Stinking Rich & We Need You!

Image source: The Economist
On Sept 29, US$1.2 trillion was wiped off the value of the New York Stock Exchange as members of the House of Representatives in the US, under pressure from constituents, voted against the US$700 billon bailout package designed to resuscitate the financial system. The knockback sent reverberations around the world, with markets falling sharply from Europe to East Asia.

What this knockback demonstrates, despite the "we are all capitalists now" proclamations of recent years, is that many Americans feel little affinity with the Wall Street set who had been "managing" their investments and who had extended their mortgages (without worrying about who would extend the cash needed to service them).

Many argue that this is a crisis of regulation, or a crisis of responsibility and ethics, as if these were technical problems to be tweaked. However, the roots of the political (as opposed to the strictly financial) crisis we are currently witnessing run much deeper. A quarter of a century of globalisation has fundamentally transformed not only our economies, but also our states and societies, leaving politicians few options.

While the current crisis has often been compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the two periods are distinctly different. The way out of the Great Depression essentially involved the establishing of a political compact between industrial capitalists and organised labour, with the state acting to stimulate demand and mitigate the risk to workers through a variety of compensatory mechanisms. What followed was a period of relatively equitable economic growth in the developed world that, among other things, gave birth to the mass consumer society of our time.

In contrast, the era of globalisation, which was ushered in by declining rates of profit and other crises in the 1970s and '80s, has involved a process of "financialisation", where the relationship between industrial and financial capital, which concerned political economists from Marx to Keynes, has apparently become largely redundant. Financial deregulation has permitted the enormous growth of global markets for a variety of financial products, which act somewhat autonomously from and greatly eclipse the "real" economy of trade in goods and services.

Financialisation has been part of a broader process that has placed the market at the centre of social relations, redistributing wealth and power. This has involved assaults against worker rights in many industrialised countries at a time where capital has been liberated to relocate to sources of cheaper labour.

Furthermore, at the same time many workers in the West have been both voluntarily and forcibly drawn into becoming investors - substituting the socialisation of risk that was embodied in the welfare state with tying pension plans to the market like never before.

And while the massive extension of credit, both in the form of mortgages and credit cards (which are now often tied together), provided palliative care to many, with some workers experiencing declining real wages, it also served to further lock them to a highly volatile system in which they had very little power to advance their interests vis-a-vis highly powerful and well-connected market players.

Meanwhile, the risk to capital has been socialised, with public bailouts a common feature of the past 25 years, regardless of the recent failure of the US government's rescue package. Yet, despite such bailouts, under globalisation arguments have been continuously advanced for less regulation and for the importance of paying CEOs "well".

In this hyper-capitalist environment inequality has been soaring, with the average pay packet of a high-end American CEO being 250 times that of an average wage earner. In short, there has been concentration of capital that still retains an insatiable appetite for profit.

In trying to satisfy this appetite capital has gone in search of returns in dangerous waters (such as that section of the population that aspires to owning homes yet has been so marginalised that it does not have the means to service its borrowings). In the short term, you can disguise this concentration by creating complex financial instruments to on-sell. In the medium-to-longer term, reality hits home when people begin to default.

So the big question seems to be not how to reregulate financial markets, but whether everyday citizens can be convinced that their interests are advanced by a different set of interests to theirs and an ideology that has spent the past quarter of a century eroding the "over-regulation" of the Western welfare state and dispensing with its social safeguards.

While US taxpayers were told by people like US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that bailing out capital was necessary to support the system for everyone and that caution had to be exercised in reregulating the financial sector, middle America doesn't appear to have much sympathy for him or the obscenely remunerated "Just Do It" set at the centre of this debacle.

The US government will still be able to put together another bailout package; however, the crisis seems far from over for the very reason that it is hard to see where new sources of real productive output will emerge, especially in an economy such as the United States.
The game of smoke and mirrors no longer holds any attraction for those left with cash to allocate.

Where the fix to the Great Depression came in the form of redistributive measures to workers within the domestic economy - a globalised world makes this process next to impossible for the very reason that capital can so easily relocate to cheaper sources of labour outside of America.

Even if capital can get back on its feet with a public bailout, finding profitable undertakings inside US borders that benefit the broad population seems highly unlikely.


Shahar Hameiri is a doctoral candidate at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. Toby Carroll is a research fellow at the Centre on Asia and Globalisation, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. This article "The Politics of the Financial Crisis" was published in Bangkok Post.


