What you are about to read is part one of a taste of my experience at the Global Public Policy Network’s conference “Governance in a Globalizing World” at Sciences Po in Paris about two weeks ago . This taste will come in bite size packets of thoughts, actions, reactions, and ramblings. It is only fitting, since I spent so much time on an airplane, where you are served airplane servings, and then in Europe, where you are served European servings. Here goes…

First, full disclosure:  I was at this conference to promote a partnership between the GPPN and The Morningside Post. We are redesigning our site, and part of that involves utilizing blogging technology to create a Web 2.0 network for GPPN content. More on this later.

I got on the plane November 4th, at 9:20pm, election results pouring in. Everything was looking Obama. But still too early to tell. Yet, NBC was calling state after state as Obama’s despite only 2% of the votes being tallied. It was looking like that kind of night.

As I entered the plane, the real action was around the TVs, where people were glued, rapt, hopeful (for a change).

I went to sleep not knowing, wondering when I would know, wondering if there would be an announcement by British Air, wondering if there would be a reaction. As I drifted off, I listened to a live recording of Dave Matthews at a recent show saying, “It is my opinion that if Obama becomes the next president, that the screams of celebration that will come from all over the world to this country will be audible without microphones.”

I awoke to the captain informing us Obama had won the “presidentship.” Everyone clapped. Everyone.

PARIS

I’d been to Paris before, but not in 13 years. So a smile ripped across my face as I ascended the elevator out of the metro to my first site of Paris, at the Republique stop—a trailer opened on one side selling crepes. Of course. Paris.

I met up with Eva (Science Po), whom I’d be staying with for the weekend. Everyone else was already there. Evan (SIPA), Vidya (LSE), Oli (LSE). Cecilia (Science Po) would come later. We did what you do in Europe around dinner time—a feast. Prosciutto, fresh garden salad, fancy fromages, black olives, baguettes, and of course, red wine.

DAY ONE OF THE CONFERENCE

Paris eats the unprepared. It is so large and challenging to navigate for those without a map or knowledge of the city, a concept for the local public transport, or are traveling with someone cranky and inexperienced. Unless you are ready for things like this, you will be swallowed whole. So, here’s where I fell back in love with Paris: when I experienced what might be the single
greatest innovation in urban planning in the last decade:  the public bicycle.

Paris now has a system in place where you can rent a bike with a credit card, ride it to wherever you need to go, and somewhere very close to your destination will be a station where you can park your bike. Get there within a half hour, it’s free. After a half hour, it’s a Euro. Imagine such a system.

Because of this, I saw a lot of Paris I wouldn’t normally have seen. I felt it in ways. The crisp air, the droplets of rain, the weaving in and out of traffic knowing that these people are actually paying attention to you, deferring to you (unlike Boulder, Colorado, where rich girls on cellphones in SUVs are a constant threat). It’s a system that is working brilliantly. And it made me want to bike the whole city, it made me love Paris anew. The best part:  we biked almost every morning and night, as our primary form of transport.

Or maybe it was that I fell back in love when Parisians yelled at us for the various traffic disturbances we created, like when we cut off pedestrians in the crosswalk, or when we turned too suddenly down side streets in front of cars. Eva explained that Parisians LOVE letting you know what you did wrong. I kinda like this about Parisians. You always know where you stand with them.

The truth is, I mentally skipped out on the first couple of sessions of the conference. I had a paper to finish that was due two days before. The “Interested in the GPPN Conference World’s” loss was the “Interested in Studies Done on Media Development World’s” gain. I was there in form if not function.

Financial Crisis Impact on Governance and Economics Session

We got a summary of what went desperately wrong that instigated the global financial crisis. It went a lot like an episode of “This American Life,” only without the anecdote. So, most of the session told me what I already knew. But it was the Q&A session afterwards that filled me with fire.

Where was consumer behavior in all of this? How come we are still talking about all of this without focusing on some really terrible
choices made by everyday people. Our solutions seem to be to bail out the institutions, without anything targeting consumers, leaving me to wonder if once everything stabilizes, a new generation of consumers will lather, rinse, repeat their terrible choices.

Are we really just fudging the numbers with all of this bailout? Are we just propping up our institutions so that our GDP won’t take too great a hit, so tomorrow we can restore consumer confidence so they will spend again? The message, again and again, is that banks stopped loaning to banks, and that’s bad. We need to start that up again with money. So banks will borrow from banks, and our consumers can…overspend again?

