Sharing the Commons: Humanity’s Collective Heritage
Interview with James Quilligan
By Jason Francis
(From Share International)
James Quilligan has been an analyst and administrator in the field of international development since 1975. He was a policy advisor and press secretary for the Brandt Commission, an international development panel created by the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Quilligan has since served as a policy advisor and writer for many politicians and leaders around the world, including Jimmy Carter, Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterrand and HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal. He has also collaborated with several United Nations agencies as well as international development organizations on global commons issues and has served as an economic consultant for government agencies in 26 nations. Quilligan is presently Managing Director of the Center for Global Negotiations and Chairman of Global Commons Trust. He is also a Board Member of London’s School of Commoning and of the US publication Kosmos Journal.
Jason Francis interviewed James Quilligan for Share International.
Share International: You’ve spent most of your career in international development, but in recent years you’ve switched into this new area called the commons. Why is that?
James Quilligan: International development for me was a way of understanding the problems of the world and how they could be solved. I felt at home in development. But was it the truth? All along I had been looking at development issues from a meta-level and it gradually dawned on me that I was barking up the wrong tree. I reconsidered the many imbalances in trade, finance and money – areas in which I had specialized for decades – and realized that Keynesian solutions like economic stimulus were not going to solve the economy’s structural problems. I also reconsidered mounting global crises such as hunger and malnutrition; decreasing water access and sanitation; the lack of education and employment; the problem of biological, conventional and nuclear weapons; the issues of refugees, migration and trafficking.
Then, there is the environmental situation with global warming, and severe pollution and degradation of air, water, soil and forests. Numerous studies indicate that if global warming causes temperatures to rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, water will become scarce, farmland will turn into deserts, there will be food shortages, many species will become extinct, island and coastal areas will be under water, millions of people will be displaced and global conflict may ensue.