RECOMMENDED READING: Emerging Lessons From The Crisis by Eswar Prasad *

"Whatever the final outcome, one thing is certain– the rest of the world will no longer be enthusiastic about adopting the free-market principles that guided US financial development. While desperate times may call for desperate measures, massive US government intervention will also make it difficult in the future to make the case that the state should stay out of the workings of the financial system."

* Eswar Prasad is professor of economics at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the former head of the IMF’s Financial Studies Division.

Contesting Indonesia

Indonesia heads back to the polls in 2009 – a process that some hope will provide solutions to many of the problems that the country faces. Poverty persists, corruption remains endemic, infrastructure is failing and fuel costs have risen.

At the same time, democratisation and decentralisation have fundamentally altered Indonesia’s political process. A great diversity of groups – state and non-state, nationalist, religious, paramilitary and otherwise – are actively jostling for influence and power in determining the future trajectory of the nation. Many are forging new mechanisms and partnerships to further their respective agendas.

CAG’s Indonesia series casts the spotlight on this deeply contested process and examines the implications for state-society relations, accountability and democracy.

(The Series schedule)

In Memory of Gordon Gekko

Just wondering how many Wall Streeters are youtubing Gordon Gekko's "Greed is Good" speech video and reminiscing about the good old days.... (click image to view video)

Here are some of memorable Gordon Gekko quotes from the movie "Wall Street":

● "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."

● " We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you."

● "It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another."

● "Lunch is for wimps."

Perspectives on the US Financial Crisis

LKYSPP Professor Charles Adams spoke on the current financial turmoil at a panel dicussion held at the Asian Development Bank on 19 September. Here are his views on the crisis:

The dynamics of the current financial crisis are broadly similar to many other crises. First, there is a period during which too much credit is extended, leverage rises to very high levels (in large measure through derivatives and low margins), and people start to believe that things will be different, based on a “story” of a new era (the Greed period).

This is the boom or bubble period that precedes the eventual collapse, as vividly documented by Kindleberger in his study of financial crises.

Second, there is some event (the “Canary in the coalmine” moment) that triggers a reappraisal of the story and, ultimately, a reversal of the excesses during the boom. The problems in the sub-prime segment of the US real estate market likely served as the wake up call during the current crisis.

In this second phase, positions are unwound, leverage is reduced, and financial firms begin to scramble for capital and liquidity in response to losses and writedowns (the Fear period).

Finally, following a series of ad hoc interventions involving lender of last resort and life-boat rescues, the official sector steps in with bold measure such as guarantees and the purchase of substantial chunks of the financial system and/or distressed assets.

For those with at least some familiarity with financial crises, the time signature of every crisis is uncannily similar. In the unhappy ending to many financial crises, the economy enters a deep and protracted downturn and public debt levels soar to high levels as the official sector bails out the private sector. The current crisis fits this mould. As the crisis is far from over, however, one should be careful in speculating about the end point.

The current crisis is only one of a large number of financial—and, particularly banking-- crises that have occurred in recent decades. The key wrinkles this time around are that the crisis blew up in the core rather than the periphery of the system (recall the large number of recent crises that occurred in emerging markets at the periphery of the system); has been affecting multiple markets, instruments, and institutions (commercial banks, investment banks, Insurance companies); and has spilled over across countries as financial risks were unbundled and sold around the world. Intriguingly, new financial players such as Sovereign Wealth Funds are starting to play a role as sources of new capital while hedge funds, at least thus far, have been in the back seat.

As in other crises, the current episode has involved a breakdown of the multiple lines of defence set up to deal with periods of excessive exuberance.

The first line of defence is the risk management of financial firms. Arguably, risk management across a range of firms has again been subject to massive failures, and their oversight oards have not performed as intended.

The second line of defence includes all the various market and official analysts-- as well as credit rating agencies--that monitored the US financial sector and failed to spot impending problems until too late. A conflict of interest on the part of rating agencies that advised on, and then rated, complex financial products likely played a role here, and will need (somehow) to be addressed. But it is also staggering how many other private and official observers did not predict problems, and did not call for action that could have avoided the excesses.

Finally, in the third line of defence, the very fragmented US regulatory bodies did not play their proper role and were arguably “asleep at the wheel” as the shadow banking system bloomed. Clearly, any one of these lines of defence could have prevented the crisis but each broke down, with serious consequences.

US-led Capitalism: R.I.P?

