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The First 30 Years
History
1 / 10 : Beginnings
A novelist would probably reject the contacts and encounters that
led up to the creation of the Club of Rome as too improbable for a
good story. An Italian industrialist who has spent much of his
working life in China and Latin America meets, via a Russian
(although this is at the height of the Cold War), a top
international scientific civil servant, Scots by birth and now
living in Paris.
They find they share similar concerns, become
friends, decide to draw others (American, Austrian, British, Danish,
French) into their discussions. Unfortunately, the first proper
meeting of this group, in Rome in Spring 1968, is a total flop but a
handful of die-hards carry on, and within a few years millions of
people all round the world are talking about their ideas.
However unlikely, that is roughly the way the Club of Rome began. It
could so easily never have happened - because the protagonists might
never have met, or they might well have given up after the failure
of that first meeting. That the Club was in fact founded and
flourished undoubtedly owed much to the personalities and experience
of the two main characters in the story.
Aurelio Peccei, the
Italian, and Alexander King, the Scot, both had excellent - though
very different - vantage points in the mid 1960s to observe the
problems emerging in the world; both were worried by what they saw
but their capacity to act on their knowledge was limited by their
positions. Naturally, they were on the look-out for like-minded
people and for ways of taking their ideas further.
Aurelio Peccei had trained as an economist and was sent to China by
Fiat in 1935. After the war, spent in the resistance and in prison,
he returned to Fiat, first helping to get the group back on its feet
and then, in 1949, as head of its Latin American operations. He
quickly realized that it would make sense to start manufacturing
locally and set up the Argentine subsidiary, Fiat-Concord. In 1957
he was delighted to be asked to create and run Italconsult (a para-public
joint consultancy venture involving major Italian firms such as
Fiat, Innocenti, Montecatini), seeing this as a way of helping to
tackle the problems of the Third World which he had come to know
first-hand.
But Peccei was not content merely with the substantial
achievements of Italconsult, or his responsibilities as President of
Olivetti, and threw his energies into other organizations as well,
including ADELA, an international consortium of bankers aimed at
supporting industrialization in Latin America. He was asked to give
the keynote speech in Spanish at the group’s first meeting in 1965,
which is where the series of coincidences leading to the creation of
the Club of Rome began.
Peccei’s speech caught the attention of Dean Rusk, then American
Secretary of State, and he had it translated into English and
distributed at various meetings in Washington. A Soviet
representative at the annual meeting of ACAST (the U.N. Advisory
Committee on Science and Technology), Jermen Gvishiani, read the
speech and was so taken by it that he decided he should invite the
author to come for private discussions, outside Moscow. Gvishiani
therefore asked an American colleague on ACAST, Carroll Wilson,
about Peccei.
Wilson did not know Peccei, but he and
Gvishiani both
knew Alexander King, by then head of the Scientific Affairs
directorate of the OECD in Paris, so Wilson appealed to him for
information.
As it happened, King did not know Peccei, but he was equally
impressed by the ADELA paper and tracked down its author via the
Italian Embassy in Paris. King wrote to Peccei, passing on
Gvishiani’s address and wish to invite him to the Soviet Union, but
also congratulating him on his paper and suggesting that they might
meet some time as they obviously shared similar concerns.
While Aurelio Peccei had been working as an industrial manager in
the Third World, Alexander King had been pursuing his career as a
national and international civil servant in the very different
setting of the industrialized countries. He had studied chemistry at
the universities of London and Munich, then taught and carried out
some important research at Imperial College, London.
The war took
him to the United States, where he was scientific attaché at the
British Embassy in Washington until 1947, concerned with "everything
from penicillin to the bomb". His experience there and in his next
jobs - with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in
London and then the European Productivity Agency in Paris - gave him
the interest in the interactions between science, industry and
society as well as the expertise in science policy matters that he
was to need in his work at the OECD.
King has described the OECD in the 1960s as "a kind of temple of
growth for industrialized countries - growth for growth’s sake was
what mattered". This veneration of growth, with little concern for
the long-term consequences, worried King and Torkil Kristensen, the
Secretary General of the OECD. They both felt that there ought to be
some sort of independent body which could ask awkward questions and
try to encourage governments to look further ahead than they
normally did. As international civil servants, however, they felt
limited in what they could do - at which point, Peccei telephoned
King and they arranged to have lunch.
