Barbara Ward’s vision

She was among the first to argue that prosperity, equality and the protection of nature are inseparable planetary goals

by Or Rosenboim + BIO

Barbara Ward at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. Courtesy UN Photo

In 1957, the economist and journalist Barbara Ward gave the first of the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures at the University College of Ghana. Shortly after Kwame Nkrumah led the British colony of the Gold Coast towards self-government, he invited Ward to address the independent country’s first cohort of students. Ward was well acquainted with the local political landscape because she had spent the previous four years living in the Gold Coast, witnessing its political transformation. As the world’s eyes were set on Ghana, the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve independence from European rule, Ward was determined to provide her audience with the knowledge needed to govern their newly founded country.

Her lectures, titled Five Ideas that Change the World, developed a world-historical narrative of the supposed human progress from nationalism to colonialism, industrialism, communism, and finally to internationalism, the highest point of political order.

Ghana’s peaceful democratic transition showed that African colonies were ready to govern themselves, weakening European arguments about the need for prolonged imperial guidance. The country soon became a model for new African statehood based on postcolonial sovereignty, inspiring other colonies on the continent to join the decolonisation process, which culminated in the ‘Year of Africa’ in 1960. The charismatic Nkrumah, who ruled Ghana from 1957 to 1966, became an international player in Cold War diplomacy by promoting pan-Africanist visions of post-imperial unity. He wanted to show the world that Africans were no longer imperial subjects but important and influential members of the global political community. While Nkrumah was a vociferous opponent of colonialism, Ward uncritically appreciated the civilisational and technical legacies of empire. Yet in her lectures, she supported Nkrumah’s international political aspirations by suggesting that economic development, international cooperation, and even world peace were interrelated problems that warranted a planetary solution.

Barbara Ward was a remarkable thinker, a visionary who imagined a ‘planetary’ political, economic and environmental justice based on both material and spiritual principles. She was an unusual figure in the Cold War political sphere, a charismatic public intellectual who advised world leaders and the United Nations at a time when women’s voices were often marginalised. She was among the first thinkers to argue that human prosperity, environmental sustainability and global justice were inseparable political questions. Her distinctive vision of planetary politics, grounded in ecological interdependence, moral responsibility and global cooperation, still offers insights into some of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century.

Ward’s diagnosis of Ghana’s predicament emerged from an intellectual trajectory that predated decolonisation itself. She was born in 1914 to a British Quaker-Catholic family that put a strong emphasis on education, encouraging her to attend a French lycée in Paris and later Somerville College, Oxford, where she was among the first women to graduate in politics, philosophy and economics in 1935. She continued to lecture at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in Catholic circles, until 1939, when she launched her journalistic career as a contributor to The Economist on foreign affairs.

‘For 30 years, it has scarcely been possible to discuss development anywhere in the world without bringing in Barbara Ward’

During the war, Ward joined the Sword of the Spirit, then a British Catholic organisation that encouraged believers to support the democratic battle against totalitarianism. This experience, as well as her friendship with Arnold J Toynbee, Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain, persuaded her of the importance of religion – and especially Christianity – as the moral foundation of political and economic internationalism. Ward drew inspiration less from the doctrinal authority of the Catholic Church (which she frequently criticised as rigid and conservative) than from her own universalist interpretation of Christianity, which she regarded as a source of moral principles applicable to all humanity. Well beyond a personal creed, Ward’s Catholicism reflects a fundamental aspect of her political thought.

After the Second World War, Ward was interested in the global challenges of economic growth and reconstruction. She travelled extensively in the United States, India, Europe and Africa, where in 1946 she prepared a study of demography and migration in British Togoland. In 1950, she married the Australian civil servant Robert Jackson, and three years later the couple relocated to the Gold Coast, where Jackson was appointed chairman of the preparatory commission of the Volta Dam, one of the continent’s major economic-development projects.

