Dennis J. Snower led the annual Global Solutions Summit in Berlin from 5-6 May 2025, under the theme “Bridging Divides: New Pathways for Global Prosperity”, with all sessions and encounters focused on how to defend, expand, and re-invent multilateral structures to promote human flourishing and meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.
This annual event is an international conference aimed at addressing key policy challenges facing the G20, the G7 and other global governance. It assembles those who believe that the future can be successfully shaped through global collaboration grounded in mutual respect. Together, we strive to find actionable solutions to shared global challenges.
Eric Beinhocker led a session on Green Industrial Policy as a Driver of Economic Transformation, examining the role of green industrial policies in fostering sustainable economic growth and job creation in developing economies, addressing challenges like geopolitics, high capital costs, and balancing climate goals with development priorities.
Bridging the divide between elites and populists
Dennis J. Snower's opening address to the Global Solutions Summit on 5 May 2025.
The Global Solutions Summit takes place in troubled times. Though the summit covers a number of standard challenges this is not a standard year. The tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting and the world order as we know it is called into question.
The problems we deal with here are largely shared global problems which no country can handle on its own. But we find ourselves trapped in a fractured world, one in which 'my nation first' thinking is proliferating across the globe. So policies that are globally ambitious in nature - such as the complete implementation of the sustainable development goals by 2030 - are looking increasingly irrelevant.
New approaches are called for that make the best of our troubled circumstances. I believe a good starting point for thinking about these new approaches is to recognise that our economies and our polities are not autarchies of sovereign units, they are, rather, relational fields in webs of economic and political interdependence. These fields are shaped by influence, power, moral values norms, institutions. In order to exert true influence within them we need to think about shaping these relational fields.
Now, surprising as this might sound, this actually suggests a number of promising avenues of how to respond to 'my nation first' thinking. What could these responses involve in the short medium and long run? Let me go through them. In the short run when 'my nation first thinking' prevails, presumably under the United States presidency of the G20 next year, the gains from multilateralism need to be translated into national gains. A lot of international cooperation can take place for national reasons. Many global challenges - whether it's climate action or financial stability or cyber security - basically involve management of global public goods. These public goods are ones where multilateral collaboration yields a surplus over and above what countries could have achieved on their own. What smart 'my nation first thinking' really demands is that this surplus actually be shared among countries so as to make all affected parties better off. That is the true art of the deal.
Negotiations over global public goods generally involve countries with different priorities and that generally means that there are win-win opportunities, whereby we cooperate on things that matter for you, in return for you cooperating on things that matter to us. In addition most global problems involve some long-term engagement that requires building trust in order to reap longer term gains. A smart my nation first approach demands that these benefits actually be exploited, and this approach is utterly incompatible with rapacious self-regard political bullying or unpredictable shifts in negotiating positions. In practice it entails a lot of global cooperation.
Of course this is still far removed from the first best world, where advantaged countries help disadvantaged countries without expectation of recompense. But even here much can be achieved by broadening the global agenda in order to take advantage of countries' different priorities. For example developed nations are characteristically disproportionately concerned with environmental sustainability, digital privacy and security and so on, while developing nations are concerned about poverty development and digital access. There's room for grand bargains whereby developed and developing nations can make deals that are to the benefit of all.
So much for the short run. In the medium run policymakers in developed and developing countries can work towards bridging the poisonous divide between elites and populists; between multilateralists and nationalists. This conflict tears apart societies and politics; it tears these relational fields that make collective action possible. The populists claim to represent the unified will of the people against the elites who hold disproportionate power in their societies - CEOs, financiers, big tech operatives, senior civil servants professors at prestigious universities and so on. These elites are concerned primarily with economic growth and environmental sustainability, while the populists on the other hand decry the loss of solidarity that is associated with weakening cultural and religious ties, and they also decry the loss of agency that ordinary people experience when their livelihood is at the mercy of globalisation and technological change.
While currently elites and populists focus on each other's weaknesses - why they hate one another, we could actually focus on their strengths. In particular each side highlights something fundamentally important for human flourishing - solidarity and agency on the side of the populists, and material gain and environmental health by the elites. All four goals are complimentary essentials for living meaningful and fulfilling lives: Solidarity 'S', Agency 'A', Gain 'G', Environment 'E' - are the foundations of a 'SAGE' approach to life. So there is a lot that could unite that currently divides.
Each of these foundations is currently under threat in both developed and developing countries. Social conflict, disempowerment, economic stagnation, environmental destruction; they're all proliferating around the world. The motto of South Africa's G20 presidency - solidarity equality and sustainability - addresses these threats explicitly, providing an appropriate context for a SAGE approach to policy. There's growing agreement in the G20 that the G20 should track progress in the achievement of the SAGE goals, measuring solidarity agency gain and environmental sustainability consistently across G20 members, and assessing the impacts of G20 policies in that regard. Therein I believe lie the seeds of new models of flourishing and development.
The SAGE approach to policy also enables governments to transform the operating system of businesses through tax subsidy schemes, laws, regulations, license to operate, government procurement conditions and so on, so that profit cannot be earned by undermining society or degrading the environment. The global solutions initiative works in collaboration with top research institutions - G20 think tanks, Harvard, Oxford, University College London - to drive this GA data gathering and policy advisory approach.
