Hello, everyone, and welcome to the latest in a series of talks at the Oxford Martin School is organising,
prompted by the recent Dasgupta review on the economics of biodiversity.
My name is Charles Godfrey. I'm the director of the Oxford Martin School and I'm delighted to have here with me this afternoon.
A colleague and friend, Henrietta More Henrietta Moore Henrietta is a social anthropologist.
She's worked in many universities Durham Cambridge LSC, but is in UCL University College London at the moment.
Parts of the Bartlett School, where she is the director of the Institute for Global Prosperity.
Henrietta has many honours. She's a fellow of the British Academy and in 2016 she was made a dame for her contributions to Social Science.
Henrietta. Welcome to this talk. I'm going to begin by asking you to to tell us a little bit about your journey.
You're a social anthropologist. You've done lots of work on gender failed anthropology in Africa,
and I know that you've become very interested in biodiversity and other aspects of the natural world,
but throughout your career, but especially in recent years. Tell us a bit about the course of your career.
Yes. Well, Charles, lovely to be here and lovely to be part of this discussion and pleased to be with everyone.
And so I think the best thing to say is really that I always held this very strong interest
in the human environment relationships ever since I did my PhD in social psychology,
which was in Northwest Kenya, and then I was very interested in the intimate relationship between smallholder livelihoods and people in place.
And one of my abiding memories actually of doing fieldwork was bumping along a very narrow road in a Land Rover,
going up and down through huge potholes and being overtaken on the inside by a giraffe, which was doing rather better than I was.
And so that sense of being in the physicality of place was a really important part of the work that I was doing.
And of course, what's evolved since then is is a is a sense really of of loss of emergency or of the
pressing nature of the changes that have taken place and not just as I experience them,
but as everybody in that part of Kenya, which is called Elgeyo Marakwet, have all my friends,
their experience, what's happened over the last 30 years or so more than that now.
And you know, the main thing, of course, has been massive deforestation, soil erosion and great biodiversity loss.
And the area where I work as part of the Great Rift, as part of the Rift Valley and you know,
in the time in living memory, that place would have been teeming with animals and birds and all kinds of things,
including the pollinators on which so much of the ceremonial life of those people depends,
which is all about collecting honey and making honeybee aerospace. And so people themselves have felt a great sense of loss.
And I think that's the thing that sent me on the journey is is is being attached to that place in a very important way.
I know that part of Kenya and I visited it over 30 years and just extraordinary the change that has happened over that that time.
Yes, amazing.
And I was also going to ask you before we get onto the Dasgupta Report to tell us a little bit about your work in the Institute of Global Prosperity.
And in particular,
I know that you have written a lot about issues about how we measure progress and the tyranny of GDP and better ways of measuring societal well-being.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think what's interesting there is that from different disciplines, including economics itself,
there is a great pressure at the moment for a paradigm change in economic thinking.
So perhaps the easiest way to think about it is to say, you know what really is an economy for and who is it for?
And if you measure economic progress in terms of GDP, you very often end up in that situation where we've had massive growth in economies,
we've had great growth in human capital over the last 40 years. But when you look around you,
what you see is increasing inequality so you don't see the benefits of so-called trickle down and all the benefits supposed to be with,
you know, rising tide raises all boats and so on and so forth.
What you're actually seeing is is is a widening gap between people and that is translating in contemporary society,
of course, into a great deal of disquiet and real anger.
And I think probably many people are aware of that sort of rise of populism and lack of trust in government, lack of interest, in fact, even.
In improper governance and most recently, of course,
in the last year with the pandemic really a sense that politicians are not dealing in a straightforward way with people,
but their words cannot be trusted and that is very, very corrosive in human society.
If you have that level of mistrust.
So what we've been doing in the institute is we've been working very, very in a very detailed way with communities in the UK, in Africa,
in Cuba and in Lebanon talking to them about what really matters to them,
what is quality of life, where would they like to see improvements in quality of life?
And generally, when you take a sort of standard economic framework, people just say, well, it's about creating jobs.
Everybody has to have a job and everybody must have an income. And of course, that's very important to people.
But when you talk to people about what do they really want,
they say what they want is a degree of security, of what we would call perhaps you and I livelihood.
So it isn't. So work is important. Yes, yes, income is important, but so are infrastructures.
Working public services, good quality housing, good quality green spaces,
the capacity to have a say about how things are run and an ability to live well with others.
And that's becomes very important.
So we've been developing a way of what we call the first citizen led prosperity index because as you clearly understand,
there are many of these different kind of indices around the world, the development and the Social Progress Index.
There are so many of them. In fact, you can hardly move for indices at the moment.
And that in itself is a good thing because it means that people everywhere are recognising that we are not quite measuring what we value.
And the question is, what is the good way of doing it? And of course, as being an anthropologist,
I'm interested in how to develop an index that can actually understand and record
the major structural constraints that are bearing down on people's lives.
So, for example, in the UK, something like deindustrialisation or mental health, those kinds of things.
