this data potential? The city of Amsterdam is looking at how rhythm can be a way for people living in the city to understand their lives better, tuning the rhythms of nature, social life and culture.

We must realize the issues are as much about our environment as data and work on the idea of multispecies urbanism, that first considers the ecological design before how people will integrate into it, let alone technology. Attention must be given to looking at the environment around us in new ways.

This principle also applies to how we deal with each other. Big tech designs for the same kind of people but it is fundamental that we design for diversity in order to thrive.

The municipality of Amsterdam has taken the decision to become a circular city, using the model of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economics enabling a relation between social and ecological as well as local and global. In this way, we can start reflecting on how we operate as our own footprint develops.

Nevejan concluded her intervention by highlighting the need for a new awareness of climate change. Applying imagination to our ability to perceive humankind and our actions must become a tool for our survival.

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Nanjira Sambuli

Nanjira Sambuli, researcher, writer, policy analyst and advocacy strategist on tech and governance shared her reflections and perspective on how international civil society can respond to the assaults of big tech.

First and foremost we must consider and accommodate the diversity of perspectives on data and privacy in the digital economy, situating them in the historical, political and nuanced contexts of digital developments across the Global South and among the diverse and marginalized minorities around the world. It is essential to reflect on how we study their understanding of these issues and how we measure our progress and success. We can advocate for laws and regulations protecting data and privacy and consider them successful when we see countries putting them in place but they may not be reflective or representative of how citizens from the Global South perceive these issues. The actions and recommendations that we put forth in countering or reforming the status quo can sometimes be impractical and even come across and callous for most developing countries. A good example of this is the deleting Facebook movement that became a moral imperative but is impractical for many people for whom Facebook and its family of apps is the entire scope of the internet. Studying the use of WhatsApp in Brazil has shown that removing it from favelas amounts to removing a resource people use to shape their realities. The alternatives we propose to reclaim our data commons or the digital space need contextualization and humility in how we put them forth to create room for the discussions of those who cannot adopt what we mainstream. For many people the entire internet experience in an enclosure altogether.

Developing markets are the greatest growth potential or capture trajectory for the digital and data economy and the mentioned assaults are coming from the private sector and Western and Eastern governments turning the Global South into the next geopolitical battleground. If we reflect on the relationship being set up, we are not even users anymore but slaves to be mined for data without receiving anything in return.

In this configuration, civil society must not repeat the same mistakes we have seen before by speaking or advocating for those left behind but rather create room to amplify the voices of those observing and mobilizing on the ground. People in the Global South and marginalized communities have been following how these issues are developing in their contexts but this is not often reflected in what becomes the internationalized movement. We see IBM stating that they will stop developing facial recognition technology while a group of AI researchers who happen to be women of colour have been speaking about this for a long time. They may not have gotten the deals to write the books we cite today about these issues but civil society has a moral imperative to bypass that. When we speak of principles and values like diversity and solidarity as a currency not everybody is using we must be careful not to seem as though we are also using a selective application and enforcement as international civil society. The marginalized majority should not have to fight the onslaught from the private sector and governments as well as internationalized or institutionalized civil society. Reflecting on and accepting this uncomfortable reality is where we must start to rebuild.

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Further discussion

Artist: Elizabeth Niarhos

Ben Tarnoff was the first to respond to a question from the audience and Ben Hayes on how we can deal with the ownership of data if we do not also address the ownership of tech infrastructure.

Thinking about infrastructure as well as data is an important point that connects to the imperfect metaphors that we use to talk about the process. Data extraction, data commons and data enclosure are metaphors that suggest there is something out there called data that is extracted like oil or enclosed like land. The reality is that data is actively constructed beginning with a camera that observes us or an algorithm that tracks our mouse movements around a website. These observations reflect a very intentional and purposeful process. In the next stage of the pipeline is what in machine learning is often called data wrangling, turning raw data into the kind that is useful for analytics. Data scientists spend most of their time on this process known as feature engineering that isolates and extracts the particular attributes of the data that will have maximal value for whatever is attempting to be predicted. We must remember that data is not something preexisting to be collected by corporate and state actors that we can take back but is completely intertwined with infrastructures that create, organize and draw value from it. The question is not simply to socialize the data commons or assert our ownership over existing data. We need to move upstream and interrogate and reorganize the structures that are creating that data in the first place.

Vahini Naidu continued by offering her perspective on the possibilities of digital sovereignty and the dangers of the WTO plurilateral discussions on e-commerce. Before outlining some of these problems, Naidu encouraged webinar participants to follow her previously provided lists of links to gain a deeper analytical and policy perspective on why some of the proposed rules would be extremely problematic for developing countries. The pandemic has revealed the deep structural vulnerabilities in the global economy seen even before the move towards consuming locally and producing within a nation’s borders on account of environmental considerations amongst other things. However, it is also an opportunity to look at how developing countries can grow their domestic industries especially in terms of the digital economy. No developing countries are even close to achieving the mass scale digital industrialization success that has emerged from the deliberate state interventions by the Chinese government.

In terms of data, the biggest issues now in the WTO is whether members will agree to unfettered cross border data flows. It is extremely premature to impose these kinds of rules when so much remains unknown. The international engagement should for now focus on experience sharing analysis, dialogue and possibly also cooperating in some areas. An additional problem with WTO rules concerns developing countries abilities to retain the space to develop and implement policies with flexibility to change, tweak and in some cases even abolish them. The levels of uptake of legislation in cybersecurity, electronic transactions, in data legislation must be taken into consideration. For example, only 50 percent of African countries have legislation on privacy and data protection. 72 percent of African countries have cybercrime legislation but implementation levels are very low.

More needs to be done in terms of policymaking to recognize the sovereignty of national data. The localization of data is crucial because even if data is located outside national boundaries and a country can access it, others for example those that own the cloud also have access to it. In the context of a growing digital and technological divide, these firms will have a much higher capacity to use and profit from that data.

From the revenue perspective, we are seeing the EU take the lead in taxing the digital activities of big tech and we should also look at how these activities can contribute to the tax space of developing countries including a customs duties moratorium on e-commerce.

In addition to responding to Ben Tarnoff’s thoughts on infrastructure, Anita Gurumurthy shared her final view on a new data settlement that simultaneously enhances our data rights while pushing back and reigning in the power of big tech. The good news is that data concentration is being met with increasing disapproval in the past few years and the GDPR had the idea of self-determination and sovereignty limiting the kind of data that could be collected by platforms. However, this has not mended the platform economy because informed consent is a blunt instrument essentially amounting to nothing. Other measures are encouraging including Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to designate certain platform infrastructures as essential utility and legal scholars in the US recommending a structural separation of platforms and commerce that would ban companies from operating a platform and marketing their own goods and services on it. Duel services tax has been introduced in ten countries and French antitrust regulators fought for Google to remunerate press publishers. It is becoming increasingly clear in dealing with big tech power that not just market failures are at stake but widespread economic catastrophe.

Small countries will be browbeaten to sign up for new e-commerce trade deals and these instruments will not take care of the incentive structures of big tech. They will simply pay the tax and write it off as a cost to the company and get on with the business of data theft and its various positive externalities for colonizing the planet. IT For Change has been looking at the need to create a distance between each of the major functions or layers of the data economy and start to take back from the colonizers who have already built profitable empires with the raw material from our soil. The data collector or holder cannot also build and operate cloud infrastructure and provide AI services. These proposals and regulations can help but to create just and fair economies we need to free up data power and intellectual capital for economic, social and public value all over the world.

In February, the EU came up with a plan called the Data Strategy about various ways by which to reclaim data power. IT For Change would like to propose that in addition to principles of sovereignty countries also complement their regulatory and legislative framework with economic rights about data. This is crucial because sovereignty must be combined with economic power and defined community ownership rights in data. These rights can be about access that a community has to data, the benefit extraction possibilities through use and licensing, defensive rights and boundary management. There will always be conflicting rights, individual sovereignty, contractual and public interest claims. An independent data governance authority and data trusts are needed to manage these rights through nested sovereignty principles that deal with the data economy not only the personal data rights.

Caroline Nevejan offered her final comment by elaborating on a few ways Amsterdam is using or planning to use data and emphasizing the importance of the locality of data and data for transparency and against corruption. In the Netherlands, there are big issues with tax avoidance made more difficult to tackle due to data sources and sharing information. However, a positive step has been a position posed by the deputy mayor and accepted by the council to enforce signs at the entrance of streets warning people they will be filmed as well as the development of the GDPR, that although is not good enough is at least a first barrier. We lack the arts in the data scene and need good visualizations that empower people instead of baffling them with schemes that are hard to understand. It is also very important to be aware of who has access to what data and since, as previously mentioned, WhatsApp and mobile phones are the entirety of the internet for most people we must make sure that WhatsApp is not used to arrest young people who protest for example. Bringing the tech titans under democratic law is fundamental to force them to accept responsibility and accountability. There must be a right to address and a right to personal sovereignty in all the interdependencies we have.

Nanjira Sambuli concluded the webinar with her final reflections and by addressing a question from the audience on how can we hold big tech to account for its role in promoting violence internationally. We do need to acknowledge that it is clear that there is discontent and people are showing various ways to push back against this onslaught coming from big tech. There are many conventions and international platforms that need to be turned into action to fight this marriage between the systems of governance and corporations calling for the rules to work in their favour. Legal systems must work for the citizens as they were initially envisioned to. The pandemic has forced protesting citizens from the streets to the platforms where these corporations are making more money in the name of our protest. This circle complicates the equation but we must start reclaiming government and governance spaces to truly use them to support and represent citizens. Prescribing strategies is difficult as there is no one size fits all model and a varied toolkit is needed for different countries. Keeping hope alive and getting strategic and creative is how we must move forward.

This essay is part of TNI’s Future Lab series on Technology, Power and Emancipation‘ organised in collaboration with ROAR magazine

Finding the political power to pursue a more just and sustainable economy is the hard part, but the tools to effectively execute such an economy are developing quickly.

On a small boat off the coast of Thailand fishermen take stock of their haul for the day. They whip out a phone, open an app and record essential information regarding the amount of fish caught, the location, the time and under what conditions. This is uploaded to a database with similar information from other fishermen; the fish itself is packaged with a tag linked to all the sourcing information.

The fishermen are credited with a cryptocurrency called Fishcoin, which they can redeem for costly data from their local phone service provider. If they have the means, they could also trade the Fishcoin in online cryptocurrency markets. Keen to source sustainable seafood, the information on the fish is of great interest to governments, businesses and consumers, who use Fishcoin to pay for access to it, reinforcing a currency that serves local fishermen and environmental stewardship.

In Canada, Sensorica, an “open value network,” produces sensor and sensing equipment. A recent project is a sensing system and app that can help monitor and assist in the safe use of particular urban areas during the pandemic. What is unique is that there are no bosses; workers are in control of the projects to which they contribute and are paid through an algorithmically enabled value accounting system based primarily on the quantity and quality of work. Sensorica sees itself as offering a new peer-to-peer vision of manufacturing in which, “people [are] creating value together, by contributing work, money and goods and sharing the income.”

