As we write, the UK is heading towards a general election. If anything, the Overton window feels narrower than ever, as political parties vie for votes based on a strategy of avoiding controversy at a time when so many people are feeling the ongoing impacts of rising costs, increased precarity, and worsening mental health.
It’s also the case that we write in the year that we sailed past seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Total ecological collapse is a real possibility - not inevitable, but the most likely outcome if we don’t change course. AI and exponential technologies are reshaping our lives at great speed, offering enormous potential but also daunting challenges. Geopolitical risks posed by polarisation, inequality, unequal impacts of the climate crisis and conflicts between states are making the world a frightening and unpredictable place, with heartbreaking and far-reaching consequences across the globe, from Gaza, to Ukraine, to Sudan.
But even with these truths, it can be hard to chart a course of change. Instead, our awareness of existential threat is simply adding to our collective confusion and sense of precarity, especially when it is laced with fear and grief that make the scale of what might be coming to us hard to confront directly.
Industrial economies have led to high levels of wealth and wellbeing for many in the Western world, but also an unsustainable trajectory of extreme, potentially terminal, environmental degradation, and no lasting solutions to multiple dimensions of social inequality. There is broad consensus now that we are experiencing two types of crisis simultaneously:
Together these give some indication that we are in the midst of a period of great turmoil, where solutions we have previously relied on may not address the complex changes that are needed to alleviate poverty and move towards a world where people and planet can flourish. Global and national institutions seem ill-equipped to handle the scale of these challenges; and we are witnessing high levels of hopelessness and fatalism. In the UK, nearly two thirds of people believe the country is in decline, and another two thirds believe politicians are ‘merely out for themselves’. Three quarters of people believe their children will be worse off than they are. Perhaps, unless things change, they are right.
There is a case to argue that we are indeed experiencing a third kind of crisis - what Daniel Schmatenberger, Germane Marvel and other theorists have called the ‘metacrisis’. By this they mean that the way we think about these crises should also be understood as part of the crisis, to borrow Bayo Akomolafe’s words. The metacrisis refers to how we perceive the world around us, our value systems, ways of thinking, being and feeling, and how these things shape our perceptions of what is possible. It’s a perspective that is summed up in Madeleine Albright’s comment that we are ‘taking 21st century challenges, evaluating them with 20th century ideas, and responding with 19th century tools.’
All this hints at the need for a deeper transition. But we won’t get there if we constrain ourselves to the scope of progressive political narratives evident in the pre-election period, which risk making us feel a bit better with some rousing nostalgic words about social democracy, all the while failing to question an economic model that’s dependent on fossil fuels and imperial logics. There are certainly things we can do within these systems to alleviate harm in the short-term, but we must not kid ourselves that they will be in any way sufficient for this moment in time, if we are serious about addressing inequality, and doing so within sustainable planetary limits.
There are a number of assumptions we want to lay out as clearly as possible that help to illuminate the choices we’ve made throughout the last two years.
We are in a confusing ‘time between worlds’. Such a time throws up complex feelings, often pulling us in different directions simultaneously. We hold conflicting accounts of the world we find ourselves in, but we are wired to resist the possibility that something new might be needed. And yet, even if a sense of hopelessness, powerlessness and confusion is our day-to-day experience, there is more to these times. Rebecca Solnit has spoken about how crises can be powerful calls to action - offering moments of opportunity and fresh perspective. Crises can help us to see what was unseeable before: revealing the hidden wiring and patterns that we’ve previously been enmeshed in, enabling us to disentangle ourselves sufficiently to regard those systems as objects of inquiry as well as being the webs in which we exist.
While there are immediate actions we can take to alleviate poverty, deeper shifts are also needed for more sustainable long-term change. Here we have drawn on the academic work of Carlota Perez, Frank Geels and Johan Schot, who have each traced the contours of paradigm shifts over history. All of them argue we are in the midst of such a transition now, and that in times like these, work is needed to resource, bring coherence and amplify the emerging new paradigm. That has formed the basis of our programme so far.
We can’t point to a blueprint for the future we are building towards, but we can trace a direction of travel. We can discern some important shifts that together hold the potential to usher in more equitable and just futures, where both poverty and climate crisis are addressed. While the work we have backed spans multiple thematics and geographies, its coherence comes from a number of shared intentions: a shift away from degenerative and extractive design to regenerative design; a shift in focus from redistribution of income, to pre-distribution of wealth; a shift away from the primacy of financial capital towards a worldview that recognises the value of multiple forms of capital including human, natural and cultural capital; and a shift away from private ownership of assets to a focus on stewardship, commons and custodianship.
