THE CLUB OF ROME PODCAST

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.

Why are current peace frameworks struggling to meet today’s complex challenges and what would it take to create genuine security in the 21st Century?

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Nolita Mvunelo speaks with Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome about why traditional peace frameworks are ill-equipped to address the deeper threats emerging from ecological breakdown, widening inequality and systemic instability. Drawing on The Club of Rome’s recent publication Planetary Peace for Human Security, Paul outlines a bold reimagining of what peace might mean today.

Together, Nolita and Paul dive into how conventional approaches shaped by military logic and colonial legacies often reinforce the divisions they aim to heal. They discuss the need for a planetary vision of peace that connects inner transformation, environmental renewal and social justice and why moving beyond analysis towards systemic action is now essential.

This episode invites us to transcend outdated paradigms, embrace an expanded understanding of peace and mobilise the transformative collaboration needed for a regenerative future.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Nolita: What does true peace and human security mean in the 21st Century? In a world of climate breakdown, rising inequality and the accelerating risks of AI and emerging technologies, our guest on today's podcast reminds us that peace must mean more than simply the absence of war. In a recent paper, planetary peace for human security, Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome, argues that traditional ideas of peace, shaped by colonial legacies, military power and post Second World War diplomacy, are no longer fit for purpose. Instead, he and his co-authors propose a concept of planetary peace, a vision of security grounded in the wellbeing of people, the planet and future generations. 

I am Nolita Mvunelo, and on today's podcast, Paul and I discuss why peace today must encompass inner development, the environment, technology, and our relationship with nature, and how collaboration can turn global crises into opportunities for renewal. That's all ahead on The Club of Rome Podcast, where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures. 

Hi Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing? 

Paul: I am doing fine, Nolita, how are you doing? 

I'm good, I'm good, and getting right into it. So, what is planetary peace? Because you describe it as something that's much bigger than the absence of war. What exactly does this mean? And why have you chosen to pursue this topic specifically? 

So historically, peace has been cued in relation to wars, usually wars among nations and among sub national groups, and peace is what's supposed to stop the wars and take care of victims, etc. But humanity now faces a much bigger risk to human life that can cause 10 times to 100 times the number of deaths that even the largest wars in history have caused, and that risk is the breakdown of planetary ecosystems. These kinds of events can kill and injure millions of people at a time in specific natural disasters that we hear about, which are becoming worse and more frequent, but also in slow seeping harm that is causing excess number of deaths from what was normal before the pollution of Oceans and air became so huge. So planetary peace is a concept of peace and nonviolence that is responsive to these major sources of violence against humans and against nature and all species. These kind of dangers and risks ensue from breaching of our planetary boundaries. So, we kind of wanted to raise the discussion of peace from the narrow focus on international wars to something that is planetary in scale and responsive to the challenges of the planetary boundaries and also the destruction of ecosystems. 

Nolita: This was the title of the first version of this publication, and now the second one was on planetary peace in the Anthropocene. So, when I'm hearing your response is that it's very much nested into this idea that we have entered a new epoch. The Club of Rome is well known for its systems thinking, connecting the dots between economics, environment and human wellbeing. Why have you chosen this legacy and the Anthropocene as the way to observe and explore peace? 

Paul: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think some of it is specific to The Club of Rome, the way this discussion emerged amongst us. But on a more abstract scale, we are defining peace in systemic terms, because it is a legacy of The Club of Rome. And for us, there are three components of the systems of planetary peace. One has to be at peace with oneself. The second is peace with others, between neighbors and nations, etc. And the third is peace with nature. These systems of peace are interrelated. They're interconnected. They're very interwoven. So, we are very much following in the legacy of systems thinking of The Club of Rome. We also trace the roots of these systems of peace to other economic, social, cultural and political systems and practices. So, we connect peace with systems that govern everyday activities and the life of people. This way, we hope that each individual person will be able to see the role of peace in their lives, in the way they conduct their lives, and take responsibility for and do something about it. So, we wanted to not only do systems thinking around peace, but also a kind of people-enabling so that peace is not left to security experts. It is not left to governments to deal with. Because, frankly, the record of governments in dealing with peace is rather abysmal. We've had 2000 years of war, so we thought that we need to shift the locus of action to people, and that was the other reason for thinking about it in these systemic terms. 

Nolita: What are the considerations about the question of understanding or navigating power? Because this, this publication, was also coming in like a backdrop of over 100 global conflicts, two of which are really grabbing the attention of people, while also, you know, the political landscape in and of itself, is shifting. 

