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Polycrisis and South-South cooperation

35 0
23.08.2025

The world is facing the existential threat of climate change crisis. Since this crisis, along with many others, including the ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon, transcends boundaries, what is required is a meaningful global effort both in terms of sharing of technical know-how, availability of adequate level of climate finance, and overall sustainable development goals (SDGs)-related finance, given the polycrisis, and overlapping nature of crises requires a wholesome and deep response.

Unfortunately, decades of practice of neoliberal policies, for instance, in terms of shrinking role of government in regulation of markets have neither allowed adequately checking over-profiteering – in turn, contributing significantly to both issues of inequality, and lack of price stability — nor enabling reaching productive, and allocative efficiencies.

Moreover, Neoliberalism seeing the role of government as mainly a facilitator to private sector, and only one of reacting to market failures, rather than actively government playing a meaningfully active role in market creation that protects the interests of demos, has resulted in over-profiteering; it has also resulted in weak capacity of government and markets – including domestic- and global supply chains as was seen in the wake of the Covid pandemic – to deal with shocks.

In terms of trade, this has meant over-employment of intellectual property rights (IPRs) by the private sector to unduly protect profit interests in general, but particularly in sectors which are both of a global public good nature, for example vaccines, and which have also a significant contribution of taxpayer’s money.

Hence, the practice of neoliberal policy over the last four decades or so significantly weakened public service delivery by governments generally in individual countries, and meaningfully diminished multilateral spirit at the back of unjustifiably more inward-looking attitudes of leading rich, advanced countries both as a consequence of neoliberal policy, but also in response to increasing role of moneyed interest in influencing public policy at the back of their rising role in election campaign financing of political parties.

A lack of multilateral spirit became very pronounced during the days of the Covid pandemic, where rich, advanced countries practiced in general vaccine apartheid, while big pharmaceutical companies didn’t share vaccines at meaningfully lower prices, nor did firms share knowledge with each other –inside the country as well as globally – to come up with a more potent vaccine even though they had in general significant contribution from taxpayer’s money.

This was in contrast to the time of large-scale spread of polio when virtual absence of neoliberal policies and weak link of moneyed private interest and public policy, allowed virtually........

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