We can see these patterns emerging already, in fields as diverse as bioregionalism, transformational investment, global governance, renewable energy, regenerative economic thinking, civic education, and innovations in the coding of our organisations, legal and governance practices, our tax systems and models of ownership. We see them too in new conceptions of what counts as knowledge and culture. Much of this work is in its early stages, pockets of something different, not always connected to others, and rendered fragile by a lack of resources and recognition. They may feel hard to grasp, but they undeniably exist, and collectively represent a pre-figurative future that lives in the present.
It is important to actively build alternatives, creating the ‘concrete utopias’ that Eric Olin Wright spoke of, and that our founder Joseph Rowntree believed in as he constructed New Earswick. As Milton Friedman once argued, it’s important to have good quality ideas lying around for when the Overton window shifts, which it can do very suddenly in times of crisis. These ideas need to have a degree of practical applicability: to be ‘proofs of possibility’ living among us. In this spirit, we take inspiration from Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. Geddes was very critical of ‘Utopia’ for its true meaning of ‘no place’. Instead he argued we needed to focus on ‘Eu-topia’ (meaning ‘good place’). Rather than the projection of hope, he wrote about the need for ‘reality-vision’. For him, this came less from looking to some abstract future, but rather seeking out adjacent possibilities in the present: being willing to look with fresh eyes at the landscape, seeing things that aren’t on the map, or that defy familiar logics. He called for us to shift our perception of what it is to exist today, rather than building utopias for tomorrow.
Innovations that are aligned with this direction of travel exist, but they remain trapped in niches, rendered fragile by unsupportive and sometimes hostile financial and political environments. Deep Transitions theory argues that in these times of transition, innovators are often operating in isolation, with few relationships and opportunities to build coherence across the many thematics and geographies in which they are operating. Impact is hard to measure in the value lenses of the dominant paradigm. We work with the ‘two loop’ model developed by Margaret Wheatley of the Berkana Institute. She argues that there is a job to name, connect, nurture and illuminate these efforts in the emerging paradigm, helping the whole to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Supporting innovations in niches is not enough; we also need to pay attention to rules and mindsets. Leading systems theorist Donella Meadows wrote of twelve ‘leverage points’ in complex systems. Lower level leverage points may yield immediate impacts, but deeper change only comes through interventions in higher leverage points - the mindsets out of which the system - its goals, structures, rules and parameters - arises. She calls these the ‘great big unnamed assumptions’, or the ‘known beliefs’ - ideas that are taken as given, such as the notion that humans have rights, or land can be owned. But this work is challenging - as Meadows points out, change in these leverage points are resisted harder than anything else.
We are operating in an environment of what Mervyn King and John Kaye have called ‘radical uncertainty’. In their book of the same title, King and Kaye argue that economists are very good at taking ‘mysteries’ - social challenges where both problems and solutions can be hard to define - and trying to turn them into ‘puzzles’ - problems which can be more easily defined and ‘solved’. Their view is that this tendency to turn mysteries into puzzles is a risky business. ‘The world is inherently uncertain, and to pretend otherwise is to create risk, not minimise it.’ There is a growing field of expertise in the field of how to make choices in uncertain times that we can learn from, and we are actively growing this field through some of the work we’re backing. See for example Michael Callon, Helga Nolworthy, Bruno Latour, Joanna Macy, the Wolf Willow Institute, Iain McGilchrist, to name a few.
In this context, systems and complexity thinking and ecological approaches are more fruitful disciplines to draw on in thinking about change than more mechanistic models that have dominated the last few decades of social policy work. Back in 1977 Richard Nelson wrote a short book called The Moon and the Ghetto where he argued that when it comes to social challenges like poverty, we long for clear solutions akin to the Apollo missions. If we could set political goals, align technological and social innovation, public and investment policy drawing on scientific analysis, then we would have a clear sense of what we need to do. But, he argues, social challenges don’t equate to technical challenges like getting a man on the moon. And indeed, searching for the ‘moonshot’ distracts us at the very moment our attention is needed elsewhere. The core dimensions of systems thinking include learning and adaptation, feedback loops and emergence. As Meadows wrote, ‘knowing what to do before you do it can’t be done’ She argued it was only through trying to deliver do you learn what to do, calling this ‘the humility of Not Knowing’.