But combine it with something that is speaks to what people in their local areas really matters and what they really want to see change in progress.
And just a plug for people who are interested in this topic.
We've had previous conversations and lectures from people like Diane Coyle from Cambridge and Paul Collier here at Oxford talking about these things,
and they're available on the Martin School archive. Henrietta.
In a perfect world,
how would you like to see a government take an indices such as you've developed one of these other ones and actually operationalise it?
Turn it into? How would it work when Treasury comes to make a cost-benefit decision, which now they largely do using economic criteria?
Yes. Well, this is one of the things that we've been discussing with Treasury and with others.
And I think the first thing to say about it is if I have my way in.
Just take the United Kingdom for a moment. By the time of the next general election,
every area of the United Kingdom would have its own prosperity index in the hands of local people who would understand whether or not they
were making progress towards any of these quality of life indicators that mattered to them and how that intersects with macroeconomic policy.
So there's an educational element to it. There is an element that's also about if you like democratic participation and voice.
And I think one of the things that would have to be have to happen in the United Kingdom because we are very,
very centralised polity is we'd have to have much more devolution than we currently have decentralisation.
And so we are already working right across the UK, in several boroughs in London,
but also in Leeds and in Liverpool and in Glasgow and other places developing these local based prosperity indices.
So one of the reasons why this is important is because so much of government policy has been aimed at levelling up the regions,
and everyone is very familiar at the moment with this discussion around levelling up and building back better.
Is that actually most government policy aimed at doing that in the last 40 years has been fantastically unsuccessful?
And one of the reasons is because it insists on seeing these things as working through a kind of technological innovation,
so it says we will bring a massive new factory producing whatever it is to Wales, and this will create lots and lots of jobs for Wales.
But what tends to happen in these kinds of situations is that the number of jobs created is tiny,
so most people are not going to be employed in one of these high end new kinds of factories.
Producing whatever it is doesn't really matter.
And so constant disappointment and constant moves of money into areas, which is not actually really doing anything for local people.
They might be doing good things overall for the economy or good things for innovation.
But actually, what is doing for local people is not providing them with any more livelihood security.
So this is a huge issue at the moment in the UK with the levelling up agenda and in many other countries as well.
So what concrete would you like to see the government doing more of?
I mean, it's struggling at the moment, but flesh on the concept of levelling up.
It is, and I've been writing about that and we've had a campaign for the UK,
which we've been running the last few months called rebuilding prosperity for the UK.
And the way I to think about it is something that I've learnt from actually from from
from the work that I've done in areas to deal with environment and biodiversity.
And that is to get local areas and indeed local authorities to take a kind of whole systems approach to what needs to change in that area.
In other words, instead of thinking about, Okay, we need more jobs, we need better health service is to actually put these things together and say,
OK, what do we need across these intersecting systems to take account of ecological approach to the economy at the local level?
And then to see how you address some of the major top five six challenges that
are in those areas through a combination of local employment and investment.
And so we're building models for that using the prosperity index right now.
So there are very concrete things that we can do, I think. But it's what's interesting about that kind of approach is that many of the jobs that
you will actually create by addressing some of the issues that people care about,
for example, lack of green spaces, no parks will not properly looked after or, you know,
very poor quality of old buildings for schools or and not enough social care and so on.
All those kinds of jobs are what you call reasonably moderate skill entry kinds of jobs.
So you're not having to wait for the whole of the area to have a whole new set of skills and a whole new education and so forth,
you can actually begin to tackle problems at root you.
A lot of sort of decarbonisation issues can be dealt with using those kinds of approaches in the UK and
also talk very much to the sense of place which we tend to have lost and move on onto the Dasgupta Report.
Just before I do that, can I ask our audience to feel free to ask questions?
If you look at your screen, you should see done on the bottom right and ask a question tab.
I see there are already two questions there do ask questions.
You can also vote for questions that you that you particularly would like me to put to Henrietta.
And please do vote because that's really helpful for me in picking the questions to choose.
So, Henrietta The Dasgupta Report Yeah. And I guess one of the highlight conclusions and recommendations that comes out
of the Dasgupta Report that talks very much to some of the measures you've
been we've just been talking about the last 10 minutes is the need for countries or countries and globally to think much more about inclusive wealth.
And as I understand it, that that is the combination of what we traditionally think of as they produce capital, the stock of materials.
We have human capital, which we're used to thinking about labour and then also natural capital.
And I wonder if you might say a little bit about what do you think the main messages of their Dasgupta report are in that?
And perhaps how also it how you view it as a social anthropologist and it meshes with some of the ideas we've just been chatting about.
Well, yeah, I know I'm very happy to. And I think firstly,
what I'd like to say is that the The Dasgupta Report itself is a wonderfully elegant working out of a really difficult conceptual problem,
which is how do you incorporate these issues of natural capital in a way that would actually make them actionable
by governments and in a way in which they could actually incorporate them not only into their thinking,
but actually into their policymaking, so that the difficult the slight difficulty we have here, I think,
is that we have to understand that what Potter has done is to create another essentially aggregate figure.
