Appropriate Participation
An Excerpt from ‘Exploring Participation’ (D.C. Wahl, 2002)
“Applying knowledge — scientific or otherwise — is an art. An artists is somebody who knows what to put where and when to put it.”124
— Wendell Berry
“A participatory approach to the live support system of the planet means that we must become more sensitive and responsive to the subtle creativity of natural processes so that we do not destroy them through our actions. Developing a science of qualities will help to cultivate that sensitivity while preserving the best aspects of science as a cooperative, open, democratic approach to understanding and living within Nature.”125
— Brian Goodwin
How than, if everything is fundamentally interconnected and each individual’s thoughts, words and actions contribute to creating our reality, if our participation is inevitable and deeply co-creative, if the non-linear complex dynamic processes of life are fundamentally unpredictable, how than can we participate appropriately in this process of interaction and relationship that we create as it creates us?
One of the assumption of holistic science is that “the organism and its known world co-create one another in accordance with consistent rules.”126 These rules are about relationship and process, relating to the emergence of healthy wholes out of the interaction of diverse and interconnected processes, at the appropriate spacio-temporal scale.
Holistic science aims to identify these rules and hopes to make them more intelligible to allow for a more conscious way of participating in these processes. Increased intelligibility does not however imply that this will be achieved through the intellect alone, we will have to employ our full range of capabilities as human beings — our instinct, intellect and intuition, as well as our ability to collectively create a positive vision for a more humane future for all of humanity and the community of life at large.
“There have been significant trends towards holistic thinking in philosophy and science, there have been signs of a major paradigm shift in human affairs. The new economics, new ecology, new politics, new social and cultural thinking, new approaches to education, and the rapid development of social networking…are all part of this shift. This emerging broad unified outlook is based on increased consciousness and awareness, seeks inner development of human potential, has an altruistic cooperative ethic, and expresses genuine concern for the environment and the planet. …This new holistic social paradigm has the potential to provide the basis for healing mankind and healing the planet, in preparation for the next stage of human and planetary evolution.”127
— Brian Burrows
The quote above is from a book with the title Into the 21st Century — A Handbook for a Sustainable Future that was published over a decade ago by Brian Burrows et al. Since then these various holistic approaches to the different aspects of human life have been developed considerably as we shall see. [Note: This is an excerpt from my 2002 masters dissertation in Holistic Science at Schumacher College. Be mindful that I wrote this 15 years ago and enjoy!]
One of the key insight expressed by Burrows et al. is that “to fulfill the potential of humankind, we need to go beyond the development of individual talents and potential, to realize the full capabilities of the human species. The next step is to evolve effective ways for people to work [and live] together in groups and teams with common purpose, for example through the development of community projects and new patterns of work.”128 Appropriate participation is about cooperative participation in community, rather than individual competition.
The new holistic synthesis will combine the insights of the humanities original, instinctive wholism with the knowledge and, where appropriate, the technology provided by rational, intellectual reductionism. The synthesis unites these poles in a new intuitive holism through appropriate participation in an unpredictable world. A truly holistic science cannot be separated from the society it serves. We all have direct experience of the world we participate in and intuitions about how we may participate appropriately. We have to reclaim the voice, the power and responsibility of true citizens, rather than mere consumers.
This will involve denying the institution of science its role of ultimate authority in debates and making it more apparent that we are just dealing with one particular way of seeing, no matter how useful it might seem. Collectively we need to establish an inter-subjective consensus on appropriate participation, based on diverse individual experiences, needs and intuitions, traditional local wisdom as well as scientific knowledge.
Establishing this kind of consensus is only possible at the scale of local, participatory democracies, which enable the realisation of the political ideal of subsidiarity. This concept suggests that any decision should be taken at the scale and by the people who are directly affected by it. Since these are the people most able to assess its possible effects on the local community and the environment. Any form of “central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.”129 Appropriate participation will and should take many diverse forms, depending on the local, environmental, cultural and socio-economic context of the community.
There is an ongoing learning process in which individual communities and humanity as a whole learn how to participate appropriately in the continuously transforming web of interactions and relationships that constitute life and reality itself. This process lies at the heart of sustainability and appropriate participation.
If we hope to sustain humanity’s continued existence within the wider community of life on this planet, we have to preserve the intricacy and diversity of the life-process on all spatial-temporal scales and act to support the circulatory processes of maintenance and self-renewal that seem to govern the complex dynamic processes of life itself. We will need to participate in a way that facilitates the emergence of health on all scales of the whole.
I will add yet another definition of the word sustainability, to a list too long to repeat in this dissertation. Seen from a dynamic, participatory attention to the process of the world as a whole — from a holistic perspective — sustainability could be defined as the continuous learning process by which a rich diversity of locally adapted communities aim to participate appropriately, at the appropriate spatial and temporal scale, in the circulatory processes of maintenance and transformation of the complex and dynamic web of relationships and interactions which sustain the community of life in its entirety.
Appropriate participation in the process by which the whole continues to evolve in the creative tension between the maintenance of identity and the transformation of temporary expressions of order requires more than linear, logical reasoning.
I believe, that appropriate participation in the emergence of healthy wholes, in the process of sustainability, requires individual and collective participation as responsible citizens committed to their local bioregion and their community, co-operation across all boundaries involving civil society, business and governments and a reversal of power- structures along the principle of subsidiarity realized through federations of co-operating, bottom-up, participatory democracies.
For appropriate participation to facilitate the emergence of health on all scales of the whole, it is of critical importance that we participate at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales and learn to become more sensitive again, more able to respond appropriately and form appropriate relationships with the community of life around us.
Understanding the reciprocal relationship that exists between us and the processes of life will require, as Goodwin pointed out, a sensitivity and responsibility which “can be systematically cultivated collectively through education programmes that acknowledge the arts as essential for developing and redefining human intuition and responsiveness to the subtle order of nature described as beauty, elegance, simplicity, truth.
One name for such participatory exploration of nature and culture is ‘science of qualities’ but there are many other descriptions used to describe approaches to the new frontier. In a postmodern world this pluralism is a strength, for convergence comes through active participation in engagement with the multiple challenges that confront us.”130
In the remaining pages of this exploration of participation, I will aim to consider how appropriate participation in the emergence of healthy wholes facilitates sustainability on all spatial-temporal scales. I will do so by synthesising some of the guidelines that have been suggested in response to the multiple challenges on our collective path towards a sustainable participation in the community of life.
[Note: This is an excerpt from my 2002 masters dissertation in Holistic Science at Schumacher College. It addresses some of the root causes of our current crises of unsustainability. If you are interested in the references you can find them here. The research I did for my masters thesis directly informed my 2006 PhD thesis in ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health: A Holistic/Integral Approach to Complexity and Sustainability’ (2006), and after 10 years of experience as an educator, consultant, activist, and expert-generalist in whole systems design and transformative innovation, I published Designing Regenerative Cultures with Triarchy Press in May 2016.]