(Cartoon source: The Economist)

New Century Financial. Sachsen Landesbank. Bear Stearns. IndyMac. Fannie Mae. Freddie Mac. Lehman Brothers. Merrill Lynch. AIG. They were all US companies that went belly up in the last few months.

British bank Barclays bought Lehman Brother's North American business. Japanese firm Normura Holdings has just bought Lehman Brother's Asia-Pacific unit. Morgan Stanley is said to be fighting for survival and China’s Bank Citic is being discussed as a possible rescuer and Singapore's own GIC is eyeing distressed US financial assets. Does this signal the irresistible shift of global power to Asia?

As the US government unveiled what is the largest overhaul of government-led financial regulation since the Great Depression, some opinion makers and stakeholders around the world now argue that the recent events signal the end of US-led capitalism. [Sung]

● “The End Of American Capitalism As We Knew It”
Financial Times

● “The World As We Know It Is Going Down”
Spiegel Online

● “Crisis Exposes Flaws in U.S. Economy, Tarnishes Image”
Bloomberg

● “Is this the end of US Capitalism”
Al Jazeera asks five prominent economists - Does the crisis signal the end of US-style capitalism? And if so, what are the lessons learned?

● “We Are All Capitalist Now? Not Any Longer”
The Times

New CAG Working Papers on Energy, Governance and Regionalism

The CAG Working Paper Series disseminates works-in-progress that reflect the broad range of research activities of the CAG researchers and faculty associates (click title to download) :

Global Governance and Energy
Ann Florini

"Energy has risen to the top of policy agendas around the world. There is now widespread recognition that energy policy has become key to international security,economic development, and the environmental sustainability of modern civilization. Yet this importance is not reflected in the world’s institutional infrastructure for managing global problems. A handful of international organizations work in uncoordinated fashion on various pieces of the energy puzzle. No organizational infrastructure exists to support the global conversation that is now badly needed about how to move the world onto a sustainable path that provides appropriate, reliable, and affordable energy services."


Contested regionalism in Southeast Asia: The politics of the trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline Project
Toby Carroll & Benjamin Sovacoo

This article analyses the trans-ASEAN gas pipeline project (TAGP) as a wayto reconceptualise regional dynamics in Southeast Asia and the forces shaping them – what we call ‘contested regionalism’. For this task, we propose an analytical framework that delves within and beyond the state, and which places emphasis upon the role of material and ideological factors operating at particular moments in time. The framework reveals that the tensions acting within and upon ASEAN and the TAGP shape the regional approach to energy governance in such a way that the gas pipeline project – much like other ‘regional’ projects – is unlikely to ever come close to fulfilling its brief or that of its masters. What is more probable is that the project’s form will continue to be conditioned by entrenched politico-economic realities and the influence of dominant ideologies – especially during times of crisis – that have the capacity to exacerbate existing regional animosities and disparities.


Regionalism, Governance and the ADB: A Foucauldian Perspective
Teresita Cruz-del Rosario

Discourse analysis is a theoretical perspective primarily concerned with the ideas, beliefs, symbols, images, and categorizations that give meaning to social life. It is likewise concerned with how these meaning systems are produced and reproduced, how they guide action and behaviour, and who are the credible agents of knowledge. Power relations produce a hierarchy of discourses, some more dominant than others. In the field of development policy, multilateral institutions like the Asian Development Bank are purveyors of a dominant discourse on governance which has been conceptualized as economicmanagerialism. This sets the tone for governance practices among its “client” governments. Despite this, there remains the possibility within ADB itself to reinterpret ideas and provide alternative meanings. Two subregional programs, the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) are illustrative examples of a patently economic managerialist approach to regional governance with possibilities for discursive shifts.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what it does to climate change

A Cantonese old saying goes “anything that walks, swims, crawls or flies with its back to heaven is edible”. I agree, mostly. I love eating meat. Korean galbi, wagyu beef from Kobe, spicy Portuguese chorizo, roasted lamb shoulder…

I also know that climate change is a real threat that affects all of us and that we can only overcome this challenge by doing something together, shoulder to shoulder. I am prepared to do my part. I just didn’t know that eating less meat is one step humanity can take in order to assist in tackling climate change challenges and threats.

