Two Social Practices to Support Emergence of a Global Collective
In this paper, I start by adopting an integral futures perspective on the global collective. An integral futures perspective reminds us that the emergence of a global mind, soul or any kind of collective structure requires simultaneous development in behavioural, social, psychological and cultural realms. That is, human biology and brain structure must develop the capability to support global cooperative behaviours; social practices and institutions must develop to support global interaction and awareness; individuals must develop the potential for global awareness through psychological transformation; and cultures must develop the capacity for mutual understanding across diverse global worldviews.
Developments in any one of these realms have the potential to stimulate corresponding developments in other realms. In this paper, I focus on two social practices that have the potential to support the emergence of a global collective. The first is deliberation across difference. Deliberation is now well established as a critical element of authentic democracy. Experience with processes that explicitly seek to promote citizen deliberation, such as citizens' juries, is growing rapidly around the world. However, to date, these processes have been constrained by national boundaries. The establishment of deliberative, citizen-driven forums that extend into the global sphere has the potential to hasten the emergence of a global collective by stimulating personal development and promoting mutual understanding across cultures.
The second social practice is integral facilitation. When people from different cultural discourses come together, it is reasonable to expect a degree of discursive contestation. In any global collective, this contestation needs to be creatively harnessed so that it does not degenerate into destabilising conflict. The role of an integral facilitator is to apply principles from integral theory to promote mutual understanding across discourses, offer solutions that appeal to multiple discourses and apply gentle developmental pressure to open up individuals and groups to more inclusive solutions. This is a challenging role; I examine the qualities required of an integral facilitator in the paper.
The two social practices outlined here work together to stimulate personal and cultural development. In the paper, I explore how each might work in practice, identify some current issues to which they might be applied and outline some of the challenges faced in establishing these practices. Both practices may play a role in the emergence of a global human collective.
Bio: Dr Chris Riedy is a Research Principal at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology , Sydney . In this role, Chris works on research and consulting projects relating to energy and water policy, climate change response, sustainability science and citizen participation. He has a Bachelor degree in Environmental Engineering and recently completed his PhD in Sustainable Futures.
His thesis – titled The Eye of the Storm: An Integral Perspective on Sustainable Development and Climate Change Response – used an Integral futures approach to examine Australian energy and greenhouse policy. It proposed a policy development process designed to integrate behavioural, systemic, psychological and cultural perspectives through expert, stakeholder and citizen participation. Chris has ongoing research interests in global governance, the politics of climate change response, Integral sustainability practice and deliberative democracy.