Paul: Yeah, so actually, we started a conversation within The Club of Rome as a response to the Gaza crisis. I mean, what is now widely acknowledged as being a war of genocide. And it shook a lot of people right at the beginning of the war, and we started having conversations within the club, among members, about what, what are we to think of this? How are we to make sense of what is going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine, and what's going on in all these other wars that we have been engaged in? What does it tell us about being human? And so actually, before this publication that you are referencing, we had another publication called “Enduring Peace in the Anthropocene”. And I'll come back to the question of the Anthropocene in a second. I know I didn't fully address it, but in that publication, I invited about a couple dozen Club of Rome members to explore this question of that we are moving into this new epoch of life in which lot of conditions are changing. People are describing it as a polycrisis and so on and so forth. What do these particular events of war tell us about living peacefully in harmony as human beings? And each person took a very different view. With a kind of open ended invitation, we got these 20-odd essays from people from all parts of the world with very different backgrounds, and it made clear to us the limitations of the traditional notions of peace, which is what prompted us to say, hey, if, if all these dangers and wars and losses are not fitting in, and particularly the Gaza war, into a narrative of peace that we have inherited over the last 200 years of war, then we need a new concept of peace, and we call it planetary peace, and we worked on developing that paper. 

So let me go back to the Anthropocene, because there are pieces of that puzzle that we haven't really fully parsed out. The Anthropocene clearly, we are in a period that is characterised by great acceleration in human population and in economic production and consumption, in devastating extraction of earth's resources, with tremendous inequalities at the same time, and in socio economic activities that are literally, literally killing the soil worldwide, killing plant life, killing other species. I mean, we are killing 80 billion animals every year for food. These are not sustainable, these are not peaceful approaches to the economy, approaches to dealing with the challenges of the Anthropocene. These are nature extractive capital accumulation processes that are at the root of breaching planetary boundaries of life, and they spill over in several ways into security and conflict issues. First, in order to provide security to the resources that we want to extract and the logistics routes for these resources that we need to protect, we are increasing military expenditures, and military systems build out. 

In 2024 we spent about $2.4 trillion in defense, so called defense expenditures. And these expenditures are going to double in the next decade. The US is already for 2026 wanting to spend over a trillion dollars itself. And then China has increased its budget by 7% India has increased its defense budget by six and a half percent, and all the NATO countries, which sort of fell under the US umbrella, are now being pushed by the Trump administration to spend 5% of their GDP into defense budgets in 2026. And so, we are moving in the wrong direction, in to protect the exploitation of resources which actually caused the Anthropocene. So that is one link to the Anthropocene. 

Secondly, the extraction of local resources, whether they're in Africa or in other parts of the world, is itself a source of armed conflicts. Now, these extractive practices benefit very differential populations. They are very unequal, and most of them are quite unfair, at least in the view of the locals. So, there is resistance by local communities to exploiting their local resources for profits by some anonymous, private and public corporations. So environmental technologies and nature-based solutions must become part of the security solution. Human security is not just about protecting the resources for the rich, which is where the inequality equation is becoming so bad now that less than 2% of the world controls 90% of the world's wealth, and so this trajectory of the Anthropocene needs to be dismantled eventually, but at least disturbed right now. 

And the third reason I would connect Anthropocene, and wars and peace is that the impacts of the current security practices is probably one of the largest cause of climate change. Defense forces and wars consume an enormous amount of resources, as Gaza showed us, as Ukraine is showing us, as other wars have showed us, they use a lot of fossil fuels. They destroy a large amount of natural environment, and we don't even track it. We don't measure the ecological footprint of armies, militaries and wars under the Kyoto Protocol, nor under the Paris agreement. And this is a huge blind spot. So we need to tie together the discourse of the Anthropocene and reimagine a piece for the Anthropocene. And this is where we are. We are sort of proposing planetary peace as a way of thinking about peace in broader terms. 

Nolita: So, if I understand correctly, the Anthropocene is, or can be, in and of itself, a violence. And you know, like the extraction, the acquisition of resources, the acquisition of human labor, is kind of what seems to perpetuate this. I mean, even if you think of it like in like the traditional human evolutionary stories, that man starts to farm, man starts to want to protect farm. Man now starts fighting neighbor because neighbor is encroaching on their farm. Here we go. We've invented war. If one accepts that narrative, it seems like it's been this trajectory that has been happening for quite some time, so much so that scholars really start to then grapple around the idea of, when does the Anthropocene start? Some define it as Anthropocene starts when colonisation starts, because that extraction of human labour, kind of makes war almost inevitable, inevitable part of development. I'm thinking of a book called “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None”. I'll share a link after this. So, I guess my question then is, what does planetary reconciliation look like, or planetary peace? So, the reconciliation of peace with oneself, peace with the other, peace with nature. What are the emerging proposals that were coming up? 

