The Mañana Prize

The Mañana Prize will be launched tomorrow for outstanding commitment to putting off important actions that can be left until another day. It will be judged on the length of the delay and the seriousness of the consequences. It is a celebration of the human capacity for stoical denial in the face of adversity.

In borrowing the Spanish word mañana, I intend no disrespect for the good people of Spain; it is just such a good word for tomorrow. Playing the game of mañana to the full can justify putting off action almost indefinitely. Each day the problem festers, getting slightly worse, until someone eventually does something or the problem goes away. Putting off what does not have to be done today is a good tactic to avoid bother but it is not effective as a long-term strategy. When world leaders rely on mañana to get from one day to the next, from one meeting to the next, from one summit to the next, from one policy to the next; we should be very worried.

In looking for potential winners, special mention goes to the euro zone leaders who have been playing mañana for the last two years, since the fault lines in the euro were exposed. Decisive action should have been taken over a year ago – even allowing for the slow process of European diplomacy. Each day that mañana has prevailed the crisis has got deeper; the euro is now in a deep hole but still Europe’s leaders procrastinate. They are now waiting for sovereign debt default to force change which will be unpredictable and dangerous to the world economy.

Another strong runner for the Mañana Prize must be the UN brokered climate talks where the game of mañana has been playing for nearly two decades. At the close of the climate conference in Durban the organizers announced success. You would have thought this would be to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but no; the success that was trumpeted was an agreement to start talking about an agreement that could be signed in 2015 to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions from 2020. Two decades of delay, in the context of claims that climate change could be the worst crisis in human history, makes the UNFCCC a very strong contender for the Mañana Prize.

Meanwhile, amongst the stories that do not make the front page, the UK government has agreed that the state should be responsible for nuclear waste after a nuclear reactor has come to the end of its life and stopped generating power. This policy is needed to persuade private enterprise to build the UK’s next generation of nuclear reactors. The business case relies on passing the legacy of the waste to future generations sixty, a hundred or two hundred years into the future. Taking into account the length of the delay and the severity of the consequences, the UK government is currently the frontrunner for the first award of the Mañana Prize.