ANZSYS conferences

Roger Attwood who organised the 2006 conference in Katoomba advises that 'ISCE publishing has now produced a very nice hardback version of the Katoomba proceedings, along with alternative electronic versions.'

The 2008 conference will be held in Perth from 1-3 December.

Understanding agriculture's dilemma between food security and conservation – new publication

The emergence of food security as a global issue is refocusing concern on the nature, properties and functioning of agro-ecosystems, a term coined by Gordon Conway in the 1980s. This report by the World Business Council on Sustainability (WBCS) and IUCN draws attention to recent trends and reveals some 'key facts' that need to be appreciated as part of policy development in relation to water, land use, agriculture, biodiversity and urban-rural relations and futures.

Some of the key 'facts' extracted from the report include:

• Meat consumption in China has more than doubled in the last 20 years and it is projected to double again by 2030.
• Producing meat, milk, sugar, oils and vegetables typically requires more water than producing cereals.
• Food production to satisfy a person's daily dietary needs takes about 3,000 liters of water – a little more than one liter per calorie.
• Agriculture was responsible for 14% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2000.
• The soils of the world contain more carbon than the combined total amounts occurring in vegetation and the atmosphere.
• Agriculture uses 70% of total global “blue water” withdrawals (from rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers), most of which is for irrigation.
• Only 17% of all cropland is irrigated, but this land provides 30-40% of the world's food production.
• Over 60% of the world's irrigated area is in Asia , most of which is devoted to the production of rice.
• In the last 40 years, the area of global agricultural land has grown by 10%, but in per capita terms agricultural land area has been in decline. This trend is expected to continue as land is increasingly limited and the population grows

Conserving systemic failure in the face of climate change

Understanding current governance arrangements as 'structure determined systems' explains why politicians will continue to fail citizens in a climate change world.

Yesterday the Australian Government released its much heralded Green Paper on emissions trading. Media reports generally suggest that the government has it right - in political terms! But what of other criteria? Beyond the headlines most commentators would agree that what is proposed does not go far enough quickly enough to address what the science is already telling us. Age journalist Ken Davidson makes the point that:

'There is a complete disjuncture between the green paper and the recent scientific discussion.'

Less commented upon is the moral imperative - what actions should a government be taking in relation to its citizens, to non-human 'nature', and thus future generations? Recognising that in regard to climate change no nation is an island, what can we expect of governments that run on an eighteenth and nineteenth century model of 'government' and, in Australia, a dysfunctional Federation formed over 100 years ago?

At an emotional level this Green Paper is a disappointment. Insightful systemic questions do not seem to be present. As with many I am distressed by the intellectual and political framing of the Green Paper. It is what one might have expected of a Howard Government forced into a corner on climate change - it says more about extant power relations in Australia than it does about anything else. It is about first-order change, or what Russ Ackoff calls 'doing the wrong thing righter rather than doing the right thing, even if not well'. Consequently the Green Paper has many elements designed to create the conditions for ongoing systemic failure - these include sending the wrong price signals to consumers and producers based on their carbon consumption or production and thus deferring the transition of Australia to an innovative, low carbon economy. Distortion in investment and thus market opportunities based on new business will be held back. The total subsidies to the large polluters, especially the coal industry, should be front page news but it is not. These companies, many of them multi-nationals, have known that change would come sooner or later yet they continue to hold Australian's to ransom (it is common knowledge that senior bureaucrats involved in Australia's climate change negotiations in the Howard era have left to join big resources companies on fat salaries).

The Green Paper makes the point that the bulk of Australian emissions come from electricity generation, transport and agriculture. Agriculture is excluded for the time being and in systemic terms there are other missing elements - the CO2 output from Australia's fossil fuel exports, the cost of CO2 in supply and marketing chains that are outside national boundaries and of course air travel.

The Rudd government seems inclined to move in a number of areas to achieve national coordination- something that is much needed, even though the devil will be in the practice that emerges! A test for the government will be whether there are meaningful moves arising from the COAG process for a national energy demand management strategy coupled with energy efficiency technologies and institutional arrangements? In a climate change world, uncertainty and complexity will be the main characteristics. In these circumstances local and adaptive or self-organising arrangements are likely to be more resilient and viable than centralised systems. This understanding creates a policy imperative for decentralised, community based energy systems to begin to replace some of the current centralised systems.

