What if we could accelerate sustainable lifestyle changes through radical inquiry?
The magnitude, urgency and scope of the climate crisis requires radical changes in society and an honest look at the transformation of how we live as well as our change-making practices. The current Covid-19 crisis is only magnifying its underlying issues. In our open community of sustainable behaviour change practitioners we are looking to increase our impact with more radical and ambitious actions, and through profound exploration and sharing.
As practitioners working towards sustainable behaviour change in different fields, we are constantly engaged in understanding, enabling and scaling our impact. Individually and in our institutions we accelerate and demonstrate how these changes might be achieved, inquire how we can amplify and deepen our projects or how we can become better system change practitioners ourselves. In this course we often ask ourselves questions like:
Am I radical enough in these challenging times?
Can my work actually bring about change in such complex systems?
Can I talk about the difficult and conflicting questions openly with others?
In 2017 Kate Power, Programme Director at KR Foundation, and Lewis Akenji, Director of Sustainable Consumption and Production at IGES, first convened a small group that later grew into the Boundless Roots Community. Boundless Roots was started in May 2019. The project is facilitated by Forum for the Future and funded by the KR Foundation through a 2-year grant. Forum for the Future is an international sustainability non-profit working on topics like climate change, poverty, malnutrition and civil unrest by convening transformational collaborations and working towards systems change.
Boundless Root’s purpose is to contribute to the amplification and generation of transformative projects that create the conditions for lifestyles to adapt and become viable for sustaining life on this planet. We currently have 15 members working on sustainable behaviour change from different countries, sectors and backgrounds. Members join as individuals, not as representatives of their organisations. Combined, our work spans areas as diverse as advertising, adult education or faith communities. We share one question:
How can we create the conditions for radical long-lasting changes in how we live that are commensurate with the magnitude of the climate crisis?
When the narrative is framed around personal sacrifice, inevitably any opportunity for creating impact becomes pigeonholed around the individual’s role. We wanted to find a way to connect deeper with the idea that each of us is part of and complicit in our wider system, pushing the conversation beyond just consumer choice.
Coming together allows us to both deepen our individual practice and bring back those insights and synergies to each of our organisations. It gives us a safe space to stop, think, reflect, feel in times of uncertainty and turbulence. It allows us to develop a better understanding of how actions and practices are interconnected and how to amplify and go more profound with our projects. Together we co-create and open our resources and launch impactful collaborative projects.
Using system change approaches, we explore the roots of this inquiry with our community of practitioners. We are coming with different theories of change and tactics but sharing the same essential questions. We believe in the boundless potential of going under the surface to explore interconnections, similarities and differences to learn and feed the collective purpose of this community of practitioners.
Systemic Action Inquiries
For systems to change we know that we need to question their fundamental purpose, assumptions, framing and understanding. We need more spaces that can host this type of exploration and the inquiry approach opens up one of them.
As a community we are taking on ‘systemic action inquiries’. An action inquiry is an ongoing process: we reflect on and discuss issues together — then test out ideas, assumptions or new approaches in our work — and then come back together to repeat the cycle, learning more and more as we go. Through these iterating cycles of exploration and action we can turn our learnings into new approaches, practices and relationships that support our ambitions.
Doing so, we work with what emerges from the different perspectives of the group. In order to approach our wider inquiry of sustainable lifestyle change from different angles, the community split into sub-groups, following threads that they perceived to be central. In the past months we have been exploring five action inquiries that our members identified:
How do we balance the urgency of getting people to live more sustainably with the need for deep change?
It is quicker, easier and starts making a difference today getting people to do simple things like recycling. But to transform to a low-carbon world we need much more to change in people’s lives, without forcing change on them. We are exploring these tensions and looking for new answers.
How do we create the conditions for moments of cultural resonance and visibility?
Change rarely happens in a straight line, there are moments when issues break into the public consciousness and change can accelerate — like we have seen with the recent school strikes for the climate as just one example. How can we build on the momentum created by these cultural inflection points?
How do we build capacity for millions of trusted messengers to accelerate the transformation to sustainable lifestyles?
How can we train and equip people such as teachers, NGOs, social media influencers, to reach wider audiences in a conversation about living sustainably? Information is not enough: how do we provoke curiosity, build engagement and turn that into real action?
How do we work with privilege and colonialism, collective trauma and power?
For each of us in different ways, how we live is rooted in our history and culture, the power we have and the power others have had over us. How can we understand ourselves and each other better, and how does that inform our work? It’s unlikely we’ll make big changes without it.
What does it mean to work with collective psychology in the context of climate breakdown and radical changes in ways of living?
The psyche is the framing we bring to the world, how I see myself and others. This has to do with ways of living. How can we re-frame the values and narratives that underpin our collective psychology?
While we are preparing to share the insights we drew from these threads in the form of articles and wider conversations, we are getting ready to start a new iteration of inquiries. We will explore the following themes together during the next three months:
Healthy power: How are we moving away from dominance and power over in the work we’re doing? How are we contributing to healthy power, becoming more aware of power so that we can work with it more fluidly?
Meaningful life: How are we inviting people into an open, evolving conversation about what gives our lives meaning?
Cultural waves: How can we work with the momentum of what’s changing culture now and operationalise that in new ways? How do we frame the new narratives?
Working with contradictions: How do we work skillfully across polarities? Us as practitioners and the communities we serve. How do we create spaces to connect with what people need in the moment with collective exploration of the potential?
We invite you to become part the journey
If these inquiries speak to you, we would like to invite you to become part of the journey. While we are a diverse group we are aware that we might be missing important perspectives and want to open up our conversation to others. We are looking for people who are passionate about radical lifestyle change, actively working to shift systems and ready to leave their comfort zone in profound inquiries. If this sounds like you, have a look at the “Join us” section on our members page and find out more.
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