You are listening to In Pursuit of Development with Dan Banik. It is difficult to escape the sense that we are entering a more unforgiving phase in global affairs. geopolitical rivalry is intensifying foreign aid budgets are tightening and climate diplomacy appears increasingly fragile multilateral institutions are under growing strain and while the language of solidarity and global justice remains part of our vocabulary it often sounds more muted today it is certainly less assured and more openly contested instead the dominant vocabulary today appears to be about power. Military power, economic power, strategic competition, trade wars, industrial policy, security alliances. We are told that this is a more realistic world, a world in which morality must take a backseat to national interest. But is that really the only way to understand the moment we're in? In this episode, I'm delighted to welcome back to the show, one of the foremost philosophers of our time, Thomas Pogge, Lietner Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Thomas has long been at the forefront of debates on global justice, human rights, poverty reduction, and the institutional rules that shape the global economic order. Together, Thomas and I explore a set of difficult but urgent questions. Why do philosophers seem increasingly marginal in public life, even as moral dilemmas multiply? Has solidarity genuinely declined or was it always more fragile than we imagined? Are we witnessing a decisive shift from soft power to hard power? And what does that mean for global cooperation? We also examine the rise of the global south and the promise and limits of South-South cooperation? Can emerging coalitions reshape bargaining power in international development? Can institutions be redesigned to curb exploitative competition over natural resources? And importantly, the conversation moves beyond critique toward institutional design. One of the central ideas we discuss is the Ecological Impact Fund, a proposed international financing facility designed to speed up the development and spread of green technologies in lower-income countries. This is a bold idea. Instead of allowing patents to slow the spread of green technologies through monopoly pricing, innovators would waive those rights in the global south in exchange for performance-based rewards tied to measurable ecological impact, particularly emissions reductions. This conversation asks whether values still matter in a world organized around competition. Can human rights remain a foundation for cooperation, or have they become tools in a broader power struggle? If you find this conversation engaging, I would greatly appreciate your help in spreading the word. Please share the episode within your networks, whether in academic circles, policy communities, or on social media. And if you haven't already, do consider following or subscribing to the show on your preferred platform. It helps me reach new listeners and sustain thoughtful and substantive discussions like this one. This is Dan Banik, and you are listening to In Pursuit of Development. Thomas what a great pleasure to actually have you in my studio in Oslo welcome thank you the last time we chatted was in New Delhi two years ago and we were talking about something then that you were working on the health impact fund today we're going to talk about something else but you're a philosopher you're a first-rate philosopher you are a world famous philosopher Looking at the world today with polycrises and doom and gloom, a lot of people are saying we're hearing the economic perspective, the political scientists talking. What role do you think philosophy has? What should philosophers be highlighting even more? Or rather, if I can paraphrase, what are the debates that are happening within philosophy in this turmoil of a world that we live in? Yeah, so first of all, I think that what is happening in philosophy isn't perhaps the most interesting stuff and what makes philosophy most needed. I think that a lot of philosophers are doing stuff that isn't all that important, partly because they have despaired of doing something meaningful that would actually help the world. But that doesn't mean that philosophy isn't urgently needed. I think that just because there are so many problems, we cannot just do with engineers and economists. We need values, we need direction, and we need to have a social science-based understanding of why these problems persist. And I think that's where a lot of the solutions that are now being offered fall short. They're technical solutions. They may temporarily help, but they don't really understand the larger picture and why we get into these problems again and again. So as I see it, the very big task of the century is to get us from a world that is based on an equilibrium of power and competing interests, basically a competition to the death among competing states and other interests, corporations for example, to a world which is based on, still in a rules-based international order, but based on foundations that are firm moral foundations. So why aren't philosophers tackling some of these issues? Why are they not addressing these major crises in your view? Because philosophy, as I understand it, actually offers some toolkits to think analytically, to put morality at the forefront, to help train young minds to think differently about the world, about solidarity, about our obligations, our moral obligations. So if you think about climate