In the face of power dynamics and structure determined systems mounting alternative arguments, regardless of their rationality, makes little progress. So what is a structure determined system? A trite answer is that it is the system that delivers the politics we have. Let me give two analogies. A car has only two ways of moving - forward or reverse - because the design of the gear box structures what is, or is not possible. My other analogy comes from my visit to Dubbo Zoo last Sunday. The meerkats were the most popular exhibit with my nephew - and this was to do with their particular behaviour. For those who do not know, meerkats are social animals living in a large group . They have evolved social behaviours and roles - such as lookouts - to protect the group from predators. Despite the new context (meerkats are from South Africa not Australia) this behaviour was very much in evidence even though it is likely that all the meerkats were born in Australia where the same range of predators are not present (though eagles and foxes might be a possibility). It was thus fascinating to see how the meerkats reacted when a flock of galahs or cockatoos (Australian parrots) flew overhead. Of course the meerkats did what meerkats do - they too can be understood as structure determined systems.

So just like meerkats politicians do what politicians do because they are part of a structure determined system. In this regard three (or four) year terms for governments are just one manifestation of a much more complex situation. Utility companies that deliver social goods - such as water or energy - in which the main measure of performance is profit derived from sales of water or energy also exemplify the limitations of a structure determined system. In today's world the main social benefit from water and energy comes from how little is used and the efficiency of its use.

The end result is that we have the Green Paper we have - it is not fit for circumstances because, in a climate change world, our overall governance systems are incapable of managing the complexity that has to be managed into an uncertain future.

Significant indicators of social and political transformation?

The British Government's £100 billion commitment to 'green innovation' is a welcome development, one that hopefully will be emulated in other countries as quickly as possible. It seems particularly good timing from an Australian perspective. It provides relief and, hopefully, an antidote, to the inane debate recently held in the Australian Federal Parliament - fostered primarily by the Opposition and a media still locked into wedge politics and lack of perspective on what really matters. The Government's Garnaut review will be out soon (a draft was due on 30th June) and it will require political courage unheard of in recent times, for the Labour Party to do what is required. It is important that Gordon Brown has said:

'...a low carbon economy - which met EU reduction targets - "will not emerge from 'business as usual'."

"It will require real leadership from government - being prepared to make hard decisions on planning or on tax for example, rather [than] tacking and changing according to the polls.

"It will involve new forms of economic activity and social organisation."'

On the water front the news continues to be bad in the Mediterranean - and is yet another reflection of how business as usual thinking and practices leads to a mess.

Dealing with the global water crisis - leaving it to a market or getting pricing right?

This interview with Maud Barlow based on her new book is worth a listen. Her book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the coming battle for the right to water is published by Black Inc Books. In this interview she makes the case for getting water pricing right within a framework of water being a universal human right. She is, however, critical of Australia's market-based approach.

Here are some comments on Maud Barlow's book:

'An Inconvenient Truth of water.

“Imagine a world in twenty years, in which no substantive progress has been made to provide basic wastewater service in the Third World, or to force industry and industrial agriculture production to stop polluting water systems, or to curb the mass movement of water by pipeline, tanker and other diversion, which will have created huge new swaths of desert."

“Desalination plants will ring the world’s oceans, many of them run by nuclear power; corporate nanotechnology will clean up sewage water and sell it to private utilities who will sell it back to us at a huge profit; the rich will drink only bottled water found in the few remote parts of the world left or sucked from the clouds by machines, while the poor die in increasing numbers. This is not science fiction. This is where the world is headed unless we change course.”

'This is a part of reality that economists simply don't see' says Ross Gittins

I am not quite sure what to make of this article by Ross Gittins, one of the main economic writers for the Fairfax media in Australia. On the positive side I concur with the main thrust of the argument - and would welcome much more of this type of analysis here in Australia where neo-classical theory is hegemonic. My concern is that in writing about so called 'economic sociologists' he presents these ideas as if they are something new (it would appear that Neil Fligstein whose work he draws upon has been writing about this subject since at least the early 1990s) . Has Gittins not heard of institutional and new institutional economics ? Perhaps not because there are so few in Australia.

Gittins also appears to fall into the trap, common in Australia, for natural scientists and economists to label all other researchers and scholars concerned with the social dimension as 'sociologists'. In saying this I am not having a go at sociologists but at the lack of awareness amongst natural scientists and mainstream economists of the diversity within the social sciences and the place of this scholarship for informing policy and practice, including research practice. This is not only true in Australia as the outcomes of a recent review of DEFRA science in the UK reports:

Social researchers being ‘overstretched’ by Defra

The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs [DEFRA] is overstretching its social researchers and undervaluing their contribution to policy making, a report has found.

