CONCLUSION
Next-Generation Social Labs
A zombie idea is one that keeps coming back, despite being killed.
— John Quiggin
Indeed, one concern would be that the initial neoconservative response to a zombie outbreak would be to invade Iraq again out of force of habit.
— Daniel W. Drezner
In puzzling over the situation in Yemen, I started seeing planning as a zombie idea. The planning paradigm, despite being killed many times over, for example, with the death of the Soviet Union, still walks among us. And it keeps biting the living, turning them into the undead.
Planning is ubiquitous across sectors, operating horizontally in the state and vertically down corporate and civil society supply and service chains. Planning was—and remains—a means of centralized control of resources, labor, and outputs by a small number of technocrats. It’s the favored means of responding to complexity. Yet it’s badly suited to the challenges we now face.
As a result of repeatedly applying the planning paradigm, we are in the midst of a worldwide crisis, a crisis of capital—human, social, natural, and financial. This crisis has the potential to take us all the way to widespread societal collapse. And the reason for this collapse is a zombie idea—planning.
Welcome to the zombie apocalypse.
AVERTING THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
In Yemen we have an archetypical situation characterized by complexity that unfortunately represents a plausible future for many of us. What does it mean to blow the carrying capacity of a country? What does it look like to be running out of resources, such as water and energy, while the population grows exponentially? What happens when a security situation leads to a drone war? It looks a lot like Yemen. And it doesn’t look good. It looks like a country heading in slow motion for a full-blown zombie apocalypse. Elements of what we’re seeing in Yemen are happening all over the place, mirrored on a planetary scale.
Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory recently reported that measurements of atmospheric CO2 had breached the barrier of 400 parts per million.1 The implications of this are being hotly debated. They include permanent food shortages resulting in 40-percent price hikes, the melting of the Siberian tundra leading to massive releases of methane, and a billion climate refugees. Meanwhile the world’s governments are locked into paralysis, unable to agree on a plan. Even if they settle on one, there is very little hope of successfully implementing it. The situation looks, in short, a lot like a global zombie apocalypse.
So how could social labs help avert this apocalypse? There are three strategic responses based on the ideas presented in this book—stabilization, mitigation, and adaptation. Again, these are not silver bullets, but they demonstrate that practical responses are well within our means.
STATE COLLAPSE: A STABILIZATION STRATEGY
The situation in Yemen has simultaneously improved and deteriorated. Incumbent President Saleh agreed to resign as part of an internationally brokered deal, seen to be averting a potential civil war. A new president, Hadi Mansour, has been sworn in, pledging reform and convening a national dialogue leading to a new constitution. A month after he took over, the worst suicide bombing in Sanaa killed 120 soldiers and injured hundreds more. The overall security situation, coupled with the inexorable resource crisis, continues to slide.
During all this, a strategy evolved from our many conversations with both Yemenis and non-Yemenis. The idea, representing a possible strategic direction, is state stabilization through sectoral stabilization. The idea of sectoral stabilization is to identify sectors critical to Yemen’s survival—food, agriculture, water, health care, energy, and so on—and focus efforts on them. If these sectors can be stabilized, this ensures against state failure, regardless of what happens at the level of the regime.
How could this work? Multi-stakeholder teams of Yemenis are convened around each sector, drawing in actors from government, the business community, and civil society. These stakeholder teams (the equivalent of lab teams) are then tasked with stabilizing their particular sector. Each carefully selected team is given a degree of autonomous decision making in order to decide what actions need to be undertaken in order to stabilize their sector. They are provided with cash, as well as negotiation and technical support. They are invited to implement on a monthly cycle, to be renewed annually. The fund is provided by the Saudis or the Gulf States and allows Yemenis to self-determine how it is to be spent via a process such as described above.
The strategy is social, in that it shifts the locus of efforts purely from already-stretched government technocrats to a wider stakeholder base—almost an extended team supporting the government to achieve their goals. The process we are proposing is experimental, in that stakeholder groups get an opportunity to figure out and test what works on the ground. And finally, the approach is systemic, in that it attempts to address the causal challenges of key sectors in Yemen.