or world poverty, stuff that you've been working on, is it not attracting that much attention? And if so, why not? No, it's not attracting a lot of attention. I think that, for me, it's also a puzzling question why it doesn't attract more attention. But one thing that I would mention is that at least in the kind of philosophy world that I'm most familiar with, the Anglophone world, it is the perception by the philosophers that they are largely irrelevant, largely sidelined. So, and if you think about, for example, who are the most well-known philosophers in continental Europe, they are pretty much, not exactly household names perhaps, but they're pretty well-known. So, pretty much every second German could tell you in a few words what Habermas is all about, or in France, similarly, with the leading intellectuals. But in the U.S., I would say that... John Rawls, is he known? No, he's not known. And, you know, if you take philosophy classes as an undergraduate, maybe you come across the name at some point, but not enough so that you would later, as an adult, still remember who the hell that was. So in my view, it is partly a demoralization that philosophers, of course, they think of themselves as important, They think of themselves as being the central component of the academy, and they feel that they are more comfortable being big fish in their small pond of the university rather than trying to get into the outside world, the policy world, and so on. And there's really nobody, if you think about all U.S. philosophers, right, the brightest and the most famous, they play no role at all in public life. Is it because they don't strive for political influence? They don't strive for political influence because they know that they will not get it. I think that's my... Even if they align themselves with, say, the MAGA movement or anything that is getting a lot of traction. I'm thinking about Robert Nozick and John Rawls. They were all important for the libertarian movement. You don't see that happening. They were not that important. No? No. I think even at their heyday, they were not really that important. I mean, compare somebody like Ian Rand, for example, and Robert Nozick. A similar kind of philosophy, broadly speaking. But Ian Rand was just a huge amount of attention relative to Nozick. and Nozick again even at his heyday very few people would have known him So it only within academia that we What about Peter Singer He got a lot He became notorious I've had him on the show. Yep. Notorious is probably the right word. But again, he has more name recognition in Central Europe than he does in the US, right? He's not really a household name in the US or anything near a household name. But in animal rights issues, I mean, certain things, Effective altruism. Again, but the animal rights movement is a fringe movement. Effective altruism is, I don't know, 1,200 pledges or something like that. It's not a big mass movement where people have really heard of him. So intellectuals in the American world, for sure, play a very minor role. So if you were to make the case today, Thomas, for my listeners, why we should be prioritizing philosophical perspectives as an angle, as a viewpoint to understand global issues. What would you say to that? Well, I would say that the fundamental problems that we need to solve in this world are problems that require thinking about values and coming to some sort of an agreement about values. And it's a notorious fact that we have value disagreement, pluralism. It's a good thing, right? we don't all have the same religion, we don't all have the same ideas about, for example, how to organize family life or how to organize the education system or the healthcare system and so on. But we can agree to disagree. And beyond this sort of agreeing to disagree, we can also recognize the sincerity of each other. Even though you don't have the same values as I do, you have values, you have something that you stand for, and we can explore each other's values. we can learn to trust each other, and we can cooperate with one another to the extent that our shared values permit. And finding that sort of an agreement, I think, is important for two reasons. One is that we can achieve things together that would otherwise be elusive. And the other is that we can also work together on a basis of trust, because the fundamental problem as I see it, but it's underlying all the problems that we have in the world today, from poverty to ecology, is that we see each other in an ultimately no-holds-barred competition with each other. So China and the U.S. are the two paradigmatic sort of poles of that competition, but everybody else fits in in some way. And we say this is really a brutal fight to the finish about power. And what you need to do in this game is you have to deploy your power in such a way that you thereby increase your power and ultimately disable your opponents. Morality, everything else is just means. It's just tools that you use to try to increase your power. It seems to me that solidarity, this feeling of showing support for injustices, that is on the decline. It seems to me that we are, or we've always been, perhaps selfish. We're thinking more and more about ourselves. Maybe we were always doing that, but at least say 10, 12, 15 years ago, we were thinking more optimistically about the world. We were thinking about the Paris Accords. We were thinking about the 2030 agenda. There was this idea that we were all largely on the