Mark Malloch-Brown railed against the world’s highest-income nations on Thursday, urging them to step up support for lower-income counterparts or lose all “political legitimacy” as their “double standards” are revealed during a time of historic upheaval.
The Open Society Foundations president argues it is vital that Europe supports Ukraine through its war with Russia, for example, but worries that other nations, especially those in Africa, sense a deep unfairness as their plights — including debt burdens, conflict, and malnutrition — fail to elicit the same rapid and generous response.
“Developing countries, they are so burned, so often on promises not delivered, particularly in the climate finance space. Now, those donors are on the hook to deliver,” he told Devex in a wide-ranging interview Thursday during the World Bank-International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Washington.
His sharpest criticism is directed at donor countries cutting back on aid when suffering is growing among the most vulnerable, with hunger rising and global poverty reduction ground to a halt — an unprecedented setback after decades of progress.
“A green recovery is part of the long-term answer to the fuel inflation issue. What’s cheaper than solar and wind, once it’s installed?”
— Mark Malloch-Brown, president, Open Society Foundations“There’s more cuts in the works,” he said, visibly dismayed as he considers the ongoing slashes to the foreign aid budget in the United Kingdom. Sweden is likely next, he said, as are other big donors, in a trend that he says is corroding trust in the global system and the de facto leaders of the international order.
Sitting in his nonprofit’s offices around the corner from the White House, Malloch-Brown has lost none of the activist energy he’s long been known for or his penchant for straight talking. His calm, considered tone helps to smooth over his calls for radical reform of an international system he worries is lagging behind the crises of the moment.
A former United Nations deputy secretary-general, his word of caution to the wealthy West is that the rest of the world is watching whether it will step up. He notes the recent U.N. vote in which many low-income countries did not condemn Russia — failing to align with the West — as many countries in dire straits are seeking energy imports from Moscow and hedging their bets.
“To enjoy political legitimacy, and to be able to hold onto a large political majority willing to condemn the Russians in Ukraine, you’ve got to show you can walk and chew gum — you can confront Russia on Ukraine but also confront this major global economic crisis,” he said.
The Western-led push for low-income nations to almost solely rely on renewable energy going forward is made worse by the fact that Europe itself is now actively hunting for new gas deals and using more coal as Russia cuts energy supplies.
“At the same time, they are telling Africans they can’t use gas in their transition. Talk about double standards. It doesn’t get more double than that,” he said.
He argues the priorities right now must be food security and fuel price inflation. He recommends that activists merge a universal message of economic security with the climate agenda, uniting those suffering in both the global north and global south.
“A green recovery is part of the long-term answer to the fuel inflation issue. What’s cheaper than solar and wind, once it’s installed?” he asks rhetorically.
He chides Western climate activists, urging modesty about understanding people’s priorities in the face of hard economic times — his political roots showing through. Pushback from African leaders, who are demanding financing for gas so they have capital to invest in their economies, should set off alarms.
“It’s a wake-up call to the climate community, that just because it sees itself as the progressive end of this, it may not be any less immune than traditional voices claiming it knows what Africa wants,” he said.
“The only people who know what Africa wants are Africans themselves.”
He said he sees himself as an “old campaigner and political animal,” who longs for a global movement for systemic reform that moves institutions away from their post-World War II origins.
“From a colonial operative structure to a cooperative structure,” he described the shift, adding that it would be “a profound reimagining of the system, where developing countries feel like they own the institutions.”
On climate, he bemoaned those who are left out, urging climate activists to open a big tent.
“The language of climate change is a rather exclusive, Western, liberal language, which doesn’t do a good job of making room for the conservationist right in the north, or the living standards [of the] majority in the global south,” he said.
A big part of his advocacy efforts at the moment are focused on reforming the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He said he came into the annual meetings this week blaming the bank’s staff for slow-walking the big changes needed — but that executive boards and shareholders need to act too.
He has little patience for the top leadership at the bank, lashing out at the “perceived failing American presidency,” a nod to David Malpass, whose climate gaffe last month haunts him, as does the general sense among progressives that he is resisting change.
OSF is pushing for an overhaul of the multilateral development banks that would entail more lending and risk taking to increase the capital available to countries in distress. This comes as the United States, Germany, and others are growing increasingly vocal about reforming the World Bank so that it focuses more on climate.
Malloch-Brown noted that this push for more boldness from his old employer — he was once a vice president at the Washington-based anti-poverty lender — comes as donors are tightening their purses.
“The G-7 types are casting around looking for how to do more with less,” he said. “And that always brings it back to the banks.”
He would like to see changes at IMF too. Most notably, he is disappointed by calls from the fund for austerity measures in low-income countries, calling it a “classic” response.
“The IMF prescription and doctrine for dealing with this is wrong for the time,” he said. He is full of praise for the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, but said she needs a board that is not afraid of being bold and breaking the status quo. She also needs a partner across the street at the World Bank, he said.
Asked if the world can avoid worsening hunger and social unrest, the former British minister is blunt: “We are not going to avoid it — it’s how we mitigate it.”
He is pleased IMF recently opened a food price shock window, showing how it is trying to be nimble by offering countries loans when they need them. But, he noted, this is still more lending, often to countries facing debt crises, which could increase their borrowing burdens.
“The fiscal headwinds donor countries are facing are pushing us into a loan-based model of emergency response … and this is not the right way to do it,” he said.