Policy makers always seek the holy grail of actions that can achieve multiple goals at once. The Just Transition is a useful label for doing just that and aligning actions that aim to be not just additive, but multiplicative as well, in the sense of being mutually reinforcing.
In this short piece I look at some of the actions being taken around the world which point to how the recovery strategies for post-COVID could be a rare opportunity to achieve a step forward not just in what governments do, but also in how they do them.
Specifically I’ll address new approaches to labour markets that will be vital in the likely turbulence of the next 18 months; how to use the crisis to ratchet up the intelligence of government which will be vital for any plausible decarbonisation strategies – and where responses to the COVID crisis offer important lessons; and, finally, how some of the big gaps in global institutions and governance might be filled.
Jobs for the transition
Let me start with jobs. We know about the short-term effects of the crisis on unemployment; we know that job losses tend to accelerate later on in recessions; and we know that many countries could see an additional big rise in unemployment thanks to accelerated investment in automation prompted by rules on social distancing applied to factories, warehouses and retail. The relative cost of people has gone up, which means, by definition, that the relative cost of machines has gone down.
Even without these pressures, many countries already faced intense challenges in relation to jobs and skills and the need for a much more comprehensive approach to reskilling. Some aspects of what needs to be done are now becoming visible. For example, Bangladesh has been putting in place what they call a collctive intelligence system for jobs. Before the crisis, analysis suggested that 47% of jobs in Bangladesh might be at risk over the next twenty years — including 60% of jobs in garments which currently represents 81% of exports. More recent analysis suggests some 33 million jobs could be lost in the aftermath of the crisis – not made up for by new jobs forecast to appear in ICT, pharma, agriculture and creative industries.
The new system would bring together data on current jobs and skills needs and forecasts to show which jobs are at most risk of automation. The aim is to help people plan ahead and to better align training and education provision with likely future jobs. The key point is that this needs to be orchestrated as a single system, even if its aim is to shape millions of individual decisions.
Other countries were already putting in place other vital policies to help with adaptation, such as new credit schemes to help people retrain – Singapore SkillsFuture credit and similar schemes in France and Canada, as well as more ambitious ideas around job guarantees. Meanwhile the crisis provides a great opportunity to reskill millions, while also putting many more training materials online. These will form a vital part of the shift to a net zero, circular economy: reskilling people in retrofitting housing or installing heat-pumps; collecting waste, from food to clothes; working in local food production or energy. Many of these are jobs which should be suitable for skilled and semi-skilled manual workers.
Another area of important innovation is further developing platforms to enable people to sell their time in ways that are fairer than the big platforms like Uber. Public service variants of Upwork are being trialled in several countries to make it easier for people to sell parts of their time fairly and transparently – into the public sector, retail or hospitality. California is one example, drawing on pilots in many cities, and this could be an important part of the post-COVID infrastructure.
Mobilising intelligence
A second big priority for the recovery is to use what’s been learned through the crisis about how governments can organise intelligence and then apply those lessons to economic renewal and to decarbonization. Many of the governments which have succeeded best in coping with the crisis have been very smart in their use of data and knowledge. South Korea brought together data from mobile phone networks, credit card transactions, mass testing and other sources. Singapore used both a contact tracing app and large teams to map infections. Taiwan organised sophisticated digital quarantines. Many countries linked together decision-makers, scientists and public health officials to quickly learn what was working and respond to new insights about how the virus spread.
These combinations of much smarter observation, use of models to predict how outbreaks could spread, fast learning and working closely with business and civil society, point us to a future where this kind of ‘intelligence assembly’ is at the heart of all policy action. Comparable approaches will be needed for getting to net zero: much more consistent and robust data on emissions, whether in business, transport or housing; systematic organisation of knowledge about what works, in things like home retrofitting or neighbourhood energy; and rapid experiment and learning.
So far much of the discussion has been focused on investment, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. In the next phase just as much attention needs to be paid to the data and knowledge infrastructures needed for success in cutting carbon emissions, and there will be similar needs in economic policy – for example tracking in real time which businesses and groups of businesses are growing or going under, what is happening to levels of debt, and adjusting accordingly.
For some countries, the next period is also going to bring a need for experimentation at scale. In the past much of what governments did happened automatically at scale – for example, new laws or welfare programmes. Then on the margins there were pilots and experiments. Now, the pressures of the crisis mean there’s no time for that. Instead new models of income support or public health have to implemented at scale right away, but organised as if they were pilots, with rapid assessment of what is and isn’t working and adjustment in real time This is now happening to some extent in India, Pakistan, Indonesia and many other countries. It requires a very agile mindset on the part of administrators and, again, much more systematic use of data to learn lessons fast.
Implications for global governance
These profound shifts in how government is organised will have reverberations within nations throughout the next decade. They will also have important implications for global institutions as they cast light on a big imbalance in how global institutions are organised. In the 1940s, when the current UN bodies were created, the top priorities were peacekeeping and flows of finance – which led to the creation of the IMF and World Bank as cornerstones of global governance. Then finance and banking also dominated the commercial economy. Now, however, our economy has dramatically changed. The world’s most highly-capitalised companies are founded on data, search engines and platforms – including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent.
However, there has been no comparable shift in the public arena. Within the UN system there are no equivalents to these companies, and no organisations to organise the data, knowledge or science needed to achieve the SDGs. As a result work on these is done on a shoestring and in very unsystematic ways. No-one at a global level owns this problem, and as a result the partnerships with big tech companies are ineffective and often trivial in their impact.
This gap won’t be fixed easily. But the COVID crisis has put it into even sharper relief and may galvanise long overdue action. Parliamentarians at the very least should be talking about this gap. After all, if we were creating the UN system from scratch these capacities would be at its core. For a new generation of politicians brought up on social media the need for this should be obvious. Yet too often the public sector lags. One good legacy from the crisis would be serious action to catch up.
This article is an extract taken from the Parliamentary Network publication ‘Just Transitions’. You can download a pdf version of the full document here.