same boat, you know, sustainable development goals. We would achieve all of this. We were selfish perhaps, but we were more willing to share what we had a little bit more than we are doing now. with others around the world. And now with declining foreign aid, with much more of a focus on trade wars, with more of this feeling that we have to look out for ourselves, that kind of solidarity has gone down the drain. And so the question is, can we bring it back? Or do you disagree that solidarity is on its way out? Do you think it's still there? I agree that it's on its way out. I also agree with what you suggested earlier, that maybe it wasn't all that much true solidarity to begin with. And it was, I think, one way to describe a lot of the trend that you are indicating is that it is a shift away from a concern with soft power in the direction of more hard power, economic and especially military. And as I see that, you might say power has three main sources. This is standard international affairs doctrine, military, economic, and soft. And that in the moment, we are in a period where we are moving in the direction of giving more weight to military power. Soft power being sidelined, being perceived as being less important. And this is something that's very much in the interest of the United States, because the United States, of course, has a comparative advantage in military power. What about economic power? Would you say that China is focusing on that? China has certainly a very strong interest in keeping the world relatively peaceful and making the competition mainly one about economics, because it has a comparative advantage in economic power. And interestingly, it shares that with the Europeans, right? Europe also has that same comparative advantage. so as I see it the world is fundamentally divided into China and Europe on the one side with other you know countries like Mexico and Argentina, Brazil and so on which are economically stronger than militarily and then on the other side countries like the US, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel which are militarily stronger than economically and have an interest in keeping the world in a state of tension, hostility belligerents not necessarily at war but at least close to war and they have of course an easier time it's much easier to create crises than to avert them and so if those countries more interested in belligerents have their way and move the world in that direction that means automatically that there's much less room then for investing in soft power because soft power is just less important. And so solidarity or solidarity in quotes, if you like, is going by the wayside. Yeah, you know, I've had Joe Nye on the show talking about soft power, the father of soft power. And it's still puzzling to me that the United States has voluntarily given up on this enormous amount of influence that it has exercised over the years with the dismantling of USAID. And you just name it, just pulling withdrawing from many international organizations, not supporting the UN, the list goes on. But if you think about what is happening in this space with the U.S. withdrawal and also the Europeans not being as generous as they used to be perhaps before, we've seen now the rise of the global south, particularly this year in 2025. And South-South cooperation, Thomas, we've discussed this before. We've been together in Delhi talking about these issues. This has been going on for many decades, but it seems to me it's not necessarily replacing what the U.S. void has created or, you know, the withdrawal of the U.S. But there is something there that may resemble solidarity. You know, it's this, OK, you know, you and I on the same boat. You can learn from me. I may not have a lot of money, but I can transfer expertise, technology. I can share the experiences with you. This is at least the official Chinese narrative that we've solved hunger. We can help build infrastructure. You can combat malaria in these ways. You don't have to follow the Western blueprint. Do you think South-South cooperation offers some lessons going forward in this new world that we've, you know, in this multipolar world of ours? Yeah, it certainly offers lessons. It also offers the opportunity to put international relations, at least among those countries, onto a different footing, right? Their footing, which is not a competitive footing where you sort of really are ultimately just playing the game to maximize your own power, your own economic position, but you show some genuine solidarity. And I think that is a tremendously important task for the global south, because, of course, for decades, if not centuries, the name of the game has been Divide at Conquer, right? Try to conquer, try to divide, and try to rule by competition. The British were very good at that. Very good at that. And even today, corporations, right, they say, we are willing to invest, We are willing to build a big mega factory somewhere, but whether it's Bangladesh or Vietnam or Indonesia, well, that depends on what you offer us. Where can we get the most favorable labor conditions the lowest wages where can we get tax advantages and so on and so forth So they play off these countries against each other and put them in a competitive situation Of course, these countries typically have very low tax bases. They are very resource constrained. They have tremendous development problems. And so the temptation is to bend over backwards to try to get this