The two men got on extremely well from the very outset. They met
several times in the latter part of 1967/early 1968, and then
decided that they had to do something constructive to encourage
longer-range thinking among Western European governments. Peccei
accordingly persuaded the Agnelli Foundation to fund a two-day
brainstorming meeting of about 30 European economists and scientists
at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in April 1968.
To launch the discussion, King asked one of his colleagues from the
OECD, Erich Jantsch, to present a paper. Unfortunately for the
success of the meeting, Jantsch produced a brilliant but far too
sophisticated paper on economic and technological forecasting which
bewildered rather than stimulated the audience. In addition, the
Vietnam war had made people very anti-American and therefore hostile
to what were perceived as American techniques, such as systems
analysis.
The debate degenerated into arguments about semantics,
many of the participants were either skeptical about the methodology
or simply unwilling to become involved in a shaky joint enterprise,
and the meeting ended in fiasco.
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2 / 10 : The Club takes shape
Half a dozen recalcitrant, however, refused to admit defeat. Peccei,
King, Jantsch, Hugo Thiemann, Jean Saint-Geours and
Max Kohnstamm
had dinner together that night to discuss what had gone wrong and
what to do next. King and Peccei agreed at once that they had been
"too foolish, naive and impatient" and that they simply did not know
enough about the subject they were tackling. The group therefore
decided that they should spend the next year or so in mutual
education, discussing world problems among themselves and
occasionally inviting others to join in.
According to Alexander King, within an hour they had decided to call
themselves "The Club of Rome" and had defined the three major
concepts that have formed the Club’s thinking ever since: a global
perspective, the long term, and the cluster of intertwined problems
they called "the problematic". Although the Rome meeting had been
convened with just Western Europe in mind, the group realized that
they were dealing with problems of much larger scale and complexity:
in short, "the predicament of mankind". The notion of
problematic
excited some because it seemed applicable at a universal level, but
worried others, who felt that the approach was valid only for
smaller entities such as a city or community. Saint-Geours and
Kohnstamm therefore soon dropped out, leaving the others to pursue
their informal programme of learning and debate.
The Club initially had no legal form or membership. The group met
quite frequently over the following 18 months, often in Geneva, to
discuss aspects of the human predicament. Peccei brought in an
economist and futurologist named Hasan Ozbekhan, a Turk educated at
the London School of Economics and currently running a California
think-tank, who shared the group’s concerns and thought he might be
able to help them to find some way of looking at the interaction of
the various elements in the problematic.
Jantsch and Ozbekhan were invited to the European Summer University
at Alpbach in Austria in September 1969 for a seminar on the human
predicament, and Peccei and King went along to support them. The Alpbach meeting was significant for two reasons. First, that was
where the German Eduard Pestel joined the group. Second, the
Austrian Chancellor paid a visit to the ESU and encountered the Club
members one evening at dinner, where they were talking about their
ideas. He was struck by the fact that these were the sorts of issues
his Ministers should be discussing together but were not, so he
invited them to come to address the cabinet in Vienna in a month’s
time. The aim of "pricking" governments, which had rather fallen
into abeyance, was thus revived at the request of a government!
In due course King, Peccei, Jantsch, Thiemann,
Kristensen (now
retired) and Gvishiani went to Vienna. They met with the Austrian
cabinet and later with a group of industrialists and bankers, all of
whom urged them to "go public" as they could be useful. This was
just the first of many meetings with heads of state during the next
couple of years.
Meanwhile, many more members were being recruited and it became
clear that a slightly more formal organization was needed. Alexander
King, as the "keeper of the ideology" from the outset, was inspired
by the model of the Lunar Society of Birmingham: a group of
independent-minded people (such as Wedgwood the potter, James Watt,
Priestley the discoverer of oxygen, Erasmus Darwin) who dined
together once a month towards the end of the 18th century and
discussed the promises and problems offered by contemporary
developments in science and industry. The Lunatics, as William Blake
called them disparagingly, had no political power or ambitions, but
they could see the interconnections between all that was happening
around them and the potential for changing the nature of society. No
bureaucracy, just thinking and doing.
