Executive will be embarking on a collaborative project with LPSN to demonstrate how different sectors of the Lebanese economy are experiencing, managing, and strategizing under conditions of current war vis-a-vis interviews with LPSN members over the upcoming weeks.
The Lebanese Private Sector Network (LPSN) is pivoting. Its new agenda makes an emphatic plea in assertion of national sovereignty while at the same time staging a determined claim to be a partner of “economic diplomacy,” LPSN board members declare to Executive in a detailed online conversation.
According to LPSN President, agro-industrialist Rima Freiji, the network’s new course of action is geared for solutions and comprehensively working towards an economically sustained future as soon as possible. “It’s all about getting into the action and implementation immediately, whether on the policy front, on the international front or on the economy front.” she says.
Claiming their right to economic diplomacy, LPSN is championing the conviction that the country’s private sector needs, and deserves, a full seat at the nation’s local and international policy making tables and a strong role in the implementation of long overdue structural reforms and legal innovations.
Having formed LPSN in the midst of the economic crisis, the previous message of the organization’s founders from 2021-23, was “to save the liberal economy and free market. We now are moving into [sending a message] connected to sovereignty, stability, and prosperity,” comments Joe Ayache, the network’s vice president and communications strategist. “These are the three landmarks that we need to accomplish in order to reach the Lebanon that we all dream of having,” he adds.
A short but eventful history
Since its founding in October 2021, Freiji explains that the network’s first strategic win was achieved right after its formalization, through the identification of guiding principles. These principles also serve as ethical signposts today “in most everything,” she says.
Not only were they directing LPSN safely throughout different activities, such as the adoption of a job creation focus in 2023; they also proved invaluable when the specters of external shocks were looming larger and larger, since LPSN’s guiding principles fostered development of crisis preparedness plans and crisis management templates. According to Freiji, these freely shared, concise, LPSN-designed plans were greatly appreciated and widely used by local businesses and also emulated by crisis preparedness planners in crisis-hit foreign countries.
In 2023, LPSN’s attention zoomed in on the establishment of jobs and a labor market initiative they coined Lebanon Works. This initiative, Ayache says, is about “being positive about creating jobs in Lebanon”. As such, he describes the employment initiative as the third leg of a tripod. This structure’s first leg consists of public awareness building & advocacy, and its second leg of lobbying with politicians and pushing for stoppage of abuses of laws, taxes, and governmental powers.
Explaining the implementation of Lebanon Works, industrialist Hady Bsat says that the concept was “to create an interactive digital platform rather than an informative platform.” As such, the founding purpose of Lebanon Works was to enable employers, both members and non-members of LPSN, to communicate job opportunities as well as success stories of employment and business ventures.
“The underlying idea was to present positive news and show people that ‘Lebanon works’,” Bsat says, adding that an updated digital platform is currently being developed and will be released as a “space of spaces” for presentation of opportunities by employers. The updated Lebanon Works platform is intended to open expanded opportunities through partnerships with international and local organizations that are focusing on labor market development. (Further discussion of LPSN’s labor initiatives is one of several interview topics that Executive will cover with the network’s leading members before the end of this year.)
Also notably, an unplanned digital platform acting as “relief hub” has been enacted by LPSN as an emergency answer to the war and displacement crisis. According to Bsat, this hub is enabling initiatives for humanitarian relief and serves as platform to share incidents and responses by vetted organizations.
Centrality of the aggression-induced petition
As part of the second leg of the LPSN tripod, the network’s hue and cry for strong policy making and reform is enshrined in a new position paper that is both posted as an online petition and laid out in a parallel, more detailed document as “a call for action, a call for unity.” Related emergency demands have also been circulated by LPSN several weeks prior, in form of an “Urgent Roadmap for Stability and Recovery of Sovereignty.”
The detailed petition levels six demands. In seeking adherence to international contracts and resolutions, LPSN calls for immediate implementation of the three dated UN Security Council resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701. Two other demands make reference to 20th century peace building efforts, one directly by asking for “immediate reactivation” of the armistice agreement of 1949, and one indirectly by proposing an internationally led “Marshall-type plan” for Lebanon’s economic recovery.
Lastly, demands relating to Lebanese sovereignty – or what a cynical observer might see as inching, incremental steps of the hesitant Lebanese polity towards sovereignty – request Parliament to immediately and “without [further] delay” elect a president of the republic. For material protection of sovereignty, the petition demands full assumption of territorial security and control by the Lebanese Armed Forces.
Groundswell of support and a pessimist’s perspective
The shorter online version of the petition was launched at the end of the first week of November. It attracted about 1,000 votes over three days of Nov 11, 12, 13 and about 100 additional signatures in the two following days. The online petition highlights the demands for implementation of the three UNSCR resolutions, for reinstatement of the state’s governance institutions, and for the creation of economic diplomacy and work towards the Marshall plan target.
Freiji rebuts the very idea of claims that the petition and new orientation of LPSN is a pious dream of utopian immensity. For far too long, Lebanese people have been fed the lie that asking for normality is unrealistic, she argues. “We are asking for what our constitution says. We are citizens of this country, with patriotic minds, and it is very basic what we are asking for. It is not a dream and utopia.”
Nonetheless, the determined and confident tone of the petition cannot conceal the background of long policy failures and vibes of desperate wartime urgency that underpin the LPSN petition and can be perceived by skeptics as anything from blue-eyed to a desperate attempt at roping in the moon.
