Forward to this Edition

Preface

Context and background to project and how it fits into the Fundamental Questions Program and Frank Fenner Foundation.

Introduction

The opening chapter draws together the key reflections on theory, methodology and practice.

Summarises the major themes about cultural change.

Context and Summary

Chapter 1

The main themes and lessons

In this chapter we outline the major returns emerging from the Transforming Cultures series. We provide a brief overview of the Transforming Cultures Framework. We the list the major assumptions and values that arose from discussions. Next we summarise what we have learnt about the major processes of transformation, using two different typologies.

Chapter 2

Transformation Literature Review

Places the presentations within the broader context of the culture transformation / change literature.

Literature Review Summary Table

Chapter 3

A framework for change

Bob Webb’s Kotter work.

Finally with the outputs from the typologies in Chapter 1 put into the Framework to explain how they might be applied.

Chapter 3 Appendix Cultural Transforming Frameworks and discussion.

Presentations and Commentary

Each chapter comprises the presentation(s) of each Human Ecology Forum session. Following the paper derived from each presentation is a brief editorial commentary linking them into the broader themes of the monograph (cultural transformation) and drawing out the key messages for the transforming culture project.

Chapter 4

Tim Hollo & Aileen Power: Cultural change is essential

How ‘culture’ as art, music, drama etc, is important for changing Culture.

Presentation.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 5

Barry Newell: The Transition to a Biosensitive Society

A systems approach to culture change. Transforming Boyden’s biosensitive triangle into a system approach.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 6

Tom Faunce: Towards Eco-centric Governance in the Sustainocene with Global Artificial Photosynthesis

Social change depends on having a technological pathway to permit the change. Artificial photosynthesis provides that path.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 7

Bob Douglas: Transformational Culture Change

How Castro in Cuba generated a cultural and political transformation.

Paper and Commentary.

Chapter 8

Elizabeth Boulton: Philosophy tackles Climate Change the Hyperobject Narrative

Exploring how the Hyperobject narrative approach might be applied to cultural transformations.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 9

Val Brown & John Harris: Reshaping our minds - parameters of Transformation

How using a thinking methodology, the seven ways of knowing, can help facilitate transformations.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 10

Kevin Thomson: A Parliamentary look at Cultural Transformation

Parliaments are working badly. Specific practical reforms are needed to build them as a means for change.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 11

Mark Stafford Smith: Facing accelerating change - the role of research

Future Earth and the role of research in helping change society - summary.

Chapter 12

Bob Costanza: A theory of Socioecological Systems Change

How can scenario planning help create a new future?

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 13

Gill King: Using Marketing for transformation

Marketing as a tool for motivating and change to happen.

Summary and Commentary.

Chapter 14

Peter Tait: Governance for the Anthropocene

To make the decisions required for transformation to a biosensitive society, we need to understand governance and reform that to achieve the greater outcome.

Chapter 15

Val Brown: Collective Mind - Application to Transforming Cultures

Another look at how we apply seven ways of knowing to help make change.

Chapter 16

Tim Hollo: Music as a path to transformative cultural change.

Music speaks to the soul through the seven ways of knowing.

Chapter 17

Peter Tait: Wresting power transforming governance.

To bring about a cultural transformation, existing power structures which are both culturally determined and determine culture must be challenged and changed.

Chapter 18

Jodie Pipkorn, SEE-Change: Transforming Cultures Case - Transition Towns Canberra.

Looks at how the Transition Town Canberra is building connections to help transform Canberra society; with Commentary.

Chapter 19

Ian Morland: Transforming Cultures - Beginning with Individuals.

A demonstration of engaging people in a narrative; Commentary.

Chapter 20

Richard Denniss: Exercising Power for Cultural Transformation.

Cultural change is a matter of exercising power, But to exercise power for good one needs to consider who is exercising the power to what end; synopsis and commentary.

Chapter 21

Andrew Gaines: Communicating to accelerate the Great Transition.

A demonstration of a communications method.

Chapter 22

Trevor Hancock: Public Health in the Anthropocene.

Chapter 23

Lyn Goldsworthy, Frank Fenner Foundation: Biosensitivity - how does this help Transform Cultures

Biosensitivity – part of the new values narrative about what people can do to transform.

Appendices

Appendix 1 HEF Transforming Cultures Series Contributors

Appendix 2 2014 Concluding Workshop Summary Outcomes

Appendix 3 TRANSFORMING Cultures 2015 Opening overview and summary

Appendix 4 Culture definitions

Appendix 5 Further reading on change: These are a few publications that came up or have been discovered in the process of formulating this Transforming cultures series. It is far from a complete or definitive list. I share it for your interest.

Download pdf of Contents

Transforming Cultures: theory, methods and practice

Published 2020 by the Frank Fenner Foundation as an electronic book.

Frank Fenner Foundation

PO Box 11

Canberra ACT 2601

Copyright Frank Fenner Foundation, 2020

Republished 2022 in Canberra Alliance for Participatory Democracy Resource Hub.

Peter W Tait (Ed), 2020, Transforming Cultures: theory, methods and practice, Frank Fenner Foundation, Canberra ACT Australia

Citations for each section should acknowledge the presenter/author(s) and title of that section in addition to the above citation.

Front cover art work: Samantha Towers, Auckland, New Zealand/Aoteoroa

Back cover photograph by Peter W Tait, of David Jensz Cultural Fragment, Woden, ACT

In 2022 it appeared that the Frank Fenner Foundation, under whose auspices the original Human Ecology Forum Transforming Cultures series was run, was going to close down and the website version of this series might become unavailable. Therefore the Transforming Cultures e-version was copied across to the Canberra Alliance for Participatory Democracy Resources Hub to preserve it for use into the future.

In this transfer process, the publication was formatted into a webpage style of text with illustrations. Links to the pdfs of the original chapters are given, mainly at the end of each chapter, for downloading and reading offline. In some cases there is no chapter text as such because this was not supplied by the authors; we only have access to their original presentations. In this case, links to these presentations are given.

Many of the presentations are accompanied by a brief summary, synopsis and commentary to draw out importance points for the series. These are usually also put at the end of each chapter.

As new material comes to hand, this is added at the end in the section titled Addenda.

Enjoy

Peter Tait

In the early 1990s, the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES[1]) Human Ecology Group’s Fundamental Question program explored how to achieve the cultural transformation, or ‘biorenaissance’, to an ecologically sustainable human society. They produced a book, Our Biosphere under Threat (Boyden, Dovers et al. 1990), and a series of monographs.

The 2014 and 2015 Human Ecology Forum Transforming Cultures theme sought to extend this work by addressing this core question: how might we bring about the necessary cultural transformation to ensure the long term survival of the human species? This is about societal change, that is the mix of individual and systems change needed to transform culture. This series wants to elaborate the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of a program for cultural change.

The program is grounded on the following assumptions:

1. Human activity, grounded in a socio-economic culture that ignores or disrespects the fundamental processes of life and nature, is causing degradation to the natural environment and that this is being detrimental to human prosperity, health and wellbeing.
2. Transformation of the current dominant world culture, including its worldview and practices, is imperative to protect human wellbeing.
3. This transformation will need to reassert the biophysical realities within which we live and promote a culture which is sensitive to and respects nature and its limits.
4. While a rapid transformation is required to protect human civilisation, there is still time to take effective action to minimise disruption to human society.

These assumptions overtly drive and frame the discussion. Further participants recognised that any attempt to change culture is being undertaken by people who are embedded in and part of that culture. Thus cultural change assumes that members of a complex adaptive system can intentionally leverage or tweak elements of the system to attempt change, even while recognising that those people have no inherent capacity to control the system and that any resultant change is unpredictable. It recognises that systems have resilience as well as tipping points.

In the context of Stephen Boyden’s elaboration of the biohistorical phases of humanity (Boyden 2010) (and see Chapter 1), this transition or transformation from the fourth, current high consumption, ecologically unsustainable phase to a fifth phase founded in biosensitivity, based on understanding the human place in nature, in tune with, sensitive to and respectful of the processes of life is called the biorenaissance. This biorenaissance may be termed the “Phase Five Transition”.

The Frank Fenner Foundation (FFF) intends to:

“... convene integrative transdisciplinary discussion and debate on:

• (a) The changes in human activities that will be necessary to achieve the transition to an ecologically sustainable and healthy society
• (b) the changes in societal arrangements ... necessary to bring about ... changes in human activities”

in order to contribute intellectually to the Phase Five Transition. This monograph will contribute to these objectives.

The question and more questions

The major question for this project was how might we bring about the necessary cultural transformation to ensure the long term survival of the human species? This recognises culture as the ‘operating system’ for a society. Sub-questions might include: what will an ecologically sustainable society look like; what aspects of culture need to change to allow that to emerge; how would such change be achieved; what are likely barriers and how can they be circumvented?

As the series progressed, further questions arose and were added:

• What is culture?
• How do individual / personal changes translate up to societal change? Or can they?
• Do we know how to carry out designed, deliberative societal changes across all sectors of society, from within that society?

This monograph

Input from a diverse set of disciplines was sought for each’s contribution to answering these questions. I note the limitation of the absence of input from political science, sociology, history and social anthropology, all of whom may have brought added insights to the series.

The opening first chapter draws together the key reflections on theory, methodology and practice from the presentations. The second chapter puts the themes and lessons from this series into context of a review of the literature on cultural and social change. The third chapter presents a model for change. The presentations which were made to the seminar series follow. They keep the presenter’s style and format to lend authenticity. Some are adapted from documents; others are PowerPoint Presentations. Each is followed by a brief editorial commentary linking them into the broader themes of the monograph and drawing out the key messages for the transforming culture project. It recommends further relevant action.

References

Boyden, S. (2010). Our Place in Nature: past present and future. Canberra, ACT, Australia, Nature and Society Forum Inc.

Boyden, S. V., S. Dovers and M. Shirlow (1990). "Our biosphere under threat."

[1] now the Fenner School for Environment and Society at ANU

Download pdf of Preface: Background and Context

Introduction: Transforming Culture: to what and how?

Peter Tait

This Human Ecology Forum 2014 and 2015 Seminar Series wants to elaborate the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of a program for change. To this end, change theory (there are many formulations of this; for one method see http://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/how-does-theory-of-change-work/#6 ) advises a sequence that answers these questions:

1. What do we want – what does it look like and how might it work?
2. Why do we want this?
3. What specifically needs to change in the current system to get us there?
4. How do we make those changes: at various levels?
5. What will help make those changes?
6. What blockages/ barriers are likely to emerge and how can we get around them.

This paper will explore these questions briefly to give some background to the seminar series.

So 1. What do we want?

Our purpose is to bring about a Biosensitive (ecosystem respecting) and therefore Ecologically-Sustainable society.

Stephen Boyden’s term biosensitivity (Boyden 2004) refers to an understanding of the place of humans in the environment that is truly in tune with, sensitive to and respectful of the processes of life; an understanding which can therefore bring clearer insights and strategic guidance to the urgent local and global task of reversing humankind’s excessive pressures on nature’s systems. Biosensitivity provides a lens through which to assess current and future human development proposals. The ‘life’ focus means that both the natural environment including other species and the physiochemical systems of the ecosystem and human societal systems (including the built environment) are respected. Consequently a biosensitive society will result in healthy biosphere supporting healthy people in a healthy society.

Ecological sustainability has these components (drawn from multiple sources):

• It operates within the limitations of the Earth’s biophysical systems
• It recognises and acknowledges the links between human societal behaviours and the effects on the natural world
• It recognises that the interests of non-human species and future generations need to be taken into account in the present
• It promotes the links between a just and equitable human society and respect for Earth’s biophysical systems/ Nature.

Both terms are complementary, putting the focus on slightly different aspects, but united in their view that humanity sits within a greater whole – the biophysical systems of planet Earth. Biosensitivity focusses on how humans regard the living, biological systems of the planet while ecological focuses on the interaction between living things and between them and the physical world. In some respects, Tony McMichael caught the essence in describing biosensitivity as a pre-requisite for ecological sustainability. One is an input state, and the other the outcome.

Project participants may seek to explore what a society operating within these sets of principles might look like in more detail. Readers of the magazine Solutions would remember several articles that explore this (http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/ ). But what are the social, political and economic institutions and arrangements of such a society? What would it be like to live in? How would it feel?

2. Why transform?

To ensure human wellbeing and health by conserving human civilisation in the immediate future, and ultimately ensure the survival of the species Homo sapiens. The reasons for this are spelt out in the assumptions listed above. Put the other way, the present and future wellbeing (that is the health, security, political freedoms and material prosperity) of humanity is being threatened by the current disregard of the biophysical realities by the practices of the dominant socioeconomic system. These practices are defined by culture.

Transformation is a term with multiple meanings. I use it here to mean a shift in the worldviews, governance and socio-economic practices within human systems to a significantly different state than they are now (see discussion in UKCIP report (Lonsdale et al 2015)).

3. Why culture?

Again culture carries multiple meanings. It embodies worldviews, beliefs and assumptions, practices of thinking and living, and the ways these are communicated through the ‘arts’ (stories and songs, literature, theatre, music, art) and cuisine of the particular society of which it is a part. In this discussion by culture I mean the default operating system for a particular human society. In saying this, I recognise that there is within societies a dominant culture, and that other non-dominant sub-cultures exist, that may, or may not, align to some extent with this dominant cultural system.

Culture has two aspects: the behavioural which includes social practices, arrangements and institutions, and the beliefs, assumptions or worldview that underlies and explains or justifies behaviour. These are in dynamic equilibrium with each influencing the other.

Therefore to change how humanity operates on the planet, we need to re-design the operating system and reboot the system in that new mode. Both behaviours and beliefs need to change in parallel.

Culture also operates at lesser scales within society; the individual institutions and organisations of the several realms (to borrow Fotopoulos’ model (Fotopoulos 1997)). Realms include the political, economic, ecological, social and personal. Social and personal realms overlap and encompass home life, leisure, the workplace, and so forth. There are also cultural factors relating to societal sectors: energy, habitation, transport, industry, agriculture, etc..

Answering the remaining three questions, specifically how to make change and how specifically to bring about change in this culture, are the focus for the rest of this series. Questions at this level look at what current arrangements particularly needs to change and how.

Cultural Transformation

Stephen Boyden has written, in relation to the role of the Frank Fenner Foundation, that it will convene integrative transdisciplinary discussion and debate on:

(a) The changes in human activities that will be necessary to achieve the transition to an ecologically sustainable and healthy society of the future (e.g. changes in energy use, transportation, food production, forestry practices, manufacturing, consumer behaviour, lifestyles)

(b) the changes in societal arrangements that will be necessary to bring about the necessary changes in human activities (e.g. changes in economic arrangements, the occupational structure of the work force, urban design, government regulations, and educational programs).

This seminar series seeks to explore how this might be done.

Processes of Cultural Transformation

Change requires both motivator and a belief that change can occur. We have a motivator (the concerns outlined in the assumptions and aims in the Introduction), but how to harness this so those in power and our fellow citizens move? More importantly, how can we communicate concern and simultaneously engender hope? Concern or fear without hope stymies change and reinforces both the status quo and black and white thinking.

In changing behaviour, we don’t have to waste effort on changing people’s minds and worldviews, which are generally very resistant to change as they are the emotionally charged basic assumptions and beliefs a person has about the world and how it should work. This set of beliefs constitute a person’s identity, and identity is the most strongly defended psychological construct. We also know that if people are put into a situation of psychological dissonance (where their identity and values conflict with an aspect of their perceived reality,) they will react in one of three ways. Usually they just ignore the dissonance and get on with living. However sometimes if compelled by emotions or arguments, they will change their behaviour, and then change their beliefs retrospectively to justify this behaviour change. This is the basis for motivational interviewing. Occasionally however, if the cause of the dissonance is too threatening, people will deny reality and hold to their belief.

We have historically been wedded to the ‘information deficit model’ theory of change. That is the belief that if people only knew the correct information they will change their behaviour. We now know that this belief is mistaken. Other psychological steps are required. However, information is important for change; it is just not usually sufficient. People require information both about what change is required, why it is needed and how it can come about. Additionally, people need a set of structures and processes that set up the psychological conditions in which behaviour will change.

Change come about because people come to believe that a different way of doing something will be better than what happens at present AND that change is possible AND that the pain of change will be worthwhile. There needs to be acknowledgement of the barriers and ideas for how to get around these. So at a personal level, it is discomfort about the present + hope / vision + practical steps for making change that enables the change to occur.

Reuben Anderson (http://vimeo.com/26943709) outlines Ten Myths of Behaviour Change. His focus is on changing individual’s behaviour to achieve ecologically sustainable societal goals. Distilling this into a series of principles we have, in no particular order:

• Make the wanted option the default option: structures and regulation at a societal level designed so doing the right thing is easy and automatic
• Create new habits; changing behaviour is about changing people’s habits: alert people to new habits, focus attention by: legislation and regulations, incentives, costs, prompts; help people to practice new habits; rely on intrinsic rewards
• Appeal to emotions not intellect: use insightful story telling
• Renormalising: people do what friends and neighbours do. So use social marketing to spread this message and develop social proof for people that this is what is normal
• Design systems for people, according to how our brains actually work, taking limits to cognitive capacity into account

Communicating needs to be undertaken with careful forethought and planning. Again, communicate in a manner and with methods that are going to get your message to the people you intend to receive it. Additionally, there are some critical factors to be born in mind with messaging effectively:

Framing and language show your audience the aspects and meanings of the message you want them to receive: Lakoff (framing)(Lakoff 2006) and Senior (working with people’s own concerns)(Senior 2014) and Jonah Berger (viral stories)(Berger 2013) and others explain in more detail.

Beware reinforcing your opponents message. John Cook & Stephan Lewandowsky in The Debunking Handbook (Cook and Lewandowsky 2011) explain about three ‘backfire effects’:

- familiarity - repetition reinforces belief (‘Goebbelization’)

- overkill - a simple myth is accepted more than a complicated correction

- worldviews - very difficult to change - this change may be traumatic

So, only mention your opponent’s message (briefly in outline) to say it is false then give brief succinct reasons why, and then repeat your message. Keep the correction clear and simple; if necessary provide options for more detailed explanations nearby. Avoid threatening worldviews; work with them by speaking to values and framing acceptably.

So far this discussion of change has focused on individuals. But what about transformation at a societal level? Since culture is the operating system of society, to change how society operates, we need to change culture. What do we know about changing culture? We know about changing people’s behaviour individually; how does this translate to a community level? We know a lot about effective communications. We can use this knowledge to designing a cultural transformation.

References

Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why Things Catch On. New York, Simon & Schuster.

Boyden, S. (2004). The Biology of Civilisation: Understanding Human Culture as a Force in Nature. Sydney, University of New South Wales Press.

Cook, J. and S. Lewandowsky. (2011). "The Debunking Handbook."   Retrieved 5/3/2014, from http://www.skepticalscience.com/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-available-download.html.

Fotopoulos, T. (1997). Towards an inclusive democracy: The crisis of the growth economy and the need for a new liberatory project. London, New York, Cassell.

Lakoff, G. (2006). Don’t Think of an Elephant. Melbourne, Scribe Short Books.

Lonsdale K, Pringle P, Turner B. Transformative adaptation: what it is, why it matters & what is needed. Oxford, UK: UK Climate Impacts Programme, University of Oxford; 2015.

Senior, T. (2014) "Climate change and equity: whose language is it anyway?" Inside Story.

Download pdf of Introduction: Transforming Culture: to what and how?

Transforming cultures is a mix of theory of culture, methods of system change and practice of creating attitude and behaviour change.

In this chapter I list the major assumptions and values that arose from discussions. Then, I summarise what we have learnt about the major processes of transformation, using two different typologies to demonstrate differing aspects of cultural transformations.

Finally, to ensure an ethical process occurs, the participants in the wrap up workshop suggested that the founding assumptions, our values and a set of principles to direct the guiding coalition have to be made explicit. Such principles are in a state of evolution but suggestions to date are:

Values and Principles:

• The process of change must be ethical and grounded in a set of values
• Value dissent
• Respect for diversity of knowledge and approach
• Recognise change is an emotional process
• Recognise we are designing influence not change
• Recognition that communication (whatever medium) is an iterative dialogic process
• Be reflective

Assumptions:

1. There is an overarching assumption that the continuation of the human species on the planet carries value, as least to humanity.
2. At the next level, a meta-purpose of society is the wellbeing of its members and the survival and continuation of the group.
3. Human collective behaviour as manifest as culture. The dominant cultural worldview is disrupting the ecological foundations that support human society and the existence of other species.
4. Transformation of the current dominant world culture is imperative to ensure human survival and minimise disruption to the ecosystem and other species.
5. This transformation will need to reassert the biophysical realities within which we live and promote a culture which is sensitive to and respects nature and its limits.
6. There is still time to take effective action to minimise disruption to human society.
7. Systems are resilient but adaptable.
8. It is possible to attempt a transformation by designing a change that will influence the system
9. It is possible to influence complex adaptive systems but not to control the effect.
10. While an intent for transformation might be agreed, all other details of all other aspects, even final outcomes, are open to varying degrees of contestation and disagreement, but these are worked out within the larger, collective concordance about intent.
11. Human wellbeing and the natural world would be optimal if human societal behaviour was to accede to a set of values including but not limited to: biosensitivity, better resource use, externalities reflected in costing decisions, recognising biophysical realities/limits, in other words having ecological sustainability

Processes of transformation – what have we learnt

Firstly, in Chapter 3 we outline one possible model of change process. Each step in this framework as a primary task, which in turn can be broken down further into other tasks (see figure 1). This will be discussed later.

We have collected a set of values and principles and clarified our assumptions.

Next, we have accrued a set of recurrent themes that pertain to undertaking cultural change. A couple of different and non-exclusive ways to assemble these are given below to facilitate discussion.

A theory, methodology or practice framework, proposed at the beginning of the Human Ecology Forum theme, provides the first take for reflection.

Theory

• Culture is communication within society and across the generations of a society
• Culture is about exercising power by establishing the operating system for a society. Therefore, it is political, socially constructed and so subject to being changed.
• Cultural transformation as an evolutionary process reveals (unfolds) an approach to systems change that regards influences into the system as selection pressures.
• Recognising culture is a hyperobject (reference Liz Boulton) provides a method for adjusting frames and identities.
• Change requires thinking “outside the box”, envisioning requires us to consider what is needed not what is possible.
• Change involves transgression and subversion leading to disruption to existing power relationships and hence conflict will occur

Methodology

• System models provide a method for understanding and analysing a system, and provide a language to negotiate and share that understanding.
• Scenario planning gives a methodology for envisioning, and testing out, a set of possible futures.
• The collective mind is a methodology for working with groups of people to help them achieve a common purpose. The agreement about the purpose is the collective mind.

Practice

Practice revolves mostly about marketing, which is about communications that draw on and apply research in psychology and neurobiology.

• Stories (narratives) are central to our identity, and for staying in status quo, and equally critical in bring about change. Our stories give us meaning and understanding of the world. New stories that give new meaning, purpose and describe how things might be are needed to replace the current stories and to help forge a new identity. Changing identity is challenging. It requires changing the frames (including the narratives and metaphors) that give us identity, to permit a new identity to emerge. It requires addressing the emotional responses to the change and using the emotions to shift the frames.
• Because words carry multiple meanings, to appeal to the emotions communications need to draw on multiple media: tell stories, dance, sing, play, draw, paint, cartoon and sculpt.
• Applying the seven ways of knowing and the collective mind process for designing intentional influence into a system opens reframings necessary to trigger change.
• Marketing, applying psychological knowledge and theories of change, can be used ethically to guide strategy and tactics to reframe situations and help change individual and group identities to bring about cultural transformation.
• Besides marketing, transgression and subversion leading to disruption to existing power relationships is necessary.
• Technology and infrastructure, the hardware of society, affect the boundaries and abilities for change to occur. Putting effort into changing these adjunct systems can facilitate culture change. Two examples are:
  • More generally novel technologies provide means for changing cultural structures; examples the abolition of slavery by machines (industrialised capitalism); creation of capitalism by technologies to better harness energy: developments in wind, water and lastly fossil fuels technology. So in future synthetic photosynthesis may provide opportunity for another change.
  • Specifically energy systems are fundamental to both political and literal power within society. Changing the energy system can open opportunity for change in political and economic power. This is particularly relevant for the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources. Additionally efficient use of energy and an overall reduction in the amount of energy used will press for change in cultures, as well as being an outcome of the primary culture change.
• Disruption to existing power relationships will provoke resistance to change and the resultant conflict will need to be managed.

An alternative typology might be:

About culture

• Culture is communication between and across the generations of a society
• Culture is about exercising power by establishing the operating system for a society. Therefore it is political, socially constructed and so subject to being changed.
• Recognising culture as a hyperobject directs attention to transformation as a process of changing frames and identities.

About change

• System models provide a method for understanding and analysing a system, and provide a language to negotiate and share that understanding
• Cultural transformation as an evolutionary process reveals (unfolds) an approach to systems change that regards influences into the system as selection pressures.
• Change requires thinking “outside the box”, envisioning requires us to consider what is needed not what is possible.
• Applying the seven ways of knowing and the collective mind process for designing intentional influence into a system opens reframings necessary to trigger change.
• Change involves transgression and subversion leading to disruption to existing power relationships and hence conflict will occur
• Scenario planning gives a methodology for envisioning, and testing out, a set of possible futures.
• Stories (narratives) are central to our identity, and for staying in status quo, and equally critical in bring about change. Our stories give us meaning and understanding of the world. New stories that give new meaning, purpose and describe how things might be are needed to replace the current stories and to help forge a new identity. Changing identity is challenging. It requires changing the frames (including the narratives and metaphors) that give us identity, to permit a new identity to emerge. It requires addressing the emotional responses to the change and using the emotions to shift the frames.
• Because words carry multiple meanings, to appeal to the emotions communications need to draw on multiple media: tell stories, dance, sing, play, draw, paint, cartoon and sculpt.
• Marketing, applying psychological knowledge and theories of change, can be used ethically to guide strategy and tactics to reframe situations and help change individual and group identities to bring about cultural transformation.
• Besides marketing, transgression and subversion leading to disruption to existing power relationships is necessary.
• Technology and infrastructure, the hardware of society, affect the boundaries and abilities for change to occur. Putting effort into changing these adjunct systems can facilitate culture change. Two examples are:
  • More generally novel technologies provide means for changing cultural structures; examples the abolition of slavery by machines (industrialised capitalism); creation of capitalism by technologies to better harness energy: developments in wind, water and lastly fossil fuels technology. So in future synthetic photosynthesis may provide opportunity for another change.
  • Specifically energy systems are fundamental to both political and literal power within society. Changing the energy system can open opportunity for change in political and economic power. This is particularly relevant for the transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources. Additionally efficient use of energy and an overall reduction in the amount of energy used will press for change in cultures, as well as being an outcome of the primary culture change.
• Disruption to existing power relationships will provoke resistance to change and the resultant conflict will need to be managed.

Another way to considering these elements is diagrammatically. This first diagram (Figure 2) summarises the major elements that were identified as helping to drive specifically cultural transformation.

The second (Figure 3) looks at a slightly different set of influences on change.

Finally returning to the Kotter-Webb-Tait framework (Figure 1), I assemble the ideas elaborated above into the framework it provides. I embed the parallel Kotter stage labels Goals, Framing,

Knowledge and Technology, Institutions, Paradigms into the steps of the model since each Kotter stage will have elements of all.

An aside on communications and marketing

The role of communications is relevant to all of the Steps (Adam Ferrier book, The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour, is an invaluable resource). The word marketing as used here, is a communications process that uses a variety of techniques based in the neurocognitive and psychology disciplines to attract, interest and engage people, lead them on the journey to discover what it is that transformation can help them achieve. It talks to people’s emotions at the same time as their reason. Marketing does not have to be advertising, nor manipulative (although it often is used this way). As a communication process it is a tool to help achieve our purpose.

