3.0 The Five Elements of the Culture of Sustainability
WorldViews
"The cohesion of every society and community is based upon and maintained by a value system such as a common religion, philosophy, ideology or ethics. The system may demand respect for the human person, propriety, patriotism, respect for cultural values, or adherence to a particular social order. The protection of such fundamental values is generally recognized as a common concern of the community and is ensured through law, especially constitutional law." International Environmental Law, third Edition; Alexandre Kiss and Dinah Shelton; Transnational Publishers, Ardsley, NY; 2004 (pdf, New Window, 4 MB)
"Construction of worldviews: The 'construction of integrating worldviews' begins from fragments of worldviews offered to us by the different scientific disciplines and the various systems of knowledge. It is contributed to by different perspectives that exist in the world's different cultures. This is the main topic of research at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies.
It should be noted that while Apostel and his followers clearly hold that individuals can construct worldviews, other writers regard worldviews as operating at a community level, and/or in an unconscious way. For instance, if one's worldview is fixed by one's language, as according to a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, one would have to learn or invent a new language in order to construct a new worldview.
According to Apostel, a worldview should comprise seven elements:
- An ontology, a descriptive model of the world
- An explanation of the world
- A futurology, answering the question "where are we heading?"
- Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?"
- A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action.: "How should we attain our goals?"
- An epistemology, or theory of knowledge. "What is true and false?"
- An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks," its origins and construction."
Wikipedia - Worldview
"‘The practice of science, including belief and magic, forms a fundamental characteristic of all human societies.’ (Bronowski 1981)
Almost parallel to Western ‘scientific’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘global’ disciplinarity, ‘indigenous’, ‘traditional’ or ‘local’ knowledge has developed in situ to encompass the holistic, inter-disciplinary wisdom, practices and experiences of local communities and ethnic groups. Despite efforts to list theoretical binary oppositions between indigenous and global knowledge (such as ‘qualitative’ versus ‘quantitative’, ‘intuitive’ versus ‘rational’, ‘holistic’ versus ‘reductionist’, and ‘spiritual’ versus ‘mechanistic’), such distinctions cannot easily be made. Many components of indigenous knowledge systems are presently being studied, documented and made available to the world community, to link up eventually with the ex situ global knowledge systems that are easily accessible in print and in data bases.
Indigenous and global knowledge systems are alternative pathways in the human/scientific quest to come to terms with the universe, and are the result of the same intellectual process of creating order out of disorder. Indeed, as Clark (this chapter) illustrates, the very roots of Western science and philosophy are based on the observation and political interpretation of local observations of nature. Thus the ‘scientific’ methods and techniques developed and used for the study of global knowledge systems can be – and have been – adapted, refined, tested and used to study and understand indigenous knowledge resources."
Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, Darrell Addison Posey, United Nations Environment Programme, Intermediate Technology Publications, 1999
Transformation
Understanding Knowledge Societies: In twenty questions and answers with the Index of Knowledge Societies (new window, 1.00MB, pdf)
Department of Economic and Social Affairs; Division for Public Administration and Development Management; United Nations, New York, 2005
| Main thought: |
To be a Smart Knowledge Society, it is not enough to be rich in main assets and to take care of their development. A new sense of direction in development and a commitment to this new direction must assure high levels of … |
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| ... quality of life and … |
… safety of life. | |
| Origins of the main thought: | Mass production of the knowledge “to do”; piling up technological innovations; and converting them into products and services in the framework of the Knowledge Economy managed by the currently existing market does not by itself assure high levels of quality and safety of life for all people every where. * |
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| The new direction in development can be formulated on the basis of using the technique and means to mass-produce knowledge to turn out and apply the knowledge “to be,” to co-exist” and “to maintain developmental equilibrium.” | ||
| What to watch? | • “ Liveable states” • Culture industry • Locus of decisions about well-being of mankind • Agenda for R&D • Practical uses of the knowledge “to do” • Dialogue on the knowledge “to be” • Principles that govern the moral code for making choices and taking decisions • The fate of the value of human solidarity • Dialogue on the global unifying central cultural thought for humanity • Development of people as citizens • Evolution of the social institution of democracy • Evolution of the social institution of the market |
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Wikipedia - Transformation of Culture
Transformation of culture, or cultural change, refers to the dynamic process whereby the living cultures of the world are changing and adapting to external or internal forces. This process is occurring within Western culture as well as non-Western and indigenous cultures and cultures of the world. Forces which contribute to the cultural change described in this article include: colonization, globalization, advances in communication, transportation and infrastructure improvements, and military expansion.
