A New Governamce Frame Needed

What a difference one and half month made in the fall of 2008 since I started this blog at the end of September! We witnessed a housing mortgage crisis, which led to credit crisis, which lead to a consumer crisis, which lead to an economic crisis the like of which did not happen since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Looking at the future of sustainability in the aviation industry cannot be done in isolation of the above interconnected crisis because they and their policy responses by the new Obama administration will substantially determine that future.

Given these extraordinary economic conditions, particularly the financial situation of the US car manufacturers, transportation is a sector that demands action, given its enormous economic and social impact on the US society. The real challenge is to develop the right policies and the aviation industry should be an essential participant in these policy developments.

SAVIA Associates International at www.susaviation.com has been proposing the IITS Initiative years before the present economic crisis. The Initiative entails a $300 billion infrastructure program over 15 years that would integrate the aviation industry with the various mode of surface transportation. Its website also has proposed an ISATEA legislation and even invited readers to sign its ISATEA petition.

One of the major obstacles to this IITS Initiative and its larger infrastructure programs that are being discussed presently is the ideological constraint that big government is bad. While that may have been true to some extent in normal economic times, it is not true in the extraordinary economic times that we are in. As well described by Robert Kuttner in Obama’s Challenge’s chapter 3 “Audacity versus Undertow” this ideological frame which started to be built during the Carter Administration is to be changed into a new one which would contain statements such as the private sector has its limits, people’s needs and economic recovery are more important than penny pinching, tax cuts have done little to low- and middle-income Americans, “Government can do great things, it particularly needs to do great things in an economic crisis.”

Let’s hope that the Obama Administration is able to develop transformative leadership that makes such change possible by bold solutions in the interest of people and planet, both in the US and abroad.