So putting those three capitals together and his view and he argues it very carefully in the report is that inclusive
wealth and social well-being are equivalent to the purposes of sustainability assessment and policy analysis.
So they are the same. They are the same thing, essentially.
And so what you would do the same thing by definition or the same thing because they're measuring the same thing,
same things and measuring the same thing? Yeah, that's right. And that when he makes an argument for that,
said one of the one of the one of the one of the issues that you could take up and people
have taken up with it with the Dasgupta Report is in what sense is that true or is it?
Sufficiently, the case to warrant action on that grounds.
But he makes a very elegant argument for it, I think. And I would urge anyone who's interested actually just to look at the the main report itself,
which is huge, but a very good read, a very good read, not embed too heavy.
But there really can be very rewritten. It's an easy here.
It's it's an easy read. It's an easy. But the difficulty we have with so let's just say one thing about the difficulty with it.
So one of the things that acknowledges, but of course,
can't resolve in the in the in the report and this speaks to the work that we're doing in the institute,
is that as an aggregate figure, it's much more useful in GDP, which discounts anything to do with the natural world.
Effectively, it's not interested in it. But as with GDP, because it's an aggregate figure, it does not reflect distribution across people.
In other words, you know, it doesn't incorporate inequalities and particularly systemic inequalities of any kind.
So you would be dealing with not understanding how it applies to the specifics of place.
Mm-Hmm. That's one of the difficulties. It would be very, very difficult to to use it to do that.
So in order to actually operationalise it,
you would need to marry it together with something like the prosperity index to make it actually speak to the specifics of the place itself.
And this is important because the ecological crisis is itself fundamentally an inequality crisis at so many different levels.
Because, first of all, because those who were experiencing the sharp end or much of the sharp end of of climate
change and biodiversity loss are not those whose actions have been driving these changes.
That was at a planetary level, to put it bluntly. So what are you in Africa?
Africa has not been causing these actions and with its consumption patterns, they have been closed elsewhere.
And it's also an inequality crisis across the generations, which is something that Potter is very concerned about.
One of the things he wants to do is to be able to hold governments to account using this notion of inclusive wealth,
in other words, to educate the current generation and the following generations to understand that you need to say to government,
Okay, so what is this going to do for inclusive wealth, this project or this policy or this particular government management of the economy?
Where will it take us?
Will it actually be an improvement in inclusive wealth or not so that there has to be work for distributive justice in his thinking?
But he he cannot say what that is because in a way, it's this is where so much of the work we do is, you know,
very well in your own work is about working in this quite novel kind of transdisciplinary way
where we actually have to get together to solve these problems both at the intellectual level,
but also at the sort of practical policy level too.
I think we need to bring different people to the table to meet these kinds of decisions now as to how to go forward.
I suddenly found that some of the writings on inequality in the report were fascinating.
And I guess one immediately thinks about if one thinks about the different asset classes and clearly people differ in their material wealth.
And we know all about that. The complicated issue about disparities in in in skills and human capital and actually what that's doing to the
country with the with the shifting political divide now going along educational along an educational dimension.
But I no thought really appreciated some of the disparities in natural capital.
And I guess I got two messages from that from the report.
One is sort of even within the country, then people have different local natural capital wealth.
And I thought the point that Martha made,
while all of you may very well was that much of our trade and actually much of our are the ways we have offshore samovar,
for example, greenhouse gas emissions has been almost an exploitation of natural capital in low income countries,
which in many ways can make us look good.
Yes, and I and I think we all all of us ought to be especially business for working in this area and and all learning.
And it's those students from of coming into the Oxford Martin School and the institute's own prosperity.
Very, very attentive to some of these issues, which are about offsetting Dominicans types, right?
Because I think that, you know, some of them will be important and will work at both at the global level and at the national level.
But many of them are just a way of being able to carry on doing what you're currently doing and feel slightly less bad about it.
And I think we need to be careful, very careful.
Now you'll be aware that there are some people who really hate the notion of economics and being mixed with
biodiversity and argue that biodiversity is literally invaluable and so economic thinking doesn't work.
I think Pather has a really sophisticated response to that objection.
But I was wondering how you, as a social anthropologist, respond when people say,
no, you can't make something as wonderful and as inalienable as nature and.
Quotidian economic thinking. Yes, and I do, and I understand this apprehension really well, and I mean,
it's not just that that that that nature is something that's fundamental for all of us,
but for many people around the world, it's something that's sacred as well.
And so, you know, putting a monetary value on it really, really doesn't help.
And I think two things to be said Wolf, as you say,
also has this sophisticated way of dealing with it because basically what he says is you you have to
understand these three forms of capital as having what he calls in economic terms and accounting value.
But that is the value which is the market price plus the social worth or the social scarcity value.
And he understands that social worth is the contribution of an additional unit of it would make to societal well-being.
So he's trying here to incorporate a notion of social wealth, including even such things as ritual work.
And he gives some very good examples in the report.
For Baynham, for example, talking about, you know, the number of sacred groves that are no longer there.