In Catalonia, the anarchist-inspired FairCoop is seeking to refashion the current global economic system from the ground up. It is pursuing this aim via a cryptocurrency called FairCoin, which is to become the preferred means to pay for goods and services among like-minded, cooperative actors worldwide. With a deep enough pool of assets denoted in FairCoin, the thinking goes, it will be possible to create a significant degree of independence from capitalist markets, especially to meet basic needs.

A Commons Bank has been formed to service FairCoin and an online FairMarket with goods and services denominated in FairCoin. By controlling this cryptocurrency, Faircoop is able to fund commons-centered, counter-capitalist initiatives like FreedomCoop, which offers legal and banking services to self-employed individuals seeking to make a living outside the exploitative grip of capital or the state.

The above cases may seem disparate, but they share a common interest in using “cryptographic ledger technology,” often referred to as “blockchain,” as a way of rethinking the valuation inherent in market-based pricing. By offering new, non-capitalist ways of measuring and pursuing value(s), blockchain promises the ability to pursue an alternative economic path to capitalism as we know it. Assuming the social and political power to do so, what would such an endeavor look like?

Before turning to the technology, it is important to be clear about the dysfunctional value system dominating the current economic order. In Ancient Rome, the thinker Publilius Syrus captured what would later become capitalist dogma when he said, “everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.”

Today, the obfuscated workings of the market — Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” — is seen as an omnipotent super-computer cranking out the current value of everything in the form of price. Following Marx, this simple reduction of value to what price it will fetch on the market happened when the basic rationale animating economic interactions shifted from one of pursuing commodity exchanges, facilitated by money (C-M-C), to using commodities as a means to gain more money (M-C-M). Money here becomes the marker of all the value in the world.

Such a valuation system, which is the very foundation of capitalism, leaves no room for any considerations of derived or inherent value, let alone ethical values. The consequences are clear: the reduction of labor to price leads to exploitation; viewing commodities as disconnected from labor results in the alienation of workers and consumers; and the never-ending externalization of environmental costs precipitates the collapse of global ecosystems.

Logically, therefore, any counter-capitalist movement must explore ways in which values — not one sole overarching value — can be re-incorporated into valuation by internalizing aspects of the economy that are generally excluded or hidden from view — both the good and the bad. Today, technology-inspired efforts, as illustrated in the examples above, are being pursued to do precisely this.

Blockchain is a digital, decentralized database of value-exchange transactions — essentially a ledger. It is open for anyone to see, like a shared Google document. Those who take part in viewing and building the ledger are called nodes. The ledger is established in a linear sequence of encrypted, time-stamped datasets, or “blocks.”

It is almost impossible to tamper with the ledger owing to a number of ingenious security measures, of which the most important is that the blockchain is based on the consent of the majority of nodes, i.e. it is a decentralized, peer-to-peer security system with no central site that could be compromised. The far-reaching contribution blockchain offers is the ability to create and maintain incorruptible records of monetary, product, or labor exchanges, among many other things, with no centralized intermediary such as a bank, a boss, or a government.

We are now also beginning to see the unfolding of second- and third-generation blockchain technologies, which have moved beyond capturing value transfers to establishing entire systems of value exchanges using smart contracts. A smart contract is a blockchain-enabled “if-then” program in which a particular event is triggered if a certain condition is met, which can be assessed by peer-to-peer or automated systems.

For instance, Sensorica’s value accounting system would be based on self-reporting and group verification. The information supplied by fishermen claiming Fishcoin could be assessed via a combination of autonomous sensing equipment, audits and reliance on users’ honor. Smart contracts can also be bound together into larger systems using artificial intelligence (AI) applications to create distributed autonomous organizations. Think here of Sensorica’s entire open value network being coded — from articles of association to bylaws — meaning that its complete production environment would have been created to function autonomously according to specific norms and values.

Despite its potential to make short shrift of centralized rent extractors and bosses, it is important to acknowledge that blockchain is not inherently progressive. In fact, it embodies the libertarian sentiments that are entrenched in capitalism’s market-centered value system. This means that technology-inspired, counter-capitalists have to fundamentally re-design, repurpose and re-govern blockchain’s underlying code.

FairCoin, for instance, successfully circumvented the ridiculous amounts of energy required by the verification system of traditional blockchains by re-coding the procedure through which blocks are added. FairCoin has also embraced open, democratic governance arrangements for managing its code in order to avoid the often opaque and guarded decision-making structures employed in systems like Bitcoin.

Some commons-oriented code writers are even developing cryptographic ledger systems beyond blockchain whereby anonymous, “trustless” networks are replaced by interlinked trusting groups, thereby enabling greater speed and scalability of data processing. One such effort is the biomimicry-inspired “Holochain,” a blockchain-like code described as a “method and reward structure for storing and accessing data and applications among users themselves.”

The ultimate aim of the Holochain project is to overcome the internet’s server-dependent centralization by using the participants’ excess computer processing power and hardware storage to create a true peer-to-peer internet, or “Holo network.”

Such a network will eventually require the widespread adoption of HoloPorts, the hardware that enables computer power sharing, as well as decentralized Holo applications that will run in the Holo network. The Holo apps, or Happs, will generally be aimed at making use of and expanding the peer-to-peer nature of the network, ranging from alternative social media platforms, such as Junto, to energy monitors and distribution systems such as Redgrid.

How could this fancy new code challenge the human and environmental degradations caused by capitalism’s valuation system? We know that the current value system reduces labor to an exploitable commodity. In Sensorica’s open value network, however, the exploitation of labor is directly challenged by creating a value accounting system that is inherently meritocratic and fair, where work done within one project can also be credited if it is picked up by another. It is a commons-based peer-to-peer production arrangement rooted in fundamentally non-capitalist values — collaboration, openness, decentralization — yet one that its proponents believe can compete with and ultimately replace capitalist actors in the marketplace.

Developing such a system has been one of Sensorica’s main goals and it is now seeking blockchain-based solutions to increase its functionality, scalability and security. Holochain is one of the leading contenders to build this infrastructure.

The idea of coding commons-centered environments such as these is also the impetus for the creation of the Economic Space Agency (ECSA), a global collective of counter-capitalist economists and computer scientists seeking to expand and scale up the values-infused production pursued by the likes of Sensorica. According to Tere Vadén at ECSA, the aim is to create environments for economic interaction that “… encode incentive mechanisms and choose specific valuation metrics of non-monetary assemblages (from relationality, trust, and quality to land, labour and material goods) in smart contracts.”

Importantly, the values being coded into these environments, which can expand far past a single enterprise to encompass trans-local economies, are not limited to labor but can also address environmental issues. According to David Dao, a pioneer in employing distributed autonomous organizations to further sustainability, “we now have accessible tools to efficiently engineer economic incentives in a cheap and scalable manner…by distilling (crypto) incentives into code, we are now able to treat economics simply as software .” Driven by this conviction, Dao founded GainForest, which uses a combination of smart contracts to link donors, forest communities and sophisticated verification systems to fund and support sustainable forest stewardship, specifically in the Kayapo Indigenous territories in Brazil.

Beyond exploitation, capitalism creates a sense that goods and services are stand-alone things whose value is directly captured in their price, thereby obscuring how this value is actually derived. This is what Marx called “commodity fetishism.” This view of commodities significantly contributes to workers’ alienation because it breaks down the inter-personal relationship between producer and consumer. It also leads to a disconnect between consumer and nature.

Turning again to Sensorica, the voluntary, empowered and justly remunerated labor that could be made feasible on a large scale through blockchain-enabled, open value networks could be a way to return a sense of ownership of the labor provided. FairCoop is another instance in which workers’ alienation is challenged by facilitating self-employment with the help of the alternative FairCoin cryptocurrency. Similarly, Fishcoin challenges the disconnect between producers and consumers inherent in commodity fetishism through more transparent supply chains.

By meticulously documenting the various stages in production, producers and consumers can develop and respond to the various human and natural dimensions in a given economic activity. The blockchain-based system that reveals the various sources of the seafood we eat, for instance, is a first step in overcoming the obfuscation within existing forms of consumption, while simultaneously serving to track and hence manage the tapped resources. The potential here is significant.

Imagine a product in which each step in the production process, from raw materials to finished assembly, documents where the processing or production took place, the working conditions and the accumulated environmental footprint. Each step of the production chain would be another block in the blockchain, whereby each transaction is documented by trusted parties and validated on the digital ledger. Products would thus be given an identification code that could, for instance, be scanned by a smartphone to reveal the entire history of the product and summarize its social and environmental impacts.

Icebreaker, a company based in New Zealand specializing in Merino wool clothing, pioneered such a system by creating a “baacode.” The code could be scanned on each piece of clothing, revealing a thorough record of production, including photos and videos from high-country sheep stations to final assembly in one or more of its globally dispersed factories.

There are limitations, however. While clothing is one thing, providing detailed histories and impact assessments for complex goods, containing hundreds of parts sourced from across the world (like cars), would require an entirely different and unprecedented level of coordination. Furthermore, even if such tracking systems could be established, it would be disingenuous to suggest that they would result in close bonds between consumers, workers and nature; the labor intricacies and distances involved in both agriculture and manufacturing are simply too great.

Nevertheless, the insidious way commodity fetishization blinds us to what actually goes into production by seeing only price could at least be blunted by establishing visible, detailed, and trustworthy history/impact ledgers.

A critical code-based tool for capturing and fostering alternative forms of valuations, as shown by Fishcoin and FairCoop, is the use of values-based cryptocurrencies, or altcoins.

Cryptocurrencies give their issuers power to denominate and quantify particular assets, thereby gaining some independence from state-issued money while also enabling access to it. The blockchain tech industry, for instance, has long used cryptocurrencies as a way to fund its ventures using “initial coin offerings” (ICOs), where crypto coins are sold for “real” money. While ICOs have been plagued by speculation and fraud, this can be avoided with well-intentioned altcoins.

Arthur Brock, from the Holochain project, contends there is room for hundreds of altcoins, which can legitimately be used to fund and incentivize participation in intentional, values-oriented projects. Brock suggests these currencies can be designed to act either as a store of value or a broad medium of exchange.

According to Brock, the key to launching a successful altcoin is to ensure it actually has some worth, so it can be used to access something of value. Fishcoin, for example, is used to incentivize information gathering by fisherman directly interacting with commons resources. It achieves its value because it can both be used to buy cell phone data and coveted information on harvested seafood. As the demand for this information is relatively steady, such a token can serve as a secure store of value. Similar altcoin-based incentive systems can be envisioned to support other goods or services, such as computer processing power and storage (like the Holo network), carpool rides, or urban-produced food.

Solarcoin is one such example, where anyone producing solar energy is entitled to receive Solarcoins. Yet, such currencies have limited appeal if they cannot be used for anything. Thus, in the case of Solarcoin, its worth would dramatically increase if electricity cooperatives, for instance, accepted Solarcoin as payment for energy use. Solarcoin could also get into the business of assembling and analyzing energy data from participating households and businesses, which it could then sell in Solarcoins as a way to secure state-issued money.

Ultimately, Fishcoin and Solarcoin seek to foster particular values-based activities in a market-dominated world. Yet, if the aim is truly to challenge capitalism, then significantly delinking from market valuations would be necessary. This is the aspiration of FairCoin, among other similar altcoins, which seek to become the tokens denominating the value of a substantial, autonomous economic realm. Their success depends on the widespread participation by economic actors committed to the project.

