Keywords

Principled professionalism, optic of the last chapter, is one remedy to the pathology of ritualism, but not the only remedy. A limitation of simple thinking about complex catastrophes is that simple thinking can be countered in simple ways. Preeminent among these is ritualism. Ritualism is a particular form of symbolism, of symbol above substance. Robert K. Merton (1968) argued in Social Theory and Social Structure that in any normative order, there are shared cultural goals and institutionalized means for achieving them. He diagnosed tensions and schisms in social structures according to how different fractions of the populace position themselves on commitment to cultural goals versus institutionalized means to reach the goals. In stable societies, many citizens are committed to both the society’s cultural goals and institutionalized means of achieving them. Others are innovators who share a cultural goal but push innovative means to it. These innovators can discover better ways for societies to renew how they live together. Or they can be criminals who replace legitimate means for achieving a shared goal like material success with illegitimate means, like robbery or becoming a warlord. This can be because legitimate means like a good job, good investment opportunities, are blocked to them, so they resort to illegitimate means to material success. Innovation shades into ritualism when powerful actors discover that the best way to rob a bank is to own one (Black 2013). An owner seems committed to the solvency of the bank because she owns it, but in fact manipulates the market, siphoning profits to her pocket.

Ritualism is a favored approach of democracy’s gameplayers. They pretend to endorse the culturally approved goals of the democracy while gaming institutionalized means to them—as by pretending to the courts that an election that was lost was actually won, by compromising the spirit of a law through a loophole embedded in the letter of the law, by endorsing equal justice principles like racially equal voting rights while obstructing access of minorities to polls, or denying resources to agencies that enforce the law against the powerful. Contempt for democratic values might be clear when ritualists scheme with their inner circles of cronies. Yet they project a public image of being defenders of democracy. Innovation and open rebellion against culturally shared goals and institutionally approved means of achieving them can be healthy for renewal. There are few circumstances, however, where it can be good to subvert a society’s culturally approved democratic goals by gaming them with ritualized means that do not actually deliver goals citizens cherish—at least with vital goals like the spirit of democracy, the spirit of environmental and health law, the fairness and efficiency of markets.

Because the institutionally approved means of democracies have been so relentlessly gamed, for example by a military-industrial complex with an interest in wars, retreatism is a widespread Mertonian adaptation. Retreatism means people have become cynical about both societal goals and legitimate means for achieving them. Retreatism is the mode of adaptation to a normative order that we see among dropouts, ‘the lie down flat’ movement of retreatist youth in China, drug addicts, or people who commit suicide. Retreatism is the adaptation of political and social disengagement that has become increasingly widespread as trust in the fundamentals of the normative order have eroded.

The larger the crises a society faces, the more widespread retreatism becomes, and the bigger the benefits of ritualism for powerholders. We have seen this with the climate crisis since long before the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came into being in 1992. In summit after summit, from Kyoto, to Copenhagen, to Paris, heads of state enthusiastically committed to action. They made specific commitments. Then they simply chose not to meet them, to game them, most recently after the Glasgow climate summit as reported in the April 2022 IPCC Report. Usually, culpable political leaders were out of office before outrage erupted from their duplicity in climate catastrophe. Another strategy is commit big at early summits; then insinuate carve-outs and caveats at subsequent gatherings. That one was particularly popular with brown Australian coalition governments who loathed taking the ‘coal’ out of their ‘coalition’. Almost all states, including the seemingly greenest, continued to deliver carbon emissions on upwards trajectories that bequeathed catastrophe from stocks of greenhouse gases as they promised glorious futures of downward trajectories (only in flows, as opposed to stocks of carbon).

Ritualism is a recurrent tactic with donor conferences to promise help for countries that suffer natural disasters. It is normally good politics internationally to promise generously at these conferences, to avoid being singled out as an ungenerous country. There are people at home who are touched by the suffering and want their country to be seen as caring. A year on, this political calculus changes. Electors at home have forgotten past crises as a result of many other disasters that have filled short windows of media attention cycles, including disasters at home. In a choice between transferring a large commitment to a year-old international crisis and diverting to a domestic priority that electors care about in the run-up to the next election, the domestic spending trumps international promise-keeping.

Similar political dynamics of promise big now, deliver small later, apply to undertakings to receive agreed numbers of refugees. This has been systematically demonstrated with rich country aid pledges of various kinds.1 In 2016, global leaders met to discuss the crisis of one-third of school-aged Syrian children denied an education. A large proportion of these were in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq, where more than a third of the Syrian children were missing an education. Global leaders agreed with advocates who alerted them to this shocking situation; leaders committed to fix it by the simple means of sharing the burden to build schools for them. Theirworld's #YouPromised pushed since 2016 for their pledges to be kept. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who hosted the donor conference, joyfully announced in February 2016 that $10 billion had been committed. In October 2016, the YouPromised campaign showed that only a fraction of what had been promised in February had been delivered. The campaign specifically focused on 370,000 Syrian refugee girls in Turkey (60% of the Syrian refugee girls in that country) who still had no access to schooling.2 In April 2018, YouPromised renewed its campaign, pointing out that there are now 680,000 Syrian children still waiting to get a school placement. They released a powerful film in which children told their stories. Ahead of another UN meeting in September 2018, Theirworld broke the story that education programs for vulnerable Syrian refugee children in Jordan had been slashed. EU countries and institutions did respond to this, and by March 2019 had transferred 56% more than their original pledges.

This is an atypical story with a happier ending than the unusual promise-big-deliver-small. The solution to such a huge crisis is a simple mechanics of building schools and staffing them. Promising big and delivering small is also a deadly simple political mechanics. ‘You promised’ campaigns delivered simple responses to complex catastrophes. Social movement activism works enough of the time through simple dynamics of shaming some of the world’s more ethical states when they walk away from promises to desperate people. There is a kind of political ritualism fatigue among humanitarian activists. Nevertheless, simple campaigns can work because promise-big-deliver-small depends on political forgetting. Remembering catalyzed by activism is its simple remedy.

During the covid pandemic, the richest countries over-hoarded vaccines that then expired, and over-monopolized production. Big Pharma did special deals for monopoly prices only rich countries could afford. Through all this, the leaders of China and the United States played childish games of mutual recriminations over covid politics. They guarded their trade secrets and production monopolies, refusing to collaborate in pooling their science and knowhow. The United States allowed new variants to emerge during rampant surges in unvaccinated poor-country populations, meeting as a G-7 without inviting China. China met separately with Russia. All great powers undermined the WHO with their greed, gameplaying and vaccine nationalism. China and Russia misled their citizens with the lie that their vaccines were better than Western vaccines. All in all, leaders of the world failed to deliver a restorative vaccine diplomacy that could have saved millions of lives with politically decent collaboration among the best labs.