Applied ontology involves the practical application of ontological concepts. This can be exceedingly difficult as ontology is a fairly abstract study. There are two main focuses of applied ontology:
- Ontology applied to computer networks, the semantic web and the like. This is the most common application of ontological concepts. See foundation ontology and ontology (computer science)
- Ontology applied to human relationships and being. This article focuses on this aspect of applied ontology.
The challenge of applying ontology is its emphasis on a world view orthogonal to epistemology. The emphasis is on being rather than doing or knowing.
One way that emphasis plays out is in the concept of "speech acts": acts of promising, ordering, apologizing, requesting, inviting or sharing. The study of these acts from an ontological perspective is one of the driving forces behind applied ontology. This can involve concepts championed by ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein.
Applying ontology can also involve looking at the relationship between a person's world and that person's actions. The context or clearing is highly influenced by the being of the subject or the field of being itself. This view is highly influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, the works of Martin Heidegger, and many others.
Ontological perspectives
Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches:
- realism - the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered;
- empiricism - the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts
- positivism - which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves; and
- postmodernism - which holds that facts are fluid and elusive, so that we should focus only on our observational claims.
Jurgen Habermas
The Theory of Communicative Action is a book by Jürgen Habermas published in 1981 in two volumes, the first subtitled Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung) and the second, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft). It is a thesis based on a concept developed by him, communicative reason, which is distinguished from the rationalist tradition in that it considers the site of rationality to be the structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject. He makes the assumption about identity that we learn who we are as autonomous agents from our basic relations with others.
The theory of communicative action has been deemed one of the most important and understudied theoretical works to have come out in the second half of the 20th Century. In summary, it challenges the Marxist focus on economics (or alienated labour) as the main or sole determining factor of oppression. Habermas argues that the key to liberation is rather to be found in language and communication between people."
"Habermas' form of critical theory is designed to rediscover through the analysis of positive potentials for human rationality in the medium of language, the possibility of a critical form of reason that can lead to reflection and examination of not only objective questions, but also those of social norms, human values, and even aesthetic expression of subjectivity."
"Habermas' earlier work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, anticipates his concern for argumentation and can be read retrospectively as an historical case study of Western European societies institutionalizing aspects of communicative action in the political and social spheres. Habermas notes the rise of institutions of public debate in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain and France especially. In these nations, information exchange and communication methods pioneered by capitalist merchants became adapted to novel purposes and were employed as an outlet for the public use of reason. The notion of communicative rationality in the public sphere is therefore heavily indebted to Immanuel Kant's formulation of the public use of reason in What is Enlightenment? Habermas argues that the bourgeoisie who participated in this incipient public sphere universalized those aspects of their class that enabled them to present the public sphere as inclusive—he even goes so far as to say that a public sphere that operates upon principles of exclusivity is not a public sphere at all.
The focus on foundations of democracy established in this work carried over to his later examination in The Theory of Communicative Action that greater democratization and the reduction to barriers to participation in public discourse (some of which he identified in the first public sphere of the Enlightenment) could open the door to a more open form of social action. The shift from a more Marxist focus on the economic bases of discourse in Structural Transformation to a more "super-structural" emphasis on language and communication in Theory of Communicative Action signals Habermas' transition to a post-Marxist framework."
Governance
Governance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists either of a separate process or of a specific part of management or leadership processes. Sometimes people set up a government to administer these processes and systems.
In the case of a business or of a non-profit organisation, governance relates to consistent management, cohesive policies, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility. For example, managing at a corporate level might involve evolving policies on privacy, on internal investment, and on the use of data.
Processes and governance
As a process, governance may operate in an organization of any size: from a single human being to all of humanity; and it may function for any purpose, good or evil, for profit or not. A reasonable or rational purpose of governance might aim to assure, (sometimes on behalf of others) that an organization produces a worthwhile pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances.
Perhaps the moral and natural purpose of governance consists of assuring, on behalf of those governed, a worthy pattern of good while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad. The ideal purpose, obviously, would assure a perfect pattern of good with no bad. A government, comprises a set of inter-related positions that govern and that use or exercise power, particularly coercive power.
