Implementing the SDGs: Gaia Education & UNESCO collaborate in training multipliers

[Edit of a longer article published in March 2017]

Why are people not participating more enthusiastically in the widespread implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals? How can we engage communities everywhere to make the United Nations’ Global Goals their local goals? How can individuals and collectives contribute to achieving ‘Agenda 2030’?

Among many activists, grassroots organizations and even some international NGOs the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been branded as the result of a top-down UN process. Failure to successfully implement previous agendas has damaged belief in the achievability of such multi-lateral agreements. Something needs to change if the SDGs are to be more successful than ‘Agenda 21’ or the ‘Millennium Development Goals’.

So far, too many on-the-ground actors are still hesitant to get behind the SDGs. The engagement with ‘Agenda 2030’ is currently too slow to catalyze the magnitude of change that is now urgently needed to avoid the worsening of a series of converging crises that are already upon us — rapid climate change, famines, mass-migration, fundamentalism, resource wars, biodiversity loss and economic volatility to name but a few.

We need to turn the Global Goals into actively shared objectives for all of humanity, if we want to create a more sustainable world that works for all by 2030. Having national leaders endorse a non-binding United Nations agreement to support the SDGs is not enough. Leaders can — at best — set an intention on behalf of their electorate. Manifesting the agenda will require active participation of people and communities around the world.

We need effective collaboration between the public and private sector and civil society at local, regional and global scale. We need to create processes that generate engagement with the SDGs at the level of communities and bioregions everywhere. Only if local people will take responsibility for implementing the SDGs in their community and their region do we have a realistic change of accomplishing the audacious task set by Agenda 2030.

To motivate such a commitment we need people to understand the multiple benefits that will result from a successful implementation of all SDGs for their own lives, their families and communities, nations, and for humanity and the community of life as a whole. The future we want has to be co-created by us!

This is my favourite way of presenting the SDGs, as it indicates clearly how healthy ecosystems functions, biodiversity and biospheric services of bio-productivity, fresh water cycle and climate regulation are forming the basis of all real value creation in the biosphere, society and economy (Credit for graphic: Azote Images for Stockholm Resilience Centre).

Successful SDG implementation requires a systemic approach

There is a significant danger in misinterpreting the 17 SDGs as separate issues that need to be dealt with one by one. Our academic disciplines, government departments and international institutions are set up in a siloed expert-lead fashion that makes such whole systems thinking and collaborating a serious challenge.

The SDGs are all interrelated and mutually reinforcing aspects of a whole systems re-design of the human presence on Earth. Only by moving out of ‘issue silos’ and paying attention to their interconnections will the global goals be achievable by 2030.

Successful SDG implementation offers a transformative response to climate change: After 20 unsuccessful meetings, an international agreement was reached at COP21 in Paris to decisively act on climate change before we trigger run-away catastrophic climate change. The Paris accord might not have gone far enough. Scientist agree we should aim to remain below 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the 2 degrees that where agreed on in Paris. Nevertheless, the recent disregard of international commitments by the new US administration will only lead to stronger rather than weaker commitment by a growing global climate alliance — that is now cross-sectorial and deeply committed — at COP23 in Bonn.

The important and widespread understanding that was reached at COP22 in Marrakech is that climate change needs to be addressed systemically and not with carbon-myopia. The successful implementation of SDG 13 (Climate Action) necessitates systemic transformational change and the implementation of all the other sixteen Sustainable Development Goals.

By way of offering another example of the interrelatedness of the 17 SDGs, here is a 12 minute video of Johann Rockström and Pavan Sukhdev taking about the integration of the goals within the context of food as an entry-point into interrelated solution clusters.

Likewise, we will only achieve Agenda 2030 if we act swiftly on climate change adaptation andmitigation, as well as, implement drawdown technologies to actively reverse global warming. Luckily many of these tested technologies, implemented at the scale of local and regional economies, will also serve achieving a number of other SDGs synergistically.

The Commonwealth Secretariat and the Cloudburst Foundation are actively working to build an international alliance in support of their ‘Regenerative Development to Reverse Climate Change’ initiative that was launched in October 2016. This approach holds the systemic linkages between all the SDGs at the heart of its reframe of climate change as an opportunity for transformational change towards diverse regenerative cultures, vibrant circular biomaterials economies and thriving communities everywhere.

The SDGs as an opportunity to go beyond ‘them-versus-us thinking’

A 3-year-long, multi-lateral and multi-stakeholder process was started at Rio+20 and lead to the conversion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) into a much more systemic set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These were agreed upon (as a non-binding commitment) by the UN General Assembly in September 2015.

It is now up to all of us — members of the human family — to make up our own mind whether to get behind the guiding intention to co-create a more sustainable world that works for all of humanity and life. Critiques point out that the process of arriving at the SDGs and the way the 17 goals and 169 targets were formulated was influenced by stakeholders who are considered part of the neoliberal power elite. Its lobbies have more than once co-opted, sabotaged or stalled the United Nation’s process in favour of vested interests.

