Student Network for Human Security (SNHS) Blog

In the next days, the eyes of the international community will be placed in Japan, following the outcomes of the two major meetings to take place in town: the TICAD and the G8 summit. As the host, the country has the challenge to ease the advance in the agenda of global and local problems, to reach some common agreements, and to send us back home with the hope that something will change.
Though much has been spoken about the preparatory workshops, the resulting innovative proposals and contested opinions; there are two facts, less commented until now, that could make us think – maybe naively – that Japan can be the difference.

Far from giving any complete answer, this short post is only to share a hint on a question that has been puzzling me for a while.

The issue of energy security has its own chapter inside world's agenda, specially driven by fossil fuels and electricity generation. And, for obvious reasons, it has been linked to human security, as one of the emergent components of a renovated conception on security. However, the nature of the link has been less elaborated and, personally, and uneasy one.

The reason for the reflection this time is a paper (sorry, only in Spanish) I presented in a network of researchers on Asia-Pacific and Latin-America & the Caribbean under the Inter-American Development Bank. There, I noted how human security, from its adoption in 2003, has become an appropriate complement to the conventional business and development agenda, by encompassing the diversity of threats to international trade. Consequently, energy security - and even sustainability - has been subordinated as a part of this section, although annex documents describe more in deep the compromises reached around the issue.

It is precisely in this documents where the uneasiness begins. The core of measures typically consist on guaranteeing the supply, researching on new sources of energy, discussing on the future of nuclear energy, ensuring sustainability and emissions minimization. Yet, when looked from the "protection from above and empowerment from below" stress of human security, less of the latter can be foreseen. Moreover, most of the discourse on energy security has a technocratic tone, emphasizing on mega-projects while a technological breakthroughs renovates the investment portfolios.

So, then, what is the essence of the uneasiness? I found the appropriate word in the review made by the Economist about Amory Lovins and his work around resource efficiency. His point about more work on the demand and less on the supply side of energy consumption is the crux of an energy security alternative more congruent with the idea of human security. However, the detail on such a proposal is worth much work and space.

See you next time,

OAGS

This case, briefly presented in October 25th edition of the Economist, is the example of an already known ailment of business' ethic failures, with the complicity of the state. From time to time, thanks to the technology advance and public awareness proper of the first world, some materials or products are found to have a deleterious impact on human health or the natural environment. An immediate ban on the commercialization of the substance will follow, plus a long process of epidemiological research and, probably, some kind of compensation. Yet, that is far to be the end of the story. Beyond the ethical problem behind compensation - how much is human life worth? - and internal struggle, there is always the problem of companies survival.

Apart from subsidies, which always distort the pollution problem because instead of "polluters pay" it becomes "taxpayers pay", there is always the option to take the problem somewhere else. It was a shameless business during eighties and early nineties, when hazardous waste was traded between rich countries and corrupt governments in the LDCs. Then Basel convention entered into force in 1992, and nowadays such problems rarely appear in the headlines - though the problem of electronic garbage remains an issue.

The problem regain public attention later inside the agricultural sector. Herbicides baned by health authorities in rich countries were exported to developing countries, which later could not export their production to the countries that sold them the poison, because the products had traces of the substance (Notwithstanding the reasons for the prohibition in the origin nation).

Yet, Canadian position on the Asbestos industry, with the largely accepted carcinogenic effects the material has, is closer to a criminal act. There might be some discussion about whether it is or not buyer's problem to take the risk of using the hazardous material. One project of Japanese international cooperation in the 80s was blocked by NGOs because it included a lot of strong agrochemicals to a tropical country in Southeast Asia, but because of the weather protection clothes were unbearable. But, beyond technical discussion, is this the attitude expected for the number one defender of the Responsibility to Protect?

OAGS

Something that is clear from the discussions behind any of the issues treated through human security is that a reconsideration of what is external and what is domestic is necessary. Some of today's challenges do not distinguish among borders, and thus solutions of individual nations would not be enough to face them. In a sense, what it is required to us, citizens of the third millennium, is to be able to take and enforce global domestic decisions.

This formulation may seem either paradoxical or trivial, but I want to remark is that human security urge us to think in a domestic way, even if it is at planetary scale, with the unavoidable problem of finding a way to make political units weaken their restraints. These two issues, taken separately, have different academic traditions behind, but to be faced together requires new approaches.

An interesting example we would see in the coming weeks is the Australian proposal for the design of a future agreement on CO2 emissions. International agreement are usually toothless, and those supposed to be binding take ages to be punished. So the delegation proposed that agreements should consist of regulations to be approved by each country congress, and thus to be designed globally but enforced locally.

A similar debate was going on around financial institutions during the peak of the crisis. Pundits were discussing whether it would be better to have a central regulation to prevent future devastating bubbles, or if it was better to trust on the different strategies design by each country. So far, the latter has been favored, not only for the difficulty of coordination, but also because, thinking in an evolutionary way, many strategies guarantee that someone would find the best answer when it becomes necessary.

Nevertheless, domestic decisions entail their own problems, which are easy to envision by following the internal debates of any country. That is why I found last Monday column of David Brooks in the NYT very appealing. In reviewing the discussion about the health system in the U.S., he emphasizes the dilemma between "vitality or security". He goes further to describe the situation as a "brutal choice", the choice of whether we prefer to care about the most vulnerable or economic progress. The domestic question is heavily influenced by values, which finally decide what we admit as a threat for us.

Those of us who work on security believe that such discussion will not affect us. In any case, we are by the side of threats, aren't we? But you can see that even with all the evidence, the question of value would have to be sorted - either at the local or the global scale. And certainly that is something human security experts have asked themselves less about.

Have you?