The Club of Rome Podcast

Is the shifting global order heading towards conflict, or can the world's many civilisations and worldviews learn to coexist? In this episode, Chandran Nair, founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and member of the Club of Rome, joins Nolita Mvunelo to unpack the tensions reshaping international relations.

Nair argues that today's flashpoints, from Ukraine to Gaza to Venezuela, stem from the West's difficulty in accepting the rise of other powers, and he challenges us to rethink what leadership, democracy and accountability mean in a crowded, unequal world. Tune in for a candid, provocative discussion on power, history and the search for a genuinely multipolar peace.

 

Transcript

Nolita: It is perhaps clearer than ever that the global geopolitical order is shifting. The question is, will this happen through force and disruption, or can we transition to a world where many civilisations and worldviews can coexist in mutual respect?

Today's guest is well-placed to explore these answers. Chandran Nair is founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, a Pan-Asian think tank based in Hong Kong, focused on advancing a deeper understanding of global issues, including the shift of economic and political influence from the West to Asia, and the reshaping of the rules of global capitalism.

His books include "Understanding China," "Dismantling Global White Privilege" and "Consumptionomics: Asia's Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet." In our conversation, we discuss how different worldviews are influencing the global landscape today and possible pathways to a more peaceful multipolar world.

Chandran, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to jump straight into the first question. So last year, in 2025, you released a book on Understanding China, which is a report to the Club of Rome and you reinforced the idea of multiple worldviews. You speak about how the Chinese see an all-encompassing civilisational concept called Under the Heaven.

From this vantage point, how do you see the current relationship between existing civilisations and worldviews and what is standing in the way of reconciling those worldviews? 

Chandran: What I mentioned in the book was simply to try and get people to understand that China and other large countries see the world quite differently in terms of its complexities and the relationship between countries than the West.

And if you're an objective observer of history and of Chinese, uh, China's relationship with the world, you'll see that by far, the Chinese have adhered to that to that sort of principle of coexistence, civilizational relationships, et cetera. That is not to say that some may interpret some actions of China, as some are doing, as a departure from that.

But broadly, if you're an objective observer, you will say the same. You would probably see the same of India as well.

I'd just like to make a point about this term civilisation. Everybody uses that. I sort of don't like it because it seems to imply that there are hundreds of civilisations around and depends how you wanna define a civilisation.

There's a lot of arguments of what is a civilisation. And then we can get into a rabbit hole of civilisations, right? And then this whole thing about, "well, which civilisation is older? Which civilisation is deeper? Which civilisation has absorbed all of these things?" And all of that. So I sort of don't like that civilisational term, though in the context of trying to explain China to the world, I do say that China remains very much a civilisational state. You could not say that the United States is a civilisational state. Question it has... 

Nolita: What's the... 

Chandran: Well, because it's too young. It has no underlying sort of long history of 10,000 years of a culture, civilisation, traditions, et cetera, born. So it's from all of the place. If the Native Americans had not been slaughtered, then you'd say there was a civilisation there. 

So that's a point I would like to make. I think your second question was how do I see the current world order in terms of civilisational relationships. Am I correct? 

Nolita: Yeah and worldviews. 'Cause, I mean, you mentioned that you wouldn't consider, necessarily, the US a civilisational state because of its age, but it also represents a very specific type of worldview versus the under the heaven worldview you were describing in the book. How do these, you know, interact and what does reconciling them look like?

Chandran: Yeah. I mean, the American worldview you could call it's a punk view, because it's the new punk in town who became very rich and through, as we know colonisation, I would say, I think it would be fairly said genocide, extermination of large amounts of flora and fauna particularly. But this is basically a modern warring state. Advanced technologically, but doesn't make it a civilisation. 

So let's cut to the chase. What we're saying actually is today's tensions in the world, and some may disagree, are essentially the major tensions of the world. This is not to say there aren't badly governed countries in Africa, Middle East, in my region, et cetera. But if you look at global tensions, then these are all as a result of both the unraveling of the post-colonial era, right?

And then the desire for past imperial powers to retain supremacy. And the United States is essentially a creation of imperial powers, which is mainly Europe, right? And then it created this powerful nation, which because of its, you know, well-known sense of exceptionalism, which I argue is born out of a great, because of its birth, a sense of superiority and white supremacy, is unable to, because it has no civilisational roots, is unable to contend with the rise of others and, in this instance, China. But it'll soon find itself unable, if it survives its resistance against the rise of the others, the equity that others are striving for. Then it'll find itself, you know, opposing the rise of Africa opposing the rise of India perhaps first, and all that.

So global tensions at the moment are a function of the inability of Western powers, Europe and the United States, to deal with the rise of the others. So if you look at the biggest global geopolitical tension today, it's essentially China and the USA. And then you have in Europe, of course, the tension between the notion that there is this communist bloc, the Cold War mentality, this socialist country called Russia. And then there's all these freedom-loving people in Europe, or these governments who then have been exposed as being willing to support a genocide in Palestine, which is itself a creation of the last 100 years because of colonial exploits.

So you have to really understand where is the angst coming from. And I've been at pains to point out to you that a different- because some people say, "Well, you know, bad leaders exist in different parts." I want to acknowledge that. Bad governance exists. But when you then look at the world today, when you look at global tensions and if you look at the three tensions today, the big issues that we're all concerned about, the Russia-Ukraine war. Gaza. You look at what's happening in Venezuela, the intimidation of a country like cuba and you look at Iran, it's all Western-led. It's all Western-led.

Nolita: I want to talk about the today and the way forward, 'cause you're talking about the inability to deal with the rights of others. I think there's a part of it where, like, there's a type of leadership needed, as you're saying, like we have bad leaders in a lot of places and also very critical places where a different leadership is needed. I also listened to a podcast of yours where you spoke about intellectual honesty being like a key competence that's needed. If someone was listening and thinking what is a way forward that doesn't result in conflicts or the loss of rights or, you know, people just subsuming to the fact that maybe there's an order and we need to accept what the order is in order for there to not be conflict going forward, what is the leadership that's needed? 

Chandran: Well, you know, I think the leadership is always, the leadership is always a reflection of where the society is at any one point, right? 

You can't have a rational discussion with the current administration of the US. You simply can't. So then it's utopian to say, "Well, how do we do this and that?" You're gonna have to wait for this guy to move on.

Nolita: But he's one person and there's...

Chandran: Exactly.

Nolita: There's eight billion other people that are- He's not doing it alone. I think that's why I started with worldviews 'cause I think there's, there are mental paradigms that are driving a lot of these assumptions and acceptances of not accepting the rights or the movement towards more people having rights.

It's a long-held debate. I mean, the whole thing about limits to growth was also about more people are going to need to have their basic needs met, but it's going to be a challenge. How do we figure it out? And people are refusing to figure it out and now we're in these resource challenges also at the same time.

Chandran: All right. Let me, let me... I mean, I think we should not conflate these things, okay? What I was trying to say is, you were saying what are the pathways? Of course, the pathways are dialogue, understanding, respect. That's what we do. We can call it allowing nation states to self-determination, collaborating with self-determination in mind, righteous, might is not right, all of those things.