A good government, following this line of thought, could consist of a set of inter-related positions exercising coercive power that assures, on behalf of those governed, a worthwhile pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances, by making decisions that define expectations, grant power, and verify performance.
Politics provides a means by which the governance process operates. For example, people may choose expectations by way of political activity; they may grant power through political action, and they may judge performance through political behavior.
Conceiving of governance in this way, one can apply the concept to states, to corporations, to non-profits, to NGOs, to partnerships and other associations, to project-teams, and to any number of humans engaged in some purposeful activity.
The state and politics
Some suggest making a clear distinction between the concepts of governance and of politics. Politics involves processes by which a group of people with initially divergent opinions or interests reach collective decisions generally regarded as binding on the group, and enforced as common policy.
Governance, on the other hand, conveys the administrative and process-oriented elements of governing rather than its antagonistic ones. Such an argument continues to assume the possibility of the traditional separation between "politics" and "administration". Contemporary governance practice and theory sometimes questions this distinction, premising that both "governance" and "politics" involve aspects of power.
In general terms, governance occurs in three broad ways:
- Through networks involving public-private partnerships (PPP) or with the collaboration of community organisations
- Through the use of market mechanisms whereby market principles of competition serve to allocate resources while operating under government regulation
- Through top-down methods that primarily involve governments and the state bureaucracy
These modes of governance often appear in terms of hierarchy, markets, and networks.
Measuring governance
Over the last decade, several efforts have been conducted in the research and international development community in order to assess and measure the quality of governance of countries all around the world.
One of these efforts to create an internationally comparable measure of governance is the Worldwide Governance Indicators project, developed by members of the World Bank and the World Bank Institute. The project reports aggregate and individual indicators for more than 200 countries for six dimensions of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and lack of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, control of corruption.
To complement the macro-level cross-country Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank Institute developed the World Bank Governance Surveys, which are a country level governance assessment tools that operate at the micro or sub-national level and use information gathered from a country’s own citizens, business people and public sector workers to diagnose governance vulnerabilities and suggest concrete approaches for fighting corruption.
Mandates
Mandate (politics)
In politics, a mandate is the authority granted by an electorate to act as its representative. Elections, especially ones with a large margin of victory, are often said to give the newly elected government or elected official a mandate to implement certain policies. Also the period a government serves between elections is often referred to as a mandate and when the government seeks re-election it is said to be seeking a "new mandate".
Mandate (international law)
In international law, a mandate is a binding obligation issued from an inter-governmental organization like the United Nations to a country which is bound to follow the instructions of the organization.
Before the creation of the United Nations, all mandates were issued from the League of Nations. An example of such a mandate would be Australian New Guinea, which is officially the Territory of Papua.
Agenda 21
Agenda 21 is a programme run by the United Nations (UN) related to sustainable development. It is a comprehensive blueprint of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the UN, governments, and major groups in every area in which humans impact on the environment. The number 21 refers to the 21st century.
Development of Agenda 21
The full text of Agenda 21 was revealed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro on June 14, 1992, where 178 governments voted to adopt the programme. The final text was the result of drafting, consultation and negotiation, beginning in 1989 and culminating at the two-week conference. the number 21 refers to the number on the UN's agenda at this particular summit
Rio+5
In 1997, the General Assembly of the UN held a special session to appraise five years of progress on the implementation of Agenda 21 (Rio +5). The Assembly recognized progress as 'uneven' and identified key trends including increasing globalization, widening inequalities in income and a continued deterioration of the global environment. A new General Assembly Resolution (S-19/2) promised further action.
The Johannesburg Summit
The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, agreed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Earth Summit 2002) affirmed UN commitment to 'full implementation' of Agenda 21, alongside achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and other international agreements.
Implementation
The Commission on Sustainable Development acts as a high level forum on sustainable development and has acted as preparatory committee for summits and sessions on the implementation of Agenda 21.
The United Nations Division for Sustainable Development acts as the secretariat to the Commission and works 'within the context of' Agenda 21. Implementation by member states remains essentially voluntary.
Structure and contents
There are 40 chapters in the Agenda 21, divided into four main sections.
