New Community Paradigms

The Center for Applied Cultural Evolution was created to help communities guide their own social change efforts using integrated social science tools and frameworks. Our mission is to launch a series of Culture Design Labs around systemic challenges ranging from poverty and inequality to climate change and more.

The Cultural Evolution Society is a professional scientific society that advances the theory and practice of cultural evolutionary studies. Our goal is to build capacity for researchers, educators, and practitioners to coordinate efforts.

No country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Our research, recently published in Nature Sustainability (and summarised in The Conversation), is the first to quantify the national resource use associated with achieving a good life for over 150 countries. It shows that meeting the basic needs of all people on the planet would result in humanity transgressing multiple environmental limits, based on current relationships between resource use and human well-being.

Pathways to a People's Economy was developed by a team of New Economy Coalition member organizations to amplify the new economy policy wins happening on the ground and provide real examples of how to shift our economic conditions from the bottom up. It provides tools for communities and organizations to make concrete policy demands to advance a new economy - an economy for, by, and with the people.

Climate This webpage aims to collect as many examples as possible where city, state, and national leaders are making COVID-19 recovery plans in ways that could also produce benefits in racial, gender, and economic equity and in climate change mitigation and resilience. It is being maintained by the multisolving team at Climate Interactive, including Dr. Elizabeth Sawin and Cassandra Ceballos.

Climate Interactive developed the Agriculture and Land Policy Simulator (ALPS) to allow users to see the interactions of different policy decisions on a nation's food system. As a national-scale model, country ministries and civil society groups can think about different development pathways to see if those policies could create their desired future.

"Simulating Regenerative Agriculture in En-ROADS D "

"Modeling food and agriculture in En-ROADS I "

"Below you can find our resources which explore intersections of the COVID-19 crisis, climate change, equity, and beyond. Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, Co-Director and Co-Founder of Climate Interactive, reflects on how systems thinking approaches are necessary during this time. Her ideas highlight the need for applying a multisolving lens - emphasizing that as we find solutions to address one crisis, we can remediate and prevent other issues. "

These principles were initially derived by Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist by training, for groups that were attempting to manage common-pool resources. The fact that groups possessing these design features were capable of managing their own affairs was so new against the background of received economic wisdom that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. The design principles were later generalized by David Sloan Wilson, Ostrom, and Michael Cox in two respects. First, they follow from the basic evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species. Second, because of their theoretical generality, they apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources. That is why they provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy groups, which is the objective of PROSOCIAL." (http://alanhonick.com/prosocial/)

Prosocial is a method for improving human welfare through creating more effective, harmonious, equitable and cooperative groups. Prosocial has been applied in situations as diverse as helping a school to enhance collaboration among teachers and students, a community to reduce the spread of Ebola and a network of environmental groups seeking to cooperate more effectively to achieve their common aims. Prosocial works best for groups, and networks of groups, that are interested in human welfare, not just economic outcomes.