Global Public Investment

In this era of planetary challenges, it should come as no surprise that the answers we require to address some of these challenges need to be new answers. They need to change.

it's one in which only a few countries really get to contribute or to set the terms of the discussion and, therefore, it's one that, in a world of global challenges – where the implications, the consequences, of something like climate change playing out differently as they do around the world – really requires all countries to come together and make those decisions. But the problem is that, even with the best will in the world, national governments do not have the institutional frameworks, let alone the ability, collectively and equitably, to finance the solutions that we require. And this is why one of the things that I've been working on for many years is efforts to rethink and redesign international public finance, so that we can go from an old, outdated system of what was called Overseas Development Assistance, or ODA, to a more modern and universal system of international transfers of money between countries called Global Public Investment, or GPI.

This brings in as well one of the fundamental questions that scholars have been confronting for many years, which is how we get countries, actors, to cooperate. One of the problems is that all countries or actors have different preferences and they have different needs. We need to find ways of ensuring or enabling what we refer to sometimes as collective action.

Collective action is when we agree to put aside our immediate or our short-term needs, desires, personal preferences, in favour of a greater good – something that might be further down the road or that may take longer to be established, or even that may be to the benefit of somebody else more than it's to the benefit of us. Finding those cooperative terms in the modern world is incredibly difficult. It's difficult because countries come from very different starting points – some are very poor, some are very wealthy – and it's also difficult because the nature of the challenges we confront today is itself more diffuse, more complex, both scientifically and politically, and more immune to the sorts of solutions that we've been able to devise as international society thus far. We are fundamentally reliant upon thinking of new ways of bringing countries together where they can agree to put aside their differences and collectively come to better decisions and more effective policies to address the challenges that we're confronting today.

– the public infrastructure, the public goods, the education systems, the welfare, the health – things that global society also needs to have financed, and in ways that are sufficiently equitable to relieve us of many of the other problems that we confront as global society, whether it's refugee crises, unmanaged migration, or the consequences of climate change, which are reinforcing drought and food security crises in many places around the world. The world today is simply too integrated, just as national countries, economies and societies were 100, 150 years ago, for us any longer to pretend that financing those solutions through a very thin model of aid and charitable transfers is sufficient to what the planet and world society require today.

If we want to have a pandemic surveillance capacity to ensure that we do not experience another Covid-19, then we need to fund that, not just in one country, not just at home, but everywhere. That means that we need to help other countries also resource their part of bearing the burden of that particular challenge.

This is a fundamental step that international society needs to take now, very much in the same way as national societies took this same step 100, 150 years ago.

We need to find other ways of raising money that are more robust, particularly in times when even the wealthiest countries are experiencing fiscal crises or economic recession. Global Public Investment could be funded in a number of different ways that are more appropriate to the objectives of our international agendas, such as addressing climate change, and you could do that, for example, through taxes on oil, or through taxes on international shipping and trade – things that impact upon the environment.

You could also do it by establishing dedicated budget lines within each country. Norway has recently considered whether, in addition to having a certain portion of its national income dedicated to poverty reduction in poor countries, it might also have a budget line dedicated to financing things that we often describe as global public goods – things such as clean air and climate mitigation measures, and things such as pandemic protection. These are all things that are becoming more and more important in the world today.

We need less growth. We need to go back to basics. We need to find ways to reduce our climate footprint. We need to find ways to wean ourselves off the old industrial approaches of the past. In some ways, that too confronts challenges, because we are and may be able to move to a more digital society, but digital societies also have their need for energy consumption – in many ways greater than before. Artificial intelligence seems to be an ethereal way of using knowledge and putting knowledge directly to the work of industrial development, but artificial intelligence is establishing a huge climate footprint in terms of the servers and the capacity of the infrastructure that's required. Global Public Investment and the focus I have in my work on global public goods, and public goods more broadly, is in many ways a middle path; it's an attempt to focus on doing things better – doing things in ways that realise natural efficiencies, because, for example, we trust one another.

But growth or degrowth are not the solution. What we need most of all are more equitable and effective public services and infrastructure that can make sure we make the best use of our available resources so that we are able, as a society, each of us, to maximise our potential contribution, at the same time as maximising our own potential enjoyment and benefit of the gains of all that we have achieved thus far.

The idea that Global Public Investment is only something of the future is not, I think, something that we need to worry about. What we do need to worry about is finding ways to bring governments together to make concrete commitments to instituting the governance rules and legal structures that will underpin something like Global Public Investment. That means they need to commit to — in the case of the wealthiest countries, which have the largest vote shares in some of the international financial organisations — reducing those vote shares so that other countries are able to come in. It means that countries that do not currently contribute – what the literature sometimes refers to as free-riding countries, and there are many countries that fit in that category – need to come forward and begin to contribute so that the burden of financing our common agendas and common challenges is spread across all countries in the world. It's only when we do that that we will begin, I think, finally, to turn the tide on something such as climate change and be prepared for something like the next pandemic.

International cooperation between countries ultimately cannot be based on charity, just as welfare systems within countries are not based on charity; they are based on common sense and mutual interest. We all pay in because we recognise that, in different ways, all of us require different public services, and there's only one way to fund those. The one conception I would change about international aid is that it really ought to be called international cooperation. I think that Global Public Investment offers us the best chance of finding a vehicle for pursuing, enabling, and perhaps even one day maximising the ways in which countries are able to cooperate internationally to meet the needs of all people.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025