Defra’s Science Advisory Council’s Social Science Sub-Group has criticised the department for defining social research too narrowly as “engagement or consultation”. It also reports that social research “was not always accorded equivalent status to other contributions, such as that from the natural sciences, to the evidence base for the policy cycle and research strategy”.

The social research capacity within the department is described as “not sufficient to meet the needs of existing or future Departmental policy objectives,” causing staff to be overstretched.

The group warns Defra that it must develop a clear strategy for the use of social research, including a dramatic change in culture that “challenges negative attitudes”.

The department should also increase the number of social researchers on its books and develop stronger links with the social science community, the report suggests.

Discount on John Seddon's book for readers of this blog

Following my posting on John Seddon's book I have been contacted by folk at Triarchy Press.

They are offering my ' blog readers a 20% discount on the full price of Systems Thinking in the Public Sector. In order to claim their discount, readers should enter tp20 in the promotional code field at the checkout'.

More sobering analysis .....but what of the action?

In today's paper:

'Water shortages could prove an even bigger threat to mankind this century than soaring food prices and the relentless exhaustion of energy reserves, a panel of global experts has told the Goldman Sachs "Top Five Risks" conference.'

John Seddon's book should be an early Christmas present for all politicians

Like so many others I rejoiced when New Labour and Tony Blair were first elected. By the time of the next election I could not bring myself to vote for him or New Labour (not that I voted Tory either). By the time of his departure I was so relieved that we threw a party and invited all those friends who felt like us ...and it was a good crowd.

John Seddon in his book 'Systems Thinking in the Public Sector' (Triarchy Press) gives a good account of all the reasons (Iraq aside) why I wanted to celebrate Blair's departure. Unfortunately most of the thinking and the practices his term spawned or perpetuated did not leave office with him. New Labour are in an intellectual mire of their own making. It is hard to imagine that they can break out of these profound conceptual and practical traps before the next election. And there is a great danger the new Australian government led by Kevin Rudd will import the same intellectual deficiencies. For one thing the brand of economic thinking which Seddon quite rightly criticizes is even more entrenched and perverse in Oz.

Here are some tasters from the book:

'[In the UK] 'bureaucracy and red tape' have driven public services in the wrong direction. The cost is not just the cost of the bureaucracy itself; there is an additional cost because the changes being mandated by the bureaucracy are the wrong things to do. The bureaucracy has made services worse, and public sector morale has been sapped'. (p. iv)

'We invest in the wrong things believing them to be the right things. We think inspection drives improvement, we believe in the notion of economies of scale, we think choice and quasi-markets are levers for improvement, we believe people can be motivated with incentives, we think leaders need visions, managers need targets, and information technology is a driver of change. These are all wrong-headed ideas. But they have been the foundation of public sector 'reform'. (p. iv)

The language of his text speaks to the frustration he has experienced and his appreciation of how the principles and practices of systems thinking could make things better. Throughout the text he refers to New Labour as 'the regime' which in the strict sense it is (regime means both the 'diet we are prescribed' and the 'system of government or rule') but I am sure his correct usage of the term will not win him friends in high places!

In his first chapter Seddon explores the ideological ground on which a lot of New Labour policies stand - as I outlined earlier this was a theme developed in Adam Curtis' three-part TV series 'The Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom'.

Chapter 2 on 'choices' addresses a particular bete noir of mine and does it well. Take the following example:

'I recall being embarrassed watching a PMDU [Prime Minister's Delivery Unit] representative explaining to a Swedish public sector audience how people should be able to choose their treatment in the NHS [National Health Service]. The Swedes took the view that doctors would know best, and the patient would expect 'advice' not 'choice'. Now in a hole, the official hurried on to the view that 'choice meant choosing another hospital if the local hospital was too busy to treat them. The Swedes politely pointed out this was no choice (Hobson's choice); what mattered to patients was not making choices but getting their problem solved.'

There is also a lovely example of how in an attempt to emulate good practice from the Netherlands they fell into the trap of 'copying without knowledge rather than seeking first to understand the thinking and principles behind the original design'.

I look forward to reading the rest of the book. If you are feeling flush send a copy to your MP as an early Christmas present! If you do ask her or him why there is not more opportunity for learning and practising systems thinking in the UK.

The recursion of real-life and fiction... Barack Obama and the West Wing

I liked Justin Webb's 10 reasons Why Obama won. As a West Wing fan I was particularly struck by his 10th reason. Liberal fantasy or not ...the first phase has come to pass.

'1. He is black. Geraldine Ferraro has a point: Obama's individual story is important and his racial makeup - he is of mixed race - is a part of his appeal. Black people have rallied to him.

