trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

esponses to an array of possible emergent conditions. Furthermore, complexity points to the need forsystems thinking, and the development of tools for handling uncertainty and a questioning of dominantassumptions about viable solutions to an issue such as climate change.Such responses are profiled by the report in the studies focusing on Sweden’s approach to biofuelsover past decades and the Brazilian city of Curitiba in the 1990s. Such cases illustrate the practicalimportance of new social tools such as citizen participation, dialogical leadership, technological andinstitutional innovation, co-creative community work and the reframing of problems as opportunities. Insuch contexts, the ability of innovative technologies to bridge the gap between present need and futurepossibilities is central to a complex system’s adaptive capacity.TechnologyTechnology has played a central role in all practical responses to change in the past. Its impact onhuman experience is profound as it shapes both the physical contexts in which humans live and workand the ways of understanding the world. Technology also impacts social identity and social choices withthe result that alternatives to dominant constructions of the present can be sidelined or overlooked.Social imagination can challenge such omissions by finding unexpected applications for a technologysuppressed by dominant usage and value systems.Case study 2: the mobile phoneThe impact of the mobile phone on modern culture has been immense. It has been the most widespreadand rapidly adopted information communication technology ever, with over 4 billion mobile phonesubscribers, representing 61% of the global population (International Telecommunication Union(ITU)2009). The number of mobile subscribers first exceeded fixed-line subscribers in 2002 and the numbercontinues to rise as developing nations rapidly adopt this technology (International TelecommunicationUnion(ITU) 2009; Srivastava 2002). This rise can be attributed to the social relevance of the technology,which has ceased to be simply a communication device. Not only do mobile phones confer status to theirowners, they meet/maintain/generate the need for mobility, freedom, continuous communication andthe sense of belonging to networked communities.The phone consequently fulfils a number of social functions simultaneously: there is the need forconnection to friends and family, there is status and identity, there is technological fascination and adesire for novelty, there is also a sense of the power of communication in the broader political spherewhere SMS and Twitter are making themselves felt in political demonstrations such as those thatoccurred in Iran in 2009 and Greece in 2010. Not only is the phone a possibly subversive tool it also ischanging social relationships with information and space. Modern phones act as assistants, info portals,global positioning systems and networking devices and are the bedrock of the 24/7 life style.Furthermore, the use of the mobile phone in contexts of historical importance is also changing the waypeople understand and navigate their world. Examples of such unexpected applications include themobile’s use in the hands of those who died in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers; the role it played aspart of the Mumbai Terror attacks where they were used by both terrorists and also those caught in thehotels; and its strategic use in the election of Barak Obama, where material was streamed globally ontothe internet.244