A Summary of “Reimagining Global Public Goods in the 21st Century”
Editor’s Note: “Reimagining Global Public Goods in the 21st Century” was a three-part workshop coordinated by the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS), Queen Mary, University of London, between April and June 2022. This general summary of the workshop was drafted by Maribel Morey, executive director of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, and Simon Reid-Henry, then director of IHSS. Please stay tuned for individual reflections from workshop participants, forthcoming on this site.
In March 2022, the United Nations announced the establishment of a High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, building upon the Secretary General’s 2021 report on “Our Common Agenda,” which called for the advancement of ideas for “governance arrangements in certain areas that could be considered global public goods or global commons.” Simultaneously, other complementary networks have formed, such as the Global Public Investment (GPI) network, exploring avenues for funding global public goods in today’s world.
Both acknowledging this current call for global cooperation and its long (and frustrating) history, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at Queen Mary, University of London convened a three-part virtual workshop between April and June 2022 titled “Reimagining Global Public Goods in the 21st century.” The goal of the workshop was to bring together scholars across the social sciences, based around the world, to inform each other’s knowledge on the definition, value, and possibilities of global public goods. We also hoped to inform global policymakers’ discussions on this very topic, such as those taking place at the UN and GPI network.
As we noted in our letters of invitation and publicity for the workshop, global public goods have a history and a geography that pre-date the current international policy discussion and which may provide clues as to how to take the concept forward. The COVID-19 pandemic has both underscored the need for this and presents some concrete challenges with which scholars and practitioners alike must reckon. Despite rhetorical promises that “no one is safe until everyone is safe” and that we all share certain common global vulnerabilities, efforts to define the discovery and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines as global public goods have been half-hearted. What is the disconnect, we asked? And what other visions of common ownership provide alternative intellectual and political vocabularies for meeting global common needs and safeguarding the public interest?
Over the course of three linked workshops, the IHSS and the Miami Institute set out to explore what is missing in the dominant policy language of global public goods. This series of virtual discussions on “Reimagining Global Public Goods in the 21st Century” complemented the Miami Institute’s ongoing discussions on alternative models of national and international political economies, knowledge production in the academe as a global public good, and the necessary collective psyches at the national and global levels to sustain public support for national and global public goods. It also conformed to the IHSS’s mandate to discuss the intellectual bases of public and political problems.
The starting point for the discussions was as follows: There has been much discussion about what constitutes a “good” in the language of global public goods, for example, but rather less on the matter of what constitutes the “public” and how we manage public needs at scale. This raises disciplinary questions. Economists have a particular understanding of “global public goods”; historians, geographers, political scientists, anthropologists and others may have a different take. Has a historical period ever existed when global public goods have existed, for example? And what can we learn from the past of other people and places?
In the first workshop,“An Interdisciplinary Discussion of ‘Public Goods,” Drs. Milindo Chakrabarti and Rituparna Patgiri presented. This discussion took place virtually in April 2022.
A critique of economics literature.
In this first workshop, Chakrabarti provided an historical overview of economic thinking about GPGs, identifying two main intellectual routes out of the 1950s discovery of the notion of “public goods”: one being Paul Samuelson and his thinking about jointness in consumption, and one being Richard Musgrave, and his thinking about excludability. Between them, these traditions underpin much of the shorthand conceptualization that goes into GPG thinking today: non rival and non-excludable. In the 1980s and 1990s, a new wave of thinking was associated with two other thinkers: James Buchanan’s idea of club goods (some goods can be produced at a level of a group where others can be excluded, this distinguishes between pure public and pure private goods), and Elinor Ostrom, who developed the idea of Common Pool Resources (CPR). Over the last 10 years, the situation has started changing again. Chakrabarti sketched this out as a four-part grid: pure private, pure public, CPR, and club goods.
A sociology of the public in public goods.
