THE FUTURE WE WANT

How will we live together in the future?  How will we care for each other and the environment on which we depend?  How can we overcome the obstacles and challenges we face in the present to build a fairer, cleaner, safer future for us all?

THE FUTURE WE WANT is a series of articles by policymakers, business leaders, academics, stakeholders and politicians from all political parties envisioning how we might work together towards a better future.

Today’s contribution is by Professor Glenn Lyons, Mott MacDonald Professor of Future Mobility at the University of the West of England.  The article is based on the speech he gave at THE TABULA PROJECT Roundtable Discussion Building a New Paradigm.  A full write up of the roundtable discussion series can be found here.

I’d like to offer my opening contribution in three parts.

Part 1 – Problems or predicament?

As a student civil engineer in the 1980s, I learnt about solving simple problems – like optimising traffic signal setting to maximise throughput of vehicles at a junction.

In the years since, I have spent more time in the realms of wicked problems. These are problems we struggle to make sense of, don’t have enough understanding of, and which are interwoven with multiple other problems. Wicked problems such as climate change cannot be solved – they can at best be managed. And they are managed best when different minds and perspectives are brought together to take co-operative action.

More recently I’ve moved beyond wicked problems to contemplate the even more mentally taxing matter of whether modern society is facing a predicament – something I was introduced to in the fascinating book by Dougald Hine, aptly titled ‘At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies’. A predicament is something unavoidable – like death. Supposing society as we know it – built upon capitalism and consumerism  – is set to collapse? What a predicament!

Ridiculous, I hear you cry! But nothing lasts forever, including civilisations. Study of them reveals that they very often collapse.

Writing for BBC Future in 2019, Luke Kemp explains as follows (be warned it’s heavy stuff): “Collapse can be defined as a rapid and enduring loss of population, identity and socio-economic complexity. Public services crumble and disorder ensues as government loses control of its monopoly on violence.”

Reasons for collapses have included: climate change, inequality and oligarchy, exhaustion of environmental resources, and accumulating complexity.

I’ve read that civilisations go through stages before reaching collapse, and the stage prior to collapse is ‘decadence’. Perhaps there is a contemporary clue here: Skyscanner is advertising at the moment with a headline “Cheap flights to Spain from £13”.

In conclusion for Part 1, I’m inclined to think we are simultaneously juggling simple and wicked problems while also facing a predicament.

Part 2 – A period of turbulence, change and entanglement

Often in my mind at the moment is the quote from Antonio Gramsci, written while imprisoned in 1930 by Mussolini’s Fascist regime: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”.

This quote gives me hope about change further ahead, albeit that the price of reaching the new world may be high. It feels right now that we are in a dark place, complete with monsters, and the fragility of democracy threatened with fascism.

We are living through a period of turbulence and change.

When it comes to transition towards Net Zero, we are seeing progress. If we ignored timescales and the overall change needed, there could indeed appear to be very encouraging progress in terms of the energy transition. Technological advances and their scaling are propelling upwards the share of renewables in our energy mix.

But this is a global challenge across countries – countries that are also pursuing economic growth, wrestling with poverty and social inequality, and influenced by bad actors.

Speaking of actors, I see five categories:

• professionals who are invested in the Net Zero agenda but who may have limited agency themselves;
• the public which collectively can have huge agency but mixed appetite for the agenda;
• politicians whose agency is tethered to the public, even where the appetite exists;
• industries profiting from business as usual who can have considerable agency to influence other actors but with little or questionable appetite for Net Zero; and
• the mainstream media and their owners which often seem to have little appetite but lots of agency.

Together, these different actors spin a complex web in which progress can easily become entangled.

In conclusion for Part 2, I’m feeling a real sense of struggle in the present in a world that is getting more complicated more quickly than it is possible to comprehend.

Part 3 – Towards a new paradigm?

So, how do we look for the light in this dark age?

First of all, we can imagine alternative systems or paradigms. For example, the work of Jason Hickel on degrowth I find refreshing and inspiring. Yet in a current system seemingly obsessed with growth as the answer, I find myself less clear about how we get from here to there.

I’m personally drawn to the need to more effectively tax the rich and tackling extreme wealth. Yet how to do it is easier said than done. For those that try, wrestling the Overton Window from the hands of the elites and positioning it where it needs to be to offer public acceptability of bold measures for change is a devil of a job.

The problem with the unsettled state we are now in is that people are scared and anxious about the uncertainty and change around and ahead of them. And if they are lucky enough to have well-intentioned political leaders, such leaders are juggling multiple wicked problems, including the arrival in earnest of artificial intelligence, ageing infrastructure in the face of climate change, biodiversity depletion, and geopolitics.

When it comes to how to propel ourselves towards a new paradigm, I believe the answer has to lie in people power. I love the notion of the 3.5% rule that suggests when 3.5% of a population protest non-violently, regime change is possible. (Maybe that is why peaceful protest is now being constrained as the status quo clings on?)

People power may be sat waiting to be ignited. Majorities of the public around the world do seem to be concerned about climate change and want to see more done about it, and are prepared to chip in themselves.

Over the last year or so, I have led the CIHT CLIMATES initiative, engaging with hundreds of highways and transportation professionals. They too convey concern and appetite to chip in.

A key recommendation from that work was the need for public-focused, positively-oriented storytelling. There needs to be persuasive messaging that moving towards Net Zero is a win-win – it is good for people’s pockets, good for the air they breathe, good for employment prospects, and good for their children and grandchildren. The story is there to be told but the storytellers are needed to tell it. And in political terms, you can see when effective communication is at work.

Allied to storytelling is the foundational importance of education – at all life stages – when it comes to better understanding the world we live in and our relationship with nature. It seems to me that we have become too obsessed with Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) at the expense of recognising the importance of the humanities, arts and social sciences.

And the importance of each of us playing a part is crucial. The mother of all social dilemmas could suggest ‘why bother?’, ‘What’s the point of me making the effort when others aren’t?’. Yet we’re bound to lose with such an attitude.  Leading by example in reviewing and revising our own behaviours can act as encouragement to others and as a means of shifting social norms. As my friend Stephen Cragg reminds me, ‘no snowflake thought it started the avalanche’.

To conclude Part 3 and my opening contribution overall, I simply want to quote from Ghandi:

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

Well, have I lost the plot? I hope not. Thank you.