Last week, UN climate change expert, Chairman of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and India’s seventh Nobel laureate Dr Rajendra Pachauri encouraged people to eat meat less and become vegetarians at least once a good to assist in solving global warming. Dr Pachauri argued that diet change was important because of the huge greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental problems - including habitat destruction - associated with rearing cattle and other animals. It was relatively easy to change eating habits compared to changing means of transport.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. These are generated during the production of animal feeds, for example, while ruminants, particularly cows, emit methane, which is 23 times more effective as a global warming agent than carbon dioxide. The agency has also warned that meat consumption is set to double by the middle of the century. Read the full article in The Guardian. [Sung]

Setting up of an Asian Observatory on Health Systems

Professor Phua Kai Hong, Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy recently attended a workshop organised by WHO Regional Office in Manila to discuss the setting up of an Asian Observatory on Health Systems. According to Dr Phua, the WHO Regional Director, Dr Shigeru Omi who visited the School a few months ago is keen to involve LKYSPP to be part of a regional consortium for comparative health systems studies. Here is the background of the meeting:

Progress in improving health outcomes, achieving the health related Millennium Development Goals, and reaching universal access to health services as expressed by the slogan 'Health for All' from the Declaration of Alma-Ata on Primary Health Care is unacceptably slow in many countries.

Weak health systems have been identified as one of the main obstacles to improving health and scaling up effective health interventions This is so even when the funding situation for health has improved. Although reasons for weak health systems vary from country to country, the common ones include inadequate human and financial resources and their inefficient use; lack of coordination and inefficient management; financial, social and geographical barriers limiting access to essential health care; and inadequate information and evidence for policy- and decision-making.

Health systems are part of the fabric of societal and civic life. The core values and principles of the Declaration of Alma-Ata on Primary Health Care promulgated in 1978 are still relevant, even in today's globalized world. There is increased awareness of health inequities and the damaging effects they have on individuals and society. Evidence suggests that health systems oriented towards primary health care (PHC) are more likely to deliver better health outcomes, more equitable health outcomes, and greater public satisfaction at lower costs.

To guide its work in responding to these global challenges, the WHO Secretariat has produced the document Everybody's Business: Strengthening Health Systems to Improve Health Outcomes-WHO's Framework for Action. Building on Everybody's Business, which was developed in Geneva, the WHO Regional Office in the Western Pacific has developed a Strategic Plan for Strengthening Health Systems in the WHO Western Pacific Region.

The regional strategic plan is aimed at improving the WHO response to the health systems challenges and needs of its Member States. A meeting of experts to obtain perspectives and inputs on how to strengthen health systems in the context of the core values and principles in PHC was convened in Manila from 5 to 6 August 2008.

In addition to dealing with the core issues and activities in the regional Strategic Plan, the meeting also further elaborated the concept of a health systems observatory for the region. The need for better collection, analysis, and use of information on health systems is a recurring theme within the region that the WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific feels the need to address. [Sung]

It’s Still Obama’s Election

Despite all the buzz over Sarah Palin and the polls showing a dead heat or even a slight McCain advantage, Obama is still well ahead in the only polls that actually matter – so much ahead that it’s hard to see how McCain can pull out a victory.

In the US system, voters don’t directly elect Presidents. Although voters cast their ballots marked for a candidate, in fact they’re voting for a slate of delegates to the Electoral College. (The American system, after all, was set up by men who didn’t trust ordinary voters to know what was good for them, so Presidential and originally Senate elections were designed to be indirect.) These days, those delegates are pledged to a specific candidate.

It’s those Electoral College delegates who actually choose the President, several weeks after the early November national election. The magic number is 270 – if you get the votes of 270 electoral college delegates (a bare majority of the total), you become President.

And Obama still has a big advantage in likely numbers of electoral college delegates, even using the same polls that show him lagging in the popular vote.

How is this possible? Because each of the fifty US states gets to decide how to allocate its electoral college delegation. Each state gets the same number of delegates as it has members of Congress – two Senators plus however many Representatives the state has, which is based on population. (The smallest number of delegates a state can have is thus three, for its two senators and at least one representative. Alaska, Palin’s home state, has three.) 48 of the states have a winner-take-all system, so a candidate who (barely) wins enough states can triumph over one who wins in several states by huge margins but doesn’t carry enough of the states. That’s what happened to Al Gore in 2000, who won the popular vote by a margin of several hundred thousand – and lost the Presidency.

So national polls aren’t very useful. Instead, it’s the state-by-state polls that matter. And adding up the numbers of Electoral College votes in states that are currently tilting noticeably to one candidate or the other shows a strong Obama advantage of about 225 Electoral College votes for Obama, versus 175 for McCain. The rest are in states currently too close to call.

