A crisis forces people to see the world in a different way because it ruptures the assumptions on which everyday life proceeds and so creates a doorway into a different kind of world, one in which people can improvise solutions inspired by generosity and empathy, goodwill and common endeavour, resilience and resourcefulness often lacking in normal times. That is a paraphrase of Rebecca Solnit’s account, in A Paradise Built in Hell, of the field of ‘disaster sociology’. The father of that field, which emerged from the study of the civilian experience of the Second World War, the American sociologist Charles Fritz, put it this way: ‘Disaster provides a societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalised patterns of behaviour and renders people amenable to social and personal change.’ Crisis creates a potent mixture of disruption of the status quo, freedom from convention and tight constraints, of time and resources, which drives radical improvisation. Doing things differently becomes the only and obvious solution.
“Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summon to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work.”
When that happens six factors come together. If we can understand this combination, we might have a chance of fostering the ‘can-do’ culture of crisis in normal times.
Crisis breeds innovation because it demands a sharper, shared clarity of purpose. That is true for societies as well as individuals. Amid all the chaos, a crisis can provide what corporate anthropologists Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen call The Moment of Clarity, when the point of what you are doing becomes clear: saving lives, caring for one another, putting food on the table. The trade-offs between competing claims on resources, which are normally hard to adjudicate and so slow down change, can be cut through with confidence about what really counts.
Outside a crisis it is much harder to create this sense of shared purpose. One way to do so is to frame a challenge as a crisis to garner greater commitment: just before COVID-19 emerged, campaigners had stopped talking about climate change and instead focused on the ‘climate emergency’. The need for shared purpose is one reason more governments are interested in mission-driven innovation, to mobilise collective effort to tackle big societal challenges. There are limits to how far this can be taken though: not everything can count as a crisis at the same time.
A crisis demands urgency because it can get out of hand, growing exponentially and outpacing normal responses, as the UK found to its cost by locking down later than many other countries. Crisis compresses timescales and forces people to work at speed, eliminating the steps in processes which add very little to outcomes. When time is short, we have to focus on what is really critical and not bother with the rest. That is how vaccines were developed and approved in record time. Elements in the process that are usually sequential, were carried out in parallel, compressing the time from initial prototype to approval from years to a few months.
A prime example is the way the UK’s highly praised RECOVERY programme was set up to test treatments for COVID-19 in real time in hospitals up and down the country. Normally it would take several months to set up a trial with 12,000 patients; in this crisis it took just two weeks.
Focus and urgency need to be combined to achieve results: governments should set clear, tight timescales for ‘mission-driven innovation’ to force teams to work in innovative ways. (But it is worth noting that one downside of a crisis is that it can drive out innovation which requires longer timescales and more diverse perspectives to unravel challenges and opportunities which are less obvious.)
In a crisis, one which engulfs the entire country, innovators have to find solutions that work at scale from the outset. They do not have the luxury of an extended period of prototyping to refine their solutions. Working fast to achieve scale shortcuts the innovation process, eliminating often lengthy processes of ideation, research and prototyping but also processes like ethics reviews. Instead, the emphasis has to be on what works fast, everywhere. That favours solutions which are simple and robust. (One downside of a crisis is that it can be bad for more fundamental, blue-sky research into more speculative solutions.)
Too often, public sector innovations get trapped on location: they do not spread beyond the local pockets in which they were developed. As a result, the public sector is rich in innovative solutions developed in one place which fail to scale more widely because there is no effective mechanism to achieve that.
That kind of defensive parochialism is much harder to justify in a crisis. People cannot afford to rest on their laurels; they need to show they are learning fast. Power is often centralised to mandate new solutions. Demand for and take-up of more effective solutions is driven by the scale of the need.
The need for urgency, focus and scale favours solutions which repurpose existing technologies rather than inventing things from scratch. That may be true of innovation in all settings, but crisis accentuates the advantages of repurposing and recombining what already works.
Giulio Quaggiotto, the UNDP’s innovation “guru” who is working with governments across Asia to support their responses to COVID-19, put it this way: ‘Having something to build upon really matters. Starting something from scratch during a crisis is difficult. Building on or repurposing what is already there is much more effective.’
