By Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón
Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón is a research fellow on Sustainable Development and the Africa Agenda 2063, hosted by the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
We are simultaneously experiencing a shift in global power, the growing strength of artificial intelligence, and climate shocks. Their concurrence and the associated instability that it will cause will inevitably impact development in Africa. Only a complexity approach can provide an adequate vehicle to pursue development interventions in this “brave new world.”
It isn’t hyperbolic to state that we are facing an unprecedented collusion of shocks. Internal turmoil, growing inequality, climate change, and mounting tensions are being manifested simultaneously in different parts of the world, as the ongoing crises in Ecuador, Haiti, and Ukraine illustrate. Africa is not and will not be immune to such shocks, as tensions in Mali and other countries in the continent illustrate. A new complexity approach is required to help us understand how these different impacts will shape developmental outcomes.
To make things even more complicated, these crises and shocks are taking place alongside two major changes that will inevitably impact Africa’s development: the transformation of what we call the global order and the rise of artificial intelligence. The role of the USA and its allies as a global hegemon has led to the disproportionate influence of “the West” – or even of “Western models” – on our understanding of society, economy, law, and even fashion across the world. That said, the context is changing and the very rules of the game are being challenged or simply not being obeyed; what we knew as the “global international order” is turning into something else.
This is obviously not the first time that we see something like this in history. The process is comparable to the tensions that were building up before the two world wars.
However, it is being accelerated by the fast deterioration in legitimacy of the current order due to the dissonance between discourses and actions.
The dissonance may be illustrated by the Western usage of the language of human rights while currently failing to condemn the violence against Palestinian civilians, let alone stop the onslaught on them. What we are experiencing is akin to what William Zartman calls a state of global disorder.
Secondly, we have the new and growing force of Artificial Intelligence. It is impossible to say whether AI is bad or good for development; we might have opinions about this, but we cannot know for sure at this point. However, we can specify a series of issues that should be of immediate concern – The sovereignty over AI is mostly held by private actors and not by states. Companies that control AI are driven by interest in shareholder value and profit. As political or societal concerns are not core to companies and key questions regarding the impact of AI are not asked by companies rolling out the newest technology, it is difficult to envision how African states will be able to protect their citizens and promote their development. As unseemly amounts of money are being invested into AI, the African continent is lagging behind the most when it comes to introducing regulations and guardrails.
Massive technological changes will have an impact on and are likely to further exacerbate the asymmetries between extremely wealthy individuals and the rest of the citizenry.
As countries scramble to attract wealthy individuals or their philanthropies, states stand the risk of inviting individuals whose actions will deepen the rift between citizens and states.
Therefore, we live in a moment of global tensions, growing concentration of power, and a technological revolution that will be deeper and faster than the industrial revolution (and which will not only change our technologies but the very way we relate to each other as individuals). As if only to make things worse, climate change and climate breakdown will also impact the wellbeing and development of Africans and the world generally.
Africa finds itself in front of an unprecedented challenge, raising the stakes of understanding how external shocks, a new global disorder, and AI will influence the future of its people. The forecasts are predicting an increase in the numbers of those living in extreme poverty as the more vulnerable citizens in Africa will be the ones to gravely suffer the blunt force of different shocks and societal changes. This raises questions about how we understand the impact of these compounded changes and the shocks on African development. It also calls upon us to enquire into and how we could develop alternatives to protect the livelihoods and wellbeing of Africans.
The picture is complex and needs to be acknowledged as such. However, we cannot understand these interacting problems with the tools that we used in the past. Our approach in the past relied on looking at different parts of the problem and to bring insights and ideas on how to deal with particular challenges.
We can no longer expect that such partial interventions will be sufficient to tackle developmental challenges that are in fact intersectional by their very nature.
The intellectual challenge of our times lies in mapping out how the interactions between these multiple challenges can aggravate current tensions. Without such an understanding, we will certainly not be able to propose adequate solutions.
Our analyses of development have mostly avoided framings that consider how the dynamics of external factors and policy interventions affect societies across time. Take the case of poverty and instability in Africa, in the past, we mostly understood poverty through a reductionist lens which saw it simply as lacking income above a particular threshold. Based on this logic, an intervention for the development of Africa would follow a linear approach with the aim to bring incomes above a certain threshold and this would then suffice to bring development and stability.
However, poverty interacts with instability across time: poorer African countries have weaker institutions, lower social protections, lesser political legitimacy, and are more likely to have external actors meddling in their internal affairs.
Mapping complex relations and their interactions, as advocated by the Sustainable Development Goals or Africa’s own Agenda 2063, will help us understand and conceive more robust developmental initiatives.
They will hopefully enable us to respond to the impacts of the current state of global disorder, the ongoing technological revolution, and the current and upcoming climatic shocks.
Africa will account for almost 40% of the world population by 2100. Yet, as a consequence of the legacy of past and new versions of colonialism and underdevelopment, Africa finds itself in an underprivileged position today. This is a stark reality but may offer a promising opportunity. Being able to conceive of development better in Africa offers the chance of improving the lives of an important share of the planet’s population.
A complexity approach can be an important tool for supporting this goal.
In cooperation with Ferenc Laczó and Rohit Sarma.
