[ Music ] >> Welcome everyone to this new episode of the next page, our podcast here at Library and Archives Geneva, designed to advance the conversation on multilateralism and advance with child today because I'm here in the studio with Professor Thomas Hale, professor of global public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. And he's here both as a professor and as an author because his new book, Long Problems, just got released. And so we invited him for a bookcast here with us to share with the audience his research underpins the book and a couple of ideas that are very important at the moment for the evolution of multilateralism and understanding where we're going with long problems like climate change. So welcome, Professor Hale. It's a pleasure to have you here at United Nations Geneva. And yeah, let's talk a little bit about your latest book, just got released long problems, climate change and the challenge of governing across time. There is a lot in there but I was fortunate enough to hear a talk about the book from you just recently and what was very useful for me that I thought we could replicate for our audience was, yeah, just simply starting by defining what's a long problem and how do we work with long problems. Fantastic. Well, Francesca, first of all, thank you so much for having me join the podcast. It's a great pleasure and honor. And long problems are basically problems that last more than one human generation. So we have lots of things that matter, of course, in the world, maybe a flood, maybe a forest fire, maybe a war. And we have some things that matter like climate change that span a much longer time scale. So I define it as a problem whose causes and effects last more than one human generation. And it's interesting to think about long problems in a world where people say there's a poly crisis underway because we have so many challenges we have to deal with, the ones I mentioned, war, drought, flooding, horrible things that are, of course, very urgent and need immediate response. But if you scratch the surface of some of these, you find many of them, indeed, I'd say the vast majority of them are also connected, at least in part, to longer-term trends, like climate change, like change in technology, like structural economic relations that persist over a very long period of time. And so we're not going to be able to react our way beyond all of them. We need to look at the deeper longer-term causes as well. OK, so as it said, right in the title of your book, climate change is typically one of those long problems. And this time lag between what causes them and the effects they have on our society and our lives is the key that you identify also in your book. So what are the implications, then, of working with these problems that you explore in your book? So I think it's first important to realize that long problems are hard problems because we don't have a very long-term mindset. And the way we organize societies, the way we behave as individuals, or the way that governments develop policy and intimate policy. And so when a problem stretches across more than one human generation, it really challenges how we work. And what I try to do in the book is develop a bit of a political analysis of why, for politicians in particular, but also bureaucracies, for governments, for international organizations, like the UN, it's so hard to get our hands around these kinds of long-term problems. And so that kind of political analysis is important because it's not just a question of, OK, thinking of it more long-term and trying to remember that we need to plan for the future as well as react to the present. It's actually about changing how we do things in a way that we're going to structurally do that over time. And so that's where the book is trying to point toward. Tell me more about this concept of uncertainty that you-- I heard in the talk you gave the Geneva grantees to-- you elaborated a little bit on that. And I found it extremely interesting. So would you share that with our audience, please? Yeah, happily. So there are a few different problems that long problems pose for political responses. And one of them I call the early action paradox. This is probably the hardest one overall, actually. So we have to act in advance. If you have a problem, as far as long as the future, then sort of by definition, you have to act before the effects of that problem are felt. And it's really hard to act before the effects of a problem are felt because politics really drives itself on two things. One, knowing what to do, knowing what the effects might be, so certainty. And two, salience has to cut through all of the noise, all of the other problems, and climb and fight its way to the very top of the agenda, the very top of the news cycle, the very top of the voter's concerns. That's really hard to do when the problems are so far away. And so uncertainty is really pernicious. It really sucks power from political mobilization. And we see this again and again, for example, in tobacco and in cancer-causing drugs. And also, depleting substances, and of course, with climate change, where these big changes we know we need to make, there's always a little bit of doubt about what it might look like. And groups that oppose action often exploit that doubt strategically, talk up the uncertainty, say, we did another study. We need to find out what this might be. Let's not act too hastily. What if we're wrong? Which is, of course, true to some degree. But if you always say that, then you never get to the solutions, and that means the long problem is never solved. And that leads me to this impression that there is an element of inaction. So there is greater opportunities for inaction and what that will cause a systemic level. Is that correct? Is that something that you encounter in your book and your research on that underpins it? That's absolutely right. So it's always easier, politically, to keep things the same and to make them change. That's, I