Sustainability and systemic change resistance
Encyclopedia
The environmental sustainability
problem has proven difficult to solve. The modern environmental movement
has attempted to solve the problem in a large variety of ways. But little progress has been made, as shown by severe ecological footprint
overshoot and lack of sufficient progress on the climate change
problem. Something within the human system in preventing change to a sustainable mode of behavior. That system trait is systemic change resistance. Change resistance is also known as organizational resistance, barriers to change, or policy resistance.
in 1970, in which over 20 million people participated, with publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, and with the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment
in Stockholm in 1972. Early expectations the problem could be solved ran high. 114 out of 132 members of the United Nations attended the Stockholm conference. The conference was widely seen at the time as a harbinger of success:
However, despite the work of a worldwide environmental movement
, many national environmental protection agencies, creation of the United Nations Environment Programme
, and many international environmental treaties, the sustainability problem continues to grow worse. The latest ecological footprint
data shows the world’s footprint increased from about 50% undershoot in 1961 to 50% overshoot in 2007, the last year data is available.
In 1972 the first edition of The Limits to Growth analyzed the environmental sustainability problem using a system dynamics
model. The widely influential book predicted that:
Yet thirty-two years later in 2004 the third edition reported that:
Change resistance runs so high that the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters, China
and the United States
, have never adopted the Kyoto Protocol
treaty. In the US resistance was so strong that in 1999 the US Senate voted 95 to zero against the treaty by passing the Byrd–Hagel Resolution, despite the fact Al Gore
was vice-president at the time. Not a single senator could be persuaded to support the treaty, which has not been brought back to the floor since.
Due to prolonged change resistance, the climate change problem has escalated to the climate change crisis. Greenhouse gas
emissions are rising much faster than IPCC
models expected: “The growth rate of [fossil fuel] emissions was 3.5% per year for 2000-2007, an almost four fold increase from 0.9% per year in 1990-1999. … This makes current trends in emissions higher than the worst case IPCC-SRES scenario.”
The Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009 ended in failure. No agreement on binding targets was reached. The Cancun Climate Summit in December 2010 did not break the deadlock. The best it could do was another non-binding agreement:
This indicates no progress at all since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
was created at the Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro
. The 2010 Cancun agreement was the functional equivalent of what the 1992 agreement said:
Negotiations have bogged down so pervasively that: “Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough.” “Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years.”
These events suggest that change resistance to solving the sustainability problem is so high the problem is currently unsolvable.
The thesis focuses specifically on developing “an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding institutional change and resistance to change towards sustainability.”
Jack Harich's 2010 paper on Change Resistance as the Crux of the Environmental Sustainability Problem argues there are two separate problems to solve. A root cause analysis
and a system dynamics
model were used to explain how:
The paper discussed the two subproblems:
The proper coupling subproblem is what most people consider as “the” problem to solve. It is called decoupling
in economic and environmental fields, where the term refers to economic growth without additional environmental degradation. Solving the proper coupling problem is the goal of environmentalism and in particular ecological economics
: “Ecological economics is the study of the interactions and co-evolution in time and space of human economies and the ecosystems in which human economies are embedded.”
Change resistance is also called barriers to change. Hoffman and Bazerman, in a chapter on “Understanding and overcoming the organizational and psychological barriers to action,” concluded that:
John Sterman
, current leader of the system dynamics school of thought, came to the same conclusion:
These findings indicate there are at least two subproblems to be solved: change resistance and proper coupling. Given the human system’s long history of unsuccessful attempts to self-correct to a sustainable mode, it appears that high change resistance is preventing proper coupling. This may be expressed as an emerging principle: systemic change resistance is the crux of the sustainability problem and must be solved first, before the human system can be properly coupled to the greater system it lives within, the environment.
