Miren Gutierrez* interviews HAZEL HENDERSON
ROME, Sep 18 (IPS) – Hazel Henderson is a futurist, an economic iconoclast, founder of Ethical Markets Media, and author of the books Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship, and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. Her main focus is exploring the “blind spots” in conventional economic theory.She has devoted her research to the creation of an interdisciplinary economic and political theory with a focus on environmental and social issues. For instance, she has investigated the “value” of fresh water and clean air, needed in huge amounts to sustain life, but taken for granted.
In the wake of the publication of the “Stiglitz-Sen report” – which says that countries need to find ways to measure well-being alongside raw economic growth, her views couldn’t be more pertinent.
Henderson spoke to IPS in an emailed interview.
IPS: We often hear that country X will not reach the Millennium Development Goals. According to Jan Vandemoortele, one of the architects of the MDGs, the MDGs have become money-metric and donor-centric, meaningless catch-all phrases. If there are no concrete, common, comparable targets, how do we know we have been successful?
HAZEL HENDERSON: We need to see the MDGs in the rapidly changing world context since 2000: the U.S. has lost its single superpower position. China, India and Brazil are now key global players, the G7 and the G8 are superseded by the G20, and soon the G192 will be the expanded venue for democratising the global economy after the crises in finance changed the game for all players.
So, we need to retain the MDGs as the goal and align them with the rapidly emerging consensus on climate change: the Global Green New Deal, lead by private investments by the world’s pension funds (assets of over 120 trillion dollars) and with low-risk government guarantees for 10 trillion dollars of Climate Prosperity bonds over the next decade.
Since all the old metrics: GDP-measured economic growth and traditional “efficient markets” model are now defunct, we need to not tie MDG goals to these old metrics. New scorecards of progress beyond money-coefficients now appearing in Europe, Canada, China, Brazil and many other countries will be able to track MDGs performance more realistically.