Chapter 11 argues that there is a geopolitical domination dynamic in this. Poisoned covid politics can inject diplomatic venom into geopolitical cooperation on military and economic matters. But the more potent pathway is from poisoned geopolitics of security and trade to pandemic politics. That is a reason this book skews its focus toward restorative renewal of the geopolitics of great power domination. The politics of domination means it is the poor who mostly die from pandemics, including inside rich countries. The poor cannot pay the costs associated with fleeing to another country as a refugee, so they are the ones who die in the killing zones of wars, from famines caused by climate change, from rising oceans and rivers.

Democratic institutions and regulatory institutions are fundamental to taming dominations of corporate power, military power. Their marriage in the politics of the military-industrial complex is an existential dead hand. Therefore, the following sections specifically focus on these domains of ritualism.

Gaming Democracy

Gaming democracy has some structural complexity. Game-playing must be endlessly contested if democracy is to have meaning. We have seen that trust in democracy has declined precipitously because democracy has been gamed to become a ritual of limited substance.

Simple enough institutions like an independent judiciary have been entrenched in many democracies. Part of the sustainability of this accomplishment that evolved over centuries is that there is a path dependency to it. Once an independent judiciary is buttressed by professional interests in independence, independence can become reasonably resilient. It is hard to budge from path dependence. Path dependence means dependence of outcomes on the paths of previous outcomes. Path dependence keeps institutions in the groove of established and legitimate institutionalized means to democratic governance outcomes. There is a simplicity about staying in the groove of the path dependency of well-established democratic institutions with robust checks and balances. Each institutional check evolved over time to help with keeping all other institutions from accomplishing overwhelming domination that overflows channels of containment set down in the separation of powers. This is a decision that the judiciary must take; presidents should not interfere in it; that is a decision for the president. Although there is a simplicity of keeping checks and balances in place once they are institutionalized, getting them institutionalized in the first place is a long, difficult, political struggle.

It is good politics for leaders to pretend that they uphold democracy. This is because the pretense of being elected democratically increases legitimacy, helping leaders to retain power and extract financial support from Western regimes that still control great aid wealth. The rational leadership model is to secure support by promising big yet delivering small on democracy. Democratic theory suggests a competition for power in which the candidate that governs best is most likely to win. That turns out to be too simple. This book has shown that in most contexts, the best way to win is to misgovern.

In contrast, in a society with strong path dependence of democratic institutions, a leader who is caught out attempting to corrupt an institution may lose power more quickly than one who accepts that it is a fact of life for politics to be played by the rules. That fact is better assured in a polity with robust institutions such as anti-corruption commissions. Political leaders of societies without anti-corruption commissions resist them because that might tighten limits of legality around what they can do. Resistant politicians can be pushed into a political corner and forced to match the promise of opposition candidates to introduce an anti-corruption commission. Their interest then is to have an ineffective commission which is itself corrupted, controlled by political hacks. Again, however, once an independent anti-corruption commission has been deeply institutionalized, this means it is in the groove of path dependent independence. Then it becomes bad politics to attempt to corrupt the anti-corruption commissioner for the same reason that it is political folly in deeply democratic societies to offer a bribe to a judge. It may cost you power to attempt to do so.

In short, what we have is a majority of societies where the incentives for misgoverning are huge while they pretend to be democratic, and a minority where the separation of powers is sufficiently institutionalized that good governance becomes a better way of winning than misgoverning. Historical opportunities for transformation do arise to move societies from faux democracy to democracy institutionalized with a genuine separation of powers. It can happen in many ways. One is the death of a tyrant from natural causes opening opportunities for reform leaders. Another is losing a war and being assisted by the UN with a UN peace operation, or a military commander effectively threatening a military coup unless elections are conducted fairly by electoral commission staff who are not corrupt cronies of the ruler. When that is achieved, democratic forces in domestic civil society and international society can rally around reform leaders to secure deeper institutionalization of a separation of powers until a tipping point is passed toward genuine democracy. Good governance then creates jobs, averts wars, and becomes the better way to win elections.

Slow-Food Global Politics

Is there not a tension between a slow-food approach to change and the vision of waiting for moments of crisis that enable step changes? Remember Ian Goldin’s question discussed in Chapter 2. Would there have been the revolutionary market changes forged in Silicon Valley without the slow-food scientists of Stanford and other great universities? Goldin (2021) makes the point that during World War II, slow food work was underway, particularly in universities, for seizing the 1945 opportunity for step transformation to the golden decades that followed. Inside the British state and universities, germinal research preparing the way for revolutionary changes in constructing the British welfare state, the Beveridge Report, were well shaped from the beginning of the 1940s.

In the United States, plans were being laid for what was to be called the Marshall Plan. In universities like Cambridge in the decades since the Versailles Peace agreement, John Maynard Keynes had been writing on mistakes of victor’s justice imposing crippling reparations on Germany in 1919 that might tragically help crash its economy. These ideas slowly laid groundwork for what became the Marshall Plan in 1945. It was massive, transferring 3% of the GDP of the wealthiest country in the world to countries that lost the war. Nothing of this magnitude has happened before or since, certainly not after NATO won the Cold War.

Keynes and like-minded reformers created Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and IMF. Reformers had been cooking the slow food of consensus during the war for a transformative institution called the United Nations. Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important figure in one reform sub-circle that included many feminists, to establish a rights revolution, transformative rights institutions as central pillars of the United Nations. Eleanor Roosevelt’s network was able to steer through an international human rights architecture that many decades later could be mobilized by second wave feminism to better institutionalize gender equality globally—simple things like a neglected right of girls to education that by the end of the twentieth century had transformed educational outcomes to more girls than boys getting top marks at high school and graduating with the best results at the best universities. In the immediate post-war decades women had been locked back into their domesticated confines; women were pushed out of the jobs they had stepped into during the war. UN rights institutions helped leave a key in the door that women pushed wide open from the 1970s, globally.

Labor movement leaders networked to re-invigorate the International Labor Organization in its transition from being a League of Nations labor rights organization to an innovative rights institution of the UN. There were so many slow food cooks of post-war step changes that delivered Keynesian transformation that was redistributive of wealth, funded by top marginal tax rates above 80% in most Western societies, above 90% in the United States and United Kingdom, well into the 1950s. This produced what Goldin called the germinal Golden Age of economic growth and human development (from 1945 to the 1970s).