think, not a difficult thing to see in so many different areas of political action. And so far, a problem like climate change, in particular, where we need to act now in order to have a beneficial effect on the future, it becomes very difficult to get governments acting this way. But, you know, it's not just climate change. Think about, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic. That's so recent in many of our memories. And yet, somehow, it feels a little bit distant, a little bit, like, it's lost salience, right? We don't focus on it. Indeed, at the moment, the UN, through the World Health Organization, is trying to develop a new treaty to help us govern pandemics better. And it's a real struggle, because governments, even though they can remember what happened in 2020, 2021, et cetera, they're struggling to operationalize that into a new, far-sighted, forward-looking pandemic treaty that can make us better prepared next time. So, even that very immediate example shows that how hard it is to get these kinds of solutions in advance. And don't you think that there is also an aspect of competition among crises? I mean, the most recent crisis becomes the fact of the most salient one. And so, there is long problems that are constantly put on the back burner of our minds, if not of our solutions. Maybe we're actively working on solutions, but in our mind is the latest emergency in the latest crisis that gets all the attention. Is that so? I think that's exactly right. And so, even if we understand, at some level, that a drought or a forest fire, or the horrible floods we've seen, for example, recently in Kenya or in Brazil, or the mudslide recently in Papua New Guinea, all these horrible crises are linked in some way to climate change. And yet, even understanding that we know we need to act very urgently to protect the people who have been hurt or displaced or need to be the assistance, that's critical. If we don't also take the next step and address the deeper drivers, though, we know in another month, another two-month there's going to be another such event. And so, we can't react our way out of it. The expression people often say is, we're always fighting the last war. In a world of long problems, that's never, we're never going to win that war, because there's always going to be a bigger problem emerging down the track. The important point, though, here is that we're not doomed here. There's lots of things we can do to act in advance. And indeed, we do so sometimes quite well. So, the book is trying to really think about the problem as a hard one, but also to point towards solutions of how we can build effective responses, anticipations that help us get better at this. Yeah, and we'll talk about that in a minute, because there is a part in your book where you suggest new political technologies, as in new technologies. There are new political technologies. You also advocate about political science to come to the table in a more crucial role, but we'll talk about that later. I was curious about the following. If long problems are born and raised through time, then there is a moment where there must be some transformation of these problems. They grow older, they grow more effective in a way, and problems also have more friends than solutions. They make friends more rapidly, seems to me. So, if you put a problem in a certain environment, you will find a smaller or bigger problems to get together with quite rapidly. So, two questions to you. Is it true in the research that you have done that problems, long problems, have an evolution of their own? And so, they could surprise us in a way, and the second question is linked to that. What happens when we create an institution to tackle a long problem towards the infancy time of the problem? And then, as the problem transforms, it becomes adult. And we sort of forget to update the institution. What happens then? It's a huge problem, and this is a second sort of big structural barrier to solving long problems effectively that the book tries to talk about. I call it the institutional lag problem, because whenever a problem emerges, we tend to think about solutions as a policy, maybe a treaty, maybe a law, an organization that tries to work on solving that problem. And to be effective, that kind of institution, which we create through politics, it has to be durable. I can't change today and tomorrow and the next day, otherwise it wouldn't be an institution in any meaningful sense. But of course, as time stretches on, problems evolve and change a lot. One example of this I think about a lot, with a lot of worry at the moment, is our pension systems. In most parts of the world, except for South Asian Africa, the population is aging quite severely. And that means there are fewer young people who are paying in-dependent systems that are providing benefits for older people. Those systems were set up at a time when there were more younger people than older people. But now, many societies are moving in exactly opposite directions. So the problem has changed. The structure of society has changed demographically, but our systems for adjusting who gets paid in, who takes out, have not updated themselves. And so we need to think about how to build with institutions that are much more adaptable to these kinds of changes over time, especially as problem length increases. When we compare this example that is very telling, I understand this example pretty well. And when I transpose it to the issue of climate change that is at the core of your latest book, what does it look like? How does it play out? So probably most people listening today will think about climate change as perhaps primarily a problem of reducing emissions or mitigation. But of course, increasingly we realize that climate change is also already happening, and indeed happening quite quickly. And so we need to adapt to its impacts and build resilience for future impacts. But that understanding was not present in 1992, when the first UN Treaty on Climate