Brendan May is tired of politics and politicians

The more time I have spent working on environmental issues, the more I have despaired of government. As a student, I believed in the power of government to make things better, as so many do. But real-life experience, first from working at an NGO and more recently from a business perspective, has rapidly eroded any idealism I once held dear.

It occurred to me recently that the best thing government can do on sustainability and corporate responsibility is to get out of the way as fast as possible. In general, other than a few global treaties over the decades, politicians are so far behind companies and NGOs on the environment that when they eventually wake up it is usually to obstruct. They cause muddle where clarity and consensus reigned, and impose stale old thinking of limited use to anyone, let alone the natural environment. 

In the UK, the recent botches over solar power, the forest sell-off, the Sustainable Development Commission and the Green Investment Bank have all made a mockery of the self-proclaimed “greenest government ever”.

On fundamental issues of food security, ecosystem services, tropical commodities and their deforestation footprint, resource depletion and biodiversity, renewable energy and countless other policy issues, governments are largely asleep.

It’s probably better this way. When I worked on seafood sustainability, nearly all interactions with governments around the world were a disaster. For the fish.

At the moment, business is in despair over the lack of clarity – on carbon capture and storage, on feed-in tariffs, on transport policy.

Business solutions

NGOs are just plain angry, and rightly so. It is simply a sign of the times that business has become the (potential) solutions provider to the planet’s system failures, often working in partnership with NGOs whose policy ambition and credibility far exceed those of any politician.

I have reached the conclusion that the more government keeps out of the environmental debate the better. The market will decide. That sounds laissez faire and Thatcherite, but it isn’t.

NGOs now act as the framework-setter that ought to make markets perform better and deprive them of their excesses. Although this regulatory role was once the role of government, politicians are not interested enough in this agenda for them to meet their responsibilities. 

But of course, it isn’t this simple. We do need governments to set the regulatory frameworks, internationally and domestically, for certain key policy mechanisms: on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, on carbon trading, on microgeneration. We need subsidies for the technological fixes that could still avert planetary disaster.

The fact that governments are botching things up all over the place doesn’t mean you can remove them entirely from the picture. That is the great frustration of the sustainability movement.

It used to be said that the problem with business is that it only thinks two quarters ahead. That is no longer the case – companies are having to think decades ahead, to plan for resource scarcity and climate volatility and to lock in supply chain resilience.

Politicians are now the short-term gamblers, with a mere three-to-five-year electoral and budgetary cycle to worry about. That rules them out of the game when it comes to sustainability. But we’re stuck with the status quo, because even if we wanted to remove politicians from these discussions, they will always persist in confusing power with influence and holding office with leadership. All we can do is make them feel that any progress is down to them. It was ever thus.

A recent tweet from a politically active lobbyist said it all. It lamented the fact that a supposedly talented politician had been handed the climate change portfolio and that the politician in question would be “wasted” on such a minor role. With that driving the psychology of so many party political people who think politicians really matter, the natural world has something of a problem.

So I don’t expect too much progress from governments in 2012. Or any year.

Brendan May is founder of the Robertsbridge Group, a consultancy, UK chairman of the Rainforest Alliance and a contributing editor of Ethical Corporation.