Section I: Social and Economic Dimensions
Includes combating poverty, changing consumption patterns, population and demographic dynamics, promoting health, promoting sustainable settlement patterns and integrating environment and development into decision-making.
Section II: Conservation and Management of Resources for Development
Includes atmospheric protection, combating deforestation, protecting fragile environments, conservation of biological diversity (biodiversity), and control of pollution.
Section III: Strengthening the Role of Major Groups
Includes the roles of children and youth, women, NGOs, local authorities, business and workers.
Section IV: Means of Implementation
Includes science, technology transfer, education, international institutions and mechanisms and financial mechanisms.
Local Agenda 21
The implementation of Agenda 21 was intended to involve action at international, national, regional and local levels. Some national and state governments have legislated or advised that local authorities take steps to implement the plan locally, as recommended in Chapter 28 of the document. Such programmes are often known as 'Local Agenda 21' or 'LA21'.
Dialogue, negotiation, advocacy, and community building
A dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog) is a conversation between two or more people. It is also a literary form in which two or more parties engage in a discussion. It is used to make a person feel like they are there listening to the conversation happen in person.
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Egalitarian dialogue
Egalitarian dialogue is a form of discussion that takes place when different contributions are considered in terms of the validity of the arguments, rather than assessing them according to the power positions of those who advocate them.
Philosophical, theological, and social concept
Martin Buber places dialogue in a central position in his philosophy: he sees dialogue as an effective means of on-going communication rather than as a purposive attempt to reach some conclusion or to express some viewpoint(s).
David Bohm originated a related form of dialogue where a group of people talk together in order to explore their assumptions of thinking, meaning, communication, and social effects. This group consists of ten to thirty people who meet for a few hours regularly or a few continuous days. Dialoguers agree to leave behind debate tactics that attempt to convince and, instead, talk from their own experience on subjects that are improvised on the spot. People form their own dialogue groups that usually are offered for free of charge. There exists an international online dialogue list server group, facilitated by Don Factor, co-author of a paper called "Dialogue - A Proposal," with David Bohm and Peter Garrett.
Russian philosopher and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of "dialogue" emphasized the power of discourse to increase understanding of multiple perspectives and create myriad possibilities. Bakhtin held that relationships and connections exist among all living beings, and that dialogue creates a new understanding of a situation that demands change. In his influential works, Bakhtin provided a linguistic methodology to define the dialogue, its nature and meaning:
Dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to the purely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional-syntactic) They are possible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects... Where there is no word and no language, there can be no dialogic relations; they cannot exist among objects or logical quantities (concepts, judgments, and so forth). Dialogic relations presuppose a language, but they do not reside within the system of language. They are impossible among elements of a language.
Celebrated Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, who is known for developing popular education, advanced dialogue as a type of classroom pedagogy. Freire held that dialogued communication allowed students and teachers to learn from one another in an environment characterized by respect and equality. A great advocate for oppressed peoples, Freire was concerned with praxis—action that is informed and linked to people’s values. Dialogued pedagogy was not only about deepening understanding; it was also about making positive changes in the world: to make it better.
Today, dialogue is used in classrooms, community centers, corporations, federal agencies, and other settings to enable people, usually in small groups, to share their perspectives and experiences about difficult issues. It is used to help people resolve long-standing conflicts and to build deeper understanding of contentious issues. Dialogue is not about judging, weighing, or making decisions, but about understanding and learning. Dialogue dispels stereotypes, builds trust, and enables people to be open to perspectives that are very different from their own.
In the past two decades, a rapidly-growing movement for dialogue has been developing. The website of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, at http://www.thataway.org, serves as a hub for dialogue (and deliberation) facilitators, conveners, and trainers and houses thousands of resources on these communication methodologies.
Obstacles
Dialogue is a delicate process. Many obstacles inhibit dialogue and favor more confrontational communication forms such as discussion and debate. Common obstacles including fear, the display or exercise of power, mistrust, external influences, distractions, and poor communication conditions can all prevent dialogue from emerging.
Negotiation is a dialogue intended to resolve disputes, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, or to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests. It is the primary method of alternative dispute resolution.
Negotiation occurs in business, non-profit organizations, government branches, legal proceedings, among nations and in personal situations such as marriage, divorce, parenting, and everyday life. The study of the subject is called negotiation theory. Those who work in negotiation professionally are called negotiators. Professional negotiators are often specialized, such as union negotiators, leverage buyout negotiators, peace negotiators, hostage negotiators, or may work under other titles, such as diplomats, legislators or brokers.