And what's happened to people's cultural life so that when he talks about the ammunition in natural capital at the time,
he's also aware that he's talking about ammunition and cultural capital for many, many peoples of the world.
And that's a very important sort of contribution. So he has come quite a long way to taking into account all of these social issues.
But I think the the important thing that we need to focus on here is.
What will what will make a change, so how can we get governments to act on this and how can we get governments to act on this in a way that we,
the ordinary citizen, can actually follow and understand?
And I think that here his contribution with economic thinking is to make trying to
make economics more relevant to the ordinary citizen in the contemporary situation.
So I think the job of a very good job of that, you know, where I where I have,
where we discussed at length in during the sessions we had was over these issues of
distributive justice and also over the fact that it's not just that things are external,
externalised or outsourced if you like to two of the countries, but there are many,
many situations in country where you have a system where people who are doing like down the river further up,
so those further down don't get anything.
So there are lots and lots of examples of how the budget for the production of produced capital has a massive impact on natural capital,
but also does so in very,
very uneven ways and usually manages to contribute to uneven situations that already exist, sort of making them worse rather than ameliorating them.
Because obviously, if you the powerful guys, you are the guys with the dam and the guys who no water to the dam.
Henrietta, this question is a slight digression, but given you did extensive fieldwork in Africa earlier in your career,
how much is your thinking about some of these issues about the sort of non-economic management issues around biodiversity?
How much was that influenced by observing how local people in Kenya managed their natural resources around their villages and things?
Well, it's a huge impact, but I think one of the things I want to say it's not for us is that we we need to recognise
that local communities across the globe and indeed particularly indigenous communities,
have storehouses of knowledge for the management of biodiverse systems which have endured for generations.
But we also need to recognise in the modern world that it won't just be enough to say, OK, let's go back to doing what we're doing in the past.
That isn't that isn't going to work.
First of all, the changes we've already wrought in these Earth systems are sufficient to have speeded up the process of natural capital decline,
and this is a point that it makes. So our world, if you like, is is changing more rapidly than it was.
So and the only thing that hasn't changed. Well, actually anything that's really grown effectively over time as being human capital,
which has grown in a global sense, but actually natural capital has been going down.
And the really big bruise growth has been in produced capital. So we've got massive skyscrapers and roads and so on everywhere.
And the difficulty here, I think, is.
Understanding that we would have to situate these forms of diverse knowledge in the complexity of the world we now inhabit,
we can't have sort of we can't imagine a world where we say, OK, let's leave everybody with their diverse knowledge to just run their own little bit.
And that, in fact, is not what many indigenous leaders and many community leaders are saying.
So if you look at what's happening in Africa at the moment,
there are quite a number of African organisations which now bring big platforms of farmers together to share knowledge about, you know,
sequestering carbon in the soil, managing soils, better, managing local seed banks,
better getting them to work with local scientists so that they have access to these improved seeds and so on.
So it isn't a matter of sort of if you like removing science,
it's a matter of bringing science and indigenous knowledge together in a way that the diversity of that approach is of benefit to us all.
So it's important to recognise that I think that's so fascinating because there is a danger of sort of having a fairly condescending,
condescending view of indigenous people and wanting to freeze their culture in aspect, which in aspect which may be not what they want and met.
And of course, everybody else, you know, is interested as we are in having a challenge mobile foot.
Yes. And again, you all know this very well from from Kenya,
but the extraordinary reach of mobile phones and mobile phone knowledge into rural agricultural communities in Kenya,
far in advance of of this country to be brought to this country.
And you can get most of you, most of you, you know, your sort of farm support comes through your mobile telephone and kept saying it could hear you.
We've got all the sort of systems in place. And so there's still, if you like, the possibility for people to be, you know,
the bits going to your farm or visiting you or other support systems for farming and some to be effective.
But in Africa, I mean, the cost of maintaining that is something that's been beyond most African governments for a very, very long time.
So actually, the mobile phone has really produced an opportunity to share knowledge and to collaborate,
which has been quite extraordinary and is extraordinarily important to the future of agriculture for Africa as well.
And Kenya extraordinary that they deregulated just at the right time, whereas many of their neighbours didn't deregulate,
and they have this wonderful ecosystem of of of individual entrepreneurs.
Yeah. Henry, I suspect we could talk a lot about Kenya, but I'm going to go back to the Dust Guts report.
I think one of the things that I did not expect Pather to have to write so strongly about not interested in your views as a
social anthropologist about this is the disconnect that many people have from nature today and the fact how little we are.
Many people are exposed to nature or natural environments. And I thought he had a wonderful clarion call for especially our children,
to be more exposed to nature and for more nature studies to be taught in schools and things.
It rather passed along to my colleagues in the biology department at Oxford.
We argued at one point that everyone coming into university should do an ecology module and things which rather alarmed the people who teach them.
But I did think it was a wonderful argument and coming from an economist as well.
Quite strong, yes. It's not something you think is important.
I do think this is hugely important. I think it has to be set, though, in a context.