Download a pdf of Chapter 1 Transforming Cultures Key Themes and Lessons

The purpose of this chapter is to place the presentations from the Transforming Cultures series within the context of the broader literature on cultural transformation and change more generally. The literature largely agreed with or added caveats to the viewpoints of the presenters. Where differences with presenters and between different writers were noted in the literature, a more nuanced view of transformation is possible. The Transforming cultures presenters added valuable findings to the sections on Communications/Marketing, Biosensitivity and the Role of the Arts.

Further, this review highlights the interconnection of some of the ideas presented. One cross cutting emergent theme was that transforming cultures is a process of social evolution. Various factors such as leadership and technology could be seen as providing selection pressure within that social evolutionary perspective. The other intercurrent theme is that transformation requires an interplay of individual level and community change happening in parallel.

Methods

Online literature searches were conducted in four databases: ProQuest Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts, Google Scholar, ScienceDirect and Web of Science in April 2018. There were initially 68 records identified through the database search, and a further six records found through referenced works which appeared frequently in the identified literature.

Search terms

Inclusion criteria

Exclusion criteria

Article inclusion criteria

Eligibility

49 articles were assessed for eligibility and selected. Abstracts and conclusions were analysed to rule out articles based on relevance or applicability to the topic.

The review was then narrowed down to 27 articles. Following a systematic reviewing of all relevant articles, a thematic analysis was used to identify overall themes and identify specific examples.

The literature suggested four main topic domains, with a fifth assemblage of factors not fitting clearly into the main four. These are grouped into: resistance to change, community based movements, policy and leadership lead initiatives, non-regulatory approaches and the role of research and scenario planning.

Resistance-to-change factors

There is extensive resistance to change influenced by various factors and, as such, much discussion of how that resistance can be addressed and contested. Power and Hollo view culture as a social construct, and found that because of this, it can be deconstructed and changed; when culture is contested, tensions arise that provide openings for change, and exploiting these openings can lead to rapid change. Lyon and Parkings (2013) agreed with this assessment, stating that culture and cultural change are deeply dependent on existing social structures, and that historical factors and societal traditions are critical to the ability of a community to undergo, adapt to and sustain cultural transformation. While Ekdale et al. (2015) also stated that cultural transformation must be contextualised within the culture being addressed, they found that reactions to change are difficult to predict and depend on compatibility, intricacy and relative advantage. This implies that the situation is more nuanced than Power and Hollo suggested, and it may not be as simple as exploiting certain lead-ins for bringing about change.

Costanza discussed socio-ecological systems change, presenting cultural transformation as an evolutionary process. This allowed them to examine an approach to large-scale systems change which regarded influences into the system as selection pressures. They argued that culture is composed of worldviews, institutions and technologies, which are subject to selection pressure. This is primarily because subcultures within a dominant culture tend to hold and practice different attitudes, values, institutions and technologies; these differences allow a selection process in response to pressures from the biophysical and social world. Messner (2015) held similar views, adding that the increasing debate and discussion on the topic of transforming culture for a lower carbon future, in itself, reflects a shift in values in society. Hansen et al. (2014) further added that rather than traditional values and heritage acting as a barrier, they provide an alternative method of forming cultural change. Ellis (2018), on the other hand, stated that changing the dynamics of social structures is very challenging and achieving a cultural shift would require overcoming substantial technical and empirical challenges on every level. This suggests that the differences in subcultures may both cause cultural transformation to be more challenging as well as enabling openings for change to occur.

Community-based movements

Morland aimed to determine what causes societies and individuals to become more ethical, citing several examples, and determined that morality is key; inspired moral leadership and laws based on ethical principles are what can pave the way for cultural change. This begins with individuals and then extends to community-based scales. Barr and Prillwitz (2014) concurred, stating that widespread behavioural change and transformation, at their core, start at an individual level. Messner (2015) had a similar perspective, stating that gradually changing individual values is what sets the stage for new standards of development. Hartijasti and Toar (2015) further emphasised this through a case study which demonstrated that cultural shifts are much easier to accomplish and sustain at smaller scales and tend to be more effective when implemented as such rather than on larger levels.

Moreover, when considering behavioural change from an organisational planning standpoint, Willis et al. (2016) deliberated that establishing a collaborative workplace culture can make shifts within that culture much easier. Jones and Harris (2014) had similar findings, particularly in terms of the role of social cohesion aiding organisational growth and behavioural development amongst employees. Thus, Brown (2014) found that recognising where the strengths of a community lie in terms of social cohesion is crucial to adapting to and minimising the drawbacks of cultural change.

Pipkorn, in their discussion of transition towns, proposed that the nature of systems is to adjust; if there is enough of a push from a community level, policies, bureaucracy and regulatory structures will change as a result. Additionally, they implied that grassroots movements and governance have a reciprocal relationship, which the literature further verified. Jones et al. (2014) suggested that policies driving cultural change must be ‘coproduced’ with communities and Barr (2014) agreed, stating that the gradual integration of community-led cultural change within policy and research findings is vital. Lewis (2015), however, had an opposite outlook, specifying that the importance of grassroots initiatives is the way in which they allow individuals and societies to adapt to policy change with ease.

Policy and leadership-led initiatives

Tait et al. discussed the importance of dismantling power structures in initiating cultural change. They acknowledged that changing how political power is exercised requires a transformation of governance, but argued that socio-political culture is what will drive this. In particular, communities taking the lead on this transformation is vital to addressing the equity issues which are rampant in power structures. Power determines what is known and what cannot be known, what can be discussed, and what is not even considered. The existing power dynamics within a society are largely culturally determined, but they also play a key role in determining culture. The literature supports this, with considerable discussion on community resilience and social cohesion as a means through which policy can be adapted by communities to encourage cultural transformations (Brown 2014). In addition, Jones et al. (2013) also found that existing political climates and policy instruments determine and shape the effectiveness of future policies, adding that considering the context of different regions when applying policies is critical to their success. This links to Constanza’s evolutionary view of change, in that existing political climates and policy help select the direction of change.

Correspondingly, Thomson discussed similar themes from a parliamentary standpoint, suggesting that the current system of governance is failing primarily due to the focus on neoliberal culture and economic growth rather than the health and wellbeing of citizens. They compared Australia and countries with similar governance to Scandinavian countries, which follow more pragmatic models of governance and, as a result, have positive social and economic outcomes and strong public support. Thompson identified specific foci for parliamentary process reform in starting cultural change: restricting campaign financing, continuous open disclosure of donations, limits to political advertising, and transparency of all government reports and public money decisions. Sabadie (2014) supported this perspective, stating that the best outcome would require a combination of policy, social innovation and community-based movements. Aside from this, Thomson’s findings were largely new to the discussion of cultural transformation, providing a unique, active member of parliament perspective going forward.

Douglas stressed the importance of leadership and clearly enunciated vision in implementing policies for cultural change, citing 1950s Cuba as an example of rapid transformation through visionary leadership and concurrent strong policies. They suggested that growing inequality in Australia is perhaps a reflection of a corrupt government, which would be a possible trigger for citizens to unite against them and elect a new government. Once in power, Douglas suggested, the new leadership would have to rapidly implement change. Further, there was discussion of the need to establish a Public Interest Council with sufficient resources to propagandise society and government and to advocate and communicate the current situation and new vision. These views were largely supported by literature in the field of employment relations and organisational change. Hartijasti and Toar (2015) stated that managerial aptitudes are key to social change, while Jones and Harris (2014) specified the importance of policies for cultural change being disciplined and structured, with strong leadership. Willis et al. (2016) added that leadership must consider context and regular performance evaluations and motivational management styles provide a foundation for adaptation. In terms of policy, this could translate to government transparency, monitoring and regulation.

Furthermore, Denniss determined methods through which power could be exercised and maintained through existing power systems to bring about cultural change. They suggested that framing policy issues, such as climate change governance, should be done in a manner which is favourable to voters; that is, by promising what they want to happen immediately after the primary goal is achieved. Further, Denniss stated that contesting a political opponent’s view is critical, but framing it as poor policy rather than intentional deceit is key to maintaining positive reinforcement, in the manner of nudge theory. Accumulating political capital on any issues and using it to the advantage of a specific agenda was another recommendation offered here, with Denniss citing John Howard’s use of gun control following the Port Arthur massacre to introduce a GST. Calabrese and Cohen (2013) had similar findings through a study of employment relations, affirming that positive and optimistic methods of leadership allowed employee perspectives to shift, thus creating a constructive work environment where employees felt safe and healthy, with plenty of room to grow. However, Milbourne and Cushman (2015) disputed this, maintaining that the complexity of culture and the diversity of individual views towards social change have limited solutions and are difficult to predict. Barr and Prillwitz (2014) were equally critical, questioning the likelihood and effectiveness of nudge theory in shaping choice architecture, particularly in long-term scenarios. Instead, they suggested that regulatory and non-regulatory approaches to implementing cultural change should be implemented in tandem. This confirms a view that a single influence for change is less likely to succeed than several influencers working together.

Non-regulatory approaches

1. Technology

Faunce noted that technology is a possible pathway to eco-centric governance, arguing that corporations have constructed our culture in a manner which advances their own agendas. Having a technological pathway, they argue, would permit social change. For instance, artificial photosynthesis takes the capacity to generate energy away from corporations by decentralising energy production, and in doing so provides abundant energy in a sustainable manner. The use of this technology would support the development of local and democratic energy governance while enabling the economy to flourish, thus freeing people up to spend more time on meaningful cultural activities which are unrelated to work. Messner (2015) added that discourse around cultural transformation for a more sustainable future is crucial to bringing about economic and technological transformation, implying that these goals are heavily linked to culture.

In addition, Hepp et al. (2015) found that, in recent years, digital media has been the cause of several significant cultural shifts; examples include education becoming increasingly open-access and affordable, influencing social structures and organisations, and directly and indirectly influencing audience perceptions of various issues. However, Sabadie (2014) disagreed, arguing that although technology can help enhance cultural change, as seen with the Arab Spring, it cannot sufficiently act as the primary tool. Ekdale et al. (2015) agreed, adding that change does not occur in isolation, and it can be twofold. They cited the journalism industry as an example, acknowledging the new voices entering the field and changing how reporting occurs as a result of technology and social media, with the caveat that this change has substantially affected the relationship between journalists and readers (Ekdale et al. 2015).

Costanza, on the other hand, discussed the link between technological advancement and shifts in attitudes, citing new technologies as a tool to change perceptions directly. Kral (2014) stated that the evolution of communication technologies has provided a way to enhance and change identities and perceptions, particularly within youth culture, as social interactions have greatly transformed. Linking back to organisational culture, Camisón and López (2014) discovered, through a survey of numerous industrial firms, that advancements in technology provided managers with a greater capacity to lead, and employees with a stronger ability to adapt. Hansen et al. (2014), however, cautioned that developing countries are likely to be more resistant to cultural change through forms of technological advancements.

On balance technological innovations might be a trigger for cultural change (think mobile phones) but are not of themselves sufficient. Nor does introducing a technology direct cultural transformation in any particular way; in an evolutionary sense it is only a selection pressure.

1. Communications/marketing

Power and Hollo discussed the power of narratives in shaping culture; stories create our ‘reality’ and maintain societal norms. Therefore, new stories have the ability to create a new reality. King argued for the use of marketing expertise, grounded in psychological knowledge, as a pathway for cultural change. Marketing techniques can be employed to reframe situations and motivate individual behaviour. Unlike previous cultural transformations that were in the midst of major historical or technological shifts the current situation requires a new context for change, and marketing can lead the way. King noted that any marketing tactics used must be employed ethically. This perspective ties into Power and Hollo’s suggestions for shifting narratives, and provides a way forward. Botta (2016) agreed with this point of view, describing communication as a valuable tool which can be a means of encouraging social innovation. However, they noted that public and financial support is necessary for any initiative to shape culture. Although communication is valuable for shifting public perceptions, it is far more challenging to garner financial support.

Gaines noted the importance of communication in terms of inspiring and motivating change. Affecting people’s worldviews in a healthy way is challenging but also an influential leverage point. Gaines described the two main aspects to improve in this regard: improving people’s frameworks for making sense of things and improving their way of acting in the world. They also stated that those in leadership roles within educational and organisational structures can shift their institutional cultures through this method. Hacker (2015) agreed, citing extrinsic motivational tactics as a key point for inspiring cultural change in structured settings. Hartijasti and Toar (2015) also found that positive reinforcement and encouraging outlooks make cultural shifts more likely to be effective and resilient.

• Biosensitivity

There was much discussion of transitioning to a biosensitive society by reframing the cultural issues with which we are currently dealing. Newell determined that understanding the world and cultural behaviours are core aspects of planning change in any system. Goldsworthy noted several barriers to biosensitivity within our current culture, including: the lack of understanding of how interconnected human health is with planetary health; the operation of societies without considering the extent of our impact and limits of ecosystems, and the prevailing view that sustainability is largely impractical. To address this, Goldsworthy suggested, it is crucial to establish a clear and shared vision of the desired outcome towards which we must head. This vision must captivate and motivate communities by activating key human qualities such as our capacity for empathy, compassion and collaboration. Boyden added that to avert the current socio-economic paradigm which is heading in the direction of causing irrevocable damage to the environment, bio-understanding must be created through communities and political leadership. Timko (2013) also stated that a cultural transformation for a sustainable and resilient future requires a shift towards bio-understanding. These considerations added valuable insights into the discourse on cultural change as there was previously very limited academic research on biosensitivity.

Along a similar vein, Hancock proposed the reframing of environmental issues as public health issues as a means to garner backing, funding and societal support. This would provide a valuable pathway for informing communities of the adverse impacts of climate change and establish a deeper understanding of how planetary health affects human health. Hancock suggested documenting the potential health impacts of atmospheric change, pollution, biodiversity loss and resource depletion and proposing an action agenda for public health. These shifts would reduce the vulnerability of those dependent on certain ecosystems and increase their capacity for resilience and adaptation. Lewis and Townsend (2015) also found that establishing a collective awareness of environmental effects on public health would lead to humans developing a more harmonious relationship with nature.

1. Role of the Arts

Hollo discussed the unlikelihood of addressing the effects of climate change within the confines of our existing socio-political culture. Key to changing that culture, Hollo argued, is music; music has been pivotal in bridging racial divisions across North America and Britain, and musicians play a critical role as cultural influencers. They also cited lessons from history showing that cultural change is unlikely to occur without such influential cultural processes at play, and artists play a pivotal role. Boulton had similar claims of the power of philosophy. They argued that it allows our narratives to shift by changing ideas about human agency; we have influence but not control. This encourages new questions and, as such, narratives about our identities and roles on the planet to emerge, paving the way for creating a new future. Discussion of these factors was heavily limited, but scholars such as Serra et al. (2017) had corresponding discoveries about the role of the arts; they stated that the use of art for political change and activism enables us to reach new people and express challenging ideas clearly. Such methods are valuable for encouraging cultural shifts among communities.

The role of research and scenario-planning

Stafford Smith identified the role of research in accelerating change, finding that research can help transformation by seeking unanswered questions and providing a framework for designing and planning change. This involves: giving information – however incomplete – to assist with managing uncertainty; providing a compass to help people navigate the chaos and fear that comes alongside large-scale change and uncertainty, and monitoring progress along the journey and advising course corrections. This specific framework is new to the world of research assisting cultural transformation, but there is academic merit to the general idea. Ossewaarde (2017) found that research studies around scenario-planning would contribute to improved understanding of group-culture, particularly in an organisational context, and that this could be used to influence cultural change and shift intrinsic beliefs. Thus, research undeniably plays an important role in encouraging social change.

Likewise, Costanza described scenario-planning as a methodology for envisioning and testing out a set of possible futures. Benefits of this framework included presenting real scenarios to people who may be unsure of why a cultural change would be necessary in the first place. In addition, it would allow people to practice different cultural variations to see which ones would be more effective in adapting to and creating a better future. Bennett et al. (2016) conducted case studies of community-based scenario-planning which had comparable results; participants found the process to be productive and enjoyable, and a major takeaway was that scenario-planning is an effective tool for adaptation research. However, caveats included that the sample sizes were relatively small and larger experiments may be more complex and have different results. Nonetheless, Bennett et al. (2016) maintained that implementing scenario-planning in cultural change research is helpful and noted that more frequent applications of scenario-planning may promise more effective learning, innovation and action.

Chapter 2 Transforming Cultures Literature Summary Table

References

Barr S, Prillwitz J. A smarter choice? Exploring the behaviour change agenda for environmentally sustainable mobility. Environ Plann C Gov Policy. 2014 Jan;32(1):1-19.

Barr S. Practicing the cultural green economy: where now for environmental social science? Hum Geogr. 2014;96(3):231-243.

Bennett NJ, Kadfak A, Dearden P. Community-based scenario planning: a process for vulnerability analysis and adaptation planning to social–ecological change in coastal communities. Environ Dev Sustain. 2016;18:1771-1799.

Botta M. Evolution of the slow living concept within the models of sustainable communities. Futures. 2016 Jan;80:3-16.

Brown K. Global environmental change I: A social turn for resilience? Prog Hum Geogr. 2014;38(1):107-117.

Calabrese R, Cohen E. An appreciative inquiry into an urban drug court: cultural transformation. Qual Rep. 2013 Jul;18(2):1-14.

Camisón C, Villar-López A. Organizational innovation as an enabler of technological innovation capabilities and firm performance. J Bus Res. 2014 Jan;67:2891-2902.

Ekdale B, Singer JB, Tully M, Harmsen S. Making change: diffusion of technological, relational, and cultural Innovation in the newsroom. J Mass Commun Q. 2015;92(4):938-958.

Ellis EC, Magliocca NR, Stevens CJ, Fuller DQ. Evolving the anthropocene: linking multi-level selection with long-term social–ecological change. Sustain Sci. 2018 Jan;13:119-128.

Hacker KS. Leading cultural transformation. J Qual Part. 2015 Jan;37(4):13-16.

Hansen N, Postmes T, Tovote KA, Bos A. How modernization instigates social change: laptop usage as a driver of cultural value change and gender equality in a developing country. J Cross Cult Psychol. 2014;45(8):1229-1248.

Hartijasti Y, Toar GH. Assessing cultural transformation from local to global company: evidence from Indonesian PR company. Procedia Soc Behav Sci. 2015 Jan;172:177-183.

Hepp A, Hjarvard S, Lundby K. Mediatization: theorizing the interplay between media, culture and society. Media Cult Soc. 2015;37(2):314-324.

Jones M, Harris A. Principals leading successful organisational change: building social capital through disciplined professional collaboration. JOCM. 2014;27(3):473-485.

Jones R, Pykett J, Whitehead M. Behaviour change policies in the UK: an anthropological perspective. Geoforum. 2013 May;48:33-41.

Jones R, Pykett J, Whitehead M. The geographies of policy translation: how nudge became the default policy option. Environ Plann C Gov Policy. 2014;32:54-69.

Kral I. Shifting perceptions, shifting identities: communication technologies and the altered social, cultural and linguistic ecology in a remote indigenous context. TAJA. 2014;25:171-189.

Lewis M, Townsend M. ‘Ecological embeddedness’ and its public health implications: findings from an exploratory study. EcoHealth. 2015;12:244-252.

Lewis T. ‘One city block at a time’: researching and cultivating green transformations. ‎Int J Cult Stud. 2015;18(3):347-363.

Lyon C, Parkins JR. Toward a social theory of resilience: social systems, cultural systems, and collective action in transitioning forest-based communities. Rural Sociol. 2013;78(4):528-549.

Messner D. A social contract for low carbon and sustainable development: reflections on non-linear dynamics of social realignments and technological innovations in transformation processes. Technol Forecast Soc Change. 2015 Jun;98(1):260-270.

Milbourne L, Cushman M. Complying, transforming or resisting in the new austerity? Realigning social welfare and independent action among English voluntary organisations. Jnl Soc Pol. 2015;44(3):463-485.

Ossewaarde M. Unmasking scenario planning: the colonization of the future in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program. Futures. 2017 Oct;93:80-88.

Sabadie JA. Technological innovation, human capital and social change for sustainability. Lessons learnt from the industrial technologies theme of the EU's research framework programme. Sci Total Environ. 2014;481:668-673.

Serra V, Enríquez ME, Johnson R. Envisioning change through art: funding feminist artivists for social change. Development. 2017;60:108-113.

Timko M. Biophilic transformation of culture from the point of view of psychology of environmental problems (from cognitive psychology to gestalt theory). Hum Affairs. 2013;23:528-541.

Willis CD, Saul J, Bevan H, Scheirer MA, Best A, Greenhalgh T, et al. Sustaining organizational culture change in health systems. JHOM. 2016;30(1):2-30.

Download a pdf of Chapter 2: Transforming cultures: what the literature tells us

download a pdf of the Chapter 2 Transforming Cultures Literature Summary Table

Introduction

In this chapter we provide a brief overview of the Transforming Cultures Framework. We take the outputs from the lessons and model typologies from Chapter 2 and position them into a Framework to explain how they might be applied in a process of transformation.

An appendix to this chapter that expands these ideas can be downloaded here.

Framework introduced

Webb’s extension of Kotter’s (1) change framework provides a tool for us to consider the practical steps in a cultural transformation process. At the same time it provides a framework in which to incorporate the learnings from the 2014 Human Ecology Forum seminar series. At the wrap up workshop, a model of change based on this framework was presented; it summarised the input from the presenters (see Appendix that follows). That framework has been modified here to better encapsulate the transforming cultures process as it emerged from the series (Figure 1).

The major difference between the original Kotter derived model and this one is in the omission of his initiating stage of creating a sense of urgency leading to formation of a guiding coalition. In this societal transformation process the sense of urgency already existed among the individuals who have come together to participate. This historical initiating context generating concern among a group of people is captured in the Framework as Step 0, which sits without but pervades the formation of a leadership group. These individuals already embody a set of values or goals reacting to evidence we are diverging from desirable outcomes; and reflects understanding of the implications of this divergence. So our framework begins with the formation of the guiding coalition or, as some commentators put it, a leadership group. We would suggest that in all cases this spontaneous formation of a leadership group is more likely to fit the reality of a social change in contradistinction to organisational change process. In organisational change an initiating group is required to recognise the situation needs correcting and they then need to start the process and bring others to join. In a social situation, the sense of disquiet already exists and it is in realising that others share the disquiet that a group who can guide the change process surfaces.

The cycle then proceeds from the small group of concerned individuals becoming a collective, developing up and then promulgating the change narrative, engaging others and helping to empower them to act, growing the movement, and in a snowballing process achieving wins that further recruits members, redevelops the vision, shifts paradigms (worldviews, social norms and practices), expands the leadership group, and iteratively continues.

The Steps fall into two groups, hinged around taking action: Steps 1 to 4 (development phase) are the influence generating steps, Step 4 is the begin action phase, while 5 to 7 (consolidation phase) incorporate the actual changes. Step 8 (evaluation phase) ensures that the practice of adaptive governance to guide the ongoing iterative process occurs. The latter phases are being undertaken by multiple actors, and so there is much less ability, if any, to control these later steps.

Furthermore, the nature of adaptive change suggests that action will not always be sequential, and deliberate feedback and reiterations between some steps will occur. That is, the ‘cycle’ is really a helix of re-iterating action through time. Therefore many or all the ‘Steps’ are likely to be in play at once, as actions at each step evolve in parallel (co-evolving), whether intentionally or not.

Framework for Transformation

This section outlines and discusses the Transformation framework.

Steps 1-3 Creating a Guiding Coalition and Change Vision, Engaging others

Step 1 Creating a guiding coalition – building leadership

There was some debate about the order of Kotter’s initial steps. It would seem pragmatically that those intending to design a change are already driven by a sense of urgency from their own experience, and so for practical purposes the guiding coalition will form de novo. However even here, some initial leadership is required from an initiator and a small group of early supporters. I have re-instituted this as Step 1 in the revised model.

There are various ways this may occur, and this step cannot be ordained but will organically ensue. However once in existence, it needs to earn a social licence to continue and to organise itself. This organisation will involve both developing its own ethical framework, clarifying its assumptions, defining its language / terms, work out its operational processes, and possibly but not necessarily formalise its existence. The role of this body is to push without controlling, to drive communications, to invite participation (GetUp as an example of such a body).

Bob Douglas in his example of Castro in Cuba, emphasises the importance of leadership for envisioning, inspiring, motivating and coordinating change. The importance of leadership also emerges from the literature (Chapter 2). The literature also reminds us that leadership for change needs to be with the people, coordination and enabling rather than directive.

Step 2 Developing a Change Vision/Strategy – mapping change

The Guiding Coalition’s initial task is articulate a guiding vision that encompasses both a vision for how a different future may look, and a realistic means to bring that about. It is not possible to lay out a detailed vision of the world we want. Firstly that is impractical; we cannot forecast at that level of detail. Secondly we could not agree on what this might be, and would bog down in details. What is possible, is to set out and agree on a set of principles and values that describe what kind of society we think would lead to a ‘healthy people on a healthy planet’, and agree to pursue those. Others joining the movement can agree to, adopt and/or adapt this set of principles and values. These principles and values provide a unifying locus around which ongoing action can be structured.

In doing this we will be making assumptions about the ‘problem’, ‘solutions’ and the possible futures. The critical thing is that we make our assumptions overt.

Some general descriptions of how such a future may look and work, based in these principles and values, is possible as a way to open people’s imaginations to the possibility of change. The real power however would be in helping people arrive at their own conception of a future that meets their present disquiets.

The final aspect of this process is to recognise that all action occurs within and is influenced by the historical context that brought us to our present. Thus all attempts to influence the system is grounded in how things are now.

The change vision also has to describe the process of change in order that people are able to engage in and not be intimidated by the actual change process itself.  This has two aspects: outlining the process of how people are to be engaged and then what activity is to be undertaken to bring influence to bear on the systems. It presages the more detailed actions that follow in later stages.

Steps 3 Tapping into a sense of urgency – engaging others

In the Anthropocene, people will be drawn to this process of transformation with a sense that the world can be better, or more likely a sense that it is just not right. So there is less need to create the sense of urgency than to harness that which exists and mobilise it for change. This is a communications task, and combines eliciting people’s sense of disquiet with the current situation to generate an emotional response which will lead to an interest in looking for alternative possibilities. Various approaches are possible: a threats frame, a threat/risk framing. However marketing suggests that allowing people to describe their own perceptions and articulate unease leads better to involving them in the development of their own solutions.

Nearly simultaneously, people need some positive perspective and an offer of hope that there is action that can be taken to move away from the unpleasant situation. This is the Pain Island – Pleasure Island model (see essay ...).

This step encapsulate two related processes. The first is disseminating the visions about what a biosensitive society might be like and how it might be achieved. The second is to invite, motivate and inspire people to join us. In doing these, the communications needs to be honest about some of the inherent uncertainties about the ability to forecast where change may occur, how any change might play out, what unintended consequences may appear, and that the process is really about a journey rather than arriving at a destination. Also to be acknowledged is the iterative nature of the change process.

Communications need to occur using all possible media. Since the aim is to inspire and motivate people, allow them to tap into their disquiet about the current state of the world, and provide them with the hope to take action, using the ‘arts’ will be particularly important in order to speak to people through their emotions as well as their reason. To this end, using the neurological, cognitive and psychological research into cognitive processes will afford the crucial insights that will make the means and content of our communications the most effective.

This step includes the realisation that interpersonal communications are fraught. Semantics are vital. The project will need to develop a process for understanding and contesting definitions, and to continue to refine our understandings iteratively as the project develops and more people join. Refining our understanding of the meanings of our terms is necessary also to counter the current system’s marginalisation of the meanings of many of the key words such as value, culture, democracy and so forth.

The engagement process needs to reflect the values and principles by employing dialogue not just ‘communication’. It is a conversation to promote transformative change, to maintain interest and develop understanding and deepen knowledge.

Step 4 Empowering others

The steps of empowering are:

Introduce people to the concept of power and teach then the ability to discern the power relationships within a social situation; that is power analysis skills.

Teach people to recognise their own power individually and collectively. These powers include attitudes, experiences, knowledge and skills and the set of resources they have access to.

Teach people to exercise their power individually (being assertive) and collectively. The collective exercise of power involves being strategic and organised (see Blessed Are the Organized(2)), understanding and applying change theories, developing advocacy skills in all media and helping people understand governance, government and government processes.