One of the challenges in working on the issue has been including Yemenis in the initiative early on. This could be interpreted as picking a side, and we would risk losing our neutrality as facilitators. Our approach so far has been outside in, starting by lobbying external stakeholders and approaching the Yemenis only when we felt we had something to offer.
A partnership emerged during the course of our work. Oxfam introduced us to Integrity Research and Consulting, run by Anthony Ellis, a former foreign office official who served in places like Afghanistan and, briefly, Yemen. Integrity specializes in conducting research in conflict zones, where they aim for 90 percent of the work to be done by local researchers (as opposed to expats).
Anthony, in turn, introduced us to Omnia Strategy, Cherie Blair’s firm. At our first meeting, Blair walked in the room and demanded, “What’s this about? We need another report on Yemen like a hole in the head.” This was followed by an hour of expertly poised questions and answers. At the end of the meeting, she and her business partner, Sofia Wellesley, approved of the action-oriented approach we were proposing and provided much-needed support.
Together we met with the Yemeni ambassador in London and formally presented our strategy to the Yemeni government. The next step is to brief the relevant ministers and then eventually the president. The implications of such a direction for other nation-states, such as many Arab Spring countries, is vast and provides a strategy for stabilization in many countries suffering from a strategic vacuum.
CLIMATE CHANGE: A MITIGATION STRATEGY
The fact that in 2013 atmospheric CO2 breached 400 parts per million carries profound implications. Even if emissions were to stop cold today, we would still be looking at a future where the polar caps melt and sea levels rise. In the United States alone, some 1400 cities are under threat.2 Such reports on the dangers of climate change proliferate, painting a world of permanent food shortages and temperatures in Australia as high as 50°C (122°F), which would lead to the largest spontaneous bushfires ever seen.3 Economist Lord Nicholas Stern admitted, “I got it wrong on climate change—it’s far, far worse.”4
According to scientific estimates, global emissions need to peak very soon, between 2015 and 2020. However, with emissions steadily increasing every year, we are squarely on a BAU trajectory leading to a truly frightening situation—temperature increases of 4–6°C (or about 41°F). This will result in widespread ecosystem collapse. There are few, if any, grounded strategies in play around peaking.
As part of my work with the Climate Action Network, a potential peaking strategy emerged from hundreds of conversations. We call it the Gigatonne Lab, or the GT Lab. The idea is to bring together a group of policy makers, financial experts, and technologists to attempt to reduce global equivalent carbon dioxide (CO2e) emissions by one gigatonne (GT) within a two-year time frame. Current global emissions are close to 49 GT CO2e per year. One GT represents approximately the entire annual emissions footprint for Germany or the continent of Africa.
We soft-tested the idea for almost two years, ironing out details and iterating it to take into account feedback. Convening the lab began in July 2013. We drew up a list of about a hundred people and sent them a short outline of the lab—the invitation. We asked them if they were interested or if they knew anyone who might be interested in the lab, either as a co-convener, a lab team member, an advisor, or a funder.
Within a few short weeks, we got a tremendous response back. We spoke to a range of actors, all of whom thought the idea was intriguing, if fraught with practical challenges. Time and time again, we were interrogated with sharp questions about how the lab would work. We presented our best guess and invited actors to help nail down some of the more difficult strategic decisions that needed to be made.
We started sketching out the lab’s possible stacks. We imagined several regional innovation layers, each responsible for a significant chunk of emissions. For example, a California Gigatonne Lab and a Canada Gigatonne Lab could each be responsible for figuring out how to achieve a part of the gigatonne target.
We spoke to campaigning organizations about running a public campaign around the gigatonne target, with the idea of inviting the general public into a wider conversation about how to reduce emissions by a gigatonne in two years. The lab acts as a public platform, a sprint to achieve emissions reduction in practice, thereby demonstrating that it’s possible to rapidly decarbonize. If the lab works, it could spawn layers, each contributing against a set baseline to significantly reduce global emissions.
One vision is to have several dozen multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous GT Labs around the world, each making significant contributions to emissions reduction, a solution that could be thought of as “fast, cheap and out of control.”5 The GT Lab could point the way to a global peaking strategy.