Ward’s bestselling books and prestigious public lectures made her a well-known figure, and she developed a public profile as a political commentator and advisor to world leaders, including Nkrumah, Adlai Stevenson, John F Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Lyndon B Johnson. By the late 1950s, she divided her time between Harvard, where she held a visiting professorship, and Ghana, where she continued to promote the Volta Dam project, sharing Nkrumah’s hope that it might foster Ghana’s economic independence. Later, she was appointed to a prestigious professorship in development economics at Columbia University in New York, and in the 1970s she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a life peer. Upon her death in 1981, The Washington Post acknowledged her influence by stating that: ‘For 30 years, it has scarcely been possible to discuss development anywhere in the world without bringing in Barbara Ward.’

Poverty was such a significant issue for Ward to tackle because it created global political unrest and undermined local societies’ potential to prosper. How could it be overcome? She was persuaded that only a revolution could help humanity undermine global inequality. The postwar era was, for her, a particularly promising time for radical change: ‘I suppose we are all aware of the fact that we live in the most catastrophically revolutionary age that men have ever faced.’ In the early 1960s, she identified ‘ten or twenty’ revolutions still underway. She singled out two important calls for equality: postcolonial self-determination, which led to ‘the new peoples’ claim to national equality with the older states’, and the revolution of economic development, which aimed to reduce global inequality. Following her friend Walt Rostow’s theory of modernisation, she explained that some countries (typically the European imperial powers) were ‘sensationally richer’ but others had ‘not yet’ realised a revolutionary transformation despite their ‘desire to do so’. The challenge of her era was to figure out how to make this revolution come true.

One successful ‘revolution’ was the Marshall Plan for the development of Europe after the Second World War, which Ward praised as an example of international economic planning. She suggested that Europe and the US should apply a similar model and provide financial aid to promote local economic development in India. Historically, Europe and the US prospered from the continuous plunder of colonial capital and resources. Imperialism caused ‘not only a considerable degree of political immaturity and instability’ but ‘also a type of economic structure or layout which is unlikely to produce further growth of itself’. For Ward, these structural inequalities in the world economy prevented postcolonial countries from overcoming poverty on their own.

Her proposals for the development of postcolonial societies expressed a paternalistic, hierarchical worldview

Ward outlined various measures to end economic inequality on a planetary scale: training local experts, transferring food surpluses to poorer countries, providing capital assistance in the form of a 1 per cent tax on national income, and advancing trade policies favourable to non-Western economies. Wealthy states, for Ward, should voluntarily embrace a more ambitious form of global fiscal redistribution because narrowing the world’s economic gap would benefit humanity as a whole. She maintained that encouraging economic growth in the ‘underdeveloped’ postcolonial world was in the West’s material interest. Yet, more importantly, it was its moral duty. Her proposals, pushing Cold War modernisation projects beyond strategic investment and reconstruction, struggled to generate political support at the time, but opened up discussions about the appropriate means to promote equality in the global economic order.

Ward accused Western societies of the ‘under-development’ of colonial societies but still considered the West superior to the rest of the world. She assumed that postcolonial countries wanted to follow Western industrialisation models (or in her terms, ‘to modernise’) but could not do so alone without Western guidance. Her proposals for the development of postcolonial societies expressed a paternalistic and hierarchical worldview. Moreover, by promoting a new world order based on ‘social justice, humane concern and Christian compassion’, Ward suggested that equality did not depend on material conditions alone but also on a spiritual transformation. In her political vision, Catholic universalism provided the foundational moral values for the realisation of a just political and economic order on a planetary scale.

Ward was fascinated by the planetary dimension of politics, which became central to her vision of development. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 inaugurated the Space Age, while Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of Earth in 1961 (and Valentina Tereshkova’s two years later) altered humanity’s perception of its place in the cosmos. As space exploration transformed public views of the limits of human life, and Planet Earth appeared as just one among many possible habitats for humanity, Ward argued that this new sense of unity would revolutionise human history. Her 1965 lectures at Columbia University, titled ‘Spaceship Earth’, outlined an idea of a fragile and united planet, anticipating the famous imagery generated in 1968 by ‘Earthrise’, William Anders’s iconic photo of Planet Earth from space. She was one of the first to argue that the Space Age would inaugurate a new kind of distinctively ‘planetary’ politics:

