How to pursue sustainable development goals in face of global forces?

Apartheid created horrendous inequalities of income, wealth, geography, and human rights in South Africa. The end of apartheid was of course a huge step forward for the country, removing the categorisation of people according to their race, with rights having been distributed unequally across those racial divides. Post-apartheid elections were held with no such restrictions on the right to vote, and the ANC was swept to victory with Nelson Mandela as President.

Most people in South Africa and globally expected the horrendous inequalities of income, wealth and geography – which had been created quite deliberately under the racist system of apartheid – to be removed. Thirty years later, those inequalities largely remain. Why is this? What went wrong?

That question is addressed head on by the opening article in this issue, ‘Elites and economic policy in South Africa’s transition and beyond’, by Firoz Khan and Seeraj Mohamed, who conclude that the answer is in large part due to the actions of the corporate elites during the apartheid era who managed to maintain their influence during the transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era, and continue to dominate the country today. I should declare an interest, in that Khan and Mohamed make their case in opposition to that promoted by the late Professor Vishnu Padayachee, who I had the honour to know, and with whom I co-authored some of the pieces in question:

It is from this point that we depart from the mainstream transition literature. The seminal contribution of Michie and Padayachee (1998, 2001, 2019, 2020) and Padayachee and Van Niekerk (2019) to the political economy literature on the transition and economic policy choices of the post-apartheid government is fully acknowledged. However, while identifying the huge impact of big business on the transition, the relinquishing of power to these elites to forge and manage economic policy is not sufficiently acknowledged.

In part, the difference in interpretation may be on the relative effects of national versus global effects, with Khan and Mohamed focusing on the role played by the South African business elite, while Padayachee and others put greater emphasis on global factors and pressures, from business itself through to the IMF and other international institutions, as well as the ideology of the era behind the ‘capitalism unleashed’ model of globalisation. That ideology was at its height during this era, with the US’s Bill Clinton and the UK’s Tony Blair moving their political parties in the same free market direction as the ANC came to take.

The opposition to this ‘Washington Consensus’ grew after it led to the 2007–2008 international financial crisis and the resultant global recession of 2009, but it still remains powerful, despite the added failures of austerity policies globally, and the weakened state such policies had left countries in when COVID-19 struck – and with the inevitable successor pandemics seemingly facing defences every bit as inadequate as with covid-19; the lessons have not been learned; there has been little ‘building back better’. How to make global policy in such circumstances is considered in the review article at the end of this issue, which discusses the 10 years of January 2007 to December 2016 when Ban Ki-moon was secretary general to the United Nations. He worked to bring into place the Sustainable Development Goals – which sought to deliver globally very much what the Macro-Economic Research Group had done for post-apartheid South Africa, presenting the incoming ANC Government with a development model, which the ANC Government then rejected, at great cost to the country and its people (see MERG 1993).

On the global scale, some progress was made with the Sustainable Development Goals. The most urgently pressing need for seriously interventionist policies, rather than a deregulatory free-for-all, has been the climate crisis, and here the Paris Climate Agreement gave hope. However, in the case of the Sustainable Development Goals, while the global recession and then COVID-19 has made them more important than ever, there has not been the necessary commitment to continue the initial progress. Many countries have failed to deliver on their pledges following the Paris Climate Agreement.¹

It is clear that the ‘capitalism unleashed’ model of free market and deregulatory globalisation has caused great harm at a global level, most obviously through the 2007–2008 international financial crisis that it caused. That laissez faire approach to economics has also been damaging at the level of individual countries, not only because the global harms from ‘capitalism unleashed’ impact at national levels but also because the acceptance of that ideology has led to economic policies at national level that fail to tackle the development goals of those countries – with post-apartheid South Africa being just one sad example.

Disclosure statement

As acknowledged in the text, the author was a co-author with Professor Vishnu Padayachee of many of the publications that are critiqued by the first article in this issue of the journal, which is discussed in this Editor’s Introduction.

Notes

1. See https://climateactiontracker.org/documents/1187/CAT_2023–12-05_GlobalUpdate_COP28.pdf