2. He is not black. He is also the first black presidential hopeful to run as a post-racial candidate (hence the upset with Ferraro). White people feel unthreatened by him.

3. He was not taken seriously. Oops. If the Clinton people had blown him out in Iowa, at the beginning of the process, he would be toast.

4. He is serious. This appears to be a serious year, in which Americans are deeply worried about the state of the nation, and Obama's slightly professorial demeanour looks a good fit.

5. He offers self-help and self-improvement. She offered a plan to make America better - he offers a plan to make Americans themselves better.

6. He promises change in a year when Americans are ready for change.

7. He is 46 and handsome.

8. He catches the attention of the media but is a hard target to attack - you look uncool to diss him (as Hillary has discovered).

9. Mark Warner - the former governor of Virginia, the other young anti-Hillary man - didn't stand.

10. Axelrod wrote the script. David Axelrod was an adviser to The West Wing and helped mould the character (Matt Santos) who succeeded Jed Bartlett. He based him on Obama and now Obama seems based on Santos. But either way, it was written... And it has come to pass...'

Systemic insights: some gems from recent reading

1. From Bernard Poerkson's 'The certainty of uncertainty' , subtitled 'Dialogues Introducing Constructivism'. I found this an engaging read as it provides insights into the history and nature of those interviewed (Von Foerster, Von Glaserfield, Maturana, Varela, Roth, Schmidt, Stierlin and Watzlawick). Some excerpts that I particularly liked:

(a) Helm Stierlin

'Systemic thinking can only be learned through one's work; it cannot be instilled into others; it needs time to gather, experience and make mistakes' p. 164.

' A system is a totality, which possesses a quality that is more than the sum total of its elements. What observers accept as a system, depends on them and on the answer to the question of where the boundary between system and environment is drawn. Is a bacterium, a rat, a human being, or a family a system? Systems are in my view, more or less meaningful observer constructs. ...' p. 166.

'The more we recognise ourselves as the constructors of our relational realities, the better we comprehend ourselves as responsible for the realities we have constructed' p. 159

'My own responsibility and my autonomy will become clear to me only if I become aware of how dependent I am upon others.' p. 160

(b) Paul Watzlawick

'Different attributions of meaning produce what I call second-order reality. This is the level of sense attribution and variable views of the world, which cannot be described and clearly defined objectively for all time. It cannot be decided who is right or wrong. By contrast, I call the level of actual events and indubitable facts first-order reality'. p. 179.

'There are obviously religious claims to truth that have no terrorist or violent consequences at all. I am, however, referring to those ideologues who claim to have established how humankind must be organised to reach the final state of happiness and to realise eternal truth. The consequences can be dreadful if people of this persuasion manage to occupy positions of power that enable them to impose their truth in an authoritarian way and to bully other people on the grounds of the accusation that they are sabotaging the true view of the world. Early stages of such a way of thinking may be discovered in Plato's Republic, where one may read about the wise ruler's, the philosopher king's alleged ethical right to impose his wisdom on humankind, if necessary by means of force.' pp. 181-2.

'in cybernetics, the complexity reducer is an incursion that does not destroy high complexity but only reduces it to useful and manageable proportions' p. 184

2. From Frank Fisher's book 'Response Ability. Environment, Health and everyday Transcendence'.

'Among environmentally concerned people ecosystem would appear to take precedence over literacy, for without it there is no life and literacy is an outgrowth of that. Look again at the last sentence and it will be obvious that without an understanding of English we would not have been able to read it, much less understand what 'life' in the sentence refers to. So literacy is primary. Indeed the system that is language has given rise to the idea of ecosystem'. p. 14

Good news 'green' innovations here in Melbourne

Here is a good news story for a change which is basically employing systems thinking.

'Australians use 18 million printer consumables each year with the bulk of these inkjet cartridges and toners ending up as hazardous landfill. But an innovative Melbourne-based organization is turning this waste into viable products, transforming an environmental program into a serious business proposition.

In fact, so serious that the organization is planning to go public and list on the Australian stock exchange.

The Close the Loop (CTL) program which began as an environmental initiative in 1998 recycling toners and cartridges is set to go global with expansion based on an Australian designed and developed Green Machine. '

Molecules of Emotion - my letter to Candace Pert in 2001

I have just come across this letter I started writing to Candace Pert in 2000, just after reading her book. It was finished and sent in 2001. Whilst I never received a reply the issues I raise seem as relevant today.

Dear Dr Pert,

I have just finished reading your book 'Molecules of Emotion'. I felt so engaged by the issues that you raise that I have decided to respond to my own emotional inclinations and write to you. We have not quite met - you sat next to me as we interviewed Stafford Beer at the ISSS Conference in Toronto recently and I was fortunate to be in the audience at your presentation the evening before.

