Nov 2003 Perched on the Moon: on Global Public Goods and Balances According to a recent UNDP study entitled, Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century," the major world crises of the late 20th century could have been averted if governments and international organizations invested more in the management and protection of… global public goods ". Perched on the moon looking down on the earth from space, I could see that there is political will to define GPGs, institutional capacity for providing them, and general agreement on the need to manage and to preserve them equitably. After all, Global Public Goods are “assets that benefit all humanity!” But not able to understand what was stalling the process (I had been sitting on the moon since June 1992) I decided to land, ever so silently, in Commissioner Lamy’s coat pocket. I thought, from this perch, I could catch up on reality. So there I listened. I listened for weeks (I had decided that “time” was a global public good, I had decided to promote it). I had landed there just in time to participate in the World Summit on Sustainable Development. What a speech that Jacques Chirac made! And I got to follow many NGO meeting with Mr Lamy who tried to explain how " on the bilateral and regional trade front, Johannesburg committed us all to integrating sustainable development into not only the WTO but our regional and bilateral trade processes. " And, in order to understand and promote sustainability we must first develop new tools for assessment. The purpose of assessment being not only to integrate environmental policy but also developmental and economic objectives in “one roadmap. ” BALANCES, Balances, all is balances! My head began to spin. Here politicians were talking about developing a new concept. And for this concept to be effective new institutions would have to be created. And to understand what is going on, there would have to be new tools for impact assessment. But hadn’t the US experience in regional free trade initiatives proven so unsuccessful in delivering promised boom for American family farmers that the government had to set up a “Trade Adjustment Assistance program” to help farmers displaced by trade deals? So why was dropping trade barriers portrayed as having great potential to generate the wealth? And what about the impact of free-trade agreements in reinforcing the dependence of Africa for food? All the instruments available for poor countries to protect their producers have been dismantled, so Africa now relies on imports while it could have the capacities to feed itself! And wasn’t there a global economic crisis? Wasn’t Overseas Development Assistance seriously lagging? Who was going to pay for all this? Finally I realized that since Millennium Development Goals have given that international community an extension on the Earth Summit commitments, and besides Global Public Goods weren't seriously ready to go anywhere, so I might as well go back to the moon for a spell. Perched on the moon, with time to kill, I decided to read my old friend John Kenneth Galbraith. Maybe a better understanding of history will help me figure out what is really going on. I opened the « New Industrial State » that had been written back in 1967. I opened to a page and read: … An almost equally vital point for the established system is the maximization of profits.…Since the message of more or less money is the message, the market transmits, the market still rules. I here argue that the greater corporation maximizes not pecuniary return but the whole complex of organizational interests of which pecuniary return is only one part and that it goes on to ensure that the goals of the larger community and the state will be sympathetic to its own. This involves an exercise of power far more important than is possible if the firm is confined to its pursuit of profit.” Meredyth Bowler Ailloud, IDS, Lyon France