Eventually the Club did have to draw up some statutes and choose a
President (Aurelio Peccei), but that was all. It was decided to
limit the membership to 100 because it was feared that larger
numbers would become unmanageable and would necessitate a paid
secretariat, hence all the usual paraphernalia of finance
committees, etc. that they hoped to avoid. So that the Club should
be seen to be entirely independent, financial support would not be
sought or accepted from governments or industry. For the same
reason, there should be no political affiliations or appointments -
members appointed to political positions were expected to become
sleeping members while in office (this happened, for example, for
Okita and Pestel). Otherwise the membership should range as widely
as possible, in terms of expertise and geography. A concern with the
problematic, and the need to delineate it and understand its
nature, was the main requirement for membership, irrespective of
political ideology.
The Club saw itself, as indeed it still does, as "a group of world
citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity and
acting as a catalyst to stimulate public debate, to sponsor
investigations and analyses of the problematic and to bring these
to the attention of decision makers".
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3 / 10 : The search for a methodology
By the time of the first major meeting of the Club in Berne in June
1970 (at the invitation of the Swiss government), there were about
40 members. Ozbekhan presented a paper proposing a methodology for
coming to grips with the predicament of mankind: they should set up
a fairly basic model of the global situation; establish empirically
a list of "continuing critical problems"; then simulate the
interactions within the system under different conditions. The
results would provide a more concrete basis for evaluating possible
policy options and offering advice to governments. The paper
provoked a heated debate, with strongly held views on both sides.
The majority ultimately decided that it would take too long and cost
too much to develop the Ozbekhan model to the point where it would
produce useful results.
Once again, the enterprise might have foundered; but once again, a
deus ex machina appeared, this time in the shape of Professor Jay
Forrester of MIT, who had been invited to the meeting. For thirty
years he had been working on the problem of developing mathematical
models that could be applied to complex, dynamic situations such as
economic and urban growth. His offer to adapt his well-tried dynamic
model to handle global issues was gratefully accepted, and the way
ahead suddenly seemed less uncertain. A fortnight later, a group of
Club members visited Forrester at MIT and were convinced that the
model could be made to work for the kind of global problems which
interested the Club. An agreement was signed with a research team at
MIT in July 1970, the finance provided by a grant of $200 000 that
Pestel had obtained from the Volkswagen Foundation.
The team was made up of 17 researchers from a wide range of
disciplines and countries, led by Dennis Meadows. From their base at
the Systems Dynamics Group at MIT they assembled vast quantities of
data from around the world to feed into the model, focusing on five
main variables: investment, population, pollution, natural resources
and food. The dynamic model would then examine the interactions
among these variables and the trends in the system as a whole over
the next 10, 20, 50 years or more if present growth rates were
maintained. The global approach was quite deliberate; regional and
area studies could come later.
In a remarkably short time, the team produced its report in 1972:
The Limits to Growth, written very readably for a non-specialist
audience by Donella Meadows. The response to the book - in all 12
million copies have been sold, translated into 37 languages - showed
how many people in every continent were concerned about the
predicament of mankind. "The Club of Rome" had begun to make its
mark, as its founders had hoped, on the whole world.
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4 / 10 : Limits to Growth and other studies
Before the final publication, Peccei circulated a draft to leading
economists and politicians, hoping for some response, but received
none. There was no shortage of reactions, however, once the book was
out.
When the results were presented to the Club, some members had strong
reservations, especially about the lack of an adequate social
dimension or of any regional breakdown differentiating between the
industrialized countries and developing world. Such disagreement was
entirely natural, given the diverse views within the Club. Indeed,
this was why Limits to Growth, like the subsequent studies, was a
Report to rather than by the Club of Rome, prepared by reputable
academics for the very purpose of stimulating debate. It was not
meant to be a statement of the Club’s credo, but a first hesitant
step towards a new understanding of the world.
Limits to Growth was discussed in hundreds of seminars, round
tables, newspaper articles, radio and television programmes. Quite
wrongly, the Report tended to be perceived as presenting an
inescapable scenario for the future, and the Club was assumed to be
in favour of zero economic growth. In fact the projection of trends
and the analysis of their cross impacts were intended to highlight
the risks of a blind pursuit of growth in the industrialized
countries, and to induce changes in prevailing attitudes and
policies so that the projected consequences should not materialize.
