Milestones for the corona recovery
The COVID19 pandemic has brought the global economy to a screeching halt. It has toppled many into terrible and sudden grief, and magnified the precariousness and peril of the lives of millions. Even for the privileged who are able to work from home and whose income continues, this is a time of stress and anxiety. National leaders have taken extraordinary steps to close down normal life, with the support of most citizens who know that the cost of inaction would be incalculably higher than the terrible toll we are already experiencing.
This means that everything is now open for question—all the assumptions (both positive and negative) that we make about how the world works in normal times are now up in the air. The crisis will undoubtedly generate deep changes in how our global, national and local social systems work. This creates both enormous risk but also incredible opportunity.
I’m not the first to say this—just in my own network I have recently seen several articles written by others making the same points and listing their criteria for the post-COVID19 reconstruction. See the excellent pieces written by Joanna Kerr in Canada, David Ritter in Australia, and Janet Stevenson in New Zealand (and if you know of other similar pieces, please send me a link—I’m starting a collection).
OK, so for all of us who have dedicated our lives to changing the status quo—the status quo is now officially out the window. So how are we going to ensure that the new status quo is better than the old? It won’t happen without conscious action to make it so.
The long game
This crisis gives the opportunity for changing how we do things—for deep change in how we organize our social and economic systems. With credit to the authors mentioned above, we need to:
Invest in the right things for a sustainable and just future—green energy and other public goods (science, healthcare, arts, education); divest from fossil fuels and the throwaway economy.
Value science, data and expertise (including allowing scientists and experts not to know all the answers!).
Value and demand good government, and value strong democracies that put governments in place. This is what will get us through this crisis and beyond, not a private sector—important though it is—that, at best, has social well-being as a secondary goal.
Build an economy based on people and on equity—build resilience in our society by supporting greater personal & family resilience, and striving for equitable societies, not just rich ones. For example, do away with the insidious casualisation of work, and (re-)build strong social safety nets.
To build popular demand for these changes, and to make sure that they will stick, it is crucial that we build the cultural foundations that will set us up for an alternative future. We must tell the right stories, those that spotlight the things that matter about our response to this global crisis and start to create new assumptions about the possible future:
Stories that celebrate the people who had the skills for this crisis: the practical and caring skills of the “essential workers; the expertise of the scientists and policy professionals; and the leadership of those who have had to make incredibly difficult choices on behalf of all of us and persuade us to go along with them
Stories of solidarity and interconnectedness, at neighbourhood right through to global levels
Stories of the importance of nature to our health and well-being, in so many different ways, and stories of the joy of basic things of life—cooking and making, growing and harvesting, communicating and making music
And warning stories—the new ‘never again’s for this century—of the incredible weaknesses in the old status quo that this crisis has exposed, and the terrible toll that the virus has taken, in every corner of our planet.
We need milestones
So what might success look like? What are the concrete things we can work to achieve now--in the next weeks and months? How can we avoid a return to the old normal for which so many are still understandably grieving? We need to accept that the old normal is gone, and now look for the markers that show the new--the green and just society and economy that we need to create. Despite the anxiety, stress and grief of the current, we should consciously try to postpone the creation of a new “normal” as long as possible, for it is in this period of disruption when the deepest change is possible.
The milestones I’ll be looking for in coming months (leaving the epidemiological milestones to those with that expertise) that would signal a longer term change in direction as we emerge from this crisis include:
Refinement of the hastily-thrown-together government bail-out funds so that they support the recovery and expansion of the right economic activities--ie those that will be part of a green and just future--and starve those that are polluting or predatory
Broad and innovative democratic involvement in the design of recovery packages and plans
Signs of solidarity between nations, in recognition of the interconnectedness we have newly discovered to be far deeper than at the supply-chain level
The beginnings of a fundamental re-design of the travel and tourism industry, putting carbon emissions reductions at the centre (what on earth are they going to do with all those planes, and all those cruise liners?)
Conversion of emergency social support packages from a temporary higher ceiling to a new permanent floor for social security nets
Increases in salaries and improvement in working conditions for those workers who we have now discovered to be “essential”
What would you add to this list?