From the perspective of a professional pessimist on Lebanon, the economic diplomacy ambitions of LPSN might be wholly out of this world but utterly needed in their contrarian position to both the historic trajectory of the Lebanese state and the current ordeal of the polity.
In simpler words, it is nothing if not audacious and encouraging in the highest order when the petition states that “the private sector, civil society, and diaspora must lead in addressing the challenges of ineffective governance and non-state actors. By securing leadership on the economic front and a seat at the table, we can rebuild trust and partnerships with Arab and global allies.”
A context of war
This is because the context of LPSN’s new demands for sovereignty, stability, and prosperity as core aims is of course the war of Israel against Hezbollah. This war, according to endless propaganda streams issued by the Israeli government, does not aim to establish totalitarian hegemony. But from the seventh-floor vantage point of an office window looking south in Beirut’s Achrafieh district, aggressions ordered by Israeli leaders seem hellbent on achieving just that and doing so with a barrage of iron-fisted attacks that inflict economic ruin on embattled Lebanon and defy any moral, mental, and material cost even on their own population.
The assessment of any Lebanese reform and development, especially ones formulated vis-à-vis geopolitical powers that are posing in the sheepskins of global allies, is incomplete without including a note to say that every page in the Israeli playbook of warfare, intimidation, and propaganda seems written in support of an expansionary narrative. It is a narrative that contorts any ceasefire proposals into schemes of military control and intrusion that Lebanon’s combative neighbor can impose with impunity.
No to economic defeatism
Regardless of war, the merits of defining new stability and prosperity baselines for Lebanon deserve to be noted for their constructiveness and also their resilience to defeatism – including defeatism of speculative GDP impact numbers.
LPSN board members on the one hand concur that these numbers testify to unspeakable economic devastation of the workforce and job market. On the other hand, they note how the magnitudes of losses to the private sector economy as a whole are as difficult to ascertain as they are to judge for their – albeit overall highly concerning – implications on the coming two years.
Damage counts are tenuous while the attacks against Lebanon yet rage on an hourly basis. Additionally, Iman Tabbara, a LPSN founding member and the organization’s lead on policy and advocacy for economic security, points out how the pre-war disintegration of formality in the economy and the war’s high impact on the mostly informal activities in agricultural production mean that there are now two distinct local economies that have been decimated by external shocks.
Indeed, the only thing that can be ascertained from more than a decade of divergences between global-lens data and Lebanese economic coping, is that both the formal and informal economies of Lebanon have long appeared to be fraught with data uncertainties.
A glance at a small country’s war exposure through the lens of economic data
On top of that pit of data uncertainty, under which the informal branch of the Lebanese economy is by its definition too opaque in usual times, the precariousness of data is disruptive to even preliminary assessment in the current scenario of extreme stress.
Additionally, from the vantage point of small economies situated in the obscure cracks and crannies of international economic flows, top-down global reports on geoeconomic and national trends cannot but be noted for high margins of error. These international assessment models are geared towards large economies and are to very large extents based on discussions with governmental entities, central bankers, and such.
Lastly and most disturbingly, the GDP impacts of external aggression on Palestine to the point of economic destruction were not included even in the regional and sub-regional economic assessments by any Bretton Woods entity. This absence was most devastatingly evident in recent GDP projections for the MENA region despite the year-long evisceration of Gaza.
The absence of economic markers that elucidate the atrocity of war as means of national repositioning and superiority of one people over the other further accentuates the grimness of undeniable warfare devastation of the Lebanese economy. Despite this impossible context, LPSN show determination of moving forward with their role in rebuilding the economic and societal fabric from the first moment after it becomes feasible to do so.
The new role of the private sector
LPSN’s response was a broad pivot from an economic-industrial focus on job creation and preservation to a broader sovereign and societal pledge of support. However, the decisive core is perhaps the sub-pivot to, and assertion of, economic diplomacy under the aim of repositioning Lebanon as a forward and upward moving emerging market, becoming once again a reliable and responsible international partner in Arab and global contexts.
The dual goal of supporting sovereignty and claiming economic diplomacy that powers LPSN on its path may not be entirely impervious to elements of contradiction. Historically, critics have disdained the viability of participatory economic democracy as viable against dangers of conflicted interests.
Freji’s argument, however, is that LPSN’s demands are thrice valid and justified. “It is very difficult to argue against our position because it is based on our constitution and it is based on what every citizen wants. It thirdly is based on improving the livelihood of the citizen,” she tells Executive.
Viewed in Lebanese context, it becomes clear that LPSN’s current demands are not just economic stakeholders’ response to war. They are based on the determination to overcome the paralysis of the Lebanese polity and economy that has been caused by the dysfunctionality of the secto-political system. This system of governance has been encroaching since the 1990s and escalated into a financial implosion and economic meltdown in the early 2020s.
Regarding prospective activities over the remainder of 2024, communication strategist Ayache says that LPSN will focus on building momentum around its message of sovereignty, stability, and prosperity and the demands outlined in the petition of November. Plans for a third annual event have been pushed from this month into the first quarter of 2025, he clarifies.
In LPSN’s organizational DNA, constructive approaches – specifically the inaugural emphasis on corporate ethics and business values as well as the 2023 focus on job creation and employment security – appear implicit to the private sector network’s resilience since its establishment, notwithstanding several LPSN board members’ dislike for the word resilience.