The whole framing of the international development agenda, which divided the world into developed, developing, and so-called ‘under-developed’ nations has had the insidious effect of eroding the self-confidence and self-determination on many indigenous and local people. Their ancestors survived the first wave of imperialist colonization, only for subsequent generations to be submitted to an even more destructive form of economic colonization in the wake of neo-liberalism.

Unbridled economic globalization without the simultaneous strengthening of of local and regional economies, ecosystems and cultures has spread into the most distant reaches of the world, from the highlands of Ladakh to the forests of Borneo and the rainforests of Africa and Latin America.

Many indigenous people have been further disenfranchised in the wake of the development agenda and many famers have been forced to stop the ancient practice of seed-saving that has helped humanity to maintain the biodiversity of food plants for millennia. The win-lose (zero sum) logic of neoliberal economics structurally drives competition and exploitation of resources, ecosystems, and people — with destructive effects.

In the light of this history, it is understandable that there is a degree of suspicion with regard to the a renewal of the international development agenda. In particular, since the UN and many of its member governments continue to be influenced by the powerful lobbies of big multi-nationals in the pharmaceutical, chemical, agri-business, financial, armament and fossil fuel industries, the skepticism towards the SDGs has to be accepted and worked with. It is possible to critique the UN process and still get behind the vision of implementing the SDGs by 2030!

Reorienting the UN development system so that it is fit for the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for a transition strategy far more ambitious than past attempts. — Global Policy Watch, 2017

We are facing a planetary emergency at the species level and we do need all nations — and what’s more all people — of this Earth to unite in a shared vision to redesign the human impact on Earth from destruction to regeneration. The time for them-against-us-thinking is over! We have to come together and co-create the future we want now!

This video narrated by the indigenous elder Oren Lyons reviews the history of the UN’s sustainable development agenda since the Stockholm Conference on the Environment in 1972. Things have got worse since then and we also have come along way towards improving many aspects of people’s lives and our impact on the environment.

The Sustainable Development Goals represent a huge opportunity for all of us to collaborate as one species and unite behind a relatively simple — yet audacious — set of 17 goals.

We might want to tweak the wording of some of the goals a little. For example, I prefer to call Goal 8 ‘Right Livelihood & Qualitative Economic Growth’ rather than ‘Decent Work & Economic Growth’. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to agree that if we were to achieve widespread local, regional and global implementation of these 17 goals by 2030, we would have come a long way towards making the world a better place.

Here they are again. Take a look at them one by one and you will see that all these goals could be easily framed in such a way that they would describe necessary improvements in your own community and region that would be worth collaborating towards.

The SDGs are the result of the largest consultatory process ever held within the history of the United Nations. More than a million people and an ‘expert group’ of over 3000 participants from over a hundred countries and six continents helped to establish the SDGs on behalf of humanity. This does give the Global Goals a certain legitimacy and grounding in participation.

Just like the UN systems itself, the SDGs may not be perfect but they are the closest thing we’ve got to a broad agreement among the human family that it is time to co-create a better world for all. Now it is time to turn that agreement into commitment and action on the ground, community by community, and bioregion by bioregion.

Gaia Education launches ‘SDG Community Implementation Flashcards’ & ‘Achieving the Global Goals — A Training of Multipliers’

In 2016, I was given the task — in my role as Gaia Education’s head of design and innovation — to craft a novel training approach and materials in support of widespread community participation in the implementation of the SDGs at sub-national levels. The recently released ‘SDG Community Implementation Flashcards’ and the training of multipliers ‘Achieving the Global Goals’, are the result of 12 month of intense development work and collaboration within the Gaia Education team.

Group of participants in the second SDG Training of Multipliers pilot on Mallorca in early 2017, organized in collaboration with the Universidad de las Islas Balears.

The Training of Multipliers is designed to train people in how to work with the flashcard to facilitate community focussed conversation about how to implement the 17 SDGs at the local and regional scale in ways that are carefully adapted to the bio-cultural uniqueness of each location.

This highly participatory small group work and question-centered training engages local communities in a process that will turn the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals into meaningful projects that are locally relevant and can be collaboratively implemented by the communities themselves.

There are 61 cards in each set: 3 cards with different questions for each of the 17SDGs (51 cards), two that enable conversations about the history of the UN work on sustainability, 1 about Gaia Education, 3 on the background of the SDGs, 1 that lists all 17 SDGs in full, 1 that specifically addresses the need for systemic integration of the SDGs, 1 on the UNESCO Roadmap for ESD, and 1 that offers a half and full-day workshop outline for using these cards with diverse groups of stakeholders.

