What if we had new, grounded ideas about how to transform from climate emergency to prosperity? What if these new insights drew out from new data using many disciplines and cultural perspectives? What if brilliant academics from across the world, especially the Global South, were bringing their skills and experiences as highly skilled researchers and sense-makers to bear on the most pressing challenges?

Imagine if we could bring together a community of academics around the challenges of describing pathways to prosperity, inspired by the IPCC but not restricted to one issue or a narrow range of disciplines?

This is the motivation behind the Academic Community for Transformation (‘ACT’). If we can change the ideas people use to understand and act, then we can transform tomorrow.

Part of Transforming Tomorrow’s perspective is that the dominant way to creating knowledge in the modern world is part of the problem. As Clive Hamilton puts it, in Defiant Earth:

“The natural world inherited by modernity is gone, and all of the ideas built on it now float on its memory. We are faced with the discomforting choices between groping unsteadily toward new conceptions that attempt to build on the new real, or clinging to old conceptions rooted in a world that has been left behind.”

The whole of Transforming Tomorrow is a response to that insight. The ACT is about exploring towards new conceptions that are fit for tomorrow, not just inherited from yesterday.

Purpose

• Make it easy for people to find excellent examples of political, social, cultural and economic innovation, and for those examples to help people see the interlinkages and synergies between different approaches on different issues..
  • More evidence available for decision-makers. This will make it easier to make the bold choice.
  • More examples for researchers. This will bring them closer to the current leading edge, and so change the ideas that frame the choices that are available.
• Define the emerging terms in the new field of ‘transformation for global prosperity’ by creating an ontology. This will have the knock-on effect of making the whole field more established and tractable.
• Influence which examples rise to the top of searches through other search engines.
  • The new ontology will allow for good examples to be tag, which will then be used by other search engines.

Approach

We have started by inviting a first wave of academics. They will join us in co-creating the community together over the coming months.

As part of our invitation, we put the following:

Our offer to you

As part of Transforming Tomorrow’s Global Academic Community, you will:

• Connect with and learn from other academics, drawn from many disciplines from around the world.
• Use the deliberations of the Regional Assemblies for deep insight into research priorities, and as a channel to decision-makers and others for your latest research and ideas.
• Use the inspirational examples generated by the AI search capacity as a timely source of data for your work.
• Co-create this community, and the rest of Transforming Tomorrow.

Our ask of you

As part of Transforming Tomorrow’s Global Academic Community, we ask that you:

• Give guidance and insight in response to decision-makers in our Regional Assemblies.
• Contribute to our outputs by writing short think-pieces from the frontiers of many disciplines.
• Join in with online sessions, surveys and other means to co-create how the community works, in time for a main launch in October 2020.
• Join a digital platform that we will be creating over the summer, which will be a means of communicating and connecting within the community.
• Provide feedback within the Transforming Tomorrow initiative. We are a young initiative and want to work in the spirit of knowing we will make mistakes. Please tell us directly.
• Help grow our community by suggesting other academics who share the ethos and can bring a missing dimension to the community.

The year ahead

• March: Have a first wave of academics willing to join us.
• Summer: co-create the community, with the Africa Assembly as a test bed.
• Oct: launch a first output as part of maturing into the next phase.

Want to get involved? There are different ways of participating:

• An academic or research who wants to join in, and how can bring in the best of a discipline and/or place.

• Someone with feedback, positive or negative, which we can use to improve.