News and Information
Pioneering Roundtable at Sustainability Institute
People who rarely have an opportunity to talk, warm up to complex global challenges...[ By Dorette Steenkamp on 27 July, 2007 ]
It was a very cold winter's day with flooding and icy wind on the south coast of Africa today. It set the scene to meet around a fire and discuss climate change. It could not be more appropriate timing...
We had the priviledge to be invited to participate in an inspiring and hope-giving initiative just outside Stellenbosch, South Africa. By October 2007 'roundtables' - like this one - will also have taken place in London, Brussels, Geneva, Toronto and probably some other places as well. They will all culminate in a conference in the UK in October 2007 and "are based on the optimistic belief that we can find solutions to our shared problems by talking across boundaries and by developing a sustainable enterprise economy".
The process is faciliated by the Applied Research Centre in Human Security (ARCHS) at Coventry University, in collaborative partnership with the UN University, Tokyo; the Sustainability Institute of Stellenbosch University, South Africa and the Nanjing University in China. Its intention is to bring together professionals from various disciplines to engage in non-prescriptive and non-directive ways. Or in the words of the facilitators: "Randomness and disparateness leads to the unexpected, to ambiguity and surprise".
This was indeed the case, with insights on 'sustainability' coming from the top executives of corporate companies, layered with comments from academics and flavoured further by development practitioners with extensive community experience. The premise of these roundtables are that conversations between extraordinary individuals hold the key to unlocking complex global problems such as climate change, poverty and social injustice. "We live in a world of global nested networks. Foremost is the global eco-system on which human life relies. Over thousands of years we have built social networks which define how we live today. As with the global eco-system, our social networks are porous; all are interconnected and interdependent. We need to better understand the complexity of existing networks and to understand the characteristics of complex networks." Malcolm McIntosh 2002
It was a thought-provoking process and led to our realisation that civil society has so MUCH to offer in the new paradigms of social networking to create truly sustainable solutions.
We wish to thank the coordinator in South Africa, Dr. Ralph Hamann of University of Cape Town, for organising this wonderful event. One of the suggestions at the end of the workshop was that we (Uthango) will drive forward a social bookmarking process and informal online collaboration between the participants... Find the start of our online bookmarking and feel free to join us:
We had the priviledge to be invited to participate in an inspiring and hope-giving initiative just outside Stellenbosch, South Africa. By October 2007 'roundtables' - like this one - will also have taken place in London, Brussels, Geneva, Toronto and probably some other places as well. They will all culminate in a conference in the UK in October 2007 and "are based on the optimistic belief that we can find solutions to our shared problems by talking across boundaries and by developing a sustainable enterprise economy".
The process is faciliated by the Applied Research Centre in Human Security (ARCHS) at Coventry University, in collaborative partnership with the UN University, Tokyo; the Sustainability Institute of Stellenbosch University, South Africa and the Nanjing University in China. Its intention is to bring together professionals from various disciplines to engage in non-prescriptive and non-directive ways. Or in the words of the facilitators: "Randomness and disparateness leads to the unexpected, to ambiguity and surprise".
This was indeed the case, with insights on 'sustainability' coming from the top executives of corporate companies, layered with comments from academics and flavoured further by development practitioners with extensive community experience. The premise of these roundtables are that conversations between extraordinary individuals hold the key to unlocking complex global problems such as climate change, poverty and social injustice. "We live in a world of global nested networks. Foremost is the global eco-system on which human life relies. Over thousands of years we have built social networks which define how we live today. As with the global eco-system, our social networks are porous; all are interconnected and interdependent. We need to better understand the complexity of existing networks and to understand the characteristics of complex networks." Malcolm McIntosh 2002
It was a thought-provoking process and led to our realisation that civil society has so MUCH to offer in the new paradigms of social networking to create truly sustainable solutions.
We wish to thank the coordinator in South Africa, Dr. Ralph Hamann of University of Cape Town, for organising this wonderful event. One of the suggestions at the end of the workshop was that we (Uthango) will drive forward a social bookmarking process and informal online collaboration between the participants... Find the start of our online bookmarking and feel free to join us:
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it's because we do not dare that they are difficult.