trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Shape Environmental Ambitions around Immediate Needs, e.g. income opportunities, foodsecurity and other critical questions of life & livelihood. Follow the Path of Least Resistance. Start with what is most possible. This is easiest whereownership & control are in our hands, but might also include other approaches, especially topower which can help or hinder us. You need to understand how power operates. Utu Net Benefits: Benefits are widely defined: to us personally, to the community around us,to the environment. (Barbets Duet, 2010)As ‘rules of thumb’, these principles are open to evolution and amendment. Governance issues, inparticular, are still evolving. Partners will work to understand what might be appropriate and effective,especially as new sites join. There is a possibility that older African institutions will offer useful ideas,especially around networked governance when many small units share a common space. Whether thatpossibility will be realized in practice, however, remains to be seen.4. DiscussionScenario building projects in East Africa and Europe have played a vital role in the creation of theBarbets Duet. The European work with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development posedthe question whether markets could manage ecosystems and directly inspired the book, Feeling forStones. In East Africa, the Society for International Development created a safe space over ten years forEast Africans to discuss the future of their societies on their own terms, without outside interference.This long period of time, and the quality of conversation during those years, created a network of peoplewho learned to explore complex issues in a climate of trust and mutual respect, both personal andcultural. These skills are crucial to the Barbets Duet.The scenarios also exposed the failures of existing social and economic systems. Older Africaninstitutions are failing to support populations that have quintupled in sixty years and now aspire tomodern material wealth. Equally, industrial societies are failing to restore environmental wealth fasterthan it is consumed. In effect, both systems are unsustainable. People in both societies are being forcedto create new social and economic systems capable of meeting human needs while respecting theimperatives of the natural world. Scenarios helped us to see that challenge, but they assumed we couldimagine, in advance, how to meet it. That assumption is ill-founded because systemic invention cannotbe imagined first and then implemented. Instead, as shown by the Barbets Duet, the new system canonly emerge, piece by piece, trial by trail.In this way, the founders of the Barbets Duet have begun to learn about emergence. In developingmultiple experimental spaces in different ecologies and societies, they expect new institutions and ruleswill be discovered and agreed. Over time, these will create a new social-ecological system. Barbetexperimental spaces are not shut off from the wider world, but are open to it. They test large ideas(many first explored in the scenarios work) in the small spaces of local lives, responding to the logic oflocal needs and constraints. That is why Barbet activity is “consistent with its site.” Or, as SammyMuvelah put it more graphically, ‘Rather than asking how can Lukenya support a Friesian cow, I ask:what can Lukenya support?’ (Barbets Duet, 2010)105