New Community Institutions for Enabling Sustainability
by Cameron Neil

I was invited to participate in a 40 person roundtable in Canberra in June this year on considering and creating new community institutions - and a related movement - for more easily and rapidly enabling sustainability in Australia.

The roundtable was organised by the Nature and Society Forum (www.natsoc.org.au), following writing by NSF members Stephen Boyden and Bob Douglas that identified a possible gap in the Australian social landscape that was holding back rapid local adoption and community involvement in realising a vision of 'Healthy People on a Healthy Planet".

The purpose of the roundtable was to bring together a selection of eminent minds in the Canberra region to consider whether there was a gap and an opportunity to create an important new phenomenon that could accelerate sustainability uptake and the required cultural and economic shift in communities.

Discussion during the roundtable, held over a Friday night meal and a Saturday, was robust, wide-ranging, grandiose and hopeful, but also realistic about the challenges, and the immediate and potentially painful impacts of climate change, peak oil, and poor health on our communities. There were some disagreements over timescales, which also related to methods. Some participants had a strong interest in seeing these new 'institutions' and a related movement averting environmental catastrophe and collapse associated with climate change, peak oil, degredation of ecosystem services, etc. Rapid development and implementation was therefore necessary.

Others, such as myself, saw the value of these new institutions as 'life boats' and 'beacons' for new ways of living that would become increasingly necessary as the environmental issues began to impact on people's lives and people were looking for solutions. Their value was in building community resiliency and knowledge, in enacting local deliberative and democratic processes where members of the community were empowered to dream about the world they wanted for their grandchildren and to take action now to create that world. The timescales for us became longer and there was greater emphasis on community involvement, ownership and participation.

Despite such differences, there was clear support from the roundtable participants for the coalescence of a new movement, grounded in physical institutions in communities, which would seek to become centres for engagement and participation of all people in creating a more sustainable future.

At the conclusion of the roundtable, a smaller group was tasked with taking the idea forward. A number of proposals and drafts of outcome documents have been circulated to us all via email and progress is now being made on piloting these SEE-Change Centres in Canberra.

For more detail on the above, a transcript of the roundtable, the outcome statement, and various other bits and pieces, including an FAQ, are available here: www.natsoc.org.au/html/SEE.htm.