investment capital to flow in. Similarly with resource exploitation, right? Many of these countries are resource-rich. They have the same sort of resources. And I put in a competitive situation, you can mine your cobalt or copper here, or you can mine it there. And it depends on what sort of conditions you give us. If you give us free electricity, if you give us a tax exemption for the first 10 years, and so on and so forth. And that is often even aggravated by personal bribery, where corporations then bribe the officials of developing countries, give them special treats, you know, we can get your daughter into Harvard, this sort of thing. And the outcome of that is, again, putting these different countries at odds with each other. So what would really help in terms of South-South collaboration is if you had mechanisms, solidarity mechanism, institutions that bind these countries together and make them some sort of a collective bargaining, essentially. And that's interesting because, you know, some of the criticism in recent years has been that much of the South-South is not codified. There are no, it's not institutionalized. I was just reading a paper from the South African perspective yesterday where they're saying this BRICS plus, you know, what does it mean? There are concerns that the bigger players in the BRICS or in the global South are doing it because these things promote their own interests, India and China and Brazil, South Africa. And the argument was that one needs, and I've been also making this for a while, that it's not just the summits and the summit diplomacy. You need something in between. And it is precisely what you just said, it's the smaller countries that feel that they're bearing all the costs and they're not getting a good deal. The bigger the actor, even in South-South, they're the ones benefiting. So the bargaining power, this is something which we've been discussing on the show with many people, let's say vis-a-vis China, African countries, with a stronger bargaining power, a bargaining as a block, you know, because that seldom happens. It is often bilateral. And the African Union, you know, often fails to showcase its trend and thereby, you know, enhancing agency of countries. That's exactly right. So we struggled together, probably with you and many others in 2022 to get the AU admitted to the G20, right? That's correct. And so that succeeded. and the hope was that the AU would rise to the challenge, that they would not only occupy the seat, but they would kind of say, in order to really have weight within the G20, we have to speak with one voice for all 55 countries. And that means we have to get our act together. And that's not happened yet. But hopefully, the challenge of G20 membership will get the AU up to snuff. and will make them more capable of really creating agreement on a common position and speak as a group. The second point I wanted to make is that you can also build institutions in a sectorial way. So one thing would be a clearinghouse, a kind of auction house for resources, natural resources. Africa is notoriously rich in natural resources, but very often they are given away in sweetheart deals to individual multinational corporations who then pay no taxes and essentially take these resources for free. The only thing they do is create a little bit of employment but low-level employment of people working in mines and so forth. So if you had a clearinghouse where everything that is sold out of Africa goes through an auction process where different multinational corporations and other bidders can put in bids, you would get much better value and you would also undermine what is now very typical, this bribery business, kickbacks. We give you a sweetheart deal on the resources and you give us some private kickback to the minister of mines or whatever it is in the respective African countries. It sounds like a good idea. My first thing would be, but the big challenge in all of these is that the big actors who are already benefiting would be the ones less willing to be part of something like this. Yeah, sure. But the thing is, if this is how the resources are sold, then you have to either go through this process or else you will not get the resources. And it should be the AU then taking the initiative. Yeah, it could be under the AU auspices, but it could also be an independent agency that organizes it. But you may not get all the 55 countries on board with it, in particular countries in which corruption is endemic and that just simply like the system the way it is because, as I said, it's not just the multinationals that benefit from that. It's also African elites that benefit from the system where you sell the resources essentially through a non-competitive process in which a lot of side payments are made under the table. That's notorious. But we could start it as an agency among willing African countries, not necessarily wait for all of them, and then gradually build it up where populations in Africa in non-member states would say, why in the world are other people getting good value for their resource? What are we getting? Why are we not participating in this, right? And gradually then, I think it would spread. So Thomas, one of the things that really worries many low-income country governments, particularly this year, is lack of aid, the fact that aid is being cut all over, but also the fact that they are receiving less money, whether it is for development, but also for climate. It