新香港六合彩开奖结果

By Jerome Boyd, MSc Global Governance and Ethics

The tension between limitless capitalist growth and the finitude of earthly resources has become increasingly familiar. In part, this is聽due to growing awareness of : they are the 鈥楽TOP鈥� signs, sending a decisive message on environmental thresholds, volatility, and collapse. Yet, largely owing to lobbying efforts by polluting industries, we continue to treat these signs as 鈥榩lanetary hurdles鈥� rather than real limits on what the planet can support.

Unitil recently, many believed these environmental harms were justified by human advancement. Historically, industrialisation has increased gross domestic product (GDP) and lifted people out of poverty. Going forward, climate-conscious neoliberals are optimistic about an absolute decoupling of GDP and ecological harm (figure 1).聽In other words, hyper-efficiency, technological solutions, and sustainable energy can allow us to have our cake and eat it. The perfect economy could grow forever-after, serving humanity without bothering our planet. Move over grey growth; green growth is the future.

Figure 1: Illustration of what absolute decoupling of GDP from environmental impact would look like (GDP growths continues while environmental impact decreases). 聽

Others are less confident that limitless growth can feature within the safe operating space of our planet. For some commentators, ever-growing resource extraction is . Indeed, despite 20+ years of implementation efforts, 鈥榮ustainable development鈥� has largely failed to produce the ambitious win-win outcomes it once promised. It seems possible that 鈥榞reen growth鈥� will suffer the same fate, and yet the stakes are too high for .

Evidently, we need to refresh our future planning methodologies 鈥� we need . This was the premise of a scenario exercise, hosted on 28 June by researchers from the 新香港六合彩开奖结果Global Governance Institute (Tom Pegram and Julia Kreienkamp) and the 新香港六合彩开奖结果Institute for Sustainable Resources (Nick Hughes), which brought together a diverse group of 新香港六合彩开奖结果students. Rather than asking 鈥渨hat鈥檚 the best we can do within our current (and highly limited) circumstances?鈥�, we shifted our perspective through a backcasting exercise (figure 2).

Figure 2: The Backcasting Methodology (adapted from )

After analysing the current circumstances (厂迟别辫听1), we imagined an 鈥榠mpossibly perfect鈥� degrowth utopia (Step 2). Through five themes, reality was contrasted against the ideal: production/consumption, work, living standards, money, and economic governance. Finally, in 厂迟别辫听3, we worked backwards from this utopia, asking 鈥榟ow did we get there from the current state?鈥� and speculated as to which key events or historical junctures enabled such radical change. We went through each of these stages in two separate groups, before reconvening to compare and discuss the results.

(1) Our diagnosis of the present was cynical: greed, material addiction, inequality, poverty.聽
(2) Our vision of the future 聽was blissfully absurd: peace, poetry, and plenty (think , but make it earth systems governance).聽
(3) Next, we bridged the gap鈥�

So, we began with the finishing touches, first asking ourselves 鈥榳hat鈥檚 the final piece of the utopian puzzle?鈥�. With each event, our attention was brought to the preconditions for positive change. For instance, a utopic world without exploitative labour requires a just transition to automation, which requires global trade unions, which requires global pluralistic assembly, et cetera (see image 1).

Attempts were made to ensure some plausibility. That said, imagining drastic transformation requires some imagination. Both groups were permitted one seismic event as a transformative catalyst. Our group opted for a Bitcoin-era Robin Hood: sometime around 2033, the global financial network is hacked, triggering a massive redistribution of wealth. Next door, Artificial Intelligence kindly offers its omniscience, with the caveat that its guidance exclusively supports young people and future generations (Vinay Gupta鈥檚 ingenious suggestion of stopping over-30s from voting came to mind). Suddenly, compared to these seismic events, abolishing capitalist exploitation felt less radical.

So, step-by-step, we had backpedalled all the way from Shangri-la to the 8th floor of the Institute of Education. Navigating our discussion 鈥榯hough the rear-view mirror鈥� was a challenge. Despite our varied backgrounds (Heritage Studies, Engineering, and Global Governance, among other disciplines), we each discovered that chronological thinking is a deeply engrained habit 鈥� not necessarily a bad one, but perhaps limiting.

Image 1: Working backwards from the degrowth utopia (workshop poster)聽

One student asked 鈥� quite rightly 鈥� 鈥榳hat鈥檚 been the product of this exercise?鈥�. Despite the sprawling pieces of A1 paper (chock-a-block with post-it-notes covering everything from political micro-communities to Umberto Eco), the answer wasn鈥檛 clear. As an experimental pilot 鈥� somewhat ironically 鈥� its future remains uncertain. Pragmatically, we hope the exercise has pedagogical potential within Tom, Julia, and Nick鈥檚 teaching. In a broader sense, the exercise reminds us of the value of creative collaboration. Backcasting flips teleology on its head, uncovering radical possibilities within global governance and beyond.