Out of the pandemic and its consequences, we should try to Bounce *Beyond* - not just "back", or "forward". A new, ambitious economic project

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We’re revealing this week our investment (of time and passion) in a major project, aimed at realising the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in full by 2030.

Bounce Beyond is an attempt to lay out plans for a new, planet-friendly economics, driven by very different indicators than our current socio-economic systems, and fully motivated by climate change, pandemic and much else.

A project incubated within both the SDG Transformation Forum and  Catalyst 2030, Bounce Beyond will launch properly - with a full website - in a few weeks. Watch these pages.

But we wanted to give you a flavour of the thinking and ambition this week. The video above from the Humanity Rising media project has some of BB’s main players - Eduard Muller and Steve Waddell - expounding the vision.

Below is a contextual note from A/UK’s co-initiator Indra Adnan, who is part of the core team at Bounce Beyond:

How many of us are living a liminal existence? Hovering between an understanding of past failings that have ongoing disastrous consequences – whether personal, shared or systemic -  and a badly defined future? It could be that you’re understanding that your life-style has been deeply unhealthy, but you can’t imagine other ways of living, eating, or moving around in the world. 

Or maybe you’ve recently understood why your own sense of powerlessness is not just your own, but one shared with millions of others due to events in the past that are only now becoming clear. Yet even as you experience some relief around finding solidarity with others, you are still lost as to how to improve your conditions or those of others.  

At A/UK, over the past three years we have been seeking – and finding – groups of community transformers: people who believe that incremental improvements to our current conditions are not enough to get us out of the mess we have made.

Instead, we have to go for the full transformation: stepping away from the problem as it has appeared and reaching for something new that has never yet been experienced. Buckminster Fuller famously describes this as ‘building the new system that makes the old one obsolete’. 

Of course, this is easier said than done: most of the time we are trapped by the old thinking, like trying to lift a table while you are standing on it. But transformation is not entirely a mystery: there are proven methods and practices.

I myself learnt assiduously from ‘the father of peace studies’ Johan Galtung the difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation. The first is a zero-sum negotiation between two parties where noble compromises are made (although often storing up problems for later). The second recognises multiple parties to any conflict and brings all of them into a healing and regenerative process. 

Through deep engagement between the mediators and each party, the different perspectives on the same problem arise, revealing a much more complex pattern – structural and cultural - of cause and effect. At the same time, commonalities rise to the surface: while the conflict polarised those affected, the transformation process retrieves deeper shared insights and agreements on issues out-with the conflict.

With this knowledge, the transformers are able to open up possibilities for completely new ground upon which, leaving the conflict behind, the previously warring tribes can work together generatively. A new future is possible.  

While transformation practice is a serious study, it is first and foremost a mindset: a ‘belief’ that any problem can be understood as multiple narratives of causality. Transformation lies in the ability to tell a new story about our shared desires and a new purpose that we birth and co-create to get to a future we can all look forward to.

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

Whether we are talking about a family in break-down or a music genre getting to the end of its popularity, transformation is a human, social capacity.

So imagine my joy when I first came upon the SDG Transformation Forum led by Steve Waddell last year. We were both on our way to a gathering about 4th Sector economies and shared a two hour journey to our destination.

If at the beginning I was grappling with the many, many pieces of a new socio-political-economic system that could respond effectively to the multiple crises we are in, by the end of it I could see a way to get there.

Not a simple mechanism where you put information in at one end and get the result at the other, but a method and practice, a set of tools and the capacities required to move through the liminal space with confidence.

Like our own work with The Elephant to get to a clear picture of this new system, but now working specifically with transformation expertise to operationalise it: get the Elephant moving.

Since then, SDG TF and A/UK have both been involved with the Catalyst 2030, joining many more global actors sharing the goal of being able to meet the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2030.

However, while Catalyst 2030 will do the crucial work of working substantively with global organisations including the United Nations itself, another vehicle has taken shape that points at the transformation system itself. 

Until now we have been part of a global socio-economic-political system designed on the premise of man’s desire to beat the limitations set by nature – whether they be human, plant or animal. But we have failed. Plundering the Earth and enslaving most of the people in the growth imperative has only destroyed the environment we depend upon for our own lives to continue.

We have run into the limitations of ‘man’s’ ego: the delusion of separation – and domination - of the individual within its own material operating system. As Doughnut Economics is making much clearer to economists everywhere, these material limitations have to be and can be respected.

However, all the while other sensibilities have existed, mostly hidden from popular view or the mainstream narratives about where our power truly lies. Shared by both men and women, but nurtured and sustained by women in more private spaces such as the home, care communities and the arts of personal development and social making.

Some people recognise them in the indigenous practices, but they are also present in the best of social work or spiritual and arts gatherings, while also developing in psychological and neurological discourse. 

Wo/man, they say, is capable of much more than this: but only if we are prepared to let go of the rigid ways of thinking. Now is the time to re-conceive, to incubate and to give birth to something we always knew was possible but never truly dared to try.

‘Bounce Beyond’ (BB) – not back, or forward - is the twinkle in the eye of this new paradigm: a new attractor for the purpose of whole system transformation. Using the transformation expertise of the SDG TF plus others (including A/UK) who are fast identifying with the aims as they are being articulated, BB will focus on new economic paradigms that serve whole system transformation. 

We will report here each week on the vehicle taking shape as BB identifies the constellation of actors ready to work together to reach into a global community that links the person to the community to the planet – I-We-World.

But for starters, here is an introductory video (embedded at the top of this blog) that showcases two of the Co-Leads of the project Eduard Muller and Steve Waddell, first premiered on the remarkable webinar series Humanity Rising.

For more on Bounce Beyond over the next few weeks, note this category.