Cultural Dimensions of Global Sustainability: The Jena Declaration (TJD)

The Case for the Jena Declaration (TJD)

The challenges facing humanity today are not abstract: there is a confluence of various global crises that are having an immediate and potentially devastating impact on the daily lives of billions of people. The intensification of the frequency and magnitude of storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, etc., in Europe and all over the world in the past few years is a pressing manifestation of this situation.

Seven years ago, as is well known, the United Nations agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. If implemented, they might enable us to avert the looming drastic consequences of global climate change and other environmental issues that threaten our very existence. In this way, a secure – or at least safer – future for all should be made possible in the longer term.

The Jena Declaration is not only about making claims, but also – and foremost about taking responsibility to engage in and organize the implementation of those claims.

The implementation of this set of goals certainly includes an ambitious, worldwide effort, embedded in international agreements. However, the lack of coherence and scientifically unconvincing layout make a failure to achieve these self-imposed goals likely. And this is despite considerable financial efforts.

Given this lack of satisfactory progress, it has become fashionable to accuse responsible authorities – especially politicians. The most common reproach is the prioritization of economic growth targets over the necessary measures to combat climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and growing social injustice.

From the rather comfortable position of those who criticize, observable undesirable developments are all readily blamed on leadership, policy, or systemic crises. Even if individuals and bodies with great decision-making power bear special responsibility, it is not very convincing to pillory them alone.

This kind of criticism leaves the central problem untouched; for it remains committed to the same, currently dominant idea that all political decisions should continue to be made from the top down. And it assumes that sustainability can be reached through existing technological innovations coupled with an increase in financial resources.

A large proportion of the measures taken to date against global climate change and environmental deterioration – as important as they are – cannot achieve the immediate effects that are required. It is striking that sustainability policy and research have so far focused primarily on technical solutions to problems. The current budget plan for the European Union’s sustainability policy, for example, allocates an overwhelming majority of funds to environmental technology. Only a comparatively small share is dedicated to all other approaches, such as education or civil society engagement.

This widespread attitude is grounded in a shared (ecology-driven) naturalistic understanding of sustainability. This attitude leads to a primarily natural scientific study and management of physical conditions to solve environmental issues via technical interventions and methods. Politicians share this approach, as do many citizens, most scientists, and even many otherwise critical NGO movements.

There are seven principles, or seven cornerstones, to keep in mind for the implementation of The Jena Declaration.

That vision is too firmly established and ingrained to be changed easily. Alternative approaches are consequently often left out, policy advice on sustainability being usually addressed to the natural sciences and technology.

In addition, it is also a fact that so far, the humanities and social sciences have at best been seen as only marginally engaged in this field, if at all. The result is the weak role of cultural and social components in sustainability research and action.

Instead of confidently developing a perspective of their own, the rather small number of engaged social scientists and humanities scholars are mostly content to “carry” the findings of the natural sciences and their expected social consequences “into society”.

On the margins of that dominant view, there is a steadily growing recognition that demanding more and more of the same, technological innovations, financial resources, and environmentally oriented solutions are not enough.

What is needed instead is a societal transformation in our ways of thinking, acting, and relating, and this implies a fundamental change in strategy.

In short: It requires a radical paradigm shift in sustainability policy! Fundamentally that is a shift of focus from the top-down to a bottom-up strategy! Calling for a paradigm shift, identifying its implications, and designing ways of implementing this, is precisely the claim and aim of The Jena Declaration.

Change of Paradigm

To build a proper bottom-up approach, The Jena Declaration focuses directly on people’s everyday practices, addressing them in a culturally respectful way.

The bottom-up approach starts from the premise that the key catalysts of any sustainable social change are the citizens around the planet with their everyday practices.

As demonstrated by recent crises, not least the Covid-19 pandemic, local, everyday practices and routines are the basis of global relationships. Or speaking more generally: all social and cultural realities are constituted and reproduced through everyday practices, which in turn either constrict or promote sustainable livelihoods, a perspective applied by The Jena Declaration.

Everyday actions are never merely a purely individual matter. All practices are always shaped by social relations and cultural schemes of interpretation. That is, they are always socially embedded, geographically located, historically contextualized, and culturally shaped. Accordingly, comprehensive social change depends on the participation of as many citizens and groups of people as possible.

The consistent inclusion of everyday worlds should make it possible to learn from one another and to share experiences globally via appropriate links. At the same time, regionally specific given natural conditions are to be considered.

An important prerequisite for achieving the goals of the Declaration is to respect the cultural environments, social and regional living conditions, and historical contexts of all people. 

