Facing the planetary emergency
“… when it comes to climate change, doing less or doing nothing literally means changing everything. The infernos and hurricanes we have seen over the last few weeks are only a very small window into what our future could look like.” — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, on delivering the European Green Deal (14 July 2021)
One of the things we could learn from recent crises (such as the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters all over the world) is that politicians and public administrations need to find solutions together with citizens. No individual or country is able to do so in isolation. And yet, when world leaders come together to try to agree solutions, as at the recent COP 26, they still seem unable to collaborate … for years!
On 25 June 2021, Julie Guégan and Obhi Chatterjee hosted a special session of Together-Ensemble about Facing the planetary emergency as part of the week-long Democracy and Governance Practice Retreat 2021: In Crisis and Beyond.
We believe this was the first such exchange to involve different levels of governance in Europe, on a topic of urgency where all levels of governance will need to find new ways to cooperate, develop inclusive policy, and to take action rapidly.
Opening conversation
To kick off the session, participants heard the expert perspectives in the video below from Janez Potočnik, Sandrine Dixson-Declève and Mohua Mukherjee about:
- the political focus on how to decarbonise current activities;
- the need to alter not only our current production but also how we consume;
- consuming less or differently (e.g., shared mobility);
- the impact of changes in the way we consume for economic growth; and
- what kind of mindset we need and how we could use citizen participation to enable the change toward it.
Workshop questions
Their remarks were followed by a deeper discussion during which the 100+ participants were able to apply their collective intelligence to co-create recommendations. In this session, we used Howspace to collect the ideas which emerged and to analyse them to propose real-time summaries.
We usually start from reflection at an individual level before moving the reflection to a societal level. So, in the first discussion round, we invited the participants to discuss in groups of 4 or 5:
What small lifestyle changes are you prepared to make?
In the second discussion round, in different groups of 4 or 5, the considered the question:
What do we as a society have to do differently for our kids’ future?
After this, we had a discussion with all the participants in which we invited them to share key insights they had heard during the discussions they had had in small groups.
Just before the end of the session, Laurent Bontoux (Senior Foresight for Policy Expert at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre) summarised the strategic conclusions, which are included at the end of the video above. As a closing question, we asked participants to post their own assessments of their:
Readiness to face the planetary emergency
How you could contribute to this global conversation
You are welcome to use the above video and workshop questions to run your own workshop(s), or to inspire a workshop design which is more appropriate for your organisation or community. Our only request is that you share the outcomes of your conversations on social media using the hashtag #TogetherEnsemble and #planet. We look forward to learning from the outcomes of your workshop(s).