Your book triggered many reflections for me and as I write I am still trying to make sense of some of them.

This was as far as it went at the time. It is now the 12^th May 2001 and despite the various demands on my time the desire to pick up where I left off remains. So here goes! I had hoped that we might meet up at the Vancouver Conference of the American Society of Cybernetics (May) but as I write I am not sure if you are still involved. Also, before saying more, perhaps I should say just a little about me - for context.

I did a first degree in Agricultural Science (University of Sydney) then, a little later, a PhD in plant eco-physiology. My research concerns have gradually moved from a focus on physiology, agronomy and ecology to grasslands as human activity systems then to grasslands as socially constructed systems. This transition accounts for why I now hold a Chair in Systems.

One of the main themes I would like to pick up is the way in which you resort to the term 'information' as an explanatory concept. The point I would like to develop is that I think 'information' as an explanatory concept may constrain appreciation of the phenomena you have so elegantly revealed.

For example p.71 you say: 'I prefer a broad term coined originally by the late Francis Schmitt of MIT - informational substances - because it points to their common function, that of messenger molecules distributing information throughout the organism'. Whilst I recognise the seductiveness of the information transfer metaphor (after all it is pervasive in our society, in the University, the classroom and elsewhere) I would argue that it conceals more than it reveals. To appreciate this there is a need to unpack the metaphor and to look at its historical development. Prior to the 1950s almost no-one in physiology, anatomy or neurophysiology would have used 'information' as an explanatory principle. It was only after the communication model of Shannon and Weaver was developed and the term 'information' began to displace 'signal' that the metaphor took hold. (For a further development of these ideas please see attached chapters from a recent book).

So basically information transfer has displaced signal transfer and what is more what was basically a mathematical model of communication has become adopted as an explanatory device for human communication (and we all know that human communication and machine communication are vastly different)! At the core of the contemporary 'information transfer' metaphor is the messenger - receiver dualism which is just like the mind - body dualism you so convincingly destroy. Drawing on the work of Humberto Maturana (who was also at Toronto and will be in Vancouver) we have found it helpful to avoid this dualism. Let me quote from Russell & Ison (2000):

' The nervous system is a closed network of interacting neurons. The physiology of the nervous system, because it is a structure-determined system (systems in which all their changes are determined by their structure and in which all those changes are a result of their own dynamics or triggered by their interactions with their environment) cannot be usefully compared to a computer or 'information transfer' system. Biologically, there are no inputs to, or outputs from, the nervous system, nor does the nervous system 'process information.' There is no encoding or decoding in the nervous system nor does it 'receive' or 'process' messages or 'information' from the environment.

The implication that flows from the nervous system being a closed and structure-determined system is that there can be no instructive interactions between such systems and between any one system and its environment. What another human can do, and all that an other can do, is trigger a response without any control over what that response might be. In no way can such a triggering determine the nature of the response. It is biologically impossible to instruct or determine an outcome with 'information.'

Since it is communication (internal and external) that creates what we call reality, developing a 'shared meaning' (a notion created by the observer) is going to involve the participation in the task of all those who will be affected by any outcome. If we accept that living systems are structure-determined systems then communication is a structural coupling of two (or more) individuals in conversation. So to converse is to dance: to turn together in a way that acknowledges the presence of two parties (one of course could and does converse with oneself) and acknowledges the willingness to act together in some mutually acceptable way. The meaning that we are inferring is similar to that found in the original Latin words: con... meaning 'with', and versare... meaning 'to turn'. The actual dance, the experience of the conversation, is a unique creation and we have no certainty whatsoever as to what the outcome might be. It is neither a transfer or a sharing of information. Useful knowledge, knowledge that will lead to satisfying action, is created by the joint action of both parties and encompasses both scientific and aesthetic judgements.'

From this perspective one might choose (p.130) to talk about networks of relationships (or perhaps conversations) rather than 'far-flung network of information' (also p. 138 - theory of information exchange). [As an aside your resort to Richard Dawkin's work ducks, to my mind, some serious issues - is a duck really a vehicle for the propagation of duck genes' or is it a means to conserve the organisation 'duck' in a changing environment?].

The phenomenon you describe on pp. 142 -143 is similar to the one Humberto uses when describing his work on vision which led him to conclude that in the moment we cannot distinguish between perception and illusion. It is only on reflection that we can become sure (or surer!). From his perspective the nervous system because of its history patterns the world (our world) rather than the reverse. It is the possibility of exploring the historicity of your peptides (history of structural coupling) and their relationship forming and breaking that this explanatory path opens that has excited me. It begins to provide an elegant biological basis for 'embodiment'.