Paul: Yeah, so, I mean, each one of them is a huge area of debate and discourse. The Club of Rome is involved in some of them. We have another paper that was put out just earlier this year on inner development, which spoke to the question of, What does peace with oneself mean? We need to understand the self in deeper ways. And I think we have the whole Fifth Element project thanks to you and all the people that you're leading in that team to try to fully understand what it means to be human. I think those are all elements of trying to understand what peace with oneself could look like. Now, there are also existing practices of people who are leading in that space. I read somewhere that over 300 million people are practicing meditation every day, and another 3 million people are doing things like yoga and other mindfulness things to cultivate the self in a different way. So I don't think in in regards to acknowledging that peace with oneself is an important component, that we are new, or we are the first one. There are a lot of people who already have this insight, but they're perhaps not connecting it to peace. They are kind of thinking of peace, mental peace, or peace with oneself as something that stands alone and is their individual responsibility and doesn't connect to the rest of the world. And we want to invite them into this conversation of planetary peace and say, no, what you're doing is actually a very essential and perhaps a central part of the systems that are needed to engage in planetary peace. 

Similarly, peace with others. I think it has been over the years and the academic discourse and certainly the practical positions have been captured by a kind of specialisation on international security and the international security world has a certain language, a certain narrative, to describe that, and in my somewhat naive judgment, it doesn't contain the key elements of this Anthropocene thinking that we just alluded to earlier. So that community needs to really deeply consider what the implications of the Anthropocene are, whether it started with slavery in the 1500s or 1600s or even earlier, or it started in 1700s with fossil fuel. I mean, the timing of the Anthropocene is, to me, less important than the core insight that it is the Anthropos, the humans, that are now at the center of driving conflicts and change and extraction and exploitation, and we really need to reconsider our way of thinking about the world and thinking about nature and thinking about peace in that light. 

Nolita: I then also want to add a challenge, because also the risk of the framing of the Anthropocene is that it creates this equality of humans, as if all humans have put us in this position we're in. If I take an example of like from an African context, is like the ability of an African person to have an impact on the environment versus someone from somewhere else, are very different. Of course, modernity, right, like how Bruno Latour describes it, or being removed from nature, seeing humanness as separate from nature, I think to some extent, most humans participate in that, but it's not the same. And I probably could then imagine that even the discussion of planetary peace in the Anthropocene probably faces a similar type of debate of that not all people, there is no equality in creating wars. So yes, we can have self-enlightenment. I mean, various cultures also have different forms of enlightenment, like there's Wudu in Southern African context. You know, there's various forms of consciousness in different Asian contexts that already within, embedded in culture has a level of reconciliation that is required. So then the peace with other and peace with nature, question that you've been addressing on the Anthropocene part, still to some extent needs to be addressed. 

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you pointed that out, because I also feel that the idea of the Anthropocene is not to just homogenise and blame everybody uniformly. We know that is not true. I mean, I keep emphasising the Anthropocene when I talk about it, I put climate change, of course, as one of the big things. But my very next thing is inequality, because climate change is not happening because what you and I do. 10% of the wealthy and their jets and ships are producing more carbon than most of what the rest of the world is doing. So, even in the case of climate change, I think who produces and who suffers the impact is completely the opposite. And there are two extremes. The production of the Anthropocene can be very squarely put into the hands of the rich, the rich countries, historically, they are the ones who have produced all the carbon that is now causing the changes, and it's the poor countries that suffer the consequences. So, to me, Anthropocene doesn't mean that everybody is equally responsible, or so I accept that, and I think it is also a question of responsibility. So, if there are historical causes that we are now starting to understand, then the richer countries, and within the countries, the richer communities, have a responsibility to deal with it in a more aggressive way. So yes, I think we will, as we start developing programmes, we will need to not only be mindful of this, but we will need to go to some very uncomfortable conversations about what reparations look like, what solutions look like, what reconciliation really means. It is not that simple in my mind, at least, and while I might not have an answer to what that reconciliation might mean. But I think that if we truly want to become human in our full potential, that reconciliation would have to include those three components, forgiving ourselves as individuals finding ways to forgive others, our neighbors, other countries, and reestablishing a new relationship with nature. And it's a very rich area for research, for practice, for change, for leadership. And I'm hoping that what this paper will do is to entice these other communities that have been providing answers to the old questions to rethink new solutions. 

