How can we improve societal learning in dealing with complex challenges?

A unifying feature of all environmental and sustainability challenges is the complexity and uncertainty of the issues and relationships between goals, and problems. In order to deal effectvely with these issues we need to better learn about the interconections, and develop new approaches to policy making that reflect these lessons. Many tentative efforts have already been made in this direction.

Obstacles have to do with how communities of knowledge are organized and funded, and the possible trade offs between relying on technical expertise and democratic values. While they are not fundamental opposites, their potential contradictions do need to be considered and addressed.

Is the democratic system as practiced today an archaic and thus counterproductive human enterprise?

Searching “democracy” on this site (Aug7): none.

Democracy as applied currently will likely undermine many of the “answers” in this survey.

It started with the Rütli Schwur, creating Confoederatio Helvetica, Switzerland. Back then in 1291, several settings made that move a logical reaction, it was a frontier phenomenon. Don’t forget that until 1989 some cantons in Switzerland had only their men vote. Some basic features of democratic systems are useful today, like providing social security, protection for unfortunates, etc. Democracy however is now also being (ab)used to favor vested interests, many of which are responsible for several predicaments of the human enterprise. For instance:

- you have the right to choose, thus, just buy whatever tickles your fancy, even if unnecessary and degrading the earth

- make sure you vote against tax increases, needed to fix our world (learn from Schwarzenegger?)

- why not make another baby or two (Hall 1994. Environmental consequences of having a baby in the US. Pop Environ 15:505)

- as scientist I am a minuscule minority, it is not worth my time to vote, since I am against millions, mostly ignorant on technical grounds, and mainly preoccupied with their immediate world, one evolutionary trait we share with most living beings

- fast changes make it even hard for scientists to keep up: forget about democratic systems to allow corrections in a timely fashion

-decisions based on emotional, self-interested, and basically uneducated people, which mostly have no concept of long-term planning, make democracy a back-firing institution

-by breeding-brainwashing people into consumerism, their created faith into the State, the locomotive for maintaining the party is the ‘growth’ model, with democracy used as pretense to e.g.:
- create markets (e.g. China)
- increase exploitation of natural resources
- justify war industries, due to need to combat “bad men”, “bad countries” and any other sellable problem

** demo-crazy **