The metaphor of communication as conversation seems to me so much more powerful to explain your claims (p179) that: 'Neuropetides and their receptors thus join the brain, glands and immune system in a network of communication between brain and body, probably representing the biochemical substrate of emotion.'

However (p.184) when you describe the 'network of communication, linked by information carriers known as neuropeptides' I am led to think what might be gained by expressing this in a different way? For example Fritjof Capra (The Web of Life 1996) chooses to describe networks in the following terms: 'As we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too form an interconnected network of concepts and models in which there are no foundations. For most scientists such a view of knowledge as a network with no firm foundations is extremely unsettling..' Thus from my perspective based on my understanding of what you write I might say (p.185): 'So what we have been talking about all along is a network of relationships. All neuropeptides have a history (ontogeny) and at any moment in time they are a product of their history of structural coupling. As they move around the body in response to a complex array of signals they form new relationships, the quality of which is determined by their history but with the capacity to realise new, emergent properties each time they enter into new relationships. One way of describing this is as an on-going network of conversations. What arises in conversation is '

Of course I am not a neuroscientist and this may be way off the mark. And maybe others have raised this with you already. However, I would at least be interested in your reactions should time and enthusiasm allow. My courage to write was prompted by the knowledge that you were interested in exploring new metaphors - e.g. p. 255. Perhaps you have already arrived at the metaphor of conversation as you refer to it on p 256. And I am largely in agreement with the arguments posited on pages 257-8 though I would not choose to describe it as 'information theory'. Nor can I subscribe to the view that information exists independently of the observer - the word information by the way comes from the Latin in formare, or formed within. The example of the cup (p.257) to me negates the idea that all knowing arises in relationship. So knowing the cup arises in my relationship with the cup - if I am apart from the cup all I have access to is my memory of the cup - a product of my history of structural coupling.

Enough of my rambling. My thanks for a thought stimulating read. If there are more recent overviews of your work in print and you have copies available I would appreciate receiving them.

Yours sincerely

Ray Ison

All page numbers refer to The Touchstone Edition (1999).

Even without climate change there is a water crisis of global significance

The late 20^th and early 21^st century will undoubtedly be seen as the ‘tipping point’ in which human interference in, and demands from, the water cycle transformed it irreversibly. As a recent review of the ‘global water crisis’ points out:

‘For the first time in human history, human use and pollution of freshwater have reached a level where water scarcity will potentially limit food production, ecosystem function, and urban supply in the decades to come’.

These authors conclude that new forms of collective action are required which will probably demand a 'new global water ethic or some other system of incentives if collective action is to be effective'. The actions they point to include changes in dietary patterns, a conservation ethic and cooperative management of shared resources. Recognition of the need for cooperative management is consistent with investing in social learning as a new governance mechanism and as a set of practices that lead to concerted action in complex situations such as that of water management.

The recent example of water shipments for the city of Barcelona is further evidence of the water crisis that is now upon us. The situation is particularly severe in the Mediterranean.

In the state of Victoria, Australia it makes increasing sense to believe that climate change is already happening and that this presents particular challenges for the city of Melbourne. Some of these are described in this March 2007 article. Later in 2007 the Government, seemingly under pressure, decided to act. Their choice of mainly engineering solutions - a desalination plant and a pipeline from the inland Murray Darling Basin - to secure Melbourne's water future have subsequently come under critical scrutiny by the State Auditor General, who said:
'The government had used flawed processes and "inadequate levels of rigour" in preparing the $4.9 billion plan'.

The Victorian plans and the broader set of policies for the Murray Darling Basin have also come in for scrutiny and criticism from Ken Davidson in The Age. He describes the latter as:

'At present the policy seems to be straight out of La La Land. ........It is a policy based on the hope of a miracle disguised by a mirage in the form of the basin authority, which assumes that extra water can be be found by spending billions upgrading irrigation infrastructure to reduce leakage and evaporation.'

In an article entitled: 'The new reality is entirely unrealistic' he shows how little regard he has for the likely effectiveness of policies of water trading based on a water market. See also 'Great water gamble could sink us all' or, for a range of perspectives, this piece by Jo Chandler.

These articles and the critical scrutiny they evoke are all to the good. On a recent study tour to look at the social and institutional aspects of water management in Israel I was struck by the unintended consequences that can arise through committing to an engineered, as opposed to ecological, water future. What was soon apparent in Israel was how complex the organisational and institutional arrangements were for managing water ...even before one considered matters relating to their neighbours. To the average citizen (and probably many who work in the water sector) the situation in Australia is equally complex. That is why we need more open debate to enhance systemic understanding, and, hopefully, practices (and this requires good policies and investment decisions).