Change was agreed, even though there was some uncertainty of needing for adaptation, the focus was almost entirely on mitigation, on prevention. And it took the concerted effort, especially of developing countries and people who are on the front line of climate impacts, to push that change. Because they basically said, we're not making enough progress on prevention, we need to think about treatment as well. And now you see on the UN agenda, an increasing focus on this issue of loss and damage. So not how do you adapt to future climate and change impacts, but how do we help people or compensate them for the impacts that have already occurred, the damage that's already been done. And so again, the issue is evolving as the issue moves forward. But it's really hard actually for the UN framework to quickly move in that direction. You might have heard recently, there was an agreement at Last Cop to fund a new fund on loss and damage, not a really significant amount of money yet, but it's a big institution that's forward. That took a really long time to get to. And so it's an institutional inertia problem, it's really live, I think, in the climate issue, as we go from prevention to treatment to compensation, and then look even further ahead, potentially we'll have to think about some kinds of solutions, like removing carbon dioxide from the air with technology, or even some people suggest managing the sun's radiation through big interventions. Again, the UN system is not yet anticipating those kinds of potential changes in problem structure because of this lag problem. Okay, that's very clear. Let's move on to your idea of introducing into mixed new political technologies. So basically, if I read your book correctly, you propose that to govern long-term issues, we also need to experiment. And experiment with new political technologies that the expression you use. And it really stuck with me. And I really liked this idea of new technology in political terms. And yeah, what does it mean, clearly, for our audience? So can you tell us more and maybe give examples of these? Well, first thing is important to say, the political institutions we have today are not necessarily the ones that we're going to have in the future and indeed are very different for the ones we've had in the past. And recognizing that institutions themselves can and do and probably should change over time is really important because I think there's a lot of, you know, surveys show very clearly, there's a huge lack of trust in government today. There's a real dissatisfaction. People look at this, they'll be like climate change, they'll look at the COVID pandemic. I think how can the system actually deliver what we need to deliver to have healthy, prosperous lives for us and our children? And so part of the solution, I think, is in the evolution of our political technology, as we say, the tools we use to make decisions, the ways we implement them, et cetera. And we shouldn't accept the current status quo as inevitable or natural or somehow the way it always has to be. And if you think about climate change, you can really see that disjuncture in time effectively. You know, the first carbon that's still up in our atmosphere looking down on us today was burnt at a vast scale about 250 years ago at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Think about how different politics was then, how different our political technologies, if you will, were multilateralism as a political technology, didn't exist in any recognizable form. And so think about how that same carbon, when it's still up there, 250 more years from now, is going to be looking down at us and thinking about all the new things we could invent in that time. Are they gonna be good things or are they gonna be bad things? It's up to us to decide on what we're going to do with it. But I think that idea that you can update and improve political technology as problems change is actually really central to putting back a bit of optimism, not of naive hope, but of practical course of action on these questions. So what could that look like in practice? Here I think is really important to say. And it's actually the most important thing that I want to come across in the book. We are governing long problems today. There are plenty of tools that people are using to extend the time horizon of governance. It's not a single set of things. There's no silver bullet. It's a thousand different things at the UN level, a national level, a sub-national level, in business, in civil society, et cetera. But there are plenty of examples. And the book is really trying to unpack those and suggest we should do more of it. Can you give us more examples? So for example, in the talk I referred to that I really enjoyed, at one point you elaborate on the idea of trustees. And another idea that really stayed with me was processes that require considering the future, like looking at the process, but from the future. And other things like creating UN representatives to advocate for the future. So there are so many examples. I get very excited talking about them, so I'll try to pick on some of the most compelling ones. But you mentioned the issue of trustees. So what is a trustee? A trustee is someone you delegate authority to, but you don't want them to do exactly what you say. You're delegating authority to them because you want them to keep you on course, for something that you know you might not be able to hold yourself to. So unlike an agent who's trying to do the work you want them to do, a trustee is someone who you say, please, you know, call me to account. And we use that kind of approach in government all the time. Courts are essentially trustees. We ask them to keep check on the implementation of the law. International organizations can be trustees. They hold governments to account, for example, on human rights issues. Central banks have this sort of function as well, where we delegate authority to them to set monetary policy in a way that will be stable