Nolita: You are listening to The Club of Rome Podcast, the place to discover bold ideas, from changemakers who are tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis to inequality and systems change. The podcast is over a year old now, and we have an archive including episodes on building wellbeing economies in turbulent times, Africa's war on misinformation and building climate resilience in the most vulnerable communities. You can find them on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the discussion. 

One of the most hopeful ideas in the publication is what you call existential opportunities, which, you know, nice play on words. You suggest that even amid global crises, humanity has a chance to reinvent itself. What kinds of opportunities are you referring to and what would a regenerative civilisation actually look like and be like in everyday life? Karima Kadaoui, a Club of Rome member, she always does this exercise of you wake up in the morning and your dreams have come true. What does that look like? 

Paul: You're asking some really very piercing questions but let me just say that the reason for thinking about existential opportunities was my rather idiosyncratic reaction to the debate that a year and a half ago I was involved in with regard to existential risks. Everybody was talking about existential risk. We were kind of coming out of a pandemic, which was the newest existential risk, after being exhausted for 20 years by climate change and 50 years with nuclear Armageddon, that were all existential risks, and now this new one, and followed very quickly by AI as an existential risk. So I was getting scared, frankly, and if we are going to think about risks, and as a Chinese proverb that says every risk is also a kind of opportunity for someone, we started thinking about what might be a way to react to existential risks that would be at least of a similar scale as these risks. And so, we came up with this notion of existential opportunity, and what we need to open our minds we become human in certain ways, and some of those ways are actually quite unhuman or inhumane. And the Gaza war is just an example of it. I mean, here is a genocide of hundreds of people, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, and a destruction of nature. We are all watching it on TV every night, and somehow it is getting normalised by people. It is getting justified. And while at an existential level, I feel a complicity. I can't watch this without saying like I am involved in this. It dehumanises me even to watch, and I should be doing something about it, my moral and my social and my all kinds of antennas are going up on, on this and yet there is no language, there is no narrative to describe this opportunity that might be there. So we, we thought that maybe the most fundamental opportunity is what The Club of Rome has been alluding to, what the Fifth Element has been alluding to is, how do we imagine being human in a world where all these major threats and polycrises are all around us? And so at the most fundamental level, this is a personal question, and it's a question that I took hope from that, even at the age that I am, in where most of my life is in my background, that I can still ask, can I be human in a different way that would avoid and prevent these kinds of carnages from happening? And so, at a very fundamental level, I see this as an opportunity to redefine human existence in relationship to themselves, to nature and to others. And it will have different answers for different people. For some, it will be a professional thing. What can they do in their own organisation, and how can they change their businesses or their hospitals or their educational institutions? For others, it will be a more private response. How do we change our consciousness? How do we change our mindset? How do we change our value? And for still others, it will be a policy question that we can be create more humane policy, the educational policy, social policy, economic policy, etc. So, I think our purpose there was to just open the door, just kick it open, and say everything should be reconsidered. 

Nolita: One of the proposals was on this transdisciplinarity, or interdisciplinarity, producing of knowledge, of collaborating, of creating new initiatives. Why was that one of the pillars? What was the opportunity that you were seeing there? 

Paul: Let me say that transdisciplinarity is part of the solution. I still see it as a positive force, but I've been arguing this for like, 20 years, and I'm a little bit fed up that the debate of the discourse of transdisciplinarity is just hung up still around disciplines. Who is having this debate now? In 2004 and 2005, and this was 20 years ago, literally, it was academics who were boxed in small disciplines and started to say, “oh, we need to talk to each other, and we need to talk to people outside academia”. And unfortunately, that debate, while there was this acceptance that we need to break out of disciplines and silos which are narrow and allow us to go deep, but don't allow us to go across, that that was an important challenge. But I'm afraid that as academics, we haven't done a good job. And I consider myself as part of the one who was promoting transdisciplinarity, and as a result, academia now has a transdisciplinary hang up. They keep talking about doing the same thing that we were talking about doing 20 years ago. I would have liked to see that debate emerge and take root in business, in medical, in other fields where practices have to go across their sectoral confines and silos, maybe we failed. Certainly in academia, we're still trying to go across disciplines. And since there are 20, 12,000 or 15,000 I mean, it's an impossible task. So, I think in some ways, we have not truly understood transdisciplinarity, and we have not made that much progress, but the idea that we need holistic action and holistic knowledge, perhaps, and a more holistic, planetary or cosmological consciousness, that core idea is still very valid. The way it is being put into practice in different practitioner groups, like academics or is, is very disheartening to me. So, I would say, yes, we should continue to do it, but let's not just react to our own immediate environment of disciplines. Let us look at what that big insight is calling for and take those large leaps that need to happen, and some of it means getting out of our comfort zone of our discipline or our academic institution or our conference or set of practitioners or communities of practice into completely different ones, and learning what it means to be effective there, and becoming a new person as a result. That's what the core of transdisciplinarity now holds. 

