Road map invoking change

We have now come to the final part of the course. We have carefully analysed the situation we are in, learned about the systems we need to work with and thought about how to deliberate at setting a goal that may achieve sustainable human well being. We have also looked at a subset of available tools for what we are going to look at in this part of the course: Invoking change.

As we know, the systems we are working with are complex, interconnected, adaptive and prone to providing surprises. As such, there is little chance of success to enforce a solution on it, as we cannot know its dynamics beforehand. Adaptive governance and management is a concept particularly sprung out of the challenge to work with social-ecological systems. Economic decision making deals with the rationale behind making decisions in world that is uncertain and to some degree unknown. Just as in one of the first lectures on transdisciplinarity, to achieve change one sometimes has to connect people and organizations with very different perspectives and knowledge base. Bridging and brokering is a process studied in some natural resource management situations that tries to do just this. One of the results of connecting people is to generate new solutions, understanding and building dialog. We will look at that in the section on “building knowledge”.

A related, but rather different approach is scenario building, which tries to build in the conceptual idea of a systems multiple future paths into a story-driven process. It is particularly useful to help generate new optional strategies in social-ecological systems that are trapped in one regime. Underlying all of these is the human capacity of agency, leadership and stewardship. Taking action, leading by example, influencing others is all part of this. And as the issue of sustainable futures is now clearly framed by planetary boundaries to support human development, we will also look at global governance and emerging perspectives in this field.