So both collecting is good fun. I mean, I certainly remember doing both collecting as a child or newts.
I think we were interested in capturing, as I recall,
but it's not that so much as setting this understanding of nature in two very important frames of reference.
The first is the fact that human systems of all kinds are embedded in the in the natural world in ways,
which means that what is happening is a process of co-evolution, which we have to continue to be part of.
So in other words, it's not going to be possible to manage all of what we need to do in the world by just rewilding half the planet, for example.
That's not going to that's not going to work. But the other is that we teach we do need to teach children in school.
I think something very important, which is what I would call a whole systems approach to understanding the world they live in now.
And in that sense, you I can see why you would argue for an ecological all undergraduates in the first year.
Well, there is. You used to argue for a sort of basic economics course,
and that's because the intersecting nature of these dynamic non-linear systems is something that everybody needs to be able to understand.
And I think that really is a change. You view it marks the 21st century out quite definitively, I think, from the 2015 movies,
ideas and then and the other thing it does is it for us as intellectuals,
it marks the boundary between the kinds of disciplines we've all been involved in,
which have their origins in the 19th century and had particular 19th century framings and forcing us into
a situation where we have to realise that we now need to really unpick quite a number of assumptions,
including in economics. And the father isn't the only person being left in economics, although he's a leading figure in this field.
To get us out of thinking about societies, for example, is moving towards steady states or towards equilibrium.
Right? This problem for us, because that's not what's happening in the world and in the societies we're living in now.
And I think the next generation really needs to understand that and where to intervene in it.
I'm going to come to questions in five minutes. But just before doing that, I'd like to ask you a specific question.
And this is about regenerative agriculture, which you've written a lot on recently.
And again, if one's interested in biodiversity but has to think about agriculture and food supply and vice versa, I think now.
And how did you get interested in that? And tell us a little bit about your recent thoughts on that.
Well, I got interested in it. I think because of my experience of the fragility of African smallholder agriculture on the conditions of fertiliser,
subsidy for mono cropping of maize.
And so as soon as that happens, you realise that a number of things is not just that you're putting the fertiliser on the fields.
I mean, you could that's something we can come back to in a second.
But the fact is that you are. Reducing the dietary diversity of these communities was what tends to happen,
is that people grow as much maize as they possibly can to try and sell it on the market,
to make money and then buy everything back again, which is, of course, how you know you live.
If you live in Oxford, you don't grow wheat to eat your bread, you know, it's not necessary.
But smallholder agriculture across the world is still going to be the major way of living for many,
many, many millions of people well into the next century.
So we have to address the fact that those that form of agriculture is becoming
increasingly precarious because the old economic model we had of saying to people,
Okay,
well, you will all leave agriculture and you will all move to the city and get employed in in something to do with industry or possibly services,
cetera cetera. Except we now understand that the numbers of people moving to those cities.
There is no formal employment for these people.
There's a huge crisis here of the of the model of economic progress, which we which we thought was, was was, was there.
So that's one reason why I became very interested in it is, in other words,
are we telling the story of how our economies and our world is going to evolve?
And I actually think this was quite big holes in it at the moment that we need to address the informality of labour is one of them.
But the other the the other reason is because. Being an anthropologist, I'm interested in diversity in all its forms,
and one of the things I'm interested in is the diversity of human imagination, the diversity of its capacity for innovation.
So in many contexts, it's quite clear to me that we do need to have lots and lots of people involved at the very local levels,
including in local farming, regenerating our soils, reducing the toxicity in our waters, diversifying our food systems.
Will we be able to feed the whole planet doing just this? No.
And so we what we're talking about here is regenerative agriculture.
What role it play? How significant is it? Each agricultural, regenerative agricultural aspects that you do,
you soon realise when you're working on it that it has to be very specific to the local.
Very specific to the soil types, to the seeds, to water availability, to labour availability,
to huge range of things that are important for making it work and we will still need what we call modern agriculture,
but that can be, you know, new types of genetically modified crops, for example, what's happening with rice?
So what was going on with rice now will mean that there will be much, much,
much less water needed to grow rice, which is such an important moment for so many people in the world.
We've got nitrogen for new kinds of crops that can fix nitrogen from the air,
which are coming in stream with precision watering systems, which we didn't have before.
We've got new ways of controlling pests and so on and weeds.
So we have we don't have to have these sort of deserts of the prairie, which are which we're going to be.
They didn't have any longevity food systems as they currently are, and I think that's that we need the diversity of both approaches.
So I couldn't agree more with you on that.
And I think one of the barriers to achieving that is an area where actually the social sciences is going to be very, very, very important.
And that is to stop destructive polarised narratives arising,
which sort of sees the more high intensity farming as totally different from the low intensity farming that it's a spectrum.
One needs variety and regenerative agriculture, depending on how you define it.
It's a kind of really interesting social science question how these terms are used.
But regenerative agriculture will be as important to the more intense ends of the spectrum as it will to the low and intense spectrum.
Yes. And also, we have to think about how food the whole question of global food systems is.