In general, the main academic criticisms - to simplify complex
arguments drastically - came from economists, who felt that the
study failed to take sufficient account of the price mechanism, and
from scientists, who thought it neglected the capacity of scientific
and technological innovation to solve the world’s problems. A
particularly thorough critique was undertaken by the recently
founded Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex.
The Report broke new ground in a number of ways. For one thing, it
was the first time that a global model had been commissioned by an
independent body rather than a government or United Nations agency,
and its findings were intended to reach a wider public than the
usual limited audience of academics. More importantly for the
future, it was the first to make an explicit link between economic
growth and the consequences for the environment. Whatever its
shortcomings, Limits to Growth set the frame of reference for the
debate on the pros and cons of growth, as well as for subsequent
efforts in global modelling.
Eduard Pestel was one of those deeply concerned about the
undifferentiated global approach adopted in Limits to Growth. As a
professional systems analyst - he had established his own Institute
for Systems Analysis in Hannover in 1971 - he was the obvious person
to produce a better one. Accordingly, even before the Meadows Report
was published, he and Mihajlo Mesarovic of Case Western Reserve
University had begun work on a far more elaborate model (it
distinguished ten world regions and involved 200 000 equations
compared with 1000 in the Meadows model). The research had the full
support of the Club and the final publication, Mankind at the
Turning Point, was accepted as an official Report to the Club of
Rome in 1974. In addition to providing a more refined regional
breakdown, Pestel and Mesarovic had succeeded in integrating social
as well as technical data. The Report was less readable than Limits
to Growth and did not make the same impact on the general public,
but it was well received in Germany and France, in particular.
Several other studies were undertaken in the early 1970s to improve
upon Limits to Growth, with varying degrees of support from the
Club. Reflecting general criticism from the Third World, a Latin
American model was developed by the Bariloche Institute in
Argentina; the Club helped to find funding for the project but did
not give its imprimatur to the final report (A.O. Herrera et al.,
Catastrophe or New Society?, 1976). Another regional model, FUGI,
was launched by Yoichi Kaya to examine Japan and the Pacific; it was
sponsored by MITI and not by the Club.
With the idea of giving greater stress to the human dimension,
Peccei approached the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen and proposed a
study of the likely impact of a doubling of the population on the
global community. Tinbergen and his colleague Hans Linnemann came to
the conclusion, however, that the topic was unmanageably large and
decided to focus on the problems of "Food for a Doubling World
Population". When this was put to the Club, Peccei and others
disagreed strongly, feeling that other aspects such as strains on
housing, urban infrastructure, employment, etc. should not be
ignored. Ultimately Linnemann and his group pursued their research
with funds they had already mobilized in the Netherlands and
published their results independently (MOIRA - Model of
International Relations in Agriculture, 1979), not as a Report to
the Club of Rome.
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5 / 10 : The early 1970s: high visibility
The immediate consequences of the tremendous public interest in
Limits to Growth were that the Club enjoyed excellent coverage in
the media and it was much easier to gain access to influential
people. Peccei was keen to build on this strong position and
initiate further projects. It was a period of great expectations,
apparently propitious for influencing both policymakers and public
opinion.
The new phase of activities was discussed at the Tokyo Conference in
October 1973 on "Toward a Global Vision of Human Problems".
Preliminary presentations were made of the Latin American, FUGI,
Mesarovic and Pestel, and MOIRA models, as well as reports by a CoR
group working on energy, resources and technological change (later
published as Beyond the Age of Waste), of a Dutch group on the
implications of the findings of Limits to Growth for the
Netherlands, and of a group from the Battelle Institute on efforts
to apply the Delphi method to macroeconomic decision-making. The Club
had come a long way from the disastrous Rome meeting five years
before. However, another event in the same month fundamentally
altered everyone’s awareness of problems of scarcity and of power
relations: the OPEC meeting which heralded the first oil shock. The
framework of discussion changed radically, at least for a while, and
the Club was to become involved in the UN debate on the New
International Economic Order (NIEO).