Two decades after it ended, a new Asian Golden Age was about learning lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. Hence, when the 2008 Global Financial Crisis struck, banks collapsed across Western financial capitals, but no major Asian banks collapsed. This chapter on confronting regulatory ritualism considers Asian regulatory reform ideas that were slow food notions such as resident inspectors who reside at desks inside the most systemically important banks and financial institutions, preparing bank resilience and systemic Asian resilience for the next crisis.3

Social movement politics, as with the women’s movement, is critical in its growth from first wave transformations, including votes for women, to second wave shifts to education, jobs, narrowing the gender pay gap. Such social movements are germinal for slow food institutions with reform agendas in their top drawers. Plans wait for moments of step change. Then the movement shifts agendas from the back to the front burner of politics. Slow-food politics is about keeping the women’s movement in some kind of repair during its darkest days (the 1950s), the labor movement during its twilight (recent deregulatory decades), the environment movement during its decades of environmental ritualism (all decades of the Anthropocene really). Slow-food politics in local social movement contestation that Making the personal political is a famous saying of political theory in reformers’ lives keeps a politics of hope alive. It deepens the base and the intellectual furrows of movements, getting them transformation-ready. A reason neglected so far for having a long-term total abolition mission for WMDs is that this is what can inspire the peace movement to retrieve a new wave of its glory days.

Not all slow food cooking of new institutions made the world better. Stalin had his coterie of slow-food cooks laying plans for Communist transformations in Eastern and Central European societies where they defeated Hitler’s armies; Chairman Mao slowly grew them along the Long March.

Gaming of democracy always gnaws at the spirit of democracy. Hence when the world’s biggest defense-contracting firms were exposed by law enforcement reformers for bribing political leaders, some did stop the bribes, at least for a while. Then they adopted a more nuanced approach to capturing political and military leaders by means within the bounds of the criminal law. It became well known that military commanders who had been supporters of defense deals were appointed as board members or as lobbyists for contractors across the globe when they retired from the military. Senators who rallied votes for defense contracts were rewarded by new military-industrial plants in their state with fanfare for the credit their senator deserved for bringing these jobs home from Washington. This is why firms like Lockheed Martin are organized so inefficiently with manufacturing plants dispersed across dozens of different US states so political payoffs can be dispersed to win many votes. This is innovation in gaming democracy to deliver misgovernance and economic inefficiency in markets monopolized at the commanding heights of a military-industrial complex. Leading firms rarely deliver contracts on time or without stupendous cost overruns, sometimes fueled by defense-contracting fraud. Even a deeply path dependent democracy is a ship constantly in need of repair at sea. Holes in its integrity broken open by waves of gaming democracy at the hands of industries that have been adept at corruption such as defense contractors, Big Pharma, and high finance, must be patched by social movements demanding action by prosecutors.

The same is true of high integrity business regulation. Innovation in gaming regulation drives holes through its integrity. For a democracy that stands still, a business regulator that stands still, rust sets in, democracy corrodes. Too simple-minded, too static a vision of democracy as a system where the most popular leaders win, crumbles through the complexity of crises. Social movement support for institutions like national audit offices and anti-corruption commissions, universities that are independent of the military-industrial complex, can play rugged roles in producing oversight that informs electors and other institutions across the separation of powers. This educates activists in what law reforms and reforms to executive government they must demand to keep democracy afloat.

Regulatory Ritualism

Strong environmental policies are recurrently implemented as greenwash. Carbon credit markets in tree planting are riddled with carbon fraud. Forests are ‘grown’ that were already there and in places that it was well known would never sustain permanent forests (Long and McDonald 2022). Even when CEOs are genuinely committed to their firms being carbon neutral by 2030, they may plan for symbolic implementation during the next five years while they serve as CEO, with the heavy lifting of green investment delivered in the final years of the decade when someone else is in charge. When state regulation mandates long-term plans, regulatory ritualism gives a tick to that defer, delay, and deny ethos.

This is one variant of how capitalism found innovative means of replacing risk management with risk shifting. Big promises and small delivery, leaving promise-keeping to a successor, involves shifting risk across time. In the global financial crisis, risks were shifted to the future, and from place to place in a game of pass the parcel. Back in the twentieth century, when homebuyers went to bank managers for housing loans, the manager managed risks associated with the transaction. Did the borrower have a job? Could her income support only a smaller loan? The rise of bonus cultures and derivatives as risk-shifting devices meant bank managers worried less about risks. Worse, lenders were encouraged to lie in loan requests, exaggerating their income in order to secure a fatter debt. Loan documents became rituals of comfort that delivered no substance of risk management. Much of the risk accounting in loan documents was delegated to and ritualized by mortgage brokers who shared tolerance of liar loans.

The bank shifted risk to others by bundling thousands of loans and securitizing the bundle—slicing and dicing the loans into securities that the bank sold to others. Investors thought they were diversifying their investment portfolio to profit from a booming housing market. They were ‘cleverly’ spreading their risks to owning less than one percent of thousands of loans instead of a concentrated cluster of loans. Once the system corroded to risk ritualism, a high proportion of loans became worthless when the housing market plummeted. The magnitude of the risk shifting from US to European banks was so great that European banks crashed in response to that small sector of the world economy that was subprime loans to poorer Americans. Indeed, almost the entire European economy crashed. Trading in derivatives was marginal in the late twentieth century but hit US$100,000 billion in outstanding deals sold in the over-the-counter derivatives market at the turn of the century. By 2007, it accelerated to $600,000 billion according to the Bank of International Settlements, ‘16 times global equity market capitalization and 10 times global gross domestic product’ (Golden and Vogel 2010, 6).

Regulatory ritualism trusted risk management systems of banks in the false belief that banks had an interest in managing risks associated with their own loans. A regulatory error was failing to understand that while banks did have an interest in averting lending risks, they could accomplish this by risk shifting. They systematically increased systemic risk by growing the derivatives market in bad loans, while reducing risk for their individual bank. Bankers knew they were playing a game of pass the parcel of billowing systemic risk, but it made no sense to many of them to reject maximization of bonus gouging until the music stopped. High finance executives and traders shifted those bonuses to their personal accounts elsewhere, so they were personally holding the profits while banks, pension funds, and foreigners were holding the parcels of dud derivatives in bad loans. They had stashed away enough in investment safe havens to remain rich while poor homeowners were bankrupted onto the street. The world financial system crashed under the weight of the systemic risk that their ritualism, their bonuses, had generated.

Political leaders who would prefer to deregulate for the benefit of business donors to their campaigns, but are forced by the electorate to increase regulation, are attracted to ritualistic regulation as a compromise. It gives the appearance of being tough without compelling substantive change. There is infinite variety in ways players of the regulatory game can be obsessed with means of achieving goals (such as inputs, processes) while failing to deliver on regulatory goals themselves. The literature on audits as a ‘ritual of comfort’ is an example of a form of ritualism that routinely fails to deliver consumers and investors the substance of financial probity, while offering the comfort of audit boxes that are ticked (Power 1997). This was the reality of the rage for light-touch financial regulation in the 2000s that settled for ticking boxes rather than kicking the tires to drive systemic security forward.