Take for example the outcomes of the recent COAG meeting which resolved that stand-off between the Australian States in what was once referred to as the 'Howard $10 billion water plan'. It is good that there has been agreement at last - and that a new spirit of Federalism exists ...for the moment!! Aided no doubt by the extra $1 billion dollars that Victoria will receive from the Commonwealth. But like all deals the devil is in the detail. The Memoranda of Understanding are being written at the moment, in readiness for the next COAG meeting (where the PM and State Premiers meet). My reading of the COAG report or more precisely the 'Murray-Darling Basin Reform Memorandum of Understanding of 26 March 2008, agreed in principle for consultation with stakeholders', raised the following issues :

1. Who will be doing the due diligence assessment on the Victorian Food Bowl Group allocation given the comments of the State Auditor? And how can the amount of money allocated be spent over the time frame indicated?
2. Eight principles for urban water reform are listed - what are they?
3. The report says that priority will always be given to critical human needs. What does the phrase 'critical human needs' mean - and how will it be deployed in practice?
4. There is nothing about organizational and institutional complexity - and the on-going role of CMAs (Catchment Management Authorities) and NHT (National Heritage Trust) money?
5. Point 33 says:
   
All Basin jurisdictions agree to examine the way in which environmental water recovery programs should be managed to ensure they are cost effective and maximise environmental outcomes.'This wording implies that there are objective criteria that can be established - and that the boundaries for cost- effectiveness can be readily established? I would contend that these are emergent properties and that they can only ever be delivered through deliberative processes. As we have articulated in our SLIM work we see sustainability as an emergent property of stakeholder processes.

The so-called Howard plan has been reworked in the recent Australian Federal Budget:

'Rather than choosing to spend money on water saving measures on farms in the first year of the $12 billion plan for rural and urban water projects, the Government will move ahead to buy back farmers' water for the environment. In total there is $3.1 billion earmarked for buying back farmers' water over 10 years.

The Government will also start spending money on fixing up some of the main irrigation routes owned by irrigation companies and state governments. And it's already announced it will spend $1 billion on the Victorian Government's planned pipeline from the Goulbourn Valley to Melbourne. In total there is $5.8 billion earmarked for infrastructure projects across Australia over 10 years.'

It would have been more convincing if the new Government had emulated recent directives in the UK, where ministers have been told to factor in a carbon cost in all decisions relating to policy or investment. It would also be more convincing if energy and water policies could be 'joined -up' - perhaps through Covenants of Mayors.

In the UK a new strategy entitled ‘Future Water’ has recently been released. At least in the UK there is a national perspective.

CIWEM, the professional body of UK water managers has also recently produced a major report looking at water reuse in industry. Among their conclusions are:

'Water reuse should be an integral part of a suite of demand and supply measures that together can bring about more sustainable water management in the UK. To facilitate the uptake of industrial water reuse in the UK, the following issues will be critical:

1. The need for society to develop a greater appreciation of the anthropogenic influence on the water cycle
2. The need to develop fair pricing for all water resources reflecting their full economic and environmental costs and yet the short-term need for pump-priming financial support from government for sustainable water reuse projects
3. The need for a coherent government policy on water reuse (as CIWEM called for in it‟s 2002 Policy Position Statement) coupled with authoritative reclaimed water quality standards that are realistic and protect public health and the environment
4. The need for existing government programmes such as the Enhanced Capital Allowance Water Technology List and Envirowise business advisory service to be expanded to include water reuse technologies
5. The need for more research and development into low-carbon, economic water reuse solutions'

Water management and human intervention in the water cycle is a 'wicked problem'; it calls out for systems thinking and practice capability amongst those charged with developing policies, investments, institutions and stakeholder engagement.

Patterns that connect: new old narratives for contemporary circumstances?

Over the last two months I have had a number of experiences that taken together reveal some interesting questions - for me at least - about our taken-for-granted Western intellectual tradition. They are of interest I suggest for the very reason that our current ways of thinking and acting seem to have put us in a right mess!

My questions emerged from three particular experiences.

At dinner one evening the son of friends related how he was about to begin a politics course. They began, he said, with Plato's 'Republic'. I am not a politics scholar nor have I studied, in any systematic way, ancient history but I had been to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens a few weeks before. In what was an excellent set of displays I had become aware that the classical period of Athens, from which so much of Western Philosophy seems to derive, was only a very brief period. What impressed me more was the archaeological detail from the Cycladian civilisation that had existed in a ring of Island in the Mediterranean from about 3000 to 1100BC. Some of the artwork was deeply moving.

