The Politics of Aid: Moving towards an attention economy
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Development. Copyright © 1999 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (199909) 42:3; 65–70; 009800.
Local/Global Encounters
The Politics of Aid: Moving towards an attention economy HAZEL HENDERSON
ABSTRACT Hazel Henderson argues that the politics of aid cannot be divorced from global geopolitics and must be seen in the context of today’s accelerating globalization. She argues that citizens’ groups need to harness today’s communication technologies to expand and empower an attention economy that can create change in economic behaviour on a global scale.
Taming the global casino Today, the search for more comprehensive and dynamic models of our economies is driven by globalization and electronic markets. Forecasters from many disciplines such as economics, technology assessment, game theory, ecology, or chaos and complex adaptive system models now agree that equilibrium models drawn from Cartesian–Newtonian worldviews of a deterministic, ‘clockwork’ universe no longer apply. The tightly interactive global economy is increasingly dynamic – creating a world in a hurricane of change. Nations and institutions are restructuring due to such forces. Many national governments still shirk their responsibilities to their broader constituencies in favour of serving the interests of global corporations and finance. In fact today’s globalization of finance and mega-corporations is a function not only of technology but of this conscious government deregulation of banking and finance since the 1980s. This private sector agenda is buttressed by the neoclassical economic policies of the Washington Consensus promoting further deregulation, privatization, open markets, free currency exchange and convertibility, trade liberalization – all equated with the spread of democracy. The US$1.5 trillion daily global currency markets in financial cyberspace now loom over national leaders ‘disciplining’ their policies instantaneously at the push of a trader’s computer key. Most market players and global corporations applaud this loss of sovereignty. Indeed they lobbied their governments for such de-regulation. Citizens worldwide are moving beyond cynicism and apathy to work for
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Development 42(3): Local/Global Encounters reforms. A coalition of citizen organizations linked on the Internet was able to scuttle the OECD’s attempt to impose the MAI – the best recent evidence of the power of dedicated, organized citizens. These citizens now oppose attempts to shift the MAI into the WTO. On the other hand, the United Nations (UN), with 186 member governments and a broader charter from ‘We, the people’, has achieved in its 50 years a broader set of global agreements on universal human rights, employee rights, and environmental protection, while raising humanitarian and development resources and providing peace-keeping. All these globalizations involve loss of national sovereignty and mobilize different
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