But you can't deal with people who are either supremacists, who are captive to the war industry, et cetera. That is the world we've created to the most powerful nations in the world. That's NATO, that's the USA. And all I wanted to say was that's why the world, the global tensions are arising out of this complex economics in which then leaders have risen.

Look at the swing to the right in Europe. And of course, the United States is a basket case in terms of... And I think most Americans who are not, you know, the rabbit type would agree, right? So the leadership is a reflection of what the state is. And it's not about eight billion people yeah.

But understand that because this one nation has accumulated so much power, then they can sanction Iran, kill half a million babies by not allowing them access to medicine, et cetera. The former secretary for state, I think it was Madeleine Albright, when asked, you know, tens of millions of people, children have died, she said, "Well, you know, tough stuff happens. That's how it is." Right? But they don't want to say it if they were white kids. So that's one part of it.

Now we're gonna talk you talked about development and leadership, right? So if political parties in the sort of democratic model are every four years fighting for power, et cetera, what we have seen is a complete erosion of values, of people with intellectual honesty and ability to lead.

Look at the UK, right? Uh, has declined and we don't even know who's the current prime minister's name and he may last another six months. So you've got this kind of sharp decline in terms of the quality of leadership because of the multi-party sort of electoral model, right? How are you gonna fix it? I don't know yet because we're in a new era.

In many other countries of the world, we're seeing different different models appear. But I think we'd be hard-pressed to say, "Uh, that's the model. That's the model." There are models and, you know, people look at, but they are in very safe, secure places of the world where there are no real tensions. And I'm always, I'm always bemused when people talk about Scandinavia and countries, but that's like, you know, you come from Africa, it's like five people live in Scandinavia.

It's kind of easy to manage and everyone can be just cool, right? And now a few migrants are coming. They're getting a bit heated up because it's getting a bit crowded, but still, it's an empty space and kind of space in terms of access to resources, et cetera. The problem lies in our leadership in the crowded parts of the world.

Your continent, my continent, et cetera. And the question is, which political system will allow, right, for the most competent leaders in accountable systems to rise? We have seen that democracy is not accountable. So that myth that democracy creates good leaders, it's accountable and you can change, is just been washed away.

You can change, but what you get is another dummy, right? Because the system is corroded so much that the most rapacious sort of individuals, it get into that system. And I think that's the big challenge about leadership. Which system allows you to essentially have the most, the best sort of quality leaders?

Not easy. If I look around, and I don't wanna mention China because then people will say, "Ah, he's pro-China," et cetera. But if you look around and you look, I mean, it's so difficult that you even have to make excuses for saying that's a great example, right? But you can read between the lines. But if you look there around the world, hmm, where?

But increasingly, and it's a small place, people look to places like Singapore and people say, "Oh, Lee Kuan Yew was probably one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century." Now, was Lee Kuan Yew a soft-pedaling democrat? No, he was hard-nosed. But it was a predominantly Chinese culture. Singapore itself is very young, but the civilisational roots are Chinese, Confucius.

So within that culture, people understood the need for a strong leader, but they also understood that he had to perform. And so long as he performed, he was not corrupt, he delivered, he was revered and he won. They had elections and those who are critical of it would say it was performative, but they had elections.

But he was tough as nails against his opponents as well. And, you know, in the early days when he was building Singapore in the '70s and '80s, the Western media called him a dictator, you know, and that it was not free and fair. But today, Singapore is much admired, right? So to your point, there is no formulae for this.

It is a function of where the society is, at what place, what leaders come to the fore and then which system allows it. I am sure there are very capable Americans, but they will never get into or they will not desire to enter the system, because the system is totally corrupt now. It's drenched in money and, you know, no good person wants to go through all of that.

The same in the UK. So what happens in Africa? You're from South Africa and, you know, there is a problem. There is a problem of not having good leaders spring to the fore. And even if good people turn up and just give me a minute, turn up, the democratic sort of process is so vicious that who wants to go through all of this?

And I think that's the big unknown. And I don't want to say, "What's the alternative?" Well, you might wanna look at the Chinese model.

Nolita: You are listening to the Club of Rome Podcast, the podcast that explores bold ideas from the experts and practitioners addressing global challenges through systems thinking. This conversation is part of our third season, where we've already spoken to thinkers like Yemi Keri on AI in Africa, to Jayati Ghosh on wellbeing economics and to Katharina Pistor on law and capitalism.

You can find our past episodes discussing themes like the universal basic dividend, climate resilience, feminism and peace on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the discussion.

I've always thought, especially when it comes- I mean, I spend a lot of time thinking about Africa and I'm much less informed about Asia. But I always think that had people had time to figure these things out without the intervention of other people, you would find that, like, leadership systems would develop and they would be unique to that context.

Like, I always think to myself, okay, but Europe had like 1,000 years of trying to figure this out with no one intervening and so they have their different governance systems. And Africa just didn't get the same chance. And so when there are these conflicts, it's treated as like, oh, this is a hopeless situation.

And it's like, no, it's because we just didn't have the same thousand years to figure these things out on what leadership looks like. I mean, Nigeria has like dozens of different subcultures in there and then expecting that one strong man will lead it might be a bit of a problem compared to, again, like a country up north where 90 point something percent of the population looks and comes from the same culture.

It's, it's different. 

Chandran: I mean, the historical sort of timeframes you mentioned are important, but don't forget that it's actually wealth and power. So Europe, having plundered the world, essentially became wealthy. Small population, that wealth trickled into the societies, so you built homes, you had roads, you had all of these things built, and you became wealthy and you were a small minority.

You know, you were a small minority who ruled the world and accumulated, you know? 90% of the wealth, which was then invested in the streets of London and all these cities, et cetera. So people had nothing to complain because life seemed to be improving all the time. Now, on the other side, then you had the poor Africans who, as you said then, "Who are these people taking all of this from us? Our whole way of living has been essentially altered."

And this happened in India as well. And we know we didn't belong to one country. We were different tribes. Of course, there were factions, et cetera. And so then the modern world, we were put in and we were told our borders are this, but we've already had been raped and pillaged.

And so what happens then is people start fighting. Civil wars, et cetera, as you know, in Nigeria, Biafra, all of those things happened. So then we're seeing the aftermath of all of that unraveling. So, you know, when you look at South Africa, how long was the apartheid era for? About 150 years?

When you have 150 years of that sort of oppression, you can't expect people to come out of that within the space of 25 years. No chance. It's like saying, "I've been hit by a bus, all my limbs are broken, I'm in ICU. And by the way, turn up to work tomorrow." You can't. So the thing that we have to understand is how will that society recover from that trauma, right?

So it's gonna take some time and then we can look at it. The last point I'll make is we also have to understand that, you know, this is not 100 years ago. This is a full world, as the club has said. So the pressures on humanity in every society are much more profound. So how do you create political systems and institutions that can even deal with it and have leaders who are good at it?

I suspect that if you put Lee Kuan Yew in, say, a large country like Indonesia today, which is, you know, in trouble, right? Huge amount of issues with close to 300 million people today. Someone who is thought of as being the most, one of the leading statesmen of the 20th century, I suspect he would struggle.

