Inclusive economics: getting more bullish about cattle
In the first of this human security series, we explored a different angle on just governance for South Sudan, highlighting the need for localised approaches, where governance should be rooted in community-driven measures and balanced with novel inputs, rather than imposing external legal frameworks. Now we turn to inclusive economics, including rethinking why we seem to be in favour of ‘bull markets’ but not bull markets...
Caux Forum framing:Vast inequalities of wealth cause resentment and create conditions for conflict. Only economies which seek to meet everyone’s basic needs, and offer everyone the chance to prosper, can assure the social cohesion necessary for continuous progress.
The first time I heard a foreigner in South Sudan saying that the problem with the country is cattle, I hoped they were an analytical outlier. It seems, though, to be a much more widely held view. To say an answer to South Sudan’s economic challenges is dismantling the cattle economy is akin to saying that the answer to capitalism’s woes is dismantling financial markets. An excellent idea in both cases, some might say, but let’s not have double standards.
Someone repeated this trope the other day, in relation to one community whom they believe must economically diversify away from their cultural attachment to cattle (granted, not as problematic as others’ view that this same community’s problem is not cattle, but their culture per se – which we turn to in next chapter on inter-cultural dialogue).
Where does this assumption come from? From the outside we may see a community that is struggling to survive (still often managing well beyond the point that any of those coming to offer aid would have ever survived). And from that standpoint, it makes sense to look for solutions. And from the standpoint of the industrial model, it makes sense then to look first – in an economic sense – to individuals in these communities as factors of production. (Forget that in many countries now, even centre politics recognises that this industrial model needs some serious tweaking. Apparently – like so much else – it’s still good enough for the ‘developing’ world.)
This seems flawed. I don’t mean this in a normative sense, but in an empirical sense. These communities have assets and potential that goes wider and deeper than their labour potential interacting with the natural environment. Experience the spontaneous, stereophonic, perfectly unison choruses to traditional songs in communities and you have a cultural asset that’s possibly only rivalled in the west by a Welsh rugby crowd. It’s certainly more socially sophisticated than deculturated Australian sporting crowds, who can’t be relied on for spontaneity anymore. Instead, we rely on the US-imported contrivances of a stadium announcer and booming pop song motifs in any vacant moment.
The etymology of ‘economics’ is the Greek oikonomika, meaning simply ‘household management’. This necessarily encompasses much more than the flows of finance, and it doesn’t prescribe a capitalist growth model. The Greek were perhaps more about the household unit whereas South Sudan is more about the communal unit. We could then think about the objective of ‘inclusive economics’ more along the lines of ‘encouraging approaches to community management that build dignity and opportunities to thrive for all’.
There is a necessary fiscal (or resource) component to this, and the imbalance of resource distribution maybe shockingly present among South Sudanese, but arguably most egregious in aggregate between South Sudanese and the international community. Ironically, for all the challenges facing national governance in South Sudan, it is at least in principle possible for a South Sudanese person to become President. In fact, a young boy in Akobo a couple of months ago told me this is precisely what he has in mind. But a South Sudanese national will never be a Country Director for most of the largest international NGOs in the country, and categorically not a UN agency. This is problematic in terms of ownership and dignity, as well as the pay gaps it reinforces.
And when it comes to remuneration, external people would often agree closing the gap is desirable, but then lament that we can’t implement seriously transformative measures because ‘we should not distort the local economy’. It isn’t uncommon for a young foreigner earning upwards of USD 100K a year plus benefits, then to be in charge of locally engaged staff member, older than them and earning half their salary, if that.
It’s unclear to me how that is not distorting the economy, except insofar as us foreigners generally don’t invest any of our earnings into key areas of the economy – we visit restaurants owned and run by foreigners, if we are UN staff we don’t pay tax, we buy properties overseas, we have our holidays overseas (not allowed to do so in South Sudan, in this allegedly uniformly dangerous place), and many of us are contractually banned from investments in South Sudan. Perhaps then, true - we aren’t distorting the local economy.
What is clear is that the question of ‘inclusive economics’ cannot be treated as a dynamic that as outsiders we are external to. We are enmeshed in a system that is fundamentally inequitable, and whilst it might be therapeutic to blame the South Sudanese government for the malaise, we might do better to start where we are part of the problem.