I mean, you know, talking about the human imagination, I don't know how we ever imagined to create such a system.
I mean, it is extraordinarily complex and very, very difficult to manage in all its extremes.
But you know, a country like the, you know, the United Kingdom has to bring in food from elsewhere.
And understanding what we grow here and how we can live better with what we grow here is an important part of what we do.
But we will never be in that situation unless we decide that no one is ever going to eat aubergine again or whatever it is.
Right? So and and clearly we need we need practical understandings of this.
But the more people who are urban dwellers, the more urban dwellers we have who actually become passionately interested in
the question of quality of food and how we grow it and where it comes from,
the better. Henry, I'm going to go to some questions now.
And the first question is from McCarey Stewart Harawira, which I suspect might be a New Zealand name.
And the question is the New Zealand Labour government promised at the beginning of its previous term to prioritise wellbeing.
However, this is not continue to be the case.
Analysis indicates that the lobbying power of certain industries overcome such critical endeavours across the board, in particular,
the dairy industry points that how can governments resist the power of industries that contribute so much to the country's economy?
This is a really terrific question and and a hugely important one, and the answer is I am not entirely sure.
I mean, in the sense that I'm very often dismayed by the effectiveness of different lobbying bodies,
particularly and not just of good food food industry bodies, but also, you know, fossil fuel,
fossil fuel companies and others and the and the way in which they can get governments to deviate from a larger policy plan by saying, Well, you know,
we can create a few jobs in this area or we can do this or we can contribute to that so that here we see the problem of political trade-off.
And of course, in these kind of changes, we're going to be dealing with this as you as you realise there will need to be trade-offs,
but the need to be just transitions and we need to have much more oversight over these just transitions.
And I think it's fine by all of us speaking up more about these things that matters.
In other words, we cannot have a situation where the British government says it's going to
be in favour of a green transition and then decides to open a new coal mine.
I do agree with you about the importance of trade offs, and one can't wish them away and one will end up having to make compromises.
Yes. Jo Flowers. There are a number of questions along this lines.
I'm just going to ask one. Jo Flowers asked Politics.
How does one get around the fact that politicians, local and natural national are looking to the next election,
which is to surely to short term for dealing with the. Some of the more fundamental issues.
Yes, and that's a very good point again.
And what I would say is that Wales has done is perhaps a way forward here for us to think about as a as a possibility.
So they have passed the Future Generations Act,
which means that any legislation that the National Assembly considers has to fulfil criteria with regard to its impact on future generations.
And some of the stuff that's coming out of Wales now because of that future generations is truly innovative.
For example, in some of the Welsh valleys communities have been have been told that standing in their village and looking up at the hills around them,
that they that land will be given to them for their future wellbeing,
provided that they create businesses and activities which improves the quality of life for future generations.
So to have that kind of imaginative idea of what you would do with it, this future generation perspective, I think, is really important.
And of course, New Zealand is trying to do that.
And the Wellbeing Alliance, which includes Iceland and Scotland and lots of other people now as well, are also trying to do similar things.
So I think the what you need is a longer term framework which isn't derailed by whether or not you're conservative or labour or green or whatever.
You know, that is the pathway that goes on between generations.
I strongly second your comments that about the really interesting things happening in Wales at the moment.
Do you think that sometimes it's a bit too convenient to blame politicians the whole time?
I don't normally quote Jean-Claude Juncker, but he said often we politicians know what to do.
What we don't know is to how to get elected once we've done it.
Yes. Well, I think I think he did have a very good point there,
and I think that the we should always think about the short termism of our own, of our own thinking.
And I think if we thought that government policy was much more directly addressed to solving problems at the local level,
then I think it would make a difference in terms of people's own commitment to voting for people who do see through these things.
So one thing I often say when I'm asked about this is, you know, let's think about one of the biggest problems, people.
Across Europe at the moment, which is the cost of housing, and this is particularly important in the UK and housing costs a lot of money for people,
but it also produces 40 percent of of all emissions in the UK come from households if you take waste into account and all the rest of it.
And part of that problem is that we're currently paying people who are elderly,
who live in houses to be able to burn enough fuel to keep themselves warm during the winter.
So why don't we just change the policy rate the House bill again and sort out the economics, right?
And question from Alan Hayes now, Alan points out to the extraordinary things that happened at the last Exxon shareholders meeting,
where a group called Engine No one managed to get together, a group that has got so, so Allen says, three seats on the Exxon board.
I knew it was two and they were thinking of them. Hope is right that it's three.
So an example of the investor community actually bringing about about change.
Allen asks, Can investments and I guess the investor community's help with levelling up and
with to expand it slightly to getting the corporate sector to be more sustainable?
Yeah, I think they can, and I think there's a huge amount that can be that can be done.
So one issue, one issue, of course, is is the question of investment and the way you see the return on that investment.
So one of one of the difficulties is that all of these big companies in the financial
institutions around them need to be involved in the process of shaping future markets.
So it's not just a matter of how you make lots and lots of money out of the markets as they currently are.