Lest it appear that the Club was devoting all its energies to
academic modelling projects, another series of meetings should be
mentioned that reveals the other strand of its activities. Peccei
persuaded the Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, to host a meeting
in February 1974 on North-South problems which brought together six
other heads of state or government (from Canada, Mexico, the
Netherlands, Senegal, Sweden and Switzerland), senior
representatives of three others (Algeria, the Republic of Ireland
and Pakistan) and ten members of the CoR Executive Committee. Peccei
deliberately did not invite any of the major European powers, the
USA or the USSR so as to prevent the debate turning into a forum for
national or ideological position statements. To encourage the
participants to speak freely, they were asked to come without
accompanying civil servants and assured that nothing they said would
be attributed to them. The two-day private brainstorming meeting
ended with a press conference for 300 journalists and the CoR
Executive Committee members issued their "Salzburg Statement", which
emphasized that the oil crisis was simply part of the whole complex
of global problems; the nine recommendations related to many of the
issues covered in the NIEO.
As a logical extension of the Salzburg meeting, Peccei asked
Jan Tinbergen to produce a follow-up report on global food and
development policies, exploring these aspects much more thoroughly
than the coverage in Limits to Growth. It seemed a propitious moment
to promote thinking on the global problematic and international
co-operation as the oil crisis made people recognize how
interdependent the world had become. Scholars from the First, Second
and Third Worlds were invited to participate in the RIO project
(Reshaping the International Order), but only Poland and Bulgaria
accepted from the Communist bloc. The basic thesis was that the gap
between rich and poor countries (with the wealthiest roughly 13
times richer than the poorest) was intolerable and the situation was
inherently unstable. What would be required to reduce the gap to 6:1
over 15 to 30 years? (Though still large, this ratio seemed the
lowest that could be realistically proposed.) Unlike Limits to
Growth the model allowed the developing countries 5% growth per
annum, whereas the industrialized countries would have zero or
negative growth; all, however, would benefit from more sensible use
of energy and other resources and a more equitable distribution of
global wealth. The main Report argued that people in the rich
countries would have to change their patterns of consumption and
accept lower profits, but a dissenting group saw consumption as a
symptom rather than a cause of the problems, which stemmed rather
from the fundamental power structure.
After numerous working sessions and presentations at CoR and other
meetings over an 18-month period, the final results of RIO were
presented at a meeting in Algiers in October 1976 and accepted as a
Report to the Club of Rome. Despite being stronger on policy than
Limits to Growth, it did not have the hoped-for impact, perhaps
because the worst effects of the oil shock were over and the First
World was much less receptive to appeals for self-denial and greater
co-operation.
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6 / 10 : 1976-1984: doldrums
The response to the RIO study was discouraging, and the other
publications that appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s fared little
better, achieving respectable but unremarkable sales and publicity.
(The possible exception was Microelectronics and Society, which did
well especially in Germany.) It became clear that, in the current
climate, it would be difficult to attract sponsors for major
meetings and research projects, and academics might be less
interested in undertaking them for the Club. The whole business of modelling had become far more sophisticated, so that the Club was no
longer well placed to make an innovative contribution; in any case,
the public had become skeptical since nobody had forecast the oil
shock. Consequently the Club’s activities, largely at Peccei’s
instigation, entered a more disparate phase, with no overall guiding
principle. This does not mean that nothing was happening, as is
obvious from the list of Reports to the Club of Rome published
during this period (see Annex), but which tended to examine specific
aspects of the problematic rather than attempting a global
approach. The Annual Conferences, held at venues in four continents
every year from 1970 onwards, continued to provide an opportunity
not only for all members of the Club to meet, but also to spread its
ideas in the countries concerned.
From about 1979 onwards, Peccei devoted his energies increasingly to
a new project: the Forum Humanum. He had come to feel that the best
hope for the world lay in young people and his aim in Forum Humanum
was to build a network of younger scientists in the First, Second
and Third Worlds who would work together to tackle the pressing
problems of humankind. His colleagues in the Club did not on the
whole share his enthusiasm, and he was left to pursue his campaign
alone. Peccei travelled and lobbied as tirelessly as ever, and
groups of young scientists were established in Rome, Madrid, Geneva,
Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, but the movement did not take off
as he had hoped.
