The current landscape — shifting from ‘what’ to ‘how’ post SDGs

Clarity on where we go with the SDGs is also lacking. As SDG advisor Alex Evans says, now that the Open Working Group (OWG) on the post-2015 SDG agenda has reported, “minds are shifting to the ‘how’ as opposed to the ‘what’ — and what a new Global Partnership on development might look like. There is a risk that the soaring ambition of the OWG’s Goals will not be matched by adequate action on the delivery side.”

Many of the answers on how to solve the challenges we face now on climate and the SDGs will need to come from society at large, from social movements, communities and citizens. This calls for a p2p revolution, the end of top-down and the beginning of people-power. The institutions of today can, and indeed must be involved in this revolution. But power needs to disperse and so does the conversation.

So delivering on the SDGs will require a host of tough issues to be resolved and delivered on including those same climate finance, loan and developing world support details so missing from Paris.

Other key issues which need to be included in delivering on the SDGs include; strong action on tax avoidance and subsidies, stretching private sector ambition and support for SD, recognition of natural resources like land, water, and the atmosphere as a special category of property right, with dividends from their use accruing to society at large, a radical overhaul of the financial system, consideration of a universal basic income and some fundamental questioning of issues such as the growth paradigm, limits of decoupling and the need to shift from consumerism to a world of intrinsic values and wellbeing.

This starting list of key SDG delivery issues represent radical changes to the status quo.

This changes everything — why we need to think ‘system reboot not plug and play’

As the post COP party hangovers start to wear off people are recognising the momentous, perhaps paradigm shifting, scale of the challenge facing us as we attempt to deliver on the highest ambitions from Paris. As Richard Heinberg has said post COP, the required transition is “not plug and play, its civilisation reboot”.

And as Professor John Foran puts it, “Despite their beautiful words, our leaders remained trapped in a broken system and a crashing worldview.”

Coming out of Paris IPCC scientist Professor Kevin Anderson has concluded that we have to make: “Fundamental changes to the political and economic framing of contemporary society…let Paris be the catalyst for a new paradigm.”

The social justice narrative of ‘system change not climate change’ has now gone mainstream with voices such as UNFCCC Chief Christiana Figueres now calling for ‘a new system’ at COP21.

Delivering on these radical changes will require a sea-change in the process of change. Policy-wonkery and lobbying may play a role but above all what is needed is a new society-wide Big Conversation on paradigm shift and systems change.

The emerging new economy vision

Many of these issues are the staple diet of those involved in the wider ‘new/next economy’ world which is the focus of the Real Economy Lab I convene.

This new economy space is a vibrant hot-bed of innovation. As Professors Gus Speth and Professor Gar Alperovitz of the Next System Project put it, “just below the surface of media attention literally thousands of grass roots institution changing, wealth-democratizing efforts have been quietly developing.”

Hundreds of movements, alliances and organizations around the world are experimenting with a new-economy – new ways of living, of making, of commerce and of ownership — open-coops, social solidarity, Transition Towns, Commoning, Sharing, initiatives from groups like the Club of Rome, Nef’s Great Transition, the Next System Project, the New Economy Coalition, Neon, the Just Transition movement of labour, Movement Generation and Edge Funders and many others.

But between the current policy landscape and this vision of the future lies an unmapped territory on which we need to start to plot a roadmap to system change.

Where do we go from here?

Very different actors inhabit the worlds of the current policy landscape and this emerging vision of a new system. Some bridge both worlds — but too few. What is needed is a common vision and narrative and an inclusive conversation we are all part of.

I see this as a journey. For a journey to be worth taking you need a roadmap. Right now we have only the slimmest of clarity and agreement on even the shape of the landscape we need to cross let alone where we want to get to. Many of us are too busy looking at our feet, fearful of stumbling, few ever get even a glimpse of a possible horizon let alone the peaks we need to aim for.

Those working in the foothills need to be helped to see a vision of where we need to head. Those with their heads poking through the fog need support to keep their feet in reality and real-politic.

Above all what will be needed is to take everyone with us on this journey. What that will require a new form of conversation built on deliberative, participative dialogue, open-enquiry and inclusiveness and powered by digital democracy.

This dialogue will need to bridge the here and now with a desirable and achievable future which is truly fair and sustainable for people and planet.

Whats crucial is that the dialogue of the deaf between so many of us needs to end and we need to find a way to develop one big conversation about system change and transformation.

Perhaps our attitude to this journey needs to take a hint from another of Marvin Gaye’s songs What Going On.

Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
C’mon talk to me
So you can see
What’s going on

The post The World Post-COP — System Reboot, Not Plug-and-play — Part Two appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The SDGs and COP21 raise more questions than they answer — 2016 will need to shift the debate to wider system change.

The current policy landscape
“Woo mercy, mercy me, mercy father
Ah things ain’t what they used to be, no no
Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas
Fish full of mercury”

I was struck by the poignancy of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 poetry as I listened to broadway star and member of Hip Hop Hope for Divestment Antonique Smith singing Mercy, mercy me at an event at COP21 ten days ago.

The lyrics reminds us just how long it has taken us to wake up to the need for an end to the fossil-fool age and how, though 2015 was a good year in some ways, in others we have only just begun the real journey.

2015 saw at least three seismic shifts in the sustainable development world. For starters in September the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by governments, setting a new developmental pathway towards 2030.

Next, by November over $3.4 trillion of assets had committed to divest out of fossil-fuels and invest in a new economy, supported by a diversity of voices from Christiana Figueres, HRH Prince of Wales, Leonardo Di Caprio, Desmond Tutu, Mark Carney and the Hip Hop Hope Caucus. And finally at the eleventh hour COP21 culminated in a global agreement to set us on the pathway to a new low carbon economy.

Not a bad year then? But the devil is in the detail. For many people both the SDGs and COP21 raise just many more questions then they answer.

Opinion is widely split between those activists and scientists who see COP21 as a sham and others hailing it as the greatest victory for civilisation. George Monbiot sums up much of the consensus on the outcomes from the talks, saying: “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” Likewise the SDGs have been both lauded as a huge step forward and derided as fatally flawed.

My own feeling is that Paris was a success. Inside the negotiating halls I saw unusual alliances of policy makers, unions, progressive business leaders and NGOs finding common case in a way I have not seen before. The sight of the B Team’s Richard Branson holding a joint press conference with Kumi Naidoo was a welcome change from the old days of endless antagonism.

And outside around Paris I saw an ever stronger and more united civil society world emboldened to demand and bring about ever greater change. And the SDGs, though not perfect, at least represented a new, more consensus-based process of dialogue.

But wherever one stands on the details of the SDGs and the COP21 agreement, it seems to me that the biggest challenges we now face involve clarity on the ‘how’ behind the ‘what’. And, in my view is that clarity on those ‘hows’ will only come from a much wider and deeper examination of the need for paradigm-shifting system change.

Why the current landscape is not sufficient — shifting from ‘what’ to ‘how’

In principle COP21 has moved things on. At least the ‘what’ of the IPCC process, the shape of things to come, is now clearer. It rhetorically sets collective sights on 1.5 degrees, we can be sure that governments will be held to their INDCs by civil society, and $100bn of new money has in principle been committed to deliver on the agreement.

But many questions remain on the ‘how’ to achieve this. The COP outcome is still voluntary, its not negotiated with wider society, the INDCs arguably currently could lock us into at least 3degrees, the agreement’s mechanisms are weighted to ‘market solutions’ like trading rather than other solutions civil society favours and there is precious little clarity on where the $100bn will actually come from and in what form.

Perhaps that’s partly where the divestment movement comes in. As the divestment movement starts to shift its campaigning to focus on the ‘invest’ piece in 2016, it has already become clear even to the head of the coal industry lobby, that the fossil-fool economy is dying and that perhaps the world’s carbon traders are becoming the new slave traders.

But despite $trillions committing to some form of divestment, the DivestInvest movement has a long way to go to plug the investment gap and to integrate a wider equity and justice frame to its work.

The disjunction between the SDG narrative and Paris is stark, with COP21 failing to integrate key social issues into the text or sentiment of the talks despite these being central to the SDG vision. The framing of a Just Transition to a new economy was largely lost over the two weeks of haggling in Paris. Likewise fundamental pillars of sustainable development such as Climate Justice and equity were sidestepped as too uncomfortable.

Issues like consumerism are also largely absent from the SDG and climate agreements and Paris saw no confrontation of prickly questions such as what Professor Kevin Anderson says about the limits to economic growth relating to combating climate change.

Ignoring the views of civil society in this way is a mistake. As Naomi Klein said in her COP21 rally speech, the true leaders of system change are in the streets not in the negotiating halls.

These thorny issues won’t go away. The Divestment movement has been emboldened to go further and become more radical post Paris. And, as can be seen from the Too weak, too late opinion compendium, the failures of COP to include justice issues has strengthened the resolve and momentum of the climate justice movement.

This is part one of a two-part blog

Originally published in The Huffington Post

The post The World Post COP — System Reboot Not Plug-and-play -part one appeared first on P2P Foundation.