The pandemic lockdown is offering groups of like-minded individuals the opportunities to come together to talk sensibly and sensitively about our global futures. Here in Derbyshire the Climate Coalition group recently initiated a zoom conversation on why and how to create a “movement of movements” on climate change. It was a robust and creative session but limited by the inevitable complexity of the question. At a time when humanity is facing a growing number of unprecedented and interdependent existential crises, how do we make progress? Is there realistically a convergence of solutions to both the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change?
Paul Raskin, the founder of the Great Transition Initiative (GTI: https://greattransition.org/), offers some encouraging ways of approaching this complexity. He argues that we need a global citizens movement. He believes we need stronger and more motivational answers to the burning question of action. He uses a simple framework of 4 questions to address this conundrum:
- Where are we?
- Where are we going?
- Where do we want to go?
- How do we get there?
The questions offer an ascending order of difficulty. On the first 3 questions there has been a growing catalogue of progress. Not least in terms of the scientific understanding of many of the so-called wicked sustainability issues we face.
We are also getting a wholesale and frightening introduction to the social, psychological, and economic impacts of a global pandemic.
The fact that most nations have signed up to implementing the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals provides us with a global road map of where we are going and more importantly where we want to go.
Other international agreements like the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Sendai Framework on disaster risk reduction add considerable weight to the beginning of a global response to these crises. But much more is needed to embed these agreements into national and sub-national governance systems along with the transformation of institutional and organisational structures and cultures.
To tackle the question “How do we get there?” we need a systemic transformation. This requires a systemic movement to lead us in a vast cultural and political transformation which can shape a new and vibrant sustainable future.
Maybe the systemic movements initiated by Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion show the way. Maybe the clean air in our cities, arising out of the current pandemic, is also showing people a new and different future.
Crucially this movement must ensure that its ends animate the means. It needs to find ways of balancing a unity of purpose with the diversity of human engagement, whilst renouncing the extremes and polarising influence of top-down vanguardism and bottom-up spontaneity.
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