In an interview on Failed States

So to speak to the base of all this, what is civil society? Or should we just follow Hegel and say that the people are that section of a population who do not know what they want?

Well, my fifth book, which is not actually a book but an article, is called On Civil Society, by Michael Ignatieff, which talks about civil society’s role as a crucial mediating influence – a calibrator between the market and the state. Ignatieff points to the critical role civil society played in the transition from totalitarianism to open democracy in Eastern Europe and argues against the very simplistic view some Western governments have that civil societies are just NGOs. I’ve spoken to officials who actually believe this. I think the value of Ignatieff’s article is to establish what civil society is composed of: the free press, professional associations, youth groups and so on. He reminds us that the organisational structures that make up civilisation are not just the state and the market but also civil society.

So civil society is not just NGOs, but neither is it just ‘the public’?

What I’ve observed in Afghanistan is that by placing what are called Community Development Services (CDCs) in thousands of villages, these entities have themselves become a bulwark between individuals and the state. And when we go and ask people what these bodies are – do they belong to the government? They say, “no, no, they are ours, we use them to talk to the government.” So this is where the institutions of society can have a mediating influence in aggregating and organising individual desires into a collective interest, whether they’re teachers' associations, or engineers' associations, or women’s groups or village groups. They define the communality between people. And people like to belong. These associations, you understand, are the grass roots of any useful adjustment to the structure of a failing state. I’ve seen US senators burst into tears when I’ve demonstrated how the CDCs really work.

So your sixth book?

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, which Amory Lovins wrote with Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken. This was a huge inspiration for Thomas Friedman’s recent book, Hot Flat And Crowded, and talks about social economics and bureaucratic systems and how we need to re-engineer them completely for the 21st century. Amory Lovins is approaching this problem set as one which is primarily environmental, addressing the need to take care of scarce resources on the planet and suggesting how we might reconfigure our systems with that goal in mind.  Ashraf Ghani and I learned a lot from Lovins and applied what we had learned in the context of national stability when we were writing Fixing Failed States.

So Natural Capitalism is my sixth book, and my seventh and final book is Herbert Simon's, The Sciences Of The Artificial, written in 1969. Simon was one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, and he looked at the Marshall Plan from the point of view of systems design. And what he discovered was that the designers of the Marshall Plan considered six different models and initially rejected three of them because they would be so micro-managing that they would never achieve anything. They would, in fact, look like the aid system today. So Natural Capitalism and The Sciences Of The Artificial both come from an engineering perspective, but not engineering from the perspective of designing a bridge or a road. They talk about how we configure power and flows of money to lead to constructive outcomes for people. So they place the citizen at the centre but recognise that the engineering of social systems has a value. That seeing like a state has a value too.

In an interview on Saving the World

Natural Capitalism.

This came out in 1994, and was the first book to say that if we get smart about redesigning capitalism then there is no reason why capitalism shouldn’t thrive alongside sustainability. Hawken was a businessman who turned all his business acumen to the issue of sustainability to see how the capitalist economy can create a more sustainable world. This book was very controversial at the time because a lot of environmentalists argued at that time that capitalism could never survive in the sustainable world. Hawken said: ‘Don’t trash it: redesign it.’ Forum for the Future works with governments and companies to work on that reconciliation between making money and sustainability.