Very different time. Because when he became prime minister of Singapore, the world's population was only about three and a half billion and I think Singapore was less than a million people. Today it's 8 million. So you can see what I'm talking about. Everything is so complex and I think large countries in the developing world are caught in a really complex situation.

Their wealth has been taken away. They've still got a lot of wealth, but then it's all trapped in an old system. Their elites want to be like those who raped and plundered because that's all they know about, you know, neoclassical sort of economic theories and they don't have the wisdom to essentially bring their countries forward.

Nolita: An inability to deal with the rights of others. I think I'm gonna keep that one with me, 'cause I think we are transitioning towards the discussion of peace, justice and a way forward once again. Do you feel that there will be a path towards peace with all of these tensions, these also, I guess, lack of intellectual honesty, ability to lead and these challenges that you're highlighting?

What does peace and prosperity on a thriving planet also, 'cause that's always in the background, is like the things that are urgent right now, there's still this big picture that's happening in the background that's making things worse and creating more opportunities for conflict over resources and that sort of stuff.

What does that look like? Can we get mutual respect?

Chandran: I mean, I think we should be realistic and say there are parts to peace that have been created. Otherwise, the rest of the world, most of the world will be, you know, in mayhem, right? So in many parts of the world, we all coexist. We coexist. And again, we come back to the point when you say, you know, the parts of peace, et cetera, what are you referring to?

You're actually referring again to essentially a couple of countries at the moment who have essentially turned the world upside down. And that I'm not suggesting therefore that there aren't bad things happening in Sudan, et cetera, but all of this has historical linkages as well. But if you take away, if the most powerful countries, let's be very straight about this, if the most powerful countries, the United States was to be able to essentially, curtail the excesses of Israel, things would be very different in the Middle East.

Extremely different. Huge amount of prosperity it would create. That doesn't mean the Middle East would essentially become a haven of peace. But my God, it would change. Would there be some tensions within Saudi Arabia, Iran, et cetera? Yes. But it would not be a world churning sort of effect, right? And in fact, it could be a very different one.

Just two years ago, it seemed like something was gonna happen, Iran, Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And then if you said Iran, yhe United States and China were cooperating. And let's be very clear, and again, I don't want to be seen as someone who's saying China is all great. But when people talk about the US-China conflict, I said, "Hmm, you better be careful."

A conflict means that two people trying to get at...two sides trying to get at each other. The Chinese are not trying to get to the US. It's the Americans who essentially instigated all the anti-China stuff for whatever reasons, but mainly around their inability to share power with a rising superpower and therefore deeming many actions of the Chinese as breaking international law, et cetera, which have all fallen by the wayside given that the main culprit, the main propo- the main country that has broken most international laws is the United States.

But if the United States gave up its fear of sharing power with the eme- the power of China, imagine what the world will look like. So the answer is there is a path to peace, a global peace. There'll always be a few bushfires here, but if the two major powers work together, I think we would see a very different world.

And that's why I believe the onus is still on the Americans coming to terms with the new world order. And the time we live in now is essentially shrouded in the difficulties of Americans coming to terms with the rise of the others.

Nolita: I think that we are looking at the US, but there are also a lot of countries that are complicit. And what you might find is once you pull out the veil of the US, you'll find a lot of things underneath that are enabling what the, um, what is happening also. I don't know if it's that clean of an answer.

But because of time, I'm gonna go to our last question and now we're talking about the Club of Rome. Last year, we had the first conference in China and it felt like an important and intellectual and cultural milestone for the organisation. So what insights did you draw from the meeting of bridging, you know, between what is historically been a very Western organisation having its first meeting in China and bridging partnerships with universities and organisations in the country?

Chandran: Yeah, I think it was a very good effort of the club to have this first meeting in China and it should do more of that. You say the Club of Rome is historically a Western-dominated organisation. I would say it still is. Uh, that's not necessarily a criticism, but that's the reality of where it is.

But more importantly is the ideas, the ideas that the Club of Rome's committed to and I think that's the biggest challenge for the club.

The ideas are, because it's kind of Western-centric, they seem to be dominated by ideas emanating out of the West, which I have argued reflect a great lack of understanding about the rest of the world, but also reflect an inability to look at issues to do with politics, economics from a different lens, because they start to reshape how we see governance systems.

And I think it was so interesting for me that many members of the club had no idea where China was, and this is the 21st century. We're not living in the age of Marco Polo where you needed to take, you know, months to get on a boat and come to China.

And so I think that is a problem for the world, particularly in the West, not to understand the changes taking place in the other world. And so many people having the arrogance to assume they know and then pontificating about these things. So what I learned there is, even though I'm aware of these blind spots, that the blind spots are actually much deeper than I thought.

Second, it was pro- perhaps the obvious thing, people were unused to listening to the views of other people because the conference was organised in a way I think I contributed a little, to bring some Chinese voices in there that were not curated to just say what we all wanted to hear.

And I think this is actually an important breakthrough. There was some discomfort with what was said, et cetera. And finally, I would say that, it reinforced my belief that it's all right for us to live in a world in which there are extremely different viewpoints.

So I think for the Club of Rome, it was a great exercise, but it just showed we need to do this regularly and we need to do it in different parts of the world.

So get people to really wake up and say, "Oh, this is what the world looks like."

So I think it was a great move but it reinforced my views that there's so much learning to be done and reinforced my view that so many people talk about the world, but they've never been to really look and think. And I think going to China was a great thing for many in the club and I hope more people will go to really understand what's going on there. Both its strengths and weaknesses.

Nolita: Well, here's to building the capacity to deal with the rights of others. And I share that sentiment also and I hope we build more of those opportunities. Thank you so much for joining us today and we will end our conversation here.

Chandran: Thank you.

Nolita: And that was my discussion with Chandra Nair. You've been listening to the Club of Rome Podcast, where we unpack big ideas and global challenges with thought leaders from across the world. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave a rating or review and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can learn more about the Club of Rome and listen to more podcast episodes at https://clubofrome.org

While the world debates artificial intelligence's implications for economies and everyday life, one question is too often overlooked: what does the AI revolution mean for Africa? In this episode, Till Kellerhoff, director for content and programmes at the Club of Rome, speaks with Yemi Keri, a technology executive, impact investor and ecosystem builder and member of the Club of Rome with over two decades of leadership experience across Africa's public and private sectors.  

As co-founder of Rising Tide Africa and president of the African Business Angel Network, Yemi brings a distinctive lens on inclusive capital and early-stage innovation. She sets out an optimistic case for AI as a "development equaliser" that could transform agriculture, healthcare and education across the continent, while pressing for African data sovereignty, homegrown cloud infrastructure and greater investment in local talent. The conversation also turns to the risks of a new extractive era built on data rather than raw materials, the energy demands of AI infrastructure, and why more women need a seat at the table in building the technology's future. Is this Africa's chance to leapfrog towards a more ethical and sustainable AI revolution, or do we risk repeating old patterns of inequality in new forms?

 

Transcript

Till: While everyone currently talks about artificial intelligence and its implications for our work, our economies and our lives, one topic that is often underexplored is the implications of the AI revolution for African countries and Africa's digital transformation. And one of the tech leaders driving this transformation is Yemi Keri.