Can McCain still win? Yes, but to do so, he has to carry many more of the currently undecided states than Obama does. Anything is possible in American elections – but the safe money now is on Obama. [Ann]

● Not all the policies proposed by Obama and McCain are sound. Foreign Policy lists 20 terrible policy proposals suggested by McCain and Obama:

Obama's Top 10 worst ideas

McCain's Top 10 worst ideas

● Reminder: Catch Ann tomorrow night (11th September) at 10.30 pm on Channel 8 FOCUS program. Ann will give her take on the upcominig US Presidential Election.

The Goonj Approach...A Voice...An Effort

It is human nature to judge people by their appearances. The clothes we wear convey signals about personality, background, taste, and social status. For some, the situation is a little different. This is what the people working at Goonj, an Indian social enterprise, saw in the village of Gidhdha:

“In the peak of winter days, the children did not have a single piece of cloth covering their bodies - warm clothing was a distant dream. This is a 35-lakh strong community spread across Bihar, where people are forced to eat rats in dire circumstances of poverty & survival. Clothing is the last priority in their lives. Parents often make their naked children sleep in a small hole dug in the ground and cover them with grass (pual), to survive the chilly nights. Women don’t take a bath for many days as they have nothing to change into & often people take loans on heavy interest to buy a single piece of clothing - which lasts them for as long as it does not disintegrate into nothing.”

A typical knee-jerk response to such a situation would be to round up some donations of clothing to give to the villagers in Gidhdha. Clothing donations are not new - and in fact are often abused: spring cleaning of one's closet while easing your conscience - why not? But goods that are passed to those in need in a pitying manner, as hand-outs, or as unwanted trash, end up stripping the recipients of their self esteem and self reliance, ending up as a particularly destructive form of goodwill.

Ashoka Fellow Anshu Gupta (pictured) approaches the poverty challenge with a very different mindset. His organization Goonj is grounded a few simple yet crucial principles: Self help as the starting point. Always uphold and protect a person’s dignity. Seek to empower rather than breed dependency. Goonj takes leftover clothing and turns it into a resource for mobilizing rural communities. The clothes come at the end of a Goonj project, not at the beginning. Goonj organizes village meetings where it asks participants to identify projects that their community would benefit from. Village members are then expected to implement these projects themselves in order to earn the clothing. Clothes (pre-sorted and screened for quality) are given to each villager at the completion of the project - with respect and without making the recipient feel like a charity case. In some cases, the mobilization and impact arising from these projects have created so much positive change that community members have forgotten about the clothing they earned in the process.

There are many different ways to think about social enterprises – e.g. business models for the production of social and environmental goods, or businesses with a triple bottom line - and debates surround the measurements of the output, impact and sustainability of social enterprises. In the case of Goonj, its financial viability has yet to be proven. Since the clothes are donated, the bulk of Goonj's operating costs are in logistics and transportation. Goonj has started some income generation streams through its production of accessories made with recycled material, but revenue from these sales will cover only a fraction of the costs.

However, the social innovation that Goonj has created is so simple and basic, it's lamentable that we even call it an innovation. It is fundamentally about dignity and respect, and 'pricing' the upholding of these principles above other indicators such as numbers of clothing delivered and numbers of households reached. If we were to use the latter numeric measurements, then it would be easy to come up with a more efficient business model. But how does one measure things like empowerment, self-help and dignity, in a social innovation model where the manner in which a piece of clothing is handed over is more important than the speed with which it reaches those in need? How does one grapple with the tradeoffs between empowerment and efficiency in service delivery?

Read more about Goonj’s approach and projects at Goonj homepage. [Yeling]

Florni's Take On Obama vs McCain

Catch CAG Director Ann Florini tomorrow night (11th September) at 10.30 pm on Channel 8 FOCUS program. Ann will give her take on the upcominig US Presidential Election.

Renewable Energy in the Mekong Delta

CAG Research Fellow Benjamin Sovacool has just returned from Laos and Cambodia, where he met with local officials, businesspersons, and activists to discuss electrification and energy development in the Mekong Delta.