If sources of systemic change resistance are present, they are the principle cause of individual change resistance. According to the fundamental attribution error
it is crucial to address systemic change resistance when present and avoid assuming that change resistance can be overcome by bargaining, reasoning, inspirational appeals, and so on. This is because:
Peter Senge
, a thought leader of systems thinking
for the business world, describes the structural source of systemic change resistance as being due to an “implicit system goal:”
Senge’s insight applies to the sustainability problem. Until the “implicit system goal” causing systemic change resistance is found and resolved, change efforts to solve the proper coupling part of the sustainability problem may be, as Senge argues, “doomed to failure.”
The direct cause of environmental impact is the three factors on the right side of the I=PAT equation
where Impact equals Population times Affluence (consumption per person) times Technology (environmental impact per unit of consumption). It is these three factors that solutions like those listed above seek to reduce.
The top environmental organization in the world, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), focuses exclusively on proper coupling solutions:
The six areas are all direct practices to reduce the three factors of the I=PAT equation.
Al Gore
s' 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth
described the climate change problem and the urgency of solving it. The film concluded with Gore saying:
The four solutions Gore mentions are proper coupling practices. There is, however, a hint of acknowledgement that overcoming systemic change resistance is the real challenge, when Gore says “...we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will.”
The twenty-seven solutions that appear during the film’s closing credits are mostly proper coupling solutions. The first nine are:
Some solutions are attempts to overcome individual change resistance, such as:
However none of the twenty-seven solutions deal with overcoming systemic change resistance.
On how to specifically overcome the change resistance subproblem, Markvart examined two leading theories that seemed to offer insight into change resistance, Panarchy
theory and New Institutionalism
, and concluded that:
Taking a root cause analysis
and system dynamics
modeling approach, Harich carefully defined the three characteristics of a root cause
and then found a main systemic root cause for both the change resistance and proper coupling subproblems. Several sample solution elements for resolving the root causes were suggested. The point was made that the exact solution policies chosen do not matter nearly as much as finding the correct systemic root causes. Once these are found, how to resolve them is relatively obvious because once a root cause is found by structural modeling, the high leverage point for resolving it follows easily. Solutions may then push on specific structural points in the social system, which due to careful modeling will have fairly predictable effects.
This reaffirms the work of Donella Meadows
, as expressed in her classic essay on Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
. The final page stated that:
Here Meadows refers to the leverage point for resolving the proper coupling subproblem rather than the leverage point for overcoming change resistance. This is because the current focus of environmentalism is on proper coupling.
However, if the leverage points associated with the root causes of change resistance exist and can be found, the system will not resist changing them. This is an important principle of social system behavior.
For example, Harich found the main root cause of successful systemic change resistance to be high "deception effectiveness." The source was special interests, particularly large for-profit corporations. The high leverage point was raising "general ability to detect manipulative deception." This can be done with a variety of solution elements, such as "The Truth Test." This effectively increases truth literacy, just as conventional education raises reading and writing literacy
. Few citizens resist literacy education because its benefits have become so obvious.
Promotion of corporate social responsibility
(CSR) has been used to try to overcome change resistance to solving social problems, including environmental sustainability. This solution strategy has not worked well because it is voluntary and does not resolve root causes. Milton Friedman
explained why CSR fails: "The social responsibility of business is to increase profits." Business cannot be responsible to society. It can only be responsible to its shareholders.
Sustainability
Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of union, an interdependent relationship and mutual responsible position with all living and non...
problem has proven difficult to solve. The modern environmental movement
Environmental movement
The environmental movement, a term that includes the conservation and green politics, is a diverse scientific, social, and political movement for addressing environmental issues....
has attempted to solve the problem in a large variety of ways. But little progress has been made, as shown by severe ecological footprint
Ecological footprint
The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to...
overshoot and lack of sufficient progress on the climate change
Climate change
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
problem. Something within the human system in preventing change to a sustainable mode of behavior. That system trait is systemic change resistance. Change resistance is also known as organizational resistance, barriers to change, or policy resistance.