While difficult to achieve, FairCoin’s chances are better than earlier alternative currency initiatives by facilitating blockchain-enabled, safe, digital transaction across the world without costly intermediaries, thereby enabling a much more expansive “marketplace.” If this marketplace were to achieve critical mass, FairCoin would become a viable medium of exchange. At that point, as essentially the central bank of this currency, FairCoop would be in a position to mobilize significant resources to pursue its goals in the political economy.

There are, of course, numerous obstacles to overcome for blockchain to establish alternative valuations in an economic system dominated by capitalism. The open value network approach to organizing production, for instance, could be co-opted by less commons-oriented organizations. Some degree of centralization could be re-inserted, payment arrangements tweaked, while workers’ social reproduction, such as health care, could remain externalized and unvalued.

It is also possible to imagine the values-capturing efforts of meticulously documented supply chains being increasingly geared for profit. Fishcoin and Baacode, for example, were devised by for-profit companies, even if they see themselves as having a broader mission. While incorporating non-capitalist values into capitalist production systems is not necessarily bad, there is nonetheless the constant danger that profit motives will eventually dominate. The fact that the innovative Baacode was abandoned after Icebreaker was bought out by the US retail conglomerate VF Corporation starkly illustrates this concern.

To face these headwinds, any commons-oriented movement committed to alternative valuation systems must find ways to protect the commons while simultaneously trying to expand them. Endeavors like Sensorica will need to soldier on, while benefit-based corporations and cooperatives will have to hold firm against capital’s continuous drive to co-opt them.

Simply adopting a defensive approach will not suffice, which is precisely what motivates FairCoin’s efforts to steadily reclaim economic space from capital. Here, too, there are significant challenges. A fundamental concern is that managing altcoins as a free-floating cryptocurrency (meaning they can be traded at market value) runs the risk of being purchased and traded with speculative, profit-seeking intent. The relation between the altcoin and what it is meant to denominate can thus become corrupted as external, speculative capital flows in and out of the cryptocurrency to profit from price swings, thus endangering the altcoin’s fundamental purpose.

While this is a challenge for any altcoin, including Fishcoin, it is even more so for a currency striving to become a viable means of exchange. The array of goods and services that underpin its value provide significant external motivation to manipulate the currency in order to access this value. There is still significant disagreement about the gravity of this problem and how best to counter it.

Some in the FairCoin organization, for instance, have called for measures that would insulate and limit the attractiveness of the currency to capitalists. For example, a demurage function could be imposed, meaning that the purchasing power of the currency decays with time, thereby incentivizing its active use and stymying speculation or hoarding. This approach has been adopted by the Circles cryptocurrency, which, similar to FairCoin, is pursuing the widespread adoption of Circles tokens as a way to facilitate a guaranteed income.

Most advocates in the FairCoin project, however, argue that their currency is not significantly endangered by open market trade, pointing out that only 10 percent of FairCoins are circulating outside of FairCoin-sanctioned markets. Furthermore, it is argued that allowing the market to determine the currency’s value, even if that value is low, is necessary to maintain FairCoin’s ability to access state-issued tender, which, after all, still denominates almost all of the world’s goods and services.

This tension between seeking autonomy from capitalist markets and being able to engage them will undoubtedly continue to be a critical balancing act as the potential of altcoins is just starting to be explored.

David Graeber, the late anthropologist and activist who long wrestled with the question of value and money in human societies put it this way, “The ultimate value … is the freedom to create and determine value itself … The degree that such capacities can or cannot be, should or shouldn’t be, measured, quantified, ranked, compared, etc., is perhaps the greatest intellectual and ultimately political challenge we face.”

While efforts like Sensorica, Fishcoin and FairCoin face numerous obstacles and still have a long way to go, they offer promising examples of tackling the root of capitalism, namely the oppressive hold on value by market-based pricing. They offer different, intentional quantifications, not just of value, but of values. They point to possibilities of how a post-capitalist future could be arranged.

Such a future is by no means a given.

The impact of these technologies will depend on how they are designed, employed and within which broader contexts they will function. For instance, if Sensorica-type organizations begin to flourish, how will the autonomous workers, even if they are co-owners and co-beneficiaries, gain access to health care and retirement savings? Will distributed autonomous organizations be created to bring about effective and fair access to such needs? Will the state be asked to provide support, or will we descend into an individualist, libertarian nightmare economy?

How these questions are answered will depend on the continuous socio-political processes that determine what value and values are and how to pursue them. Thus, before becoming infatuated with the revolutionary potential of any given technology, counter-capitalist movements need to build awareness of, and find answers to, the essential question of value(s). Only then will it be possible to turn to emerging technologies like blockchain, which are making the operationalization of values and the incentivization within values-based systems increasingly manageable.

We will certainly all remember 2020 for the way it turned our lives upside down, but what will its long-term repercussions be on our political, economic and social systems? The virus may have been invisible to the human eye, but this spiky protein particle exposed like never before the fractures and flaws of our manmade systems, accelerating certain trends, and demonstrating the need for transformative change to protect our health and the health of this planet. Between April and July 2020, Transnational Institute hosted a unique set of 12 global conversations to analyse the fallout from COVID-19 and to articulate the changes we need for a better world. The webinars took place in collaboration with allied organisations and partners around the globe, including AIDC and Focus on the Global South. This critical report pulls out the main analysis from those conversations, with a focus on the proposals and solutions put forward by activists and experts worldwide. We hope this report helps citizens and social movements analyse the crisis, inspires transnational solidarity and works towards the emergence of a more just world.

1. Internationalism – Social movements limit themselves by working within national boundaries.

For too long, activists have operated in silos – failing to provide platforms for each other’s struggles, build cross-national infrastructure and reallocate resources towards those most in need. The global nature of the crisis presents an opportunity to unite and fight – we must better understand the transformative power of solidarity, reach over divides, and reduce the disparities between richer and poorer nations.

2. Healthcare – Privatised healthcare systems cannot cope with pandemics like COVID-19.

Creeping privatisation of public health infrastructure and big pharma withholding access to medicines have impacted upon those most in need of life-saving healthcare. We must prioritise resourcing universal public health services across the globe that will best serve both patients and frontline health workers.

3. Neoliberalism – States have not learned lessons from the last great financial crash in 2008.

Government proposals to stimulate the economy after a global shutdown fail to consider existing social inequalities, which are likely to exacerbate in the aftermath of the pandemic. Rather than bail out CEOs and speculators, we should strongly invest in communities and workplaces, while addressing underlying structures of injustice.

4. Migration – The ‘border-security complex’ is expanding and normalising massive breaches of human rights.

The crisis has seen the increased demonisation and harassment of migrants, with access to asylum closing, displaced people being detained, and borders extending further. Civil society can help dismantle barriers and better champion migrant rights and the freedom to move by placing those with experience of migration at the forefront of campaigns.

5. Authoritarianism – Emergency powers handed to state authorities tend to stick.

New measures have given police and security forces unprecedented capabilities under the guise of public safety, yet these often curtail fundamental civil liberties – particularly of those already marginalised – and embolden authoritarian groups. The public should push for emergency laws to be transparent and temporary and seek to defend spaces of resistance when governments and vigilantes overstep the mark.

6. Ecology – The likelihood of future pandemics and climate chaos is rising.

Extractive industries and human expansion into wildlife habitats play a critical role in spreading disease and speeding up climate change. An immediate transition from fossil fuel reliance to localised renewable energy production, and moving away from commercial agribusiness towards more agroecological farming methods will help avert large-scale food, water and electricity shortages, create jobs, and allow humanity a chance to live a sustainable future.

7. Feminism – The women’s movement offers a transformative politics to address contemporary crises.

Industries with predominantly female workforces like nursing, cleaning and food production are underpaid and at risk, domestic labour is devalued, and under lockdown restrictions women have been targeted by state authorities and abusive partners. The women’s movement is advancing feminist democratic ideas worldwide through building new inclusive structures of power, and centring care and participation as the basis of social organisation.

8. Incarceration – Unsafe, overcrowded prisons unveil a crisis in the worldwide criminal justice system.

Across the globe, prisons lack basic provisions and support for those incarcerated – many of whom have committed minor, non-violent offences and predominantly come from poorer backgrounds. Society should make urgent moves towards decarceration – looking at community–based alternatives to detention, championing rehabilitation over punishment, defunding prisons and supporting those with experience of the criminal justice system to have a say over its future.

9. Technology – Big tech’s growing power poses an unprecedented threat to democracy and privacy.

As more of our work and social life moves online, states are paying technology companies vast sums for public surveillance, digital businesses are booming and storing unprecedented amounts of our personal data, while developing countries are being over–run or excluded from participating in the modern economy. Citizens should work towards helping to close the digital divide between poorer nations and major economies, bring tech titans under democratic control, and protect our privacy by reclaiming our data.

10. Universalism – Our human rights are being further eroded.

Across the globe, access to even the most minimal services – from social security and healthcare, to food, water, electricity and shelter – is denied to many, and in each continent there are states which seek to persecute marginalised communities. Activists will need to ensure that during an emergency the fundamental rights of all citizens are not just protected but advanced, forming the basis of the society which emerges from this crisis.

‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’ Arundhati Roy

Unleashing fear and confusion among citizens and states across the world, COVID-19 demanded an internationalist response as it exposed social inequalities and the inadequacies of public health systems in developing and industrialised economies. The panel explored the global dimensions of the pandemic, discussed what resistance and solidarity can look like and the ways social movements may organise an internationalist response.

Analysis

According to Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, the pandemic was a ‘ticking time bomb’ which experts knew was coming. Humans have taken over half the surface of the planet and non-human species crowd the ever decreasing habitats left behind – frequently next to where we live and work in homes, towns, and farms. Industrial expansion at the expense of wildlife habitat is at the root of COVID-19’s spread, amplified in our cities and travelling throughout a global network created to rapidly trade commodities. Ebola originated in West Africa from a single event where a two year old child was playing near a tree in which bats were roosting – the child fell ill, infected family members, their healthcare workers and their family members and so on. This massive outbreak killed over ten thousand people.

There is a dynamic between disease and poverty that mirrors existing inequalities. Cures for malaria – ‘a disease of the poor’ – have been available for over a hundred years, yet hundreds of thousands of people every year still get sick and die from it. Shah understands that there is not ‘a lot of drug development for diseases that affect the poor’ – the best remedy for malaria is based on a 3000 year old Chinese medicine. Illness remains unaddressed even though there may be easy solutions – it is down to lack of political will.

Public health professor Dr Luis Ortiz Hernandez draws parallels between the United States and Cuba in their responses to the pandemic. The US health system based around private insurance is disorganised, struggles to contain the infection, and sees hospitals compete for ventilators. Meanwhile Cuba’s less resourced but universal health system organised around family physicians sees community workers identifying people with infections then isolating them, going as far as to send medical missions around the world because the country has internally controlled the epidemic.

Focus on the Global South’s Benny Kuruvilla describes the dual necessities of containing COVID-19’s spread while minimising the social and economic consequences on the vulnerable and marginalised. Before the crisis, India’s huge informal workforce had already experienced a precarious job market, cramped rental accommodation and no social security, following a long-standing agrarian crisis where tens of millions left rural areas to seek work in the cities. The economic fallout of Coronavirus saw migratory workers undertake a mass exodus from large business centres back to rural villages where jobs are scarce.