Ever since the early days, the Club had essentially been run by
Peccei and two secretaries operating from his office at Italconsult
headquarters in Rome. (On paper, CoR also had offices in Geneva and
Tokyo, at the Battelle Institute and c/o the Japan Techno Economics
Society (JATES) respectively, but these were little more than useful
addresses for correspondence or for organizing meetings.) In July
1982, after changes in company leadership, he received a week’s
notice to give up this office; in the ensuing upheaval, he salvaged
what seemed to him the most important documents, now stored by
Umberto Colombo at ENEA in Rome, but much archival material was lost
at that time.
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7 / 10 : Renewal
Peccei had been such a dominant force in the Club that when he died,
in March 1984, the feasibility and desirability of its continuing
existence was put in question. At a meeting in Helsinki in July
1984, however, the majority of members decided in favour of carrying
on.
Certain changes were inevitable. Largely thanks to Peccei, the Club
had managed to survive as a "non-organization", without a formal
structure, a proper secretariat and a budget, but this state of
affairs could not continue and new arrangements were needed to make
the Club more efficient. Alexander King was appointed President
(President Emeritus since 1 January 1991, when he was succeeded by
Ricardo Díez-Hochleitner). A more participative mode of operation
was adopted, with a Council (12 members) and a small Executive Board
(8 members). The Council defines the general framework for the
Club’s activities and deals with the issues of substance; the
members are chosen so as to reflect a balance of regions and
viewpoints. The Executive Board takes decisions relating to the day
by day actions of the Club and implements them; for practical
reasons, the members need to be easily available by telephone and
for meetings. Membership of both bodies is for three years,
renewable once, to ensure a rotation.
A major practical problem was to find someone prepared to take on
Peccei’s role in the day-to-day running of the Club on a similar
voluntary basis. In 1984 Alexander King proposed to the Executive
Board that there should be a new position of Secretary General to
assist the President, and the task was shouldered by Bertrand
Schneider. The Club’s headquarters then shifted to Paris.
Another new development was the decision to invite prominent world
figures who share the Club’s concerns to become Honorary Members.
Although their positions may prevent them from taking a public
stance, as in the case of the Queen of the Netherlands or the King
and Queen of Spain, they can and do give valued moral support. Among
the others are former President Gorbachev, former President Richard
von Weizsäcker of Germany, the first President of newly democratic
Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel, President Arpad Göncz of Hungary,
President Carlos Menem of Argentina, and the Nobel laureates Ilya
Prigogine and Lawrence Klein.
The main strands of activity continued to be part public, part
private - part collective (through the Annual Conferences, other
meetings and seminars, and the National Associations), part personal
initiatives, though these are not seen as separate: the action of
the Club is made up of the actions of the individual members.
Regular "Activities Reports" several times a year now keep the
members informed of each other’s, CoR and National Association
projects.
As regards the public actions, there was a deliberate change in
emphasis in tackling the "predicament of mankind". Although the
distinctively global approach would be maintained, emphasizing the
complex interactions within the problematic, the Helsinki meeting
felt it would be appropriate to focus on particular aspects, perhaps
concentrating on a single major item for the next few years.
Possible topics considered for this new phase are set out in
Alexander King’s "The Club of Rome - Reaffirmation of a Mission"
(1986): governability, peace and disarmament, population growth,
human resources and assessment of the consequences of advances in
science and technology. The first of these - examining the need for
innovation in the ways society and institutions are managed to cope
with the demands of a rapidly changing world - was selected as the
theme of the Annual Conference in Santander in 1985.
Similarly, the Club had a long-standing interest in development
questions, but now examined them in greater depth. Bertrand
Schneider’s The Barefoot Revolution, accepted as a Report to the
Club in 1985, marked a turning-point. The study examined at first
hand the working of 93 development projects, mainly in rural areas,
in 19 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Report
highlighted the contribution of the NGOs, but above all stressed the
enormous potential of the villagers themselves, once given the
chance to speak and act. After this broad overview, the Club focused
in turn on different regions of the Third World, starting with a
year of special concern with Africa. Under the leadership of the
Finnish National Association, a study was undertaken of food and
famine in Africa, following on the famines in the Sahel and
Ethiopia. In this connection, a meeting was held in June 1986 in
Lusaka under the patronage of President Kenneth Kaunda, and the
subsequent Report Africa beyond Famine had a considerable impact. A
larger conference was then arranged in Yaoundé, in December 1986,
bringing together about 80 Africans and 30 members of CoR from other
regions, for a frank discussion of the continent’s problems, along
with proposals for radical solutions. This concern with development
has continued in the 1990s.
