Shifting Paradigms

John Elkington

November 21, 2009

Perhaps the biggest single task facing our species is to shift our prevailing paradigms, something that happens rarely, that typically triggers social, political and economic convulsions over protracted periods, and that reorders our mental landscapes in ways that were far from obvious to the change agents who started the process.

As the concept of sustainability increasingly goes mainstream, we face multiple new challenges. The first, though, is simply a scaling of what feels like an age-old challenge – that many new entrants to the discussion will seek to define sustainability in ways that suit their own priorities and vested interests. Second, we have the problem that the climate agenda is tending to drown out many other elements of the agenda. Third, as the centre of gravity of the global economy shifts east, it is very clear indeed that countries like India, Indonesia and China will have a different take on all of this. Fourth, and by no means finally, there is the fundamental problem that no amount of tinkering is going to produce change at the scale and pace we need unless we also change the overarching paradigm within which governments, capitalism, economics, accounting and investment operate.

So how do we shift paradigms?

Few books, if any, have had quite the impact on my own thinking as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, written by Thomas Kuhn. I first read the book in 1968 – and it literally changed the way I saw the world. But it wasn’t a cookbook, offering recipes on how to change prevailing paradigms. We are going to have to work out how to do this experimentally.

My own view is that what I have called the ‘Cornucopian’ Paradigm began to shift in the 1960s, first with the work of people like Rachel Carson and the emergence of the global environmental movement, and second with the publication of the first images of Earth and of Earthrise, seen from space. That’s one reason why I was so thrilled that we managed to attract astronaut and cosmonaut Jerry Linenger to the Volans Advisory Board.

Meanwhile, we can debate what the new Paradigm might be called, but for the sake of argument I have talked about the ‘Gaian’ Paradigm. Part of my personal mission over the next five years or so is to talk to some of the people worldwide who are putting in place some of the key building blocks of the new order, both to learn from them and to work out how we at Volans and SustainAbility best support them.

At Volans, we signed a contract this week with a fascinating new foundation that will now support our ‘Pathways to Scale’ work in the field of ecosystem services, with more on that shortly.