In This is an Uprising, (3) Mark and Paul Engler provide an evidence based analysis of empowerment for change.

Of course, as discussed, the purpose is to initiate change that we hope will readjust the socio-political system to take humanity toward a more biosensitive and ecologically sustainable future, realising that the actual outcomes and benefits are not predicable.

Steps 5-7 Acting and embedding transformation

The action of transformation involves disruption of current societal systems, transgression beyond and subversion of current societal norms and boundaries, and hence will generate conflict and opposition. Conflict and opposition can be anticipated and will have to be managed as it arises in whatever form it takes.

Because the actual activity in these steps are borne out of the prior empowering and planning steps, there is little concrete to say about the processes. Action needs to occur across all of Meadows’ leverage points (4) and include both societal behaviour, institutional and paradigm change (Figure 2: System Leverage points, adapted from Meadows D. Leverage points. Places to Intervene in a System Hartland, Vermont, USA: The Sustainability Institute. 1999).

The common elements that emerge in these steps are:

• change requires a focus on agreed actions
• embedding change is a crucial objective of Steps 6-8 as it is very easy to backslide; Step 6 can win the battle but Steps 7-8 are necessary to consolidate the changes
• whilst it is true that significant culture change is really only likely at Step 8, being based on lived experience of the other steps, it is important to reflect that the other steps also require a culturally aware and informed approach – for example understanding the characteristics of the current culture(s) is essential for Steps 1-4.
• values and ethics key to culture change; but noted for example that the ‘faiths’ have been slow to support

Step 8 Assess process, progress and effect

Process – reflection about the methods and processes, tactics ... progress and effect – how much of what was intended been achieved, what still needs to be done, what changes required. Feeds into the next iteration of the transformation process.

References

1. Kotter JP. Leading change. Harvard Business School Press, Harvard. 1996.
2. Stout J. Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America Paperback-December 9, 2012: Princeton University Press; 2012.
3. Engler M, Engler P. This is an Uprising: how non-violent revolt is shaping the twenty-first century. New York: Bold Type books; 2017.
4. Meadows D. Leverage points. Places to Intervene in a System Hartland, Vermont, USA: The Sustainability Institute. 1999.

Download a pdf of Chapter 3 Transforming Cultures Framework

I want to preface my contributions to this session by noting that I come to this is a practitioner rather than a theoretician. I have many years ago studied legal and social and cultural and linguistic theory, and I have followed developments with interest, but my career has been in campaigning, communicating, politics and music. I’m very interested in any theoretical grounding you can offer me back, and I hope very much that what theory I offer isn’t too basic, or even wrong.

With that in mind, let me start by telling you a story, and we’ll return later to why.

Once upon a time, in the middle of a shining sea, there was a beautiful country. Crowned by snow-peaked mountains, edged by snow-white beaches, garlanded with magnificent forests. Most of its people, sadly, never saw much of its beauty. They spent their days in offices and shopping centres, caught in traffic between them, and feeling rushed. But they did feel pride in that natural beauty, and sadness deep in their hearts when they thought about losing it.

Every few years the people of this land came together to elect new leaders. Now, the people knew that the wild places that they loved were under threat, and they felt sad, but every day in a myriad ways they were told that that was an inevitable cost of modern life. When they watched television, when they listened to the radio, when they drove past the billboards on their commute, they were told that the path to happiness lay through material possessions. They heard themselves addressed as consumers, not citizens. So they pushed their sadness deeper inside and pressed on.

Now there were those in this country who saw where this was heading, and they worked hard to turn things around. They quoted facts and figures, they shared photographs on social media, they talked of the costs to the economy of failing to protect the environment. And most of the people agreed, yet they still turned away.

In their wisdom, the news media of this country felt that it was important for the citizens to be properly informed for their solemn democratic duty, so they set up a great many "fact check" sites to make sure those seeking election were held to account. On many key issues at this election, it was found that one party in particular was not being entirely truthful. It was the party that most strongly promoted the idea that material wealth would make us happy, and that protecting the environment was a nice but, in the end, frivolous path.

Come Election Day, it was that party which won a majority.

And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and people crying "but he's not telling the truth! What went wrong?"

Well, that’s why we’re here today. I think all of us agree that it is our culture that went wrong. And that what we need to address, fundamentally, if we’re to turn this around, is our culture.

This is not to say we should abandon facts and figures - far from it. Rather, we need to use better ways of communicating these facts. Because, far deeper than facts, it is our culture that determines what most of us believe and how we act, most of the time.

As a media advisor for Greenpeace and then Communications Director for The Greens, I used to get deeply frustrated when people told me that we couldn’t set our sights on ambitious climate action because “politics is the art of the possible”. But, having spent a year outside day-to-day politics, researching widely, discussing broadly and thinking deeply, I now believe it’s true.

Because I now see politics as the outward expression of underlying culture. Subcultures are still expressed through minority voices, but the governments we are able to elect and the policies we are able to implement, even the stories we can get reported, are limited by what the culture deems “possible”.

But equally I know that, if we set out to do what is possible, if we accept the limits of what is currently possible, we will fail. We will never succeed in driving the scale of change necessary to prevent catastrophic climate disruption.

That is not to say, either, that we need to set out to do the “impossible”. The lesson here is that it is our job to change what is possible. And that is about changing culture.

Let me dig a little deeper into what I mean about culture limiting what is possible.

In campaigning and politics, one of the central tasks of planning is power analysis, based on a pretty traditional structure: power is exercised by political and business leaders, mediated and often aided and abetted by media. Grassroots campaigning has always been a common approach to driving change at these levels, through a belief in democratic power being ultimately held by the people. My analysis has long placed media in a more central and powerful position than others’ analysis, partly due to its deep links with and hold over politicians and business people, but largely because I agree with McLuhan, Chomsky, Lakoff and so many others, even back to Gramsci, that power in our society is in the hands of those who control the story, those who set the boundaries of our discourse. In our modern societies, where thankfully state sanctioned violence is no longer a common form of coercive power, coercion is generally exercised by controlling the discourse and controlling the culture – controlling what we are allowed to say and think.  If an idea cannot be said – or if said, cannot be understood – then it cannot be implemented.

While ever the dominance of the current culture persists, none of the individuals involved – political or business leaders, journalists and editors, ordinary citizens – are able to envision a reality outside their current conception of the world. We know this from theory, but also from practice. Working on the Hill I got so tired of hearing phrases like “you guys are so far out there we can’t see your tail lights”, or “but we can’t do that, it would mean a different world”, or “that’s not how we do things”, or “politics is the art of the possible, so you have to change your demands to fit into what is possible”.

Well, “what is possible” is fundamentally a cultural question, wrapped up in how we collectively and individually conceive of the world around us and our place in it. In order to change the culture, we need to reprioritise cultural values, shift behavioural norms, and tell new culture-defining stories.

The “right” has now spent a generation redefining “what is possible”. And many of the “left” have ceded the ground on the basis of a failure to understand that “what is possible” is changeable. Our post-Fukuyama End of History politics has reached the point where those who advocate change on any substantial scale are dismissed as naïve and childish while those who want to indefinitely extend the status quo, despite clear scientific evidence that that is impossible, are seen as realists.

We see poll after poll showing overwhelming support for our issues while voting intention goes in the opposite direction. So many people support maintaining the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area yet vote for the Tasmanian Liberals when they vow to undo it; so many support renewable energy yet vote for Tony Abbott after he promises to wind it back. I believe what’s going on here relates to our ability to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time. People do support our views, but they don't see them as a priority. They come in a distant second to the "grown up", "mature", "responsible" priorities of making lots and lots of cash fast so we can buy new toys.

Central to the subconscious calculus going on here are values. Values are central to culture as it is largely through values (and the stories that embed them in our consciousness) that we establish our conception of how the world operates and what our place in the world is.

The most sophisticated work going on in this area, in my opinion, is the research undertaken by the Common Cause project in the UK.  Here, psychologists involved in values mapping – analysing the way the values which underpin our understanding of the world relate to each other in our minds – have shown that emphasising “extrinsic values” such as wealth, status and security undermines and suppresses “intrinsic values” of sustainability, compassion, creativity and universalism and vice versa.[1]

So no wonder, when we’re consistently told that consumption and materialism and wealth and status are the most important facets of life, sustainability and compassion are suppressed.

Values trump facts. But it goes even deeper than that.

A study by political scientist Brendan Nyhan and colleagues has found that strongly held political values actually trump our ability to do maths. We can read graphs really well. Except when they contradict our frames. This study showed a clear tendency for people with high numeracy skills to misread graphs about gun control or climate change, even when they’d just correctly read the same graph about soap.[2]

One rather special example I want to share with you highlights the power of culture and values to an extraordinary degree.

In recent years in the USA, there has been an extraordinary number of virgin births recorded.

A group of researchers decided to look into this. They found the young women, across the USA, who had given birth and denied having ever had sex. What they found is critically important to environmental and science communicators. They found that this phenomenon was, and I quote, ‘associated with cultural mores highly valuing virginity’. These young women, they found, truly believed that they were virgins. They had, it appears, subconsciously redefined sexual intercourse so that their own behaviour fitted into their culture.[3]

In this, I believe, is the most fascinating and difficult irony of what we might call our “post-Enlightenment” era: the discovery, through rational, scientific processes, that we humans are not, in fact, rational beings. One in a long line of researchers in this area, neuroscientist Drew Westen, has mapped cerebral activity when asking people political questions. He has demonstrated that political decisions are made in the amygdala, the ‘lizard brain’ which controls our fight or flight reflex, and our more highly evolved cortexes then go through a complex process of post-facto rationalisation, presenting a veneer of respectability to ourselves.[4]

Our political decisions, even though we might not want to believe it, are tribal, emotional, cultural.

That’s why cultural change is vital to any serious attempts to address the ecological crises facing our world.

Art, performance and culture

Art and culture, of course, have a very close relationship. Some people use the two words interchangeably. There are a couple of very interesting reflections on this relationship that I’ve found in my research and are worth quoting.

Firstly, theatre director Wesley Enoch beautifully explores the complex relationship between art, culture and nature from the perspective of an Indigenous Australian artist:

Art is a way of mapping our landscape, story is a way of placing ourselves in the continuum of time, dance teaches us to be the animals and plants we live with. Art has a purpose that is beyond distracting you from your life. Art is about personal connections to the world around you... expressing what you have at stake.[5]

Environmentalist and author, Bill McKibben brings a culturally very different perspective to the role of art in shaping our cultural response to climate change:

Art, like religion is one of the ways we digest what is happening to us, make the sense out of it that proceeds to action… We can register what is happening with satellites and scientific instruments, but can we register it in our imaginations, the most sensitive of all our devices?[6]

The social role of the arts goes back millennia. According to William Danaher, “[m]usic and rhythm have been central to human history, in part, by motivating humans to act for the benefit of the group over and above themselves.”[7] As John Street notes, “From Plato to the Frankfurt School and beyond, the case has been made for regarding music (especially popular music) as a source of power”.[8] Michael Kantor argues, for example, that:

The Greek tragedies were… performed to reinforce the resilience and openness that Greek society needed to be able to cope with uncertainty, both through reminders of the limits of the human condition, and the always-present potential for the Gods to render humanity secondary.[9]

Much deeper is the case put forward by Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison in their book Music and Social Movements, that the arts/cultural change relationship is not just one way, but their interaction can in fact be a “source of cultural transformation”:[10]

Our claim is that, by combining culture and politics, social movements serve to reconstitute both, providing a broader political and historical context for cultural expression, and offering, in turn, the resources of culture - traditions, music, artistic expression - to the action repertoires of political struggle… [T]he collective identity formation that takes place in social movements is a central catalyst of broader changes in values, ideas and ways of life.[11]

Indeed, they argue, cultural changes driven by political movements can also have a quite specific impact on the arts. For example, “the resurrection of bluegrass music, as well as many other traditional musics, was inspired by the civil rights movement, and its actualisation of history, its linking of the past with the present”.[12]

This brings us to one of the most critical aspects of culture that art has a strong influence on: that of identity. Art can help define the identity of a broad national or ethnic culture as with bluegrass, Jewish klezmer music, traditional dancing and more. But it can also help new and emerging subcultures define themselves in a way that can strengthen their internal coherence.

Andrew Ross, writing on youth music and culture, notes that:

the level of attention and meaning invested in music by youth is still unmatched by almost any other organised activity in society, including religion. As a daily companion, social bible, commercial guide and spiritual source, youth music is still the place of faith, hope and refuge. In the forty-odd years since “youth culture” was created as a consumer category, music remains the medium for the most creative and powerful stories about those things that often seem to count the most in our daily lives.[13]

We’ll return to the question of identity shortly. But for now let’s take that last line as a cue to turn to one of the most powerful and central aspects of culture – narrative, or story.

Narratives and culture

Culture is very frequently mediated or transferred through story.

We all know the power of story. It runs very deep in human nature that we are attuned to understanding and responding to stories far more than we are to facts and figures. Why else do fairy tales old and new, from Cinderella to Star Wars to Frozen, hold such sway? Why else would every religion be based on ritualised retelling of stories? Why else do we use mnemonics? ‘My very elderly mother’ is so much easier to remember than Mercury – Venus – Earth – Mars.

Creation myths, Bible stories and other allegories; all are used effectively to instruct us about our world and our place in it. The stories embed in our hearts and minds the values we are supposed to hold dear, those we are meant to prioritise over others. They depict, and thereby create and emphasise, cultural norms.

In order to create culture change, we need to tell new stories which will shift values and norms. And, in order to do that, we need to first understand what the cultural basis of our current situation is.

This is, of course, very much up for debate, but I suggest that the cultural basis is four-fold:

• the dominance of consumption/production/economy culture;
• the dominance of conservative/stasis/“change is too hard” culture;
• the dominance of hyper-individualism that overlies both and these; and
• expressed most particularly at the elite level, by Tony Abbott and right wing business and media leaders, the powerful cultural belief that natural resources are simply there for humans to make use of. And that actually has the power of creation myth, coming as it does from a one-eyed reading of the Bible, making it intensely difficult to shift.

These four cultural stories emphasise values of wealth, status, material possessions, and a narrowing of the value of security to the smallest scale – protecting me, my family, my culturally homogenous white bread country, and excluding the broader conception of security as a universalist need for us all to work together to learn to share this tiny planet of ours. There is clear evidence that our society is becoming less trusting of others, less empathetic, less tolerant of difference, more fractured and polarised.

Put these four stories and the values they represent together and you find not just the heart of why we are not tackling climate change but also why we accept dehumanising brutalisation of refugees, why we flee public schooling, why we no longer join unions, why we fail to face up to our past and present mistreatment of Indigenous Australians, and so much more.

Here is my first attempt at creating four threads to a new story that match and respond to the four cultural drivers I articulated above:

• Readdressing what makes us happy, is at the heart of it. We need to demonstrate through modelled behaviour, through experiential programs and through new stories, that consumption and materialism do not make us happy. There is actually reason to believe that if some of us stopped campaigning for climate action and started campaigning towards greater happiness, we might be more successful.
• In order to move from a culture of stasis to a culture of transition, we need to tell stories that explain that “this world is over”, that “change is coming – whether it’s positive or negative change is our choice”.
• To overcome the hyper-individualism, we need to rebuild the power of community as stronger than the individual, through modelling, story and experience.
• We need to rebuild a culture that understands that human civilisation is entirely dependent on the natural world.

Through telling these stories, modelling behaviour, providing experiential opportunities and empathetic encounters, we CAN effectively reprioritise cultural values, pushing intrinsic values at least into balance with the extrinsic values which so utterly dominate our current culture, if not eventually putting them into a position of dominance.

Culture and change

Now story, of course, isn’t the only way to embed culture. Personal experiences, empathic encounters, immersive experiences and modelled behaviour are also very powerful.

One non-artistic idea I want to dip into briefly is the cultural problem caused by our disconnection from the natural world and the potential for cultural change this raises.

This is something that has been explored quite a bit recently, especially led by Richard Louv and his description of Nature Deficit Disorder.[14] The fact that we are bringing up generations of children who have less and less direct experience of playing in nature has serious implications for how we understand our relationship with nature. How can we love nature, how can we fear and mourn its loss, if we have no direct experience of it?

Fascinatingly, it goes a lot deeper than this. Louv points to medical and psychological research attributing all sorts of problems to a lack of connection with the natural world, from obesity to depression.

There are now several organisations dedicated to driving broad cultural change through engaging children and adults with nature, the most prominent being Nature Play, Natural Change, and Project Wild Thing.

Through modelling and immersive experience, as well as the stories they tell, these projects can make a significant contribution to the fourth thread of my narratives above – the story that our society is a small part of, and entirely dependent on, the natural world.

Another left-field idea I have recently come across is the Human Library project, which aims to foster community and experiences of universalism by asking people to register themselves as books to be borrowed and read by others interested in broadening their horizons. I am keen to find out more about this idea but can’t yet tell you more about it.

To return to the role of arts in culture, one of its central roles is in identity formation, as raised earlier.

“Identity processes are inherent in all movements,” Rosenthal and Flacks explain, “[a]nd music is the way many first try on that identity... Indeed, music is a major resource for identity construction in contexts that are remote from the political”.[15] “Music and group identity,” they say, “may become so intertwined as to be synonymous in the minds of group members and outsiders”.[16] “Music is a basic tool, especially for young people, in the ‘cultural map-making’” that all people must do.”[17]

As part of this identity process, art can act as a social legitimiser. “While the music creates the bond, the listeners of … may then be motivated to carry out their political ideals not because the music ‘says’ they should but because many others feel the same way and that it is acceptable to express those opinions”.[18]

Possibly the most powerful role for music in social and cultural change, then, is the power of artistic work infused with that sense of identity to spread ideas wider. As Rosenthal and Flacks say:

The ethos developed in scenes and subcultures also functions powerfully to spread a worldview beyond their boundaries … What begins percolating isn’t a coherent ideology, but… “structures of feelings”, part emotional, part rational, a heady brew of social ideas, fashions, music, and so forth, both precursor to a developing ideology and more than simply an ideology, involving “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” by each individual.[19]

One of the early deliberate attempts to create this kind of deep change using artists was taken by early union organisers and the Communist Party in the USA, bringing in non-involved musicians to recruit supporters. The advent of radio, which spread songs beyond the reach of the musicians themselves, helped radicalise millworkers, becoming an alternative form of information from papers and mill owners.[20]

Taking this approach to perhaps its logical conclusion, the Highlander Centre, one of the first activist training centres in the world, involved a substantial focus on music, recruiting and training musicians and workshopping campaign songs.[21] “We Shall Overcome” is the most famous of many protest songs of the 1960s that had its origins there. The recent emergence of “Tipping Point” projects in the UK and Australia, which bring together artists, scientists and campaigners to work on climate change, might be considered to follow a similar approach.

Perhaps selfishly, I want to mention in this context the project I have recently, started, Green Music Australia.

As both a musician and environmentalist, the idea behind this project is that, if we musicians can start to convincingly walk the talk, if we can green up our own industry through cutting waste streams of things like plastic water bottles and plates at venues and festivals, by using LED stage lights, efficient refrigeration, and on site renewable energy, and by tackling transport to and from gigs, we can become very powerful cultural leaders.

By tying together modelling of behaviour, experience and participation, both for the musicians themselves and for their surrounding industry and audience, and the cultural power of the music itself, the idea is that this will drive change at a deeper level than has yet been achieved by the environment movement.

I want to conclude with what I find the most fascinating idea of all, and filled with opportunity for the role of the arts in driving climate action. That is contained in a recent paper published by Common Cause suggesting that engagement in arts & culture in and of itself can encourage values of compassion, social justice, and sustainability.

This is an idea that has been instinctively noted before. For example, arts educator Bridget McKenzie writes that “the skills of critical thinking, empathy, imaginative problem-solving and resourceful making will be essential in helping humanity rise to the many challenges climate change presents.”[22] But the evidence base in the values mapping work is new.

The value of care for the environment sits on the map close to values of creativity and curiosity, amongst the values collectively referred to as “intrinsic”, and opposite “extrinsic” values, such as desire for more material possessions, social status and power.

If we accept the sensible proposition that engagement in arts and culture activates values such as “curiosity” and “creativity,” then the implication from the research … would be that the intrinsic portion of the human motivational system could be encouraged and strengthened, while the extrinsic portion could be suppressed, as a result of participating in arts and cultural activities… As such, it may be that the more that one engages in artistic activity for these kinds of intrinsic reasons, the more the intrinsic portion of the motivational system will be strengthened, and thus the weaker extrinsic values will become.[23]

There is more research to be done in this area to confirm the link in practice, but it may well be that, beyond their role in helping to most effectively communicate messages and support social movements for change, the arts may in and of themselves change our culture to one more conducive to tackling the climate crisis.

This is a very brief overview of my current research and thinking. I hope it is provocative and useful and welcome any feedback.

References

[1] See http://valuesandframes.org/

[2] Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler, ‘When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions’ (2010) 32(2) Political Behavior 303.

[3] US researchers ponder modern day virgin births, British Medical Journal, December 17, 2013, http://www.bmj.com/press-releases/2013/12/17/us-researchers-ponder-modern-day-virgin-births.

[4] Westen, Drew, Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (PublicAffairs, 2008).

[5] Tipping Point Australia, Greening the Arts: Thinkpieces for Zero Carbon Future and A Survey of Sustainable Arts Practices (October 2010), 4.

[6] William McKibben, ‘Imagine That: What the Warming World Needs Now is Art, Sweet Art’, Grist Magazine, 21 April 2005.

[7] William Danaher, ‘Music and Social Movements’ (2010) 4(9) Sociology Compass 811, 813.

[8] John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’ (2003) 38 Government and Opposition 113, 116.

[9] Tipping Point Australia, Greening the Arts: Thinkpieces for Zero Carbon Future and A Survey of Sustainable Arts Practices (October 2010), 11.

[10] Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.

[11] Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7.

[12] Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.

[13] Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (Routledge, 1994, 3.

[14] Louv, Richard, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books Of Chapel Hill, 2005.

[15] Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 165.

[16] Rob Rosenthal, unpublished work extracted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 94.

[17] Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 95.

[18] Rob Rosenthal, unpublished work extracted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012),165.

[19] Rob Rosenthal, unpublished work extracted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 100.

[20] Rob Rosenthal, unpublished work extracted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 75.

[21] Rob Rosenthal, unpublished work extracted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 205. See also Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3.

[22] Bridget McKenzie, ‘Cultural Education for a Changed Planet’ (2008) Spring Engage 21 19, 19.

[23] Professor Tim Kasser, in Mission Models Money & Common Cause, The Art of Life: Understanding How Participation in Arts and Culture Can Affect our Values (2013) <http://valuesandframes.org/ download/reports/The%20Art%20Of%20Life%20-%20MMM%20and%20Common%20Cause.pdf>, 10-11.

A pdf of this Cultural change is essential to tackle climate change can be downloaded here.

Please open this pdf to view a copy of their joint presentation made to the Human Ecology Forum.

Forum Theme: Transforming Culture

Abstract: In the first presentation of the Cultural Transformation theme, the need for radical cultural change to avoid the collapse of civilization was argued.   The aim of this next presentation in the Theme is to explore ideas around culture.

It offers a number of theoretical approaches to understanding culture and the centrality of communication and technology in creating and changing culture:

• contemporary ways of understanding what culture is;
• how cultures develop;
• how cultures shape notions of identity and experience; and
• how they influence decision-making and behaviour at various scales; individually corporately, nationally and internationally.

The presentation aims to provide some clarity and parameters for further discussions of ways to achieve better environmental outcomes for the planet and its current and future inhabitants. While concepts of culture are the main focus, some attention will be paid to the notion of ‘transformation’ and ways to work towards this in relation to cultural change for improved environmental outcomes.

Tim:

Culture defines how we act

Politics – the art of the possible. What is possible is culturally defined.

To change what is possible, change culture.

Common Cause Project: Extrinsic values (wealth, power, display) undermine Intrinsic values (love nature, compassion)

Values drive learning and belief ie frame what is learnt and believed.

Aileen:

Culture: multiple concepts of meaning

Culture: transference (exchange) and creation of meanings; culture is learnt.

Usefulness of post-modernism and feminist theory: power as the core element of culture and of change. Culture is political. Power creates knowledge. Power is agency, and interacts dynamically with systems.

But as culture is a social construct, it can be deconstructed, and changed.

Culture: a dominant culture, but culture is not monolithic; there are contested elements and tensions that allow alliances and collaborations, and provide openings for change.

Balloons = people; rock = culture; Moving the balloons, no lasting effect; moving the rock, the balloons stay moved. The right has been moving the rock.

Contemporary Theories:

• Power relations and networks
• Agency and Change – capacity for choice / action
• Cultural identity – shifting, produced interdicursivity
• Contradiction, contestation, fragmentation.

Communications are central to culture.

Tim:

Art – identity – culture

Stories and narratives – powerful; create ‘reality’ and maintain cultural norms.

Therefore new stories create a new reality.

Stories about reconnecting humans and nature; using multiple media, experiential learning, (green Music Australia), use of music / dance, theatre. Art neurologically linking to intrinsic values.

Q&A

Research on culture change: renaissance; Ming dynasty. Printing press, internet.

Place of media reform?

Getting new stories out: easy to write? No see literature on “capture truth” (Liz Boulton).

Power of metaphor. Power of coherent narrative (right vs left in coherence of their narratives)

Further reading

Common Cause Project, Brendan Nihan, http://valuesandframes.org/

Drew Weston, The Political Brain,

Corbs 2013, Disruption of Scale,

Chapter 5 The Transition to a Biosensitive Society

Barry Newell

Human Ecology Forum, Forum Theme: Transforming Culture

Abstract: The transition to a biosensitive society requires major cultural reforms. I will outline some of the insights that have come from an attempt to develop a conceptually coherent view of this challenge. The work involved the blending of two sets of ideas—ideas about biosensitive societies developed by Stephen Boyden, and ideas about the behaviour of social-ecological systems developed by myself, Katrina Proust, and our colleagues. This work has produced a systems version of Boyden's Transition Framework. The new version of the framework underlies a practical way to look at the interplay between culture, community, human health and wellbeing, and ecosystem health. I anticipate a robust discussion.

This talk is based on Chapter 7 of the book, Understanding Human Ecology, by Rob Dyball and Barry Newell (2014).

Taking Stephen Boyden’s model for health as the start point, and Stephen’s now 20 year old call for a theoretical framework and a methodology for human ecology to assist understanding of and improve communication about this field, Barry described briefly a systems dynamic approach and then outlined an application remodelling the biosensitivity triangle into a systems diagram.

The premise is that to permit change in the dynamics of a situation one needs to have a general approach to that situation.

Figure 1 Biosensitivity triangle

The overall description of the conceptual modelling approach and systems thinking is outlined in the article links her and on the Human Ecology Forum website. In brief, understanding the operation of reinforcing and balancing feedbacks in systems terms is core to planning change in any system.

Secondly the outputs of a system are a function of the parts of that system, their interrelationships and the feedbacks. In analysing a complex system, the methodology has a series of steps to work through that enables the macro level system and the interrelationships and feedbacks to be maintained at more detailed scales. This involves feedback guided analysis (or holistic reduction). First an overview of the system is made in which the components or variables to be analysed are chosen, then a problem space diagram is created of that part of the system to be studied and finally from that the specific system of interest is isolated and mapped for analysis. At each stage there is increasing specificity of the variables and their links.

The figure 7.5 gives an example of this systems diagram. Arrows show influence which is either an action or a feedback. Notice there are two kinds of links: action links (numbered 1, 3, 5 and 7) and learning links (2, 4 and 6), by whereby the ‘culture’ finds out about the state of its environments.

This system model is adapted from Stephen Boyden’s Transitions Framework (not shown: see http://www.fennerfoundation.org.au/our-projects/biosensitivefutures/part-3-our-place-in-nature/7.-a-transition-framework ). In it the State of Cultural Paradigms is the focus variable; it is the one we wish to influence. The process of change is of course more complicated and so in the Figure 7.6 one can see the added variables ‘desire to modify paradigm’.

