Overcoming systemic roadblocks to sustainability: The evolutionary redesign of worldviews, institutions, and technologies

TLDR

Humanity’s goal is a high and sustainable quality of life, yet the prevailing socio‑ecological regime promotes unlimited material growth, which beyond a threshold fails to improve well‑being and instead creates resource and climate constraints that hinder sustainability. The study proposes that overcoming these roadblocks and achieving a sustainable future requires an integrated, system‑level redesign of worldviews, institutions, and technologies focused directly on sustainable quality of life rather than growth. The authors suggest an integrated set of worldviews, institutions, and technologies to stimulate and seed an evolutionary redesign of the socio‑ecological regime toward global sustainability.

Abstract

A high and sustainable quality of life is a central goal for humanity. Our current socio-ecological regime and its set of interconnected worldviews, institutions, and technologies all support the goal of unlimited growth of material production and consumption as a proxy for quality of life. However, abundant evidence shows that, beyond a certain threshold, further material growth no longer significantly contributes to improvement in quality of life. Not only does further material growth not meet humanity's central goal, there is mounting evidence that it creates significant roadblocks to sustainability through increasing resource constraints (i.e., peak oil, water limitations) and sink constraints (i.e., climate disruption). Overcoming these roadblocks and creating a sustainable and desirable future will require an integrated, systems level redesign of our socio-ecological regime focused explicitly and directly on the goal of sustainable quality of life rather than the proxy of unlimited material growth. This transition, like all cultural transitions, will occur through an evolutionary process, but one that we, to a certain extent, can control and direct. We suggest an integrated set of worldviews, institutions, and technologies to stimulate and seed this evolutionary redesign of the current socio-ecological regime to achieve global sustainability.