Overview of resistance to solving the sustainability problem
While environmentalism had long been a minor force in political change, the movement strengthened significantly in the 1970s with the first Earth DayEarth Day
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. The name and concept of Earth Day was allegedly pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. The first Proclamation of Earth Day was by San Francisco, the...
in 1970, in which over 20 million people participated, with publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, and with the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment
United Nations Conference on the Human Environment
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was an international conference convened under United Nations auspices held in Stockholm, Sweden from June 5–16, 1972...
in Stockholm in 1972. Early expectations the problem could be solved ran high. 114 out of 132 members of the United Nations attended the Stockholm conference. The conference was widely seen at the time as a harbinger of success:
- "Many believe the most important result of the conference was the precedent it set for international cooperation in addressing environmental degradation. The nations attending agreed they shared responsibility for the quality of the environment, particularly the oceans and the atmosphere, and they signed a declaration of principles, after extensive negotiations, concerning their obligations. The conference also approved an environmental fund and an ‘action program,’ which involved 200 specific recommendations for addressing such problems as global climate change, marine pollution, population growth, the dumping of toxic wastes, and the preservation of biodiversity. A permanent environment unit was established for coordinating these and other international efforts. [This later became] the United Nations Environmental Program [which was] was formally approved by the General Assembly later that same year and its base established in Nairobi, Kenya. This organization not only coordinated action but monitored research, collecting and disseminating information, and it has played an ongoing role in international negotiations about environmental issues.
- "The conference in Stockholm accomplished almost everything the preparatory committed had planned. It was widely considered successful, and many observers were almost euphoric about the extent of agreement."
However, despite the work of a worldwide environmental movement
Environmental movement
The environmental movement, a term that includes the conservation and green politics, is a diverse scientific, social, and political movement for addressing environmental issues....
, many national environmental protection agencies, creation of the United Nations Environment Programme
United Nations Environment Programme
The United Nations Environment Programme coordinates United Nations environmental activities, assisting developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and practices. It was founded as a result of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in June 1972 and has its...
, and many international environmental treaties, the sustainability problem continues to grow worse. The latest ecological footprint
Ecological footprint
The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to...
data shows the world’s footprint increased from about 50% undershoot in 1961 to 50% overshoot in 2007, the last year data is available.
In 1972 the first edition of The Limits to Growth analyzed the environmental sustainability problem using a system dynamics
System dynamics
System dynamics is an approach to understanding the behaviour of complex systems over time. It deals with internal feedback loops and time delays that affect the behaviour of the entire system. What makes using system dynamics different from other approaches to studying complex systems is the use...
model. The widely influential book predicted that:
- "If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity some time in the 21st century."
Yet thirty-two years later in 2004 the third edition reported that:
- "[The second edition of Limits to Growth] was published in 1992, the year of the global summit on environment and development in Rio de Janeiro. The advent of the summit seemed to prove that global society had decided to deal seriously with the important environmental problems. But we now know that humanity failed to achieve the goals of Rio. The Rio plus 10 conference in Johannesburg in 2002 produced even less; it was almost paralyzed by a variety of ideological and economic disputes, [due to] the efforts of those pursuing their narrow national, corporate, or individual self-interests.
- "...humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years."
Change resistance runs so high that the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters, China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, have never adopted the Kyoto Protocol
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , aimed at fighting global warming...
treaty. In the US resistance was so strong that in 1999 the US Senate voted 95 to zero against the treaty by passing the Byrd–Hagel Resolution, despite the fact Al Gore
Al Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
was vice-president at the time. Not a single senator could be persuaded to support the treaty, which has not been brought back to the floor since.
Due to prolonged change resistance, the climate change problem has escalated to the climate change crisis. Greenhouse gas
Greenhouse gas
A greenhouse gas is a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. This process is the fundamental cause of the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone...
emissions are rising much faster than IPCC
IPCC
IPCC may refer to:*Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the United Nations*Independent Police Complaints Commission, of England and Wales*Irish Peatland Conservation Council...
models expected: “The growth rate of [fossil fuel] emissions was 3.5% per year for 2000-2007, an almost four fold increase from 0.9% per year in 1990-1999. … This makes current trends in emissions higher than the worst case IPCC-SRES scenario.”
The Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009 ended in failure. No agreement on binding targets was reached. The Cancun Climate Summit in December 2010 did not break the deadlock. The best it could do was another non-binding agreement:
- “Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet, and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties.”
This indicates no progress at all since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international environmental treaty produced at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development , informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to 14, 1992...
was created at the Earth Summit
Earth Summit
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development , also known as the Rio Summit, Rio Conference, Earth Summit was a major United Nations conference held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 June to 14 June 1992.-Overview:...
in Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...
. The 2010 Cancun agreement was the functional equivalent of what the 1992 agreement said:
- "The Parties to this Convention... [acknowledge] that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response.... [thus the parties recognize] that States should enact effective environmental legislation... [to] protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind...."
Negotiations have bogged down so pervasively that: “Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough.” “Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years.”
These events suggest that change resistance to solving the sustainability problem is so high the problem is currently unsolvable.
The change resistance and proper coupling subproblems
Understanding change resistance requires seeing it as a distinct and separate part of the sustainability problem. Tanya Markvart’s 2009 thesis on Understanding Institutional Change and Resistance to Change Towards Sustainability stated that:- "It has also been demonstrated that ecologically destructive and inequitable institutional systems can be highly resilient and resistant to change, even in the face of social-ecological degradation and/or collapse (e.g., Berkes & Folke, 2002; Allison & Hobbs, 2004; Brown, 2005; Runnalls, 2008; Finley, 2009; Walker et al., 2009)."
The thesis focuses specifically on developing “an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding institutional change and resistance to change towards sustainability.”
Jack Harich's 2010 paper on Change Resistance as the Crux of the Environmental Sustainability Problem argues there are two separate problems to solve. A root cause analysis
Root cause analysis
Root cause analysis is a class of problem solving methods aimed at identifying the root causes of problems or events.Root Cause Analysis is any structured approach to identifying the factors that resulted in the nature, the magnitude, the location, and the timing of the harmful outcomes of one...
and a system dynamics
System dynamics
System dynamics is an approach to understanding the behaviour of complex systems over time. It deals with internal feedback loops and time delays that affect the behaviour of the entire system. What makes using system dynamics different from other approaches to studying complex systems is the use...
model were used to explain how:
- "...difficult social problems [like sustainability must be decomposed] into two sequential subproblems: (1) How to overcome change resistance and then (2) How to achieve proper coupling. This is the timeless strategy of divide and conquer. By cleaving one big problem into two, the problem becomes an order of magnitude easier to solve, because we can approach the two subproblems differently and much more appropriately. We are no longer unknowingly attempting to solve two very different problems simultaneously."
The paper discussed the two subproblems:
- "Change resistance is the tendency for a system to continue its current behavior, despite the application of force to change that behavior.
- "Proper coupling occurs when the behavior of one system affects the behavior of other systems in a desirable manner, using the appropriate feedback loops, so the systems work together in harmony in accordance with design objectives. … In the environmental sustainability problem the human system has become improperly coupled to the greater system it lives within: the environment.
- "Change resistance versus proper coupling allows a crucial distinction. Society is aware of the proper practices required to live sustainably and the need to do so. But society has a strong aversion to adopting these practices. As a result, problem solvers have created thousands of effective (and often ingenious) proper practices. But they are stymied in their attempts to have them taken up by enough of the system to solve the problem because an 'implicit system goal' is causing insurmountable change resistance. Therefore systemic change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first."
The proper coupling subproblem is what most people consider as “the” problem to solve. It is called decoupling
Decoupling
The term "decoupling" is used in many different contexts.-Economic growth without environmental damage:In economic and environmental fields, decoupling is becoming increasingly used in the context of economic production and environmental quality. When used in this way, it refers to the ability of...
in economic and environmental fields, where the term refers to economic growth without additional environmental degradation. Solving the proper coupling problem is the goal of environmentalism and in particular ecological economics
Ecological economics
Image:Sustainable development.svg|right|The three pillars of sustainability. Clickable.|275px|thumbpoly 138 194 148 219 164 240 182 257 219 277 263 291 261 311 264 331 272 351 283 366 300 383 316 394 287 408 261 417 224 424 182 426 154 423 119 415 87 403 58 385 40 368 24 347 17 328 13 309 16 286 26...
