October 3, 2002

INTEGRATION AND INTERCONNECTION

The unfolding of the Global Networked Knowledge Society challenges assumptions about how policy levers work, what effects they produce and the roles of public, private and civil society stakeholders. This challenge applies particularly to the medium-to long-term unsustainability of a Global Networked Knowledge Society that seems increasingly dominated by short-term dynamics. Sustainability discussions and policies limited to one or two of its economic, social, environmental and cultural dimensions or isolated parts of the GNKS cannot meet the challenge: sustainability is a global property of the whole system. This challenge calls for a holistic approach that looks rigorously at specific aspects of the system, combines quantitative and qualitative methods and considers appropriate combinations of policy levers: joined-up thinking to find joined-up solutions. The Integration theme within TERRA takes up the specific issues, scenarios, models and insights from the Human Capital, Inequality and Growth and Information Age Sustainability themes and uses them to build an analysis that focuses on the system as a whole.

Many tradeoffs, which play an important role in thematic analysis, can be questioned or reinterpreted at the aggregate level. For instance, it is generally believed that growth requires incentives, which in turn implies inequality. However, this may only be locally true: economic growth is strengthened if potential customers can afford the goods and services on offer; costs associated with poverty and underdevelopment are reduced by fair allocation; efficiency is strengthened by fair competition, which means strong competitors on a world-wide scale, etc. Also, while greater rewards for efforts, initiative or well thought-out risk taking are necessary incentives, there is no reason why they should be disproportionate or should persist into advantages for successive work, initiatives or generations.

As a second example, it is increasingly observed that growth in general, and economic development in particular, place increasing demands on both input and ecological resources. While the relationship between environment and income in cross-sectional data is an inverted U-shape (the environmental Kuznets curve), this need not be true of the developmental trajectories of individual countries and there are some significant exceptions to the relationship. Fundamentally, technology and economic growth constitute a two edged sword, capable both of doing and undoing damage to environmental quality, and the integrative approach offers some hope of understanding how to decouple growth from pollution or even to re-couple them into a beneficial relationship. ISTs and networking are critical to this transformation: they support the mechanisms that allow us to internalise the external costs generated by our activities and support collective mechanisms (e.g. markets) for reallocating activity and deploying solutions. At a more immediate level, advances in communications allow us to change patterns of work, commerce and energy use; these have clear implications cutting across all three of TERRA's major themes.

Finally while efficiency is clearly a prime concern, the WSSD has demonstrated that fairness is just as important, particularly in dealing with joined-up, global problems.