An obvious example is the way South Korea and other Asian states drew on their experience with the SARS epidemic: that meant South Korea had thousands of epidemic intelligence officers to call upon. The Indian state of Kerala built its highly effective response on its community-based health and care system. Greece was quick to repurpose existing technologies to new ends, using a simple SMS system to regulate its lockdown. In Bangladesh, more than 11 million people have self-reported COVID-19 systems using a simple SMS system which is analysed in real time by artificial intelligence. That has allowed the authorities to spot ‘hot clusters’ of the virus 10 days earlier than they were able to at the start of the pandemic. More than 200,000 doctors and nurses went through an online training course to operate what Anir Chowdhury, policy advisor with UNDP and Member of the Prime Minister’s National Digital Task Force in Bangladesh, calls an ‘Uber pool system for doctors’.
The imperative to repurpose rather than invent explains why a crisis can lead to a sudden surge in usage of solutions that were developing only gradually in normal conditions. Indonesia has created a primary telemedicine system for 300 million people by working with a handful of startups which had been finding it hard to gain traction before the crisis. The crisis has accelerated the adoption of solutions that were developing only tentatively.
Recreating that collaborative spirit is hard outside of the conditions of crisis. The conflicts common to the public sector will likely resume as 2021 unfolds. Yet the crisis might yet create a longer lasting legacy of collaboration, not least if more governments recognise the power of mission-driven innovation to create a framework for collaborative innovation around a shared, critical challenge.
Governments and digital service providers may in future collaborate more to provide critical social infrastructures. In Bangladesh, Anir Chowdhury looks forward to a future in which the country has a digital basic income, combined with a mobile-first health system and an online distance learning platform for all children. None of that will be possible, however, without a partnership between government and mobile operators who will be entrusted with what will become vital public infrastructure. The mobile operators will want to know there is a sustainable business model: someone will have to pay.
Another place where a newfound spirit of collaboration may flourish will be in local government, where councils have learned that, in a crisis, the first and ongoing responders are in civil society. Local mutual aid, care networks and food systems might live on after the crisis, as a permanent complement to the local state.
The inherent uncertainty created by an unfolding crisis means it’s hard at the outset to say what will work. That means failure is almost inevitable and therefore more tolerable. In a crisis not everything will work first time around. As Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, puts it: you have to make 100 per cent decisions with only 50 per cent of the information. There is no option but to accept, embrace even, the radical uncertainty of the situation, and the creative, adaptive solutions that requires.
Bets have to be hedged in the knowledge that some experimental solutions have to be written off in pursuit of the one that works best. Failures are easier to write off in a fast-moving crisis.
Failure is easier to tolerate, however, so long as it leads to rapid learning and better solutions: perhaps after months of mounting criticism from the public, doctors and nurses, the UK Government has created a supply chain to provide hospitals and care homes with the PPE they need. Time will tell.
Whether all this leads to more intelligent, forgiving and thoughtful attitudes towards failure and experimentation in government remains to be seen. If it did, this would encourage innovation.
Having something to build upon really matters. Starting something from scratch during a crisis is difficult. Building on or repurposing what is already there is much more effective.
Giulio Quaggiotto, UNDP
There are plenty of reasons why it would be a mistake to model innovation policy on how we behave in a crisis. Many kinds of innovation are casualties of crisis. Serendipitous innovation is unlikely to thrive in a socially distanced world in which a visit to a café has to be pre-booked. In a crisis patient, blue-sky research often has to play second fiddle to urgent pragmatic problem-solving. A clear sense of shared focus can mobilise collective action to achieve a common goal, but a good deal of innovation comes from the plurality and diversity of values and vantage points in society. Getting government to focus on a single mission is not just difficult, it might be dangerous if less politically correct missions are neglected.
Yet a crisis like COVID-19 does show us how society can be rapidly reorganised around a different set of priorities. A profound economic and social shock provides a heightened sense of urgency and focus, which in turn creates a newfound willingness to collaborate among people and agencies used to fighting turf wars with one another. The need to work at speed and scale means that inventing things from scratch is out of the question; repurposing existing technologies, infrastructure and institutions is far more effective. All of this requires a tolerance of failure as solutions that are initially not good enough are discarded or improved.
Crisis is not a model for all kinds of innovation. Yet in these special conditions we become capable of turning what was thought impossible into everyday reality. Crisis reveals not just weaknesses but also strengths and capabilities; it creates huge costs but also unexpected dividends in all the new and different ways we find to organise ourselves that seemed out of the question just a few months ago.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.