Someone astutely asked the question:  Where was civil society in all of this? If there were all these indicators that this was happening in the early 2000s, why wasn’t it being reported?

Exactly. Tell me again why we shouldn’t be investing more money and resources into the media development aspect of civil society?
Particularly citizen journalism and journalism that isn’t primarily pro business? Why isn’t this considered central to all development?

Francesco Saraceno, MPA Professor in the French Observatory on Economic Conditions at Sciences Po, warned that we shouldn’t ask if someone was smoking in bed before we put out the fire. He’s right, to a point. But when we ask who was smoking in bed, we’d better make sure the consumer’s breath is checked.

Practices of Sustainable Development Session

We were assured that sustainable development and growth can in fact go hand in hand. Although, I have to say, I disagree. Sustainable
development takes into account things like the environmental impact of growth and development. And yet, pretty much every measure we have of growth leaves environmental impact out. GDP, an incredibly  flawed tool for measuring the health of an economy, is unfortunately the primary tool for measuring a country’s growth. But it mainly measures what was produced this year, and we want
that number to be a percentage increase on last year, without factoring in how much we will have to pay in the future due to
the environmental and health degradation that will follow producing today’s goods and services.

So how exactly can development be sustainable? Can we sustain development forever and ever? Or, does it stop at some point? And if so, when? When resources run out? When we are all equal? Not a whole lot of talk on this matter. We just all really like the idea of taking more into account than GDP per capita.

And what if we hit a global GDP ceiling? Our whole economic self-esteem, at least in the economic superpower of America (maybe
instead of USA, we should call it ESA), comes from whether or not we produce a percentage increase. But what if one day we are no longer able to do that? What if that happens to the whole world? Will Malthus finally rest in peace when we all catch up to his notion that land can only support so many people?

I was troubled that the whole conversation wasn’t really centered around creating a global movement to replace GDP as the primary
measurement tool. Jean-Michel Severino, General Director of AFD, made the point that China certainly can’t sustain its double digit growth rates indefinitely, and it will pay for it in the future with a great big environmental bill, among other things. So why aren’t we creating a global multilateral movement to measure economies with a ruler instead of a mirror?

On that point on China, Severino also made the great point that a lot of those emissions we scold China for, as it approaches number one emitter status, come largely from all the manufacturing outsourcing we (in the US, in particular) have done. It’s not all China’s fault that it emits so much.

I wish when people talked about sustainable development, they would tell us the cost of achieving it, and the cost of not achieving it. We get that somewhat with Jeffrey Sachs. But, here, we got more about the grim realities we will face, sans cost figures. Agricultural yields are down due to changing rainfall patterns. Massive deforestation. A rising number of political conflicts within unstable countries. Mass urbanization, which is terribly mismanaged quite frequently. But costs? Opportunity costs? What are the real figures here? Would we get more development support if we could demonstrate a real cost-benefit analysis?

Severino cited energy demand in Africa. He said it grows by 15% per year, 90% of which comes from coal, which is the environment’s least best friend. Part of the problem is, it takes one year to build a coal plant and ten years to build a dam, so coal plants tend to win. By Severino’s estimate, Africa is using only 6% of its hydropower potential.

It was at this point where my notes drift off to:  I wish Randy “Macho Man” Savage would bust through the wall and start whipping Slim Jim’s at us. Or better yet, The Yes Men finish off the day with a presentation on how we could implement a Malthusian-inspired plan to raise income per person by reducing world population, perhaps by killing pleasure and reducing incentive to live. Something to break up the beat that all conferences seem to drum.

That night, there was a social event at a bar. My two favorite things about this place are:  posters of Obama everywhere and the fact that the bartender gave me a coin from Sudan as part of my change for a drink. The posters were mostly of Obama talking to a Native American chief wearing a giant feather headdress, and one where McCain was sticking his tongue out in an awkward and suggestive way as he reached for Obama’s derriere.

We biked back that night. I can’t overstate how fantastic the French are for coming up with this system. Imagine never needing another bike lock. Or even a bike.

I also can’t overstate the love Obama is receiving in Paris. His face is everywhere. It’s like eight years of tarnishing of our world image is being re-shined at the sound of a single finger snap.

Photo 1:  Students in conference action (Courtesy of the author).

Photo 2:  A little taste of that Obama love (Courtesy of the author).