EMSU 08 - Governance and changing responsibilities needed to build a sustainable future

Governance and changing responsibilities needed to build a sustainable future

Written by Prof. Victor D. Phillips, Director, GEM, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

To face global challenges successfully a new knowledge culture is needed. In the EMSU thematic area of “governance and changing responsibilities,” several ideas are emerging at the dawn of the 21st century to move to a sustainable future.

• Extraordinarily rapid global change is accelerating to a post-peak oil existence. Nation states invested in business-as-usual status quo are obsolete and mostly unable or unwilling to respond to governance changes needed for a sustainable future.

• International organizations recognize failure of top-down approaches in transforming policy to practice successfully to implement fast-action solutions in response to global change; they are now embracing bottom-up governance locally for effective action on the ground.

• Local knowledge and action are key to implementing solutions through citizen stakeholder steps towards sustainability—one farm field, one stream segment, one factory, one village at a time.

• Tribal culture and corporate culture share common attributes of focused mission, shared values, and social organization worth considering as model for place-based governance needed for sustainability.

• Universities as ivory towers isolated from society are anachronistic, irrelevant and wasteful of time and resources needed for creating solutions for sustainability. The dogmatic days of academic freedom and tenure are dead. Universities must build bridges to serve local communities directly with knowledge-based products and services, and to lead by example in campus operations and culture to create sustainable solutions.

This essay is punctuated with some thoughts of Vine Deloria, Jr., a visionary Native American philosopher and pragmatist whose wisdom I find substantive and stimulating. I hope you do, too. This essay is to be provocative, to spark dialog, and to stimulate potential EMSU 2008 delegates to submit abstracts and papers on “governance and changing responsibilities needed to build a sustainable future.”

Come to Barcelona to share your perspectives on what governance changes in society and at universities must occur now and in the next few generations. Papers are invited in any of these topical areas to address key governance questions:

1. Is nation-state governance compatible with a sustainable future?

2. Are international efforts, such as UN Millennium Development Goals, UN Decade for Education, Kyoto Protocol, and many others, making an impact on the ground in building a sustainable future?

3. Are local capacity and action sufficient to build a sustainable future?

4. Are tribal or corporate cultures pertinent models for organizing and implementing sustainability?

5. How are universities to be re-invented and re-structured for relevance to help create a sustainable future?

Download complete article here.

Prof. Victor D. Phillips, Director, Global Environmental Management Education Center (GEM), University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

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