Look around you. There is virtually no economy (other, perhaps, than proverbial Switzerland?) that is not in mess. Either in the North or in the South. Widespread unemployment, imbalanced trade, unstable currencies, budget deficits, rising taxes, escalating prices, international obligations, national debt, deteriorating public services. All we can see is general stagnation and recession everywhere.

Northern economics have also to cope with growing pollution, waste accumulation, social alienation, drugs, climate and a wide range of generally unsustainable production and consumption patterns. More and more automation in the face of more and more products with less and less purchasing power and declining demand.

And yet, national leaders, most of them prodded by their economic advisors, see these as minor, transient problems amenabale to some fine tuning here and minor fixing there. Except, of course, for the predicament of the developing countries for which the economists (largely educated in western universities and trained in Bretton Woods institutions) have no trouble realising that symptomatic malaise has turned into systemic rot. For countries in the South there is clearly no way, they say, but it undertake structural change. This requires Structural Adjustment Processes.

The restructuring of Southern economics through these processes has to satisfy the basic neo-classical economic principles: strengthen the market mechanisms, promote efficient activities, facilitate export-led growth, reduce government expenditures and attract foreign investment. Why are structural adjustment programmes applicable only to the poor? The underlying concept, that systemic change is a necessary condition for sustainable development, certainly applies to them-but also, and no less, to the rich. Clearly, it will take on its own qualities and the specifies could be quite different; but the relevance is unquestionable.

Any structural adjustment programme for an industrialised country must clearly include measures to increase meaningful employment, reduce un-meaningful production and consumption. To do this, it will have to accelerate the transition to tertiary and quarternary sectors of the economy, reduce use of global resources, particularly energy, reduce emission of pollutants, particularly global, and release financial resources for global development.

The instruments available to the North are as varied as those for the South. They can include energy taxes, pricing of waste disposal, taxes on consumption rather than income, etc. But economic measures will not be enough. Technological choices will have to be fundamentally rearranged towards low material intensity (MIPS) options and towards a different mix between individual and community services. Equally, decision structures of societies will need to be rearranged to reward environment - friendly, longer term solutions and to penalise short sighted decisions.

With regard to knowledge systems, and innovation, it is clear that the validity and value of traditional wisdom, gained over millennia by countless societies all over the world, will have to brought on par with other "modern" sciences. A more holistic understanding of society and of the biosphere is a crucial first step to designing a more sustainable future.

In the area of values, or social paradigms, the most urgent need is for western society to redefine the concepts of "progress" and "development". Much of what has passed for progress over the past century has, in fact, led to a poorer quality of life. Indeed, we now have to rethink what actually constitutes the good life, not to mention a whole series of related concepts such as security, competitiveness and efficiency at the individual, community and national levels. This will quickly lead us into rethinking not only the indicators of development, but also the whole design of so-called "development cooperation".

At the heart of many northern problems lies a skewed system of values, partly arising from a misunderstanding of the opportunities created by the industrial revolution. It is now urgent that we redefine some of the most basic assumptions inherited from the nineteenth century on such issues as work and leisure, "high" technology, the role of science in society, the relationships of people with nature and machines - and, not least, with each other. Nineteenth century colonial, or frontier, mindsets on self-interest and resource exploitation need now to be replaced by wider visions and longer time horizons that provide a more accurate path to the kind of self-reliant interdependence we will need in tomorrow's  world.

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