Beginning with an anecdote of how a friend, an economist, questioned why a sociologist such as herself would be asked to speak on public goods—a term he assumed only economists should and did have perspectives to share—Patgiri underscored the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the subject worthy of sociologists’ attention. For starters, Patgiri argued that sociologists long have analyzed public goods—if not through that very term, then—through their analyses of inequality. After characterizing goods as non-rivalrous, non-exclusive, and possibly intangible, Patgiri went on to exam the public in “public goods.” As far as the public here, Patgiri stressed, the question becomes how to mobilize the public so that “public goods” go from being an intellectual project to actual realities. And this, Patgiri notes, is where sociologists can help economists understand the complexities of “collectivity,” of the collective action necessary to sustain the necessary public support for public goods.
Or, building upon Patgiri’s reflections, we can take this framing of global public goods (GPGs) in the world to explore an alternative: “another public”, an antagonistic approach—a public against the public.
A production theory of public goods.
The conversation in this first workshop covered the matter of what is a legitimate form of exclusion of public goods, and also examined the issue of intergenerational exclusion. For example, by using up present resources we may be depriving future generations. It was noted that duties to future generations is actually a focus in the work of the UNSGs office coming out of the Our Common Agenda report. Secondly, we touched upon the issue of whether what we need is a production theory of GPGs rather than (as present) a consumption theory. Lastly, public goods, as they go global, have to be beyond any one country’s normative stance on things. This is why international governance arrangements that can incorporate multiple and pluralistic voices and adjust for the fact that different countries are unequally positioned are needed as part of the solution to how we supply global public goods in the future. International political and economic developments, including responses to recent “global” crises, from the war on terror to the financial crisis to the pandemic, have changed the terms on which GPGs are produced; our analysis of them needs to change too. It cannot simply be reduced to seeking the desired outcomes, the “goods” in a broader sense, that might compensate for, or mitigate, these global “bads”. It must incorporate non-rationalist explanations and focus more on how we can cooperate (collective action) to provide them AND how we can work (using law and other instruments) to ensure they remain publicly accessible once produced.
The second workshop, titled “National, Regional, and ‘Public Goods’ in the world,” took place virtually in May 2022 and included presentations from Drs. Raúl Rodríguez Rodríguez, Deen Sharp, Juliano Fiori, and Maribel Morey.
Building upon her recently published book, White Philanthropy (2021), Morey discussed the three main case studies of knowledge production in the social sciences highlighted in the book. Morey argued that knowledge production in the social sciences can be a more robust global public good by including the publics much earlier in the knowledge creation process. That is to say that we as scholars should work towards encouraging knowledge production that is accessible to, deliberated, and ultimately applied by the global public(s). Morey stressed that knowledge as a more robust global public good—than visualized by historical actors in White Philanthropy—would be much more dialectical from genesis to completion. That is, it would be openly accessible to global publics from the moment that a social problem is being defined by researchers and funders, deliberated as data is being collected, and then collectively applied by the public.
Sharp presented the social history of the waqf as a useful historical model for the collective funding of goods while Fiori emphasized the NGO-ization of societies and that certain societies, such as Brazil, question the very value of a public sphere. Without a public sphere, Fiori questioned how we can imagine the financing of global public goods (GPGs). Via NGOs? This workshop concluded with a discussion of this very question, with Rodríguez Rodríguez suggesting that states—not NGO’s—should be the main funders and providers of public goods. Though as Fiori underscored earlier in the conversation, are we discussing global public goods in a theoretical world where public realms and, by extension, states, are robust and powerful or in this actual world in the twenty-first century where both seem enfeebled by comparison to the private and nonprofit sectors?
The third workshop, titled “Confronting Psychological Limitations,” took place virtually in June 2022. The event saw panel presentations from Drs. Olivia Rutazibwa, Grieve Chelwa, and Yan Long.