Mazibuko Jara of the South African Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education says that the crisis has shown his country’s elites to be ‘out of their depth’. South Africa is the most industrialised nation in African continent, yet millions of poor and working people are left with no food, water, or adequate medical facilities. Resources to fight the pandemic are out of the public’s hands, with the government introducing inadequate social and economic measures, leaving the private sector to dominate the emergency health response.

Umyra Ahmad of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) in Malaysia states that the pandemic cannot be isolated from systemic faultlines – authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and neoliberalism are all entrenching themselves during this period of flux. Xenophobia is heightened as specific communities – Muslim and Chinese especially – are seen to be culpable for spreading the virus. Racial profiling has led to closing off borders, while mass surveillance and the misuse of personal data are being justified as the unfortunate by-products of ensuring public safety. The push for exceptional laws impacts most upon already vulnerable communities – law enforcement agencies are gifted executive powers, while misinformation and propaganda may be deployed as a tactic of social control. Global governance is not able to react to a situation like this, with bodies like the International Monetary Fund responding to the economic fallout with a ‘neoliberal’ approach, doing little for the most marginalised.

Solutions

Despite the devastation the virus has wrought across the globe, the panel believes that these politically uncertain times provide opportunities at an international level.

Sonia Shah discussed the unique way that everybody is focused on a single pathogen – even the world’s wealthy elites are getting sick, losing money and work. Telling a compelling story of the virus to the widest possible audience may offer the chance to address the root causes of its spread, insisting that all interventions consider the fundamental rights of humankind. At a time when people are ‘getting a crash course in epidemiology and public health’, science should be brought into the political sphere, and civil society can look to empower the public with scientific literacy.

Dr Luis Ortiz Hernandez feels this novel situation gives people time to consider not only what is best for their immediate families but also how society as a whole can take care of every citizen. Rather than simply disseminating data and guidelines around the virus and its spread, the World Health Organisation should spearhead a more active and coordinated response.

Benny Kuruvilla believes it is time for free trade treaties to be altered, and countries to instigate a more ‘activist industrial policy’. Medicines can be better developed domestically or at regional levels rather than extending a dependence on foreign imports – India, the second largest nation on earth relies on China, the biggest, for 70 per cent of its drugs. States should further be able to requisition private hospitals for public health reasons without the threat of litigation from lawyers acting on behalf of multinational healthcare conglomerates.

Mazibuko Jara thinks we can embed the notion of healthcare as a right and as a public good. There is hope in the practices of community-based health groups who provide ways of ‘socialising’ healthcare beyond existing public health systems. Alternative systems of public financing can be explored outside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, while mutual aid networks and peasant mobilisations across the world can offer support to citizens if states fail in their duty of care.

Umyra Ahmad sees a heightened awareness in recent times of the international arena, giving social movements the space to break out from their silos and connect their struggles. In framing their demands, an alternative and transformative system can be imagined which, in the spirit of co-creation, highlights, amplifies and spreads new narratives from communities working on the ground.

Further resources: ‘Coronavirus: the need for a progressive internationalist response’, Transnational Institute

‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships’. W.E.B. Du Bois

The worldwide economic fallout from COVID-19 looks set to have greater impact than the virus itself, especially in the Global South. The panel discussed how social movements can advance cogent economic responses where they failed following the 2008 crash, and address the underlying structures of injustice.

Analysis

According to Economics Professor Jayati Ghosh we have reached an unprecedented moment. The economic impact of the pandemic will be devastating – worse than the 20th century’s two World Wars and the great crashes of 1929 and 2008. Simultaneously shutting down large parts of the global economy has significantly reduced incomes and supply, leading to a shortage of services and necessities, and exports collapsing in the travel, transport, and tourism industries. A cessation of economic activity has seen bond markets collapse in many emerging countries, currency depreciation, volatile borrowing, and capital flight. Inequalities have increased – both between and within countries – and developing countries are the worst hit.

The structures of power may not be ‘dramatically affected’, but as with all capitalist crises, it will impact upon workers and women the most. The outcomes of this crisis cannot be anticipated, though war is a possibility. Global institutions show little vision in bringing the international community together and the chances of cooperation are often undermined by ‘horrible’ leaderships in many countries, which fail to listen to or negotiate with civil society.

Walden Bello, TNI Associate and author of Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash, believes we have entered the second big crisis in globalisation in just over a decade – many countries barely emerged out of the 2008 crash, and do not seem to have learnt its lessons. During the last downturn, governments of major economies focused their resources on protecting big financial oligopolies rather than saving jobs and homeowners – this time around, the most severe crisis in the capitalist system’s history, their focus could go the same way. States are usually ‘instruments of the elite, the ruling class’ and we have seen authoritarian measures deployed from India to the Philippines designed not only to deal with the public emergency, but also to strengthen executive control.

Quinn Slobodian, Author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, thinks that the virus can be viewed in three distinct ways: as an X-ray, exposing the existing structures of our societies and economies; as a dress rehearsal, for when we will have to respond to upcoming collective recessions; and as a dynamo, exacerbating and exaggerating existing political tendencies. The authoritarian right is finally ‘learning about money’, with both the League in Italy and National Front in France favouring anti-austerity measures to deal with the crisis. In an ‘era of fantasy and fabulism’, progressives will find themselves needing to argue with the far right not only in economic terms, but also debunking their conspiracies, such as ideas that coronavirus was created in a Chinese laboratory or caused by 5G technology.

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko of the South African thinktank Trade Collective understands that neoliberalism’s fixation on ‘competitiveness’ has led to the ‘unnecessary’ catastrophe we find ourselves in. We are ‘not here by chance’ – instead the current crisis is part of an epochal moment dating back to the 1970s which launched an era of financialisation. The virus will be no great equaliser: across Africa currencies have been overvalued – from the South African rand to the Kenyan shilling – and are now depreciating compared to the US dollar.

Solutions

Though state authorities and large companies would like to see a rapid return to ‘business as usual’, the panel believes that social movements have the ability to change the narrative, putting forward progressive solutions to the current crisis.

Jayati Ghosh notes the need to make immediate demands that are ‘socialist, feminist and ecologically conscious’. These include pressuring the IMF to create global liquidity and a debt moratorium, encouraging developing countries to instigate capital controls and better localise employment, production and consumption, and ensure that public goods like health and care work are recognised and protected. Progressive forces are weak, but may be able to revive by ‘capturing people’s imagination’ and creating enough public support that governments might cede to their demands.

Walden Bello believes that crisis and conflict on the streets – with several groups defying lockdowns ‘imposed from above’ – present both problems and opportunities. Responses need to be progressive, not authoritarian, and our economic life must be radically reorganised to offer a different kind of politics and create a truly popular democracy.

Quinn Slobodian outlines ways to ensure that public responses to financial instability are better than those proposed after 2008. When people come back to work, ‘green infrastructure’ should be in place, with workplaces pushing a zero carbon model. Worker representation on boards can form part of any bailout, in addition to an immediate debt moratorium as Argentina has argued for, and a prohibition on bonuses. Similarly, at national level, economic recovery plans must be strictly tied to socially-just ecological transition. It is possible to ‘retool’ international institutions like the IMF and WHO given the vacuum of US involvement, as their mandates change over time. A return to localism can be promoted not only around issues of food security but also pandemic preparedness.. These initiatives have the benefit of encouraging solidarity, with people checking in on each other as part of wider local care networks. There is ‘inventiveness in resilience’, which can spark new forms of political action.

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko sights an opportunity to move away from neoliberalism, with countries in the Global South having witnessed that sovereign wealth funds ‘don’t solve everything’ and debt is bad (‘bad bad bad – morning. noon and night’). Developing countries are used to suffering, and the global nature of the pandemic may aid them when reframing their demands from larger economies. The role that state banks may play in a future economy should be considered, alongside the potential for wealth taxes and the introduction of a basic income. Gross Domestic Product as a measure of achievement is ‘bunk’, of little use, and could be replaced with the quality and comprehensiveness of a nation’s healthcare services to define its success.

Further resources: The Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Developing Countries, Inter Press Service

‘The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.’ Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

Global food systems and industrialised agriculture have been put in the spotlight due to their critical role in the spread of the pandemic. The panel discussed working towards minimising the power of international agribusiness, fighting for food sovereignty, securing better rights for small farmers, and making sure fewer people go hungry.

Analysis

‘Agriculture had a role to play in this crisis’, according to Rob Wallace, the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu. The transmission of COVID-19 follows the pattern of deadly viruses such as SARS, Ebola and Zika moving from non-human species into human populations, as shifts in land use, migration into recently urbanised areas, and the expansion of factory farms make new influenzas more likely.

Disease and deficits are interacting – for many impoverished people access to food is a more pressing concern than the virus itself, while in countries like Brazil and the US, migrant farm workers’ wages are lowered as ‘pandemic relief for agricultural companies’.

Moayyad Bsharat of the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) argues that policies around privatisation have made healthcare unaffordable for many, meaning that small scale farmers and their families often lack the financial capacity to access healthcare. There is an urgent need for food producers to get back to their land and cultivate gardens to harvest healthy produce rather than rely on state handouts or the commercial and chemical processes of agribusiness.

Arie Kurniawaty of feminist organisation Solidaritas Perempuan (SP) in Indonesia feels that though her country is rich in agriculture and fisheries, government policies are ‘biased towards the middle class’. Indonesian authorities are more concerned with the needs of the military than allocating resources towards the public good. The current crisis falls hardest on women, who make up most of those working in the country’s traditional food trades. Women are finding it difficult to buy and sell produce at markets, which lacking the state support to implement health and safety protocols, are labelled unhygienic and forced to close.

Sai Sam Kham of Myanmar’s Metta Foundation argues that conflict, land grabs, dispossession and migration are all interlinked, with the country’s rural population struggling as the government fails in its attempts to provide citizens food. A backdrop of xenophobia against migrant workers returning from neighbouring countries and state control of the Internet in conflict-ridden areas has jeopardised many people’s access to the essential information needed to survive the emergency.

Paula Gioia, who works as a peasant farmer in Germany, believes that industrialised agriculture in recent decades has strengthened corporations, labour exploitation, and disease. Across Europe, the income of small food producers is being threatened by the closure of public markets, canteens and restaurants, with production concentrated on supplying the larger supermarkets. In Spain, France and Italy, a fallow period for tourism has seen many local food producers lose their biggest source of annual income, while seasonal agricultural workers find themselves urged to accept dangerous working environments and longer working hours. European farmers, with an average age of 65, are more vulnerable to the virus than much of the continent’s workforce and due to restrictions on movement face extra difficulties accessing their fields and delivering produce.

Solutions

The panel discussed how the public can help avert a food crisis and prevent an already exploited agricultural workforce falling victim to both the disease and the state response to it.

Rob Wallace argues for a profound shift in our relationship with the planet. Learning from indigenous groups, people can fight to reclaim rural and forest landscapes and waters, restart natural processes, and reintroduce crop diversity. The ‘story of food’ should be re-established – for it not to be seen as dependent on an industrial economy but a natural economy, using sun, soil and the life cycles of animals to feed and nourish the population.