Yemi is a technology executive, impact investor and ecosystem builder with over two decades of leadership experience across the public and private sectors in Africa. She's the co-founder of Rising Tide Africa, a women-focused angel investment network and the president of the African Business Angel Network, where she champions inclusive capital and supports the growth of early-stage ventures across the continent.

I'm Till Kellerhoff, director for Content and Programs at the Club of Rome and in this episode, we explore Yemi's take on what an AI-positive future could look like in Africa. Yemi paints a particularly optimistic picture of the future of AI in Africa and its possibilities to revolutionise agriculture, healthcare and innovation.

In this episode, we'll hear from her based on the experiences in Africa's innovation system, then unpack some of the other views on AI's risks and challenges. 

Till: Hi, Yemi. Welcome. Pleasure to have you on the Club of Rome Podcast. From where are you calling today?

Yemi: Today I'm speaking to you from the rainy season of Lagos. So if you listen behind me, you would hear traffic.

Till: We want to talk about this big topic of AI today and a question that gets rarely asked, but is maybe good to be asked from the perspective of the Club of Rome that wants to ask fundamental questions. What do we need AI for? What is AI for from your perspective? Why do we need it? 

Yemi: I facilitate at a business school and I tell them that it's going to become a utility, like we have electricity, in the long run. We need AI where it helps us solve real consistent problems, issues like healthcare access, agricultural productivity.

Can AI help a farmer increase their yields? Can it help a teacher reach 100 students or 400 students instead of maybe 20? So if AI helps us solve all of these kind of problems, then it becomes a transformational, tool or platform or enabler.

Till: So Yemi, if we look at concrete examples on the ground where AI is already useful today and will be useful in the future, what would that be from your perspective? 

Yemi: I mean, there are different variants of things that are happening. Particularly for when we are looking at the impact on climate change in itself on smallholder farmers. In the agri-sector, a lot of projects are using AI to ensure that information gets to the farmers at the, you know, the smallholder farmers because I mean, they grow our crops and we are predominantly an agri-economy.

And so, a lot of AI is being utilised and models are being built so that they help the farmers, the smallholder farmers, you know, with predictive crop, the soil testing, everything like that. The other one I know is really healthcare. Diagnosis of diseases, or symptoms as the medical people call it. It's more affordable to people that, in the rural areas, would have to transport themselves to a hospital to be able to get that done.

And so if you're looking at the impact on the society, a lot is being done and developed that is supporting and helping the society to grow.

Till: And you described AI as a utility, similar to electricity and one can also describe it as a tool. And I think what we see in the development of general, in the last decades and hundreds of years, is that tools can be used both for, let's say, good and evil, right?

Tools are not good per se or bad per se, but they can be used in different directions. And you named a few positive ones, particularly for the African continent and we will go more into that. But what gives you your optimism that AI indeed will follow the route of being used for the positive things rather than all the potentially negative ones, right?

You can use AI also for automated weapons. You can use AI for all kind of things that might not benefit the flourishing of humanity on our planet. So why are you optimistic about it?

Yemi: I guess I come from a standpoint that when we talk about good or bad, doesn't that tell you about the user? It is really a behavioral thing when you're talking about AI for good or responsible AI, those who...you know, it is ethical AI. It is our values and our ethics. So when you choose to use AI for deepfake and use it to destabilise another human being's life, it is you as a human being and what you believe you want to use, you want to use it for evil. It's not the AI that is good or bad, it is the people that are using it that have good intentions or bad intentions. That's where I see this. 

Till: Do you see a risk that we individualise the debate by that, in a way, that it's in the end the responsibility of the users to see if they do good things with that or bad things with that? While on the other side, we see the systemic changes to our economy, to our lives being implemented by, basically, a few big companies currently, right?

And it's very, very difficult as an individual with high ethical standards to swim against the current of potentially unsustainable business models by big AI companies, for example, right? So how do you see this relationship between kind of the systemic implementation of AI globally; what it does to our lives, our economies and the kind of individual user case, that has the agency to decide in what areas to use AI and not?

Yemi: The institutions have their strategy and the bottom line is the bottom line that they're all after, and they have the stakeholders that they're responsible for, and there is a long debate about the use cases for what they want to use AI for.

They have the capital for them to be able to expand and buy, use infrastructure or even compute power. The individuals have access to the information, the different applications and the software side of AI. So if we're looking at it, we can actually also start to talk about development equaliser.

You know, AI doesn't magically make everyone equal. It equalises access to capability. Today, a small business in Lagos can use AI tools that, five years ago, only multi-national companies could afford, right? A young entrepreneur can access legal advice or marketing expertise or coding assistance, all from the mobile phone.

You know, that is incredibly powerful because it is changing how human beings are beginning to see life and what they have access to. So that means that if you have affordable internet or reliable electricity or relevant local data and policies to go about it, you also have the access and capability that the larger institutions also have.

So when I say development equaliser, I mean it has the potential to sort of level playing ground, democratise opportunities — but only if we can invest in the foundational things, right? So multinationals have capacity and capabilities for the foundational things. However, individuals are able to have access to the information and data and the tools to use on an AI.

Till: But is there also something you're worried about the development, or are you purely optimistic? Because we had, for example in previous episodes, discussed developmental models, right? Also for African countries. And one concern some people, some economists, including for example Fadhel Kaboub from Tunisia originally expressed, is that our economic model globally is often built on raw material exports from African countries and then high-value imports coming back to African countries, but that the value chain is actually not happening there on the ground.

Is there a risk that we repeat this pattern as well with AI, with basically a few American companies attracting incredible amounts of capital and the value also going there? Is that a risk you see, that those are the ones that benefit in the end, or don't you see that concern? 

Yemi: You're correct. Historically Africa, we export our raw materials. Today, one could argue that data is becoming another raw material, right?

If African data is collected here, processed somewhere else, used to train models elsewhere and then sold back to us as finished products, then yes, we would have to ask the difficult questions. And that, for me, is a worry. The evolution of AI and the development of AI is so exponential that we, in Africa, do not have the infrastructure yet that would allow for us to compete effectively.

We're building. The governments recognise that they need to build the infrastructure. And it is only when we have such things that we are in sort of a safe space. But yes, it is correct. We are beginning to look at data colonisation.

The export control directive that came out, the prevention of foreigners to access a new model. Now, is that a level playing ground? No! We're now seeing that it's now becoming a power tool, right? And for us in Nigeria, I think the government last week or two weeks ago, said that all payment systems, financial institutions must have their mandatory data localisation in Nigeria for the financial sector. You understand? So this is a major policy shift.

AI depends on data and if payment data is kept locally, then the central bank is looking at the broader issue of data sovereignty. And that is also what the US is looking at, right? Data sovereignty.

So don't give access because they are looking at the issues of cyber threats and their ability to control certain parts of the models. So really, if we're looking at all of these things, AI is becoming a game changer.

Till: Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's a game changer, absolutely. I think it will be revolutionary. I just think it's not totally clear yet in which direction the revolution will go, right? If it's the developmental equaliser, or if it's reproducing certain patterns of our economic systems that we have seen in the past with regard to inequality, with regard to access, but also with regard to the environmental dimension.