Nolita: I've run a little experiment on transdisciplinarity on myself because I did my undergraduate in chemical engineering. I'm doing my master's in Environmental Humanities. So one day over coffee, I'm going to give you my unhinged analysis of what's going on. But I think, but if I, if I try to keep it professional for the podcast, I think a lot of it, when I try to analyse, like a case, an example of a water conflict in the rules of the Eastern Capes of Africa. And what happened and what continues to happen, a lot of it does have to do with does this learning actually create change, or is it knowledge that insists upon itself, you know, like knowledge that is so refined and so finite that it just insists upon additional knowledge. So hence, the response to the problem is, let's get funding for more knowledge and not let's now inspire change. That's my top line analysis of what I understand, having now put my foot in both worlds. Could this potentially be one of the invitations then that are coming from The Club of Rome to the listeners of this podcast is, how do we overcome some of the analysis paralysis? What does interdisciplinarity at the action level as well as the knowledge level as well as the consciousness level, look like? 

Paul: What you just said is probably the most insightful thing I've heard about transdisciplinarity in a very long time, that it is about action. It is about impact. It is about change. It is about being on the ground in the real world, and what does it take to do that? It doesn't actually have very much to do with the discipline. I mean, these disciplines and silos or whatever blinkers and bubbles we want to live with our choice we like chosen to self-censor ourselves from action, because action is not a trivial thing. It comes with personal responsibility. It comes with personal consequences, and one can play a lot of mind games to avoid taking those risks of action. And I think the transdisciplinary academic discourse is in some ways shielding people from going into action in that dramatic way. And what you are telling me is that as you have experienced life and engaged in projects, you've started realising the kind of connection between that action and understanding. And sometimes you need a lot of understanding to engage in meaningful life, sometimes you don't. You just have it. So, I would agree with you that action is the heart of it. There are some real problems in the world out there, and we can't just keep on understanding these problems. We need to go and solve them. And I think if there's one thing that we could be doing more is modeling. So, when I look at you, and I look at some of our other colleagues and our members, the ones that I'm really inspired by are the ones who are on the ground doing things, rather than just talking about doing things. 

Nolita: So, the invitation is more people on the ground doing things, and for them to please get in touch. Because my final and my last question was that you described planetary peace as both a process and a project. In a world that's defined by division, what gives you the hope that this particular vision might be the one that actually takes root? 

Paul: Very good question, and also it kind of behooves the question of, how are we going to bring some new initiatives into reality and establish some things so as we are taking this concept out, we are always looking for collaborations, and I am really amazed with the kind of reactions that we are getting from all sorts of groups, all the way from the InterAction Council, which is the former heads of state, to individual university like Kyung Hee University, Hiroshima University, to there's a group called The Elders for Peace that are mostly retired bureaucrats and academics who are interested in innovation in the peace space, to peace organisations, the traditional peace NGOs, which is a huge community in itself, to academics, to people who are victims of war and trying to bring about peace in hot areas like Gaza. 

All of these different groups that we are talking to, they get it. They get the need for expanding peace and creating a peace centric world, just like we were arguing for an ecocentric world 50 years ago when the ecological movement started. We are sort of taking that idea of ecocentrism to include peace, and we are kind of weaving the two together to create a peace and ecocentric world together. So it has great appeal, and that is perhaps the biggest source of hope, the fact that younger people are finding a kind of enablement in this notion that saying that, yeah, we can do something, perhaps not about what's going on in Gaza, but if we look around us and look at the economic system that we are embedded in, we see a lot of violence, violence to the earth, violence to our neighbors, violence, and we can hopefully do something to rectify that at our local level. So, this kind of enablement is another source of hope for me, but ultimately the proof of the concept will lie in how many action projects we can create. So, we're going around to foundations, proposing to them that we need to change our economies towards a peace economy. We need to change our political systems and our educational systems and our healthcare systems and our food and energy and all our systems. 

Nolita: Okay, thank you so much, Paul. Thank you for joining me today. 

Paul: Okay, thank you, it was a wonderful conversation. 

Nolita: Thank you for listening to The Club of Rome Podcast. Follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about The Club of Rome and planetary peace at Club of Rome.org