The Wolf Protection Agenda, the largest canid in South America and an endangered species, forced us to rethink the generation of income for poor farmers in Brazil. It was 1991, I learned with my father to do sustainability projects with communities in remote jungles of Torreões, a municipality 200 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro.
Although we shared the Guardian agenda, when designing and implementing its protection strategies, public administration, NGOs and universities did not approach the land enough. The contact they established with the farmers – key actors to protect the wolf – was insufficient. As a result, we were impossible for us to collaborate with the wolf agenda.
This was my first experience with the phenomenon Ivory tower: The disconnection between those who design agendas and those who live the challenges to be resolved. At that time, at 16 years and as a lobo lob, I was baffled that the farmers, whose knowledge I admired, did not collaborate with the environmentalists, whom I respected for their commitment to nature. I would never have imagined that, years later, I would continue to see this same phenomenon undermining sustainability projects and agendas in Europe 2030.
Participatory agendas, as promoters of collaboration
The 2030 Agenda, with its 17 objectives and 169 goals, is conceived to enable the necessary collaboration for a sustainable future. Agendas are intersubjective realities, agreed between groups, organizations, people. They are narratives that align imaginations and perceptions; communicating the common purpose agreed, underpinning and remembering it. But the most important thing here: agendas are a key pillar to enable collaboration.
According to the United Nations, the 2030 Agenda exceeds its predecessor, the millennium objectives. Above all, because it would have been conceived more participatory, involving communities in social exclusion, such as favelas, young people or farmers. But would the phenomenon be managed Ivory tower?
In communities, emotions with a skin flower are constantly dealt with in a way that we usually ignore when we carry proposals designed in formal contexts
These communities live in the first person the challenges for a sustainable future: poverty, access to education, emancipation or food production in a “free” global market and a changing climate. Therefore, its direct participation is a fundamental pillar.
However, as American sociologist Sherry Arnstein points out, who popularized the expression “Citizen Participation Staircase”, true participation implies sharing power, which requires approach. Often, as happened in the case of Guará in 1991, the 2030 Agenda and its sustainability projects are designed and implemented without involving communities.
In addition, entities that create and promote 2030 and their sustainability projects tend to consider communities as a simple actor, being distant to the field. They teach training under this erroneous perception, germinating ineffective projects and negative impacts. They do not consider that, unlike formal actors (such as companies or NGOs), community representatives (if any) are not usually paid or have strategically aligned agendas or arguments. Urgent subsistence challenges and different hierarchical systems such as drug trafficking, such as favelas, face in the first person. In the communities, it is constantly dealt with emotions to the leather in a way that we usually ignore when we carry proposals designed in formal contexts. In business terms: the client orientation of these entities is very poor.
Consequently, this lack of empathy and orientation to the people of the communities do not align imaginations and perceptions. The collaboration is not enabled and the feelings of lack of representativeness, frustration, anger or fear usually emerge among people because their knowledge is not considered in the projects designed to improve their lives. Finally, they disconnect, disconnect and distrust from 2030 and sustainability projects. They could even break with organizations that lead the 2030 Agenda and support their detractors, such as some political parties that promulgate pre -aluministic speeches, illusoryly patriotic and religious, and anti -science.
A distant land agenda can contribute to conspiracy theories
After the farmers of Torreões, I continued working in economically poor areas of Africa, Asia, Américas and Europe guiding multinationals to the client through their sustainability and undertaking projects. Value and admire the informal knowledge of the communities, on the field, were pillars of differentiation.
I always ask about project -related agendas. Since the launch of the 2030 Agenda, in numerous diagnoses that I made in more than 800 interviews, 78% do not know what sustainability is. Of those who know it, 93% perceive it as something alien to its realities and 95% do not know the 2030 Agenda. Of that 5% who know it, nine out of 10 perceives it as something distant, typical of politicians, companies, universities. Very online, the Havas Institute concludes, based on more than 395,000 interviews in the world, that society does not trust sustainability.
For a sustainable future we need a common project agenda as humanity. We need the ability to stop the cacophonic thoughts, understand the context with more rigor
This distancing from people contributes to popularity the idea that there are forces of power with hidden agendas conspiring and manipulating the 2030. Although this can occur in any agenda, it increases the perception that there is an organized and coordinated globalization plan, disguised as an agenda 2030, to take power. Nothing farther from reality.
It is unlikely that there is a specific group capable of coordinating our chaotic and unprecedented game board. In the last five years a complex and vertiginously changing global disorder has broken. Above, characters such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk, paradoxically, ended up uncovering the lack of authenticity of organizations that champion the 2030 agenda and retreated at full speed before the political change in the US. All this is extremely volatile, artificially “intelligent”, unpredictable, unstable; Little organizable and hardly dominable by few minds or organizations.
The traditional elite, which according to those who believe the conspiracy would manipulate the 2030 Agenda, progressively lose its identity. It is fractured, polarized, frustrated and fearful. New elites, counter-ellites and anti-ellites come to power, including algorithmic elites that generate knowledge for humans that adopt them without understanding them. In times of immediacy, simplistic theories and conspiracy agendas gain ground in all political spectra. Members of the society, in need of identity, are divided under personalist agendas of “istas” and “ismos”, building identities based on barriers of rage and division while power is concentrated. All this when we still lack language to define the current context. For example, neoliberals such as Trump and Musk are now interventionist and anti -globalization. The disorder that we lack language to describe it is such. You can imagine then the ability to control it. And what will happen when we no longer know if the narratives of the agendas are created by humans?
In this unpublished chaos, less and less understandable by organic intelligences, the struggle for power becomes amorphous and diffuse. The ability to think collectively and collaborate is faded. The distancing of the land, of agendas that can be fundamental, can promote agendas of the “I First”(I first), which gain popularity as in war dining rooms.
For a sustainable future we need a common project agenda as humanity. We need the ability to stop the cacofonic thoughts, understand the context with more rigor, respect the “other” knowledge, and listen and talk, although we disagree. Thus we are more able to collaborate, especially with the people who live the challenges for a more authentic sustainability in their skins. The distance of people paves the terrain for extremisms. The better we go to everyone, the better we can go to each one.
