The story has at last broken through. We have reached a tipping point where we cannot anymore ignore inconvenient science like climate change or unmistakable facts like rising inequality or migrant nations. Or indeed the powder-keg that awaits us when all these various issues collide. Millions of striking school children have read the memo.
The science also now gives us a timetable. We have 10 years to act, or we face a hard exit from the Holocene. The clock is ticking.
Rising to these challenges as a political leader would be tough even in the best of times. Yet, there is also the threat of recession looming, ongoing trade disagreements, and tensions once again rising in the Middle East. Stubborn challenges like the skills crisis as technology changes work and the problem of short-termism and instability in our modern market economy also fester. This creates much uncertainty across society.
There are always one or two outstanding exceptions (take a bow Costa Rica), but generally around the world national government ambitions to tackle the climate crisis within this wider context feel underwhelming to say the least. Navigating all these short-term national economic uncertainties still trumps long-term collective future-proofing.
Add in social disruptions driven by new technologies and the political window for climate action feels like it closes still further. How to take a science-based approach to anything if there is a widespread collapse in trust around information?
Meanwhile, the younger generation is rightly upset and demand action. Unless relevant and impactful action is taken -- “systems change, not climate change” -- rising frustration among Gen Z and younger millennials will turn to despair and anger.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, this makes it a very difficult time to be a leader.
Even the most well-intentioned government or business leaders find it hard to make impactful “systems change.” Where do you begin? How do you know that your stakeholders will support you? And how can you be sure of wider cooperation, even by your competitors?
This is an interesting thing to reflect upon.
It seems, in fact, that many of those government and business leaders who do get it and who also want to see big changes happen are in fact searching for the very same thing as many activists: both are searching for how to create some form of social, or multi-stakeholder movement to help them make systems change happen. They can’t do it alone, so they need to somehow trigger a wider “movement” for change. On the street, across the boardrooms or in their political meetings.
This means working with others to create such movements or partnerships for change.
Micah White, the co-creator of Occupy Wall Street puts this well in a recent article for the World Economic Forum.
This is why a stakeholder approach is now more important than ever before.
What can we all do, both individually and collectively through collaborations and partnerships with each other – large and small actions – to help show leaders that things can be done, that actions and initiatives can work, that new innovations can emerge from collaboration, that costs are surmountable, that new jobs and skills can be created and that an increasing movement of people, civil society groups, cities, companies and investors can make important changes happen?
Piece by piece, issue by issue, brick by brick, stakeholder engagement in such collaborations and partnerships can help give leaders the confidence that systemic challenges can be overcome, and that these actions can grow into unstoppable movements.
Just think of the rise of awareness and action over the last few years on marine plastic pollution as one example. More and more governments and business leaders are now getting behind the issue, as their confidence builds on the back of successful stakeholder efforts.
The Global Plastic Action Partnership is fast growing into a “system change” alliance to curb marine plastic pollution by 2025. It is giving the confidence for governments to pass new laws and regulations to stop plastic pollution; and it is helping governments to make their regulations work.
Creating such stakeholder partnerships to help business, civil society groups and governments take positive action in collaborations does work. They enable people to positively engage, learn from each other and create useful outcomes. They also create a climate of confidence such that governments and business leaders feel increasingly able to take further, bolder actions, even if the initial obstacles seem so complex.
In a time where government leaders are unclear how to raise ambition, stakeholder engagement is where we can start. Both on the street and across the boardrooms.
To this end, the UN Secretary General should be applauded for his efforts to push for action coalitions at his Climate Action Summit. This will help governments gain confidence to raise ambitions.
And this is why the World Economic Forum, as the international organisation for public private cooperation, hosted the Sustainable Development Impact Summit in New York.
The Impact Summit brought together the best in class examples of stakeholder collaborations. It hosted over 1,000 participants – including over 100 CEOs and company executives, 116 innovators and young entrepreneurs, 11 heads of state and more than 118 government leaders, heads of international and regional organizations and other public figures across more than 40 workshops, all focused on how to share experiences, scale collaborations and drive impact on the most pressing problems facing us in the world today, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals.
For example, a “high ambition” leaders initiative will be launched that helps industry and government leaders work together to reduce their climate pollution in line with science, across important heavy industries such as steel, ships, aviation, aluminium, trucks, chemicals and cement. This will give participating governments like India and Sweden together with Argentina, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Korea and the UK more confidence that such actions can work and that higher ambition policies to speed things up can be put in place.
With Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and CEOs all in the mix at this summit, these meetings help show how such stakeholder engagement can help create the movements we need to clean up the mess we are in. It gives them inspiration and confidence to raise their ambitions and go further.
In this way, and in today’s difficult times, the Sustainable Development Impact Summit showcased how many different stakeholder movements and partnerships are making an impact and it gives leaders from governments and business a precious gift: they gain a rising climate of confidence and ambition about what can – and must - be done in the decade ahead, and also how to do it.