And we see the enormous investments going into data centers, infrastructure is incredible. What comes along with that is an increase of energy usage. We see in many countries still in the world, something that can be described as energy poverty, right? Like, there is little access to energy.

Do you see a potential competition between AI data centers, particularly in certain African countries where there is energy poverty and people still don't have energy access, or is that not a big concern you have? 

Yemi: No, it is a genuine concern. AI consumes enormous computing power and many Africans countries still struggle with reliable electricity. So we have to be very intentional, that as we're building this AI infrastructure, it shouldn't be seen to compete with hospitals.

But I think that, Africa, we are used to leapfrogging. And one of the areas that I see that at this point in time for us is of advantage, is when we begin to look at renewable energy. If we think about renewable energy, it gives Africa the opportunity to build differently from the start, right?

So the data centers now have the solar and the capacity. In the early days the infrastructures will compete and it's really a genuine concern. But as we begin to build these data centers and as we begin to compute, we have the opportunity for using renewable energy. And if we invest wisely, AI infrastructure and clean energy can actually grow together.

So what excites me most, you know, about Africa; I actually think Africa has an advantage. We've built a culture of leapfrogging; you know, we missed the fixed telephone lines. We became leaders in mobile money. We adopted fintech faster than many developed markets. I believe AI presents another leapfrogging giant stride opportunity for us. And we don't have decades of legacy systems like that. We can build digital-first institutions from the beginning. 

Till: You're listening to the Club of Rome Podcast, the place to discover bold ideas from change makers for the world's biggest challenges. This conversation is part of our third season, where we've already spoken to thinkers like Jayati Ghosh on wellbeing economics, Katharina Pistor on law and capitalism, Runa Khan on climate-vulnerable communities, and many more.

Find these episodes and past seasons exploring more big ideas on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the discussion.

Till: I want to come to one point, that is, very close to your daily work and your biography. Through Rising Tide Africa, you do empower women to become investors, mentors and leaders in Africa's tech and business ecosystem, right And that's a very important part of your work.

At the same time, you now see a certain tech scene in Silicon Valley that is often described as tech bros. Basically, a handful of men that control the tech business there. Is that something you think about  when you think about AI and the role of women in all of that?

Yemi: I think that, you know, we are male-dominated is the reason why really, Rising Tide's mission came out and it was straightforward to help more women become angel investors so they can see it as an asset class. Today we are much bigger than that. We're helping women become investors, mentors, board members, ecosystem builders and even founders.

So AI is already changing how we are evaluating our businesses and things like that. But the fact still remains that we need to intentionally start to ensure that women are participating in this AI play and not only on the application level, but also at the infrastructure level.

You know, capital hasn't been equally distributed for a long time. Networks haven't been equally distributed. Neither has leadership opportunities for women. So naturally, the AI industry is mirroring these imbalances, right?

But imagine if we as women were building AI and building the infrastructure. The kind of areas we'll be focusing on; maternal health. We'll be looking at education, financial inclusion, care work. Because diversity doesn't just change who builds the technology; it also changes what gets built. So if there are more women in the AI play, it will also change the perspective of what we are building. 

Till: How do you think AI might look different or how would AI look like in, let's say, 20 years, with more female leadership in the field? 

Yemi: We're not going to be lowering the bar in any way, but we are going to help to transform the society; a more rounded society. That's what I think. Because we're gonna be looking at not only the business and the business outcome.

You know, I give example, educational opportunity. Education is a long play. It needs patience, capital and therefore you see that a lot of the finances is not going to the education sector even at this time.

But that is where a lot of women play, right? Financial inclusion. If we look at the demography of those that are in the rural areas at the bottom of the pyramid, you will see that it's predominantly women, right? I think it would be a better society, really.

It would be a lot more impact driven. I'm not saying that we wouldn't make money but you know, the impact would drive the profits rather than the other way around.

Till: And last question for that. In order to achieve this positive vision in 20 years, what decision, what steps do we have to take, now in the next year, in the next two years?

Yemi: We need to start looking at how we can create ecosystems of AI. We need to look at how we can have reliable electricity. We need to have African cloud infrastructure. We need to have the regulations. We need to do that. We need to do a lot in terms of research.

We need African datasets. Every major technological revolution creates different layers of opportunity. We're probably not going to outspend the hyperscalers on foundational models. But the governments of our continent need to start becoming the leaders in applying AI to uniquely African problems. It's not the inventing of the technologies, it's applying it, right? And we do have the opportunity now to take into consideration (and deliberately so) building the AI infrastructure that will take us where we need to be.

Ensuring that we have the computing power, the energy for the future of AI. Ensuring that we localise our data, so data sovereignty. Ensuring that we have control of our data and our datasets. So these are the things that we need to put in place if we want to achieve the long goal.

And also most importantly is the talent. Our people must be well-trained, so that for me would be what we need to be looking at and doing today.

Till: Thank you very much. Thank you very much for laying out some steps of what we need to do now and this topic will accompany us at the Club of Rome more and maybe we speak again, in the future.

Thank you very much for joining the Club of Rome podcast.

Yemi: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

Till: You've been listening to my conversation with Yemi Keri, member of the Club of Rome and co-founder of Rising Tide Africa. As you've heard, Yemi is an optimist about the possibilities of AI in Africa, though with caveats about issues like data sovereignty and the need for homegrown infrastructure.

Other Club of Rome members have expressed concerns about the current developments of AI, including ethical questions and what it actually means to be human in these times, about economic consequences of a rapid AI development, including financial bubbles and consequences for the labor market and of course, environmental concerns through the massive use of electricity and water.

Members of the Club of Rome have also recently highlighted the risks of AI in an open letter to the UN Secretary General, calling for a special session of the UN General Assembly dedicated to the governance of artificial general intelligence and warning of AI's existential threat.

We want to hear your thoughts. Is this Africa's chance to leapfrog to a more ethical and sustainable AI revolution, or do we risk a new extractive era, this time in the form of data?

Where do you stand on the AI's risks and rewards and who would you like to hear discussing this central topic of our time? Let us know via email, on the Club of Rome website, in the episode comments or on social media. This is a topic we'll surely be coming back to in future episodes

Thank you for listening to the Club of Rome Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please do leave a rating or a review and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can learn more about the Club of Rome and listen to more podcasts at clubofrome.org

What does it take to reach the world's most marginalised communities - not just with aid, but with dignity? In this episode of the Club of Rome Podcast, host Nolita Mvunelo speaks with Runa Khan, member of the Club of Rome and founder of Friendship, an international social purpose organisation that has been working on the river islands and coastal chars of Bangladesh since 2002. In 2025, Friendship won the Earthshot Prize in the Fix Our Climate category. 

Runa grew up in a privileged "glass bubble" in Bangladesh, shielded from the realities of deep poverty. An encounter with communities on the nomadic islands of the Brahmaputra river sparked a lifelong commitment to justice and equity. Her father's words stayed with her: "You are only as rich as what you can do without." 

In this conversation, Runa and Nolita explore what it means to build truly holistic, locally-led solutions. Runa explains the importance of the right interventions at the right time - not standardised programmes designed elsewhere - and why Friendship doesn't just go the last mile, it goes the last metre. They discuss the structural barriers that keep aid from reaching the most vulnerable, the tension between donor-led agendas and community-defined needs, and why quality and beauty matter even – indeed especially - in the most resource-scarce contexts.