Moayyad Bsharat’s Union of Agricultural Work Committees is distributing hundreds of thousands of seedlings to assist Palestinian farmers returning to the land, in addition to providing hygiene kits to their families. He calls for those providing local support to globalise the struggle against capitalism.

Arie Kurniawaty sees an opportunity to show international solidarity and prove there is no need for people to rely on agribusiness for food and livelihoods. Since the crisis hit, there have been several local initiatives aimed at bringing together the needs of rural and urban people. Food barns have been built anticipating future scarcity while the distribution of government aid packages is monitored in a bid to root out corruption.

Sai Sam Kham says civil society and public opinion in Myanmar demands an immediate end to conflict. While welcoming China’s offer to provide medical support to the state, the superpower’s strategic economic and political interests in the region is cause for concern.

Paula Gioia sees hope in smaller European farms feeding their local populations with fresh, healthy food, often in open air peasants’ markets at a fair price, alongside the growth of consumer cooperatives and shopping groups. The right to food and nutrition is paramount, and people should fight to guarantee public access to fields and waters. Public policy should focus on providing Common Agricultural Policy payments to small-scale farmers, delivering a safe environment for land workers, supporting new entrants into agriculture, and ensuring generational renewal.

Further resources: Public policies for food sovereignty, Transnational Institute

“We know now that Government by organised money is just as dangerous as Government by organised mob.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

For decades, corporate power has entrenched itself in healthcare delivery – public health providers are increasingly privatised and big pharma has profited while withholding access to life-saving medicines for those who cannot afford them. The panel discussed what needs to change in the global governance of health.

Analysis

According to President of the Transnational Institute Susan George, the world is ‘not ready for this pandemic because we allowed our health systems to become neoliberalised’. Globally, an underpaid, underequipped public health workforce sits beside chains of profit-making hospitals and private clinics.

The pharmaceutical industry – whose ten biggest companies are worth $1.8 trillion – continually lobbies Washington and Brussels to further push a deregulatory agenda that seeks profit-making over saving people’s lives. That there are no reserves of supplies to tackle health epidemics is by design, not by accident.

Baba Aye, Health Officer at Public Services International, tells us that a 1978 international conference organised by the World Health Organisation and Unicef was a flashpoint in the struggle towards universal healthcare. The United Nations agencies proclaimed a wish that by the year 2000 there would be health provision for all – however, corporations were able to subsequently argue that they could play a leading role in addressing the lack of money invested in public healthcare systems. From private finance initiatives in Britain and across Africa to the introduction of user fees, public money has frequently been used to subsidise private interests rather than provide universal coverage.

South Africa’s Daily Maverick editor Mark Heywood looks to his country’s struggle with big pharma in getting access to HIV/Aids medicines. Pharmaceutical companies took the post-apartheid government to court in order to stifle its attempts to make medication more affordable, citing World Trade Organisation rules around intellectual property rights. Successful campaigning pressured the WTO to establish the Doha Declaration in 2001 which allowed states to circumvent patent rights for better access to essential medicines. While HIV/Aids medication has become more accessible for those in developing countries, pharmaceutical companies are still able to patent treatments for many preventable illnesses and thus restrict access for the poorest people. Considering the current crisis, Heywood believes the world ‘cannot afford to wait for a vaccine to be developed to start raising questions about access, affordability, patents’.

Lawyer Kajal Bhardwaj understands that intellectual property rights, enforced by international trade rules, are deeply entrenched in national and regional legal systems, making swift action against the pandemic difficult without first guaranteeing corporate compliance. Myriad private patents have been recorded in the treatment of COVID-19 – its diagnosis and prevention as well as medicines and vaccines. Big pharma can block the manufacturing of affordable treatments by withholding access to patented products that may be repurposed – during the peak of the outbreak in Italy, those producing parts for ventilators through 3D printing were threatened with legal action by companies that owned the patents.

David Legge of the People’s Health Movement argues that the failure of research following prior pandemics and the World Health Organisation’s lack of skepticism regarding transmissibility contributed to delays in travel restrictions resulting in the rapid spread of COVID-19. The WHO is dependent on funding from rich countries, the World Bank and big philanthropic donors.. The American government has pressured the secretariat over recent decades to advance the interests of large private companies, using the threat of defunding to assert its control and push trade liberalisation. Proposals for publicly funding the research and development of pharmaceuticals to allow lower costs are widely supported by the member-led World Health Assembly but have not been enacted by the WHO.

Solutions

The pandemic has shown the necessity of working towards universal public health systems and increasing access to medicines so that everyone in need can afford them.

Susan George believes that ‘it is possible to have everyone cared for’ – if corporations are taxed properly, our social security systems are improved and the health lobby’s attempts at influencing legislation are scrutinised and fought.

Baba Aye wants populations to loudly proclaim that ‘our health is not for sale’. A new global consensus has developed that healthcare is a right – an idea already present in most countries’ constitutions. Swift action by both governments and social movements has already led to a number of private hospitals requisitioned to deal with the pandemic, and factories converted to manufacture personal protective equipment and medical supplies to make up for a shortfall.

Mark Heywood understands that ‘sometimes it takes a crisis to make people work together’. It is through public investment in research that medical breakthroughs are achieved, and people should demand universal access not only to a coronavirus vaccine but to the knowledge and understanding behind it. Activists should remember that big pharma is not invincible – organised people are much more powerful. Movements in Africa and India in the past have forced down prices of medicines, saving millions of lives.

Kajal Bhardwaj thinks that the threat of government action encourages good behaviour from pharmaceutical companies. There have been positive developments in Germany, Canada, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador where authorities have implemented measures to issue compulsory licenses. There is also capacity in many countries to ramp up production of generic medicine at extremely affordable prices.

David Legge hopes that with enough public pressure, it is possible to successfully campaign for intellectual property reforms. Efforts should be focused on lobbying authorities to ensure – in the face of hostility from big pharma – compulsory licensing and allow generic drugs to be produced without the consent of the patent owner.

Further resources: People’s Health Movement, Coronavirus – statements and responses

“We are connected to one another, in the deepest sense, through our common pain. When we lose that connection we lose our humanity.” A Sivanandan

During political crises, states push for emergency powers. Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11^th 2001, for example, a wave of immediate measures was introduced to counter a terrorist threat, yet much of this architecture remains in place to the present day. The panel reflected on a wide range of issues from authoritarianism and surveillance to the rise in anti-migrant sentiment and Islamophobia, and agreed that the rights of citizens are being curtailed across the globe and must be resisted.

Analysis

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism Fionnuala Ni Aolain, parallel to the medical pandemic, ‘we are seeing an epidemic of emergencies’. Under international law, emergency measures can be introduced to protect public safety, health, and national security, yet there is a ‘pattern of non-notification’ where states choose to use these powers but fail to inform official bodies or their own citizens. During emergencies, the political culture of nations often changes – oversight mechanisms are removed in favour of increased powers for the executive, police and security forces.

Alongside parliamentary opposition, civil society can find it difficult to know what states are doing as emergency legislation refrains from naming itself, with measures often tucked into health and sanitation bills. Citizens in a state of fear may be willing to sacrifice their liberty, believing that during an emergency human rights are not a priority, yet temporary powers have the tendency to stick around.

Author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror Arun Kundnani points to 9/11 as a useful reference point for those monitoring authorities’ emergency measures. The attacks on the World Trade Centre saw a temporary emergency transform into a permanent state of affairs. Almost 20 years later, acts of terrorism still take place across the world, the detention camp at Guantanemo Bay remains open, and the wave of anti-Muslim racism enveloping Western nations has further ‘globalised’ into countries such as India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. Authorities now look to empty states of their unruly populations while the influence of big business sees our lives determined by market-based digital algorithms. New licenses given to police forces to implement quarantines and lockdowns has only intensified existing forms of violence. The COVID-19 crisis has given rise to a clampdown on migrants – already existing anti-migrant sentiment has intensified, while those in immigration detention centres experience high infection rates with little possibility of isolation. Various EU countries continue to turn away refugees in the Mediterranean, in Qatar migrant workers offered coronavirus testing were rounded up then deported, and from Hungary to the US, nativist leaders have weaponised the pandemic, unleashing new forms of racism.

Author of Militarisation and Women in South Asia, Anuradha Chenoy says that the current crisis ‘can be marked as an authoritarian moment in world history across countries’ where regimes look to expand control over citizens and centralise power even within democratic systems. When the virus began to spread, almost all states – unprepared and panicked – similarly reacted, taking emergency measures without declaring emergencies. The military were put on the streets in Israel, Philippines, Yemen, and Iraq, and self-appointed vigilantes linked to right wing populist governments took on the role of monitoring particular marginal communities. The stigmatisation of outsiders and dissenters has seen police use chemical disinfectant on migrant labourers and investigative journalists picked up and incarcerated. Global bodies such as the World Health Organisation are being undermined by the leadership of member states – the US has sought to remove itself fromWHO’s jurisdiction – while supranational organisations like the EU and ASEAN seem more concerned about closing borders than international solidarity.

María Paz Canales of the digital rights campaign Derechos Digitales believes there has been a ‘repurposing of many surveillance technologies in the context of the pandemic’. Private firms are offering their services to the state under the auspices of being helpful in a moment of crisis, yet are hoping to whitewash technologies through their new use. Many were ineffective when deployed for their original purposes and are inefficient in tackling the spread of the virus as the type of data recorded is not precise enough. Facial recognition technologies – used in the past in the name of public safety and national security – in particular have very limited use. The danger is that ‘we are not surveilling the virus, we are surveilling people’, impacting upon the rights of vulnerable groups and stigmatising the sick.

Solutions

The panel talked about how to protect fundamental rights in the shadow of creeping authoritarianism, outlining ways of mobilising ourselves during lockdown, and imagining lives less dependent on technologies.

Fionnuala Ni Aolain considers the global effect of the pandemic – every single person’s rights are being impinged upon in certain ways and some more than others. The language of rights for all can be reclaimed, and the idea of health as a basic human necessity entrenched – after all, governments ‘shut down the world’ on the basis of the protection of the right to health. Though the pandemic may have empowered authoritarians, weakened democracies and multilateral systems, producing a ‘narrower and tightly squeezed civil society space’, Ni Aolain argues that  ‘crisis is innovation’ providing an extraordinary opportunity to emerge with a healthier democracy.

Arun Kundnani warns people to be wary of corporations trying to exploit the current situation to create their own version of a new order. The increasing digitalisation of our social lives must be fought as the public becomes dependent on big tech to provide and mediate these relationships – over lockdown, the use of video chat has become the norm in accessing healthcare and higher education, and tech companies want to keep this in place as populations move out of an emergency situation. Activists ‘cannot give up the streets’, and should fight to reclaim public spaces and defend a ‘sense of human connection’. It may well be safer to attend protests than turn up to workplaces. Quoting journalist Susie Day, Kundnani predicts ‘The revolution will not be quarantined’.

Anuradha Chenoy notes that there has been no end to defence spending – citizens should be asking ‘where is the defence against this virus?’, and demand a transfer of military expenditure towards health expenditure. Though the compact between civil society and the state has been breaking down over recent years, the public has been able to show its strength during the crisis, delivering mutual aid and food parcels to communities in need. Instead of globalisation, Chenoy argues, there should be international solidarity – its symbols including alternative media outlets have been emerging in the face of a toxic press.