Editorial Commentary part 1.

A more complete commentary can be found in the following tab.

The discussion following the presentation focused on understanding the system modelling better, and did not progress to looking into how using these system diagrams might help with the process of designing a social change.

Building on the ideas presented however, and looking at the focus variable State of Cultural Paradigms one can begin to consider how to approach a change process.  The processes (arrows labelled 2c, 4c and 6c) provide balancing feedbacks from the dominant paradigm into the system that usually serves to protect the paradigm by resisting change.

At this scale of modelling, strengthening pressure for change would need to come from one of the other State variables (Health and Wellbeing, Community or the Ecosystem) via influence along 2a, 4a or 6a to increase the desire to modify paradigms.

Not attempted at this seminar was an exercise in scaling into more details to help develop deeper dialogue about this system and how to bring influence to bear to change it.

However, in part 3 of Understanding Human Ecology, there is discussion about the need for the cultural transformation which Boyden prescribes in his work that lead to these presentations. While no plan and timetable are laid out, I will quote and summarise some relevant portions here:

“In the Anthropocene, humans have emerged as a new Earth-system force, exerting strong evolutionary selection pressure on the biosphere and significantly affecting energy and material flows at a global scale. Having developed such capacity, humans [as sentient and moral beings] must assume moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions” (p. 197).

“Human ecologists interested in understanding how people and communities might change the way they see the world around them and imagine its future, so that what currently seems impossible is perceived as plausible and, indeed, desirable” (p. 199).

Cultural Transformation: “will occur only if the dominant paradigm changes, and this will require political engagement from an active concerned citizenry” whose values and the convenience of expressing them are aligned (p. 176).

The drive to support a transformation rests on two grounds:

• Self interest – an individual’s own wellbeing is linked to the wellbeing of very other species and the good functioning of the biophysical ecosystem processes
• Ethical considerations – what impact is each individual having on others given the others’ right to pursue their own wellbeing; that is consciously balancing one’s own entitlements (factoring in values, convenience, desires, comfort) with the entitlements of others.

So, the desire to modify paradigms is influenced by recognition of the human place as a force of nature in the Anthropocene mediated by both self-interest and values, and the resulting change in the State of Cultural Paradigms “this will require political engagement from an active concerned citizenry”.

Peter Tait

Further information:

Further information about systems analyses and conceptual modelling are available in Dyball R, Newell B. Understanding Human Ecology: A systems approach to sustainability. London, New York: Routledge; 2014.

Download a pdf of this talk here.

Chapter 5 The Transition to a Biosensitive Society Commentary

Editorial commentary Peter Tait

Commentary

Taking Stephen Boyden’s vision of a biosensitive society as the starting point, and Stephen’s now 28 year old call for a theoretical framework and a methodology for human ecology to assist understanding of and improve communication about this field, Barry described briefly a system dynamics approach that has the potential to support the process of transitioning from a business-as-usual society to a biosensitive society. The overall description of the conceptual modelling approach and systems thinking is outlined in the associated articles on the Human Ecology Forum website (Newell 2012 GEC.pdf and Newell and Proust 2012 CCM Intro.pdf).

In brief, understanding the operation of reinforcing and balancing feedbacks in systems terms is core to planning change in any system. The response of a system to management interventions depends on the feedback interactions between the parts of that system. But any attempt to take account of all of the interactions soon runs into overwhelming complexity. Newell and Proust (2012: 13) have devised an approach to this problem that they call ‘feedback-guided analysis’ (or holistic reduction). The methodology enables the macro level system interrelationships and feedbacks to be maintained at more detailed levels of analysis. The method also provides a shared visual language to assist communication of these complex ideas. These are summarised in the actual presentation, found in Transition.pdf.

The discussion following the presentation focused on understanding the system modelling better and did not progress to looking into how using this approach might help with the process of designing a social change.

Building on the ideas presented, however, and looking at the variable State of Cultural Paradigms (see Figure 7.5), one can begin to consider how to approach a change process.  For change to occur it is necessary for the society to learn (learning processes are represented by arrows labelled 2, 4 and 6 in Figure 7.5) as they perceive the impact of their actions on the state of their environment and on human health and wellbeing. The process is not straightforward, of course, because there are additional influence links (not shown in Figure 7.5) whereby the dominant paradigms tend to protect themselves by inhibiting the learning processes.

Not attempted at this seminar was an exercise in scaling into more details to help develop deeper dialogue about the dynamics of societal change and how to bring influence to bear to change basic assumptions—and so change society. Perhaps later in the year.

A pdf of this commentary can be downloaded here.

This chapter 6, Towards Eco-centric Governance in the Sustainocene with Global Artificial Photosynthesis by Tom Faunce, is available as a pdf of the presentation here.

Forum Theme: Transforming Culture

Abstract: This presentation explored the hypothesis that the great expansions of human sympathy and conscience that underpinned many substantial reforms in governance systems (such as abolition of slavery and of child labour as well as enfranchisement of women) were driven by technological revolutions that made such change economically feasible. It critically analysed how governance systems should begin planning for a Sustainocene period in which the globalisation of artificial photosynthesis (the production of hydrogen fuel and oxygen from using sunlight to split water and the making of basic foods and fertilizers through reduction of atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide) allows human beings to dwell on earth as good stewards of its ecosystems for millions of years. Such a Sustainocene period, it was argued, will be characterised by local or community-produced agriculture and industry that lay stable preconditions for cultures with a greater emphasis on contemplative traditions.

Reflection: report and commentary

Thomas Faunce and Peter Tait

Report

This presentation drew together two intersecting threads: that historical cultural transitions have been enabled by and consequent to change in technology, and that control of this technology gives particular institutions in society undue influence over the governance of society. Since the industrial revolution, it is the corporate sector (particularly those earning profits directly or indirectly from fossil fuels) who, with the assistance of so-called free-market ideology, that have altered the nature of our basic social contract, the ethical and legal rules of our democracy in ways that cede sovereignty and undermine the foundational social virtues of justice, equity, respect for human dignity and environmental sustainability. So much so that rather than perhaps we should be referring to our current era as the ‘Corporatocene’ rather than Crutzen’s ‘Anthropocene’. (Crutzen 2002)

Corporate entities, although considered by corporate law to be a hybrid species of people (capable, for example, of suing for defamation or to enjoy corporate free speech in some jurisdictions), resemble those ‘zombies’ much evaluated in the thought experiments of ‘consciousness researchers: entities that appear to be alive, but lack conscience, the ability for self-reflection or self-abnegation for the good of others. Their primary legally required function is to maximise profit for shareholders and they hold little of consequence outside this short-term objective. The consequences are summarised by The Five ‘Ps’ that characterise life in the ‘Corporatocene’: population; poverty, preparation for war, profits and pollution.

The dominance of global corporate governance has precipitated the present global ecological crisis characterised by Epoch of profound human interference with various ‘safe’ boundaries for human occupation of the earth. These include land use and land cover, coastal and maritime ecosystems, atmospheric composition, riverine flow, nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus cycles, physical climate, food chains, biological diversity and natural resources. Pressure on such ‘safe’ planetary boundaries as human population 10 billion by 2050 with associated energy consumption rising from ≈400EJ/yr to over 500EJ/yr (Steffen, Crutzen, McNeill 2007).

Using a medical analogy, our situation is now like that of 19^th Century medicine. We have good diagnostic skills and the capacity to determine when such ‘safe’ planetary boundaries are being breached, much like we could diagnose abnormal physiological parameters in human health in that period. Interventions have been proposed, but remain at the level of weak planetary therapeutics (see Box 1). But have yet to develop the therapeutic armamentarium to affect planetary pathologies. Hence there is a need not only to specify ‘safe’ planetary boundaries as a type of world healthy physiological framework (that could be supported by international or common heritage of humanity legal obligations) as wellas , most importantly, development of a planetary therapeutic.

Access to large amounts of locally produced clean energy clearly is one technological method that can begin to open up ways to both meet energy needs and address the power of corporations. This is because the societal / cultural changes needed to do the one will address the other. Global Artificial photosynthesis (GAP) by capturing sunlight on every available sun-exposed surface and using ‘biochemical’ means to store that energy locally, in addition to supporting measures (see Box 1) will improve local resilience and productivity, and enhance local food and fuel production, and begin to remove power from energy and agricultural corporations. The process of introducing GAP to and promoting its uptake could also enhance democratisation of local communities.

Research into this technology is still in its early days. However multiple centres around the planet are looking at using sunlight to split water as a source of hydrogen and oxygen while absorbing atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia (when mixed with hydrogen) fuel and fertiliser as well as carbohydrates (edible and non-edible). Utilising such technology, all human-built structures (buildings, roads, vehicles) on the earth’s surface can become sources of fuel, food and positive contributors to the environment as they in effect do photosynthesis more efficiently than trees and grass. One impact of this distributed food and fuel will be to de-corporatise fuel and food, this is to make its production and distributed less centralized, and mass-scale as well as less dependent on long-distance transport and packaging.

NH₃ provides bulk of world’s fertilizer but Haber-Bosch process is energy intensive (1-2% world’s annual energy production). Some trees and grasses can convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia (NH₃) (via nitrogenase) via nodules in their roots. The energy for this process comes from sunlight. So another aspect of AP could be photosynthesis of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen and the hydrogen from water splitting. NH₃ meets US DOE 2015 H₂ storage target for H₂ based transportation fuels-can be blended with diesel for a fuel that releases H₂O and N₂ when combusted.

Lessons for distributing AP technology

Life cycle analyses of GAP are need to facilitate realistic predictions at the research development level, through to scalable production. Rapid deployment for unregulated use i.e. for localised H2-based fuel production at residential or farm level, requires recycling methods, environmental risk assessment and monitoring methods.

Continuous technological improvements in AP will require stable and certain incentive laws for domestic and community uptake. World Bank energy investment schemes and scalable business models with start-up funds derived from carbon pricing schemes or taxes on global financial transactions

There is at present poor public understanding of benefits of GAP. There is also a high likelihood that the globally highly profitable fossil fuel industries will resist aspects of GAP, despite attendant benefits to the poor and to the environment. One instructive lesson here involves the failure of the photovoltaics (pv) industry in the 1970’s and 80’s as a result of patents being bought up and legislative schemes for subsidies being constrained. One purpose of a GAP project will be to fund a protective shield of relevant ethicists, policy and governance experts. This needs to be done quickly as energy, food, water security and climate change problems associated with the expanding global human population constrain the time for developing GAP so it can meet such challenges. Window to develop governance of GAP before efficiencies rapidly increase, devices marketed and patents secured. Long lead time to get GAP into policy space. GAP lacks basic supporting governance documents at national and international levels.

If Carbon price is non existent at a national level or set too low, this will not incentivize venture capital investments in new renewable energy technologies such as GAP. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol, is encouraging investments in emission-reduction projects in developing nations, is biggest offset market- 95 percent of total spot and secondary emissions offset trading.

Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is a mechanism that constrains democratically elected governments by allowing foreign investors to sue before panels of trade arbitrators. Such a pro-corporate governance mechanisms emerges from the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) signed in Lisbon in December 1994 with its associated Protocol on Energy Efficiency and Related Environmental Aspects (PEEREA) (both in force April 1998) as well as BITS and the TPPA. ISDS privileges MNCs in global governance. Will it be misused as an anti-competitive mechanism (like decreased OPEC oil price in 1970s-80s) to shut down renewable energy initiatives?

Once answer is to declare photosynthesis in its natural and artificial forms common heritage of humanity under international law. As such international law would ensure no private or public appropriation (ie., through patenting) of the whole of that process; no legal entity should own the entirety of photosynthesis in its natural or artificial forms. Representatives from all nations could manage artificial photosynthesis resources on behalf of all (via a special agency). All nations could equitably share benefits of artificial photosynthesis, linking the concept to global public good. No weaponry could be developed using artificial photosynthesis technology (ie., devices to destroy energy and food security). Making photosynthesis in its natural and artificial forms common heritage of humanity under international law could assist its being preserved for the benefit of future generations and their ecosystems.

Towards a global project on AP

One strategy for working towards a global project on AP involves developing regional and national centers of excellence- competing-but bidding for funding and benchmarking with international collaborating groups. Regional and national groups also could coalesce into consortia with data-sharing arrangements. Another approach involves collaboration mainly on global governance architecture, for instance through international agencies such as UN and UNESCO. A further technique could facilitate collaboration on sharing major infrastructure being built into grant requirements and proposals. Such models could utilise corporate and private sponsorship for GAP with major researchers as directors. They could also draw upon and modify governance models of existing macroscience projects- HGP; ITER, CERN.

What we are looking at here is a macroscience project on GAP similar to the Human Genome Project, the Russian and US Space Missions, the Hubble Telescope or the Nuclear Fusion (ITER) project to achieve this.

Great moral revolutions such as the abolition of slavery, emancipation of women and the cessation of child labour were based on the emergence of ideals in values and virtue. Yet in each case it was the advent of new technology that supported the economy that permitted these ideals to be indulged in governance arrangements.

Commentary

GAP could provide the same catalyst for what Boyden calls a Phase 5 Transition to a biosensitive society. In Faunce’s terms, this transition is from a human-centric worldview to a nature- / universe-centric one. Humans take their moral role of stewardship seriously, natural entities are afforded enforceable rights, and social institutions designed to permit this enforcement.

Historical changes in technology have been particularly in relation to developments to permit better harvesting of energy. This parallels David Christion’s thesis in Maps of Time wherein access to increased energy permits expansion of the human project, until the next limit is reached. (Christian 2004) In our modern society, the sector of society having particular undue influence has been energy corporations, reflecting this importance of energy supply, followed by transport (also energy but mobility too) and more recently the financial industry. Faunce’s contention about ceding sovereignty to corporations is similar to Deetz idea that corporations have colonised out culture and our society. (Deetz 1992)

The application of GAP technology would enhance the transformations in local democratic governance and energy resilience being advocated by the Transition Towns movement. (Hopkins 2009)

References

Christian, D. (2004). Maps of Time: an introduction to big history. Berkely, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press.

Crutzen, P. J. (2002). "Geology of Mankind." Nature 415(6867): 23-24.

Deetz, S. A. (1992). Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communication and the Politics of Everyday Life. Albany, SUNY Press.

Hopkins, R. (2009). The Transition Handbook. Sydney Finch Publishing.

Steffen W, Crutzen PJ, McNeill JR, The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment. 2007; 36(8); 614-621

Michalsky et al Energy 2012; 42: 251-260

Lan et al Int. J Hydrogen Energy 2012; 37: 1482-1494

Faunce TA. Ch 21. 'Future Perspectives on Solar Fuels' in  Wydrzynski T and Hillier W (eds) Molecular Solar Fuels Book Series: Energy. Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge UK (2012) 506-528

Faunce TA Governing Nanotechnology for Solar Fuels: Towards a Jurisprudence of Global Artificial Photosynthesis. Renewable Energy Law and Policy 2011; 2: 163-168

Faunce TA . Will International Trade Law Promote or Inhibit Global Artificial Photosynthesis Asian Journal of WTO and International Health Law and Policy (AJWH) 2011; 6: 313-347

Faunce TA, Lubitz W, Rutherford AW, MacFarlane D, Moore, GF, Yang P, Nocera DG, Moore TA, Gregory DH, Fukuzumi S, Yoon KB, Armstrong FA, Wasielewski MR, Styring S. Energy and Environment Case for a Global Project on Artificial Photosynthesis. Energy and Environmental Science (2013) vol 6 695

Faunce TA, Styring S, Wasielewski MR, Brudvig GW, Rutherford AW, Messinger J, Lee AF, Hill CL, deGroot H, Fontecave M, MacFarlane DR, Hankamer B, Nocera DG, Tiede DM, Dau H, Hillier W, Wang, Amal R. “Artificial Photosynthesis as a Frontier Technology for Energy Sustainability” Energy Environ. Sci., (2013) vol 6 1074

Faunce TA (ed)Open source edition of Australian Journal of Chemistry Volume 65 Number 6 2012 Artificial Photosynthesis: Energy, Nanochemistry, and Governance

Faunce TA Towards a global solar fuels project- Artificial photosynthesis and the transition from anthropocene to sustainocene. Procedia Engineering 2012; 49: 348 – 356

A pdf of the commentary and summary section is available here.

Chapter 7 Transformational cultural change in Australia: What will make it happen?

Bob Douglas

Human Ecology Forum Fenner School Friday 13 June. 2014

Abstract

I have just returned from a three-week tour of Cuba and am struck by the despondency of most of the people to whom I have spoken since my return about the state of our nation and its future. The recent federal budget has helped to cement in place for now, a national culture of environmental and climate denial and market fundamentalism. That this has happened with such speed and clarity, says something about the state of Australian democracy and those who currently represent us. Many of us have been talking for years about the need for a transformational shift from anthropocentric thinking to eco-centric thinking and the requirement for a new national narrative. That promised land now seems further away than ever and because of my recent Cuban experience I am prompted to explore the factors which led to revolutionary change in that country in the 1950’s and to ask the question, “how do radical cultural transformations occur? My conclusion is that they depend both on inspirational leadership and crisis opportunities. This presentation will also build on my experience of attempting to foster transformational change through three NGO’s: SEE-Change ACT, Australia21 and Transform Australia, with which I have been actively involved since my retirement from academic public health in 2001. It is hoped that this could be an interactive discussion about the prospects for radical change in Australia within the near term future.

Slide 1. Transformational cultural change in Australia: What will make it happen?

2 . I have just recently spent three weeks in Cuba and thought that I would begin by talking about that experience. Then I will touch on what we understand about system transformations and move on to what has been my central preoccupation for the past six months:- understanding financial inequality in Australia and the world. I will then move onto a discussion of Australian culture in 2014, and a suggestion about the prerequisites for cultural transformation.  I hope we will then have about 20 minutes for a two way discussion about what will make change happen of the kind that I, for one, consider that Australia urgently  needs.

3. My own background is that I trained in medicine and worked as a physician in Papua New Guinea in the 60s. This led me to a growing focus upon public health rather than clinical practice and resulted in me coming to ANU about 25 years ago to lead the development of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. One of my biggest learning experiences in that post was from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research with whom we worked on the issue of inequality. I learnt particularly the value of multidisciplinary activity and on my retirement was involved with others in the development of a national body called Australia21, which seeks to bring big thinkers from many disciplines together to think about the issues that confront Australia in the 21st-century. That experience in turn led me to a recognition that if transformative change is to occur, it must begin at the grassroots in the hearts and minds of ordinary Australians. In turn that led to the development of a community body, SEE-Change ACT, The S-E-E of SEE-Change stands for Society, Environment and Economy and all of these will need to change if Australia is to make the essential transformative change that I think is needed. In late January of this year, Australia 21 with collaboration from the Australia Institute and Dr Sharon Friel from the ANU and also the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Parliamentary member for Fraser Dr Andrew Leigh, held a roundtable at Parliament house on the issue of inequality in Australia and the world. And much of today's talk deals with the report of that roundtable that was launched this week.
4. But let me say a bit about my recent Cuban experience. Cuba's modern history began in the early 1500s as a Spanish colony. The United States always had a real interest in the richness of Cuba and fought the Spanish in a war in the late 1800s. Throughout the 20th century until the 1950s, Cuba was theoretically an independent republic but its independence was dominated by US supported capitalism and Mafia style corruption. From the 1930s, a key contributor to the politics was a man named Batista who seized power in 1952 as a dictator with little interest in the welfare of the population, which was then about half its present size of 11 million. The population is a mix of colour and background, the land having been previously populated by American Indians and then strong inter-marriage between African slaves brought in by French and Spanish landowners. There was a strong underlying resentment at the oppression of the poor by the rich which Fidel Castro, a brilliant young lawyer tried to capitalise on in a failed attempt to overthrow Batista in 1952. On trial for his life, he mounted an extraordinary defence in which in 2 1/2 hours he laid out all that was wrong with the Batista regime and presented in detail, his own plans for a revolution aimed at improving the lot of the average Cuban. He went to jail for 22 months but was released because of pressure from the community and escaped to Mexico where he conspired with an Argentinian doctor, Che Guevara who returned to Cuba with Castro and for several years worked with him in a mountain hideout to plan the resolution which came in 1959. Other events in Cuban history were the 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion by Americans supported Cuban-American forces and the 1961 missile crisis when the world came close to nuclear war as a result of the intention by the USSR to install missiles aimed at the United States on Cuban soil. Despite the USSR back down, Russia continued to provide great support to the development of the Cuban communist revolution, and the country prospered despite the antagonisms of the United States until the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1991. Since that time, Cuba has been in economic crisis, that has not been helped by continuing crippling US sanctions. Fidel Castro stepped down as President a couple of years ago and his brother Raoul is now the president and in his 80s. There are now modest efforts underway to introduce market forces to a centrally planned economy, while maintaining equity.
5. Let me quote from Castro's trial speech of 1952. The words have some resonance for Australia in 2014. He said, "The future of the country and the solutions of its problems cannot continue to depend on the selfish interests of a dozen financiers nor on the cold calculations of profits that 10 or 12 elite think up in their air conditioned offices. The problems of the Republic can be solved only if we dedicate ourselves to fight for it with the same energy, honesty and patriotism our liberators had when they created it."

6.During my visit to Cuba we visited the Highland Forest headquarters of Castro and Che Guavara during the 50s. Here is a photo of them together  in one of the huts that are now resored as a museum,

7.Here is the typewriter on which they prepared  the new  national constitution;

8. Here is the kerosene refrigerator that Castro's supporters carried in to his Forest headquarters under enemy fire from circulating helicopters and if you look carefully you can see the dent made by a shell.

9.Here in Santiago de Cuba is the balcony from which Castro announced the revolution and his plans for the nation in 1959. Cubans are immensely proud of their heroes and the picture I have shown you are something like sacred shrines to the people of Cuba.

10.Transformation occurred at breakneck speed. Within weeks, 100,000 teachers came to Havana to train as literacy teachers to illiterate farmers across the nation. There was massive development of primary and high schools, funded by nationalisation of banks and of land previously owned by Spanish capitalists. There was a centrally planned and managed food production and distribution system, huge housing development and investment in health and the training of doctors. All of this was assisted by Soviet supported infrastructure. This was a Communist one-party state but with what seem to be genuine democratic inputs from community delegates. There is no doubt in hearing and reading the history of the Cuban Revolution that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were immensely important to its success. And success it undoubtedly was, even though Cuba bears many of the hallmarks today of a country in desperate need of  new capital investment.

11. What brings about system transformations? Human culture is really a series complex adaptive systems each with their own feedback loops. Systems theory suggests that transformation occurs in systems when stimuli reach critical points and overcome the moderating capacity of the feedback loop. Extensive feedback loops are available to maintain and reinforce the status quo in our culture today. Think of the way the Minerals Council responded to the suggestion of a super resource profits tax Many of us have been arguing for many years about the need for a transformation in our culture from anthropocentrism to eco-centrism and a new respect for the limitations of nature. So how can we help to make it happen?

12 In my 77 years, the closest thing I have experienced to cultural transformation was the Whitlam era between 1972 and 1975. Gough Whitlam came to power after many years of Conservative government, with a clear vision of the kind of Australia he thought we needed to become. I was working in the United States at the time of his election and returned to Australia in 1973 to find huge shifts taking place in the empowerment of communities and in government priorities. There was excitement in the air and huge new opportunities  in my newly chosen field of public health as a result of the new priorities of the government. Whitlam had solid electoral support at first but incompetent management and clever politics from the Conservatives resulted in the blockage  of supply and what has come to be known as “the great dismissal”.  I would say that since that time we have witnessed a much slower but relentlessly progressive transformation to self-interested anthropocentrism

13. Let me turn now to the issue that has dominated much of my thinking in the past 12 months and the report, which former Liberal leader John Hewson launched this week entitled “Advance Australia fair? What to do about growing inequality in Australia.”
14. Around the world especially in rich countries the gulf between the very rich and the very poor has been increasing. Here is the distribution of mean household net worth in Australia in the financial year 2011-2012. The lowest 20% of the population in that year had an average net worth of $31,000 with the highest 20% having an average networth of $2.2 million.
15. And here are a few quotes from the new report. Pope Francis last year in his first policy statement said among other things "While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by the happy few. This imbalance is a result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation”. In its submission to the Davos conference of the World Economic Forum, held in January this year Oxfam pointed out that "The richest 85 people on the globe – who between them could squeeze onto a single double-decker bus – control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population together (3.5 billion people.)”
16. And here is my favourite quote from the Nobel laureate economist, Joseph Stiglitz in his book "The price of INequality. He says "Inequality is a choice. I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and the have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it and those that do. Some countries will be successful in creating shared prosperity – the only kind of prosperity that I believe is truly sustainable. Others will let inequality run amok. In these divided societies, the rich will hunker down in gated communities, almost completely separated from the poor, whose lives will be almost unfathomable to them and vice versa. I have visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or the desperate shantytowns”.
17. The local parliamentary member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, is a former professor of economics at ANU and last year he published his analysis of inequality in Australia. Which was the stimulus for Australia21 to move into action to bring together a groups of 35 experts including 5 federal parliamentarians and explore what should be done about it. Let me quote from Leigh's book. "To see the full extent of inequality today, imagine a ladder on which each rung represents $1 million of wealth. Now imagine the Australian population is spread out along this ladder with distance from the ground reflecting household wealth. On this ladder, most of us are just a few centimetres off the ground. Half of all households are closer to the ground than they are to the first rung. The typical Australian household has a wealth of about half $1 million, placing it halfway to the first rung. A household in the top 10% is 1 1/2 runs up at about the knee height. A household in the top 1% is five rungs up at about thigh level. The mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is nearly 10 km off the ground”.

18.Here's another analysis of the percentage share of Australian household disposable income and net worth in 2011-12 for each  tenth of the population, lower to upper. What this reveals is that the upper 10th of the Australian population in that year had 45% of all Australia's net worth whereas the lower 10% had none of it.