Ward borrowed the metaphor ‘Spaceship Earth’ from the US inventor and scientist Buckminster Fuller, who used it in 1963 to describe the planet’s fragility. He argued that Earth was a capsule with limited resources on a ‘totally precarious’ vast space voyage, whose success depends on the rational actions of every single individual. Ward similarly suggested that:

Yet, for her, the planetary perspective was not merely a celebration of extraterrestrial exploration but also an opportunity to highlight the limits of Cold War politics centred on the so-called ‘national interest’. The relevant scale of politics was planetary, not national. The challenges of global economic inequality could no longer be adequately addressed through national emancipation or self-determination, which limited political and economic change to state boundaries:

She concluded that ‘we have become a single human community’ but warned that ‘Our physical unity has gone far ahead of our moral unity’.

Ward thought that only the Christian West could provide the world with the moral foundations of a planetary community

Technological changes, such as interconnectedness, shrinking space and industrialisation, were not enough to generate a meaningful political change. Ward argued that a planetary community could be achieved only by transforming the physical unity of Planet Earth into political, economic and potentially moral harmony. Yet identifying the appropriate moral foundations for planetary politics was a formidable challenge. She called for the emergence of a common planetary morality to ‘turn the mob into a community’.

Ward recognised the value of humanity’s pluralism yet, as a devout Catholic, she found inspiration in Christianity. She criticised the ecclesiastical institutions, although she was one of the few women in 1964 invited to contribute her expertise to the Second Vatican Council, and admitted that, historically, faith had ‘divided the world so bitterly’. But she was persuaded that the notion of ‘Christian brotherhood’ could help rediscover ‘what unites rather than divides the communities of the world’. Quoting Pope Paul VI, she argued that the newly found unity of her era emerged from ‘one of the fundamental moral insights of the Western culture which has now swept over the whole globe’, namely that ‘mankind is not a group of warring tribes, but a single, equal and fraternal community’. Equality and justice thus relied on the ‘Western sense that men, as souls of infinite metaphysical value, stand equal before the throne of God’.

Thus, in the mid-1960s, Ward uncritically sought to persuade her audience that only the Christian West could provide the world with the moral foundations of a planetary community. The ‘West’ had a special responsibility, she argued, to provide moral guidance for a new world order based on justice, equality and solidarity. Thus, the Christian West was self-servingly represented as both fraternal and paternal, both equal and superior, and a cultivator of a universal creed that could motivate planetary action. Imagining a ‘planetary community’ that could foster humanity’s freedom and equality was, for Ward, an act of faith.

Alongside economic inequality and planetary politics, the third pillar of Ward’s thought regards humanity’s relations with the natural environment. In the 1970s, she used the term ‘sustainable development’ to argue that economic growth, though essential to human wellbeing, must not come at the cost of natural degradation. She outlined a vision for sustainable growth that reflected her optimism about ending poverty while avoiding a planetary economic and environmental crisis.

In the early 1970s, Ward offered an original and optimistic response to two contemporaneous concerns about growth. Thinkers in the Global South worried that there was not enough economic growth to generate wealth and prosperity in postcolonial countries. Without robust economic growth, these new states could not guarantee welfare services, healthcare and education to their citizens. Economic stagnation could threaten political stability and peace, always a significant concern during the Cold War. At the same time, Western thinkers warned that the relentless pursuit of economic growth in consumerist societies was destroying the natural environment. In 1972, the Club of Rome published its report, The Limits to Growth, endorsing plans of economic equilibrium rather than growth as a strategy for planetary ecological wellbeing.

Ward rejected the catastrophic pessimism of her fellow economists, who challenged existing growth models, but echoed their concerns about the planet as a fragile, vulnerable environment that needed to be preserved for future generations. Moreover, she was sympathetic to the claims of ‘developing countries to get their peoples out of a trap of poverty’ through economic growth based on agricultural and industrial innovation. Yet she did not think that these two aims – economic and environmental justice – were necessarily at odds. Optimistically, she suggested that economic wellbeing and planetary wellbeing could be reconciled if humanity acted collectively, morally and responsibly.