María Paz Canales says people would be wise to reject the ‘technosolutionism’ of not only authoritarian but, increasingly, democratic governments. Citizens need to be more critical about which type of data is useful for their purposes, and seek to develop alternative technology that opposes ‘capitalist-surveillance logic’. Some data can prove helpful in fighting the pandemic, related to a country’s testing capacity, resource allocation, and directing assistance to the most vulnerable, yet there is no need to capture the identity of individuals, putting certain people at risk of discrimination in terms of immigration and employment status.

Further resources: From Fanon to Ventilators; Fighting for our right to breathe, Arun Kundnani, ROAR

“We have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.” Bertrand Russell

A more serious emergency than COVID-19 is on the horizon – the climate emergency. Decisions  forced by the pandemic to shut down extractive global modes of production saw not only a reduction in carbon emissions and air pollution, but demonstrated states’ potential to take bold decisions to protect their citizens. The panel outlined the challenges and opportunities of working towards a just transition to a sustainable world.

Analysis

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s Richard Kozul-Wright, comparisons can be drawn between the Green New Deal and the original New Deal. Both wish to contest economic power, regulate Wall Street, and invest in public services and infrastructure. Before Coronavirus hit, economic prospects globally were deteriorating following a period of hyperglobalisation, with Bretton Woods institutions serving as handmaidens of speculative, predatory forms of capital.

The response to the 2008 crash can be viewed as a ‘dry run’ for current and future crises  – instead of going back to business as usual, COVID-19 has forced governments to tear up the neoliberal rulebook. ‘Tory chancellors suddenly discover their inner Keynesian selves’, with emergent ‘magic money forests’ concocting trillions of dollars to deal with consequences of the pandemic.

Chair of Friends of the Earth International Karin Nansen believes that humanity is at an impasse – related to the imposition of neoliberal logic which fails to work for people and the environment, endangers lives, and threatens public wellbeing. Companies are gaining more and more power and there is a widespread expansion of extractive activities, especially in the energy sector. Capitalism provides false solutions – carbon offsetting, for example, that is not a ‘real’ solution to addressing climate change. Those who generated the environmental breakdown comprise a small portion of the population in a few countries – those who are most affected barely contributed to it.

Sandra van Niekerk of the One Million Climate Jobs campaign in South Africa feels that the term ‘Green New Deal’ is contested having been hijacked by big capital, offering the veneer of environmental friendliness. Instead of encouraging a ‘reformed, green capitalism’, there is an urgent need to deal with the dual crises of unemployment and climate change. In South Africa – ‘one of the most unequal countries in the world’ – it is difficult to tackle climate change when you have no house or electricity, while renewable energy initiatives are hampered by trade regulations, limiting their ability to grow.

Solutions

The panel put forward a programme of action to encourage the just transition towards a green future that centres environmental justice and the needs of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Richard Kozul-Wright believes the Green New Deal provides a ‘unifying narrative’ and calls for any new proposals, like the first New Deal, to be based around ‘an avowedly political project’ and embrace popular voices. Rejecting the concept of ‘degrowth’ as unhelpful framing particularly for the Global South, he advocates reforming the international financial systems in order to ‘reconnect a healthy people and planet with a healthy economy’. Bailout packages should reject austerity, introducing measures that are wage-led and job rich. This involves a massive investment push into climate mitigation and adaptation, reliant on progressive taxation, financial regulation, and strategic planning in industrial policy, with a far greater role considered for public banking. Though many reforms are rooted within nation states, work can be undertaken internationally with major economies helping to pull up the Global South.

Karin Nansen argues that the radical transformation of society demands public participation and democracy. Organising around a ‘common agenda’, the world may be able to transition away from fuel dependent economies, change energy systems and ownership, and move towards community-controlled energy production. In addition, there needs to be a huge transfer of resources from North to South to pay for climate debt and historic economic crises generated by former colonial powers. Nansen considers the example of Latin America, where peasant and indigenous movements have often taken a stand alongside women’s groups and trade unions as a critical model for the movements that need to be built to deliver this systemic change..

Sandra van Niekerk understands the need for a ‘radical restructuring of the economy’ and the redistribution of resources in a ‘hugely unequal world’. The public sector can employ people in new climate jobs; transport, local government, schools, hospitals, and housing could be made more energy efficient; and workers could be supported to transition away from the fossil fuel industry. Considering South Africa, where many people lack electricity, van Niekerk suggests not talking in terms of cutting back on the amount of energy generated – if there is a shortfall, many people may never have access to electricity, and continue to live in poverty-riven environments.

Further resources: Just Transition: How environmental justice organisations and trade unions are coming together for social and environmental transformation (TNI, 2020)

“The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue.” Tony Judt

There has been a groundswell of vocal support for public services during the current health emergency. The panel discussed the broad impacts of privatisation on countries’ wellbeing and people’s dependence on poorly paid frontline workers delivering essential services.

Analysis

According to former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston, the steady privatisation of essential public services demonstrates that governments have been ‘washing their hands of human rights obligations’ by passing over relevant sectors to private interests. Across the world, access to even minimum services – from water, electricity, and transport to education, criminal justice, and welfare – is denied to many. If a country is unable to provide public services like a nationwide health system to its citizens, it is unable to deal with the pandemic, effectively throwing the bottom half of the population ‘under the bus’. The dramatic ideological shift from public to private can be traced back to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and subsequent Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s administrations.

Despite very little supportive evidence, the assumption that private is always best– cheaper, more efficient, less corrupt, and ultimately better for societies – has subsequently become the dominant mentality of most governments and international organisations. In the push towards digitisation of the public sector, further steps may be taken in the privatisation of essential services – in recent years tech companies have been offering to assist the UK’s National Health Service deliver its commitments.

General Secretary of the global union federation Public Services International (PSI) Rosa Pavanelli believes that the pandemic highlights the failure of the neoliberal system, unearthing a deeply unequal global division of labour. National health services which have been the most privatised, such as the US, also have the most unequal societies, while many major economies outsource to developing countries because it is cheaper to employ their workers. Multinational corporations are able to avoid tax contributions, while countries in the Global South struggle to pay their debts to former colonisers.

Sulakshana Nandi of the People’s Health Movement Global in India believes that we have witnessed decades of privatisation under the guise of improving efficiency. The Indian government actively promotes vested interests, handing over district hospitals to the private sector, while reducing the national health budget, and rolling out a costly insurance scheme. Vulnerable groups entitled to coverage under the scheme are often not able to utilise it and rural areas remain under-resourced as the private sector routinely refuses to operate in remote regions, meaning they are ‘completely missing in action’ in the testing, surveillance, and treatment of COVID-19.

Aderonke Ige of the Our Water, Our Rights Campaign in Lagos, Nigeria, states that ‘you cannot leave the public good in private hands’, arguing that the ‘problem isn’t lack of resources, it is lack of political will’. The pandemic exposes the gap in the system, where governance is accompanied by the capitalist philosophy of commodifying every public good, including water. Nigeria has significant economic income, but still cannot prioritise universal access to water – women and young girls carry the greatest burdens, but are rarely consulted in public decision-making.

Solutions

The panel outlined ways to make the public sector more democratic and participatory, and how citizens can move away from subsidising large corporations in the delivery of essential services.

Philip Alston declares there are very few examples of private companies acting in the broader public interest, so ‘we shouldn’t expect it and it’s not going to happen’. Corporate actors will see no opportunity to profit from helping poor people, and services will always be priced above their capacity to pay and directed to those better off. Civil society can look at a different set of principles and institutions for delivering services. On an international level, people should reevaluate whether the sustainable development goals can be achieved, and more broadly determine what the United Nations stands for.

Rosa Pavanelli suggests the World Health Organisation’s commitment to researching and producing a COVID-19 vaccine which will be free to all is ‘invaluable’ for the ‘common good of humanity’. However, governments must be pressured to transform the direction of their economies. They must introduce an immediate wealth tax on digital corporations like Amazon and Google, that are profiting during this crisis. People can better interrogate how the closure of borders will affect food distribution and work towards more sustainable farming and energy production.

Sulakshana Nandi notes that in India areas with good food security programmes have often effectively dealt with the crisis, and more progressives states such as Kerala in the south have better health outcomes. The most vulnerable should be offered opportunities to have a say in decision-making and public sector workers need to be adequately resourced.

Aderonke Ige says that improved investment in the public sector amounts to ‘collective development’. The Our Water, Our Rights Campaign is a ‘child of necessity’, prioritising the rights and welfare of everyday users of water. The coalition, born in 2014, brings together civil society, the labour movement, youth and grassroots organisations. Women play an active role and have achieved a number of victories protecting Lagos’s water – authorities have tried to privatise access but are yet to succeed.

Further resources: The Future is Public, Transnational Institute (2020)

‘The function of freedom is to free somebody else.’ Toni Morrison

Patriarchal states have shown themselves incapable of facing global problems. The panel reflected on the condition of women across the globe, how to dismantle gendered labour hierarchies, and how to construct stronger, feminist participatory democracies.

Analysis

According to Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author of the manifesto Feminism for the 99%, the ‘work of women and gender non-conformist people makes all other work possible’. Though capitalism prioritises profit-making over life, it also depends on the processes and institutions of life-making, yet is reluctant to spend any money on this. Thus care work is devalued, underpaid or unpaid and there is a continual push to underfund or privatise schools, hospitals and public transport.

Professions that embody the spirit of care work – teaching, cleaning, nursing, homecare, food production – are undertaken in the most part by women, and it is they who are hardest hit by the current crisis: from those forced to work in unsafe conditions and risk being laid off, to others compelled to remain indoors with abusive partners as rates of domestic violence rise.

Awino Okech at the Centre for Gender Studies of the UK’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) believes that with governments failing to respond to public needs, democracy no longer works for the vast majority and our agency as citizens has been taken away. Renegotiating the social contract through electoral means has never looked less appealing to the public: authoritarian leaders and parties in the US, Europe and Latin America find themselves represented in national parliaments, while in Africa – from Sudan and Burkina Faso to Tunisia and Egypt – citizens may have ousted their leaders but have yet to secure the change they fought for. Ultra-nationalists, informed by their conservative and binary ideas around gender and sexuality, are targeting and disciplining female human rights defenders and the LGBT community, while feminist and queer politics is narrowly and opportunistically co-opted by certain governments in order to prevent wider, more important discussions about women’s and gay liberation.

Khara Jabola-Carolus, author of Hawaii’s Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19, outlines some ways in which women can work positively within official structures. Most US states have a commission on the status of women – a tool left by 1960s feminists to help advance the movement – and Hawaii has one of the longest standing ones. This has the potential to provide a link between feminist activists and government, facilitating community-based participation by diverse women spanning race, class, age and life experience. Having an understanding of the shared trauma of colonialism and land loss in Hawaii, the commission seeks to reorientate the economy away from destructive industries – for example tourism and militarism – and to scale up the social safety net.

Laura Roth, co-author of the report Feminise Politics Now!, argues that pandemic responses show a trend towards top-down centralisation. In times of crisis, fear can make people worry less about who is making decisions, but Roth believes that feminism and municipalism, with their focus on building power from the bottom up, may offer an alternative. They are ‘great allies’: both change the way ‘politics is done’ and can link up social movements with local government, a lifeline for many people in sustaining relationships, taking care of the vulnerable, and looking after the invisible. Politics is something that ‘everyone should be able to do’ and citizens platforms have shown they can win elections at a local level – in Spain, these took power across some of its largest cities in 2015 on the back of a nationwide anti-austerity movement.

