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Rethink Success! Traditional metrics like GDP ignore environmental and social costs. Look at what causes the problem you want to address. See how these causes affect people's happiness, the planet's health, and the economy. Think about who gains from creating the problem and who suffers because of it, both people and nature. Sometimes, those who cause the problem also suffer from it.Green as the New Black: Understand the incentives behind the harmful behaviors that lead to your environmental challenge. Also, asses what obstructs sustainability action. Asses which incentives can make sustainable practices possible, attractive, and rewarding.Nature as our Minimum Viable Product: How is nature's intrinsic value considered in the decisions that lead to the environmental challenge you want to address? How do key stakeholders see protecting nature from ethical and economic perspectives? In your context, what are the beliefs that link happiness to material consumption and those that emphasize well-being and harmony with nature? What would be needed to turn the latter into sustainable actions?
Plan by defining research questions, objectives, and methods.Collect data from sources like interviews, surveys, or observations.Analyze and interpret data to conclude.Use insights to guide project design, implementation, and evaluation.
Iceberg Model
As you work on your Iceberg Model, consider how social systems can foster environmental stewardship by setting the right incentives, rules, and procedures, such as secure and inclusive land tenure for land management or Extended Producer Responsibility legislation on waste - the variables are multiple.
Recognize the limits of your influence and focus on understanding and navigating existing social systems to reveal and address root causes.
Goals:
Economic:
Social Systems:
Institutions are norms, rules, organization, and governance systems, i.e., humanly devised constraints that shape interactions. As a result, institutions solve social dilemmas by promoting cooperation/participation based on regulated interactions that reduce uncertainty.
Control over an individual's actions always results in, as intended, a gain or loss for another individual.
However, institutions are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient/fair; rather, they are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to devise their functioning rules. We will unpack more about this later in this module.
Action Points Before We Begin🚀
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