Padilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “Introduction,” Introduction, p. XXXV(35)-XXXVI(36)] SPark
Chapter 5 concerns sustainable development as an alternative to the dominant ‘mainstream economics’ paradigm proposed by the Brundtland Report Our Common Future (1987). It has not yet been fully implemented precisely because most governments of the world continue to be under the influence of neoliberalism and continue to regard growth as the quintessential parameter of development. In my view, one of the most appropriate ways to confront this predominant reductionist kind of thinking is the sustainable development paradigm, among other reasons because the dominant economic system based on the neoliberal ideology hidden beneath ‘mainstream economics’ responds to an unsustainable situation because development is not guided by the satisfaction of human needs but by the growth and accumulation of capital for the benefit of the worldoligarchies of the super-rich. The majority of the world’s population lives in poverty, and it is important to realize that economic growth, as shown masterfully by the French scholar Thomas Piketty (2014) in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, does notrespondto the interests of national states but to the interests of the small world elite of super-rich people transformed into a new class of rentiers in such an excessive manner that it is the main source of inequality and concentration of wealth at world level, not just within national states. This situation isabsolutely unsustainable. It is also the root of social reactions expressed through protests and violence (like the gilets jaunes of France or the social movement of Chile in 2019). The electoral support for the extreme right nationalists in Europe, Trump in the United States and Brexit can be explained by thissocial malaise. It goes without saying that the inequality and enormous concentration of wealth provoked by neoliberalism are the sources not just of the world’s social uneasiness but also of the governments’inaction concerning climate change and the political disarray of the international system that personalities of the US political establishment - such as Richard Haas (2017) and Henry Kissinger (2014) - deplore in books dealing with the crisis in the Westphalian system.