could be for just doing the stuff that maybe some of us, some of our countries want them to do, or to focus on some issues that they want to focus on, but there's not enough money. We've had the G20 summit. We've had the COP in Brazil. Some of the critical reports were showcasing the fact that it's still the petrostates that are dominating the discourse, a lot of criticism as to why we should even have these big meetings. In this context, two years ago, you launched the idea, at least on the show, about the Health Impact Fund. And I know you've been working on something additional called the EIF, the Ecological Impact Fund. So the Ecological Impact Fund would be a new permanent institution in the world institutional architecture. and it would pay a fixed pre-announced amount of money every year to innovators who are willing to give away their innovation, their green innovation, for free in the global south, in the developing world. In the north, everything would remain the same. But in the south, these innovators could earn impact rewards that are based on the ecological impact of their innovation, measured on two dimensions. On the one hand, improvement in health. Air pollution, of course, is the paradigm example. We have now more than 8 million people dying of air pollution every year. And so if your innovation makes inroads against air pollution, that would be rewardable. And the other dimension would be greenhouse gas emissions, reducing CO2 equivalent emissions into the atmosphere. So insofar as your innovation makes progress in these two dimensions, or one of them at least, it would be participating in the annual reward payouts for a total of five years after market introduction. And then at the end of the five years, the innovation would continue to be available for reproduction royalty-free. So essentially anybody participating would have to give up their intellectual property rights, their patent privileges, and would then participate, would be indemnified by these impact rewards. So what's the attraction? Why would they want to be a part of it? They will make money at some point, but not in the first five years? No, they make money in the first five years, but through impact rewards and not through patent markups. Why would they want to participate? Well, they retain their patent privileges in the global north, where most of the patent royalties now come from, the patent income, the monopoly rents, if you like. And they would, of course, participate only if and insofar as they think that they will make more money in the Global South by accepting the impact rewards, even at the expense of giving up the patent privileges. Why would that be the case? Well because you can really achieve very high monopoly rents in the Global South because there most customers are relatively poor And so for many classes of innovation you will simply not have many customers if you put the price too high. So with impact rewards, however, you can make a lot of money because the potential of really making a difference to pollution is very high. And that's, of course, exactly why we want to create the ecological impact fund because we think that the lowest hanging fruit in the fight against climate change and against pollution are located in the global south, right? We can, with the same money, achieve vastly more in the global south than the global north. The first thing I'm thinking about is, okay, so let's say an individual innovator comes up with a technology. You can have a technocratic solution that works in a lab setting, but for genuine impact, you have to get the politicians on board. You have to get society involved. And as we speak, New Delhi in India is struggling with air pollution of unprecedented levels. Yesterday, for the first time, a cricket match in Lucknow was called off because of smog in the area. This has never happened before. So how would it work if I came up with some sort of technology that could purify the air? I'm still reliant on power holders to sort of accept this, adopt this technology and make it happen, right? Yes, indeed. And the responsibility really is on the innovator. This is one merit of this idea, I think, to put the incentives all into one hand. So if you are an innovator who wants to develop a certain technology, you should not even start until you have thought about the next steps. You have to have a path clear to achieving impact because only if and when you achieve impact will you actually be rewarded. So you have to have a good network from the fore. Yeah, or you have to build one. You have to sort of see where am I going to get my capital. If you don't have capital to invest, larger companies have, smaller companies will have to look for investors. And you have to look for the way in which you can commercialize your innovation. So that's exactly the idea. We don't want to fund prototypes. We don't want to fund milestones or anything like that, which in the end may lead to nothing. And a lot of money is being wasted in that way now as it is. We want to really put the pot of gold at the very end of the pipeline where there is actual impact and people's health is improved and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. And as I understand it, you are now planning the pilot phase? Yeah, we are planning the pilot phase. So we are now putting together a research coalition of people, top researchers from different disciplines in different countries, to design the blueprint for a pilot project. The