19. In January of this year, a Frenchman named Thomas Pikety published what many see to be a game changing economics book on the relationship between inequality and capitalism. This graph taken from his book shows the time trends of a measure of income inequality that is widely used as a marker for the USA, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The vertical axis represents the share that the top 1% of of the population receives of total income for the nation.. During the past 100 years, there was a dramatic decline in income inequality following the Second World War in all four countries with a dramatic rise beginning in the mid-1980s. Australian income inequality is not yet as severe as that for the United States or Britain but it is rising very fast. The prediction of course is that it will rise even faster in the context of the recent budget.
20. Here is a graph of tax paid as a percentage of national GDP for OECD countries in 2010. You might be surprised to find that Australia is the fifth lowest taxing country in this list, with Italy, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark taxing their populations a good 15% more of their GDP than we do in Australia.
21. And this graph shows that our tax levels have been well below the OECD average for the past 30 years. It also reveals that our principal taxing agent is the Australian government and that by comparison, state governments and local governments collect relatively little of our tax.
22. Here is another graph taken from our inequality report, which shows over time, the relationship between unemployment benefits and the poverty line. You may recall Bob Hawke’s assertion that by 2000, no Australian child would live in poverty. Between 1987 and 99 the unemployment benefit ran above the poverty line but since that time it has been declining and is declining quite drastically, running now at 20% below the poverty line.
23. This Histogram is the result of a survey conducted by the Australian Institute recently. In 2012 the actual New Start unemployment allowance was $245 per week. The minimum wage at that time was $589. The Australia Institute survey indicated that the perceived cost of living was about $454 a week and that most Australians believed that the New Start allowances should be at least at $329 per week.
24. So why does Inequality matter? There has been a huge literature on this in recent years. It is clear that as inequality of income and wealth increases there is greater stress on the community with adverse impacts on trust, self-image and equality of opportunity for disadvantaged groups. This in turn has negative effects on health and social stability. There is growing evidence including from the International Monetary Fund, that increasing inequality impedes economic productivity and economic growth as well. An unequal society also has very unequal health outcomes. What you see on this graph is the socio-economic gradient for the prevalence of four health outcomes among people aged 45 years and older in New South Wales. The people on the right of the graphs are the people in the upper strata of income and the people on the left are in the lower strata. There is a clear gradient for heart disease, cancer, diabetes and depression across the socio-economic spectrum.
25. I have talked about the distribution of wealth and income but most economists agree that the most important variable in terms of the future of society is equality of opportunity. Here is what is called the Great Gatsby curve, which shows that more inequality is associated with less social mobility across the generations. What I mean by social mobility is the possibility of a child, on reaching adulthood moving into a higher income bracket than their parents. Without going into the technicalities of the Gini coefficient and generational earnings elasticity which are shown on the horizontal and vertical axes of this graph, you will note that the countries which have lower income inequalities such as Sweden Finland Norway and Denmark also tend to have greater equality of opportunity. At the upper extreme of the graph is the United States which has great income inequality and low iequality of opportunity or social mobility. Note where Australia stood on this issue prior to the budget.
26. So much fo inequality, which I submit is now a very important part of Australian culture and will worsen significantly as a result of the recent budget initiatives. Coming back to the question of transformation and where we now stand in Australia in June 2014. I think they will be little disagreement that we have a government that is in climate and environmental denial and that market fundamentalism now rules our nation. It's also true that the current government is deeply unpopular at least among the chattering classes. Inequality is growing rapidly and will worsen in coming months. National policy is driven by the wealthy elites specifically in their interest. Our report on inequality points out many of the economic changes that have been made in the past 20 years by both Liberal and Labour governments have disproportionately favoured the very rich and favored little, if at all those at the lowest end of the income scale. So I put it to you that trans formation of our culture to equitable eco-centrism has never been more urgent and I hope that in the discussion that follows we can consider what will be needed to bring about transformative change.
27. Going back to the earlier discussion of Cuba and the elements, which led to massive transformative change in the culture in that country in 1959. There was a deeply corrupt dictator in power. There was a visionary and determined leader who had been planning the revolution for about 10 years. There was a brilliant military strategist and a profoundly oppressed population ready for change. When change came, rapid action occurred. My reading of the mood in Cuba is that the centrally planned government still commands wide and deep support. despite the economic difficulties that are evident.
28. So, what is my take-home message about transformative change and its feasibility in Australia in the near future. The first is that feedback loops are powerful reinforcers of the status quo. And that to generate transformational change will require a combination of a supportive population, leadership, vision, strategy and quality implementation. I think that if we agree that transformative change is needed in Australia we will need to recognise the validity of Castro's words in his "History Will Absolve Me" speech. "The problems of the Republic can be solvedd only if we dedicate ourselves to fight for it with the same energy, honesty and patriotism our liberators had when they created it.

So let me hear what you think about all of this.

Q&A

Outcomes of the discussion following the presentation resolved into these ideas:

The need to generate a political conversation, to open discussion for us to listen to the futures that people might want; but we lack the dynamic leader with the vision of how we can move forward, we lack the progressive narrative,

The role of the media in maintaining the dominant narratives was recognised. Therefore to get new narratives out requires activating people at the community level.

Previous transformational shifts have actually occurred because the mechanisms were already there for them to emerge; eg slavery was replaced by waged labour when capitalist found it cheaper to pay than keep slaves, and waged labour stimulated the economy, and more efficient machinery became available. Rejigging the economy for war was possible because we are practiced in preparing and undertaking war, we have standing armies, but we have little practice in ecological sustainability. So we are asking of modern society a novel undertaking: to self-impose limits even as we butt up against the existing biophysical ones. However the impending biophysical limits society is now approaching is a game changing situation.

Finally Bob Douglas suggested the need to establish a Public Interest Council with resources to propagandise society and government, to advocate and communicate the current situation, the new vision and the means to go there. Groups (yet to be defined) need to build a framework for a Public Interest Council.

THMs

The lesson of Cuba in the 1950s is that rapid transformational change occurs with a visionary, determined leader, supported by a brilliant strategist, balancing the feedback loops to overcome the resilience of the entrenched system, garners popular support against a deeply corrupt government. Growing inequality in Australia, may be a reflection of a deeply corrupt government, which may provide the impetus for the popular support required for such leadership to bring about change. What we lack is the visionary, determined leader. Once in power, the new leadership needs to rapidly implement the needed changes.

You can download a pdf of the presentation here.

A pdf of this paper can be downloaded here.

The pdf of the presentation is available here.

This is the summary and commentary. A pdf of this summary is here.

Chapter 8 Philosophy tackles Climate Change: introducing the ‘Hyperobject’ Narrative

Elizabeth Boulton

PhD scholar at the Fenner School. Her thesis topic is: “Cross-disciplinary approaches to climate and environmental risk.”

Abstract:

There is a steady drum-beat calling for a new narrative to support the scientific story about climate change. Cognitive and decision-science has proven that the delivery of facts-based information has a very limited influence upon people. Rather, mostly people think and act in accordance with their underlying beliefs, values and worldviews, even if they are presented evidence to do otherwise. This principle holds true even when people’s levels of IQ are taken into account. It is also now understood that how an issue is framed, greatly affects how people respond to it. Hence there is now increased attention on how to frame and describe climate change in such a way that it truly resonates with people.
Ironically, a fresh approach has emerged from one of the oldest fields of human scholarship – philosophy. Timothy Morton describes global warming using creative language and reframes it as a ‘hyperobject’. He also presents an argument for the expertise of the humanities to be more effectively utilised in the climate communication challenge.
This presentation will provide an overview of key cognitive science insights about ‘deep framing’. It will then describe the Hyperobject narrative, reflecting upon its utility as a new frame.

The full paper is available here and a more recent iteration of the theme here.

Synopsis and Commentary – Peter Tait

Opening with a demonstration that scare tactics haven’t been working, and giving people the facts isn’t working took us into a journey through philosophy and cognitive science to look for an idea of what might work to help people change, and hence transform culture.

The importance of narratives, the stories we tell about our world and ourselves, emerged as a critical element. Our stories give us meaning, understanding of the world and most importantly they provide us with our identity. The only way to supplant a narrative is to create a stronger one.

Creation of a stronger narrative is difficult and can be done badly resulting in unintended consequences. The clumsy handling of fear, raising suspicions and resistance is one example. A good narrative needs to speak to the identity of the person (their values and beliefs), be in a context of the already known and understood, allow a difference to be imagined, and engage the emotions.

Lakoff: “Real reason is: mostly unconscious (98%); requires emotion; uses the ‘logic’ of frames, metaphors, and narratives; is physical (in brain circuitry); and varies considerably, as frames vary.”

A deep frame is a worldview. It is a system of metaphors and frames. Values are grounded in this deep frame. It is change resistant. To change a deep frame – well it can’t be, so change requires creating a new frame, that is a new system of metaphors.

A new frame requires new words, it needs to resonate emotionally (feel ‘right’), be values based, have a coherent narrative or storyline. Repetition of images and metaphors is needed to ‘learn’ and to reinforce it.

Timothy Morton brings the idea of a hyperobject into the discussion. The hyperobject is a method for introducing new frames about humanity, and our place in nature. A hyperobject is a ‘thing massively distributed in time and space, relative to humans’. Examples would be anthropogenic global warming, the capitalist economy, human culture – all of which are creating wicked problems for humanity. In essence a hyperobject is characterised by people being embedded in it, it is global and long term, it is outside usual human capacity to comprehend, we can only observe aspects of it and we can only know it through its traces or signs. [Morton introduces the term ‘hyperobject’ to define “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 2013 p.1). Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.]

So the recognition of something as a hyperobject changes human perception of it and our response to it. We are forced (however unwillingly) to acknowledge that we have no control over a hyperobject. This leads to a new narrative of human existence by altering our identity of ourselves (as in what it means to be human); the frame of how humans view the world and the issues that are hyperobjects; it changes how we create narratives about what is happening and what can be done; and it speaks to the emotional content of the situation.

This new frame is both terrifying and liberating. Terror from the shift in identity and the humility in acknowledgement that humans are not in control. Liberation from the realisation that we can forge our own narrative and that the emotions are a normal part of our response, and in accepting them we can move into action. Just because we are not in control doesn’t mean we cannot respond and influence the situation.

Thus from this we gain a new sense of identity – yet to be completely resolved, a new set of tools for viewing, approaching and responding to wicked problems, and a more ‘accurate’ sense of what it is to be human. The ‘Arts’ provide the vehicle for creating the new narratives, metaphors and frames needed for change.

Summary

Our stories give us meaning, understanding of the world and our identity. Introducing hyperobjects introduces change to our identities – who we are; and the stories and narratives we tell about who we are and why we are here. It changes the ideas around human agency – we have influence but no control. It changes the meaning of the place of humans in the universe. It permits however ability to craft new narratives about our identity and our role. It makes the emotional responses overt and so manageable, and this opens opportunity to use the arts to tell these new stories.

Changing the frames of our existence by altering the narratives and metaphors we use, allows humanity to create a new future.

Valerie A. Brown, Professorial Fellow and John A. Harris, Visiting Fellow, Local Sustainability Project, Fenner School.

The pdf of the presentation is here. This provides the illustrations for this presentation.

The pdf of this summary and commentary is here.

Abstract

Transformational change of environment and society is not easily understood through a single lens, no matter how powerful. Both research and practice require a collective approach. The discussion will be based on a study of collective responses to dynamic changes in our four-dimensional world (the non-living and living systems of the planet, the influence of human ideas and the synergies created by the interactions among these three self-organising systems). Current responses include changing opposites to relationships, drawing on multiple ways of knowing, and the structural changes in society towards a collective science, deep democracy, and a common pool economy.

This presentation is a development of the ideas from Brown VA, Harris JA. The Human Capacity for Transformational Change: Harnessing the collective mind. Abingdon and New York: Routledge; 2014.

Synopsis and Commentary – Peter Tait

The transformation occurs in our heads (minds). Our minds are plastic, but exhibit two tendencies: to stay embedded in their culture (habits of thought and belief), and to focus on bits not wholes.

Consequently change is piecemeal, does not follow a program and so is unpredictable. Examples presented: Mount St Helens, Hiroshima, development of multi-organism cells/eukaryotes, flight MH17 and the conversion of a worldview grounded in creation to one of evolution, with evolutions in the associated assumptions and values, for example society as an individualist versus collective enterprise, or the place of humans as special (chosen by God) versus humans as part of the system.

Transformation happens in three phases to this: ideas, actions and application. Ideas encompass recognition of the four dimensions of reality shaped by five key interrelationships. Action comes through use of the methodology of the seven ways of knowing, that create the collective social structures in each sector (science, economy, governance, etc.) that facilitate change. Application arises from making the collective social structures to put these ideas into practice. This is explained in much more detail in The Human Capacity for Transformational Change. This methodology is the basis for creating a new story about how the world can be. All the structures needed to transform society are in place and operating somewhere now.

Ideas:

We live in a world of four dimensions: there are the three self-organising systems of the biophysical, the human social and the human mind plus the interactions between each of these. These allow us to counter the heresies of the current worldview:

The second idea is that a collective mind approach reframes our traditional dichotomised view from opposites to relationships along a continuum:

(Nowotny H, Scott P, Gibbons M (2001) Rethinking science: knowledge in an age of uncertainty. Polity, Cambridge)

So using the methodology of the seven ways of knowing or thinking permits a full systemic approach to recognising reality and making wise decisions.

Conclusions:

1. Transformational change is always a sharp break in the pattern; tomorrow will not be the same as yesterday
2. The response to the break is self-organised from within the diversity of the system; no one is in charge
3. A transformational change is never final; the conclusion of one phase prepares for the challenge of the next
4. Transformational change is inherently collective; the whole pattern changes or the system reverts
5. In human-initiated change, the shift in ideas comes first; collective action in the whole system follows

Q&A

Discuss elements of the methodology. Key unresolved question: Collective what?

JH creating a third space eg WWWeb, Q&A, parliament

GK harmony, melody and discords

THMs

Transformation arises first in our minds, so depends on how our mind works. Therefore transformations are piecemeal, not programmed, and so are unpredictable. A reframing of how we approach the world, society, and human agency enables a collective approach to creating the transformation required. The methodology of the seven ways of thinking contributes to this reframing. This facilitates development of collective social structures for a new way of living on the planet. A transformational change is a sharp break in the pattern of a system. The system will respond to that break; the response is self-organised from within the system. Either the whole pattern changes with the transformation or the system reverts. No one including humans are ‘in charge’ of the change or the response. A transformation is never final; each phase sets the conditions for the next change. In human-initiated change, the shift in ideas comes first; collective action in the whole system follows.

The concept of collective mind was challenged; participants understood the collective but wondered if mind was the correct word. However no better alternative has been suggested, and mind fits into the presenters’ view of minds working together using shared space such as the internet.

But this is perhaps a distraction. The core concept of the collective mind is in its application as a methodology for working with groups of people to help them achieve a common purpose. The agreement about the purpose is the collective mind. While purpose might be agreed, all other details of all other aspects, even final outcomes, are open to varying degrees of contestation and disagreement, but these are worked out within the larger, collective concordance about purpose.

Discussion of Mind.

Use of collective mind in this context provokes discomfort because of the ‘new age’ sounding nature of the proposition. How can there be a collective mind? Perhaps we are not talking brain centred neurological process mind but instead collective information and knowledge gathering, sharing, analytic and decision taking processes; what Julian Cribb describes as ‘thinking at the species level’. The emphasis is on the species level, collective, big picture yet locally specific thought.

The pdf of Kevin Thomson's talk is here.

The pdf of this summary and commentary is here.

Synopsis

For Thomson, “making the world safe for civilians is core business for anyone like me who is involved in public policy, and core business for people like yourselves who are interested in good public policy and promoting human health around the globe” is the purpose of governments. In the context of inter- and intra-national violence and the fact that the major powers condone this when it applies to their ‘friends’, and so stymie effective action by international agencies such as the UN to stop such violence, and the poverty, inequity, environmental destruction and reduction in the quality of people’s lives, Thomson asks what transformation in our culture is required to address this.

Since the 1980s the ‘progressive left’ (left politics, trade unions and the environment movement) has been losing the war: “We sometimes win battles, but overall we are not winning. I repeat, we are losing the war. We sometimes win elections, but usually on the terms of our opposition. We are in office, but not in power. And at all times we are fighting defensive, rearguard actions to protect the things we have achieved and built up”. The regulation of corporations occasioned by the Great Depression has been progressively undone as corporate wealth, power and influence has grown and big corporations have become transnational and so outside effective government control.

The neoliberal political philosophy espousing market fundamentalism, ‘free’ trade and a globalised economy has come to dominate our culture and shape how we operate as a society. Even the left accepts this framing. The role of the media in promoting this philosophy is

To counter this Thomson proposes that we learn from nations where this world view is less is ascendant. Scandinavia provides such a model. He advocates we “campaign in favour of independence and self-reliance and against rapid population growth.” So the transformation of Australian political culture required is to adopt this pragmatically successful model. “For Australia to progress, we need to look less at tired orthodoxies from either the Left or the Right and study the Scandinavian models instead.”

The model includes: to have a diverse economy, free tertiary education, an industrial relations system favouring high workforce participation and strong support for workers, a large public sector and balanced books. This cultural paradigm permits strong public support for the political institutions.

Our success then needs to be measured not in relation to financial through-put but by achievement of social values outcomes in terms of “employment, inflation, interest rates, and balancing the books. We need low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, and a strong budget.” Focus on the welfare of the population creates the social capital that helps these nations remain economically strong and competitive.

The final cultural transformation proposed is to recognise the role of ecosystem services to improve habitability of cities, and to facilitate active participation in the green and blue outdoors to build physical and mental health.

Discussion

At a parliamentary level, cultural transformation would include de-concentration of the news media and expansion of internet and social media.

Specific parliamentary related reforms:

• Campaign financing reform to limit donations to political parties and prevent people and corporations with commercial interests from buying influence over parliamentarians.
• In parallel open, continuous open disclosure of donations with various limitations such as ceiling on amounts for individual, limits of donations to individual people (not corporations).
• Limits to political advertising during elections with the funding for the advertisement publically disclosed.
• Transparency of all government reports and public money decisions, all related documents available on a website. Only limited ‘commercial-in-confidence’ applicable during an actual tender process, but not subsequently.

These openness and accountability rules would apply to all organisations and individuals involved in the political process: corporations, think tanks, NGOs, Unions, etc..

Process issues (input form Jim Donaldson, Kelvin Thomson, Franzi Poldy):

• Identify and work with those not benefiting from the current system; explain the cause of current problems and expose the reasons why the current system is creating this situation.
• Build mechanisms for collective action focused around a specific issue. Link these spatially across geographic and nations scales.
• Develop mechanisms to overcoming resistance to change from vested interests – use the tactics of the resisters.

Commentary

The role of government is to make society safe for citizens. The system is currently failing because of less than ideal behaviour by major nation states and because of the unconstrained influence of corporations operating within a ‘free-market’ neoliberal cultural paradigm. There are examples in the Scandinavian countries where pragmatic alternative politico-economic models operate that have very positive social and economic outcomes that reinforce prosperity, health and wellbeing of the citizens. Because of this they have strong public support.

The model includes: a diverse economy, free tertiary education, an industrial relations system favouring high workforce participation and strong support for workers, a large public sector and balanced books. Success needs to be measured in relation to achievement of social values outcomes in these domains not financial through-put.

Specific foci for parliamentary process reform were identified: campaign financing, continuous open disclosure of donations, limits to political advertising and transparency of all government reports and public money decisions.

Summary: Peter Tait

5 Sept 2014

Mark set out an architecture for change within which he advised how the research could make a contribution. In so doing he acknowledged that research questions and processes are not value neutral; whose research, done how, by whom, etc. are all relevant. He briefly outlined how the Future Earth Project might contribute to a research agenda.

There are four aspects of an architecture for change:

• The Sustainable Development Goals
• Tipping points and thresholds
• Measures of Wellbeing
• Narratives of self-identity

Within the Future Earth project, their third research theme is Transformation to Sustainability, into which the co-design and co-production of knowledge with decision takers has a place.

The Sustainable Development Goals provide a package of goals that give us the basis for a global narrative of where we, humanity, need to be heading within social and economic domains.

There are likely to be biophysical and social tipping points, both advantageous and deleterious, that we will cross on out journey into the near future. With social tipping points in the context of cultural transformations, one research question would be ‘what is the minimum level of societal change necessary to for a transformation to occur?’ The work of Bina Agawal in India with rural land use management suggests about a third of participants need to be engaged.

In regard to measures of wellbeing, clearly research has a role in defining those measures, but also research crosses into practical matters such as how to get measures of wellbeing onto the evening TV news.

Narratives of identity are a powerful influence on action (see Solutions Journal 5(1) Jan’Feb 2014 p.31). Identity as a city dweller, as a consumer, as an indigenous person, all direct how we think and respond. So research questions here include: how to change identity; how to move beyond consumption as an identity?

Discussion

Issues raised in discussion included:

• The need for equity in transformation processes
• Going against the dominant paradigm may provoke a strong reaction if ignoring change agents is insufficient.
• Malcolm Gladwell identifies critical mass as only one of several elements for crossing a tipping point: the situation, key communicators, key facilitators and the stories used all contribute.
• Resilience in a system that maintains the status quo, is also a factor.
• Uncertainty and complexity are two related elements and how they are managed is critical to any outcome. There is both uncertainty of situation and of the outcomes once a change has been begun. Often change is not initially recognised as it often happens on the fringe. In starting a change, one need not have all the answers and indeed need recognise that one doesn’t.
• Transformations are non-homogenised; they are plural and have multiple elements. Three types of transformation become evident:
  • Emergent– undersigned, emerge from current situation
  • Facilitated – facilitated by social processes, not master planned. For example changes in consumption occasioned by corporations in a capitalist economic model.
  • Designed – a central planning agency designs and sets off a transformation, such as the 5 year plans in China.

(Lorrae vK)

• Each type of transformation leads to different types of research question and roles for researchers. Drivers, feedbacks, unintended consequences, thresholds, are all topics for research.
• Resistance to change can be overcome by framing the situation differently. Climate change is a social and economic problem. There are links to enlightened self-interest; an engagement strategy can start in any sphere of social interest; different narratives for engagement for different social groups.
• Understanding the narratives of past transformations can help inform future transformations, subject to recognition of the role of uncertainties. And one may not be able to recognise which changes are beneficial or not.
• Transformations are likely to be chaotic; how to provide a lighthouse to help navigate through the chaos and fear. Do the SDGs give some guiding principles? Frameworks for change can guide if not totally remove uncertainty; provide a compass as to the course even if there is no map.
• The option of muddling through is not an option. Therefore we need to plan options to influence how change might occur.

Summary

Research can help transformation by seeking the questions that need to be answered and then to provide a framework for designing and planning change, by giving information however incomplete to assist with managing uncertainty, by providing a compass to help people navigate the chaos and fear, by monitoring progress along the journey and advising course corrections.

Ref: Frantz CM. Tapping into core social motives to drive sustainable transformation. Solutions. 2014;5(1(Jan-Feb 2014)).

The pdf of this summary is available here.

This presentation is based on Costanza R. A theory of socio-ecological system change. Journal of Bioeconomics. 2014;16(1):39-44.

The pdf of the presentation is available here.

Synopsis

The ideas of Elinor Ostrom, David Sloan Wilson and EO Wilson, that evolution occurs over many scales from genes and epigenes, to groups and cultures, feeds this theory of socio-ecologic system change.

Assuming we prefer a smooth societal transition to collapse (a la Jared Diamond), a model of change was presented. An evolutionary view of culture change (Beddoe R, Costanza R, Farley J, Garza E, Kent J, Kubiszewski I, et al. Overcoming systemic roadblocks to sustainability: The evolutionary redesign of worldviews, institutions, and technologies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2009;106(8):2483-9; Ostrom, E. (2013).Do institutions for collective action evolve? JBioecon. doi:10.1007/s10818-013-9154-8.), permits purposeful design of cultural variants upon which selection pressures can act, to winnow out the less adaptive ones.

Further “one unique feature of cultural evolution compared to biological evolution is that it is “reflexive” in the sense that goals and foresight can affect the process. To a certain extent, we can design the future that we want by creating new cultural variants for evolution to act upon and by modifying the goals that drive cultural selection. If our societal goals shift from maximizing growth of the market economy to maximizing sustainable human well-being, different institutions will be better adapted to achieve these goals.”(p42, Costanza 2014)

The initial step in any such change is arriving at a shared vision of what we want an ecologically sustainable society to look like. Envisioning radically different worldviews, and an assessment process of these different views, permits intentional action to evolve society toward this new state of affairs.

Two other pieces of knowledge assist. First, we know that cultural tipping points have occurred. The fall of the Soviet Union is one such example. These tipping points are the output of interacting slow and fast variables driving or inhibiting change. Second there is a body of work about how cultures evolve (Turner JH (2003) Human Institutions (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD); Tainter JA (2000) Problem solving: Complexity, history, sustainability. Popul Environ 22:3–41; Boyd R, Richerson PJ (2005) The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford Univ Press, New York); Ba´na´ thy BH (1998) Evolution guided by design: A systems perspective. Syst Res Behav Sci 15:161–172; Heckbert S, Parrott L, Costanza R. Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya).

This leads to a suite of actions to reframe the arguments about how society should be from how it is to a sustainable and desirable future story. Yet putting those ideas out is not enough; the current cultural paradigm might be considered a ‘societal addiction’ (to a growth-at-all-costs with fossil fuels and consumption paradigm) and therefore applying an addiction treatment model to change may help action develop. In this context addiction means that the behaviour is destructive, but so embedded onto the social system that plausible alternatives are not visible.

An addiction treatment model requires the sufferer to engage in a conversation about change. First is to introduce the addict to the possibility of a different reality. Then there is an assessment of the costs and benefits of change (balanced with the costs and benefits of no change).

The motivational interviewing equivalent for societal cultural change is scenario planning. This operates on four assumptions:

1. The future is not the past
2. The future is not foreseeable
3. Many futures are possible – this is the possibility space
4. The process is both rational and creative

Several examples were described, including a current research project being undertaken to test the process in an Australian context (www.anuscenarioplanning.com) which is leading to creation of a series of future programs (documentaries, news items, soaps, etc.) to be published in the Journal of Future Studies (http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/).

Ray and Anderson have proposed a classification of subcultural types within the USA, which they call symbotypes, based on adherence to a sub-worldview within the western liberal tradition (Ray PH, Anderson SR. The cultural creatives: How 50 million people are changing the world: Three Rivers Press New York; 2000). These symbotypes are: (1) Modernists —the dominant worldview of markets and economic growth—46% of the population in 2000; (2) Traditionalists —a nostalgic appeal to earlier (often more religious) times—26 % of the population in 2000; and (3) Cultural Creatives —a worldview based on sustainability, equity, and sufficiency—28 % of the population in 2000. Cultural Creatives are “disenchanted with “owning more stuff…materialism… status display and the glaring social inequities of race”. Since 1965 the proportion of each has changed in the population in the USA with Traditionalists markedly declining and Cultural Creatives rising ten-fold (Costanza 2014, quoting Ray and Anderson).

In the evolutionary model of cultural transformation, a symbotype is the locus of action for selection pressures from the social and biophysical environment. Thus we see that the rise of the symbotype Cultural Creative may be a response to selection pressure and as that worldview becomes more common, the culture will shift into more culturally creative operations. This will include use of the alternative internet based media to permit reflection and broader dissemination of a cultural creative world view, thus influencing further the spread of its own memes. An example of this at work is the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity (ASAP) http://www.asap4all.com/. (See also Costanza R, Kubiszewski I, editors. Creating a sustainable and desirable future: Insights from 45 global thought leaders. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd; 2014.)

Discussion

The metaphor of addiction was challenged on the grounds that it blinds us to consumption. However others felt that it cought various aspects of the situation well: addicts stuck in a cultural milieu, advertising as pushing, addiction as self-image ...

Questions were raised about the practicalities of realising these objectives, and the importance of changing minds. Issues of stated intent to change versus measurable change in actual behaviour, issues of anxiety relating to the uncertainties of a different future, the power of the present.

Summary

Thinking of cultural transformation as an evolutionary process reveals (unfolds) an approach to systems change that regards influences into the system as selection pressures. Culture is composed of worldviews, institutions and technologies, and it is these that subject to selection pressure. Subcultures within a dominant culture will hold and practice different attitudes (values, beliefs, and emotional attachments), institutions and technologies. It is these differences that allow a selection process in response to pressures from the biophysical and social world.

Scenario planning is a methodology for envisioning, and testing out, a set of possible futures. Cultural transformers can use this to elaborate stories of the future with which to engage people in bringing about those futures. It allows people to practice different cultural variations to see which ones work better in creating the world we want.

The pdf of this summary and commentary is available here.

The pdf of the presentation is available here.

Human Ecology Forum’s Transforming Culture stream has so far mainly focused on theoretical models and academic discussion.  Running through that has been a theme about the narratives we tell ourselves, how those narratives become our identity, and that those narratives will need to change if civilization and life on Earth as we know it is to survive.

This session aims to spur the Forum into practical discussion about how cultural transformation might be effected. Drawing on traditional fairytales, marketing, and practical empowerment movements, I will introduce some models to help stimulate creative thinking and research that is oriented towards the practicalities of change. Our discussion will focus on developing alternative images, stories and language that might replace the ones that currently dominate our world.

Synopsis

Shaping public opinion and societal behaviour is already being done by marketing experts using the learnings from psychological research. In using these techniques to bring about a cultural transformation, we need to recognise and abide by the ethical principle that we use these techniques for good.

King describes the fairy tale as the ultimate narrative: a journey on which we are beset by villains from whom we are rescued by a hero, Prince Charming, assisted by a Fairy Godmother. However two issues arise: first this is the ultimate outsourcing of responsibility, reinforcing the image of us as helpless victim. Second in our story, because both the villain and the hero in our drama is ourselves, (and there is no Fairy Godmother) we cannot resolve this dilemma and so remain inactive.

Current empowerment movements (March Australia, Kitchen Table Conversations, Divestment Campaigns) seek to replicate the successes for societal change of previous movements such as Women’s Suffragettes and the anti-slavery campaigns. However will they be powerful enough to transform culture?

