India takes leadership of the G20 at a critical time. The Prime Minister has declared India will stive to strengthen global cooperation to resolve systemic problems such as economic inequities, climate change, and unequal access to technologies. This requires a new approach: more systems thinking and less expert driven; and more common people and less big power driven.
A primary cause of systemic problems is fragmentation of scientific knowledge, which advances in silos, with each discipline knowing more about less; all losing sight of what makes everything work together. Government programs, NGOs, and corporations are drawn to “focus” on one, or very few things to do them “at scale” for increasing their impacts. The second and third order effects of their own large-scale actions on the condition of the whole system are not foreseen; there is insufficient cooperation amongst them; and the well-being of the entire system is reduced. For example, there are multiple causes for malnutrition of children, a persisting problem in India. In addition to poor diet, other causes include poor sanitation, unclean water, and maternal health. Lack of systems thinking in the design of policies, and collaborative working in their implementation, are principal causes of systemic problems such as malnutrition, persistent poverty, increasing inequalities, and environmental degradation.
Systems thinking and scientific knowledge
Global institutions set up after the Second World War to maintain global peace and an equitable order in global financial and trade systems have broken down. Civilization seems to be breaking down while science advances with high-tech weapons deployed by rich countries to defeat each other. Millions of innocent refugees are victims of ravaging wars in the Middle East, and now in Ukraine, for access to oil and energy, as well as civil wars stirred by contests amongst powerful countries for global hegemony. The Middle East is the source of, as well as refuge for millions, forgotten in camps in Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, and Turkey, with global attention shifting to the latest refugee crisis in Ukraine.
Refugees in the oldest camps are constrained to rebuild their lives and communities in difficult conditions. They have no government to rely on, only each other, and some support from local and international NGOs, who too are finding it harder to obtain resources amidst the global turmoil. The refugees must rely for solutions on traditional forms of cooperation within families and communities, and on the ancient wisdom of “systems thinking”. Lessons from them may explain how broken systems can be repaired bottom up with people at the center of solutions. (See Repairing a Disordered World Bottom Up https://arunmaira.com/reading-ideas/f/repairing-a-disordered-world-bottom-up).
Ukraine and the Middle East are where Asia meets Europe, and East meets West, and where major geo-political conflicts are coming to earth. The Middle East has also become the site of contests between two modes of civilization. On one side, the European scientific Enlightenment, tracing its history to Greece, with its “liberal values” placing individual rights above social solidarity. On the other side, a more ancient Enlightenment, with roots in China, India, and Persia, that submits to the wonder of the Universe, and respects the wisdom of traditions.
Do Asians think differently than Westerners? Do they see the world through different lenses? Development psychologists Joan Miller and Richard Nesbitt think so. One sees components within systems; the other the pattern of relationships amongst them, as Nesbitt explains in his book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why? For Asians, the world is “a complex place understandable in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject to more collective than personal control”. Whereas to the Westerner, the world is “a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and is highly subject to personal control”.
“One size and shape” solutions, found by experts divided in their scientific and policy silos, and for whom people are merely numbers in equations, are breaking up the health of local and global systems. The benefits of modern science and technology are going disproportionately to too few people in the world and, with their second order effects, are destroying the collective commons of the natural environment and social harmony on which all depend.
Systems thinking and cooperative action must guide policies to make the world better for everyone. A solution to global systemic problems that humanity must solve urgently in the 21st century, such as climate change and increasing inequalities, is local systems solutions collaboratively implemented by communities in their own places where these global problems come together in different shapes. Also, policy makers must listen to common citizens respectfully. Who may not have gained sufficient modern scientific enlightenment, but have not yet lost their traditional wisdom and common sense.
(An abridged version of this was published in Economic Times on 15th Nov 2022)