pilot project would be much less ambitious. It would just be a single payout of maybe $200 million, something like that, targeting 2029 or so. And we would give innovators, carefully selected innovations, maybe eight or 10 of them, a two year window to try to get as much impact for the innovation as possible in the global south or maybe a limited area in the global south. India actually would be a very good area in which to try that out. And then on the basis of impact achieved in India in that two-year period, the 200 million would be divided among these eight or nine participating innovations. I have to go back to something that you are widely known for, the concept of global justice, something that you've been working on, Thomas. This relates partly to what we've already discussed, but I just want to end on that note that in this world that we live in with so much egoism, so much self-interest and declining solidarity, can we even talk about human rights? I know that human rights is not perfect, but it's the closest we have to an idea of global justice. What is the future of human rights? Do you hear that being talked of more, or is it just back to, as you said, military power, economic statecraft, less about these other aspects that you and I care a lot about? I think that human rights is still the best basis we have, the best beginning we have for building what I talked about before, that moral foundation on which we can collaborate together. We will never have, I think, a world in which we have one single morality in which we all agree across the board on everything. But what we can hope for is a kind of overlapping consensus where first and foremost we are serious about morality and talk about each other's moral principles and values and recognize that even where we disagree, the other party is sincere about their values as we are sincere about ours. And what is happening recently or since the end of the Second World War, I think, is a kind of deprecation of the currency, right? We have moved. We still pay lip service to human rights to a certain extent, but the sincerity with which we pursue them has become less and less. They have been abused as tools in the competition for power, basically soft power kind of tools. And that obviously has not been very good for human rights. And many people are now cynical and skeptical that human rights can achieve very much. But the moment after the Second World War was really a brilliant moment in which we had an opportunity, a chance to say, let's make certain things sacred. Certain things should not be part of the ordinary political competition, which will always be there, presumably. They should be taken off that competition, and they should be held sacrosanct by all states. Genocide, for example, human rights, for example. And these things that we thought once were once and for all achieved by human civilization, they are now again very much in question. And again, you think of them in more or less strategic terms. I want to end on an optimistic note, Thomas. Give us some hope. Give my listeners some hope, the young people. What should we do more of? How can we reclaim this space? I really think that the Ecological Impact Fund illustrates the answer to that. What we need is we need something that goes beyond fighting rearguard actions, where we say, oh my God, USAID has cut its funding. What we need to do now is stuff the holes and save what can be saved and so on. That is not inspiring. That is something that is deeply depressing. So think of this as a new opportunity for doing something new. I think that's right. And we need to say, look, what would a really well-organized world look like? In a well-organized world, we wouldn't hamper the distribution of green technologies by putting patents on them so that royalties have to be paid and these new technologies don't penetrate. They don't actually get taken up, certainly in the poorer parts of the world. That is a very bad way of organizing it. Of course, innovation needs to be rewarded, but it needs to be rewarded in a way that greases, that supports its uptake rather than hampers and impedes its uptake. And so this is one plank of a future world that we can imagine for 2100, where we would have nice institutions in place across the board. let's look at whether we can build already now one particular piece of that future global institutional architecture that fits into that future world but also fits into our world would make our world much better so it's a little bit like being on theseus's boat and repairing plank by plank right we would take an old plank out and put a new plank in and the ecological impact fund is designed to be such a plank. It anticipates the future, a much better way of organizing things, of governing innovation, but it also fits into the existing architecture and makes the world as it is a lot better and thereby I think has the capacity to inspire people and say look we don't have to just fight these rearguard battles, we can actually do something that is a real step forward and shows what a value-based multilateral world would look like. Well, on that note, Thomas, it's always a great pleasure to meet you, to chat with you. Thank you very much for coming on the show again. Yeah, great pleasure to be here. Thanks, Dan. Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Banik from the University of Oslo. Please email your questions, comments and suggestions to inpursuitofdevelopment at gmail.com.
