1. Effective and Ethical Leadership for Global and
Local Justice, Peace, Safety and Security: Building
Canals rather than Dikes
Erwin Schwella

2. Introduction
• Erwin Schwella
• Interests and Institutional Affiliations
– SPL Stellenbosch
• SIGLA
• ACCERUS
• IFR
• PLF
– Leiden University
• LLC
– NIPAM, Namibia

3. Reflections on War and Peace : Initial and Provisional Common
Sense Perspectives from a Mere Concerned Citizen
Destructive War Constructive Peace

4. Orientation
• Goal: Explore, discuss and learn from leadership thinking
and action applied to global and local needs related to
justice, peace, safety and security
• Objectives:
• Explore relevant:
• Contextual dimensions
• Base dynamics of current reality
• Challenges

5. Orientation
• Leadership Responses
– Concepts
– Competencies
– Conclusions

6. Orientation
• Relate these dimensions to:
Effective and ethical leadership;
Towards global and local peace, justice, security
and safety;
Building canals and bridges rather than dykes and
walls

7. Setting the Scene: Justice, Peace,
Safety, Security
Si vis pacem, para bellum:
"If you wish for peace, prepare for war"
• Does this mean that preparing for war will
result in peace?
• Do you get what you prepare for or what you
wish for?

8. Setting the Scene: Justice, Peace,
Safety, Security
• Is there a logic and/or preferred sequence in
the phrase chain: Justice, peace, safety and
security?
• Should there be a logic and/or preferred
sequence?
• If there is a logic:
– Should/is this logic based on morality and/or
causality

9. Justice, Peace, Safety, Security
• Are their possible/inferred causal relationships?
• Are there and/or should there be moral relationships?
• How does this relate to effective and ethical
leadership?
• A personal considered opinion:
• Justice results in peace and justice and peace are
conditio sine qua non for sustainable safety and
security
• From an African perspective:
“Development can only be advanced in a safe and peaceful
environment”
President Joaquim Chissano @ SIGLA@SPL@Stellenbosch

10. The Quest for Justice, Peace and
Resulting Safety and Security
• Justice is more than a mere absence of injustice
• Peace is more than a mere absence of war and
conflict
• People and their leaders are significant actors in
the process of creating the conditions for and the
condition of justice and peace and therefore
safety and security
• Peace, justice, safety and security are linked to
effective and ethical leadership
• Leadership and leaders matter.

11. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
• Inequality
• Differential Access
• Rising Expectations
– Global visibility
– Impact of mass media
• Sustainability
• Poverty
• Diversity
• Mobility
• Real, perceived and created scarcity
• All of the above?

12. Base Dynamics of the Current Reality
• Global and local inequality
– Inequality realities and trends
• Global Gini Coefficient 68-70
• Higher than the world’s most unequal countries: South
Africa and Brazil
• Top 5 per cent of individuals in the world receive about
1/3 of total world income, and top 10 per cent receive
one-half

13. Base Dynamics of the Current Reality
• Ratio between the average income received by the
richest 5 per cent and the poorest 5 per cent in the
world is 165 to 1
• Richest earn in about 48 hours as much as the poorest
in a year
Milanovic (2005 and 2008)
• 2000,the top 10% of adults in the world owned 85% of
global wealth, while the bottom half owned barely 1%
(ASPA, 2008)
– Inequality within countries? What are the trends?

14. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
• Differential access
– Real, created and perceived inequality and scarcity
linked to the challenge of sustainability
– Basic human needs:
• Clean water and sanitation
– 37% per cent of the developing world’s population – 2.5
billion people – lack improved sanitation facilities

15. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
– Over 780 million people still use unsafe drinking water
sources.
– Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services, kills
and sickens thousands of children
– Leads to impoverishment and diminished opportunities for
thousands more (UNICEF JMP)
• Education:
– 67 million children were out of school globally during the
school year ending in 2009 (Unesco Institute of Statistics

16. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
• Sustainability
“If all of humanity lived like an average resident of
Indonesia, only two-thirds of the planet’s biocapacity
would be used; if everyone lived like an average
Argentinean, humanity would demand more than half
an additional planet; and if everyone lived like an
average resident of the USA, a total of four Earths
would be required to regenerate humanity’s annual
demand on nature.”
http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2012_sum
mary_booklet_final.pdf accessed 13 August 2012.

17. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
• Poverty
– The richest 20 % have 83% of global income
– The bottom 20 % have 1% of global income
(Cummins and Ortiz, 2011)
– Last thirty years have seen the gap between rich
and poor continually increase, making a reversal
of the trend more and more difficult despite
recent progress

18. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
– UNICEF estimate: more than 800 years for the bottom
billion to achieve ten per cent of global income at
current rate of change
– 2015 Projections UN MDG
– At the current rate of progress by 2015 about 1 billion
people will still be living on less than $1.25 a day
– Global extreme poverty rate of just below 16 per cent
– Four out of every five people living in extreme poverty
will live in sub Saharan Africa and Southern Asia
(UN MDG Report 2012)

19. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
– Globalised liberal market economy may have
delivered economic growth
– ‘Singularly and consistently failed to deliver
economic justice’ (Rogers, 2009: 10)

20. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
• Oxford Research Group (2011):
– Perhaps the four most important underlying
drivers of insecurity are:
• Climate change,
• Increasing competition over resources,
• Global militarisation, and
• Marginalisation across much of the ‘majority world

21. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
“Changes in our environment and the resulting
upheavals - from droughts to inundated coastal
areas to loss of arable lands - are likely to become
a major driver of war and conflict”
UN S-G Ban Ki-moon, (2007)

22. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
– Consequences:
• Too little to go around?!
• Mechanisms to control access
• Mix of political and economic measures to control
access to public and private goods and services
– “Markets and/or military might”
• Billions excluded from basic services due to base
dynamics of current reality
• Through mass media and globalisation increasingly
aware of it
• Impact/Injustice?

23. Context: Base Dynamics of the Current
Reality
• Base Dynamics creates global and local public
leadership challenges in respect of justice,
peace, safety and security

24. Leading into Leadership Challenges
• The societal context, within which effective and ethical
public leadership has to be practiced now, is best
described by the famous Charles Dickens quote:
– “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times;
– it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness;
– it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity;
– it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness;
– it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair;
– we had everything before us, we had nothing before us;
– we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the
other way."

25. Justice, Peace, Safety and Security
Leadership Challenges
• Deal with the Price of Inequality and the other
Aspects of the Base Dynamic
• Global, National and Local Transformation
– Constitutional
– Institutional
• Prepare for Justice and Peace and Wish for Safety
and Security
• Adaptive Challenges and Wicked Problems
– Heifetz
– Grint

26. Challenges as Dilemmas
• Global governance deficit
• Global, national, local conflicts of interest
• Institutional deficit
• Institutional fatigue
• Scaling challenges
• Individual / collective leadership capture
• Leadership disempowerment and incapacity

27. Dealing with Justice, Peace, Safety and
Security Leadership Challenges
• Angry and alienated demands to deal with the
big issues related to inequality, access,
expectations and sustainability
• Public leadership is being determined by the
challenges rather than determining what is to
be done about the challenges
• Three possible insufficient meta outcomes:
– Malthusian collapse / MIT “Limits to Growth”

28. Justice, Peace, Safety and Security
Leadership Challenges
– Schumpeterian innovation / Joel Barker: Always
Another Door Opening
– Applying less than adequate mere muddling
through methods
• Rather than these inadequate, naïve or
neglecting options there is a need to find ways
to deal with wicked/adaptive problems

29. Justice, Peace, Safety and Security
Leadership Concepts
• Conceptual and strategic options in the
approaches linked to dealing with adaptive or
“wicked” problems
• Leadership as facilitating learning (Heifetz)
• Leadership as adaptation and learning in
complex adaptive systems (Gunderson,
Hartzog)
• Leadership in complex adaptive systems
(Hartley & Bennington and perhaps Schwella?)

30. Justice, Peace, Safety and Security
Leadership Competencies
• Facilitate learning and dialogue before
dictating action and “final solutions”
• Frame and share questions to enhance
analysis rather than answers to enhance
quality decisions
• Create awareness, analysis, experimentation
to inform decisions and action
• Manage stress and conflict within tolerable
ranges for innovative and creative learning

31. Justice, Peace, Safety and Security
Leadership Competencies
• Include and involve all stakeholders in the
“problem” in a consciously and properly
managed and controlled process
• Facilitate:
– participative professional evidence and ideas
based professional approaches, rather than
It is about facilitating a learning dialogue rather
than forcing a lamentable dictatorship.

32. Justice, Peace, Safety and Security
Leadership Competencies
– power determined political emotion and ideology
based approaches
to problem solving
• Create knowledge and learning based
networks which is strong on a participative
vision and weak on boundaries

33. Challenging Conclusions
• Scalability of the approach?
• Enquiry requires facilitation (leadership
without authority), thinking and intellect
• Implementation requires force (authority),
thrust and impact
• Concluding Questions: Is this/Are you for
Real?