Above all, the shift in question calls for the development of strategies that encourage and support people to radically change their everyday actions. For this, societies should be included in their entire breadth, and the focus should be on the mobilization of civil society. People of all ages and backgrounds need to be reached, involved, and motivated to cooperate and act purposefully in the spirit of global sustainability.

Together with local and global partners, this process should set in motion a movement that is as broad as possible. It shall also include a new understanding, a more cultural and socially orientated understanding of sustainability, encompassing the fostering of human security for all. That includes, for instance, the call for strengthening solidarity, social justice, reconciliation, and respect for cultural diversity, to mention some of the more important ones.

According to The Jena Declaration, the speed and depth of societal transformations along these lines can only be improved if sustainability policies are not primarily focused on the institutional level, but rather go directly to the key actors of change.

Considered together, these points make it clear how urgent it is to change the focus from the currently dominant top-down orientation to a bottom-up logic.

This catalog of requirements constitutes the frame for the action program of The Jena Declaration. But, before turning to the description of its basic principles and key program lines, I would like to give a short overview of the development process of the declaration.

Background

The Jena Declaration is based on a survey among internationally leading sustainability experts, carried out by the UNESCO-Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability, based at Jena University. It was sponsored by the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council on “Imagining the Future Knowledge Mobilization”.

Many of these experts were drawn from the International Science Council, UNESCO, the World Academy of Art & Science, The Club of Rome, the Academia Europaea, the International Council for Philosophy and the Human Sciences, the International Geographical Union, and several leading international universities. They all participated in the follow-up Conference on “Humanities and the Social Sciences for Sustainability” which led to the declaration.

Civil society actors have a vital role to play in raising public concern and creating pressure for change.

The Jena Declaration is now a consortium of partners, including many UNESCO Chairs; relevant international organizations; and academic institutions of the natural, social, and human sciences; arts organizations and networks; business companies; civil society movements; and the like. Following the first global launch event held last October, specific launch events are planned for Asia & Oceania, the Americas, Africa, and Europe.

This Declaration is working to gather the highest possible number of signatories to put pressure on the leading sustainability agencies and bodies, in order to reach the SDGs in time. The Jena Declaration is not only about making claims, but also – and foremost about taking responsibility to engage in and organize the implementation of those claims.

Please allow me to now present to you briefly the declaration’s leading key principles of action.

Leading Principles

There are seven principles, or seven cornerstones, to keep in mind for the implementation of The Jena Declaration.

• The first cornerstone is very simple – but at the same time often forgotten. It’s the insight that sustainability is about more than ecology; more than simply managing ecosystems or the environment. Much of today’s thinking about sustainability is rooted in the idea that the human and the natural sphere are somehow opposed – that nature is simply our “environment”. But the opposite is true: With our bodies, we are part of nature! And the way we understand, relate to, and transform nature depends on our cultural backgrounds. Therefore, sustainability is in fact about us as part of nature, guided by cultural schemes of interpretation.
• The second cornerstone is the idea that true change toward sustainability can only be achieved if people begin to change their everyday routines and practices. Sustainability is more than just a fashion, it is a mindset – something that enables us to live sustainably. Here, especially, the voice of the arts can make a powerful contribution in the form I just mentioned: establishing new ways of connecting with the world; to finding sustainable solutions for everyday problems in the most diverse contexts.
• This idea leads directly to the third cornerstone. This addresses the deficiencies of top-down approaches. If you have ever bought a “one size fits all” shirt, you may know that one size only rarely fits all. The same holds for solutions to achieve sustainability. Top-down approaches that prescribe solutions for everyone rarely succeed. Instead, we need to find solutions that fit the specific conditions in different contexts. Or, more precisely, we need to empower people to develop such solutions themselves.
• As a direct consequence of this, we can say – as a fourth cornerstone: cultural and regional diversity shall be the starting point of any sustainability strategy. Everything people do is locally emplaced, historically situated, and culturally embedded. It’s difficult to convince people to make their lives more sustainable if the proposition doesn’t find even the slightest anchor in their everyday world and speaks to their socio-cultural background. So, successful sustainability strategies must embrace cultural and regional differences.
• The fifth cornerstone concerns an additional role of the arts and humanistic and social research. As I have said before, the arts open up new horizons. They can envision and design in advance a different world than we currently inhabit. Likewise, the Social Sciences and the Humanities help us understand the social and cultural dimensions of the current transformation – and get us away from a first aid “solutionism”. The Jena Declaration argues that arts and social and humanistic research are key to making living sustainably not only possible, but even enjoyable by everyone.
• The sixth cornerstone highlights that a true bottom-up strategy involves a change in our ways of producing and applying knowledge. Many sustainability policies try to teach and tell others how to do things properly, without knowing their cultural context, and without respecting their expertise. We are convinced that robust solutions must be developed together and that there is a great potential for collaborative co-production of new knowledge in a transdisciplinary way. The basis for this is mutual learning—learning from each other.
• And finally, the seventh cornerstone calls for civic engagement. Genuine bottom-up policies enable us to use the forces and creativity of concerned citizens of all generations, but especially of the young members of our global community. To make this engagement more effective we developed a global platform to facilitate concerted action by people all around the world, whether they are researchers, teachers, officials, or concerned citizens.

