Newsletter #1 – Alliance for Strategic Sustainable Development
To the research-alliance network,
Thank you all for your interest to be posted about news around the research alliance!
Karl-Henrik Robèrt and other Blue Planet Prize winners call for Transformational Change in paper launched this week at UNEP
Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, Founder of The Natural Step, joined a group of the world’s leading scientists and experts in sustainable development today in calling for urgent changes to policies and institutions to enable humanity to tackle environmental crises and improve human wellbeing.
The group – all past winners of the Blue Planet Prize – have gathered in London to finalise a paper that will be launched at the UN Environment Programme’s Governing Council meeting in Nairobi on 20-22 February.
Allowing Sustainability Principles to Emerge
Some pedagogical advice by Karl-Henrik Robèrt and Göran Broman
Strategic Sustainable Development is mainly about competence
Our greatest Sustainability problem is not climate change, shrinking biodiversity, poverty, or any other contemporary sustainability challenge. It is the lack of leadership-knowledge.
The two scientific approaches for acquiring insight are useful but inadequate. One models how any sustainability aspect relates to others—inevitably as more get added, models complexity smothers insight. The other delves ever more deeply into understanding the system while expecting escape routes to emerge, but transition strategies cannot be derived directly from the system. If current science is important but insufficient, what’s missing?
Scaling up Research
Do we have the courage to learn a new mind-set? It is a fantastic human experience to understand basic principles for worthy goals together, across disciplinary and professional and ideological boundaries, and realize that we need each other to get there. Against that background, it is breathtaking that so few of our leaders know how to put full sustainability on the table, and to shape their debates and action programs and economies accordingly. The result is reductionist piecemeal attempts to deal with one issue at a time, commonly solving one sustainability problem by inventing another. Strategic planning towards sustainability is not something that “comes to you” if you are only enough engaged in the public debate, have a certain field of expertise, or admit to a certain ideology. What we need today are decision makers open to learning this competence, and the language that comes with it, a language which makes multi-sectoral collaboration possible at the scales required for success. Only then can potential leaders make relevance of their leadership, cooperate efficiently across discipline and sector-boundaries, and only then can they ask the relevant questions of scientists and experts. Robust and validated knowledge on such frameworks does not run in the face of a strong economy, it is precisely the opposite way around. We are currently loosing more and more money from increasing costs and lost opportunities due to insufficient leadership. And such knowledge does not run in the face of the freedom to embrace different values and ideologies, nor of the creative polarities that may follow from the confronting of values and ideologies with each other. On the contrary, creative polarities gain from not being grounded on poor knowledge and misunderstandings of facts and of other people. [Basil, Broman and Robèrt 2011]