Ward underlined the importance of knowledge in politics

Ward’s vision achieved its clearest expression in 1972, at the UN Conference on the Human Environment, which was the international organisation’s first attempt to outline a common environmental strategy for the world. Ward was invited to take a leading role in preparation for the conference in Stockholm and wrote (with the scientist René Dubos) the report Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, which was circulated to all participants before the event to present the organisers’ vision of economic development with respect for nature.

Drawing on her vast international network of experts, Ward approached 152 scientists, diplomats, industry leaders and stakeholders from 58 countries, and solicited their views about the prospects of economic development and its impact on the planet. She wanted to give space to the multiple, sometimes contradictory, opinions about the ecological impact of economic-growth strategies. She edited the collected ideas into a comprehensive document outlining possible approaches to ensure that economic growth wouldn’t come at the expense of the biosphere by limiting (though not banning) pollution, consumption and extraction.

The book concluded with a vision of a ‘planetary order’, premised on a ‘shared biosphere’ in which humanity had to use technology to survive. Planetary politics was not just about a world scale, but also about paying attention to the long-term impact of political choices on the physical conditions of Planet Earth. Thus, Ward underlined the importance of knowledge in politics: while scientists and experts should not replace politicians in national or international governance, they should provide the necessary data for informed decision-making:

Financial investment, international cooperation, and scientific expertise could help ‘creep up on the infinitely sensitive issues of divisive economic and political sovereignty’ because ‘No nations, on their own, can offset the risk of deepening disorder.’

International governance could, Ward argued, provide the best means for overcoming environmental degradation and economic inequality. Yet, at the conference, she discovered that not all members of the UN wanted to limit national sovereignty. Her plans to expand international cooperation to the non-violent settlement of disputes, progressive farming, urban planning, pollution control and global economic redistribution remained on paper. While largely unrealised, the declaration that the conference’s delegates produced remained an important signpost on the road towards global environmental governance.

She later downplayed her earlier emphasis on Christianity as the moral foundation for a planetary community

Ward advocated for institutional innovation on a planetary scale and considered the UN as a proto-world government. Yet she was acutely aware of the limits of international institutions and, by the late 1970s, lamented the UN’s inability to translate environmental commitments into effective action. The challenge was not just to create adequate institutions, but also to give them the power to act. In this sense, Ward suspected that the problem was not the institution’s design but the ‘loyalties’ of its members, which were based on ideology and morality: ‘The planet is not yet a centre of rational loyalty for all of mankind.’ Instead of institutional change, she sought to transform the world’s civil society by raising public consciousness of questions of political and economic justice. A new planetary order should be based not on top-down institutions but on a bottom-up planetary community that ‘our environmental interdependence’ could generate.

To fully appreciate Ward’s contribution, it is important to acknowledge the limits of her vision. Her viewpoint was inherently Western-centric and elitist, and her earlier writings frequently explained imperial expansion as an expression of Europe’s civilising mission. She advanced a civilisational hierarchy that viewed Christianity as the ethical basis of human unity, undermining alternative creeds. Areas of the world that she dubbed ‘undeveloped’ were assigned only a passive role in her planetary community. When the ‘Global South’ sought to shape its own political and economic future through initiatives such as the New International Economic Order, she insisted that the West still had a moral responsibility to lead the transition to global justice and equality.

It is worth noticing, however, that in her later writings about environmental justice, Ward downplayed her earlier emphasis on Christianity as the moral foundation for a planetary community, suggesting instead that public awareness of the planet’s physical unity could also generate political union. Economic development of postcolonial countries should, she argued in the 1970s, take local preferences into account rather than follow a Western model. The emergence of ecological concerns marked a significant shift in Ward’s political thought, transforming her understanding of the relationship between economic justice, political unity and postcolonial world order.

Ward remains relevant today as a far-sighted thinker who anticipated the intertwined challenges of inequality, environmental degradation and global governance that continue to dominate political debates. In her later writings about the environment, she advanced a more inclusive idea of planetary community based on ‘physical interconnectedness’ and postcolonial self-determination, abandoning some of her earlier ideas about Christian morality and European superiority. By outlining a vision to end global inequality, protect nature from harm and generate economic growth, Ward sought to save humanity from its own demise. Her ambitions were matched only by her optimism that her vision of a planetary community of welfare, growth and harmony with nature would, one day, be realised.

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