What if the key to transforming capitalism lies in the law? In this episode, we speak with Katharina Pistor, Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University, member of the Club of Rome and author of The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, about the legal foundations that underpin our economic system, and how they might be reimagined. 

Katharina argues that capitalism is not a free market but a "market economy on legal steroids," shaped and sustained by legal structures that govern everything from corporations and property rights to data ownership and financial markets. She explores how tools such as limited liability, asset partitioning and private contract law have enabled the concentration of wealth - and how those same tools could be repurposed to drive systemic change. 

From the enclosure of the commons to the rise of the data oligarchs and the Alaska Permanent Fund, this is a wide-ranging conversation about the unwritten rules of our economy and the potential for transformation. 

 

Transcript

Till: Welcome, Katharina. Great to have you on the show. 

Katharina: Thank you so much for having me. 

Till: We have often on this podcast talked about our polycrisis, overlapping different crises, eroding social capital, polarisation, of course, our ecological crisis. And in all of the debates, we often talk about economics, politics, but rarely about law. 

You now write in your new book that seeking change through law does not make transformative change easier, but arguably it makes it more likely. Why is that the case? Why should we talk more about law when we talk about change and transformation? 

Katharina: So I think before we think about change and transformation, we have to do a thorough diagnostic of the system. And my diagnostic of the system, now people might disagree, but my diagnostic of the system is that capitalism is a system that is effectively a legal system, a legal regime. Capital is coded in law, as I have argued in my previous book from 2019, "The Code of Capital," and in the new book, "The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It," I'm basically extending the analysis to the system as such. 

And I'm arguing that the system is a legal regime. It is based on law. It is maintained by law. It's entrenched in law. And because of this, we have to seek change through law rather than from outside of the legal system. 

Till: What I was wondering when, when, when reading the book and, and, and listening to you, is law kind of then the foundation as you see it of then, the capitalist system? Or is it following logics of capitalism and kind of aligning with those logics to an extent? So is it preceding or following? 

Katharina: Yes. Well, that's a really interesting question. So I think from a Marxist perspective, you would say it follows, because it's all about the material conditions that create the conditions for law to evolve in a particular way. Also, Evgeny Pashukanis, one of the leading socialist legal theorists of the early 20th century, he argued that law takes a particular form in capitalism. 

He might even go as far as saying law is always necessarily capitalist. That I think would go a little too far. So in my mind, it's very difficult to do the chicken and egg analysis here because we have a long trajectory of legal institutions. Private law, the law of contracts and property,   even business organisations, you can trace back all the way to Roman times. 

Prior to the rise of the nation state, people used legal arrangements, and so the question is then what is really law? And I think law, in my mind, is when you start formalising the norms and institutions that govern social and economic relations. So once you formalise them, you abstract them, and then once you also add the capacity of a state or authority to back these contracts and property rights through enforcement mechanism, then you have something like a legal system. 

That's what I would call a legal system. And I think for capital and capitalism, that was really critical because capitalism is not just about having economic transaction within your small little community, it's about scale. And scaling requires more complex, more abstract, more formal systems of ordering, of social ordering, and you may not want to call this law what I would call that law. 

So in that sense,  the rise of the nation state, the scalability of socioeconomic relations, and their enforceability by mobilising the consolidated means of coercion is absolutely critical for capitalism. So if you push me, I would say that comes first, but in fact, of course, it comes in relation with. 

It is sort of, it's a correlation that it has to happen at the same time, but it doesn't... It's a sine qua non. Without this, it will not happen. 

Till: And what I found interesting in that context when you spoke aboutthis way of law and the expansion of economic activity in general in capitalism happened through it. You spoke about steroids of law enabled  the economic system to do, right? Yeah, maybe you want to refer to that. 

Katharina: Yes. So many people think that the markets are free and the markets kind of do what they do by whatever market means. So it's, you know, the price mechanism, it's demand and supply. You have those with this curve. Yeah, but you have to think about, okay, what creates demand and supply and through what means do people actually meet and then exchange goods and, and payment, and they rarely do this on the spot these days. 

They do this through a very complex financial system. So I'm basically saying capitalism is not just a market economy. It's a market economy on legal steroids. Even an ideal market economy needs contract law and property law. I think most economists would concede this today as well. I think capitalism goes much further. 

Just think about corporations. So corporations are legal creatures. They don't exist outside the law. They have to be created. They can't be created without some authorisation that actually you create a legal person, the assets of which are distinct from the owners of that legal person. That's a legal fiction, but it's a legal fiction that is absolutely central for a capitalist system. 

And you can't contract for this. You might, may be able to contract for limited liability. You can't contract for this asset partitioning because you can't easily enforce it. So there are certain features of the law that were created over time, and of course, were pushed for because theywere proven to be helpful, that enable the accumulation of capital over time. 

So corporations are critical because you can create basically separate pools of assets that can incubate over time and create wealth. The fact that shareholders are dominating,   corporations, the fact that we are,  you know, sort of making debt deductible from corporations, the fact that we allow all kinds of assets to be used nowadays as collateral, including financial assets that are themselves created in the law. 

So we basically have created an entire machine. The fact that we have a complex banking and money system where we have a central bank at the top that sort of governs liquidity, makes sure that people have enough liquidity, which means cash on hand if things go bad, when things are creaking. And if we didn't have this, we would have just many more crashes. 

So there's a whole apparatus which I think can be disentangled and dissected when we have a bit of an understanding of what the legal structures are that underpin it. So we can go beyond the illusion that this is a free market. It's a market economy on legal steroids, and capitalism would not be able to do the kind of accumulation that it does and allocate the resources that it does in the way it does without these legal steroids. 

Till: I think it's a very important point because it also takes away this pseudo objectivity of market transactions and kind of our system as we have set it up, right? It shows again that all of that are in a way also a construct, social contracts or constructs or at least enabled by humans, and shaped by humans, and there is no objectivity in market transactions per se. 

It depends on the institutions that are involved by that, and you argue then that those institutions very much depend on law. 

Katharina: Correct. I mean, like, you know, institutions, as Douglas North said, come in two forms, informal and formal, and the formal ones are the law. And I think for a scaled system at national and global scale, you can't rely exclusively on informal institutions. They still play a role. There's trust involved, and people know each other, and they know some, you know, traders better than others or trust some institutions more than others. 

But I think you can't have a multi-trillion global financial system without formal institutions, so it has to be the law. 

Till: And what those steroids led to is, of course, something the Club of Rome deals with since decades, the question of growth, right? We have seen massive, massive growth, of course, in financial activities in a way, this whole debate around financialisation. But it's of course never only kind of the mechanisms of, of economic systems are not reduced to, to financial systems in a way. 

It's, it comes with a massive offloading onto nature and kind of expanding what we now call planetary boundaries, as well as, of course, people, right? It comes with a breaking of certain social capital as well. And I was then wondering, because the steroids thing is, is something we actually don't want in that way. 

We don't want growth on steroids. We don't want massive expansion. We, in a way, want to reduce the impact we currently have on our planet. I was wondering what's, what's the role of law in there? Can law in our systems be designed without those steroids or even steroids in the other direction to help a transformation, or how do you see that? 

