Panelists
- Harald Brekke, Senior geologist in the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, chairman of the legal and technical commission under the International Seabed Authority (ISA)
- Fredrik Myhre, Marine Biologist, Team Leader Oceans at WWF-Norway, Executive Director at Hjelp Havets
- Alla Pozdnakova, Professor of law (International Law, Law of the Sea, Space law, EU/EEA Law) at the Scandinavian Institute of Maritime Law, University of Oslo
- Helge Ryggvik, Historian and researcher at the Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo
- Lise Øvreås, Professor of Geomicrobiology at the University of Bergen and President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA)
Moderator: Andreas Ytterstad, Professor of climate journalism at the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Oslo
Background
The need for systems-level change to mitigate grand, societal challenges has become increasingly accepted among researchers, politicians and practitioners alike. Climate change (IPCC, 2021), ecological degradation (Steffen et al., 2015) and social injustice (Raworth, 2012) are examples of such systemic challenges in that they are complex, interconnected across sectors, actors, and resilient to change (Clayton & Radcliffe, 2018; Holling, 2001). Consequently, it requires companies and other organisations to rethink their value-creation structures through new ways of innovating, collaborating, and governing. However, efforts to intervene and direct systems-wide changes are exposed to high degrees of uncertainty, long timeframes, and ultimately, at risk of unintended and unwanted effects.
A growing community of researchers is investigating how to facilitate such transformations in a just and safe manner in recognition of planetary boundaries and social foundations (Raworth, 2017); or, as it is increasingly becoming to be described as Sustainability Transitions (ST) (Loorbach et al., 2017).
Stimulus for the panel
The recent impact assessment of ocean-floor mining by the norwegian government has sparked a heated public debate in which interesting lines of conflicts are drawn. Conservation-perspectives are challenged by political and industry intesrests that argue such human-activity to be essential for green technological shifts. As such, it represents a unique opportunity to discuss, more generally, principles of approach to new frontiers of human activity that must acknowledge aspects of justice and sustainability.
The Roundtable
The questions we hope to address during the roundtable:
- Who and what is governing the transitions to an economy that secures social foundations for humanity now and for the future while mitigating pressures on planetary boundaries?
- What obstacles and opportunities does business experience when taking part in such transitions?
The roundtable is based on a Dialogic Design approach, enabling a space for radical interdisciplinarity. This participatory, interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder format facilitates a reflexive approach with knowledge brokering that has a long tradition in designerly practice (Schön, 1992). The Dialogic Design approach emerged to enable business actors, civil society, and academia to observe rigorous, dialogic process to sensemaking, decision-making and co-creation of more sustainable futures. The interactive roundtable consists of three activities:
- Some days before the roundtable, the participating practitioners and academics are presented with ideas in the form of provocations to stimulate reflection and discussion. Research Provocations (in the form of statements or short narratives) do not simply summarise an existing debate, theme, or body of scholarship; they actively seek to expand the scope of investigation through intrepid dialogue and stretching of mental models.
- During the first part of the roundtable, the participants will engage in a gigamap exercise (Sevaldson, 2018), mapping the obstacles and opportunities business experience when engaging in their sustainability transition. The gigamapping exercise creates a dialogical design space. The audience can walk around the table while the gigamapping takes place.
- During the second part of the roundtable, we have a discussion with all participants, where we reflect on the results and arrive at recommendations.
One purpose of the Futuring Nordics roundtable is to incentivise an UiO:Demokrati application.