In addition to the publications commissioned in relation to these
activities, a new "Information Series" of Reports was launched, such
as Bertrand Schneider’s Africa Facing its Priorities (1988) and
Eduard Pestel’s Beyond the Limits to Growth (1989). As the series
title indicates, the main aim was to provide information, with less
emphasis on policy recommendations. In general, publications were
subjected to more rigorous appraisal.
As to the more private face of the Club, the personal diplomacy
always practiced by members was given new impetus by the gradual
thaw in East-West relations after 1985. Two examples are
particularly striking. Before the Rejkavik Summit in October 1986,
Eduard Pestel and Alexander King sent a memo to both President
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, suggesting that the United
States and the USSR might be induced to work together on reducing
arms sales to poorer countries - the superpowers would gain
politically, if not economically, from such efforts, and they would
benefit from the experience of actually working together. The
response from the White House was perfunctory, but Gorbachev
immediately reacted very positively, and this led to personal
contacts between the Club and the Soviet leadership during the
crucial period of glasnost and perestroika. Similar contacts made by
Adam Schaff in Poland led to the creation there of a National
Association of the Club of Rome, providing a meeting ground for
members of the Communist Party, the Roman Catholic church and
Solidarity.
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8 / 10 : The evolution of the National Associations
The network of National Associations has grown largely
spontaneously. The first one came into being in the Netherlands as a
result of an overwhelming public response to early drafts of Limits
to Growth leaked to the Dutch press and presented on television; the
book ultimately sold 900,000 copies in a country with a population
of 13 million. Frits Boettcher, the head of the Dutch delegation to
the OECD Committee on Science and Technology, tried to persuade the
Club to build on this response and set up "The Club of Rome
Association for the Netherlands" in late 1971. The Club was,
however, extremely wary of self-proclaimed Associations which could
all too easily misrepresent the Club proper and detract from its
global mission. Nevertheless, similar Associations continued to
spring up here and there, and eventually gained the blessing of the
Club, since they can clearly make a substantial contribution to
spreading its ideas within the countries concerned.
Worries about the Associations engaging in activities and
propagating views out of line with the Club’s position, but outside
its control, have been allayed since a common Charter was worked
out, largely based on the model of the Spanish Association. The
Charter was adopted in Warsaw in 1987. Only Associations willing to
abide by the provisions of the Charter are recognized as official
"Associations of the Club of Rome".
Following the collapse of communism, National Associations for the
Club of Rome were established across Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria,
Croatia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia,
Slovenia and Ukraine; National Associations already existed in
Poland and Russia. Chapters were also created in Latin America
(Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico and Venezuela). Currently there are
30 National Associations spread across all five continents.
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9 / 10 : The Nineties
The topic of the Annual Conference in Hannover in 1989 was "Problems
of World Industrialization - Panacea or Nightmare?", highlighting
the environmental constraints on industrial growth, the problems of
industrialization in the developing countries and the essential role
of energy in future world development - a complex of interdependent
issues that underscores the importance of the problematic concept.
Participants were so impressed by the gravity of the situation that,
at the suggestion of Ricardo Díez-Hochleitner, it was agreed the
Club should spend 1990 re-examining the world situation and
re-assess its own mission in the context of turbulent global change.
The result was, for the first time, a Report by rather than to the
Club of Rome: The First Global Revolution, published in 1991 and now
translated into 11 languages. The views of members were sought via a
questionnaire, and the Council then had intensive discussions, with
two meetings held at the invitation of Jermen Gvishiani in Moscow
and of Ricardo Díez-Hochleitner in Santander. These efforts
culminated in approval of the Report written by Alexander King and
Bertrand Schneider. As the first part of the book makes clear, the
concerns that led to the founding of the Club are still highly
relevant; the second half concentrates on practical suggestions for
ways to tackle the problematic and coins a new term, the "resolutique".
The Club then defined itself not only as a thinktank but also as a
centre of initiatives and innovation.
