Visioning new visions

Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Prize winning economist) recently wrote a book/report about the effects of the financial crisis and what to do about it. Based on the review (I haven't read the book yet), this is book is 90% what went wrong and why it went wrong and 10% new solutions.

It reminded me that it is difficult to imagine different scenarios, and different ways of running the world, than the ones we currently have. Post Financial Crisis and Post Copenhagen and Pre-the Next Big Crisis, creating new visions of sustainable development is critically important. But I don't know how good we are at doing it.

There are some good reasons for this. Partly, it is because a) we don't tend to give ourselves much time, and good thinking takes time - usually a lot of time, with good relationships with those you are doing the new thinking with, b) blue sky thinking about new paradigms of development is rarely funded (though blue sky thinking for chemistry, warfare, physics and other 'economically beneficial' or 'security-necessity' type thinking is often funded) and c) it is much harder to build something new than to break down an old thing.

I just left a workshop about new visions of development. One of the challenges was the word 'new'. What is 'new' about what we are (and are not) doing? Well, while there are some new shifts in sustainable development (the growing power of China in wind industry is beginning to shape how Europe conceptualises its innovative strengths, for example). But much is not new. Women are coming together in small groups to support one another to adapt to crises. not much new there. That's one of the reasons the human species has survived. So part of hte problem is that we put too much emphasis on new visions. Maybe a better question is, why haven't past attempts to actualize the alternative visions not worked and not been realised?

Or, where do we see 'new visions' of sustainable development, how are they characterized, and when do they or do they not become realized and integrated into the rest of society (or at least their 'target populations')?

I see the work that Green For All and many other organisations on Justmeans as trying to live the vision by creating it and acting it out and then figuring out what they just did - practice reflection practice theory practice - as a good model. But its rare - too often, visions either are not dreamed, or scoffed at before they have a chance to take root, or are forgotten or dismissed as fanciful. We say we want new visions, but we often do not want them. Indeed, some of the most fundamental visions (of loving ones neighbor as oneself, for example) have never been fully realized - and those are over 2,000 years old.