Most globally significant regulatory institutions drank the elixir of light-touch regulation. They were captured by the burgeoning power of large international banks and a generation of economists who legitimized their folly. The financialization of capitalism meant that Bill Clinton’s 1990s political counsel, ‘it’s the economy stupid’ effectively became ‘it’s finance capital stupid’ by the time Obama’s recovery plan was crafted by bankers brought in from the ritualistic culture of Wall Street. Structurally, this capture was particularly profound in London where the financial sector accounted for the fattest profits in the economy and over one-fifth of British employment by 2008. Politicians were beholden to finance capital for campaign contributions, tax revenue, jobs, and legitimacy as ‘contemporary’ neoliberal thinkers.

As Goldin and Vogel 2010,11) point out:

The financial crisis could not have occurred without the scaled-up computing power that facilitated the innovation and transmission of sophisticated credit derivatives, automated underwriting and increasingly complex risk assessment models. Technological change via the acceleration of computer processing has greatly contributed to system fragility because microprocessors facilitate logistical chains, increase connectivity and facilitate the innovation of complex financial instruments, the underlying mathematical theories of which can be flawed, hard to understand and even more difficult to regulate.

Goldin and Vogel conceived the system as overwhelmed by algorithmic innovation that sidestepped underwhelming regulation. Quants ruled through coding algorithms that drove the system. Quants displaced Keynes in economic theory. The older managers in banks and regulators had no semblance of understanding the math that drove it all. Nor could they have understood it even if they were mathematical geniuses as well as wise managerial heads. It was too complex to be comprehended by any such level of human capability within the reach of one CEO. As AI exponentially grows intelligence, this becomes truer.

What was needed was simpler remedies like greatly increased levels of reserve deposits mandated to cover whatever incomprehensible mismanagement of bank risks occurred. Also needed was putting some bankers behind bars for encouraging fraud in loan applications around 2004 and 2005 when the FBI began to document an extraordinary epidemic of housing loan fraud. Likewise I argue later that one of the things required to remedy the disappointing performance of trading regimes that put a price on carbon was incarcerating some corporate highflyers for carbon fraud.

Simplification was also needed by uncoupling more peripheral nodes of the financial system from the algorithmic follies of the dominant finance nodes in New York and London. This was crucial to how Poland delivered superior outcomes for its economy between 2007 and 2010, compared to the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe. Australia was another internationally integrated economy that never went into recession during this period; it enjoyed three full decades free of recession from the beginning of the 1990s until the covid crisis. Australian banks were much more monopolized than US banks and had even more widely and deeply securitized housing loan markets than US banks. They were, however, only trading in securitized loans in an Australian housing market that they understood. They were not trading many sliced and diced US housing loans. That decoupling from the dominant nodes of securitization was a good form of simplification. The Australian regulators insisted that the Big Four Australian banks take responsibility for making the market in securitized Australian home loans an Australian market in managed risks. Australian banks did not allow themselves to become casualties of global markets in risk shifting.

One simple thing that was needed in response to the global financial crisis was better investment in international cooperation on regulation, more staff in international and national regulators. Every bank that is big enough to trigger systemic risk through failing to manage fraud and imprudence should have a resident inspector from the prudential regulator who can give early warning of pending collapses while collapse can still be prevented. Korean banking regulators installed resident inspectors at all the systemically critical Korean banks after the Asian financial crises, and Australian prudential and securities regulators did that much later, as did its meat and tax inspectors.4 That was not rocket science. And we know resident inspector programs work to avert catastrophes in other areas of regulation. If vigilance to uncouple contaminated meat from global trading systems makes economic and health sense, why does not vigilance in uncoupling contaminated financial algorithms and banking products make sense? These abstract products can cascade systemic crises much more rapidly in financial systems that are more tightly coupled than meat trading systems. Financial engineering that drives waves of aggressive tax planning is a contagion that can be, has been shut down twice in recent Australian history by rapid response against early movers of the financial engineering herd (Braithwaite 2005). Simple announcement tactics are effective in early response to shut down such contagions: ‘We have noticed a new form of financial engineering into the X kind of tax shelter; Tax Office legal advice is that it strike down the first firm to enter such an arrangement after 1 March’. In various such press releases by the Australian Commissioner for Taxation, all firms ceased entering such schemes after the nominated date. The early detection and rapid response principle illustrated here by resident inspector programs is advanced in the concluding chapter as a general principle for simple solutions to cascading complex crises.

It could be tempting to think that one can only defeat systemic risk in a systemic way. Global regulatory institutions do need to be strengthened (Goldin 2013). I will argue that simple strategic regulation by small countries or even single corporations can prevent global crises. It could be tempting to think that one can only outsmart AI with cleverer AI. That is the path taken in AI arms races. Our killer robots will be able to outsmart yours, then move on to kill humans on their facial recognition data base, or kill humans wearing uniforms who command enemy killer robots. I argue that there is the simpler alternative of the theory of nonviolent defense. That involves first taking the view that one’s military might ultimately win or lose an AI arms race, but that to some degree both sides will lose. Both sides’ killer robots may do a lot of killing before they are wiped out by smarter robots. Both sides might so successfully escalate killing that they are even more capable than humans of intentionally or unintentionally drawing nuclear weapons into the fight as they resist being wiped out. Both sides will be capable of devastating escalation of cyberwar against their enemy. That might cascade to nuclear war if satellites that guide targeting of enemy nuclear weapons are accidentally disabled. Or the escalation of slaughter might be so chaotic that the escalation to nuclear war happens in chaotically unknowable ways.

Nonviolent strategy opts for restorative diplomacy oriented to substantive outcomes first. This means rejecting rituals of comfort on a subject as important as war and peace. Responsive business regulatory strategy likewise opts for listening and persuading first through restorative regulation. Nonviolent strategy is an alternative that can allow the enemy the ritual of comfort of seeming to win militarily, perhaps even without a fight. Then mainly through nonviolent resistance the strategy denies the enemy the substance they wish to secure from the conquest. If it is nuclear plants, perhaps spin their centrifuges out of control to the point of mutual destruction. If it is oil and gas pipelines, make them unusable. If it is IT platforms or space programs, prepare the most technically brilliant staff to strike and then exit. Support them to go into hiding; smuggle them across borders. Train them to leave behind sabotage logic bombs that explode later to cause the takeover to destroy its objectives in taking over. Simple ju jitsu strategies can turn the power of a powerful enemy against itself. Concentrate preventive capabilities on containing risks, on sustaining simple international institutions of peacemaking, and on restorative diplomacy with potential enemies.