and consistent over time. And so we have this very established practice, but we're not applying to something like climate change. We could. And the best example I can think of comes from California, where the state has created something called the California Air Resources Board. It was created in the 1960s to deal with smogs. So not at all for climate purposes. But over time, it's acquired real power and credibility as an independently-minded regulatory agency that's able to maintain policy consistency over time. So for example, in California, it recently passed its net zero target. It's a very short piece of legislation, only a few pages long. It then delegates how to do that, and how to update that over time to this independent agency, which has, of course, all the usual checks and balances. It's not some sort of dictator. It's couched within the democratic system, but it's trying to put it into a problem-solving space that has that one step of removal, like we do for courts or central banks or anything else. So it seems like there's a really ready solution there that we could build on. Yeah, that's super interesting. There is one other example I would like to unpack a little bit for our audience. Is this kind of inviting the future at the table, where we're devising or thinking about solutions? So this kind of giving voice to the future, and how does it look like in your book? So one of the problems with long problems is that the people who are most impacted by the problems, where effects are felt long in the future, don't exist yet by sort of definition. They are yet to arrive on the world. So how can we represent them effectively in politics? It's hard. I call these shadow interests, because we can only kind of glimpse them dimly through different kinds of forsake processes or through modeling other kinds of tools. And usually in politics, a big part of a solution comes from people who are negatively impacted or have a lot to win or lose either way, from kind of rising up and demanding a change or being the primary driver of that momentum. Even people who lack any kind of agency, or sorry, lack any kind of power, have at least a little bit of agency that they can put into uprising, even enslaved people right now in history have been important drivers of change. Future people don't have that agency because they don't exist. So we need to find ways to somehow inject them into the present. And one of the interesting examples of doing this is to create a commissioner or a representative for future generations who sits in government and has this kind of voice. And that could be a person. For example, in Wales, they've appointed an independent authority who again acts a little bit as a trustee to hold government to account, to ask government as sort of a critical friend. What are you doing on future generations? Another model is to actually empower certain politicians to play that role. So a number of parliaments around the world, for example, have a future generations caucus or committee. And that's a group of legislators who try to bring up those themes to their colleagues. So there's different models for how to do it. But having some kind of institutionalized voice is a way to make sure we don't forget about the future just because they're not here to talk to us. And I think that's one side of solutions. Like anything though, there's no silver belt here. Having someone to say this doesn't sort of make that person the authority setter. They can't dictate that everything will be happening for future generations in a good way. But think of how much more likely we're going to be if they have a little bit of a voice in the room and then if we have nothing, which is the status quo in most parts of the world. Hearing you talk about this comes up for me is the term or the word long-termism as opposed to short-termism. How do you make sense of that polarity between so much of the discourse, even linked to democracy being leading into conclusion of, "Okay, this is so short-termism." And on the other side of the polarity, this long-termism that comes along when you invite the future to the table where you devise the solutions. How do you make sense of that? And does it appear in your book? So long-termism I think is a very important mindset and a way to think about how we should manage the problems. And obviously people say, well, should we only care about the future? What about our needs now? And if in a world of so many urgent crises, it seems somehow like almost a luxury or something to be considered as a second-order priority to think about this long-term view. But if you think about your own lives, do you imagine the oldest person you know? Probably when you are a child, you might have met a grandparent or a great-grandparent, maybe that person is still with us, maybe they're not. But that person probably can be back, say 100 years or so on average. Then imagine the person is going to live longest who you know. So when you're old and maybe a grandparent or a great-grandparent, think about your grandchild or your great-grandchild. In that human family, there's about 200 years there between the oldest person you'll have known and the youngest person you'll have known. And so actually in our own lives, we have this combination of long-term and short-term thinking. And the point isn't that people are necessarily short-termistic. It's that systems do overweight the short-term. And so we need to correct for that in some way. And so there's, you know, even though there's a bit of bias to our short-term and some cognitive, institutional, organizational, political, there's nothing inevitable about that. And I think it's really important to recognize that human aspect of it because it suggests there is actually a deep-seated need to have what some philosophers and lawyers have called our acorn brains, not as our marshmallow brains, you know, our cathedral thinking, not as our news cycle thinking. And that's part of human nature too. And we just need to cultivate