Global challenges and local lessons

Citation

Blackman, C. (2002), "Global challenges and local lessons", Foresight, Vol. 4 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/fs.2002.27304eaa.001

Global challenges and local lessons

Global challenges and local lessons

It would be easy to dismiss the list of 15 global challenges identified by the Millennium Project as so much apple pie and wishful thinking (see Glenn and Gordon's article "Creating a better world: 15 global challenges" in this issue of foresight). After all, who doesn't want to see sustainable development achieved for all, or everyone to have proper sanitation, or diseases reduced?

Glenn and Gordon mention some good ideas that emerged in the course of the Millennium Project study which are worth further consideration, e.g. establishing a World Environment Organization with powers similar to the World Trade Organization. Still, I am sure the authors would acknowledge that having the vision is the easy part and that translating vision into reality is a different matter altogether.

Meanwhile, the harsh reality is that the UN Summit on Sustainable Development has been and gone and has been widely dismissed for being an extravagant jamboree and "talkfest" which achieved very little. Indeed many environmentalists believe that the sustainable development cause suffered a considerable setback in Johannesburg compared with Rio ten years earlier. Perhaps the outcome was disappointing but there was one notable achievement and one other fact that hasn't received too much attention.

First, countries agreed to commit themselves to a target of 2015 for halving the billion or so people who lack access to clean water and proper sanitation and agreed to provide the resources and technical assistance needed to achieve this. Second, there was some progress on climate change with 19 new countries ratifying the Kyoto protocol. Among them, significantly, were Russia, China, and Canada. The USA is looking increasingly isolated on the issue and the hope is that it will re-engage with the rest of the world on this as well as other international matters. It was significant that in his address to the United Nations in September 2002, President Bush slipped in the fact that the USA was prepared to rejoin Unesco – the first sign for some time that the USA is more inclined to cooperate internationally to achieve its goals.

But, back to the question of how to move from vision to reality in complex global situations. Does futures research and foresight have a role to play? Two other articles in this issue provide some food for thought. The articles by Michel Godet and by David Mercer and Adele Wilter both describe the use of participatory foresight methods in the context of local and regional government. For Godet:

Local development is not made possible by infrastructure and even less so by subsidies, which at best can only support it … The key to local development lies really in individuals and organisations. Everything depends upon their ability to pool their energies in common projects rather than working against each other, for an area achieves strength though unity not divisiveness, and as the American expression goes, a house divided cannot stand. Society cannot be changed by decree; the doors to change must be opened from within and from below …

At the local and regional level, there are now many examples of how participatory foresight exercises have developed a vision and a strategy for turning that vision into reality. If we are to address global challenges more successfully, there may be lessons to be learnt from local and regional initiatives. Seen in this way, perhaps world summits, reframed more as large-scale participatory foresight exercises, can play a more constructive role.

Colin Blackman