The theory of nonviolence notwithstanding, there are circumstances of states retaining authority over their society where they regulate systemic vice with systemic virtue to secure substantive outcomes instead of rituals of comfort. Cartels can use price monitoring AI that ensures that no members of the cartel cheat by secretly cutting prices. Likewise, competition regulators can deploy price monitoring AI to detect patterns of price fixing or predatory pricing. They can approach cartel cheats with an immunity deal to become whistleblowers to prosecutors against other members of the cartel. As in warfare, there may be contexts where anti-cartel AI defeats cartels and their AI. But these are temporary victories until the technological tide turns and the other side gets on top. Simpler, older, detective strategies may work better more often. Organizations always have plenty of resentful people who have been passed over for promotion, sexually harassed, bullied, or who simply find it unethical when their firm arrogantly flouts the law. Insider knowledge of skeletons in the corporate closet is always there, indeed usually widely diffused. The problem is that it is not a smart career move to blow the whistle to the regulator, however resentful you are. It tends to harm your physical and mental health and your career. Whistleblower suicides are rife. This is why I advocate qui tam suits as in the US False Claims Act (Braithwaite 2008, 2022). If a whistleblower gives the Justice Department enough evidence to win against the corporation, or against the Defense Department in a case of illegal development of AI weapons, the whistleblower should get a percentage of the corporate fine. If the Justice Department is captured by the corporate criminal or state criminal, a private prosecution can be launched that attracts a higher percentage of the fine because there has been no help from the Justice Department in winning conviction.

Weapons of the weak, like nonviolence and whistleblowing, can counter the exploitative power of ritualism when regulatory diplomacy is restorative, when business regulation is creative. It can be preventive in containment of risk, yet ultimately responsive in its escalation of collaborative networked capability to contain and deter risk abusers.

Responsive Regulation to Contain Risk

This book and my earlier work concludes that a simple strategy that is evidence-based is for regulators to have many arrows in their quivers (Braithwaite 2008, 2022). It is to have a regulatory mix of strategies that delivers regulatory redundancy. This means regulators do not need to be more brilliant than the corporate executives or the robots they regulate. They can require sophisticated corporations to take responsibility to design systems for taming risk in the context of their business circumstances, or in the complex environmental or oceanic circumstances of an offshore rig where they extract gas. If the strategy regulators draw from their quiver fails to persuade rigs to do this well and with integrity, pull another strategy from the quiver; if that fails, another; until finally a strategy works in motivating the firm to do its own sophisticated technical work in managing the complex risk, and in being able to show the regulator how it works. This is the idea of responsive regulation that regulators should have a pyramid of regulatory strategies that may fail one after the other until there is escalation to a strategy that delivers. It must deliver substantive outcomes, not ritualism; the responsive regulator is required to keep trying new strategies until the desired outcome is accomplished. The simple side of responsive regulation is that it means trying one thing after another until finally something works. Simpler, less interventionist strategies are tried first. These escalate in interventionism and complexity as the regulator escalates up the pyramid in response to regulatory failure. Strategy redundancy tends to be more cost-effective than seeking some best strategy that will always outgun the adversary or always be optimal. This is because simpler, cheaper strategies based on appealing to the better nature of the responsible duty-holder will often work because the firm can be convinced that if this does not work, there will be a sequence of costly battles that might ultimately result in loss of the conflict. The essence of responsive regulation is redundancy and a regulator who will not walk away until the problem is fixed.

What works with regulating corporations can be dangerous with regulating armies. The fact that grips the thinking of realists is that international society is anarchic. There is no global Leviathan that can command states (and their armies). With states regulating corporations, there is a Leviathan. At the end of the day, even though some corporations might be ‘too big to fail’, states have the capability to close them down. Fear of that capability at the peak of a responsive regulatory pyramid is one of the (many) things that makes it work. Realists say capability of a Leviathan to close down armies is absent with regulation of states. Hence, a problem with escalation up a pyramid of great power nuclear escalations under anarchy is that when reciprocated escalation cascades out of control, no global Leviathan steps in to stop it. That is a current problem with Russian strategists of ‘escalate to deescalate’; they explicitly embrace nuclear weapon escalations. The Russian strategy only works if the United States decides that it will allow a Putin to push it around through Russian nuclear escalation to deescalate. This book argues that the US simulation work suggests that this is not how America responds in nuclear crisis simulations. What happens instead of Vladimir’s beautiful theory of escalate to deescalate is that the United States instead keeps escalating. Reciprocated escalation quite likely continues until the planet is destroyed.

Absent an explicit commitment to minimally sufficient deterrence, responsive regulation of one great power by another is dangerous in this way. This is fundamental to the hypotheses of this book that civilizational extinctions are inevitable unless commitments to minimally sufficient deterrence and movement toward WMD abolition are explicit and internationally institutionalized. Perhaps Robert Oppenheimer the realist was right in the 1940s that the only route to survival is world government. That is harder to achieve than the policy hypotheses of this book, however.

Networked responsive escalation of international governance of warfare works much better than realists predict because of the empirical conclusions of the life work of Andrew Mack discussed in Chapter 6. Yes, having a credible deterrent peak to a regulatory pyramid does matter, but that does not need to be a WMD peak. The evidence is that the most important work done by regulatory pyramids is at their base; when that fails, a hugely more substantial volume of effective regulatory work occurs as escalation occurs up through the middle of pyramids than occurs at the peak. When escalation fails in the middle of regulatory pyramids, lateral moves to alternative strategies at that middle level are more important and more recurrent than moving higher up the pyramid to severe deterrence (Braithwaite 2008, 99–108, 199–207). Moreover, most of the regulatory work is not done by a unitary state Leviathan, but by a networked plurality of national actors, sub-national, corporate, civil society, and supra-national actors of diverse kinds (Braithwaite 2008, 94–98). So the problem with any realist view that responsive regulatory pyramids cannot work with great power military contests is that it adopts too old-fashioned a view of how really existing regulation works, a view that it works by command and control by one statist regulator that is a Leviathan. Indeed, my argument is that the Leviathan fallacy has cursed the world with domination and regulatory failure at every level of governance. It is also false that families descend into anarchy unless ruled by a patriarch who carries a big stick. The African aphorism that it takes a whole village to raise a child is closer to the truth. This book makes the case that what works in regulation of anything is minimal sufficiency of deterrent command and control combined with rich plurality of preventive mechanisms à la Mack, of conversational regulation and pluralist networked regulation.

