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Everyone knows about the big global challenges like economic instability, loss of nature, poverty, waste, conflict and climate disruption. Even after decades of efforts these monstrous problems are not being tackled so much as tickled! Many of these problems are getting out of hand yet even now the possibility of rapidly reversing all of them is within our grasp. This goal looks unrealistic to many people, given the struggle for meaningful change so far. Yet this is the key; the scale of our ambitions must match the scale of the problems as a whole. This is society's blindspot - see this and civilisation gets the chance to go on. This article is the introduction to an 'advanced research workshop' paper, Seven Policy Switches for Global Security, for the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme

This article is about power structures in society and how they interact. Specifically it is a guide to seeing who has power when important decisions are being made. It is quite old, but never-the-less of great value to anyone interested in issues of citizen participation. The concepts discussed in this article about 1960's America apply to any hierarchical society but are still mostly unknown, unacknowledged or ignored by many people around the world. Most distressing is that even people who have the job of representing citizens views seem largely unaware, or even dismissive of these principles. Many planners, architects, politicians, bosses, project leaders and power-holder still dress all variety of manipulations up as 'participation in the process', 'citizen consultation' and other shades of technobable.

What interests me is how the lessons found in the article could be applied to real world community governance in relation to the public sector. Such communities are already in existence so cannot be created outside of the box to start with, however many of the other observations can be applied especially with the use of the Internet and application of direct democratic dialogue. It should be possible to create some new disruptive innovations which such an approach and resources to create some new community paradigms.

In this article, I articulate ten important issues and concerns which Collective Impact fails to adequately acknowledge, understand, and address. These failings have serious consequences for the engaged communities. I welcome the community of activists and scholars who are engaged in coalitions, partnerships, and collaboratives to react, disagree and/or to add to the list of concerns.

"This article is meant to serve as a living document where I will curate reading materials on bioregional design and add new links as I discover new content. It is done in preparation for a workshop on bioregional design that I plan to give later this spring. "

Since the 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article introduced the concept, collective impact has been widely adopted as an effective form of cross-sector collaboration to address complex social and environmental challenges. Though collective impact has proven to be a powerful approach in tackling a wide range of issues in communities all over the world, many practitioners are searching for the tools they need to be successful in this work. The thought leadership and resources below, and in the Resources and Blog sections of this website, will help you build a foundation for doing this work

Series of articles in support of the Self-Directed Services and Personal Budgets project in Australia

Pioneers in such efforts are sharing their practices on a new website. The Natural Capital Business Hub, launched Wednesday at the 2014 GreenBiz Forum, is a joint effort of The Nature Conservancy and the Corporate EcoForum. It showcases the natural capital efforts of some 40 companies - from Alcoa to Lockheed Martin to YES Bank - representing $1.4 trillion in revenues. Nonprofits involved include BSR, Trucost and World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "There's more going on in this field than people expect, and it's really boomed in the last couple of years," said Michelle Lapinski, senior advisor, Businesses Valuing Nature, at The Nature Conservancy. The hub's core tool is a database of case studies, which you can search by industry, geography, benefit, approach or ecosystem. Supporting articles introduce visitors to the basic concepts of valuing natural capital, with categories offering to help you "make the case, benchmark, implement and connect" your own efforts.

An initiative of Peter Block and friends, Restore Commons aims to curate the ways of thinking and practice towards the common good. The move to the commons is well underway. We simply want to document it. Restore Commons is designed to be an online gathering place for stories and radical ideas strong enough to build the social capital and engaged community required to restore the common good. The website features a variety of content including stories, articles, videos and podcasts that highlight inverted and radical thinking that is essential to an alternative economy, a connected neighborhood, and ways of dealing with the end of the so-called consumerist middle class. This is what is required to restore compassion, civility and interdependence that is disturbingly fragile in today's world. The focus is on place-based, localized and grassroots initiatives that are alternatives to the tools of empire.

The mission of the Donella Meadows Project is to preserve Donella (Dana) H. Meadows's legacy as an inspiring leader, scholar, writer, and teacher; to manage the intellectual property rights related to Dana's published work; to provide and maintain a comprehensive and easily accessible archive of her work online, including articles, columns, and letters; to develop new resources and programs that apply her ideas to current issues and make them available to an ever-larger network of students, practitioners, and leaders in social change.

The new practice connects researchers and practitioners in a loop that allows problem solvers to broadcast, receive, refine, and adapt solutions on an ongoing basis.

Collaboration is appealing in concept but challenging in practice. While extensive resources-including ones from the Community Tool Box, The Intersector Project, and NewNetworkLeader.org-exist online to support collaborative efforts, the fact remains that we human beings are simply not very good at making "we" work. And yet, most changemakers today acknowledge that to address the complex social and environmental challenges we face we must learn how to collaborate-across organizations, sectors, networks, and differences. Effective collaboration must become a reality, not just an aspiration.

Systemic change needs more than data and information; it needs real intelligence and wisdom. Jay Forrester, the founder of the system dynamics method that has shaped our approach to systems thinking, pointed out that complex non-linear systems exhibit "counterintuitive behavior." He illustrated this by citing the large number of government interventions that go awry through aiming at short-term improvement in measurable problem symptoms but ultimately worsening the underlying problems-like increased urban policing that leads to short-term reductions in crime rates but does nothing to alter the sources of embedded poverty and worsens long-term incarceration rates.

"To promote the wider arguments in the book, Lewis and Conaty produced a series of very short articles. The following Special Report features their series on Community Land Trusts, Mutual Home Ownership, the Garden City Model and the Co-operative Land Bank. The Garden City Model merits special attention, as Garden Cities that took land out of the market were a full expression of radical socialist and co-operative economy planning. Nowadays, a number of parts of the world are showing an interest in reviving them."

Memes are to culture what genes are to biology: the base unit of evolution. The term was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins writes, "I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged . . . It is still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind." He goes on, "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."3

"We need to ratchet up from targeted innovation and apply design-thinking principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself. "

For over three decades, Balaton Group members have consistently advanced the boundaries of research and strategy for sustainable development. Collaboration among members has resulted in more than 30 books, over a hundred conferences, new learning centres and NGOs and uncounted computer models, training programmes, planning methods, journal articles, films, videos, policy initiatives, educational games, courses and research projects.

Some pro-development commentators are starting to suggest a different strategy: acknowledge that NIMBY fears are frequently well-founded and address them with changes in design, policy and process that respect their concerns.

Here's how the positive deviance approach is different: * Outsiders don't bring in ideas to change a community's culture. Instead, they ask the community to look for its own members who are having success. Those local ideas, by definition, are affordable and locally acceptable - at least to some people in the community. Since they spring from a community's DNA, the community is less likely to feel threatened by these ideas and more likely to adopt them. * The focus is not a community's problems, but its strengths.

William H.(Holly) Whyte (1917-1999) is considered the mentor for Project for Public Spaces because of his seminal work in the study of human behavior in urban settings. While working with the New York City Planning Commission in 1969, Whyte began to wonder how newly planned city spaces were actually working out - something that no one had previously researched. This curiosity led to the Street Life Project, a pioneering study of pedestrian behavior and city dynamics.