: “Ecological economics is the study of the interactions and co-evolution in time and space of human economies and the ecosystems in which human economies are embedded.”
Change resistance is also called barriers to change. Hoffman and Bazerman, in a chapter on “Understanding and overcoming the organizational and psychological barriers to action,” concluded that:
- "In this chapter, we argue that the change in thinking required of the sustainability agenda will never come to fruition within practical domains unless proper attention is given to the sources of individual and social resistance to such change. The implementation of wise management practices cannot be accomplished without a concurrent set of strategies for surmounting these barriers."
John Sterman
John Sterman
John David Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, and the current director of the MIT System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is mostly considered as the current leader of the System...
, current leader of the system dynamics school of thought, came to the same conclusion:
- "The civil rights movement provides a better analogy for the climate challenge. Then, as now, entrenched special interests vigorously opposed change. … Of course, we need more research and technical innovation—money and genius are always in short supply. But there is no purely technical solution for climate change. For public policy to be grounded in the hard-won results of climate science, we must now turn our attention to the dynamics of social and political change."
These findings indicate there are at least two subproblems to be solved: change resistance and proper coupling. Given the human system’s long history of unsuccessful attempts to self-correct to a sustainable mode, it appears that high change resistance is preventing proper coupling. This may be expressed as an emerging principle: systemic change resistance is the crux of the sustainability problem and must be solved first, before the human system can be properly coupled to the greater system it lives within, the environment.
Systemic versus individual change resistance
Systemic change resistance differs significantly from individual change resistance. “Systemic means originating from the system in such a manner as to affect the behavior of most or all social agents of certain types, as opposed to originating from individual agents.” Individual change resistance originates from individual people and organizations. How the two differ may be seen in this passage:- "The notion of resistance to change is credited to Kurt Lewin. His conceptualization of the phrase, however, is very different from today’s usage. [which treats resistance to change as a psychological concept, where resistance or support of change comes from values, habits, mental models, and so on residing within the individual] For Lewin, resistance to change could occur, but that resistance could be anywhere in the system. As Kotter (1995) found, it is possible for the resistance to be sited within the individual, but it is much more likely to be found elsewhere in the system.
- "Systems of social roles, with their associated patterns of attitudes, expectations, and behavior norms, share with biological systems the characteristic of homeostasis—i.e., tendencies to resist change, to restore the previous state after a disturbance.
- "Lewin had been working on this idea, that the status quo represented an equilibrium between the barriers to change and the forces favoring change, since 1928 as part of his field theory. He believed that some difference in these forces—weakening of the barriers or strengthening of the driving forces—was required to produce the unfreezing that began a change."
If sources of systemic change resistance are present, they are the principle cause of individual change resistance. According to the fundamental attribution error
Fundamental attribution error
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors...
it is crucial to address systemic change resistance when present and avoid assuming that change resistance can be overcome by bargaining, reasoning, inspirational appeals, and so on. This is because:
- "A fundamental principle of system dynamics states that the structure of the system gives rise to its behavior. However, people have a strong tendency to attribute the behavior of others to dispositional rather than situational factors, that is, to character and especially character flaws rather than the system in which these people are acting. The tendency to blame the person rather than the system is so strong psychologists call it the 'fundamental attribution error.' "
Peter Senge
Peter Senge
Peter Michael Senge is an American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known as author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization from 1990...
, a thought leader of systems thinking
Systems thinking
Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish...
for the business world, describes the structural source of systemic change resistance as being due to an “implicit system goal:”
- "In general, balancing loops are more difficult to see than reinforcing loops because it often looks like nothing is happening. There’s no dramatic growth of sales and marketing expenditures, or nuclear arms, or lily pads. Instead, the balancing process maintains the status quo, even when all participants want change. The feeling, as Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts put it, of needing ‘all the running you can do to keep in the same place’ is a clue that a balancing loop may exist nearby.