The responsive regulatory approach should be asserted as a neglected possibility with the world’s most acute long-run risk—nuclear war based on misunderstanding, misinterpretation, false flag cyberespionage, or technical errors. States without nuclear weapons could insist in the context of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that they will ultimately opt out of the regime to exercise their right to acquire nuclear weapons unless each of the nuclear weapons states discloses transparently how its nuclear safety and surety inspections are continuously improving to safeguard against accidents, cyber-threats from criminals, terrorists, or spies fomenting false flag perceptions, and so on across the gamut of risks. Other states could insist on escalation to a right to their participation, or participation of adversary nuclear weapons states, on inspection teams to rigorously evaluate continuous improvement in safety and surety. How can 190 states without WMDs argue to their citizens that they take their security seriously if they do not insist on this? Some of them would reply that they are realists in surrendering to trust in allied nuclear weapons states. Is it realistic to trust without verifying?

Undoubtedly there is a place for writing books about designing systematic regulatory strategies for countering ritualism that rely on clever AI. By the time the book is published, it will be countered by a cleverer, newer way of gaming the clever new regulatory design. Hence an appeal of simple institutional strategies that are also meta-strategies (as discussed in Chapter 3 and Braithwaite (2022)—strategies like responsive regulation concerning how to order strategy choice. This appeal for the scholar is that simple meta-strategies have more enduring relevance than specific complex techniques that create opportunities to be gamed beyond relevance because they are complex, and because they code technical specificities. The work of the Center for Tax System Integrity on how a small number of tax principles can trump over millions of national and international tax rules illustrates this thinking about the policy pathways for reasoning about simple principles (Braithwaite 2005).

My standard analysis of the diffusion of light-touch regulation so far oversimplifies in a way that is important to see. The regulatory capitalism literature shows that investment in regulatory states has not declined this century (Coglianese et al. 2021; Braithwaite 2008, 2022). In the decade after the 2001 terror attack on New York and Washington, the steepest regulatory growth was associated with the Department of Homeland Security and its contractors. These were the new flocks of street-level monitors who scrutinized our persons and luggage as we boarded aircraft. A decade later it was cybersecurity regulation that was growing in the public sector, but more so in the private sector where IT departments shifted from service functions to self-regulatory inspectorates for guarding against cyber-threats. Then there was covid regulation. It is untrue that financial regulation withered during the first decade of this century. Rather its focus shifted from diagnosis and control of systemic risk to regulation of money laundering and illicit financial transfers that might reach the pockets of terrorists. This shift of focus and regulatory resources was ill-conceived. It contributed little to preventing access to the modest funds terrorists needed to launch operations as grand as collapsing the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Many more lives were lost to suicides associated with the homelessness, unemployment, and retirement nest eggs that disappeared during the Global Financial Crisis (IMF 2009). This was the kind of financial regulation most needed for the risk containment of that era.

During the low-growth decade of paying down national debts from the deficit stimulus years after the financial crisis, pandemic preparedness institutions and environmental regulation counted among the facets of regulatory states that were dismantled. Again, environmental crises and pandemic crises, whether they are covid, HIV, polio, or influenza, can each cost hugely larger numbers of lives than terrorism has ever historically managed to inflict. While some specific regulatory state investments like scanning for weapons entering aircraft have been highly cost-effective, overall the war on terror, particularly through the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya made the world less safe, made Islamic State stronger, especially as it spread south from Libya across the Sahel, then right across Africa.

Hence, the problem is not one of a declining regulatory state. It is the wrong kind of regulatory state with an excess of investment in sometimes counterproductive forms of the national security state such as the war on terror, the war on drugs that cascaded to wars among armies in Colombia, Central America, Peru, Mexico and beyond, to refugee invasions of the United States, and to the decade of failed Bush-Obama invasions. In addition, the diversion of the attention of financial regulators onto terror and drug financing was strategically counterproductive financial regulation, in an era of financial fragility, when deeper risks needed to be recoupled to responsibility. This chapter argues that growth in regulation, particularly inspection of risks of WMDs, remains imperative inside national security states. And regulation of health and the environment remain areas where regulatory investment formerly directed at the war on terror might productively be shifted.

Political resort to audit as a ritual of comfort applies to environmental as well as financial audit. For so many decades, plans for environmentally disastrous new coal mines would be announced to a barrage of critique from environmental defenders. Political leaders then responded by announcing a further environmental audit of the mine that proceeded until the anger subsided or the election was over.

The widespread reality of regulatory ritualism is the enactment of many new regulatory laws without provision for additional regulatory resources to monitor additional laws. Audits that are rituals of comfort are a second step that occurs after public criticism over accountability to those laws. There are large numbers of regulatory laws for which no corporate offender has ever been imprisoned, no large fine ever imposed on a corporate offender, and in many cases not even symbolic slap-on-the-wrist fines have ever been imposed, and most critically, no inspectors have been deployed to detect non-compliance. Attention to regulatory ritualism means recognizing that little tends to be achieved by just writing a new law. Sadly, many civil society campaigners for regulatory transformation are pleased enough to comfort their funders with ritualistic back-slapping for nothing more than enactment of a new law.

This is not to argue that laws are meaningless unless law breaking is consistently punished. The evidence does not support this at all. It is not the case that the regulatory agencies that impose the toughest punishments have the lowest levels of law breaking (Braithwaite 2022, Chapter 9). There are no societies or regulatory domains that criminologists can point to where many business offenders have been sent to prison and as a result the community is well protected from corporate crime. There are, however, many domains where the evidence does support the conclusion that regulators that invest in a rigorous regulatory mix, that includes some deterrence, protect the community better, sometimes a hundred times better, than was previously the case (Schell-Busy et al. 2016; Braithwaite 2022). With crime in the suites as with crime in the streets, pure punishment policies do not work; what works is a regulatory mix that provides minimally sufficient deterrence and a regulatory mix that in combination delivers prevention, self-regulation, rehabilitation, and some incapacitation and deterrence. The right mix can be discovered iteratively and responsively until the data show that the non-compliance problem is being brought under control.

Sadly, this mostly does not happen. Big business makes its campaign contributions; they intimidate regulatory bureaucrats who fear for their careers (Accs and Coglianese 2022). Bureaucrats and politicians both have opportunities to be rewarded with better-paid jobs in regulated corporations. Admirals responsible for monitoring defense-contracting fraud and bid-rigging may have prospects as good as their defense minister of securing a job upon retirement working for a naval contractor or as a lobbyist. Likewise top health bureaucrats have lucrative prospects with Big Pharma.

It is important that regulatory inspection is deployed to the greatest hot spots of risk rather than wasted checking activities that pose little risk. Yet sadly what has happened in recent decades is that risk analysis and risk scanning has degenerated. It has been captured as a form of risk ritualism. That is, over time action against businesses that are failing to meet their regulatory obligations declines because regulators are spending most of their budgets on risk measurement, risk scanning, and risk analysis and little on street-level shutdown of risks.