What are some practical models that can be used to change behaviours and minds?

Gillian introduced the Sales Model as one such method. The Sales Model for behaviour change uses marketing techniques to reframe the situation in a way that motivates individual behaviour or attitudinal change.

The bones of the model are:

Pain Island, Pleasure Island and The Boat.

Pain Island is where one is now. Pleasure Island is that wonderful place where there is no pain and all is good. The Boat is the mechanism to get there.

In more detail from a marketing perspective:

1. I understand your pain, (then rub salt into the wound to increase it)
2. This is the better, happier and ‘funnier’ place that you could be (free from your pain)
3. Here is the Boat to take you. Join me, your Captain and Hero on the Boat, and I can take you to Pleasure Island.

This is an emotional experience. The juxtaposition of pain and pleasure, and the relief at accepting a way to ameliorate the pain and gain the pleasure by getting on the boat, draws people in. In designing the experience, getting on the boat has to be easy emotionally. Relief has to be palpable.

Applying this model to creating actual change for transforming culture, Pain Island is the Anthropocene, Pleasure Island the future ideal alternative and the Boat is the process of cultural transformation. In painting the Anthropocene, one would use people’s own stories of distress and unease. In so doing we would empathise, agree with them, and use their language and imagery to feedback our sympathy to them. In opening the vision of a real alternative future, again using their concerns as the initial focus and help them to visualize what this new future could be like. Help them to feel how much better for them this could be than the present.

The workshop then explored what elements of a narrative about this change would include. A list of The Stories of the Anthropocene was produced (Appendix A). As this emerged several factors about the items in the list emerged:

• We ourselves are stuck in the story; it is part of ourselves.
• It is given with the authority of accepted truth and has strong currency.
• Most people are lead to believe that the Anthropocene is Pleasure Island. While we may think this is a con, many do not. In fact the power elites and those wishing to emulate them identify strongly with this story.
• This narrative requires countering (undermining) rather than direct assault.

It became obvious that both Pain and Pleasure Island contain both positive and negative aspects and a person’s perception of these depends on their personal framing of them. So in the alternative narrative we need to recognise this. Tailoring stories for individuals means that a matrix of narratives will be needed.

Matthew Rimmer made the following points:

Several strategies are needed for countering:

• Positive narratives
• Culture jamming and myth busting
• Exposing the marketing of the current narrative
• The multiple aspects of each theme can be framed to undermine the present or promote the future; one example is the use of civil rights language.

• Counter-branding (eg Lock the Gate)

A similar complex emerged in listing the aspects of the envisioned future (Appendix A).

Building the boat requires a framework for system change. Although the boat was unfinished, a scaffold is provided by Robert Cialdini (1984, Influence, the psychology of persuasion) around which we can design it.

Note: these are similar to the discussion about the Reuben Anderson’s 10 Myths of Behaviour change from the introductory talk.

It behooves us to remember that these tactics are only to be employed ethically.

That said, use of marketing expertise that is grounded in the knowledge of psychology can provide invaluable help to us in creating a better world. As Bob Douglas’ talk presented, a bold, clear, vital, even daring and daunting but inspiring vision of a possible future is needed.

The who, where and how questions were passed over to another time.

Q&A

Franzi Poldy pointed out that previous examples of transformational change have been going with the flow of history [others have pointed to this factor being technological change]. For instance the use by Kennedy of the space program to inspire effort was in the context of the cold war contest with the Russians, and fitted firmly into the military-industrial complex’s agenda. Extricating ourselves from the Anthropocene is going against this flow.

Discussion suggested that in this case we need to create the new context for change.

Val Brown reminded us that we cannot plan this change; in response I proposed that we can mindfully meddle.

Franzi Poldy also suggested that rich systems, such as complex industrial society, can tolerate meddling and resistance but that if the resilience of the system is activated by this meddling, then we will not be tolerated by the system and removed. In response, this resilience needs to be anticipated.

Overcoming the anxiety about getting on the boat that is the anxiety about change, and people opting sometimes for the ‘evil they know’, is a real but unaddressed factor in this workshop.

THMs

Use of marketing expertise that is grounded in the knowledge of psychology can provide invaluable help to us in creating a better world.

It behooves us to remember that marketing tactics are only to be employed ethically.

The Sales Model for behaviour change uses marketing techniques to reframe the situation in a way that motivates individual behaviour or attitudinal change.

The success of the model is in the juxtaposition of pain and pleasure, and the creation of relief at accepting a way to ameliorate the pain and gain the pleasure, is a powerful emotional experience. It taps into people’s unconscious psychological processes.

A bold, clear, vital, even daring and daunting but inspiring vision of a possible future is needed.

Subverting the dominant western liberal narrative requires countering (undermining) rather than direct assault.

We cannot plan this change; we can only mindfully meddle.

Unlike during previous transformations when change has been within the context of historic or technological flows, in the current situation we need to create the new context for change.

Synopsis week 2

A review of the sales marketing model as a method for driving transformation opened a broad ranging discussion whose outcomes included:

• An explanation of marketing as a discipline
• How the knowledge in the discipline can be applied
• The necessity for one’s assumptions to be repeatedly spelt out during the process and overt recognition that this is a normative process (Julia Torbert-Jones) Val Brown, Bob Webb).

The Discipline of Marketing (Gary Buttress)

The key pillars of marketing are: product, place (distribution), price and promotion.

A traditional neoliberal USA based view is the ‘value-in-exchange’ model in which a product is worth what you can buy/sell it for.

An alternative, European view is the ‘value-in-use’ model, which is a relational (service dominant) view and focuses on what utility the product or service is to you. The views of stakeholders are also of value to the producers/ sellers.

Applying Marketing Experience/Knowledge

This was less completely teased out. Themes:

a new story is required, but

the need to focus on the process of transformation as much as if not more than the end point, given that the end point is subject to differences in vision, definition of better / worse, although is a meta level agreement on ‘good’ or ‘better’ possible? (Annas Sam, Bob Webb, Peter T)

what are helpful framings to induce willingness to try change, to aid people to reveal to themselves what Pleasure Island might be for them, so

multiple audiences need to be catered for. Research is required to identify the different framings and languages for the range of audiences

How to identify the market mavens?

In initiating change, people need assistance over the hump of initial resistance; this is getting people onto the boat.

Getting People on the Boat

To be further explored.

Commentary

Peter Tait

Need to clarify the role of marketing in social change; social marketing can be useful (see Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s work) and clearly the accumulation of multiple efforts at changing behaviour at community level can help. But what is the role of marketing n the bigger picture? How can it help transforming culture?

Unlike advertising, which is a short term enterprise aimed at getting immediate or at least short term behaviour change – ie purchase of a product, cultural transformation is a longer term and ongoing process. In the marketing exercise in advertising product, getting people on the boat from Pain to Pleasure Island revolves around a tangible product. There is an object (or service), a brand, a set of emotions some distressing and some offering relief, and a fairly immediate action – buy.

Getting people on the boat of cultural transformation, requires sustained behaviour and attitude change over a long time, years. Further the brand of a better future is more contested and diverse than a product. It requires a leap into uncertainty. The comfort of the present is a stronger anchor than manufactured desire over product.

Using the experience of social marketing in public health (refs needed: smoking, seatbelts, drink driving) and other changes () it is clear that the marketing campaign is only one part of a much broader set of activities to inform, change behaviour and attitude, and sustain that behaviour / attitudinal change.

Does it come back to engaging people in the governance system?

A pdf version is available for download here.

Over the coming decades as humanity needs to address the pressures on society that will result from global environmental change, governance will become a vital factor in how well we succeed. Further, in considering cultural transformations, the matter of governance both as an element of culture that requires changing itself, and governance of the change process are two important considerations.

In this paper I first set out the basis from which I approach the issue of governance. I then discuss the form of governance I think most helpful and why that is so. And then I outline some ideas about ways to move from the present system to an appropriate system for governing in the Anthropocene.

If we take up the idea that culture is the operating system for a society, that sets out what we know and believe, and what we can’t know, how we behave, what is important and what is ignored, then for the purpose of this talk I propose that governance is the programmer.

Governance is not government: government is the set of institutions that evolve to govern and deliver on governance.

So government is a cultural institution and governance is embedded in the culture that it programs. Governance comprises all the elements or factors that impinge on defining how societies operate. So this gives us an example of actors within a complex system acting to influence that system.

From a health perspective, good governance enables the constituents of wellbeing. Wellbeing is a system and the elements comprising wellbeing inter-influence (Figure 1). Central to wellbeing is people having a sense of control over their circumstances (Marmot and Wilkinson 2006 Marmot MG, Wilkinson RG, editors. Social determinants of health. 2 ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; 2006; Wilkinson RG. The Impact of Inequality: how to make sick societies healthier. New York: The New Press; 2005).

Therefore the method of governance chosen by a society has implications for that society’s members’ wellbeing.

A range of governance systems exist, and so which of these governance systems will be most helpful to achieving ‘good’ governance?

By ‘good’ governance, I mean a governance system that enables society at all scales to achieve wellbeing. I also note that, as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment implies (Figure 1), wellbeing includes a biosensitive attitude and an ecologically sustainable approach to the environment on which it depends.

The range of governance systems go from Absolute Autocracy, through a continuum of oligarchies into a continuum of ‘democracies’ to small self-governing groups.

As Aileen Power has pointed out, governance is ultimately about power-sharing: who gets how much of the share?

On this continuum, I assert that democracy gives the best fit for achieving good governance. That assertion comes from the importance for wellbeing of people having a sense of control over their circumstances, and the most effective way for that to occur is for people to actually have control over their circumstances (as far as possible).

However, we have a warped idea of democracy in our modern, neoliberal world. One of the elements of democratic process has come to represent for us the whole of democracy - voting. This is an historical accident, to do with how governance in Europe evolved since the Middle Ages, and encompasses the theorising about and experiments in governance in 18^th century France and America, and 19^th century Europe that eventuated in 20^th century anarchist experiment in Spain, and finally communist Russia on one hand and capitalist USofA on the other.

So what then is democracy?

I think it useful to consider this in three sections: a definition of what I think democracy is, a set of principles that constitute this definition, and an array of processes to institute and operate these principles.

So first, the definition: Democracy is about mechanisms for decision taking (governance) such that decisions are taken by those who are going to be affected by, that is have to live with the consequences of, those decisions.

Additional to that core idea of democracy, there are many other definitions. But for this discussion I am going with this one.

Democracy is not elections. Elections are but one of a series of processes for achieving democratic outcomes in particular situations.

The principles that make a democracy are listed in Figure 2. Political equality is usually described as “one vote one value”. More accurately it signifies that in a democracy, each individual has the opportunity to exercise a similar degree of power or influence (see discussion below).

Deliberation means decisions are a dialogic (discursive) process, iteratively reached and informed by the best available technical and logistic evidence and the lived experience of those who will be affected.

Tyranny is the outcome of undue influence and the tactics used to gain such influence; it occurs in two situations. Either when a small sector of society is able to exercise disproportional influence for its own advantage or another sector’s disadvantage. Current western liberal democracies are rampant examples of this. Ironically this is a subject that exercised the founding fathers of the USA considerably. Secondly, it can occur when a majority group within society can oppress a minority. Freedom from domination is another way to express this (see Pettit).

Reflection recognises that this process has to watch itself, be explicit about its values, make its assumptions transparent, review its process, and be mindful of all the knowledges that feed into the deliberations (Brown VA, Harris JA. The Human Capacity for Transformational Change: Harnessing the collective mind. Abingdon and New York: Routledge; 2014.), and takes a learning attitude to its existence.

Adaptive governance provides two lines of thought:

First Cooney and Lang provide a definition: “governance process that seeks to make decisions / formulate policy in the face of uncertainty and incomplete knowledge, recognising inherent conflict and valuing diverse interests, and is reflective of its processes and of the evolving situation”. They introduce managing uncertainty and reinforce managing conflict, valuing diversity, and reflection.

Second, Ostrom outlines five basic requirements for achieving adaptive governance. These include:

• Deliberation,
• Acknowledging and actively managing conflict,
• Users of a resource monitor usage to enhance rule compliance,
• Providing infrastructure, that is flexible over time, both to aid internal operations and create links to other regimes
• Identification of and steps to address errors and evolving developments.

The Principle of Subsidiarity has it that decisions are taken closest to the level they will be implemented and services are delivered at the level in a way that balance economies of scale with economies of effectiveness. Ostrom’s principles and the idea of subsidiarity feed directly to the definition of democracy. Two other elements are important: Connectivity, horizontal and vertical, and Accountability, down and up.

Democratic processes are briefly outlined in Figure 3. Political equality requires representation of all legitimate interests in order to embody equality and avoid tyranny. I haven’t resolved if representation needs to be proportional numerically or can be substantive. And there are serious questions of how to define legitimate, that is which interests are included and which excluded. Methods exist to do this (Ulrichian boundary critique) but I’m not going to discuss this today, except to say that not only do current and geographically present interests need inclusion, but the interests of future generations, geographically distant people, other species, the disadvantaged, the less powerful, the young and the aged need representation too. Again ideas about how to do this can be discussed elsewhere.

Deliberation: face to face whenever possible even if electronically, with adequate but not indefinite time, access in real time to necessary expertise and information. Examples are citizen juries.

In the interests of time, some of these will come out in the discussion further along.

Finally to this section of the discussion, democratic systems need to incorporate mechanisms to ensure there is accountability for governors the the governed, and that the processes of government are  open and transparent to everyone.

In passing let me just remind people of Fotopoulos’ idea of inclusive democracy (Fotopoulos, T, 1997, Towards an inclusive democracy: The crisis of the growth economy and the need for a new liberatory project, Cassell, London, New York.). The lesson here is to recognise that to be truly democratic, a society must have democracy operating across all of his realms: the political, the social (including the personal), the economic and the ecologic, including institutional frameworks that aim to eliminate any human attempt to dominate the natural world. His argument for the failure of the experiments with democratic governance across the past few centuries is that each only paid attention to some of the realms while others were ignored. This emphasises questions of representation and reflective and adaptive governance processes.

Presenting in Figure 4 is a very simple model of our governance system. It represents the main loci of power and how they interact.

In today’s neoliberal, western “democratic” cultural tradition, we position government in the central position of power. We observe the myth that governments are in control.

We know however that power is actually contested between all three: government, the civil society and the corporate groups. This contestation revolves around differing sub-cultural views about the role and reach of government in governance, whose interests are given priority and why, and links in to differing world views which, to use Lakoff’s descriptors, are the strict father or the nurturant parent view. The former currently has ascendency.

So to undertake the cultural transformation to bring about the Phase 5 Transition Boyden argues we need urgently, one of the key cultural sectors needing to change is our governance. This is both because of the institutional power and resources governments hold, and because of the role which nurturant parents see government having in regulating corporations, which in turn is a critical part of the culture change we want to see.

Based on the idea that a democratic governance system is this best way of achieving a biosensitive, ecologically sustainable society what creates the conditions for human wellbeing, I’m proposing that democratic governance, as defined above, is where a governance transformation needs to go.

What would that look like?

Without pre-empting discussion too much, one view could be this (Figure 5), based on Ostrom’s  “nested polycentric governance systems”: at the core would be a set of citizen assemblies deciding about public policy, economic and social priorities, and the ways and means of achieving these, appointing public servants, monitoring service delivery.  The business sector would be no longer shareholder owned corporations, but cooperatives governed by citizen assemblies or mutuals governed by members. Appointment of the boards of directors would be by these assemblies, or sortition (chosen by lottery) from members, who would monitor the processes, worker standards and conditions, output quality and similarly. Many more business would have returned to small corner store business, the family business model on which Adam Smith predicated his economic theory.

These will be supported and informed by a multitude of community groups of NGOs each active in its area of interest. These NGOs may also deliver services for their communities.

For practical purposes most assemblies will be geographically situated. Natural Resource Management experience suggests that geographic alignment of these local government areas be grounded within watersheds which allows the social, economic and environmental realms to be better aligned. But non-geographically located legitimate interests can still be included.

Over increasing geographic scale, nested assemblies can go up to the global level, abiding by the principle of subsidiarity, and each level taking advice from ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ levels.

Of course there is going to be politicking and jockeying for position and influence but the system designed in accord with democratic principles will have mechanisms built in to account for and minimise the impact of that.

In this situation, one of the cultural changes has been an acceptance that part of one’s civic duty is to take a turn in a citizen assembly. This will carry rewards in status and future career opportunities as a ‘community elder’. Community elders will be the magistrates, advisors, appeal judges and so on. This society will also feature more leisure time, less consumption driven work, be more localised and more globalised, using electronic communications and limited travel. Slow life will be the norm.

National governments as such would have ceased to exist although some large scale organisations such as disaster management/relief, coordination of climate change adaptation, coordination of governance of the global commons, trade, nuclear weapons technology and waste, governed in turn by people chosen by sortition from ‘lower’ level assemblies.

We really want the changes to begin now. Change will have to most likely occur in two phases: a reform phase, incrementally improving the current situation and a transformative phase. Both will have to occur simultaneously with more reform early, moving across into transformative change as momentum builds.

I’m not going to pre-empt where the transforming culture series is going in regard to method, but will list some ideas about what types of changes might occur under each heading in table 1.

Table 1: Governance Reform Transform

Discussion and Commentary

Bob Webb and Wendy Russel both wondered about the need to make explicit that this is challenging capitalism and the ‘growth’ consumption/productionist economy. I see it is more an implicit rather than a direct challenge, wherein the changes proposed will alter the current economic model, and change how capitalism operates without becoming engaged in discussion about an impersonal entity (Capitalism) but rather directly focusing on the entities who are be their behaviour creating the situation, the corporations themselves, and the people who are running them.

Dierk van Behrens observed that corporations are not a homogenous entity. There are different models of a corporation, with different control structures, and even ‘tween’ organisations such as the Grameen Bank, who are focusing of service and community development as well as reasonable profit. Indeed this diversity within the ‘corporate’ world does need to be acknowledged as it demonstrates openings for changes to occur. Ethical investing and ‘triple bottom line’ reporting are further examples of how the transition is already emerging. However while some smaller, local businesses and corporations do demonstrate benign behaviour, and may be operating within Princen’s Principle of Sufficiency (Princen T. The Logic of Sufficiency. Cambridge, Ma. USA, London, UK: MIT Press; 2005) the large transnational ones are not. Further the Corporations law designs the system to guide large companies to operate in the way they are; as Paul Gilding alludes, the directors of companies are as caught up in the system as we are.

Bob Webb further noted that there are emerging trends in Australia reinforcing governance on a ‘regional’ scale of five to ten LGAs. Building on these initiatives where they exist to leverage better governance of particular issues, and promoting this scale of governance is important to the transformation. A theme in the recent Future Earth Conference on distributed infrastructure helping develop more self-reliant communities is one such initiative.

Wendy Russell reminded us of the need to consider what needs to occur within each societal sector, and, as John Dryzek has said, to look at the trade-offs that are required between sectors during the transformational period.

Val Brown opened a series of discussions. First, in what context am I wanting to bring democracy – developed / developing nations? Is this something that would work in all human systems? While I believe that all human societies have the capacity for and will benefit from democracy, I only feel capable to focus this work in Australia. However this does not preclude others from taking the ideas into other locales where their experience and capability will allow them to use it.

Secondly, Val sought an overarching / primary principle, not covered in the list given in Figure 2. This provoked a long discussion out of which arose agreement that a (we did not settle on the language for this) primary or overarching principle or assumption is that all human beings are capable of equally valuable contributions to governance. Another point is that the Principles in Figure 2 are Guiding Principles, and that additional such principles may be required such as Accountability and the separation of powers (judiciary and parliament).

Gill King asked about how to deal with non-participants. On one level, any such choice would need to be respected, but each community would need to establish for themselves precisely how they would deal with this situation.

Gill also stimulated discussion about the mechanics of creating regional governing entities. Is this to be a naturally evolving redistribution of power or something more sudden and radical? How will money and power be taken from State and Federal governments? Is it a matter, as shown by David Holmgren and his permaculture practice, and the Transition Towns movement, of establishing parallel institutions and practices and allowing the central authorities to atrophy? (I think Franzi Poldy might here interject that the central authorities would actively try to discourage such a state from developing and strong resistance would be met). That said, it also may be possible to make our alternative society look so good that the people sent to oppress us may want to join us.

Dierk then introduced a set of humanity related factors, which in essence advised of the necessity for any transition system to work with the genetic and psychological pre-dispositions of humans. However it is also noted that humans are psychologically and socially very adaptable, and will respond dynamically with the societal situation in which they find themselves. Michael Ignatieff and his The Needs of Strangers was given as an example demonstrating that humans are capable of identifying as one with other human beings, permitting their personal resources to be used to meet the needs of strangers. Many examples of charity and altruism support this observation.

A pdf document of this presentation is available here.

This is a rough transcript of an interactive session exploring the concept of the collective mind.

Transformational change is: complex, chaotic, connected

Collective Mind =  Individual minds in a community of collective minds:

Seven forms of evidence: physical observations, social narratives, ethical principles, aesthetic sensations, sympathetic recognition, plus individual experience and collective reflection.

7 ways of knowing:

Transforming learning cycle, in practice a learning spiral

How to apply: not clear process but a commitment to give it a try. Be conscious and reflect.

A pdf version is available here.

As most of you know by now from sharing this room at these excellent forums, I identify myself as “a musician and environmental activist”. I want to start off this session by again identifying myself in that way because, as Val has helped us recognise, identifying a personal path into a question is a vital part of understanding it. It is the first of the seven ways of knowing – the introspective – which sets us off on the journey. The first chunk of this presentation, then, is an exploration of my own journey to this starting point.

What do I mean by “musician and environmental activist”? Well, for my whole life I have been professionally and passionately focussed on these two directions – playing and listening to music, and working to protect our environment, both of them in various different ways. Many of my earliest memories have to do with specific pieces of music and David Attenborough documentaries! After school, I studied law, as a path to better informed social change, and repeatedly had to convince myself not to drop out and go be a musician. I did honours in theatre studies, with a focus on alternative political interpretations of Shakespeare. And I have spent my entire professional life juggling activism, music and family.

I think I have always instinctively felt that these two paths were running in tandem towards the same goal, that in some way they were different aspects of a larger whole. When I discovered Brecht and Weill as a teenager, and then explored what Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith, among others, was doing with environmental themes in his music, I became convinced of it. I started to put it into practice properly around a decade ago by working to reduce my own band’s environmental footprint, and discussing what we were doing with as many people as possible. And then, two years ago, I quit my job as Christine Milne’s Communications Director to start working full time on an NGO to “facilitate, organise and inspire” the music scene to green up its act.

It was always my belief that Green Music Australia, by working at a practical level with musicians and their surrounding industry, could and would help create deep, cultural, social change. But I didn’t really know how. So I started researching it, at first with a paper I wrote under the auspices of my friend Matthew Rimmer’s Future Fellowship on Intellectual Property and Climate Change (and many of the quotes today come from interviews I conducted for that research), then on culture and environmentalism for the ACT Conservation Council, then here through the Human Ecology Forum, and now seriously discussing the prospect of doctoral research on the topic.

The word that brings it all together, for me, and what appealed to me so much about this theme of the Human Ecology Forum, is “culture”. It’s such a wonderful word, partly, as I said at my first presentation here, because it can mean so many different things to different people in different contexts, and yet still have the same underlying driving force. We have high culture and low culture, ethnic cultures, socio-political cultures, culture in yoghurt or a petri dish which makes it come alive, flourish, thrive, create something new and interesting.

The relevant definition from the Oxford English Dictionary is “[t]he ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society”. American artistic activist Arlene Goldbard defines it more poetically as “the fabric of signs and symbols, customs and ceremonies, habitations, institutions, and much more that characterize and enable a specific human community to form and sustain itself.”

Culture guides us as we make the myriad decisions that we make each day. Culture guides what we eat, whether we wear jeans, a skirt or laundered trousers, the words we use, the way we work and commute, how we engage with our children and our parents. Culture sits behind our desire to follow social mores or our willingness to break the law, whether by jay walking or shoplifting or locking on to mining equipment in an act of civil disobedience. Culture drives the way we vote, the music we listen to, the way we deal with conflict. And each of our actions feeds back on and influences culture as it continues to evolve.

Sometimes cultures are changed by natural events such as earthquakes. Sometimes they are changed by disruptive technology like agriculture, iron tools or telecommunications. Sometimes they evolve incrementally as populations grow, pushing people into closer proximity, or as waves of migrants influence a host culture. Sometimes cultures are deliberately changed by a group of people adding intentional impulses to the bigger evolutionary process they form a small part of.

Culture can be benign, influencing whether we prefer eggs or congee for breakfast. But culture can become hegemonic, driving unhealthy and unsustainable consumption, blocking certain groups of people from access to services, limiting democratic choice.

Culture, as I understand it, is at the heart of everything.

This, I suspect is obvious to all of you, but after years in politics it came to me as a bolt from the blue. And it came as I was thinking for the millionth time about the old dictum which used to be the bane of my existence:

“Politics is the art of the possible”.

I would get deeply frustrated when people told me that that meant we couldn’t set targets for deep pollution cuts or 100% renewable energy. But, having extracted myself from day-to-day politics and spent time researching widely, discussing broadly and thinking deeply, I now believe it’s true – it’s just utterly misinterpreted.

If we accept the limits of what is currently possible – and the vast majority of our politicians, media, and environmental and social activists broadly do – we will never successfully face up to the deep challenges we face as a society, from preventing catastrophic climate disruption to building genuine social and economic equality to true Indigenous liberation. But neither can we just baldly declare we are going to do the impossible. Within the confines of the existing socio-political culture, it is literally impossible.

Our job is to change what is possible.

And what is possible is fundamentally a cultural question, wrapped up in how we collectively and individually conceive of the world around us and our place in it.

Going back to the political and legal theory I’d studied much earlier, and forgotten because the culture of politics and political change as currently practiced shut it out of the realms of the possible, helped me lock onto these ideas.

I searched around about this idea that culture, by framing the way we understand our world and our place in it, by limiting or expanding our social and political discourse, consequently underlies and circumscribes our behaviour. One of my favourite expressions of it, from Arlene Goldbard, sets it out as: “our capacity to act is conditioned on the story we tell ourselves about our own predicament and capabilities.”1 My other favourite, from American activist, Daniel Hunter goes like this: “Politicians are like a balloon tied to a rock. If we swat at them, they may sway to the left or the right. But, tied down, they can only go so far. Instead of batting at them, we should move the rock.”2 I would expand that to say it’s not just politicians – it’s all decision-makers. And we all make decisions. We are all balloons tied to the rock of our culture.

It’s fascinating to me that climate scientists are way ahead of campaigners in recognising that culture is key to climate change, driving the social norms that create it and holding back the necessary social, political and economic change to address it.

Climate scientist, Kevin Anderson, quoted in the RSA’s A New Agenda on Climate Change, says that the numbers are so stark that what we have to do is “develop a different mind-set – and quickly.” Similarly, Graeme Pearman, told my study that “Climate change is really a human question, it’s not primarily a physical science question at all. It’s about what humans perceive they want or need.”

I really like how the RSA explores that idea:

[E]nergy demand is driven by perceived ‘need’, but this sense of need is highly contingent from a historical or cultural perspective. Global perception of energy demand is driven by the social practices … we come to view as normal (eg two hot showers a day, driving short distances, regular flying), features of life relating to contingent norms of cleanliness, comfort and convenience rather than inherent features of human welfare.

If what we perceive to be necessary in our lives is culturally driven, then any solutions must also grapple with culture and seek to change it.

Political theory got there a century ago, if not more. Gramsci understood culture as central to his conception of hegemony. He developed Marx’s theory of class dominance to cover a critical point of power dynamics – that those in power will seize control of the arena of ideas as much as they will the traditional arms of coercive power. Power is held by controlling the discourse and the deepest way to contest power is to contest those ideas at the cultural level.

Chomsky writes that power is held over us only with our consent, and powerholders actively manipulate and ‘manufacture’ consent. In writing that “[t]he smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum,”3 Chomsky could have been describing ABC’s QandA.