- "Leaders who attempt organizational change often find themselves unwittingly caught in balancing processes. To the leaders, it looks as though their efforts are clashing with sudden resistance that seems to come from nowhere. In fact, as my friend found when he tried to reduce burnout, the resistance is a response by the system, trying to maintain an implicit system goal. Until this goal is recognized, the change effort is doomed to failure."
Senge’s insight applies to the sustainability problem. Until the “implicit system goal” causing systemic change resistance is found and resolved, change efforts to solve the proper coupling part of the sustainability problem may be, as Senge argues, “doomed to failure.”
The current focus is on proper coupling
Presently environmentalism is focused on solving the proper coupling subproblem. For example, the following are all proper coupling solutions. They attempt to solve the direct cause of the sustainability problem’s symptoms:- The Kyoto ProtocolKyoto ProtocolThe Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , aimed at fighting global warming...
- The Three RsWaste hierarchyThe waste hierarchy refers to the 3 Rs of reduce, reuse, recycle, or and [ which classify waste management strategies according to their desirability. The Rs are meant to be a hierarchy, in order of importance...
of reduce, reuse, recycle - More use of renewable energyRenewable energyRenewable energy is energy which comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal heat, which are renewable . About 16% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables, with 10% coming from traditional biomass, which is mainly used for heating, and 3.4% from...
- Better pollution control of many kinds
- Collective management of common-pool resources
- Certification programs to reduce deforestation such as PEFC and FSCForest Stewardship CouncilThe Forest Stewardship Council is an international not-for-profit, multi-stakeholder organization established in 1993 to promote responsible management of the world’s forests. Its main tools for achieving this are standard setting, independent certification and labeling of forest products...
- Contour farming to reduce soil erosion
- The green revolutionGreen RevolutionGreen Revolution refers to a series of research, development, and technology transfer initiatives, occurring between the 1940s and the late 1970s, that increased agriculture production around the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s....
- Zero population growthZero population growthZero population growth, sometimes abbreviated ZPG , is a condition of demographic balance where the number of people in a specified population neither grows nor declines, considered as a social aim....
The direct cause of environmental impact is the three factors on the right side of the I=PAT equation
I PAT
I = PAT is the lettering of a formula put forward to describe the impact of human activity on the environment.In words:The equation was developed in the 1970s during the course of a debate between Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich and John Holdren...
where Impact equals Population times Affluence (consumption per person) times Technology (environmental impact per unit of consumption). It is these three factors that solutions like those listed above seek to reduce.
The top environmental organization in the world, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), focuses exclusively on proper coupling solutions:
- "2010 marked the beginning of a period of new, strategic and transformational direction for UNEP as it began implementing its Medium Term Strategy (MTS) for 2010-2013 across six areas: Climate change; Disasters and conflicts; Ecosystem management; Environmental governance; Harmful substances and hazardous waste; Resource efficiency, Sustainable consumption and production."
The six areas are all direct practices to reduce the three factors of the I=PAT equation.
Al Gore
Al Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....
s' 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.Premiering at the...
described the climate change problem and the urgency of solving it. The film concluded with Gore saying:
- "Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands, we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will. But in America, the will to act is a renewable resource."
The four solutions Gore mentions are proper coupling practices. There is, however, a hint of acknowledgement that overcoming systemic change resistance is the real challenge, when Gore says “...we just have to have the determination to make it happen. We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will.”
The twenty-seven solutions that appear during the film’s closing credits are mostly proper coupling solutions. The first nine are:
- Go to www.climatecrisis.net
- You can reduce your carbon emissions. In fact, you can even reduce your carbon emissions to zero.
- Buy energy efficient appliances & light bulbs.
- Change your thermostat (and use clock thermostats) to reduce energy for heating & cooling.
- Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit.
- Recycle.
- If you can, buy a hybrid car.
- When you can, walk or ride a bicycle.
- Where you can, use light rail & mass transit.