Return to Street-Level Bureaucracy

Regulation globally has seen shifts from inspection by street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980) to desk auditing and algorithmic regulation. Doubtless there will be ways these shifts uncover some better methods for achieving regulatory outcomes. There are also structural risks, however, in moving regulatory monitoring away from the field and away from human field-level inspection. Field inspection is the path to detective competence that finds skeletons in corporate closets (or in the closets of nuclear weapons programs). One of the ways detective competence is delivered when inspectors go onto worksites is that insiders who are concerned about a safety issue build a human relationship with them and then confidentially give the inspector a steer to the closet they should inspect to find the skeleton. This is a safer form of indirect whistleblowing than blowing a whistle publicly oneself.

Whether this is one of the important reasons that regulatory inspection works, or less important than dozens of other mechanisms reported in the literature, the bottom line is that there is formidable evidence that regulatory inspection can improve compliance with regulatory laws. So far, however, there is a dearth of systematic evidence for this with desk audits and algorithmic regulation. That is true of policing as well. The evidence is strong that putting police on the beat at hot spots of risk reduces crime even if the police are not there with any soundly conceived risk-prevention strategy (Braithwaite 2022). But systematic evidence that police doing desk audits works does not yet exist. Scholars who do a lot of interviewing of street-level regulators are familiar with complaints that shifts of regulatory investment to head office staff who do desk audits with algorithmic help threaten regulatory work that is responsive to realities of the field and to detective competence. I have interviewed many environmental and other regulators who say that the big reform they need is to reverse the drift of staffing to head office, returning to a world where a good half of the staff are on the beat.

For 50 years I have been listening to inspectors pointing to what their in-house data seem to show—that the best predictor of future catastrophe is not past high-risk incidents (which is what mostly informs risk profiles) but may be a diffused profile of sloppiness with standards where most of the sloppiness is low risk or near miss and therefore not recorded. That is a rationale for resident inspectors with desks at the biggest, badest workplaces. They call in their supervisors for backup when those risks spiral out of hand again.

From the perspective of a restorative and responsive approach to prevention, one thing that can be less restorative and responsive than desk audits is robo-regulation, as exemplified by Valerie Braithwaite’s (2020) work on the Australian government’s notorious Robodebt fiasco. At root, Robodebt was also a problem of IT consultants selling their wares; our IT can save resources and provide quicker decisions by cutting field staff, replacing them with algorithms activated by some extra central office staff who work with us as consultants. Shortcuts that trim human participation cut out the relationality that is the essence of responsiveness and of restorative diplomacy.

The AI turn in regulation nudges humans not to think. It nudges them not to heal, not to be relational. AI might remake human regulators to become more like the machines the consultants sell, to think more like machines designed to make work easier. That is a risk to relational regulation posed by the techno-social systems of AI, a risk that responsive regulation and restorative diplomacy must struggle against. We see the risk with the simplest of apps that advance faux relationality by automated Likes of friends’ Facebook posts, Instagram pics, or loving automated birthday wishes. In even simpler ways, the risks were always there with templates and checklists. Like AI, these are valuable tools for regulators and diplomats. Over-reliance on them, however, rewires the brains of street-level staff with templated, tick-box mentalities that erode wisdom, relational listening, and capabilities for motivational interviewing. They tie inspectors to their computers and their desks rather than to their boots as they talk and tramp the fields of buried bodies, the closets of hidden skeletons. Relational regulation works when someone spurns a shortcut and instead takes a high road of reaching out to help with regulatory diplomacy toward fixing a problem. The street-level diplomacy issues here are not so different from commanding heights diplomacy among great powers discussed earlier. Relationally simple diplomacy can be as technically simple as providing a hot line so there can be instant restorative and responsive engagement, president with president, general with general.

In a more general way, consultants, including university ones of the kind I have been, are the problem because we write reports for central office regulatory staff who have budgets to pay us. We don’t work to street-level staff. So we focus on regulatory tasks that can be done by our central office clients. Risk containment challenges end up in the hands of bureaucracies where greater resources go to measuring risk, and declining resources to preventing risk or taming them once they blow up. Might regulatory reformers do better to stand with old-fashioned inspectors who wish to see most regulatory resources devoted to inspection and to enforcement follow-up?

I admire Malcolm Sparrow’s (2011) work with regulatory agencies on how to realize his prescription to pick important problems and fix them. It requires deliberation by the regulatory agency centrally, sometimes co-design with stakeholders (though not often enough), on what are their top priority problems, collecting baseline data on those problems, then putting programs in play to treat the problems, measure improvements above baseline, and disseminate results. Although the scientific designs of agency evaluations tend to be weak, much success has been achieved by Sparrow’s methods. They have improved the quality of the regulatory craft. Risks remain, nevertheless, that centrally prescribed priorities can crowd out priority problem identification discovered serendipitously during inspections that are closer to the realities of where the problems are. In aged-care regulation, centrally planned prioritizing, with consultation engaging stakeholders, is dominated by industry leaders, trade union leaders, other national players, and technocrats with a national orientation to problem priorities.

At the nursing home level, the voice of lowly voiceless frail aged is empowered by inspection, as are voices of visiting family members and staff members who might be lowly but have deep insights into the biggest problems in their particular workplace (Braithwaite et al. 2007). I have little doubt that Malcolm Sparrow has helped significantly many regulatory organizations that he has worked with that have got better at picking important problems and fixing them, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States. Nevertheless, we must not be so dazzled by that success as to forget that there was longstanding strong evidence that street-level OSHA inspections worked, as with inspections by other regulators. Nor did OSHA inspections work because they imposed high fines that made compliance rational; historically OSHA fines were risible. They succeeded in identifying problems in their local context to reduce workplace injuries throughout the 1980s (Scholz and Gray 1990), before OSHA considered Malcolm Sparrow’s head office risk analytics. Hence, care and responsibility is needed by those of us who work with head office regulators to protect what demonstrably works from excessive head office crowding out of priority setting. That applies to universities and national research funding agencies as well, where top-down problem prioritization can counterproductively crowd out more local, more serendipitous identification of research priorities by individual teams of scholars. Research teams close to the coalface are generally more nuanced about priorities for mining knowledge. Care is needed there as well that their judgment is not overly dominated by strategic planners.