These are – in a nutshell – the seven key principles of The Jena Declaration. The Jena Declaration is an invitation to make sustainable development happen at your doorstep, to mobilize people around the planet, and to enable fruitful outcomes from their engagement!

Program Lines

To reach these goals, the implementation of The Jena Declaration is currently focusing on three program lines: Arts, Learning, and Civic Engagement. The presentation of these three lines shall help to reach a synoptic view of the chosen implementation strategy. Consequently, it unavoidably entails some repetitive elements.

Program line : Arts

With this first line of action, we propose – as already mentioned – the development of a new aesthetic for dealing with the natural as well as the social world; thus, the call for a focus on the arts.

What is the role of arts?  Mindsets, daily routines, and habits depend very much on everyone’s cultural background, and their applied schemes of interpretation. How we do things depends very much on what they signify to us; how we see the world and our place in it. The arts in all their forms are crucial for expanding mindsets and providing new perspectives on how to see things and ways of living. To mobilize artists of all forms of expression: music, fine arts, photography, film, performance, creative writing, poetry, numerical art, architecture, culinary artists, etc. for a deep societal transformation is of core relevance.

To this we connect and support artists from all different orientations for the broadest possible arts movement across all continents, societies, and languages, to rebuild our attitude to nature through new visions and its regenerative transformation. In short: promoting new ways of living sustainably in all cultural and regional varieties.

Program Line: Learning

The second line of action focuses on the students who will be learning new ways of living and their teachers.

We need to concentrate first on teachers and learners because they are uniquely positioned to share mutually what they know and learn with about 2 billion pupils and students all over the world. It is those students who will make decisions about sustainability throughout the 21st century, and we need them (all) to know as much as possible and to care deeply about sustainability.

To this, we connect the very knowledgeable and deeply committed force of sustainability professionals, volunteers, and concerned citizens with schools and universities around the world.

Program Line: Civic Engagement

Civil society organizations are at the core of the Jena Declaration’s third program line. Their expertise and commitment will be used to catalyze deep societal transformation towards global sustainability.

The role of civic engagement in social transformations can hardly be underestimated. Community groups, non-governmental organizations, charities, faith-based organizations, youth organizations, and many other groups in the third sector bring citizens together to engage for the common good. Civil society actors have a vital role to play in raising public concern and creating pressure for change.

They can amplify marginalized voices and offer unique perspectives that help innovate policy formulation and implementation at all levels of society. Through civil society organizations, many savvy and passionate citizens can be reached who are willing to tackle today’s challenges at their doorsteps.

To achieve this, The Jena Declaration wants to show how civil society organizations can successfully engage for global sustainability and share ideas on how social change can be pushed forward from the grassroots level. We use their expertise to explore new ways of empowering third-sector organizations all around the world. We encourage them to serve as laboratories of living sustainably and to lead the transformation towards global sustainability.

For this, we help to

Concluding Remarks

Clearly, an important prerequisite for achieving the goals of the Declaration is to respect the cultural environments, social and regional living conditions, and historical contexts of all people. Citizens should not experience the change in lifestyles to form a sustainable future as a constraint. Rather, they should envision it as a direct benefit: for example, contributing to their safety, health, and cultural development, as well as to social cohesion and inclusion. In this way, the direct involvement of local communities and individuals worldwide can be achieved.

To be sure, there is already an almost unimaginable number of initiatives at the local level worldwide. But what is missing so far is global coordination of local actions, which can be initiated, enabled, and promoted by The Jena Declaration. This will utilize the global digital platform that will be made available free of charge to all partners who are committed to sustainability goals in the sense of this declaration. It should eventually be linked to as many other platforms as possible. This platform should enable the worldwide coordination of sustainability projects, regardless of whether they are initiated and implemented by artists, researchers, teachers, or concerned citizens.