Some solutions are attempts to overcome individual change resistance, such as:
- Tell your parents not to ruin the world that you will live in.
- If you are a parent, join with your children to save the world they will live in.
- Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis.
- Write to congress. If they don’t listen, run for congress.
- Speak up in your community.
However none of the twenty-seven solutions deal with overcoming systemic change resistance.
Overcoming systemic change resistance
Efforts here are sparse because environmentalism is currently not oriented toward treating systemic change resistance as a distinct and separate problem to solve.On how to specifically overcome the change resistance subproblem, Markvart examined two leading theories that seemed to offer insight into change resistance, Panarchy
Panarchy
Panarchy is a conceptual term first coined by the Belgian botanist and economist Paul Emile de Puydt in 1860, referring to a specific form of governance that would encompass all others. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the noun as "chiefly poetic" with the meaning "a universal realm," citing...
theory and New Institutionalism
New institutionalism
New institutionalism or neoinstitutionalism is a theory that focuses on developing a sociological view of institutions--the way they interact and the way they affect society...
, and concluded that:
- "...neither theory devotes significant attention to understanding the dynamics of resilient and resistant but inefficient and/or unproductive institutional and ecological systems. Overall, more research is required...."
Taking a root cause analysis
Root cause analysis
Root cause analysis is a class of problem solving methods aimed at identifying the root causes of problems or events.Root Cause Analysis is any structured approach to identifying the factors that resulted in the nature, the magnitude, the location, and the timing of the harmful outcomes of one...
and system dynamics
System dynamics
System dynamics is an approach to understanding the behaviour of complex systems over time. It deals with internal feedback loops and time delays that affect the behaviour of the entire system. What makes using system dynamics different from other approaches to studying complex systems is the use...
modeling approach, Harich carefully defined the three characteristics of a root cause
Root cause
A root cause is rarely an initiating cause of a causal chain which leads to an outcome or effect of interest. Commonly, root cause is misused to describe the depth in the causal chain where an intervention could reasonably be implemented to change performance and prevent an undesirable outcome.In...
and then found a main systemic root cause for both the change resistance and proper coupling subproblems. Several sample solution elements for resolving the root causes were suggested. The point was made that the exact solution policies chosen do not matter nearly as much as finding the correct systemic root causes. Once these are found, how to resolve them is relatively obvious because once a root cause is found by structural modeling, the high leverage point for resolving it follows easily. Solutions may then push on specific structural points in the social system, which due to careful modeling will have fairly predictable effects.
This reaffirms the work of Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows
Donella H. "Dana" Meadows was a pioneering American environmental scientist, teacher and writer. She is best known as lead author of the influential book The Limits to Growth, which made headlines around the world.- Life :Born in Elgin, Illinois, Meadows was educated in science, receiving a B.A...
, as expressed in her classic essay on Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Twelve leverage points
The twelve leverage points to intervene in a system were proposed by Donella Meadows, a scientist and system analyst focused on environmental limits to economic growth...
. The final page stated that:
- "The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it."
Here Meadows refers to the leverage point for resolving the proper coupling subproblem rather than the leverage point for overcoming change resistance. This is because the current focus of environmentalism is on proper coupling.
However, if the leverage points associated with the root causes of change resistance exist and can be found, the system will not resist changing them. This is an important principle of social system behavior.
For example, Harich found the main root cause of successful systemic change resistance to be high "deception effectiveness." The source was special interests, particularly large for-profit corporations. The high leverage point was raising "general ability to detect manipulative deception." This can be done with a variety of solution elements, such as "The Truth Test." This effectively increases truth literacy, just as conventional education raises reading and writing literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
. Few citizens resist literacy education because its benefits have become so obvious.
Promotion of corporate social responsibility
Corporate social responsibility
Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model...
(CSR) has been used to try to overcome change resistance to solving social problems, including environmental sustainability. This solution strategy has not worked well because it is voluntary and does not resolve root causes. Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades...
explained why CSR fails: "The social responsibility of business is to increase profits." Business cannot be responsible to society. It can only be responsible to its shareholders.