Approaches to negotiation
Negotiation typically manifests itself with a trained negotiator acting on behalf of a particular organization or position. It can be compared to mediation where a disinterested third party listens to each sides' arguments and attempts to help craft an agreement between the parties. It is also related to arbitration which, as with a legal proceeding, both sides make an argument as to the merits of their "case" and then the arbitrator decides the outcome for both parties.
Negotiation involves three basic elements: process, behavior and substance. The process refers to how the parties negotiate: the context of the negotiations, the parties to the negotiations, the tactics used by the parties, and the sequence and stages in which all of these play out. Behavior refers to the relationships among these parties, the communication between them and the styles they adopt. The substance refers to what the parties negotiate over: the agenda, the issues (positions and - more helpfully - interests), the options, and the agreement(s) reached at the end.
IDEA: Democracy and Deep-Rooted Conflict: Options for Negotiators (pdf, 3,489 KB)
The Changing Nature of Conflict and Conflict Management
1.1 Characteristics of Deep-Rooted Conflict
In recent years a new type of conflict has come increasingly to the fore: conflict that takes place within and across states, or intra-state conflict, in the form of civil wars, armed insurrections, violent secessionist movements and other domestic warfare. The change has been dramatic: in the last three years, for example, every major armed conflict originated at the domestic level within a state, rather than between states. Two powerful elements often combine in such conflicts. One is identity: the mobilization of people in communal identity groups based on race, religion, culture, language, and so on. The other is distribution: the means of sharing the economic, social and political resources within a society. Where perceived imbalance in distribution coincides with identity differences (where, for example, one religious group is deprived of certain resources available to others) we have the potential for conflict. It is this combination of potent identity-based factors with wider perceptions of economic and social injustice that often fuels what we call “deeprooted conflict”.
A striking characteristic of such internal conflict is its sheer persistence. And this arises, above all, because its origins often lie in deep-seated issues of identity. In this respect, the term ethnic conflict is often invoked. Ethnicity is a broad concept, covering a multiplicity of elements: race, culture, religion, heritage, history, language, and so on. But at bottom, these are all identity issues. What they fuel is termed identity-related conflict – in short, conflict over any concept around which a community of people focuses its fundamental identity and sense of itself as a group, and over which it chooses, or feels compelled, to resort to violent means to protect that identity under threat. Often, such identity-related factors combine with conflicts over the distribution of resources – such as territory, economic power, employment prospects, and so on. Cases where the identity and distributive issues are combined provide the opportunity for exploitation and manipulation by opportunistic leaders, and the highest potential for conflict.
Three central themes dominate this handbook:
1. Importance of Democratic Institutions
Democracy provides the foundation for building an effective and lasting settlement to internal conflicts. Therefore making appropriate choices about democratic institutions – forms of devolution or autonomy, electoral system design, legislative bodies, judicial structures, and so on – is crucial in building an enduring and peaceful settlement.
2. Conflict Management, not Resolution
There needs to be move away from thinking about the resolution of conflict towards a more pragmatic interest in conflict management. This handbook addresses the more realistic question of managing conflict: how to deal with it in a constructive way, how to bring opposing sides together in a co-operative process, how to design a practical, achievable, co-operative system for the constructive management of difference.
3. The Importance of Process
The process by which parties reach an outcome impacts significantly on the quality of the outcome. Attention must be paid to every aspect of the process of negotiations in order to reach a durable outcome.
1.6 Process and Outcome
The third theme of this handbook is that the process of designing negotiations is critical to the success and durability of the outcome. In thinking about the search for settlement, a useful distinction can be made between process and outcome. Process is the business of negotiation and dialogue. If conflicting parties now need to discuss the elements of a solution, how exactly should that discussion be structured? For example, would the intervention of a third party be useful or distracting? what types of third-party intervention might be used, and how have they worked, or failed, in the past? Who exactly should participate in the talks process? Leaders only? Political parties? Non-governmental agencies? Outside observers? Would a time-limit on talks help or hinder the process? Should the talks be secret or public? What are the issues involved in choosing a venue for negotiations? These and many other pertinent questions need to be addressed in order to design the optimum process, the one that offers the best hope of a successful outcome.