Katharina: Yes. So I think here it's again important that we think about how we would address this. So I think with environmental legislation in the '70s and onwards, we've tried to use, once again, public law to regulate private activities, and the private sector typically finds ways to mitigate the costs that are imposed on it. 

Till: And so for me, therefore, the question is also can we use the instruments of private law? Can we reduce the legal steroids, as you put it, that they're using to organise the system? And there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. One is the allocation of responsibility, right? 

Katharina: That's what the law does. Who's responsible for what? Who has to internalise the cost of what kind of actions? So with corporations and giving the investors who buy shares in the corporation limited liability, we have created a license to externalise. Because the investors are not responsible for the damage that the corporations create, full stop. 

And that made sense in the 19th century when we had capital scarcity and we needed to get lots of savers to put their money into corporations as well. It makes no sense when you think about that brown assets that are issued by companies that are in the natural resource sectors or that are major polluters are,   giving you high monetary returns and the investors don't have to care about the polluting effects. 

So I've written an op-ed a couple of years ago where I said we just have to take away limited liability from major polluters. That can be done through a legislative act, unlikely, but some courts, including the UK Supreme Court, have developed new doctrines where they attribute, at least to the parent company, damages done by a subsidiary and by inference, I think you could go a step further and attribute the damages also to the investors behind the, the, the parent company. That has to happen. They have to bear the cost of what they are creating for their financial returns. They have to bear these costs so that you drive down the financial returns. 

Without this, I don't think we can make much headway. 

Till: How radical is the suggestion of reducing the limited liability of certain companies? Because it sounds a little bit technical, right? Reducing limited liability, and we know that it was maybe useful in a certain period of time to make sure enough capital goes into certain activities, and we know that might not be useful today anymore. 

But is basically reducing the limited liability, does it equal changing ownership structures in a way... 

Katharina: I mean, like, even if you look at property theory in economics, people like Harold Demsetz and others would say an owner has the control over the residual returns, but the owner also will internalise the cost of using the asset. They're basically accusing state ownership or the commons of a system where nobody internalises the cost of using the asset. 

When we now create limited liability, we actually are destroying the logic of property rights theory in accordance with economic theory. And so it’s like a theoretical proposition, I think it's totally consistent with ownership saying an owner invests and knows what, you know, has expectations about the returns of the investments, but also knows that there are costs, and if the company is being held liable for causing certain damages to others, then the owners will also have to bear these costs. 

In any other organisational form, like in partnerships, that is undisputable, and we have created limited liability as an artifact of a particular form of cooperation that was capital intensive. But I don't think we have to maintainthat, and I think you would have real owners at that point. 

You would have shareholders who really have to think about the cost that the corporation imposes on others before they invest. 

Till: And, and could one still go one step further? You have also written a lot about the enclosure, right? A starting point of kind of public land, dealt with by norms or public norms in private law into private ownership.  We have worked in the Club of Rome initiative called Earth for All on a concept called universal basic dividend,  where it was argued that basically the global commons in a way belong to all of us, right? 

And there should be dividends coming out of activities such as fossil fuel or even data or kind of activities that are related to the commons. So we see that in parts. There is something called the Alaska Permanent Fund, where kind of money is distributed across a population. You might argue that in Norway there are similar approaches. 

Is that something that could follow out of the changing  law debate here as well? 

Katharina: I think so. I think there is, however, a potential cost of this because we all might become used to the dividends from oil revenue, for example. And that argument has been made also in the US context for our pension system. So if you have your pensions in private stock markets, you want to have the markets go up and you're not really interested in how this happens. 

You just want to have a decent pension. So I think in the Alaska Permanent Fund, this was a really good solution to a very corrupt regime that existed until the 1970s to make sure that the people in Alaska had control over the dividends. They could see whether something came back into their accounts, because they were participating in this. 

So that was important for that particular reason. But I think there's also danger, especially where people's income in general stagnates, that they become hooked on income that is being produced by certain types of assets which create the kind of externalities that we have to get rid of, right? So it would have to be very diversified, if at all, and I think when you know, as a general first, as a first step to say, "Why does the wealth from pollution accrue to a handful of investors and they become super rich and then also dominate the political system?" 

That's worse. So I think in that sense, it's a step in the right direction. 

Till: Yeah. And I mean, you see variations of that, not exactly this, but you see, for example, that in Europe, the debate about internalising externalities, particularly through carbon taxes is more advanced. It's much harder in the US. And you have some countries, Austria, partly Switzerland, who then kind of share that, that money again amongst the population. 

But the question is if it has to be stuck with those externalities we don't want in the natural world, or if one could include even factors such as data, right? And kind of use it as a way of dealing with our digital world as well. 

Katharina: That I find an easier proposition and one that I would really support as well, is that I think we, as some forms of collectives and the organisation of which and the size of which would have to be determined, we should have control over how our data is being used. This is again, and it's an artificial decision, which is again deeply rooted in the law, to say that the data producers, you and I, do not have ownership of our, over our data. 

So the European directive says personal data is basically you determine with consent or not, but the consent is kind of meaningless. In the US, you have lots of cases where the courts explicitly say because to you and me, our data have no economic value. We can't sell them at a price, just the little data that we produce all the time. 

Therefore, we can't have property rights, and only those have property rights that basically have scaled the data collection already and put them on a device. There was already a legislation passed in 1986 in the US that the tech industry, industry lobbied for it,  which basically said if you then try to get these data away from them, this is hacking and it's basically theft, and thereby you create a new property right. 

So I, so I think the reorganisation of control over our data is absolutely fundamental, and that would include both control who can use the data for what type of purposes, and then the returns that are being produced with the data should be shared as well. And one can think of lots of different legal solutions to do this, public trust and also corporations and shareholdership and, you know, affiliations. 

Till: And I mean there are ways that, that we know we can organise both control rights and return rights in a way that would allow us to participate in the digital economy and not leave it to a handful of super rich. 

Super rich are sometimes called oligarchs in a way because you do see that the accumulation of wealth at the top is, is, is mind-boggling.   and,   you say there are different legal ways of dealing with that. Do those legal forms already exist or do they have to be created? 

Katharina: No, they exist. Interesting and good, good point. 

They exist, and I mean the data oligarchs are using them. These are corporations. They're using ownership structures and voting structures so that Mark Zuckerberg has over 50% of voting control over Meta. They are arbitraging with the legal tools that exist to give them absolute control rights, and they control both, everything that's being said. 

They also get a huge return from these companies. And I think on top of that with data, because they can control how we behave, certainly on the internet, if not beyond, they also have massive social control. So this is, this is a form of authoritarianism, I think that is kind of creepy because it's not as visible, but is massive, and I think we have to think about this. 

You know, what I'm arguing also in my new book is, there are lots of tools in the toolbox of the law that could be used in different ways. And of course, it's a question of the political economy and the relative power structures. What I'm trying to say to tell many people who don't really know what to do, and they always run to Congress or they might run to court, is that you also have tools in your own hands right now. 

