In his opinion, one possibility is to tie state funding and investments to conditions for transparency in the supply chains. Or to only subsidize companies where social and ecological criteria are an integral part of their corporate policy. The 2030 Agenda with its goals for sustainable development should serve as a checklist for the state ministries. This would allow them to check whether a decision contradicts the sustainability goals. “The question of how we achieve the sustainability goals should be as important as the question of what will happen to the German auto industry at the moment.”

According to Keil, many people have reconsidered their own consumer behavior during the Corona crisis. And about what each and every individual could do for a fairer world “and some,” he is sure, “may have come to different answers than before.” He is sure that we will all get something important out of the Corona crisis could learn on the way to a more just world.

In terms of state action, in his eyes the crisis has shown that the state can intervene in our lives much more than we would have ever thought possible before. In the future, this experience will make politicians “very unbelievable when they say: daycare centers closed, city centers closed, borders closed, we did all that - but against the fact that the cell phones and batteries we buy here contain cobalt “Contains something that is being mined by children in the Congo and that children are dying every day, unfortunately we can’t do anything.”

The interview was published in the Stuttgarter Zeitung on June 5, 2020 on page 4 under the headline “Will politicians rethink after the Corona crisis?”