I don’t think it’s any accident that these two great theorists, Chomsky and Gramsci, were both linguists. Because language is the most obvious way in which we express to each other our understanding of the world and our place in it. Language is the most sophisticated way in which we expand or limit our ideas of what is possible.

But what if there were a deeper way than language? Something that predates sophisticated political debate and sits evolutionarily deep within us?

It is absolutely no accident that the word culture has artistic connotations as well as deep political meanings. If culture is about our understanding of our world and where we belong in it, art is one of the first and best ways in. Art is how we make sense of our world and how we find our place in it. Art, including music, is one of the earliest human impulses. Actually it predates humanity, and is found in many other species, from mating calls to territorial marking to group bonding. Musical instruments are some of the earliest discovered tools, found in some of the oldest archaeological digs.

This instinct for music as a way of finding and cementing our place in the world developed into hymns and other religious music, ethnic musics which still bind many of us so deeply, national anthems, and protest songs.

Artists have always reflected and been part of cultural change – consider our conversation at the recent forum about Turner’s work moving from rural idylls to industrial landscapes over the course of his life, and Vivaldi and Bach reflecting different aspects of early Enlightenment culture. Further, artists, as cultural leaders, have been involved in driving social change over centuries, if not millennia, from civil rights to union organising to queer rights to feminism to democratic and human rights and more.

According to William Danaher, “[m]usic and rhythm have been central to human history, in part, by motivating humans to act for the benefit of the group over and above themselves.”4 As John Street notes, “From Plato to the Frankfurt School and beyond, the case has been made for regarding music (especially popular music) as a source of power”.₅

In an article entitled “The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics”,6 Street looks at the use of campaign songs in contemporary election campaigns, and discusses how the CIA’s Voice of America, as well as national anthems such as “God Save the Queen”, can be considered “a form of state propaganda", before moving to the more explicit use of militaristic and/or folk music by the Soviet, Nazi and South African apartheid regimes.7 In each of these cases, the internal justification for this propaganda art appears to be around issues of identity politics, branding or the simple abiding belief that music has the power to exercise or undermine social control.

The corollary of the promotion of certain desirable art as propaganda is the direct censorship of undesirable art. Street notes the prohibition of jazz and Jewish music under the Nazis and the banning of Fela Kuti’s music in Nigeria, amongst other examples.8

Many authors9 have noted that censorship invests music with a power it may not have possessed or intended until the act of censorship itself. Shane Howard raises the banning of the “Devil’s interval”, or augmented fourth, by the mediaeval church as an example of this.10 However, Howard and others reflect that these kinds of clumsy interventions reveal a very real power of art that those seeking social control and fearing art understand. Guy Abrahams of Climarte, in my interviews, fascinatingly reflects that it may be the very uncontrollable nature of the arts and how they convey meaning that strikes fear into the heart of totalitarian regimes: “because they recognise that it’s not something that can be controlled.”

Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks in their excellent book Playing for Change, thoroughly examine the role of music in social movements, covering issues such as recruitment, conversion and mobilisation, diffusion vs containment of ideas and activity, experience and participation, and collective identity.

They define political music through its role in driving change:

political music implies that existing arrangements are not natural... [and are] susceptible to change... if opposed... [Music] is also political if it helps achieve the tasks necessary for mobilising such opposition.11

So, music can be used by political forces to help drive opposition and resistance, and, on the other hand, musicians can of their own accord exercise their political voice. In some cases, these desires and aims are consistent; in others, there is a clear decision by political forces to co-opt musicians.

The use of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign is among the most famous examples of co-option, the songwriter being deeply unhappy that his music’s intended critique of his country’s treatment of Vietnam veterans was used as a simplistic patriotic anthem for a campaign he did not support.12 Just last week we saw John Schumann deeply disturbed by Reclaim Australia’s co-option of his song “I was only 19” at their racist rallies.

A more cooperative approach was taken by early union organisers and the Communist Party in the USA, bringing in non-involved musicians to recruit supporters. Most famously, the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies, saw folk music as central to their project, publishing their Little Red Songbook with regular updates throughout the last century, and directly inspiring songwriters such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

Later, the Highlander Centre, one of the first activist training centres in the world, involved a substantial focus on music, recruiting and training musicians and workshopping campaign songs. “We Shall Overcome” is the most famous of many protest songs of the 1960s that had its origins there. Spirituals and blues became a key part of the fight for civil rights in the USA just as Jimmy Little, Yothu Yindi and many others made their music a part of their fight for Indigenous self-determination here in Australia. Macklemore’s Same Love and Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl, while less explicitly political, can be seen as part of the cultural shift to normalising homosexuality in recent years.

So how, and in what ways, does music have this powerful effect?

Well, this is what I’m hoping to test in my doctoral research, if I take that plunge. But I believe it can be divided into three distinct roles:

1. music affects the way we receive ideas;
2. music affects and interacts with the way we see the world and our place in it in such a way as to shift cultural norms; and
3. music can shift and reprioritise values in such a way as to enable transformative cultural change.

The first of these is in many ways the most self-explanatory, and is certainly the most thoroughly explored in existing literature.

Affecting the way we receive ideas can be as simple as drawing attention to an issue and passing on information about it. On that level, we can consider the role of the musician as celebrity, singing about an issue, playing at a benefit gig such as Live Earth or Band Aid, taking part in the fossil fuel divestment campaign. While it is often superficial engagement, this can nevertheless be a crucial role for musicians, recruiting more supporters from their fanbase, helping raise much needed funds, and ensuring that those already involved stay inspired.

The central question here is what is the role of the musician as messenger? Climate communications expert Suzanne Moser talks about the credibility of a messenger being context dependent. We might trust a scientist to inform us of scientific information, but not necessarily on policy responses. We wouldn’t trust a priest to explain science to us, but we might trust them to articulate a moral response. Musicians have neither scientific credibility nor moral standing. But they do have cultural credibility, and it is in their role shaping and guiding culture that they become powerful messengers.

This cultural role is what Billy Bragg, among the world’s most celebrated ‘political’ songwriters, is tapping into in his response to this question:

I think you have to reveal to the audience that you don’t have all the answers and that you yourself are not completely sure that you know what you’re doing, you’re just trying to make the best of it, same as everyone else… It’s not about offering answers, it’s asking the right questions… It’s the audience that has the answers.13

As well as humility, authenticity is key to musicians’ involvement. I think this is why many musicians are so interested in Green Music Australia. They see that, if we can help them take important first steps, they will be in a better position to engage with their audiences authentically on the issues.

But musicians have something beyond the potential of being humble and authentic messengers. They are not simply talking on the street. They are singing, or at least talking in the context of their music, in the context of their performance. They are interpreting the information they are conveying through their music, presenting the ideas in a way which engages their audience emotionally. Suzanne Vega’s song Luka opened space for discussion of child abuse, for example, far more effectively that any words she could have said.

Music, in other words, frames the ideas, and primes us to accept new frames. It opens our hearts as well as our minds through invoking emotions, memories, social constructs and more.

Framing is, of course, a word that comes from the arts. The word itself paints a picture of a work of art within a frame which directs the viewer’s focus, providing a specific perspective.

While George Lakoff, the grandfather of framing, does not explicitly address the use of arts, two specialists in the field who have followed him, political scientist Brendan Nyhan and neuropsychologist Drew Westen, do draw attention to it. Nyhan’s most relevant contribution in this area arises from his practical examination of Lakoff’s revelation that “[i]f the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off”.14 He has conducted studies into such “disconformation bias [and]… resistance to corrections”15 to identify appropriate ways to help people to accept new frames. The results of these studies show that both graphical representations and “priming” can be effective in shifting the frames of debates sufficiently to alter people’s understanding of certain “facts”. Graphical representation can involve mathematical graphs and tables or more artistic works representing the issue in question. Priming can be anything from smiling, or actively boosting the self-confidence of the subject, to playing music that triggers certain feelings, making the subject more receptive to new frames and messages.

Rosenthal and Flacks note that “music can serve as a ‘prime’ that triggers a complex interpretive schema in which specific situations are linked to a framework of more general beliefs.”16 Whether it be hearing Arethra Franklin singing “Respect” triggering frames about gender roles, or simply the positive social atmosphere of a gig and emotions triggered by the music itself, music can act powerfully as the kind of prime Nyhan identifies and thus help the process of shifting frames.

Drew Westen’s neuropsychological studies into the way the brain makes political decisions have very clear implications here. His central relevant conclusion is that emotions are the most powerful political communications tool, since political decisions are not made “rationally”, but subconsciously. Westen specifically addresses the role of music as critical to emotional engagement around messages. He notes, for example, that it has been “shown in a series of experiments that something as subtle as varying the musical score in a political ad can alter its power to persuade”, something that has long been known by advertisers and film makers.17

Shane Howard of the band Goanna is convinced of music’s “emotive force”. His analysis of the impact of his song “Let the Franklin Flow” is that the message was carried more powerfully because of the music’s “capacity to open the soul, and in a way prepare us for a transformative message.”18

For Charlie Mgee of permaculture dance band Formidable Vegetable Sound System, the role of music in priming audiences is central to the philosophy behind the band. The music is “a way for people to get together as a group and enjoy themselves. And when they’re transformed to that state of enjoyment it’s really a lot easier to get messages through about more serious issues.”19

This is a practical demonstration of John Dewey’s writings on aesthetics and the power of art to create shared experience,20 as well as Martha Nussbaum’s view that “the arts and literature develop our ability to empathize.”21

And that brings us to the second aspect – how music affects and interacts with the way we see the world and our place in it in order to potentially shift cultural norms.

The way we see our place in the world can also be expressed as identity, and that is a question Rosenthal and Flacks explore in some detail.

“Identity processes are inherent in all movements, [a]nd music is the way many first try on that identity... Indeed, music is a major resource for identity construction in contexts that are remote from the political”. “Music and group identity,” they say, “may become so intertwined as to be synonymous in the minds of group members and outsiders”.22

Andrew Ross, writing on youth music and culture, notes that:

the level of attention and meaning invested in music by youth is still unmatched by almost any other organised activity in society, including religion. As a daily companion, social bible, commercial guide and spiritual source, youth music is still the place of faith, hope and refuge. In the forty-odd years since “youth culture” was created as a consumer category, music remains the medium for the most creative and powerful stories about those things that often seem to count the most in our daily lives.23

One of the important roles for music in this identity process is as a social legitimiser. “While the music creates the bond,” Rosenthal and Flacks say, “the listeners of punk may then be motivated to carry out their political ideals not because the music ‘says’ they should but because many others feel the same way and that it is acceptable to express those opinions.”24

Charlie Mgee has found this very process at work in his audience engagement:

I think it’s essential to the movement, in fact I think it’s essential to any kind of group action, in that it creates an identity among people, and a sense of belonging. It makes them feel validated as part of a group. If everyone’s there listening to music about climate action or permaculture or whatever, just them being there, having a good time together, enjoying that, is bonding them in a way that validates what the music or the art is about. That was the idea behind my project… to actually take something that not many people were talking about and just make it fun without pressing the actual ideas too heavily onto anyone, and then through that really drive it home and try to bring that enjoyable positive context into what you’re talking about. Which is an interesting experiment, but it seems to be the way that it works. And I really think that music is the most powerful tool we have for bringing people together.25

As well as building a broad sense of shared identity, music plays a critical role in helping create, maintain and cement internal movement identity amongst campaigners. Shane Howard recalls the large number of songs written to support the Franklin River campaign which never reached the level of popularity of “Let the Franklin Flow” but “on the ground, those songs are lifting people’s spirits, they’re galvanising the intention, and reminding people why those issues are important.”26

Tim Levinson, the DJ Urthboy, finds the perfect metaphor for this role, speaking passionately about the importance of “preaching to the choir”:

which I have no qualms with whatsoever. It’s one of those condescending comments … that dismisses all this value, that misses the point of how vital it is to preach to the choir, to support what the damn choir is singing, to be the band behind the choir!27

One of the most powerful roles for music in social and cultural change, then, is the power of artistic work infused with that sense of identity to spread ideas wider. As Rosenthal and Flacks say:

What begins percolating isn’t a coherent ideology, but… “structures of feelings”, part emotional, part rational, a heady brew of social ideas, fashions, music, and so forth, both precursor to a developing ideology and more than simply an ideology, involving “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” by each individual.

That brings us to the other aspect of affecting the way we see the world that music and musicians can very effectively engage in: prefiguring – modelling new behaviours and behavioural norms.

Music and musicians, as cultural leaders and influencers, have a critical role to play in their behaviour, both on stage and off.

Rosenthal and Flacks highlight the example of British multi-racial “2-Tone” bands presenting a reality in which “race divisions were not inevitable.”28 The same process took place on the edges of the civil rights movement in the USA, with black and white jazz musicians, for example, sharing stages and working together.

The importance of modelling behaviour has major implications for the lifestyles of conspicuous consumption that some celebrity artists lead. It is also a key driver for efforts to practically “green” the arts, such as by Julie’s Bicycle, Green Music Australia, the SLOW BOAT conference,29 and others. While an artist is, perhaps unconsciously, modelling excessive consumption, any work they do to promote sustainability cannot succeed as it lacks authenticity. By consciously shifting their behaviour to modelling greener lifestyles and business practices, artists can effectively contribute to changing cultural norms and thereby amplify their individual actions by, in some cases, several orders of magnitude.

Musicians do not, of course, model behaviour simply as individuals, or even as celebrities. Their art plays a key role in their ability to influence, thanks to its emotional pull, its ability to “prime” us for accepting new frames, and its cultural power to create coherent meaning out of disparate elements.

As Rosenthal and Flacks explain:

In this role as soundtrack of our individual and collective lives, music not only takes part of its meaning from its setting, but also organises our memory of that setting, the symbol that ties it together in an accessible package, thus contributing to the meaning we attribute to it in later recollections.30

Charlie Mgee has an intriguing persepctive related to these ideas that is worth exploring – that music can perform a mnemonic function, placing an idea or set of behaviours into people’s “cultural repertoire that acts as a reminder and a pointer”. In coming to this theory he draws on:

the ancient roles of music which were aimed towards direct action – I’m thinking along the lines of the work songs, the sea shanties. In a way, musicians are the shanty people, guiding us along this course of change. Sea shanties were traditionally work songs that were mnemonics to help people engage in action that would get them somewhere they were trying to go, or to achieve a particular function in their community or culture.31

Mgee compares this to the modern use of jingles by advertisers, using catchy, simple and repetitive music to, as he puts it, “encode public mnemonics” that can trigger certain decisions and behaviours in a given situation. He is experimenting with that approach in order to hopefully trigger environmentally sustainable behaviour:

so that when people are put in particular situations that are challenging to their lifestyle or particular circumstances arise, a song is inspired to come into their head that helps in that situation… [In that way] music is just a way that you can set people up to have the answers available when their troubles arise.

Shane Howard calls prefiguring “future-dreaming” and he sees the role for “the artist to psychologically prepare people for change, or to explain change” as “very subversive at times.”32 This is because art can be and is used not simply to challenge certain behaviours but to actively change very deeply held views of the world.

Angharad Wynne-Jones, from Tipping Point Australia, fascinatingly reflects that this “comes back to the inherent value of art-making in and of itself as an activity that resists the economic pressures, that can be done outside or alongside or subvert the… dominant economic paradigm.”33 One of the questions I want to explore more deeply around this is whether music, as an experiential activity rather than a material good, can in some way act as an inherently anti-consumerist force, if separated from the commodifying process of the mainstream industry.

This is where the role of prefiguring and modelling dovetails with the deepest layer of all – shaping and reshaping the very culture through which we understand our world and our place in it.

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, in their seminal work Music and Social Movements, describe the interaction between arts and social change activism as a “source of cultural transformation”. Just as artistic culture can influence and shift broad culture, the broader cultural environment can have an impact on art, creating a fascinating and potent interweaving of the two. For example, “the resurrection of bluegrass music, as well as many other traditional musics, was inspired by the civil rights movement, and its actualisation of history, its linking of the past with the present”.34

More specifically, they argue that the participation by artists such as Brecht and Weill, Dylan and Baez, in social movements not only helps create our cultural understanding of those movements, but also had an impact on their art, engendering a creative feedback loop. Indeed, their “engagement was objectified in their art, and the movement thus came to be embodied in them.”35

[B]y combining culture and politics, social movements serve to reconstitute both, providing a broader political and historical context for cultural expression, and offering, in turn, the resources of culture - traditions, music, artistic expression - to the action repertoires of political struggle.

The composer John Luther Adams, who spent years as an environmental activist before dedicating himself to music, explores this idea about his own practice in an article recently published at Slate:

My work is not activism. It is art. As an artist, my primary responsibility must be to my art as art—and yet, it’s impossible for me to regard my life as a composer as separate from my life as a thinking human being and a citizen of the earth. Our survival as a species depends on a fundamental change of our way of being in the world. If my music can inspire people to listen more deeply to this miraculous world we inhabit, then I will have done what I can as a composer to help us navigate this perilous era of our own creation. For me, it all begins with listening.36

The deepest layer of cultural communications and campaigning currently being researched, in my opinion, is that of values mapping and how activating certain values can support or repress other values. The Climate Change Advisory Group notes one aspect of this strand of research:

Undue emphasis upon economic imperatives serves to reinforce the dominance, in society, of a set of extrinsic goals (focused, for example, on financial benefit). A large body of empirical research demonstrates that these extrinsic goals are antagonistic to the emergence of pro-social and pro-environmental concern.37

As mentioned, Angharad Wynne-Jones posits that, on this level, the arts are in and of themselves presenting a different set of values, prefiguring a different world, “not unrelated to the fact that it doesn’t make financial sense as an industry”. In this way, artists, other than the tiny number of hugely successful celebrity artists, present quite a different picture of “what it is to be successful in a society that pretty much values economic success over anything else”.38 Artists express ideals of intrinsic values as success quite contrary to the broader cultural context in which extrinsic measures of wealth and status define success.

Perhaps the most fascinating concept of all, and filled with opportunity for the role of the arts in driving climate action, is raised in a recent paper published by Common Cause suggesting that “engagement in arts & culture… [in and of itself can] encourage values that support well-being, social justice, and ecological sustainability”.39

This is an idea that has been instinctively noted before. For example, Guy Abrahams notes, from his experience, that “[b]eing artistically active, even for people who aren’t artists, is a way of accessing ways of thinking which they normally don’t.”40 Wynne-Jones extends her point about art not making financial sense into this deeper context:

One of the things I see artists that I work alongside doing brilliantly is opening up spaces of meaning that are different to the transactional meanings that we have in the economy that’s driven by material gain and capital. Really just the very presence of art and creativity can create a different understanding of the world and currency within the world which feels to me fundamental... In that sense I think that all art, no matter whether it proclaims itself to be socially motivated or politically motivated, has that capacity and makes that offer if it’s engaged with.41

The evidence base in the values mapping work takes this to a fascinating new level. The values of creativity and curiosity sit on the map amongst the values collectively referred to as “intrinsic”, close to the values of care for the environment, social justice and universalism, and opposite “extrinsic” values, such as desire for more material possessions, wealth, social status and power. Professor Tim Kasser writes that:

If we accept the sensible proposition that engagement in arts and culture activates values such as “curiosity” and “creativity,” then the implication from research on the value circumplex would be that the intrinsic portion of the human motivational system could be encouraged and strengthened, while the extrinsic portion could be suppressed, as a result of participating in arts and cultural activities… [A]rts and cultural activity are realms of human life in which people frequently report strong feelings of flow and engagement, and in which people often engage for the solely intrinsic reasons of self-expression, creativity, and exploration. As such, it may be that the more that one engages in artistic activity for these kinds of intrinsic reasons, the more the intrinsic portion of the motivational system will be strengthened, and thus the weaker extrinsic values will become.42

This is an area I am extremely keen to research further.

A clear lesson from history and theory is that not only can artists play a pivotal role in social change, but that such change is unlikely to occur unless cultural processes are at play, because social change is cultural change. The ability of arts and artists to draw people together around a new conception of the world is second to none.

7 ways of knowing

1. Identity - who am I!!! Music central to identity formation
2. Physical - can music affect the way we observe physical phenomena?
3. Social - music as a language, or a conduit for language
4. Ethical - music as a way of sharing ideas of good and bad
5. Aesthetic - obvs
6. Sympathetic - music as a conduit for connection between people, and people and our environment
7. Reflective - music as a way of bringing different ideas and views and ways of knowing together. Also music is closely associated with MEMORY - organising memory of events in a coherent set of feelings.

“As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself. If my work doesn’t function powerfully as music, then all the poetic program notes and extra-musical justifications in the world mean nothing. When I’m true to the music, when I let the music be whatever it wants to be, then everything else—including any social or political meaning—will follow.”43

References

1 Arlene Goldbard, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists and The Future, Waterlight Press, 2013, loc 193.

2 Daniel Hunter, Strategy and Soul: A Campaigner’s Tale of Fighting BIllionnaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos, Smashwords, 2013, Chapter 10

3 Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, Odonian Press, 1998, 43.

4 William Danaher, ‘Music and Social Movements’ (2010) 4(9) Sociology Compass 811, 813.

5 John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’ (2003) 38 Government and Opposition 113, 116.

6 John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’ (2003) 38 Government and Opposition 113.

7 John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’ (2003) 38 Government and Opposition 113, 114-115.

8 John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’ (2003) 38 Government and Opposition 113, 117.

9 John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’ (2003) 38 Government and Opposition 113. See also Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012); Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

10 Shane Howard, interview, 26/03/14.

11 Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 20.

13 Billy Bragg, quoted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 214.

14 George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant (Scribe, 2004) xv, 17.

15 Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, Opening the Political Mind? The Effects of Self-affirmation and Graphical Information on Factual Misperceptions (Dartmouth College, 2011).

16 Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 124.

17 Drew Westen, Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (PublicAffairs, 2008).

18 Shane Howard, interview, 26/03/14.

19 Charlie Mgee, interview, 17/03/14.

20 Nancy S Love and Mark Mattern, Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics (SUNY Press, 2013), 128.

21 Nancy S Love and Mark Mattern, Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics (SUNY Press, 2013), 10.

22 Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 94.

23 Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (Routledge, 1994, 3.

24 Rob Rosenthal, unpublished work extracted in Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012),165.

25 Charlie Mgee, interview, 17/03/14.

26 Shane Howard, interview, 26/03/14.

27 Tim Levinson, interview, 13/03/14.

28 Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 115.

29 Tipping Point Australia, Greening the Arts: Thinkpieces for Zero Carbon Future and A Survey of Sustainable Arts Practices (October 2010), 9.

30 Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 88-89.

31 Charlie Mgee, interview, 17/03/14.

32 Shane Howard, interview, 26/03/14.

33 Angharad Wynne-Jones, interview, 14/03/14.

34 Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.

35 Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12.

36 John Luther Adams, “Making Music in the Anthropocene: How should artists engage with times of crisis?”, slate, February 24, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/02/john_luther_adams_grammy_winner_for_become_ocean_discusses_politics_and.single.html

37 Climate Change Advisory Group, ‘Communicating Climate Change to Mass Public Audiences’ (Working Document, September 2010), 6.

38 Angharad Wynne-Jones, interview, 14/03/14.

39 Professor Tim Kasser, in Mission Models Money & Common Cause, The Art of Life: Understanding How Participation in Arts and Culture Can Affect our Values (2013) <http://valuesandframes.org/ download/reports/The%20Art%20Of%20Life%20-%20MMM%20and%20Common%20Cause.pdf>, 8.

40 Guy Abrahams, interview, 14/03/14.

41 Angharad Wynne-Jones, interview, 14/03/14.

42 Professor Tim Kasser, in Mission Models Money & Common Cause, The Art of Life: Understanding How Participation in Arts and Culture Can Affect our Values (2013) <http://valuesandframes.org/ download/reports/The%20Art%20Of%20Life%20-%20MMM%20and%20Common%20Cause.pdf>, 10-11.

43 John Luther Adams, “Making Music in the Anthropocene: How should artists engage with times of crisis?”, slate, February 24, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/02/john_luther_adams_grammy_winner_for_become_ocean_discusses_politics_and.single.html

The pdf version of this talk is here.

Abstract

To bring about a cultural transformation, existing power structures must be challenged and changed. The existing power relationships in a society are both culturally determined and determine culture. Power resides in determining the discourse: that is it determines what is known and what cannot be known; what can be discussed and what isn’t even considered.

Synopsis of discussion

Earlier discussion in the Transforming Cultures theme identified the issue of power, the exercise of power, and the role of culture in shaping the expression of power came forward as idea to be explored. A subset of this idea, the public health response to power and governance, was also suggested as a topic. Today’s topic is to explore power as being a central issue in culture.

First to recap some definitions to help understanding for purposes of this theme:

• If culture is the operating system for society, then governors are the programmers
• Governance: the action or manner of controlling or regulating a state, organization, or people (OED)
• Power: The capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events (OED), or in a Weberian terms, the ability to get outcomes despite resistance
• Democracy: a mechanism for decision taking by those who are going to live with the consequences

Clearly governance is about asserting power. Many forms of governance are possible but, from a primary health care perspective, the better outcomes overall for the wellbeing of humans and the natural world of which humans are a part, would come from a democratic system where people have a high degree of control over their lives and society. A brief recap of the principles and processes of democracy was given (Boxes 1 and 2).

Discussion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and particularly the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism raised the matter of corporate power, and how corporate power might be resisted.

The suggestion of the use of consumer power was challenged because this concept, while there may be particular uses of it, generally fails because is accepts the framing that corporations have put on consumer culture. The second idea, localising businesses, was not explored. It does however help to reframe corporate power by refusing to play in, or opting out of, the corporate space. Regulation to ensure triple bottom line reporting was a third option.

The way that the Chicago School’s worldview of neoliberalism has taken over the framing of economic and social discourse was given as an example of how power is exercised through culture. Individualism, anti-collective, a market model for human relationships, worth being monetary, people as consumers not citizens are now accepted as normal, that is. how the world naturally works. How one worldview comes to dominate was discussed; several factors contributed.

Val Brown proposed and the proposition accepted that all things have power (see the tree analogy). We humans all have the same basis of power, intrinsically. This power cannot be lost or given up. However, people can chose to abstain from exercise of their power, as has occurred with the growth of a neoliberal worldview, or with accepting Elizabeth Windsor as our monarch. This choice might be consensual, that is power is voluntarily ceded, gifted or lent. Alternatively it may be taken forcibly. More often, and this is probably the case in many instances, it is distorted, manipulated, or bought. In these situations peoples’ agreement may be assumed by those exercising their power, or people may go along with the situation, but consent is never formally given for power to be handed over.

In these latter situations, the exercise or non-exercise of power becomes built into the culture, and the social structures. Particularly when power exercised through brute force cannot prevail, then grounding exercise of power in the culture may be the only option available. The evolution of the divine right of kings when kings could not defeat their magnates directly is an example. Equally, when the exercise of power is embedded in the social structures, then people can chose to accede to that power or can chose to resist it.

For humans, power resides in the relationship networks in which people live. As such it is both fragmented and connected. It also sits with people in the physical and social environments in which people live. It is these factors that help to influence when and how people chose to exercise their power.

The exercise of power may reside in the social structure which is cultural. The exercise of structural power may not be consciously intentional just as setting up the culture may not have been intentional. Therefore influence is gained even though non-intentionally exercising the power available. The culture also provides the social cues for when and how people may choose to exercise their power. Thus individual and groups of people can be disempowered or empowered by their culture.

Power it can be seen then carries many connotations. In essence the core issue is that power is exercised through relationships. It can also be not exercised. It is direct and personal, or it is structural, build into the culture. In this case its exercise is non-consciously intentional. This structural exercise of power can be overt, but more often it is hidden. It is hidden in the way that power is defined within the culture: kings rule by divine right, men are just more intelligent than women, the poor are less worthy. In this way people are dissuaded from exercising their own power by being taught that they have no power.

