On October 23, last year, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, was hauled before Congress to testify on the causes underlying the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression in the 1930s.
'I made the mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,' he said, adding that he had 'found a flaw' in his underlying economic assumptions. 'The whole intellectual edifice,' he admitted, 'collapsed in the summer of last year.'
Since Wall Street's crash last September, igniting a global recession, 'Washington Consensus' models of economic development have been discredited. Developing nations are seeking alternatives. Nowhere is this feeling stronger than in Asia, which had been chastised and lectured by Washington after its own regional financial crisis in 1997.
The Himalayan Consensus is a response to the global crisis. Finding acceptance from Islamabad to Dhaka, from Lhasa to Kathmandu, it is now being discussed in Beijing.
The premise of Washington's neo-liberal capitalist and neo-conservative political models is Adam Smith's underlying theory - greed alone motivates mankind, all markets will find equilibrium if left to the choices of greed's 'invisible hand'. The Himalaya Consensus rejects this notion.
As Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus summarises: 'With all of our economic theories we forget the environment, forget people, forget culture, and destroy anything to make money. This is the inherent fault in economic theory which creates an artificial human being [Homo economicus] who knows how to make money because maximising profit is the sole basis of business. But human beings are bigger than just money.'
The Himalayan Consensus is not just another voice of the developing world calling to restructure our global financial system. Rather, it calls for re-engineering the very values underlying assumptions driving that system. The Himalayan Consensus places environmental protection as the single most urgent task. It promotes multi-ethnic diversity best fostered and preserved through culturally sustainable development programmes or businesses - not just aid - to address poverty and income gap inequality.