Digital coding is happening by technologists, and there are many technologists out there who have different ideas of how to code relations. Similarly in the law, there are different ways in which you can organise businesses. There are lots of different companies. Think about Patagonia, which has completely reorganised itself using something as old and arcane as a trust structure to make sure that the mission of Patagonia will be withheld and, and, and protected in the future. 

So there's lots of stuff to play with. You just have to know about it and then have to find some lawyers who are not charging $3,000 an hour to help you set them up. 

Till:  Yeah. And what about this is that it kind of starts with this whole inequality debate at a different level, right? Because we often talk about redistribution and in a way it's- I support many of the suggestions there, right? And you now have also in, in New York, you have the debates about taxing the rich by the new mayor. 

But it is of course a present debate also within the Club of Rome. But to a certain extent, redistribution might already be too late, and we should think more about the pre-distribution. 

Katharina: Yeah. That, you know, it goes back to what we said at the beginning. It's about the diagnostics of the system, and I'm basically saying you're using a public resource, because our legal system is a public resource, and you could add the money system, which is also a public resource, to create enormous amounts of private wealth and,   plus all the negative,   effects that h- this has on inequality, on political systems, et cetera. 

So this social resource is available to us. We just have to know how to use it and also to imbue it maybe with different normative foundations so we can use it in a way that is conducive to more, to the rest and not just the few on the top. 

Till: Yeah. We did talk a little bit about the different kind of stages of capitalism and the varieties of capitalism from an economic perspective, I find it sometimes hard to describe what's going on at the moment even because you find certain things that are happening,    that 10 years ago in the US, let's say, the attacks on the independence of the central bank, right? 

Like 10 years ago, there were green progressive forces arguing against the independence in that way and including some issues such as, as green transformation,   as part of the mandate or things like that. Now it comes kind of from the right side and from the side many of us probably wouldn't want. 

Same with like tariffs. It's not the typical toolbox of free market policymaking in a way But you have people like Ha-Joon Chang who argued that this was basically also a way of protection of emerging markets to, to climb up the ladder  in a capitalist society. So it's confusing.  And what we try to do in the Club of Rome podcast often is also to make sense of complexity of the world. 

So can you help us to define what is the stage of capitalism we look at at the moment. How is our economic system and paradigm changing currently? 

Katharina: So I think in many ways, we've seen the movie before. If I think about Karl Polanyi and his analysis of "The Great Transformation," his point was that the process of capitalism, the process of industrialisation, the transformation of the entire institutional framework has subordinated the society to the market principle. 

And then society fought back, because they kind of didn't like to be subordinate to the market principles. The fallout was massive, and the results was communism and fascism in the 1920s. And I think, unfortunately, we have not heeded his advice after World War II to think about how we could make sure that we kind of maintain the upper hand by society. 

But we've allowed and enabled the market to completely control us to an extent I don't, I don't think that even happened in the 1920s or at the beginning of the 20th century. So globalisation of the financial system, the power of private financial industry, and now the data is basically a massive control of the private sector over society, and is trying to subordinate norms, values, institutions, behavior to the logic of a market, of a market system. 

And the worst, I think, is really on the internet. Our entire social interactions are being driven by how many clicks you get and how much-- what the return is and how many ads they can place. It has nothing to do with other types of form, of formal values. And so I'm not surprised that somebody like Trump, I don't... 

It doesn't matter what he believes. I don't think he believes anything. He just has an instinct. He has an intuition for what the people want. So his MAGA movement is kind of what we saw in the 1920s, both on the right and the left, a backlash against the subordination of the society to the market principle. 

They've had it. They have no control over the future of the system. They can vote whichever party they want to vote into office. The system will continue because the system has become relatively autonomous from the state as such. The state can't regulate it, but we still use law, the private law, to sustain it. 

And I think that's the reaction that, you know, the MAGA movement is built on and is basically using it. It has to sort of symbolically show that they're doing something for them, which is kind of the tariff game, which of course hits them too, which they may or may not understand. It's a different story, but you're making a big spectacle. 

"This is Liberation Day. We're now doing something for you." That's politics. It has nothing to do with economics. But I think the politics are a reaction of a system that has suppressed too many people for too long and has basically, even in democracies, and especially in democracies, the sense that we have lost control over our future is devastating. 

And I think that's why we see extremes, not only in this country, but also in, in countries of Europe. 

Till: Yeah, and I agree with you, the losing control, polarisation, insecurity in the future, economic insecurity - there are many contributors to this situation as we see it. And what would you say, then slowly coming to an end already, would be the role of, you know, organisations like Club of Rome, but also people and institutionswant to fight back? 

Katharina: So I think for me, the most important thing is to show that there are viable alternatives. We've been told for a long time by politicians that there is no alternative. If we want to have growth, then this is the system that we have.   I think there's also a case to be made that we maybe need less growth, but many people in many poor countries in the world are still trying to somehow get out of poverty, and so I think that we have to keep, keep in mind. 

But in my mind, there's a lot of creativity. There's possibility for creativity. There are lots of opportunities that you can take without necessarily having to fight it at the international la-law level with treaties or even at the national law with politics, because a lot of legal structures exist already which could be repurposed. 

That's what capitalism has always done, because it rarely has gone through legislative approval. In democratic systems, this would have been too complicated. They've basically used the law as is. Now, obviously, if we have a direct confrontation between powerful forces of, on the capitalist side and, and others, this will be difficult to win. 

But there are cases where cases have been won, and so I think just collecting these cases and showing that there are viable strategies and making them known to others and thinking of how in different systems, because there's no silver bullet. But in different systems, you can see different openings, different legal tools that might be available to push on a particular front. 

And I think for the climate, I think it would be, it would be climate finance, of course, also environmental regulation. But,   thinking creatively about how you could really use these tools and get people on your side, including people who might have made a lot of money in the capitalist mode but want to change their ways and want to help do something else. 

 I think the Club of Rome and other organisations that have a voice kind of in the political and policy debates. We shouldn't only talk to the politicians and policymakers in Brussels and elsewhere. We should also talk to lawyers and to private actors and think about how we can help them find a better path. 

Till: Thank you very much, Katharina. For everyone who would like to learn more about the law of capitalism and the power of law as well, I do recommend your latest book, "The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It."  It has been fascinating speaking to you. Thank you for listening to the Club of Rome podcast and thank you Katharina for joining us today. 

Katharina: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun to talk to you.

Why have a decade of global commitments failed to deliver a fairer world, and what would it actually take to build one? 

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Till Kellerhoff speaks with Jayati Ghosh, economist, member of The Club of Rome and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, about why the promise of 2015 — the SDGs, the Paris Agreement, a moment of collective ambition — has given way to a world of deepening inequality, democratic erosion and concentrated power. 

The episode explores how the neoliberal framework underlying the SDGs was always likely to undermine them, why progressive forces have struggled to channel public anger into transformative change, and how a tiny group of ultra-wealthy individuals has come to shape laws, institutions and the course of global events in ways unprecedented in history. 

They discuss the urgent need to shift from GDP growth as a proxy for progress towards economies that deliver dignity, decent work and basic security for all — and why communicating that vision in simpler, more direct terms has never been more important. 

This episode maps out where the possibilities for genuine systemic change still lie, and why, even now, there are reasons not to abandon hope.