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE: AN ADAPTATION STRATEGY
Communities around the world are subject to increasing shocks. These shocks range from the environmental, such as extreme weather events, to the fiscal, where public services are cut. In some cases these shocks are predictable. In the UK, for example, it’s possible to figure out which communities will be hardest hit by cuts to public services, such as health care, well in advance of the cuts occurring. Where climate change is concerned, we are starting to see patterns—repeated flooding and heat waves causing extreme damage to property and, in the worse cases, loss of life.
Early in 2012 we were approached by Alan Heeks—a social entrepreneur, writer, and consultant with a passion for sustainability in the fullest sense. Alan was concerned about how communities across the UK would cope with a number of shocks, including social, environmental, and economic. He wanted to know if we could help come up with a response that would practically increase the resilience of communities to these shocks. In our first conversation, I asked Alan, “Which communities?” He looked at me, surprised, and said, “All of them.”
It took a year of work to figure out an approach. We did extensive research, which included interviews with thinkers and actors within the broad field of resilience, examining a range of existing initiatives (we created an “atlas of resilience strategies” to map them), and a number of consultations. The Community Resilience Lab was born out of this approach.
The core idea behind the lab is to bring together stakeholders around particular geographies in order to come up with proactive responses to the resilience challenges they face. Instead of waiting for a shock to hit the community and then mobilizing a post-event response, the goal is to tackle challenges before they hit.
THE BATTLE OF THE PARTS VERSUS THE WHOLE
In an essay critiquing optimization in the Soviet Union, Cosma Shalizi writes,
These are all going to be complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second best solutions is going to demand “bold, persistent experimentation,” coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles. We will not be able to turn everything over to the wise academicians, or even to their computers, but we may, if we are lucky and smart, be able, bit by bit, to make a world fit for human beings to live in.6
A social lab is a gathering, a coming together of people across the silos that characterize dominant social structures in order to attend to a social challenge for as long as necessary to shift the situation. In the face of the technocratic systems of high modernism, the paradigm of the social lab lives and dies by an idea that perhaps seem quaint in this day and age—the idea that people working together can address our most profound challenges.
A critical underlying condition behind the success of a social lab is that as much as possible, the people on the lab team act of their own volition, a lot like world class athletes. It’s clear that as adults, we will not really change the way they see, listen, talk, embody, and collaborate unless they are self-directed enough to know why they are doing these things. They are, in effect, committed to shifting a system and creating social change not because they were forced to by a central authority or because they are being paid to but because they believe in the need to shift a system from its current state to a desired state.
Social labs therefore require that participants operate from a place of inner volition and drive. In doing so, we are creating a space for people to connect to their deeper calling for change, for a better state of affairs. This inner volition, independent of institutional authority, is ultimately what makes the change that comes from a social lab sustainable.
By definition, a social lab must be social. That is, participants of the lab are not simply experts, whether they’re academics or activists. Rather, team members must reflect the diversity of the stakeholders concerned with the issue at hand.
In order to justify being a lab, a social lab must also undertake to work in an experimental and iterative way to address challenges. A program is very different from a lab.
Finally, for social labs to actually have impact, they must be systemic in orientation, aiming to address social issues at their root cause. Labs, whatever their focus, must put inquiry—and not just advocacy—at the heart of their activities.
Our most ferocious challenge today is to avoid the reactionary tendency to go to war with our problems. As Max Dublin reminds us, “All failures in achieving goals, that is, in mastery, be they in our ability to build cars or to make love, are based on failures in cultivation, in nurturance.” We have a tendency to declare hugely catastrophic wars against our social challenges. The war on drugs is just one example.
The attractions of war, however, are that it’s glorious, it’s heroic, and it’s human. War brings out something both terrible and human within us, and we are drawn to it as a way out of having to focus on ourselves, on our failures in cultivation and nurturance. The call to arms in the name of justice is most dangerous and seductive. From the Crusades to the war in Iraq, wars have been fought under the banner of a higher calling.
As our social challenges become more serious, we will find ourselves subject to new siren songs calling us to fight new crusades.
Social labs represent the constitution of a new sphere of activity, a new space. The gathering together of people within this space represents the beginning of what can be thought of as an armistice, a suspension of what has been called the battle of the parts versus the whole. People come together, recognizing the truth that the cost of war is too high and there is another way.