What we’re reading at r3.0 (15)
By Bill Baue
This edition of What We’re Reading is so jam-packed that we’re reverting to brief annotations — we hope this helps steer you to resources that support your own learnings!
- Nafeez Ahmed. 2024. “Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilisation. Foresight. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-02-2024-0025
Nafeez sent me his latest publication for my review. Here are excerpts of my responses to him:
“Planetary phase shift theory makes good sense. Your analysis of the potential upside seems to rely on overly optimistic projections of the limits of the downside.”
[From the paper: “Every foundational sector of the material production system of human civilisation — which now operates at a planetary scale — is experiencing a phase transition, which points to total transformation over the next three decades. This transformation is driven by disruptive technologies, which could make possible a large reduction in material extraction compared to prevailing industrial structures, while creating new possibilities for networked superabundance within planetary boundaries whereby clean energy, transport, food and knowledge is distributed to all.”]
Back to my assessment: “It strikes me that the scale of collapse dynamics is amplified by the planetary scale systemic interactions you mention at the beginning, which could obviate the potential for the metamorphosis you project. What would you make of a more low-tech scenario as a means of navigating the phase shift with less reliance on techno-optimism?
“Re low tech, the defining aspect for me is collapse resilience. Seeing as we agree that we are experiencing significant collapse of many ecological and social systems — arguably the worst in human history due to human exacerbation — then I’m very cautious of collapse navigation pathways (forecasts) that rely significantly on technologies that in turn rely on significant resource availability, sophisticated / far-reaching supply chains, social cohesion, etc…”
“That said, the way I understand your framework, it is agnostic to high v low tech — it is simply a mechanism for fore-/backcasting that takes panarchy / Hollings / adaptive cycle dynamics explicitly into account, which helpfully provides empirical guidance for what the phase shifting of these cycles suggests about potential futures.”
“So yes, I think there is strong value in fore-/backcasting a lower tech future than what you describe, explicitly from a collapse resilience perspective.”
- James Scott Cardinal & Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal. 2024. Information, Entanglement, and Emergent Social Norms: Searching for ‘Normal’. Societies 14(11). https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14110227
I’m still reading this, but I want to excerpt a few of my favorite quotes thus far:
“Norms operate at the intersection between individuals and their communities, reconciling the information needed to find optimal solutions. We view social norms as a mechanism for identifying, aligning, and refining information. Social norms embody provisional information that forms the leading edge of selection for social evolution and learning. Subsequently, the utility or fitness of this information is evaluated against the repeated experiences of all members of the population.”
“Given the natural variations in individual experiences and abilities and the diversity of contexts, each assessment of these norms yields distinct evaluations and expectations based on the provisional information. Individual evaluations are then transmitted back through the same social network, reintegrating updated information and contributing to the adaptive refinement of collective norms. Successes and failures as well as the specific environmental conditions and situational contexts all serve to refine the current information exchanged. This cyclical and recursive process of evaluation, assimilation, and retransmission of information functions as an evolutionary search to identify an optimal set of potential solutions within complex and dynamic environments.”
Here are a few of the figures that illustrate the Cardinals’ ideas:
- Julie Davenson, Karen Nordstrom & Shane Rogers. 2024. From Extraction to Regeneration: A Just Transition approach to Financing Climate Resilience in the Food System. Policy Brief. Food Solutions New England. https://foodsolutionsne.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/FSNE_Issue_Brief_Extraction_to_Regeneration.pdf
We collaborate with Julie in our bioregioning work, and were very glad to see our work — and the work of our collaborators, including one of our funders (Lankelly Chase) and our Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation Blueprint lead author Ben Roberts — referenced in this policy brief.
“Innovative foundation leaders are starting to acknowledge the extractive origins of their wealth and are supporting projects that foster social capital, shared governance, and equitable access, especially for underserved populations. Abandoning traditional charity, Lankelly Chase redistributed funds to communities and organizations seen as better stewards, while acknowledging that how they accumulated their wealth was based on extractive models of colonialism.
There are alternative models of philanthropy emerging funding projects in the northeast such as Earth Regeneration Fund, Kinship Earth Flow Fund, and Co-Creating Funding Ecosystems for Regeneration (CoFundEco) that use a decentralized approach to flow resources through relational structures in bioregions. Regenerative funding governance, a term used by Ben Roberts of CoFundEco, is viewed as essential social infrastructure needed to ensure regenerative outcomes are achieved at systemic levels. “We’re inspired by the possibility that the process of gathering and allocating funding can shift from being an extractive to a regenerative one for all participants and that this is also the best way to support regenerative (and) transformational outcomes from the work being funded.” Since CoFundEco’s launch in June 2023, Roberts, who lives in Connecticut, has co-stewarded a growing community that spans the globe, with participants spanning from New England to Africa and the Middle East, as illustrated on the public map of their ecosystem.