So in the context of transforming cultures, we need to devise new ways of exercising this power to achieve the desired better outcomes (see Box 3: a case study). The details of this project [devising new ways of power] are unclear. Framing culture as a hyperobject (see box 4) however permits us to use this methodology to attempt transformation. That includes not accepting the current power structure or the political theory that underpins it.

Further we need to change the frame of the political discussion. Historically political discussion has been with a political economy framework primarily about the sharing of resources, natural and manufactured. It has taken a primarily resource exchange model of human relationships. Reframing the discussion to be about creating a biosensitive society with the goal of ecological sustainability creates the need for a new political discourse, one within a political ecology frame. In this frame exercising power involves prioritising the values underpinning biosensitivity and looking for ways to live together with each other within the ecosystem. There may still be exchange but this is no longer the focus.

Since power is a matter of governance then governance too needs to be transformed. It is not about whether we have time or that transforming the socio-political culture is a lesser priority. If we do not take the lead on this transformation to address equity and democracy as a part of this project, then those in power will take the lead to transform our culture in alternative ways that may lead to less fair and peaceful future societies (such as Fortress Earth dystopias).

Commentary by Peter Tait

Power is the capacity to influence the behaviour of other people and things. Everything and every person has power. Power exists in the network of relationships in which people live. People may choose to exercise their power or, for a variety of reasons choose not to exercise their power. Such reasons may be consciously intentional as when power is loaned or ceded to another; it may be forcibly overridden; a person may go along with the situation, but consent is never formally given for power to be handed over. In these situations peoples’ agreement may be assumed by those exercising their power. When this becomes the social norm, then this exercise of power may be considered to be coded in the culture. Once thus enculturated, then power is being exercised through the social structure. Structural power use may not be consciously intentional just as setting up the culture may not have been intentional.

Power may be structured into different aspects of the social system: advantage / disadvantage and unfair sharing of benefits can accrue to one section of society along political, economic, gender, race, worldview and other lines.

Considering more precisely social or political power, in response to structural power relationships, we need to reframe the political discussion. Historically political discussion has been with a political economy framework primarily about the sharing of resources, natural and manufactured. It has taken a primarily resource exchange model of human relationships. Reframing the discussion to be about creating a biosensitive society with the goal of ecological sustainability creates the need for a new political discourse, one within a political ecology frame. In this frame exercising power involves prioritising the values underpinning biosensitivity and looking for ways to live together with each other within the ecosystem.

The exercise of political power is a matter of governance. Changing how political power is exercised then requires a transformation of governance. This will require the citizens to exercise their own power in political and in others social sectors. Some may argue that transforming the socio-political culture is a lesser priority because of the urgency to address the various aspects of global environmental change. However if we do not take the lead on this transformation to address equity and democracy as a part of this project, then those in power will take the lead to transform our culture in alternative ways that may lead to less fair and peaceful future societies.

The pdf of this colloquium is here.

Presenter: Jodie Pipkorn, SEE-Change

Summary and commentary: Peter Tait

What are Transition Towns

Transition Towns (TT) are members of a worldwide Transition Network (www.transitionnetwork.org). The Transition Network aims to move human society to a low-carbon, socially-just, healthier and happier future, which is more enriching and more gentle on the earth than the way most of us live today.

In our vision of the future, people work together to find ways to live with a lot less reliance on fossil fuels and on over-exploitation of other planetary resources, much reduced carbon emissions, improved wellbeing for all and stronger local economies.

The Transition movement is an ongoing social experiment, in which communities learn from each other and are part of a global and historic push towards a better future for ourselves, for future generations and for the planet.

The Transition movement two main programs are Energy Descent Plans and Economic Resilience Plans. These are developed through grassroots democratic processes and taken by the community up to governments at all levels for adoption and implementation. These plans use a cycle of learning process to draw neighbourhoods into participations. A neighbourhood can scale from streets, suburbs, work places to towns. The program model divides conversation and planning into five sectors to provide structure to the conversations: Energy, Water, Food, Transport and Waste. This also permits individuals to work on areas that interest them most.

In Canberra the TT seeks to provide a headline banner around action for ecological and social sustainability for the ACT within which members groups can collaborate. It provides a unifying focus for what otherwise maybe just be isolated local activities. The Canberra TT intends to strengthen rather than replace existing activities in the ACT, create opportunities for collaborations and the efficient use of resources, and minimise the duplication or creation of new work.

The aim was to avoid setting up another organisation but instead to:

• Provide support for the transition of life.
• Raise awareness and challenge the ACT community.
• Encourage and support each other.
• Pool resources, share skills and knowledge, and other assets.
• Acknowledge the groundwork that is already being done in the ACT.

That is, to coordinate, share and strengthen.

Operationally the group is a collaboration between organisations; it has collaborators rather than members. Terms of Reference establish the aims and intent of the organisation, defines access to the website, and the clear process rules to permit a useful loose working relationships between collaborators.  There is no formal governance structure as such; all collaborators may attend the bi-annual events and join in discussions occur. There are no decisions on policy and alignment and organising of projects and events beyond the two held each year. It embodies ‘organisation lite’; perhaps a loose-structure organisation.

A Secretariat, drawn from three of the collaborating organisations and auspiced by one, undertakes the three operational responsibilities:

• Coordinate arrangement of two TT gatherings per year; this includes sharing and reflecting on each event, facilitating conversations in organisations and developing and maintaining a ‘running sheet’ for the following event.
• Maintain a website (bit.ly/CanberraTransitioinTown) that has summary information and holds the links to each of the collaborators own webpages where more detailed information about activities and projects is held.
• Maintain a register of people and groups interested in being associated witht eh Transition Town Canberra.

Activity occurs be collaborators forming their own issue or event focused collaboration and working together on this. Thus subgroups can form using the links on the website to find groups/people with a common interest. Urgent matters are handled similarly: collaborators contact each other. This loose framework allows self-direction around issues, interests and passions at all degrees of urgency. Or as Jodie put it: “allows the magic of self-nominated activity and non-coerced commitment.”

The one activity being undertaken at a whole organisation level is to map out the groups in Canberra that are active in the broad transition space. That map is on the website and input is desired.

Transition Towns Transforming Cultures

The Transition Network explicitly aims to change how communities and hence general society operates. It fits then the definition of a transformative movement. Lots of resources detailing the process exist on Transition Network websites.

Specifically they us a Trans-theoretical Change Model, based in DiClemente’s Stages of Change work that recognises change occurs in stages, and that the process of changing needs to begin at the stage that a person is at, and begin with the issue that a person is interested in / excited about. Therefore there needs to be leadership, implying leaders, to push progress / draw people along.

TTs use the FRAMES model of change.

Discussion

Bottom up vs Top Down: to achieve change success at the grassroots will need to engage the top echelons of the system to change.

The nature of systems is that they will adjust. If enough energy / force comes from the community then the top will react. There will be bureaucratic or regulatory change. Space needs to be allowed for the system to evolve on an as-needs basis. If the bottom-up provides a clear action for government, then regulatory change can occur.

What if the top echelon reaction to change (system resilience) is resistance or suppression?

Don’t anticipate resistance until it emerges. The system dynamics may not produce it. So don’t over plan. If resistence emerges then work with it or work around it.

Summary

Clear by provoking discussion about how the world, that is human society can be better (in terms of the TT aims), the transition Towns Movement is fundamentally about changing cultures.

A pdf of this presentation is available here.

What causes people - individuals and societies - to become more ethical?

Abstract: Human ecology is about the relationships between humans, our cultures and our ecosystems. It is fundamentally concerned with the principles of ecological sustainability and social justice. At this point in history it is critical that we change our behaviour to follow these two principles.

History shows that societies have sometimes become more ethical. We need to know what causes these improvements. I submit that the main causes are as follows:

• personal, emotional experiences
• inspired moral leadership
• laws based on moral principles

My presentation will be based on a subjective, experiential approach. I will use real-life stories and images to illustrate major ethical issues. We can then discuss the examples used, in our usual objective manner. Our ultimate aim should be to determine the truth about what improves people.

The pdf of the presentation is here.

Synopsis and commentary by Peter Tait

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”  Warren Buffet, NYT, 26/11/2006

See also the Richard’s Manning Clark Lecture on Big Idea: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/manning-clark-lecture/6293172

On many issues, in a democracy, there are going to be winners and losers. While conversation, dialogue, compromise and negotiating to a win-win solution will work on some issues, on many such as stopping mining coal to mitigate climate change, there is no possible middle ground. In a ‘democratic’[1] governance system, not losing means being political. It means recognising we have opponents and we are playing a game with them. It means recognising that on most important issues, if one side wins, the other side loses. For instance, with stopping coal mining to mitigate global warming, some groups are going to lose (coal miners) and some groups are going to win (anti-coal campaigners and the public good). Or, as is the case presently, the other way around.

Richards’s key point is that the major, or indeed the only, aim in societal struggle is to not lose. That means recognising that there is, and engaging in, a fight. It means recognising that there are opponents. There will be allies or partners, some natural but others allies on this issue but opponents on other issues, but there are never friends.

We can learn how to do this by analysing how the right side of politics is currently winning. It involves being focussed, playing the political game strategically, with one’s eye always on the long term end game. It means being organised, focusing on the matter at hand, unified when needed, and working for common goals at the appropriate level. For example, Coles and Woolworths, daily arch rivals in the market place, attend Grocery Council meetings and work cooperatively with every other competitor to dilute the provisions of the Trade Practices Act. At the Business Council of Australia, they ignore the Trade Practices Act and work with BHP and Rio Tinto to water down the industrial relations regime and counter overtime pay. In this way the right side of politics displays cohesion and cooperation, even a collectivism, that is absent on the left despite the rhetoric.

It means mobilising power to harm, or more usually threaten harm, to parliamentarians. In this context harm may mean loss of popularity, or votes, which translates into loss of office. Since parliamentarians stand for election to shape the world in the image they think it should be, then they need to hold office. Anything therefore that prevents this, generates fear. The purpose of the game is to be in power; it is not primarily ideology or money but being in control. To play the game is to do whatever it takes, and what it takes is usually doing what other powerful people want you to do, which basically come down to sharing a bit of the power and the providing them with resources.

Further, it is always a minority who is wielding power of a majority. This is achieved by the organised dividing their opposition, allowing progressives to fight on multiple fronts on symptomatic issues, and employing delaying tactics: inquiries, dialogue, incremental changes, small non-useful compromises, and even treacherous marketing. The lesson: look at what your opponents do not what they say.

As Lakoff has discussed in Don’t think of an Elephant, the right is small, organised and expertly uses language to frame issues in their favour. The left on the other hand, is large, focussed on multiple issues, fights over the differences between themselves, and usually buys into or reacts against the framing that the right gives them.

Richard’s example is growth. In itself growth is not bad of itself. Children grow; cancers grow. It is therefore a question of growth of what and how. So economic growth is not the problem. Exponential growth in resource use and waste production might be a problem. Therefore it is essential to define what is being discussed. Similarly GDP is a metric that has it uses; however the point is in who applies it as a metric to what end.

So lesson one in exercising power is: use words and language to frame the message in a way that supports what we want people to hear us say. Another example: we want to spend more on health and education, and indeed we will put a tiny bit of money toward that, but first we need to fix the budget deficit. That is we agree in principle with everything you want, but first we need to do something we want. Of course this works the other way as well: we want to fix the budget deficit, but first we need to make sure we have global warming under control (Cordelia Dalton).

In making strategy, we need to avoid playing chess against ourselves. Our strategy needs to recognise our opponent’s strategy, and needs to be flexible to respond to changes in their strategy as they respond to ours.

Spelling out the positive vision is important to get people’s attention for your message, but is insufficient to avoid losing. As well there needs to tell people how your program is going to take them there. Again framing is everything. At the same time, contesting your opponent’s vision is critical. Not just talking it down, but telling people why it isn’t going to take them where they want to be.

But even then, without threatening parliamentarians with pain unless they move on an issue, we are going to lose. For instance, 91% of Australians oppose junk food advertising at times when children watch TV. The evidence supports not advertising to children, regulating to control junk food advertising will cost the government nothing financially, and the small volume of funding to the major parties from the food lobby isn’t a major factor. But the pain that the conglomerate of the food industry, the TV stations, and the advertising industry can threaten political parties with if anything changes is immense. Another example is the pain caused to the Rudd government by the mining industry over the Super-Profits Tax.

So a marketing or information campaign is useless when 91% of people are already on side. This doesn’t change the power politics. Only by making the issue the top of voters’ priority list, and being able to threaten pain is going to improve the chances of winning. That is the power of some progressing groups: Lock the Gate, the EDOs, and the Australia Council. Focused coalitions with wide membership, active in the political space, engendering fear among the political class.

The right side of politics never concedes defeat. The Warkworth mine expansion into the town of Bulga was defeated in the court; the NSW government changed the law and the proponents have submitted a new application under the new law. Sophie Mirabella has been re-endorsed as the Liberal party candidate for Indi. The Senate Inquiry into Wind Farm noise has pushed the government to appoint a Wind Farm Commissioner. The Inquiry into tax deductibility for environmental groups ignores the tax deductibility of right wing think tanks and industry councils.

Questions and Discussion – themes arising

The role of Doom and Gloom or positivity reflects the differences between strategy and tactics. It depends on the market situation. In a market where one is able to grow market share, marketing 101 tells one to keep it positive: good news stories, about how my product is better than all others. In a fixed market, for instance for voters in elections, negative attack advertising works. Your opponent’s loss is your gain. Ethically one would attack one’s opponent’s actions not themselves.

Other tactics for maintaining power:

Accumulate political capital on any issues one can and spend it on what you want. John Howard’s use of the gun control following the Port Arthur massacre to introduce a GST; Tony Abbott’s us of Axe the Tax and Stop the Boats to try to bring in a massively regressive budget.

Don’t criticise the tools but use whatever tools are available to you. While neoclassical economic theory provides the palette (worldview) we use to paint the fabric of our lives, how we apply the paint is of our own choosing. Progressives too can sue the language of neoclassical economics. Similarly the forms of economic rationalism have been deployed by those in power to dismember their opponents. We too can use these tools against our own opponents, holding them to the same account they use themselves. We can reclaim the language. But recognise that of itself economic language is only a tool. Use of this tool needs to be grounded in an explicitly articulated system of values.

Cultural change is a matter of exercising power, But to exercise power for good one needs to consider who is exercising the power to what end. It is a matter of exercising power ethically. Can one exercise power ethically? The exercise of power is ethical if it adheres to the principles of democracy.

So if we are to come at a central theme, a point where all other issues are enclosed in the net, the meta-issue, what would it be?

[1] That is a western, liberal, parliamentary system of government; Churchill’s worst form of [national] governance apart from all the others that have been tried.

The pdf of this document is available here.

The Inspiring Transition initiative

My Aikido teacher used to ask, “What’s needed now?” What does this group of students need at this point in their development? He would then improvise a training session based on that perception.

When I look at the global situation, like many others I see two trends.

On the one hand, both environmental deterioration and corporate control of the state and its citizens is increasing.

On the other hand, underneath the radar, millions of civil society groups have formed in response to these trends, and environmental and socially responsible businesses are forming as well.

I think that what is most needed now is a concerted effort to inspire urgent thoughtful mainstream commitment to doing everything required to transition to a life-sustaining society. Who should do this? Those of us who care!

This is a call to a new kind of action.

The Great Transition to a life-sustaining society

There is a huge movement for positive change underway. It comprises millions of groups and their members. Paul Hawken describes it in Blessed Unrest.

If this movement fulfils its potential, historians in the future may describe our time as ‘the Great Transition to a life-sustaining society’.

A number of thought leaders and groups are using the phrase Great Transition spontaneously. For example:

Paul Raskin and his colleagues at Tellus Institute wrote a seminal paper, Great Transition: the promise and lure of the times ahead. In it they outline possible scenarios for the future. Two are quite dark: Fortress World and Breakdown. They call the two positive ones (Eco-Communalism and New Paradigm) the Great Transition.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein uses ‘the Great Transition’ as a label for what our movement is about. Other independent thinkers, including the New Economics Foundation and Lester Brown have adopted the phrase as well.

I suggest that we might all adopt ‘We are in a  Great Transition to a life-sustaining society’ as a guiding meme for our time.

Brand recognition and social change

The meme We are in a Great Transition, and we need to accelerate it (and variations of this) can act as a counter to the mantra ‘economic growth, economic growth’. In time (as soon as possible) we want the Great Transition to supplant ‘economic growth’ as the primary definition of what our times are about.

Marketers know the value of having a brand appear ‘everywhere’. That’s why we see brand names featured prominently in sports arenas, clothing labels, billboards and glossy magazines.

We don’t exactly have a brand; each of the groups Paul Hawken mentions has their own brand. But we have a unifying meme.

Applying the meme is simple. We can bring it up in conversations. We might use it as a tagline in our email signature:

We are in a Great Transition to a life-sustaining society!

We can refer to the Great Transition in blogs, articles and lectures. The idea, as marketers know well, is to have the phrase appear everywhere, often.

Does the prospect of mentioning that we are in a Great Transition make you feel foolish awkward? I encourage you to do it anyway, because affecting public consciousness in this direction is the single most important thing many of us can do.

Or so I assert. There anything more important than affecting mainstream consciousness?

Projects are necessary–but not enough

Whole system change shows up as on the ground projects such as renewable energy, building soil carbon, cultivating local economies, improved childrearing and the like.

However, the large-scale systemic drivers of environmental deterioration are not dealt with in approaches that focus on specific projects. For example, even when companies such as Interface commit to becoming ecologically sustainable, their sphere of concern is limited to their company gates and supply chains. Likewise the good hearted folks in Conscious Capitalism do not (yet) assume responsibility for changing the overall direction of a society that is ecologically self-destructing.

This is not to criticise them; it is just to call attention to the fact that now all of us need to raise our sights and take responsibility for the well-being of society as a whole. Just ‘doing our thing’ with specific projects will not suffice.

Actually, some people hold that a multitude of us ‘just doing our thing’ will suffice. This is one theory of change. Does it stand up to criticism? On current trends the operation of society as a whole, directed by powerful elites with the general compliance of a consumerist society, is taking us all over the ecological edge.

It is as though we are all on a boat. Even as we achieve local successes we are headed for the falls. We need to change the direction of the boat itself, and this requires us to inspire massive commitment from the general public and from influential decision-makers.

The most important problem to be solved is How to gain mainstream commitment to a life-sustaining society?

With such commitment the multitude of positive initiatives that are now underway will gain much more traction. Without it, the current operation of mainstream society will take us all over the ecological edge.

So how can we gain mainstream commitment? By thousands/millions of us acting as ‘citizen educators’ who help people connect-the-dots and think for themselves. We could call ourselves ‘Transition Leaders’, but the label doesn’t matter.

I suggest that in addition to our specific projects, each of us devotes a portion of our efforts to enabling people in our networks to grasp why transformative change is necessary, and how they can contribute within their sphere of influence.

Developing a mental framework for grasping whole system change equips people mentally and emotionally to support leadership for large-scale transformative change when it emerges, and to exert leadership themselves within their sphere of influence.

Inspiring Transition

Inspiring Transition is a platform to support us in communicating with our networks.

Inspiring Transition has a well-developed communication strategy, interesting communication tactics and a model for engaging thousands–even millions–of groups. We have intentionally set it up so that playing a role in Inspiring Transition need not take an inordinate amount of any one group or individual’s time. We know that everyone is busy.

Everyone who participates acts as an autonomous agent. Our vision is to inspire organisations and their members to act as citizen educators (thinking catalysts) seeding transformative ideas into mainstream culture.

I would like to think that you too will want to play a role in Inspiring Transition.

For people new to Inspiring Transition two key articles to start with are:

• Accelerating the Great Transition - Engaging mainstream commitment to a life-sustaining society
• Understanding Whole System Change

Administrative support is provided by Be The Change Australia, but we do not direct what people do.

In the movie Invictus Nelson Mandela asked, “How can we inspire ourselves to greatness when nothing less will do?” I think it is time for each of us to lift our game to a new level of leadership.  In my view masses of us communicating with our networks about whole system change is the key to success.

Transformative social change through thinking, not slogans

Donella Meadows observed that the most influential leverage point in any human system is in people’s paradigms or worldviews. Affecting people’s worldviews in a healthy way is also the most challenging thing we can undertake.

I have spent most of my professional life helping people think better, in ways they find beneficial. I sometimes say that I help good brains work better. I use techniques from Feldenkrais, creativity training and experiential psychotherapy. I know that all skilled behaviour–and therefore all purposeful activity–is mediated by patterns of coordination in the central nervous system.

My theory of social change is to improve the way people think. I suggest that there are two aspects that we especially want to improve. One is that we want to improve people’s map of the world–their framework for making sense of things.

Tabletop Presentations, one of the Inspiring Transition communication tools, has a series of modules that enable people to shift from ‘silo thinking’ to grasping the big picture drivers of ecological deterioration. It is actually not hard.

We also want to improve people’s way of acting in the world. As Riane Eisler has suggested, there are two fundamental ways of operating: good willed partnership-respect in contrast with self aggrandising domination-control (some people quibble and say ‘Oh, there must be more’, but for our purposes Eisler’s distinction is useful).

The Spanish Inquisition and the Western powers’ invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq are terrible examples of domination-control, and the movie Avatar illustrates how powerful commercial interests willingly destroy creativity and the environment.

In contrast, Pope Francis’ recent encyclical is a beautiful example of partnership-respect thinking.

It is not the institutional label that should be the basis of our assessment (e.g. ‘Christianity’ or ‘democracy’), but the actual behaviour.

There are modes of personal training, such as Aikido and Non-Violent Communication, and also of organisational development, that increase our capacity for partnership respect relating.

In addition, leaders in schools and businesses can affect their institutional culture. This is what I mean when I talk about ‘taking responsibility for the Great Transition within our sphere of influence’.

And of course we can all do our own inner work, if we are so moved, to sort out the emotional drivers that lead to our own tendency to dominator behaviour. The reward is an increased capacity for caring relationships...

Slogans and messages that appeal to people’s values can be helpful for certain purposes. But to actually inspire whole system change we must help people’s thinking become far more comprehensive.

The aspect of improving thinking that each of us can most readily affect is people’s map of the world, because we can do this through conversations as well as through writing. The communication tools on the Inspiring Transition website enable us to conduct focused conversations that affect people’s worldview.

Inviting the audience to become leaders

You are familiar with the idea of preaching to the converted. It is time for the ‘converted’ became leaders.

Every year there are millions of talks, meetings, webinars, festivals, and conferences focused on environmental and social issues. People attend because they are interested in the topic–which means that they care about a positive future. Each of these people is a potential thought catalyst in the Inspiring Transition initiative.

Each of these meetings can be used as an opportunity to encourage members of the audience to step up and act as thought catalysts for the Great Transition. I suggest that:

1. Whenever you give a talk or lecture, participate in a panel discussion, run a webinar or workshop, or organise a conference, mention that we are in a Great Transition and we need to accelerate it, and encourage members of your audience to become active communicators.
2. Follow through by referring people to the Inspiring Transition website to get up to speed about whole system change, and to gain access to our open source communication tools.

There is nothing people need to join. We are encouraging self-initiated independent action.

It is not enough for those of us who care to just inform ourselves. It is time for all of us to step up and proactively seed transformative ideas into mainstream culture in whatever way we can.

The Inspiring Transition Launch will be during September, with a great flowering throughout 2016. During the lead up we are engaging as many individuals and organisations as we can to communicate with their networks about the Great Transition.

We have about twenty interesting communication tactics, some of which are quite simple.

I request that each of you who read this choose to play a role in communicating about the Great Transition to a life-sustaining society. Together we can accomplish something magnificent that the  we couldn’t dream of achieving separately.

Andrew Gaines

+61 2 8005-8382

Skype: andrewgoodhumour
andrew.gaines@inspiringtransition.net

www.inspiringtransition.net

We are in a Great Transition to a life-sustaining society!

A pdf document of this presentation is available here.

Trevor Hancock is a public health physician and health promotion consultant and in July 2018 retired from my position as a Professor and Senior Scholar at the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. He has a lifelong commitment advocating for humans living in harmony with nature, and in taking the action necessary to transform society so we can do that and survive as a species. Further information about Trevor is on his blog.

His presentation to this Transforming Cultures series is available here.

To conclude the series, Lyn Goldsworthy, executive officer of the Frank Fenner Foundation, placed transforming cultures in to the biosensitivity frame.

Her presentation is here.

In addition I would like to than the dozens of people who attended the sessions and put in insights, ideas and examples. I regret that I did not keep a record of who you were but am very grateful for your now anonymous contributions.

The pdf of these tables is here.

In November 2014 the Human Ecology Forum held a workshop to sum up the findings to the first years series and plan a second year.

The report including the summary pdf is here.

The first session of the 2015 series summarised the 2014 series and set the scene for the 2015 series.

The pdf for the 2014 summary and introduction to 2015 can be found here.

Appendix 4 Culture definitions

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/culture

1. The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively: 20th century popular culture

1.1 A refined understanding or appreciation of culture: men of culture

2. The ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society: Afro-Caribbean culture

2.1 The attitudes and behaviour characteristic of a particular social group: the emerging drug culture

Fundamental Questions and Culture

Fundamental Questions Paper 1:

The word 'culture' in this context is taken to mean the various abstract aspects of human societal systems, including beliefs, knowledge, assumptions, values and technology (i.e. technical know-how). Also considered as an aspect of culture are the various cultural arrangements that arise in society through the aptitude for culture, such as the social hierarchies, institutions, social organisation, the economic system and legislation (Figure 3).

Especially important among the consequences of human culture, from the standpoint both of the ecosystems of the biosphere and of human experience, are various human artefacts, which include for example, all tools, ornaments, machines, works of art, buildings and roads. These artefacts are part of the biophysical environment, and in our conceptual model are regarded as an aspect of the biosphere (Figure 3).

This simple model can also be expressed as a pyramid (Figure 4), reflecting the interdependencies of the three elements. At the base of the pyramid are the underlying biophysical processes of the biosphere which gave rise to humans as biological beings, and on which humans remain entirely dependent. Culture, at the top of the pyramid, is the product of the activities of humans, and is entirely dependent on them, as well as on the underlying processes of the biosphere. In turn it also influences human activities, and consequently also the processes of the biosphere.

... Biohistory pays attention especially to the processes of cultural adaptation that may be brought into action in response to culturally induced threats to human survival and well-being. Such cultural adaptive responses have been very important in human history; and whether or not humankind survives the next century will depend on the extent to which they are successful in the near future.

Boyden, speech June 2015: culture is a biologic entity; it exists in the neurobiology. It is a force in biological systems.

The pdf of definitions is here.

These are a few publications that came up or have been discovered in the process of formulating this Transforming cultures series. It is far from a complete or definitive list. I share it for your interest.

Cialdini RB. Influence: Science and practice: Pearson Education Boston; 2009.

Dolan P, Hallsworth M, Halpern D, King D, Metcalfe R, Vlaev I. Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way. Journal of Economic Psychology. 2012;33(1):264-77.

Duncan Green, From Poverty to Power, Oxfam International, Oxford UK, Annex

Engler M, Engler P. This is an Uprising: how non-violent revolt is shaping the twenty-first century. New York: Bold Type books; 2017.

Ife JW. Community development: Creating community alternatives-vision, analysis and practice: Longman Australia; 1995.

Kahneman D. Thinking, fast and slow: Macmillan; 2011

Korten DC. Change the Story, Change the Future. Oakland, California, USA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 2015.

Roman Kryznaric, 2007, How Change Happens: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Human Development, Oxfam GB, at: www.oxfam.org.uk/publications (31/5/2016)

Marshall G. Don't even think about it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. New York: Bloomsbury 2014.

Power SA. Culture and Social Change: Transforming Societies through the Power of Ideas. Brady Wagoner, Eric Jensen, and Julian A. Oldmeadow, eds. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. 2012. 358 pp. Wiley Online Library; 2014.

Renfrew C, Cooke KL. Transformations: Mathematical approaches to culture change: Elsevier; 2014.

Wagoner B, Jensen E, Oldmeadow JA, editors. Culture and Social Change: Transforming Societies through the Power of Ideas. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing; 2012.