Neoliberalism innately destroys the notion of Environmental Recovery through its motive of serving the Stakeholder.

From Shareholder to Stakeholder Capitalism: More of the Same? The political economy that characterizes most of today’s world – capitalism – is centuries old, although its most recent form – neoliberalism – only became dominant in the 1980s.2 Neoliberalism’s core elements (trade and financial liberalization, low taxation, minimal state intervention, strong property rights) birthed our now familiar globalized economy, criticized almost at its outset for the inequalities it was fomenting. To WEF founder, Klaus Schwab, the problem Labonté 2 International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 2022, x(x), 1–5 lay less with capitalism itself than with its neoliberal emphasis on maximizing shareholder value, where economic decisions are based on creating the greatest return on investment in the shortest time possible. Schwab’s and the WEF’s promoted solution is ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ in which everyone (and not just shareholders) should have a stake in capitalism’s benefits.5 Few might object to the idea of all gaining (even if not equally) from liberalized market activities, but as one economist argued, the stakeholder model is essentially: “…just a way of bringing the opponents of capitalism to a common venture of extending its lifespan, while ignoring the system’s intrinsic and destabilizing profit motive” (W. Bello, interview communication, October 27, 2021). As one example, in a post-pandemic ‘Great Reset’ wealthy investors are encouraged to invest in businesses whose activities align with the Sustainable Development Goals. This, it is said, would allow them to “make a profit and still save the world.”6 To the extent that such investments go into non-fossil-fuel renewables this win-win hyperbole is a partial truth; but with many of these ethical investment portfolios being non-compliant with global climate change goals7 this may simply be ‘greenwashing’ what remains fundamentally profit-motivated investing. We might also ask: What economic policies and practices enable investors to become disproportionately wealthy in the first place? As a recent study noted, the stakeholder capitalism model will do little to redistribute wealth but will strengthen the private sector’s (not unself-interested and growing) role in global health governance.8 The Return of the State: Can Governments Mitigate Capitalism’s Inherent Inegalitarianism? The state is certainly a critical ‘stakeholder’ in capitalism since its policy choices enable or constrain the actions of economic actors within and across borders. The post-1980 drift to neoliberalism saw the state increasingly defer to market interests in efforts to have their countries remain globally competitive (T. Jackson, interview communication, October 28, 2021).9 Tax rates fell, financial markets deregulated, and inequalities within most countries soared.2 The 2008 global financial crisis saw a rapid volte-face, with wealthier country governments spending trillions of dollars to bail out ‘banks too big to fail.’2 The return of the state was brief, with austerity measures (fiscal contraction) quickly following to cover the public costs of rescuing private banks and investors2 at the cost of eroding health systems that proved ill-prepared for a global pandemic. The pandemic saw the state roar back once again, with many countries responding with wage support, people who matter most in society, the ones who protect our lives and care for us, the ones we applauded from our doorsteps during the pandemic, yet they were…left behind in terms of wages, security, the value of their jobs, their status in society” (T. Jackson, interview communication, October 28, 2017). Certainly, the need for greater public investment in health and social protection is an undisputed outcome of the pandemic, especially given how government responses to COVID-19 increased women’s care burdens, employment losses and experiences of domestic violence.10-12 Others saw massive government interventions in the economy as demonstrating that: “…all that neoliberal talk about government intervention is bad, bad, bad just got thrown out the window…what we’ve seen is the ideological assumption of neoliberalism laid low” (W. Bello, interview communication, October 27, 2021). Early post-pandemic recovery plans for those countries with the requisite fiscal capacities appeared to embody such transformative optimism. The original US multi-trillion Green New Deal promised substantial environmental protection, a rapid shift away from fossil fuels, and expansive new social spending.13 When it was later tabled as a following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU and many other countries are pivoting back to energy (fossil fuel) independence, questioning their 2021 commitments to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.18