A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.

The pictures that emerge are of ambivalent participants, and clunky principles that demand attention. The winning photograph is a local solar installer in a residential project in South Africa. The photographer has tried to use an on camera fill flash, but doesn’t seem to have applied any exposure compensation, so the subject – an installer awkwardly crouching – is rather underexposed. The third placed photo, ‘Indian Sugar Power’, also feels like an uneasy moment has been captured. A boy is holding a loose sugar cane on a (presumably moving – we can’t tell because the shutterspeed is set too high) truck and glaring, unemotionally into the camera. The four placed photo, ‘Mount Bagasse’, actually shows some aesthetic effort, though it’s hardly in line with the intent of the competition – to showcase the way the CDM is ‘changing lives’. Instead, the subjects are thoroughly dominated by technology and the flattened by the landscape as if in an ironic homage to the romantic modernists.

Though the aesthetics of industrial waste gas destruction are conspicuously absent from the photo contest (they make up a disproportionate number of Certified Emissions Reductions), the GAO provides a nuanced view from experts on the issue. Some believed it a good move because it probably wouldn’t have happened anyway, and these cheap ($1, sold on for $25) offsets are finite and rapidly diminishing.

However the sense that the CDM, in a Frankenstein-esque move has overtaken its original role as provider of, well, finance for some clean development projects and devoured other development pathways (such as direct legislation) is perhaps the most notable punchline of the GAO report, which notes that

… using the CDM to involve developing nations in efforts to address climate change may not always have positive effects. For example, some experts said the mechanism encourages host countries to rely on external funding from industrialized nations. Others went further, saying the CDM can dampen or delay efforts by host countries to reduce emissions on their own. The CDM does not credit emission reductions that result from newly imposed policies or standards, in part because it would be difficult to demonstrate that emission reductions were a direct result of the law. This may pose a dilemma for host countries that want to implement low-carbon policies but also want to attract investment through the CDM. Given these considerations, many experts and researchers have said the CDM would best be used as a temporary tool to help transition countries toward broader commitments (p.38).

Which isn’t to say that policy insiders are aware of this problem. Flows through the CDM will almost certainly be explicitly pulled if developing countries don’t signal an intent to get on board an international mitigation effort down the track. Perhaps the most telling data from the work of the auditors was this graph which shows the inherent ambiguities in the notion of ‘additionality’:

The CDM isn’t just asphyxiating alternative technological development, but propping up industries that were well on their way too:

According to a review of available research, between one-third and one-half of CDM projects involve some type of technology transfer. Such transfer is much more common in certain types of projects, such as industrial gas projects that utilize “end-of-pipe” technologies developed in Europe and Japan. Apart from industrial gas destruction, the project types most likely to involve technology transfer appear to be wind power, landfill gas capture, and agriculture (biogas). However, one expert pointed out that most of the wind power capacity represented in the CDM project pipeline is sited in India and China, countries that have supported domestic wind industries prior to the CDM (p.44).

In Australia, of course, has devised its own solution to the question concerning technology. Cars in, wind out. One might be forgiven for thinking that our debate is completely arse backwards if we can’t even figure out how to transition away from fossil fuel dependent stationery energy, let alone what some abstract carbon target should be. Howard was a denialist through and through, but at least he put his priorities on the table – like looking after Australia’s natural advantages. Like having babies. and digging things up.

On a more positive – if entirely unrelated – note, get your daily does of hope and the sublime in one hit from Sarah Wilson’s extraordinary documentary slideshow of Texas School for the Blind prom.

Update: Point Carbon is reporting that a ruling on whether to include new HFC-23 production in the CDM has been delayed until June. Looks like it’s part of a broader trend of delays to hit the process.

Elsewhere: Kevin Smith in New Matilda: Money Can Save the World:

The winners are energy intensive companies, whose profit margins have benefited enormously in the short term through the lucrative trade in the credits themselves. Because of fundamental flaws in the design of the CDM, industry has been able to buy cheap carbon credits to meet their emissions commitments and avoid the cost of shifting to low carbon technologies. Add these savings to potential windfalls from new trading options in derivatives and other exotic financial services and it’s no surprise there is such a gold rush for this lucrative market.

Conversely, Southern countries have lost out enormously. Many projects, such as the waste incinerator in India, have been imposed on communities without their prior, informed consent…

Political will must instead be directed at ensuring that Northern countries meet their commitment to providing finance to the South that isn’t tied to undemocratic institutions like the World Bank and that doesn’t lock those countries further into the spiral of debt.

It was the idea of making money from looking after children that so many people found objectionable, and the fact that they had no choice but to participate due to the lack of child care choice in their area. It was almost like WorkChoices for the under-fives. And there was the suspicion that ABC Learning cut corners and offered lower quality care — a view reinforced when it tried to stop the Victorian Government from inspecting its centres and argued its directors weren’t legally responsible for the children in the company’s care, when figures emerged of the company driving down the wages and working conditions of its staff, and when stories emerged of poor quality care.

That’s all now linked to the Coalition. Not just because of the subsidies model that massively expanded under John Howard, but because of the company’s willingness to embrace the Coalition, with Sallyanne Atkinson as chair and Larry Anthony on the board. ABC Learning has now become emblematic of the Howard Government’s approach to childcare, and Eddie Groves will come to be identified with the era just as surely as Alan Bond and Christopher Skase represented the Hawke years.

For those of us in Brisbane who remember Sallyanne Atkinson as both Liberal Lord Mayor and perenially unsuccessful federal candidate, her protestations about her own financial position and avoidance of responsibility repeatedly made in the Courier-Mail have been an all too familiar, and quite predictable tale. Particularly damaging, and revealing, are her comments expressing puzzlement about how ABC could lose money – being a “government supported business”. Keane is quite correct to say that the sorry tale of ABC Learning will redound on the Coalition. But I also think he doesn’t quite understand the paradigm shift in public thinking he himself describes – and I note that bloggers and commenters here at LP were questioning the validity of the market childcare model a long time ago – when he writes:

Whenever the Coalition now talks about private-sector child care — an eminently reasonable concept, given sufficiently rigorous accreditation requirements — people will recall ABC Learning and a profit-obsessed approach to looking after their kids. This is slow-burn stuff, the type of political background radiation that doesn’t show up in polls but slowly accretes over time, shaping voters’ perceptions of parties, making them resistant to their messages, or in their opponents’ case, more receptive. But it’s not yet clear that the Coalition realises how much baggage it is carrying in the debate.

I’m not sure that private-sector child care is an “eminently reasonable concept” at all. Not only – as Atkinson admits – was its business model based on what is basically rent seeking – a transfer of public funds to private profit, but whatever accounting and managerial errors were made, ABC demonstrated that the only way you could make a profit was through aggressive acquisitions in search of market dominance and local monopolies and cutting costs. It seems very clear to me that the market logic is precisely the problem, and Keane is right to point to the fact that people are questioning it, without accepting that the question about the desirability of profiting from child care is absolutely valid.

I think we’re going to see a return to child care as a matter of non-profit and voluntary association provision, with more of an educational and development focus, which I think is fantastic. But I also think we’re going to see a return to the legitimacy of state and community sector provision more broadly, as the lessons of “letting the market rip” are drawn. It would appear that some commentators can’t see those lessons even when they’re staring them in the face.