But how do you shape the future markets? So really, for example, for that for the United Kingdom would be the renewables market.
So if you go back a few years, even only a few years, people would say things like, Well,
we'll never be able to produce enough out of renewable energy to really get rid of fossil fuels.
And that debate has shifted dramatically. And it happened.
It was shifted only by a combination of investment, financial investment into renewables,
shaping and regulating the renewables market, making it more attractive and allowing companies and so on to invest in it.
So there is a big role, but there's also a big role for the big pension Hulu as well in redirecting
this investment to long term investment and not looking all the time for very,
very short term and immediate returns. And part of that is about how do we how do we get quickly, for example, for me,
and one of the things I'm very exercised about is how do we leave many of these fossil fuels as actually as stranded assets?
How do we leave them right? And a lot of that is about how we will manage the financial sector.
So why don't we have many more green bonds? Why did we have to build back better to the U.K., particularly?
Those have been suggested. And I think there are lots and lots of things that could be done there.
But the big change for business is that business has to think more about the long term benefits of being
a long term business as opposed to how do you get short term profits and that that is really difficult,
that that's a long, long term thing. And some businesses manage it very well.
I mean, IKEA, for example, has managed investment and the pension fund for IKEA managed investment into
social housing into things which do make a very good return for the pension fund.
But they're very, very long term and not about immediate ways of running a business.
So is that a problem with the Anglo-Saxon business model?
The tyranny of the quarterly report as opposed to IKEA from and is a bit crass to say it as
a as quite separate to this as a sort of Central European Supervisory Board type model.
Yeah, I mean, lots of people have made that argument. And actually, at the moment, we've got someone in the world working on precisely this,
looking at what has happened with the quarterly report and what's what happens with the annual report in
the AGM meetings and why it's important to do do the shareholders actually raise anything with management?
And it turns out that they very rarely do so.
They they make they make noises behind the scenes, but they very rarely raise them at the AGM.
So by the time you get to the AGM, lots of decisions will already have been made.
So it's really about changing the long term management of the company's objectives, I think.
So just as we've done some good work on this shift between, you know, stakeholder and shareholder and,
you know, whether it's the form of the company that some of the energy companies,
the problem just going back to the previous question,
I think that's one of the reasons why the engine number one initiative and action was was so extraordinary.
And at least reading what the economist said about the meeting, it completely nonplussed Nexon,
who had to go away in a dark room to see if they could reverse it.
It did not seem to be able to. Are you a fan of disclosure as a means of getting better practises in the corporate sector?
So we have a lot about climate disclosure, and we're beginning to see things about nature disclosure.
And again, it criticises this. In greenwashing, do you think that can be a force for good?
No, I think it can be a force for good because I think all of these things need all of the institutions we have in our lives in know so businesses,
governments and educational institutions and so on.
You know, we need to be much more aware of where they are investing their money and how they are managing
their long term future because actually they're involved in managing our long term future.
So all of those forms of disclosure, and I think one of the things I would say is I'd like to see when I've been writing about this,
the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis as seen as an intertwined emergency rather than one and the other going together.
So I would be very keen to see disclosure on nature based things as well.
I think that would be hugely important. I think now there's wind in the sails of that movement.
I think really what's happened over the last 18 months is is really encouraging.
Let me go to another question. It's just initials de at the Manischewitz D.H. Lawrence.
How diverse are views on what contributes to prosperity and how do we balance different ones?
What if I value undisturbed countryside? But you want high speed trains and more housing?
So I guess. Well, I guess this difference in in economics said.
But I suspect what the H is getting at is people have different values and these may not be commensurate.
How does one deal with that in a democracy? Well, that's extremely good question,
because the first thing is we have to understand is that the prosperity itself is a is is an emergent property of a complex assemblage on the ground.
So a social and ecological and environmental and economic assemblage.
So how it works in each place is going to be slightly different.
And that diversity is a good thing, not a bad thing. But when we adopt prosperity index for particular areas, we are, of course,
we have elements in it that are comparative so that we can compare across and then understand bigger trends in the economy and stuff.
But also what we're looking at is what are the top things that need action in that area for people themselves?
And that process is a process of working with communities over time.
What you tend to get in that process is a number of things bubble up to the top of what are the top five or six?
Now that doesn't mean that you can have everything you want in the notion of prosperity, because if, for example,
everybody in a community suddenly decided that prosperity for them and everybody had to have a personal swimming pool,
this would not be environmentally sustainable. Nor would it long term be actually a form of socially sustainable prosperity.
And so there are issues here about people's different values.
But what's most important is how we negotiate them and when they're in conflict and they can be in conflict.
But at the local level, what you tend to find is a great deal of solid social solidarity comes out of this process of
working on what is prosperity for us together at that level so that some of that is done there.
The question of how you deal with the fact that Birmingham wants to have a high speed rail link and those people who are
living right next to where it's going to come into London don't want it is it is a is a perennial problem of government,
but that's not really about the prosperity itself. You understand prosperity.
And I guess it relates to your point very early on about we're going to have to devolve more decision making down to more local levels.