Now for the long run. Institutional innovation is required. In the absence of genuine multilateralism, it becomes advisable to form coalitions of the willing for collective action - not only with regard to climate but health, poverty, hunger and other sustainable development goals. These coalitions can extend their influence through protective policy walls such as CBAMs (carbon border adjustment mechanisms), which aim to level the playing field between domestic and foreign actors. Some of these coalitions of the willing could be pragmatic responses to geopolitical shifts such as the 19 plus1 configuration under Germany's G20 presidency in 2017, when 19 countries remained committed to climate action after the US departure from the Paris climate accords.
Currently, much could be achieved through a coalition of large countries and regions - such as the EU, India, China - to which the US could be invited to harmonize their CBAMs, and thereby these countries could have a major in impact on incentives to restrict carbon emissions worldwide. In the future, multilateralism could be approximated by stages first through regional coordination - Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America - then followed by coordination across regions on the basis of internationally-agreed rules to achieve specified grand bargains. Within this process, the rules themselves could be modernized, such as updating the multilateral trade regime or reforming multilateral development banks to provide much needed poor country finance and debt relief - all subjects that we will be discussing here. A more formal collaboration between the G20 and the UN could help guide aspects of this interregional coordination.
In general terms I hope that it will be well understood that polycentric governance should be called. This involves coordination across multiple levels - local national international - each level having its own autonomy and responsibilities in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. There's mutual monitoring and accountability, as well as learning through experimentation. Ultimately one would hope that these institutional arrangements would lead to new narratives; narratives that highlight our shared humanity and reconnect us with enduring universal human values such as honesty, freedom, fairness, care for the vulnerable, in recognition of our intrinsic interconnectedness.
This interconnectedness is powerfully articulated in South Africa's current G20 presidency through the concept of Ubuntu: 'I am because we are'. The Global Solutions Initiative is prepared to provide intellectual and practical support for coalitions of the willing in this spirit. So in sum, though these are troubled times, there are massive opportunities for productive global problem solving. May the Global Solutions Initiative serve this purpose and I wish you all the very best of good fortune in this faithful endeavour.
Watch the address.
The Clean Energy Revolution is Unstoppable
Eric Beinhocker's introductory remarks to the panel discussion on Green Industrial Policy as a Driver of Economic Transformation on 6 May 2025.
It is my pleasure to be moderating this panel on green industrial policy as a driver of economic transformation. We have an outstanding group of panellists to discuss this important topic: Nicola Brandt Head of the OECD in Berlin; Patricia Füller President and CEO of the Institute for Sustainable Development; and Izabella Teixeira former Minister for the Environment and Member of the Advisory Board for Brazilian Center for International Relations.
Before I turn to our distinguished panellists for their opening remarks, I'm going to spend just a couple of minutes setting the stage. There's no question that we're facing some political and geopolitical headwinds in the world on this topic, especially with the change in US administration. But it is also important to remember that we have some very strong economic and technological tailwinds behind us, and in fact I would argue that these tailwinds are so strong that the clean energy revolution I think we can even say is unstoppable. The only question is how fast will it go and will it be fast enough to save the planet and the most critical tailwind has been the huge decline in clean energy costs in wind solar batteries and other clean tech.
Although people are aware that these costs have come down it's not well understood just how fast this has happened - and what it really means for the energy system. In fact even experts, including at the international environment International Energy Agency, have mis-forecast these costs for decade on decade, and underestimated how quickly they would come down. The reality is that costs are actually falling exponentially about 12% per year for solar and batteries, and following a pattern very much like the declines in costs of computers and mobile phones. In fact there's evidence that clean technology follows a kind of Moore's law for clean energy, and just as Moore's law transformed the world and computing and other technologies, this decline in clean energy costs is transforming our world.
These costs are now going through tipping points where they have the potential to radically change energy systems, and I'll just give you one example. Pakistan has historically had a very expensive and not very well functioning energy system and it's about 49 gigawatts in total, of which 29 gigawatts is coal. The rest is mostly hydro and nuclear. Just last year, in one year alone, Pakistan imported 17 gigawatts of solar, and the year before that they imported 8.5 gigawatts. This was mostly very, very cheap solar that was coming in from their next door neighbour China. In just two years Pakistan has imported enough solar to essentially replace all their fossil fuel electricity generation. This does show that when these prices pass a certain tipping point and when things get cheap enough things can actually move and flip very quickly. Pakistan is also experiencing explosive growth now in batteries electric scooters and other things that are electrifying their economy. So the clean energy transition is no longer an economic burden to be avoided It's now an opportunity to be seized.
There are lots of barriers to seizing this opportunity not just for developing countries like Pakistan but also for developed countries too, and throughout history technology revolutions have needed government help to accelerate them and and make them possible. The energy transition is no different. The markets alone won't get us where we need to go. In particular this is a very capital intensive transition. We need to mobilise lots and lots of capital and again there are particular issues with the developing world. We need to build public infrastructure grids EV charging stations. We need new and different supply chains as it is s not realistic politically or economically to depend on just one country for many of these goods. We need to support innovation in hard to abate sectors like steel and cement aviation and so on. And we also need different policies and regulations for our energy markets which were built for fossil fuels.
So in short we need a 'systems approach' looking across all these issues, and that brings us to our topic of industrial policy that we need broad portfolios of policies well beyond the economist's favourite answer of carbon pricing. We need policies that mobilise the whole economy to drive and accelerate this transition. Since this is a solutions summit, I'm now going to turn to the panel and ask what are our solutions in green industrial policy. What's working, what's not working and what do we have to do differently?
Watch the full panel discussion.
