JohnElkinton.com - timelines

Downwave 3 (2003 - ongoing)

2003 marked the twentieth anniversary of our launching of the old John Elkington Associates - and saw the launch of this website, almost a year in the making. A huge amount has changed since 1983 and a great deal has been achieved. But as the Downwave 3 period gets into its stride, with global recession, war in Iraq, the economic impact of the SARS epidemic in Asia and so on, we need to refocus and prepare for new challenges.

Among the issues I expect to be predominant in this new phase of the debate are:

Security: Competing definitions of security are emerging. Some are based on high technology defence technologies, others on the notion that, in the end, "we are all in the same boat, including future generations." There are profound implications for privacy and civil rights.

Globalisation: With the market signals early in 2003 suggesting that the globalisation project has slipped a few gears, and could well go into reverse, there will be new emphasis on how we can achieve globalisation that really does achieve acceptable triple bottom line outcomes.

Governance: Both global and corporate governance will continue to be in the spotlight. Of the two, global governance is by far the biggest challenge, as the problems experienced by the US, UN, NATO and the EU during the build-up to the Iraq war - and subsequently - demonstrated.

Financial markets: A growing proportion of our work has focused on financial markets: the insurers, reinsurers, lenders, financial analysts, and so on. As SustainAbility sets up a new office in Zurich, led by the company's executive director, Peter Zollinger, we will focus even more effort in this area.

Access: 2002's World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was something of a political failure, but it usefully sketched out a powerful new agenda for the next decade. The focus will be on access: access to clean water, affordable energy, drugs (e.g. for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria), and so on.

Social enterprise: Most of our work has focused on large corporations, but we remain sceptical about their capacity to make the necessary changes in time. So we plan to focus more time and effort on the social entrepreneurs who are experimenting with radically new technologies and business models.

Market engineering: To make the necessary changes happen, we will need to become much more sophisticated in terms of reshaping market signals to deliver sustainable outcomes. Experiments such as the Chicago Climate Exchange are pioneering in this critically important new opportunity space.