- Miriam Jorgensen (ed). 2007. Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development. University of Arizona Press.
I’m in a bioregional reading group, this is meeting bi-weekly to discuss this book, upon the recommendation of Mike Thomas, a tribal elder in the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation.
In the last meeting, the thing I most appreciated about the chapter we read was the addition of 4th element of governance to the “standard” 3 elements of legislative, executive, and judiciary: an overarching “oversight” role over these functions — to govern the governance, so to speak…
- Kiran Kashyap. 2024. Designing for Earth Democracy transitions: Processes to foster an economics of radical interdependence. PhD Dissertation. University of Technology Sydney. https://www.kirankashyap.com/_files/ugd/e5eeeb_9efb560349ec4f5c8d8c2b716b327aeb.pdf
I recently spoke with Kiran about his dissertation and the work behind it. To give you a taste, I’ll excerpt from the Summary of Findings:
3. Systems convening: Development of platforms for prefigurative movement building through emergent network weaving across public and private sectors. Constitution of ‘middle out’ coalitions that attract top-down institutional engagement along with considered bottom-up political insurgency — to enable decentralised ownership and power through social learning.
5. Grounding in place-context: Deeply contextual practice that is led by engagement with the qualities and needs of the stakeholders, communities and ecosystems in question, including through ongoing partnership with First Peoples. Development of participatory cultures amongst citizens through collaborative forums and deliberative democracy.
6. Multiscalar engagement: Navigation of interconnected nested systems in seeding alternate forms of economics and governance, underpinned by the political approaches of cosmopolitan localism and polycentricity. Developing local contextual interventions through consideration of regional socio-ecological conditions, including questions of global justice.
8. Interconnected needs and thresholds: Fostering the development of bioregionally-adapted regenerative economics through development of both deficit-based imposition of limits, as well as strengths-based intersubjective approaches founded upon care and reciprocity. Drawing from existing methodologies e.g., DEAL’s Doughnut Unrolled in this endeavour, uplifting qualitative articulations of wellbeing as a counterweight to the predominant focus on quantitative approaches.
10. Systemic investing: Encouraging the creation of multi-party agreements for the financing of long-term portfolios of linked projects, moving beyond a reliance on only philanthropic capital. Creating visibility for the value of catalytic funding, and engaging in the ongoing development of place-based capital and local pooled funds such as through bioregional bank accounts.
- Matthew Moroney. 2024. Place-based Transition Funds: A Playbook for Systemic Portfolio Construction. Metabolic. https://www.metabolic.nl/projects/playbook-for-place-based-transition-funds/
I also recently met Matt, who conducted the work behind this report while a fellow-in-residence at the Foundation House, as far as I understand it. I haven’t had time to delve deeply into this work yet, but it clearly resonates with the work of the BioFi Project on Bioregional Financing Facilities, and the work of the Design School for Regenerating Earth (as well as our own work in our Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation) on Bioregional Funding Ecosystems.
See the figure below for a graphic summarization of the model proposed in this playbook:
- Johan Rockström et al. 2024. Planetary Boundaries guide humanity’s future on Earth. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 5, 773–788. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00597-z
From my LinkedIn post: “Having worked on the application of sustainability thresholds to organizational & investment contexts for about a half-decade, I clearly remember the profound impact of the Planetary Boundaries concept when the first studies came out in late 2009. The graphical representation alone was groundbreaking, enabling us to visualize sustainability thresholds (or PBs) against the background of the boundary of the earth’s biosphere itself, enabling contextualization of potential tipping points across 9 interrelated earth systems.”
“This new study adds a new visualization to the mix (see below), mapping out the recursive trajectory humanity must follow to steer our impact on earth systems from the Great Acceleration of the 1950s, through the current state of overshooting 6 of the 9 PBs, into what the study calls the “Great Turnaround” where we return to the safe operating space (and ultimately to the safe *and just* space).”
“I also appreciate the PB timeline (also below), showing the developments informing the PBs (going back to Boulding’s 1966 “Economics of Coming Space Ship Earth” and Meadows et al’s 1972 “Limits to Growth”), and then the many strands of maturation of the PBs framework (from its 1.0 iteration in 2009, through its 2.0 phase starting in 2015, into its 3.0 phase starting in 2023).”