The ‘SDG Community Implementation Flash Cards’contain more than 200 questions structured into the four dimensions of Gaia Education’s whole systems approach to sustainability (social, ecological, economic and worldview).

Participants explore these four dimensions for each of the 17 SDGs in small group conversations that invite them to collaboratively identify actions and solutions aimed at implementing the global goals in ways that are relevant to their lives and their communities. The training offers an effective way of creating local community ownership of the SDGs and hence local participation in SDG implementation.

Daniel Wahl (standing) supporting participants in a Training of Multipliers at the cultural centre Casa Encendida in Madrid, May 2017

Each SDG card has some background information (figures, facts, and trends) relevant to a particular SDG. This background information is presented through the lens of Gaia Education’s 4-dimensional whole systems design framework (see above) and offers a social, worldview, economic and ecological perspective on that particular SDG.

In addition each card has four questions — or series of questions — that invite people to have a conversation: How is this SDG relevant for our community? Are there already projects in our community or city that help to implement this particular SDG? If yes, what can we do to support these efforts? If no, what kind of project could we start to strengthen the local implementation of that particular SDG? During the training of multipliers a lot of emphasis is put on the systemic interrelationships between the 17 SDGs and how to strengthen them.

This is the back of one of the 3 cards focussed on SDG 2

The day-long training includes a brief introduction and history of the SDGs, followed by a participatory process that invites people to identify those SDGs with the highest and most immediate priority in their particular locality. Participants work in small groups to identify those SDGs that are already on a path towards widespread successful implementation and the ‘strong links’ between them. In a subsequent round groups identify those SDGs that still need a lot of work for successful implementation and how to strengthen the ‘weak links’ already existing between them.

Various small groups exploring local, national and international SDG implementation at a Training of Multipliers in Madrid, May 2017.

Towards the end of the day the small groups identify what kind of local policy changes, resource mobilization strategies and which specifically targeted projects could help the implementation of the SDGs in their locality. In a further step groups explore how to strengthen both the weak and the strong links between the different SDGs regionally, and begin to commit to concrete next steps that they will take after the workshop to move from theory to practice.

In a variant of this process different groups can work on SDG implementation at different scales: local, regional, national and global. This can lead to interesting conversation about how to create synergies between these scales (vertical integration). Each workshop also offers an opportunity for at least some of the participants to begin practicing their own facilitation skills as they use the cards to focus small group conversation and help their group harvest key insights and possible next steps.

There is always a feedback and evaluation round at the end of each training and a brief conversation about how the group can stay in touch to promote SDG implementation in their region. Some time is dedicate to explaining how best to collaborate with Gaia Education in becoming multipliers in the use of the ‘SGD Community Implementation Flashcards’ and use the cards to replicate the training of multiplier.

Gaia Education ran the first trainings in Germany, Spain, Denmark, Brazil, Canada, Thailand, and there will be further trainings in Scotland, Italy and Argentina soon. The flashcards and the associated training of multipliers have been reviewed by UNESCO and met with enthusiastic feedback. The flashcards are already available in English, Spanish and Portuguese and UNESCO is providing support for translations into Arabic, Chinese, French and Russian.

May East, Gaia Education’s CEO (on the right) holding a pack of SDG Community Implementation Flashcards during an international gathering of educators — the UNESCO week for peace and sustainable development — in Ottawa, Canada.

As a key partner within the UNESCO ‘Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development’ (GAP), Gaia Education has joined the ‘Accelerating Sustainable Solutions at Local Level’ partner network. Over the coming months and years we will continue to creatively weave the use of the ‘SDG Community Implementation Flashcards’ and the methodology of the ‘Training of Multipliers’ into most of our face-to-face courses.

The overall objectives is to support communities in using the Sustainable Development Goals as a means to create a more sustainable future for themselves. The training of multipliers aims to build will and capacity within local communities to actively engage in SDG implementation. Only together we can achieve Agenda 2030 and co-create a world that works for all — one community at a time! You are shaping this future too!

We need a ‘Declaration of Interdependence’, but more than another declaration and agenda we need to come together to collaborate in co-creating a thriving future for all of humanity and all of life. We are shaping our future through both our actions and our failures to act. This is the story you are shaping! Choose to be part of the Regeneration! Chose a thriving future for all!

[About the author: Dr. Daniel Christian Wahl works part-time as Gaia Education’s ‘Head of Innovation and Design’. He has revised and co-authored all four dimensions of the online curriculum in Design for Sustainability and has organized and taught on Ecovillage Design Education programmes in Scotland, Thailand and Spain. Daniel also developed the concept and content of the ‘SDG Community Implementation Flashcards’ and collaborated with May East in the design of the ‘Training of Multipliers’ and with Alexandre Pereira and Virginia Gegg in the graphic design of the cards. His 2016 book Designing Regenerative Cultures has already reach international acclaim.]