Summarizing conclusions from this section, regulatory agencies almost everywhere are at risk of over-investing in desk audit and risk analysis that they too often fund as an end in itself, while under-investing in street-level inspection that treats risks. With fraud in rural carbon credit schemes, a problem is under-investment in farm-level inspection. Here it must be conceded, however, that strategic use of satellite images of farm tree cover is imperative. The evidence that inspection works and that detection works more powerfully than sanctions is strong; evidence that punishment works, and algorithmic regulation works is weak (Braithwaite 2022, Chapter 9). Listening skills of inspectors are crucial to the diagnostic and catalytic competence that renders inspectors more like detectives and diplomats, more relational practitioners than they currently are, and less like auditors.5 Compliance inspection can practice restorative diplomacy. To change behavior, we must genuinely listen to narratives of non-compliance and change that organizational storybook. More than that, the listening should lead to agreement on desired outcomes, and on how to monitor progress toward them, and informal praise from inspectors when progress is made. The empirical evidence shows that informal praise by inspectors for success costs nothing, improves compliance and problem-solving and the human quality of the work lives of all involved (Braithwaite et al. 2007). Commitment to improvement is secured through evidence-based motivational interviewing methods that humanly help actors to find their own motivation to attain an outcome. Motivational interviewing enables organizational and individual problem-solving more by expanding their strengths than controlling or deterring their weaknesses. We have seen that ritualism can be countered by rapid detection and correction, as by resident inspectors, and mobilization of whole networks of accountability and enablement.

Conclusion: Principles for Transcending Ritualism

All variants of political ritualism can be countered by relentless monitoring by regulatory regimes with redundant, responsive capabilities for demanding accountability of actors with the power to prevent. In this, social movements for regulatory reform, the environmental movement, the peace movement, are more foundationally germinal than Leviathans. Social movement politics is also required to move corporate and state governance from risk shifting to risk management. International institutions develop inspiring Sustainable Development Goals but do not institutionalize monitoring of the delivery of pledges made to realize them through a systematic pledge-monitoring system. We cannot, need not, consistently punish pledge-breakers. We do need to consistently monitor their breaches, demand that promises are kept, and deliver consequences when such pleas are ignored. I have argued that this should also be true of regulation of reckless deployments of nuclear weapons led from states without nuclear weapons. Boundless networking of civil society creativity is needed in how this is catalyzed. If a ruthlessly hard-headed minister who is hard to shame fails to meet his pledges to support education for Syrian refugee girls, mount a little protest when he visits a girls’ school. Creativity to grab media attention is the thing with this kind of protest. For some issues, protests outside churches of company directors have had impact.6

A responsive regulatory strategy that works requires shift of energy from desk audits and risk analysis to getting out on the street, to street-level inspection and networked relational dialogue about regulatory obligations. Civil society might not be able to demand access to evidence that surprise inspections of the surety of nuclear weapons are happening, but China is foolish not to demand such access to evidence of nuclear weapons surety, the United States is even more foolish to fail to demand scrutiny of programs more reckless than their own in Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Israel. Nuclear surety ritualism is too profound a risk for transparency and checks to be waived. Global security institutions must move down from the clouds and check what ground the boots of inspectors are covering.

The final decades of the twentieth century were among the greatest for national transitions to democracy. The first decades of the twenty-first are among history’s finest for gaming democracy and for declining trust in democracy. A slow food approach to educating citizens on why a multitude of separations of powers, cross-cutting checks and balances, can prepare citizens for the crisis when a despot dies, or when catastrophes destabilize a despot (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018; Braithwaite 2022). Although misgovernance is the rational strategy for leaders of new democracies, slow-food patience for institutional cooking can entrench institutional checks and balances and deepen furrows of good governance path dependency. Chapter 11 returns to this theme.

Chapters 8–9 made the case for better global and local institutions of diplomacy and collaboration. This includes global and street-level regulatory diplomacy and regulatory institutions. These regulators crave a better mix of strategies in their quivers than they currently have. They need the capability to be creative at trying one strategy after another to prevent crises until one of them works, or more likely a mix of them works. In these forms of slow-food preventive work at blocking crises before they take off and cascade to other crises, regulators worldwide can achieve more if they learn to collaborate with one another at being cosmopolitan, using national enforcement threats to demand global compliance improvements under the shadow of the axe of deferred national prosecutions. There is much for the rest of the world to learn from the WHO architecture of nurturing collaboration among health regulators to surge support for helping one another at early prevention of pandemics.

A multidimensional strategic imagination for crisis prevention is needed. Simply putting a high price on carbon will produce abatement too slowly and weakly because of carbon fraud and price manipulation. Sadly, the higher the carbon price, the stronger the incentive to game the measurement and reporting of carbon emissions. State closure of coal-fired power plants and banning of internal combustion motor vehicles are also imperative. Carbon traders cannot deliver without carbon detectives with simple skills who muddy their boots so they can be approached by whistleblowers who expose carbon fraud to enforced accountability.

Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, ONE Campaign documented that five years later only 61% of promises to increase aid to Sub-Saharan Africa made by the G-7 Gleneagles Summit were delivered, a US$7 billion shortfall on pledges. ONE Campaign, Key findings from the DATA Report 2011. ONE Campaign, 2011: https://www.one.org/us/?one_policy_docs=data-report. (Accessed September 29, 2023). A sequence of ONE annual reports persistently documents such trends with refugee pledges and many kinds of aid pledges. Their 2016 report made the case for a systematic pledge-tracker as part of the Sustainable Development Goals architecture: ONE Campaign, The 2016 Data Report: A Bolder response for a changing world. ONE Campaign, 2016: https://s3.amazonaws.com/one.org/pdfs/ONE_DATA_Report_2016_EN.pdf. (Accessed September 29, 2023).

  2. 2.

    The Theirworld #YouPromised campaign website documents the chronology that follows: https://theirworld.org/news/story-so-far-promise-to-educate-every-syrian-refugee-child. (Accessed September 29, 2023).

  3. 3.

    In Australia the idea of resident inspectors elected by miners and paid by the state had their birth in the late 1800s at times of terrible mine disasters. In the 1970s, after a series of mine disasters, the US Mine Safety and Health Administration introduced resident inspectors for the 78 mines with the worst lost-time accident rates in the country. After they got their resident inspector, those 78 mines had below-average accident rates. (Braithwaite 2008; Seung 2016).

  4. 4.

    Every Australian abattoir that exports meat for half a century has had resident Australian government meat inspectors with an office and laboratory located inside the abattoir. The Australian Taxation Office has had them for decades with desks inside the towers of the largest, most aggressive corporate taxpayers.

  5. 5.

    This is one of Jennifer Berger and Keith Johnton’s (2015) Simple Habits for Complex Times. Active listening is one of their simple habits of mind that stretch leadership capacities to cope with complexity. Another simple habit for complex times is being able to use that listening to reframe options for action with multiple perspectives. If the system being confronted is chaotic, with unknowable causal drivers, these multiple perspectives include options for leading to impose a better order on the chaos.

  6. 6.

    This was a tactic made famous by the JP Stephens campaign against company directors responsible for exploitative labor practices (Fisse and Braithwaite 1983).