This was the occasion for redefining the priority concerns -
development, the environment, governance and education - and setting
out clearly the aims, strategies and initiatives for the future. The
first of these was followed up through a research programme on
"Evolving Concepts of International Co-operation for Development",
with major meetings in New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur and the Japanese city
of Fukuoka. The results were brought together in a Report to the
Club of Rome, The Scandal and the Shame, by Bertrand Schneider,
which criticizes the waste and failures of development policies in
the Third World over the last forty years and makes concrete
suggestions, including the transformation of the World Bank and the
UN agencies involved. The concern with governance, which had been a
commitment of the Club of Rome since its early days, gave rise to a
Report by Yehezkel Dror on The Capacity to Govern, and the Hanover
Declaration after the 25th Anniversary meeting. This project is now
being taken further by Ruud Lubbers, former Prime Minister of the
Netherlands. As to the environment, two recent Reports to the Club
of Rome looked at different aspects of "green accounting": Factor 4:
Target for Sustainable Development by Ernst von Weizsäcker, and
Taking Nature into Account: Toward a Sustainable National Income,
edited by Wouter van Dieren. One of the topics under consideration
for future work is "A New Approach to the Threats to the
Environment".
In addition, the Club of Rome made a Statement on Human Rights and
Responsibilities at the conference at Punta del Este in 1991.
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10 / 10 : The future
Much has been achieved in this first quarter-century, but much
remains to be done. What, therefore, are the tasks in hand and
ahead?
As regards its own membership and organization, the emphasis is on
action and producing results. Members are expected to participate
actively or else give way to others who are keen to make a
contribution, so that there is a constant process of renewal. Since
1984, the membership has changed substantially, and there is a
conscious effort to seek more women and younger people to improve
the sex and age balance. The members are now drawn from 52 countries
on all five continents. A new structure is now in place, consisting
of an Executive Committee of around a dozen members. The precarious
financial situation is at last being addressed via a Foundation,
registered in Geneva, administered by a Board of Governors, who will
themselves act as patrons and help guide the Club’s activities. The
aim is to constitute a substantial endowment, allowing the Club to
finance its more routine activities as well as major programmes of
work without constant anxiety about finding the necessary funding.
The programme for the next three years is evaluated and regularly
updated. The overall strategy has four interlinked aspects: to take
a global view of the fundamental problems of our interdependent
world; to examine contemporary problems and policies in a longer
term perspective than governments usually do; to try to develop a
deeper understanding of the interaction of political, social,
cultural, ecological, scientific and technological problems; and to
have a constant concern to seek efficient and equitable strategies
and find workable solutions.
The Club is engaged in several main areas of action which can only
be sketched here. The continuing programme of research and studies
is currently focused on "How New Media will Transform Society". A
meeting was held in Washington in October 1997, jointly organized
with the Smithsonian Institution. Members of the Club of Rome and
experts from leading firms and universities from all over the world
discussed the impact of the new information technologies on
humanity. They stressed the potential contribution of the new
technologies to solving global issues through processes such as
access to knowledge and lifelong learning, or the prevention of
conflicts and environmental pollution. At the same time, governments
and businesses need to work to counteract the imbalances created by
these technologies - between countries, and within each country. It
was decided to create an International Symposium on Information
Technology, which will meet annually. A Report on "The Multimedia
Society" by Juan Luis Cebrian is in preparation.
In addition, specific projects which illustrate the commitment to
the motto "think globally, act locally" and aim to tackle key
problems are being undertaken, in each case led by at least one
member of the Club. The vast range of expertise and experience
within the Club is made available to decision-makers at all levels
through its consultancy activities to governments, international
institutions and corporate leaders, as well as to the public at
large through its media and public awareness efforts to improve
knowledge and understanding of the problematic. As well as its
programme of publications - the last Reports are on "The Rediscovery
of Work" by Orio Giarini, and "Normative Conflicts and Social
Cohesion" by Peter Berger - the Club of Rome now has its own web
site on the Internet. Many National Associations have major projects
planned or under way, and there are interesting possibilities of
regional co-operation in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
The thirty years since the Club of Rome was founded have seen
astonishing changes in every part of the world and in every aspect
of our lives, and there is little sign of an end to the upheavals.
It is all too easy to be overwhelmed by the pace of change and to
feel powerless to do more than submit to the consequences. The Club
has always taken the view that it is better to confront present
problems and possible future trends, to try to understand what is
happening, and then to mobilize thinking people everywhere to take
action to build a saner and more sustainable world.
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