it more. How do we make sense of, you know, this year, for example, in the world is one of the major electoral years in the world? Isn't it sadly true that elections lead to short-term thinking? And how do we integrate long-termism into this, you know, ability that we have to choose by election the mix of short-termism that we accept in our societies, with particular reference to climate change? So there's definitely a fact where elections have this forcing moment in time and people have to respond to them and that creates a sort of deadline that creates a short-term pressure. But it does not follow from that that an absence of elections therefore guarantees long-term policymaking. And actually what you see across the world is the societies that are most investing in climate mitigation, that are taking the most investment in early childhood education, investing in the welfare of mothers. And doing all these kind of long-term policies, they actually tend to be on average more democratic than not. And many autocracies often find themselves responding to short-term pressures that are, you know, basically coming into play for who's holding power or not. And so there's nothing about elections that is more or less long-term or short-term. Every system that has a kind of accountability check in, you know, for example, China has rightly, has a lot of valuable features in its system for long-term planning and goal setting. But it also has lots of short-term problems. When you're coming to the end of a five-year plan, there's a huge rush to try to get the targets met and there's a lot of corners that are cut to make sure you get there. Just like in a democracy where you have an election that takes place and you have a similar sort of effect. So different systems but similar results for short-termism. The good news is though, I don't think there's anything that you, you know, there's lots of things that governments are doing that complement representative democracy, other forms of political institutions with these more long-term goals. So having, for example, a trustee organization has a long-term perspective like a central bank or a court entirely consistent with existing constitutional democracies or other systems. Having representatives is for the future. Again, so we see very much playing it out with democracy. The other thing I think I would really put my finger on is making sure there's a much more participatory part of this long-term thinking as well. Because there's a bit of a danger that we can talk about, climate change, in particular, or other similar sets of issues. You empower scientists, engineers, people who are thinking mostly through a technocratic mindset. And obviously you need that element to see what the effects of the future will be. But by the same token, you absolutely need to have people, communities who are thinking about what future they want for their societies. If you have one but not the other, then I think you're really going to risk losing not its political legitimacy but also an accurate view of what the future we're trying to build should look like. So I think representative democracy, as we know it, should be increasingly complemented by more technocratic, maybe trusty-like institutions like the California Resources Board. I mentioned, but also in equal measure, citizens' assemblies and citizens' journeys and these kinds of tools to help also engage people in really meaningful conversations that give them authority and agency over the futures that we're all building together. Yeah, that is very powerful. I think it resonates with a lot of people. Now, this participatory dimension of problem solving, when problems are both longer and more global. After all, a lot of the institutions that we have seen through the evolution of multilateralism, where there before problems went global, problems were perceived having a life of their own within state borders and state could take care of it, at least in my own state. I could think of solutions in trying to impose them or democratically roll them out, but there was this kind of within borders kind of mindset. And then things, of course, changed into climate change, but also with migration and a number of other things that we now tend to recognize as global crisis. And that is a segue, for me, what you just said, into trying to explore the view from the UN. And I know that that is not part of your book. I know that much, but the professor in the US being encountered with systems and system theory applying to international relation and global policy, I'm hoping to have a view that you can share with our audience in terms of what it looks like when we try to look at this from the UN point of view. The UN is the prototype of a long-lived, long-developing, low-development global organization sitting at the juncture of short-term crises and long-term problems that weren't there when the UN was created. So now taking it from your book, this notion of lengthening the time horizon, the question would be if we must lengthen the time horizon to address long problems effectively, how do we make sense of international organizations that were not engineered or designed to work on that kind of problems? So I think innovation in international organizations is hard. You know, we often see a lot of stasis and inertia and some professors, political scientists have written papers about so-called zombie institutions where you have these international organizations that kind of still keep going despite having really lost their purpose and energy and enthusiasm. And we should really be worried about that because we know in a world of climate change, of pandemics, of huge security difficulties, we need multilateral cooperation to be effective, to give people meaningful control over these transnational issues that affect them. But it's really hard in a world of geopolitical tension. And so how do we make the UN fit for purpose in the current context is a huge challenge and unfortunately there's plenty of