Principles

            While acknowledging that in the discussion, the distinction between 'principles' and 'goals' is often blurred, it is appropriate to identify the main such 'principles' that have guided the discussion, the selection of issues upon which to focus, the selection of examples to study, and the recommendations emerging from the effort.

(order of items:  suggestions/ additions, deletion ?)

            Innovation and building on past and current experience

            The Davos address by the UN Secretary General clearly called for innovation -- even 'revolutionary' thinking and action;  and the discussion emphatically endorsed this and encouraged the development of creative -- that is, 'new' -- solutions to the many problems we face; the discussion itself generated some ideas that had not been published and documented elsewhere. But, impressed by the wealth of information, initiatives, insights, and creative activity that was uncovered by the participants,  it also stressed that the solutions must build on that foundation of innovative activity and experience. Therefore, one guiding concept was to acknowledge the many efforts already ongoing, or proposed by others; encouraging the support and empowerment of these initiatives;

            Leverage points

            Much of the thinking in the group was aimed at attempting to identify 'leverage points' where even limited efforts can achieve substantial improvements.

            'Missing' elements in an overall strategy.

            Besides the general shared attempts to identify the factors (causes, necessary conditions, contributing factors) for the crisis and their systemic interaction, as preconditions for developing effective solutions, there was a significant effort to identify, understand, and call attention to  factors and issues that have not received adequate scrutiny or are entirely missing from the discussion and agenda of the many groups trying to address the crisis.

            'Local' initiatives within a framework of 'global' agreements

Both 'global' and 'anti-global'  (primary of local, small-scale, self-organized action) arguments and strategies were discussed and were synthesized into the principle that whatever form the 'model for survival' might take, it must not be a uniform 'one size fits all' model imposed 'top-down' fashion by some global authority or power. 

It must emerge as a ('minimal') framework of negotiated global agreements arising out of wide participation in global discourse, while encouraging and empowering many 'local' initiatives and projects. Any 'solution' involving any group must be felt to be 'their' solution to be accepted.

             Vision (?)           

            A growing sense of 'transformative action, geometry of action, human stewardship, intentional community, spirit of 'we' rather than 'me', cooperation rather than competition,  different values, visions  (>>> Helene)

            Variety and diversity

            A general tendency of recommendations was that of favoring variety of many small independent 'local' actions, activities, experiments over uniform 'one size fits all' models that would have to be imposed ‘top down’ fashion by some central global authority.

            Holistic perspective

            At the same time, the necessity was evident of developing and embracing an understanding of the holistic nature of the entire system or model -- including not only an economic model but an integrated ('SEE') social and environmental and economic  view of the challenge. Within this perspective, the dominant maxims were to urge movement towards such notions as

            - more stable equilibrium (rather than unrestrained growth)

            - self-organizing systems (rather than highly structured, hierarchical systems);

Specifically, in the environmental system:

            - adopting a sense of stewardship toward the ecological system

            - variety, diversity of species

            - fighting environmental degradation, restoring natural diversity and balance

            - re-use of natural resources: 'closing the loop', cradle to cradle

In the social system:           

            -  reducing  / reversing the income and wealth gap between rich and poor,

                        and exploitation, marginalization of women, minorities

            -  providing adequate living conditions,

                        food, water, energy, health care, education  for all segments  of society

            -  which implies reducing consumption and waste in current developed economies

            -  developing more effective tools for the control of  power and abuse of power, corruption

            -  developing more effective tools for nonviolent / non-coercive conflict resolution

            -  reducing the displacement of traditional cultures as a result of globalization

            - encouraging variety and diversity in voluptuary social organization

            - de-emphasizing predominance of narrow national interests

                        at the expense of other nations' and global concerns ;

In the economic system:

            - moving away from unrestrained exponential growth as a guiding motivation

            -  developing and adoption of better measures of economic performance

                        (replacing e.g. GDP with quality-of life- oriented measures)

            -  reducing dependence of debt

            -  moving away from short term ('quarterly profit) performance orientation

                        towards long term sustainability

            - explore different currency systems for social transactions

            Consistency versus Experimentation

            It is a reasonable expectation that the recommendations of a report of this nature be mutually compatible and consistent. However, the controversies about many of the issues discussed are far from definitively 'settled'; their resolution will depend on further research, discussion and the analysis of experiments yet to be carried out.  And many proposed solutions may be not be equally appropriate for all regions, environments, and cultures.  Therefore, the standard of consistency of the ideas discussed here must be relaxed somewhat in favor of creativity, variety and exploration.

            Orchestrating 'how to get there' as a function of wide participatory discourse and action rather than developing a blueprint of some ideal future state of affairs.

            In some contrast to the discussion of some desirable future ('Future We Want') which is important as a vehicle for determining the overall direction of movement towards that future, the STW discussion tended to focus more on the question of steps needed to organize the discussion and negotiation from which a elastic future model of survival would emerge.

Approach

            Process

            The process by which the present report was developed and organized, once a desire emerged to summarize its findings and insights in a more coherent format than the LinkedIn discussion, was not a straightforward one. The question of selecting that format and orchestrating the process was itself a major topic of the discussion, and can be seen as an interesting example of a self-organizing group process, with ideas and contributions from many participants.

            It began with an effort by the moderator to summarize and organize the many contribution ideas and especially links to efforts, initiatives, reports and other work identified by the participants into a few major themes, for the first 1200 or so posts.  Other participants prepared system model proposals, video presentations and suggestions for report outlines.

            The fractionalized nature of  an online discussion forum, the LinkedIn length limitation for posts (4000 characters), and the fact that posts could not include diagrams, images or other visual material, led to various attempts at shifting the work on a common report or summary to different platforms:  e.g.  the 'systemswiki' platform provided by the organizer of the overall LinkedIn Systems Thinking World  group Gene Bellinger; to the Google 'knol' and Google.doc platforms, and to the Debategraph platform. None of these outside platforms were very successful in attracting  participation of discussion participants to contributing to the writing and editing of the report, and in providing the necessary overview of the ongoing work. Several separate web sites and LinkedIn groups were pursuing related discussions. This experience significantly influenced the group's thinking about its proposals for the framework and platform for the global discourse.

            Format                                    The eventual selection of a format -- (to be added …)

            Editing

            The final report was developed by posting the proposed organization and table  of contents  as well as drafts of individual sections for comment and editing by discussion participants, until an acceptable final version was achieved.

            Report organization (in view of stated goals)

            The aims of the report (as described in the previous section) are pursued as follows within the general recommendation of an overall framework for the process and global discourse:

            The body of recommendations will begin with a section listing the principles and criteria that emerged in the group as essential features of a sustainable global future, features that guided its development of recommendations. This includes the examination of general principles, maxims and strategies deemed counterproductive to a sustainable future,

            The recommendations themselves are organized in a description of a general framework and its main components, the first of which is the overview of the many projects and initiatives compiled by the participants:  activities that were considered exemplary in their pursuit of sustainability.  Selected projects and ideas are described in more detail in the appendix.

            Both desirable proposed elements and missing as well as counterproductive aspects of current practice are discussed as they apply to each of the functions of the other components of the framework, and the selected projects detailed in the appendix. Each of these components are described in some detail in relation to each other and with specific recommendations of priority steps to be taken.

The main observations and  recommendations will be summarized in a concluding section.