Yeah, we want that if we want more sensible decisions to be made that affect the lives of people in the local place.
But that I guess the more decision making centres you have, the more capacity there is for disagreement.
And how does one navigate that? And again, it's easier if you're authoritarian China, but much harder in a democracy is much harder in the democracy.
But I think the one of the issues is to think about the fact that we are already locally.
So we just speak about the UK government because we're here in the UK,
but we already all of our community is very diverse and so we already have to negotiate that
diversity is itself a strength because different people bring in different and innovative solutions.
And so when you bring people together to solve problems, you have all of their imaginative capacities.
When you only have one set of people with one set of fixed ideas, then they're only going to come with their one fixed idea.
So diversity in these things is, is, is, is a is is a good, it's public good in a way.
And so that has to be how we have to work with the democracy.
Because we can't, for example, in the UK have people deciding that they're not going to allow anybody into their area who doesn't look like that.
Yes. And a final question is this from Sophie Taylor?
How might the index, I think says the Prosperity Wellbeing Index, you were talking about help.
Are you spiritual or bequest value largely within in indigenous and Aboriginal cultures?
Yeah, that's a great that's a very good question.
And I think the way it does that is by looking at what would be and ways of representing those spiritual values within the index itself.
So very often that's about protecting mountains or protecting waterways,
or protecting particular ways of being able to manage and own the land and have a relation and relationship of kinship with the land and so on.
So those issues we're working on active at the moment.
So thank you for asking that question in the work that we're doing in Kenya,
because one of the things that really makes a difference in doing the prosperity index in Kenya as opposed to doing it here in central London,
is that here in central London, people hardly ever mention the environment, except for green spaces by which they mean parks.
In Kenya, almost all of the prosperity index is environment, plus tarmac roads and some other things.
But mostly the things that people really care about are in broadly what we would call that space.
So you see those things reflected in the way in which I want you to ask a final question.
And we've been through an extraordinary time in the last 18 months with the pandemic.
Hopefully, we're coming out of it. Hopefully, you've been vaccinated with the Oxford vaccine.
But as I say, social anthropologist and looking back about what we have gone through communally over this 18 months,
a pandemic which is really stressed the interconnectedness has made government do things that are unprecedented in peacetime.
How much do you think that that is going to change the way we approach some of these other issues?
I'm not thinking about the pandemic now. I'm thinking about issues such as biodiversity and climate change, but I guess also equality as well.
Economic disparities, do you think in a couple of years will we be just back to status quo ante or do you think it will have made a difference?
No, I think it would have made a difference because I think that one of the things that it's made a difference to is the younger generation.
And I think that it's clear to them now the kinds of actions that they would like to take and the things that they would like to see happening.
And I think the more we can speed up that process, I think that, you know, for me,
if I compare it to not just two years ago, but also to sort of 40 years ago, you know, the discussion about biodiversity.
I mean, I don't remember any old even mentioning, you know, so we have come a very, very long way and we see many,
many other changes which have had that capacity to be a very slow burn and then push forward.
So gay marriage is one of them, for example, which nobody ever thought would happen.
And then it did.
No, it turned it turned very quickly, and it turned because there were enough people who suddenly thought, you know, honestly, what is this about?
We need to be doing this. And I think that the the biodiversity is one of those things.
What's more difficult is that we do have really deeply embedded systems of all thumb
of profit and elitism and gain that are going to be very difficult to unseat.
And it's there that we need to have people working in all those businesses.
So as you go up and go out into jobs, that's what needs to change. Actually, it's two minutes to go, so I can spend a final question.
So Henrietta Rishi Sunak calls you in to his wonderful office in the Treasury and says
I've just finished reading passes 400 page report and you can you can see his tied hands.
And he asks you, what is the priority of legislation I need to bring in now?
What what should I do first? Well, I think the priority would be to to bring in a form of all inclusive wealth accounting that Carter is asking for,
but also to make sure that it becomes the backbone of the way you think about the changes you
want to see in in illness that is in the management of our own landscape and farming systems.
Just to interrupt there. So Elms is a scheme that they're bringing in that will help support rural communities.
The substitute for the Common Agricultural Policy will have to make those different parts of both of policy work together.
So the environmental and mental scheme has to work alongside the idea that natural natural capital accounting will be part of this inclusive wealth,
and therefore you will adequately recompense farmers for managing public goods.
Yeah, and that it might happen. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
Fingers crossed, Henrietta, just before thanking you.
Let me thank everyone else,
everyone who's joined us this afternoon for some really super questions and apologies for the people whose questions I didn't get to.
There is one more talk in the series. It's on the 17th of June.
It's not at our normal time, it's at 12:30 and it's with Natalie Sutton, who's at Oxford, who's an expert in nature based solution.
Then she'll be talking to my colleague Cameron Hepburn, Henrietta.
That was the most fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. You bring a really fascinating perspective to these issues.
We're enormously grateful for you spending time with us this afternoon.
Thank you very much and thank you very much, Charles. Lovely.