examples of inertia. But there's also examples of innovation, right? So look at the UN climate change process, for example. It was set up at a time in 1992 when there was a certain level of development in the world and it wanted the negative things. It was lucky in a certain definition of which countries have to act first, which 100s have to act second, etc. Based on an 1992 world view of who's developing who's not. That's obviously changed a lot. The Security Council is another great example, right? Where we have a set of countries who happen to be the victors of a single war in 75 years ago or so who are now have a veto on the Security Council when others do not. And that probably isn't accurately effect the needs and interests of the world today. It's hard to update these things that once they're agreed. And so that problem is difficult. But on the positive side, think about the founding words, the first words in the UN Charter, which are we, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save exceeding generations from the scourge of war. So there's already the very founding of the UN, this idea of the future mattering. And actually the purpose of the organization is to look ahead and not just guarantee a good world for the people today, but also into the future. And look also at the role of the UN developing this idea of sustainable development, which the Breutland Report famously defined as meeting the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So actually I think the UN has, from its very founding, this very important idea about looking into the future and some really positive examples of where innovations happen to make that possible. So I think while the status of the current system is huge, maybe one of the biggest threats to effective governance today, it also has seeds for change. Yeah, and it's actually amazing throughout the podcast. What emerges is the contemporary significance of the values that are enshrined in the UN Charter. It's quite amazing how a piece of written work can hold the test of the time for almost a century. And of course there are many parts of the institution, the machinery that needs updating at that. The Secretary General of the UN, the current Secretary General makes no mystery at that. But the values of the Charter are still rings as one of the highest achievements in terms of saying what's important and trying to make it a universal value. So yeah, thank you for that kind of peak at the problem seen from the UN. I think that was very helpful. I would like as we wrap up this conversation with you. I would like to ask you two questions. One is, what have you learned from long problems in your way of seeing things from your standpoint in your discipline but also with regard to all the things that you have theorized and written before this latest book. And the second is, if you had one strong message, memorable and portable for our audience to put in the pocket and continue the journey, what would that be? So that you're actually linked. The thing I've really learned by looking at this issue is how many times in history people have thought about how to make a better future and what they could do to build that. So there have been various elements of this conversation at least for 150 years or so. The science fiction writer, H.G. Wells, one of the first science fiction writers in the 19th century. So we should really study the future more systematically and try to think about it as a way to use that study as a way to design a world we want to build. And during the 20th century we saw both, I think, good and negative examples of how people trying to build a better world succeeded, failed, built a world that will be better for some and not for others, and the horrible consequences that flow from those sort of, if you will, naive visions of progress. I think where we end up today is actually the much more, I would hope, wise place where even though we understand that building a better future is desirable, we're also a lot more humble, if you will, about what we can actually do to take it forward. And so looking at those historical examples was very educational for me. I think that we're not going to have some kind of perfectly far-sighted governance system that's going to somehow look ahead at all across time and figure out these magical solutions. And we shouldn't aspire to try, because if we did try to do that, we'd probably get it very wrong and create some worse problems than we started with. But that's the message that I really want to leave everyone who reads the book with and people is seeing today, that even though we should be very humble in that way, we also have lots of examples where we can actually do a lot better relatively easily than we're doing now on these long problems. We're doing it for some issues, it's not others, we seem to transpose them over, and we have a whole range of solutions we can bring forward. So it is feasible to actually govern across time. The metaphor, sometimes I use in the book, is imagine a person jumping off a tall building and the first, second, as they look down thinking, "Oh, it's fine so far." This is the nature of the early action paradox, not knowing the outcome. Governing long problems effectively is in some ways kind of like learning to fly, it's knowing that even though we can't, you know, necessarily foresee all the outcomes, we should at least try to direct the course and speed of human development in a way that's going to lead to a better outcome. And we're not going to be some sort of eagle sorry, majestically over control. That's the, we need to be humbled about that, but at least we can build ourselves a parachute. Well, thank you so much that at least resonates, certainly with me. So Professor Thomas Hale, thank you so much for coming to the next page here, the UN in Geneva to talk about your latest book, Long Problems, climate change, and the challenge of governing across time. Thank you so much. Thank you for Jessica. [MUSIC] [MUSIC PLAYING]
