Curating the conditions for a thrivable planet: systemic leverage points for emerging a global eco-civilization

Abstract

Our team worked on the practical design challenge of creating a series of related international events that address issues of livability and thrivability in terms of systemic socioecological innovation. To do this, we focused at two systemic levels of intervention: at one level (which became the meta-level), we focused on curating the conditions for a thrivable planet. This was the larger vision – the idealized design objective that allowed us to contemplate a variety of pathways to address this objective. In this sense, it served as a design attractor for our work. We then chose to focus upon one feasible and realizable pathway that could serve as a functional prototype for addressing the meta-level objective. The 57th Meeting and Conference of the ISSS, set for Viet Nam in July of 2013, was selected to serve as the systemic case for our specific contextual design initiative. This became our system in focus, and our design efforts were then concentrated on setting an actionable agenda for the realization of this event. Given that there are numerous pathways to address the metalevel design objective, we set the system level objective for the ISSS Conference based on the theme of Systemic Leverage Points for Emerging a Global Eco-Civilization. By setting this focus we intended for ISSS 2013 to provide both a platform for other contextual designs framed within the meta-level objective of curating the conditions for a thrivable planet, as well as to catalyze the emergence of a network of such initiatives through the specific system level focus chosen for this event. We considered that the selected conference theme would attract living cases of systemic sustainability – those which demonstrate socio-ecological innovations that span social, technological, economic, agricultural, and infrastructural domains. By focusing ISSS 2013 on the exploration of both real-world cases of systemic sustainability and theoretical models dedicated to their promotion, this event will serve to seed the emergence of a Global Living Laboratory network of such initiatives. The result of this event would therefore be the emergence of an auto-catalytic socio-technical system focused on individual projects of systemic sustainability that collectively contribute to the creation of conditions for a thrivable planet. The design we worked out for ISSS 2013 was based on the four ways of knowing described by Heron and Reason in 19971, moving from experiential knowing to presentational knowing to propositional knowing to practical knowing. Through both local and virtual conversation-based systemic inquiry, our design offers a key example of systemic socio-ecological innovation aided by collective intelligence.