Here are a few insights from his trip:

● The people of Laos and Cambodia, while culturally rich, are economically poor. More than half of the population of both countries lives on less than one U.S. dollar per day, and a majority of people in both countries lack any sort of regular access to electricity. Indeed, while Benjamin was in Phnom Penh he experienced two power outages in less than twenty-four hours. (see first photo of rural villagers fishing in the Mekong)

● Because of this striking poverty, Laos and Cambodia have both embarked upon ambitious plans to develop massive hydroelectric projects on the rivers flowing throughout the two countries. The Laos Department of Energy Promotion and Development Ministry of Energy and Mines, for example, reports that Thai, Cambodian, and Laotian developers intend to construct no less than twenty differently sized hydro projects in the region. (See second image of Laotian map of dams)

● Unfortunately, their plans for electrification and development, while they could definitely help local villagers and farmers, could also induce grave consequences on the natural environment. Large-scale dams, such as those that have been proposed in the Mekong Delta, consistently fragment riparian ecosystems, destroy habitats, shift sedimentation flows, and degrade local fisheries. The environmental consequences of continuing to build large dams along the Mekong remind us about the tenuous balance policymakers and regulators must face with pursuing economic growth on the one hand, and preserving the environment on the other. [Ben]

The answer, my friend, is blowing the wind

This ad by Epuron- a German based renewable energy company - won the top honor for best film advertising spot at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes. Titled “Power of Wind”, it shows the benefits of the wind when used intelligently. This is a funny and intelligent take on the wind as an energy source, an excellent promotion for the future of renewable energies. Click image to view. [Sung]

Consensus-Building Asian-Style

A recent conference in Tokyo entitled "Consensus-Building in Asia: Building a Sustainable Society" yielded some surprising insights. For one, culture was a predominant discussion item on the table - a refreshing break from most discussions that often neglect or bypass cultural aspects in tools and technologies that are deemed as “universal” and therefore “context-free.”

Not so during the Tokyo conference. Amidst a variety of scholars and practitioners who grappled with the problem of understanding conflict and building consensus around environmental issues, culture was more than sufficiently mentioned, not as a footnote, but rigorously “unpacked” to award it enough scholarly merit.

Here are a few insights:

● Informal networks are usually operating in parallel with formally-designated consensus-building processes, mostly through intermediaries (go-betweens), an invisible “council of elders” to confer its blessing/benediction, a ritual network of buddies, classmates, soulmates, friends, peers, etc. --- all of whom drive the process in ways that are not so apparent during the formal process;

● Symbolic outcomes as important as the material results of consensus-building, perhaps even more so. Respect and recognition, for example, is a significant currency with which to measure success, and not just the formal, written agreement that may come out of the lengthy consensus-building exercises;

● Technical choices are most often choices that are deeply laden with values, and are also most often unstated. While the language which protagonists use are couched in technical terms, an underlying layer of value(s) oftentimes foregrounds the process which, if left unrecognized, leads to a hardening of positions among all sides, and thus makes consensus building problematic;

● Consensus is most difficult to obtain in cases that involve value conflicts, mostly around identity issues. A good example in environmental cases is the antagonism between traditional uses of a physical space (e.g., a mountain regarded by the locals as “sacred) versus modern uses of the same space (e.g., astronomers who want to use the mountain to build a telescope that will give the best view for gazing into the universe). The identity of belonging/community on one side is pitted against professional/scientific identities on the other, and both are oftentimes locked into positions that cannot be resolved by technical approaches. The “arrogance on both sides” threatens to convert these differences into a long-standing intractable conflict;

● Conflicts that are surrounded by historical baggage need to be seen through the prism of value conflicts. These are built up over time and obtain the status of immutability, especially when historical conflicts have become entrenched in memory that is carried over through generations.

The conference did raise very valuable points for both scholars and practitioners who look at Asia as a site for redefining and refining theory and practice around consensus-building. [Tess]

Shape of things to come

Some have argued that Katrina was not the only category 5 hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast and that the Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to hurricanes, with or without global warming. What we do know is the physics of tropical hurricane and that it forms over warm ocean water. We also know that since the early 1950s, the average intensity of tropical storms has increased globally and that this trend correlates with the increase in average sea surface temperatures in the tropics.

Carlos Pascual and Strobe Talbott from the Brookings Institution also point out in their recent article titled “7 Years to Climate Midnight” that greenhouse gas emissions are raising the Earth's temperature and the Earth is on a trajectory to warm more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit by around mid-century and that exceeding that threshold could trigger a series of phenomena: Arable land will turn into desert, higher sea levels will flood coastal areas, and changes in the convection of the oceans will alter currents, such as the Gulf Stream, that determine regional weather patterns, Manhattan and Florida would be under water, while Nevada would have no water at all. Read "7 Years to Climate Midnight". [Sung]