Emergence from Emergency: how to hold Complexity

Omschrijving

In the aftermath of the Club of Rome report on The Limits to Growth, and other initiatives raising the alarms on the sustainability of human development, many organizations have been created all around the world and are now active in different ways to address the manifold challenges we face. The proclamation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement in 2015 has made politically correct the inclusion of sustainability issues in the agendas of governments and corporations. All this has created a space for thinking and acting towards sustainability, which has some characteristics of a market: many actors are competing in it for scarce resources (attention and funding) provided by a small number of key players (governments, businesses, philanthropists, media). This of course is a tragic paradox: in such competition, there are high risks that the selection criteria will be consistent with our current practices, including linear thinking, rather than open to completely new possibilities. In a way we apply to the survival of humanity the same rules of the framework that has created the problem in the first place.