Solutions

The panel discussed ways of creating transformative feminist realities, revaluing women’s role in public life, and alternative non-patriarchal modes of power.

Tithi Bhattacharya believes that humanity should work towards a world where ‘life and life-making’ become the basis of social organisation – states must now be pressured to prioritise life over profit. The pandemic has normalised the view that nurses and farmworkers, not stockbrokers and CEOs, are ‘essential workers’. Women’s unpaid labour in the home amounts to ten trillion dollars globally – capitalism for hundreds of years has undervalued the lives of women, migrants and other marginalised people, yet networks of support, solidarity and survival have survived..

Awino Okech understands that ‘we are not all in this together’. It is therefore imperative that effective allyship is sought across borders, moving resources from the Global North to the South. The autonomous organising of marginalised groups should be respected, and transnational solidarity can occur without sharing the same physical spaces – though civil society should refrain from relying on those with access to funds from determining the success of initiatives in poorer parts of the world.

Khara Jabola-Carolus understands the need to move from the language of inclusion and equality to liberation. Her group uses shareable documents to co-create agendas and provide training to hundreds of government workers – telling stories that instil empathy and helping people better understand the lives of women and non-binary people.

Laura Roth hopes feminists will look towards municipalism to find ways of building new forms of power. Little will be achieved simply by bringing more women into politics or focusing solely on local issues – there is a need to innovate around new forms of leadership, share responsibilities and ultimately treat people as ‘subjects’ not ‘objects’ of politics. Participatory democracy can shoulder a collective spirit – women have the ability to break historic privileges, move away from confrontational discourse and bring care into the political arena.

Further resources: Feminists, it’s time to decide where public resources go (May 2020), AWID

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Nelson Mandela

COVID-19 has exposed a crisis in penal systems across the globe – prisoners live in unsafe conditions, lack legal support, and punitive drug policies drive up the numbers. With unprecedented numbers of inmates released to prevent deadly outbreaks in jails and detention centres, the panel discussed the societal costs of mass incarceration, the potential for criminal justice reform across the globe, and alternatives to imprisonment.

Analysis

According to Olivia Rope of Penal Reform International, prison systems were at breaking point before the pandemic, with 11 million people incarcerated globally – the highest figure yet, with numbers still on the rise. People are in no way becoming ‘more criminal’ – crime rates across the world are either stable or going down. Yet over 100 countries still operate above their maximum occupancy rate as imprisonment is increasingly used for those committing non-violent offences.

Within a system where mortality levels are 50 per cent higher than in wider society, there is an overwhelming lack of healthcare provision – the prison population is virtually unable to follow World Health Organisation guidance around Coronavirus and tens of thousands of people have contracted the disease inside.

Isabel Pereira of Dejusticia states that in Latin America prison overcrowding is rife and there is an excessive use of pre-trial detention. Societal discrimination leads police authorities to target women and the LGBT community. There has been an increase in the use of incarceration as a deterrent for minor drugs offenses, overwhelmingly affecting people from low socio-economic backgrounds – in some cases drug possession is placed on a par with the length of sentencing for rape and genocide convictions.

Andrea James and Justine ‘Taz’ Moore of the National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls in the USA argue ‘prisons are not financially equipped to take care of us’, and during a health crisis become a ‘death-trap’. Incarcerated people live in cramped sleeping conditions, and lack toilet paper, hand sanitiser, soap, masks and adequate food supplies, often reliant on those outside to provide these essentials. Disproportionate levels of criminal justice funding are put towards building new jails and providing police equipment rather than rehabilitating people in their communities on release. Women are often threatened with eviction by taking in people with convictions, and former inmates find it difficult to get work, making recidivism more likely because there are no resources to support them.

Advocaid’s Sabrina Mahtani believes that African states have reacted to the COVID-19 crisis by taking a law enforcement rather than public health approach. Prisons in Africa are old and overcrowded, lacking running water and soap which makes it difficult to maintain good hygiene. Women’s needs are often ignored by the authorities and if outside after curfew they risk being detained. The prison system lacks facilities for women, some of whom are imprisoned with their young children – access to basic supplies is problematic and there is one doctor for every 2000 detainees.

Maidina Rahmawati of the Indonesian Institute of Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR) believes that state authorities were not prepared for this outbreak. Prison overcrowding has become ‘undeniable’ during COVID-19 in a country which sees few alternatives to detention. Indonesia has an ineffective bail system that lacks transparency and under-resourced parole, probation and integration programmes.

Solutions

The panel discussed the urgent necessity for civil society to make the case for decarceration and effective strategies towards long-term structural reform of the criminal justice system.

Olivia Rope understands the pressing need to reduce numbers in prison and explore non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment, especially for women. Swift coordinated action by the Irish government, for example, saw the female prison population reduced by over one third at the start of the pandemic. Civil society needs to gather evidence to urgently highlight the plight of incarcerated women, while arguing for prisons, as part of society, to be better integrated into public health systems where inmates can access medicines, care and support.

Isabel Pereira sees networks of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families active in protesting poor conditions in prison. Budgets should be reallocated away from building new prisons and minor drug offences must not lead to incarceration.

Andrea James and Justine ‘Taz’ Moore urge people to ‘stay in touch with those inside’ and support the growing demands not just for reforms but rather abolition of prisons – an end to incarceration. Those who have experienced incarceration may be able to provide solutions – not just around reimagining the prison system, but reimagining whole communities. In recent years, a clemency project to commute the sentences of women who are elderly, pregnant, survivors of domestic violence, or terminally ill, has achieved success, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, campaigns to defund police departments are gaining traction. Women of colour are the fastest growing demographic in American prisons, and ‘defunding racism involves ending the incarceration of women and girls.’ In addition to being ‘vigilant on the fiscal side’ – monitoring the levels of investment set aside for new jails and police equipment – James and Moore advocate for more ‘transformative’ forms of justice, where neighbourhoods can come together to deescalate a situation without resorting to police involvement.

Sabrina Mahtani has witnessed civil society groups across Africa push for decarceration and provide urgent supplies for those incarcerated during the current crisis – adapting their capabilities to offer legal advice and monitor police activity. In Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya, thousands of detainees have been released in a bid to reduce overcrowding. Exploring alternatives to prison for drug possession, there is a push towards decriminalisation of petty offences which affect the poorest in society – ‘poverty should not be a crime’, Mahtani proclaims.

Maidina Rahmawati believes that the Indonesian government is aware of the ‘undeniable’ problems with its penal system, and has taken steps to release vulnerable inmates. The promotion of ‘restorative justice’ can help further reduce prison overcrowding across the country.

Further resources: The law of the land: decolonising criminal justice (March 2020) Oliver Durose at Verso blog

“We must not fixate on what this new arsenal of digital technologies allows us to do without first inquiring what is worth doing.” Evgeny Morozov

The pandemic has accelerated the use and profits of large online platforms, giving them unprecedented power over how we conduct our everyday lives. The panel discussed who owns our data, how we can protect our right to privacy in the face of big tech, and the best ways to build a fair and equitable digital economy.

Analysis

According to founding editor of technology magazine Logic Ben Tarnoff, digitisation now is as important to capitalism as financialisation was in the 1970s. It is the new engine of capital accumulation and offers states innovative tools of social control to help manage and order rebellious populations, with the COVID-19 crisis only intensifying developments. Globally, unprecedented numbers of people are staying at home and there has been a sharp increase in internet usage, with traffic 25–30 per cent higher than before. Big data is driving the digitisation of everything as corporations make it easier for us to do more online, yet ‘everything we do online leaves a trace’.

‘As long as capitalism has existed’, Tarnoff argues, ‘data has helped it grow’ – from bosses watching employees work then rearranging them to be more efficient, surveillance generated information has been used to increase productivity. Digitisation makes data more abundant – it has become easier to create, store, transmit – and a small device can be attached to anything to stream real-time information: shipping containers, assembly lines, gas turbines, and the wrist of a worker in a factory or office.

Vahini Naidu of the South African Department of Trade, Industry and Competition has witnessed advanced economies pushing their own agendas within the World Trade Organisation, pursuing a deregulatory approach to digital trade. Big Tech companies believe there should not be any customs, duties, or fees on digital products transmitted electronically, and argue that consumers will decide how secure their electronic transactions should be. These proposals reinforce existing global imbalances, constraining the ability of developing countries to build their own digital capacities – the ‘digital divide will reinforce the social divides in the world’. Digital capacity is essential to build productive capacity, especially for countries in the Global South in pursuit of sustainable growth.

Anita Gurumurthy, Director of IT for Change in India, sees all global production and market exchange managed through insights from data. ‘Platforms’ dominate the business landscape today and their power is growing at breathtaking speed. Large companies work out which other companies to acquire and how to expand their dominions based on ‘data marriages’ – no different from how royal families once decided to fix the marriages of sons and daughters based on political and economic considerations. Thus, a company like Whole Foods can be acquired by Amazon to ‘marry’ its online commerce with a new and booming offline market for organic foods.

Chief Science Officer of the City of Amsterdam Caroline Nevejan argues that because of data we have moved from measuring individual human beings to measuring humankind – we now know ‘what many people can feel, think, and see’. Big Tech is invading our private lives, financialising aspects which were never previously concerned with money. As we lose our personal privacy, we are given little information about how our data is used by large corporations to extract profit.

Kenyan technology writer Nanjira Sambuli feels we need a greater degree of ‘contextualisation and humility’ when dealing with issues of data and privacy, especially in the Global South – ‘the diverse and marginalised majority of the globe’. These markets are ‘prized possessions’ in the data economy. While activists should continue to advocate for laws and regulations protecting data and privacy, they must also understand that this is not necessarily reflective of what much of society wants. Deleting Facebook or WhatsApp, for example – ‘the internet for so many people’ – may be a growing political demand in the North, but at present is impractical for substantial numbers of citizens in developing countries without alternatives in place.

Solutions

The panel explored pressuring governments to constrain the excesses of big tech, ways of reclaiming our personal data, and how countries – especially in the Global South – can achieve ‘digital sovereignty’.

Ben Tarnoff warns civil society that it cannot simply call for data to be ‘socialised’ as currently ‘capitalism doesn’t just own the data – it owns the infrastructure’. The increasing demand for invasive state and corporate surveillance should be confronted – during the pandemic, personal data has been gathered through contact tracing, monitoring location and body temperature, facial recognition, and wearable technology in the workplace.

Vahini Naidu believes in the need to develop policies that recognise the ‘sovereignty of national data’. The ‘localisation’ of data provides an opportunity for the Global South to tie up its domestic industries with the digital economy. While the European Union is ‘taking the lead’ in confronting
Big Tech companies, only 50 per cent of African countries have introduced legislation regarding privacy and data protection.

Anita Gurumurthy calls on people to interrogate who controls new supply chains and how to reclaim data for ‘the commons’. To build an equitable and fair digital economy, the huge discrepancy between the economic superpowers and the rest of the world must be addressed – 75 per cent of the cloud computing market is controlled by the US and China. Campaigners should find ways of freeing the personal information Big Tech companies hold hostage – which amounts to ‘the raw material’ that allows an invasion into private lives and ultimately leads to exploitation.

