DRAFT
Description
There is enough evidence that humanity will continue to face significant development and security challenges for the rest of the 21st century. A question arises whether it is possible to envision a world where all humans have fulfilling lives, meet their basic needs, and live with dignity and peace. Meeting that overarching goal of human development requires adopting a new mindset on how humans interact without degrading the ecosystems and services they depend on.
The literature contains many case studies demonstrating the direct or indirect constraining and threatening impact of conflict and climate change on community livelihood and security. As a result, promoting peace and sustainability in human development and security while accounting for the risks associated with climate change and other adverse events has become more imperative at different scales, from the local to the global. The intersection of peace, sustainability, and climate security or their opposites (i.e., conflict, unsustainability, and climate vulnerability) is rarely articulated with a systemic mindset.
This book makes a case for using an integrated, coherent, and multi-solving approach to addressing human development and security issues. It explores, more specifically, the underlying dynamic across the peace-sustainability-climate security triple-nexus at the community scale. Peace, sustainability, and climate security are modeled as entangled states (or cultures) that emerge from the interactions of shared community systems subject to various constraints, barriers, and adverse events. The three states and the community systems influence each other. Their coherence is better captured using a systems approach rather than considering them in isolation. To do so, decision-makers involved in community development must be able and willing to make decisions in complex, ambiguous, and uncertain community environments with a system lens that embraces complexity rather than organized simplicity.
There are many ways of approaching human development and security challenges and the coherence between peace, sustainability, and climate security. The approach used in this book acknowledges first that there are no one-size-fits-all unified and optimized static states of peace, sustainability, and climate security as they are context, scale-specific, and time-dependent. Since multiple “good-enough” states are possible, peace, sustainability, and climate security and their nexus must “be read as a plural.”
Another aspect of the approach proposed in this book is the value proposition for embracing complexity and systems thinking, using systems tools, and following a systems-based methodology when addressing human development and security issues at the community level. The proposed method acknowledges the multi-sectorial, multi-disciplinary, and participatory nature of community development and the importance of understanding how community issues, behavior, and socio-economic, political, and cultural structural patterns are related and depend on the underlying mental models used by community stakeholders and decision-makers. Changing the mental models and, consequently, the mindset represents the highest leverage point of any intervention in community development.