Discussing two anecdotes, Rutazibwa reflected on the distinctions between cognitive and material discussions of global public goods, warning that we should not remain at the cognitive level in this conversation. If we want this global dialogue on public goods to be meaningful, Rutazibwa suggested that we need to engage with the material consequences of these goods and be vigilant on the narrow ways that we might imagine who should be part of these discussions on how, which, and in which ways public goods should exist in our global community.
Analyzing the usage of COVID-19 vaccines in China, Long underscored that the Global South (including too the African continent) has been playing a key role in where vaccine trials are happening. Long also noted that Chinese vaccines have been used as a political bargaining chip, and a stake in rivalry between older and newer empires. Long thus suggested that the challenge ahead in thinking about global public goods is the neoliberal agenda of emphasizing nation-states as providers of public goods. Unlike Patgiri and Rodríguez Rodríguez from earlier workshops, who emphasized the role of states as rightful providers of public goods, Long stressed the need to think beyond nation-states as key providers of these goods.
Concluding this final workshop, Chelwa began by noting that we need global public goods (GPGs), but that we need to think about how they are devised and sustained. Chelwa stressed that the existence of well-supplied global public goods reinforces (or rather, would reinforce) the idea of being human and the togetherness that we require for that purpose. To have meaningful GPGs, Chelwa argued that those goods need to allow us to address all of our needs. So one of the first cognitive limitations we confront is that GPGs are seen to only able to address our public problems. But they also should nourish our private ones.
Post-1945, Chelwa argued, we as a global community actually made GPGs with some success (e.g. the United Nations Charter). To this point, Chelwa stressed that intangibleness is also important and that the founding of the UN and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights fall in this tradition. Yes, Chelwa acknowledged that the organization and its mission have become neoliberalised, but it was in its original formulation a real public good. Even more amazing, Chelwa argued, is that both of these were products of genuine consensus across traditions and cultures. How in today’s world would we ever conceive of something like the formation of the UN and UDHR? Relatedly, Chelwa observed that we must not think about global public goods in exclusively economic terms, noting that this is a second major cognitive limitation and perhaps the biggest one. This is because discourse on global public goods tends to be couched in the terms of scarcity (with conversations on how we pay for them being the key issue). But what we should really focus on is on something else. In the 1940s through the 1960s, Chelwa mentioned, economists had many debates trying to define a public good and the “non-rival” and “non-exclusive” characterizations of public goods came out of these debates, essentially reducing the discussion to scarcity. This was a narrowing not an enriching of the debate, as Chelwa argued, because these economists were not motivated by the idea of public need but, rather, by a desire to make the market the arbiter of these things. How do we instead define GPGs as institutions, Chelwa asked, and then ask how can they be governed best?
Thinking forward.
Collectively, this workshop series has called us to find inspiration from the past, and yet also the impetus to move beyond it. We can find inspiration in the founding of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Chelwa stressed, for example, but do we need another global trauma, such as the Second World War, to create the necessary global mobilization for sustaining another global public good?
As Chelwa asked us all to reflect on this matter: Can there really be another path possible for us that does not require a crisis? Perhaps the answer is not to look outside the concept of “crisis”, but rather, to widen our idea of the crises that are always ongoing and see how to respond globally to those, in order to mobilize and nurture new public goods. After all, we don’t lack for crises globally. The task may be more a case of becoming more vigilant with regards to which crises get to count.
In this vein, for example, Rutazibwa reminded us that many people remained stuck at the cognitive level in their response to Black Lives Matter protests. Big brands engaged with these things, but as Rutazibwa stressed, engaging anti-racism only becomes meaningful if we as a global community can also engage the destructive capacity of capitalism. After all, it is through capitalism that ownership is assigned. Rutazibwa encourages us all to have both this cognitive and material discussion at the same time, not in parallel but as one conversation containing its various constitutive parts. In other words: How do we think about what counts as a global crisis? And can we inspire each other to shift our psychologies sufficiently to expand our understanding of global crises and, subsequently, to collectively nurture and sustain public goods that respond to the material deficits inspiring these crises?