Caroline Nevejan asserts that it is ‘not normal to be filmed’ throughout daily life. Citizens need to learn and practice cryptography in order to protect their personal details. This should happen in conjunction with helping to bring the tech titans under democratic law – data about their operations is important for transparency and exposing any corruption that may be taking place, so civil society must demand that this information be put into the public domain.

Nanjira Sambuli suggests that because many people ‘can’t take to the streets during COVID-19’, activism is increasingly undertaken online – using the same large global platforms, like Facebook, that many activists wish to see deleted. International civil society must consider a ‘diversity of perspectives’ on digital rights and ensure to ‘give a spotlight to those working on the ground’.

Further resources: Evgeny Morozov: The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level (April 2020)  The Guardian

‘Governments are responding to this pandemic with nationalist gestures – with images of the border, of the wall.’ Achille Mbembe

The pandemic has seen the closure of borders in many countries and displaced people detained at alarming rates. The panel looked at how the ‘border-industrial complex’ impacts upon the most marginalised communities, and the ways populist politicians seek to blame the spread of the disease on migrants and those deemed outsiders.

Analysis

According to author of Undoing Border Imperialism Harsha Walia, walls are not to be seen as ‘static structures’ – borders are ‘elastic’, their existence less about demarcating territory and more linked to controlling labour flows. European border policies have considerable influence over regions in North Africa; Australia extends its reach to the Pacific islands. In exchange for trade and aid agreements, poorer nations are compelled to impose increased border controls, off-shore detention facilities, migration prevention campaigns as well as admitting expelled deportees.

The ‘free flow of capital requires precarious labour’ underpinning contemporary policies of ‘managed migration’. An asymmetry sees tourists and expats given different legal rights to refugees and asylum seekers, ‘bargaining chips’ in immigration diplomacy. The language used to describe the ‘migrant crisis’ has Western nations presented as its victims – their past colonialism ‘conveniently erased’ – while the migrant is depicted as its cause, not an outcome of the actual crises of capitalism, conquest and climate change.

Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders and Transnational Institute’s More Than A Wall report, interrogates the United States’ ‘border-industrial complex’, believing that public focus on the Trump administration’s infamous pledge to ‘build a wall’ along US-Mexico lines erases the nation’s long trajectory of border militarisation. There has been an ‘astronomic’ increase in funding the expansion of immigration enforcement apparatus over a number of presidencies – both Republican and Democratic. In 1994 the annual budget was $1.5 billion; by 2019 it was $24 billion. Public bodies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) spend billions of dollars on private contracts, creating ‘borderscapes’ to deploy drones, robots, biometrics, and hi-tech cameras to monitor the movement of people. Beyond national boundaries, the US government pressures neighbouring states in the Caribbean and Central America to build up their border security, while American companies such as Raytheon operate facilities further abroad in the Philippines and Jordan.

Jille Belisario of Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe understands that migration has always played a role in human development, and always will. In Europe, several countries have used the COVID-19 spread as an excuse to suspend access to asylum, with populist politicians painting migration as a threat to containing the virus. There have been reports of violent pushbacks on the Croatia-Bosnia border, while Maltese and Greek authorities have deported incomers to areas outside their jurisdiction. The externalisation of Europe’s borders to Turkey, North Africa and beyond has become ‘the new normal’.

Kavita Krishnan of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) believes that daily life is extremely precarious for ordinary citizens in border regions and for the many migrant workers being forced out of India’s cities during COVID-19. This is part of a historical pattern in which migrants and refugees have experienced waves of conflict and repression. Under Modi, existing tensions between a nationalist state and those it considers outsiders have been exacerbated. Aggressive contact tracing is used to surveille potential infiltrators, rather than focus on helping those most in need, while the criminalisation of ‘illegal migrants’ and marginalisation of the country’s Muslim population frequently lead to inhumane treatment and violence against those opposing reactionary citizenship laws.

Solutions

The panel outlined ways to resist growing anti-migrant sentiment, secure rights for the undocumented, and encourage solidarity across borders.

Harsha Walia feels that to secure people’s ‘freedom to move, stay, return’, campaigners will have to make connections between differing experiences of oppression. Artificial divisions between activist movements must be broken down – in the north American context, black liberation, indigenous and migrant struggles are often seen as separate, and yet the same ‘white vigilantes’ will cause concern for each group.

Todd Miller finds the sheer scale of the global border system ‘astonishing’, and its continuing growth ‘unsustainable’. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were 15 fortified border walls – now there are more than 70, two-thirds of which were built after 9/11. Civil society must keep track of the ‘pushing out’ of US borders and the European Union’s extension of its boundaries, which see armed guards and billions of dollars of technology deployed to Western allies across the world.

Jille Belisario says the biggest challenge for civil society is to find ‘strategies of convergence’ between border politics and other social issues. People who have experienced migration should be considered key parts of other progressive struggles – from trade union and peasant rights to improved conditions for domestic and care workers. There is ‘a lot of positive activism and resistance’ around borders taking place including the Permanent People’s Tribunal which has held hearings in five European cities, supported by 500 organisations.

Kavita Krishnan has witnessed the Indian government criminalising people who protest in favour of the rights of Muslims, against militarised borders, and around disputes over Kashmir – in the state’s eyes, ‘to protest is proof of criminality’. Those routinely termed ‘anti-national’ should be supported as many are being profiled and threatened with arrest under draconian laws allowing imprisonment without trial.

Further resources:
COVID-19 and Border Politics https://www.tni.org/en/publication/covid-19-and-border-politics

‘Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.’ Frantz Fanon

At a time of unprecedented anxiety and insecurity, building truly global movements may well prove arduous. The panel discussed how authoritarian power can be challenged and the pandemic could become a turning point in the struggle to defend humanity’s very survival.

Analysis

According to Thenjiwe McHarris of the Movement for Black Lives in the USA, discussions around challenging the patriarchy often get lost within social movements – ‘men with guns’ serve hierarchies of power. The ‘NGO-isation’ of movements leads to an emphasis on individual campaigns, losing sight of the bigger strategy of social transformation.

In a country where a disproportionate number of black and indigenous people lose their lives to state violence, the recent ‘black-led multiracial uprising’ across the US confronts a system which treats blackness as ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’, and seeks to control it.

Indian human rights lawyer Vrinda Grover understands that ‘working from home is not an option when you don’t have a home or don’t have a job’. As the pandemic deepens inequalities in the Global South, it is possible to see ‘schisms further aggravated’. In India, care, compassion, and public consultation have been conspicuously absent as its government favours a punitive approach, further extending its authoritarian power. With Parliament prorogued, decisions are made through executive decree and courts are hesitant to intervene. Following reelection in May 2019, Modi’s government has stepped up stifling freedoms of speech, expression, assembly, and association, while arresting and incarcerating prominent human rights activists. Press and broadcast are increasingly used as propaganda, while those protesting the government invite ‘the wrath of social media’.

Secretary General of the SENTRO trade union in the Philippines Josua Mata sees the rich live through lockdown in comfort, while the poor are imprisoned in their shanties. President Duterte has mishandled COVID-19 but remains popular following years of neglect. The Marcos dictatorship, followed by periods of kleptocracy and neoliberalism, and now state terror and creeping authoritarianism, have severely eroded people’s confidence in themselves and their collective capacities. In a period of mass unemployment, it becomes clear that the system has ‘never been working for the working class’.

Hakima Abbas of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development feels that 2020 has proven to be a long year in which the ‘economy has gone from the alienation of labour to the coercion of labour’. It began in ‘rebellion’ within countries as diverse as Haiti, Lebanon, Chile, Guinea, West Papua, France, and Palestine, where people made demands for an absolute transformation of the economy. The COVID-19 crisis then kick-started the ‘deepest economic recession in history’, with stay-at-home orders and other restrictions negatively affecting four in five of the world’s workers, while wealth at the top has increased. Women in work continue to be at the bottom of the global supply chain – they undertake the most precarious jobs, yet are paid less than men and experience violence.

Palestinian performance poet and lecturer at SOAS Rafeef Ziadah states that when COVID-19 hit, the economy was already in a dire condition with Palestine’s manufacturing base destroyed. Subsequently, the Netanyahu government has positioned itself as a leading global exporter of surveillance equipment that has proved successful in monitoring and dictating every aspect of Palestinian life.

Solutions

The panel outlined an internationalist agenda for social movements – how to mobilise and emerge from the crisis with a confidence in people power to fundamentally transform the global system.

Thenjiwe McHarris hopes people develop a ‘multi-decade strategy’, as social movements ‘can’t do everything at once’. Difficult conversations need to take place about how to envisage global movement infrastructure, governance and resources. In this particular moment, the traditions of black resistance and black liberation can be learnt from, while rejecting notions of incremental reform, and the differentiation between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ protestors. Furthermore, people should be unapologetic about naming their opposition: ‘the billionaire class’. Power is not some ‘weird mythical creature’, and though it may be difficult to imagine a radical realignment, there is a ‘real possibility of victory’.

Vrinda Grover compels activists not to indulge in ‘the politics of distraction’. This may be a ‘moment of anxiety’ but ideas and imagination can flourish from it. Society is involved in an ‘intergenerational struggle’ – many existing structures like the nation state must be interrogated with ‘compassion and dignity’. Where political leadership is lacking, activist citizens should fill the gap – the feminist movement in India showing solidarity with Black Lives Matter in the US points the way forward in a spirit of internationalism, friendship and solidarity.

Josua Mata thinks that ‘things will get tougher before they get better’, but there are signs of hope. In Manila, many workers – street cleaners, garbage collectors, domestic workers, food vendors – used to be invisible; now they are ‘essential’ to people’s survival. Community kitchens are establishing themselves, while social media sheds light on state corruption and Filipino youth rises up against a government ‘creeping towards fascism’. The country can be rebuilt through educating, organising and building unions, reaching across organisational as well as ideological lines.

Hakima Abbas believes that, at a time when mutual aid and collective care is providing disaster relief, now is the moment to ‘capture the imagination’ and ‘squash myths’ around the ‘inevitability and pervasiveness of neoliberal capitalism’. A ‘feminist bailout’ is needed – only the ‘first step towards a feminist economy’. The concept of ‘growth’ should be rejected, economies recentred towards health and wellbeing. There may even be opportunities to build a ‘communal tapestry across the world’, linking previously disparate struggles. If factories are taken over or popular communes created outside the state, real tangible experiments can blossom. Social movements should bring humour and irreverence to the situation, though ultimately people need to believe they can win and ‘transform society’.

Rafeef Ziadah understands that as ‘austerity is back on the table’, movements must build their own ‘infrastructure of dissent’. They can take as an inspiration the struggle of the Palestinians, who continue to ‘resist’ – ‘we have survived and in our survival is strength’. The planet is no longer sustainable so citizens across the world have no choice but to confront power.

Further resources: ‘Social movements in and beyond the COVID-19 crisis: sharing stories of struggles’, Interface Journal

Acknowledgements

Authors: K. Biswas, Nick Buxton

Credits to: Kirstie Crail (text), Orijit Sen (header illustration), Elizabeth Niarhos (webinar illustrations), and Jess Graham (images)