'Centered on the Cyclades islands, the Cycladic Civilisation is split up into three time periods. They are the Early Period (3000 – 2000 BC), the Middle Period (2000 – 1500 BC) and the Late Period (1500 – 1100 BC)'. .......'By the end of the Late Cycladic sequence (ca. 2000 BC) there was essential convergence between Cycladic and Minoan civilization.'

In comparison to the classical period these were 'sustainable civilisations' judged in terms of time. When these civilisations were destroyed, ultimately it is thought, by the massive eruption of Santorini (about 1520 BC) , the world in some ways regressed. Unlike the classical period little survives in written form. This is potent evidence of the power of the pen, so to speak - if one thinks of the power accorded in our intellectual traditions to the classical Greeks, followed by the Romans as well as Hebrew scholars.

So why does politics 101 start with Plato?

Some weeks later I found myself clambering over and amongst the remains of one of the many Nurarghi that can be found in Sardinia. These came from a civilisation, not unlike the Cycladian, which flourished from 1600 to 1000BC. I had seen these on an earlier visit but the patterns that connect were then outside my experience. The art and thus concerns of this civilisation had many features in common with the earlier Cycladians.

I must admit that some of the questions arising from my experiences were not entirely new. Some years before I had read drafts of what has just become 'Origins of Humanness in the Biology of Love' by Humberto Maturana Romesin & Gerda Verden-Zoller (ed. Pille Bunnell) so I was sensitised to these early European civilisations that seemed to flourish without the patriarchy that so typifies the much later Classical Greek and Hebrew traditions. As I understand it though, they suggest that the pre-patriarchal societies had started to wane by about 4500BC.

At this historical moment we need to re-examine and re-invent discourses more in keeping with our circumstances. Being open to different pasts can help in creating different futures. Let's find some different beginnings for politics 101.

Checkout the BBC World Service report on the Amazon Paradox

This excellent BBC report reveals many of the systemic issues that comprise the Amazon Paradox. They include human population growth, human livelihoods, climate impact, food production systems and global trade, technology and the need for new institutional arrangements that can pay for ecosystem services.

It is both difficult and dangerous to extract simple strategies for action from such a complex situation, but there is a need to act quickly. Future actions that seem warranted include:

1. Stopping the massive transfer of plant products to Europe for animal production (e.g. soya beans);
2. Reducing per capita meat consumption and reversing the social expectation that meat production rises with increases in income;
3. Develop new institutional arrangements that allow funds transfer to purchase ecosystem services in places like the Amazon and at the same time secure more sustainable livelihoods for local people;
4. Re-frame the whole conceptual edifice on which international trade talks are built.

New discipline of sustainable economics?

Check out where you stand with regard to the two contrasting paradigms depicted within this site dedicated to the new arena of 'sustainable economics'. As depicted here the current dominant paradigm is depicted with ecosystems subservient to the global economy and contrasted to that advocated by ecological and sustainable economists who see the economy as subservient (sub -systems) of ecosystems.

For some background see this article by Robert Gilman.

Can Senator Penny Wong head Australia in the right direction.....at last?

The whole world knows how irresponsible Australia was in dealing with its carbon footprint during the Howard years. This was also a period when the large coal and resources companies literally ran Australia's climate change policies - hence no ratification of Kyoto until the election of the Rudd Labor Government.

Now these same executives and their lobbyists are beating a path to the door of Penny Wong the minister responsible for developing Australia's climate change policies. She appears to be under intense pressure, but her own experience of trying to connect to Greenpower for her own home, is a telling example of why urgent action is needed to both reform the marketplace (i.e. carbon trading) and to introduce sweeping institutional reforms that favour changes in citizen behaviour and creates a wave of new investment in technologies other than coal - especially oxymoronic 'clean coal'! She needs help like that orchestrated by GetUp to resist and transform!

Some environmental NGOs seem less than helpful in this regard. Take WWF(Australia):

'Bourne [Director of WWF(Australia)] and his organisation have hitched their wagon, along with the Climate Institute, to the coal industry's strategy: that "clean coal" should be a key part of the Government's climate change policy. They are joined by the mining union.

The two environmental groups attracted intense heat from other green organisations for their policy switch earlier this year. The Greens senator Christine Milne believes "clean coal" technology will not be commercially feasible in time. She argues against using taxpayers' money to fund the technology. "It comes down to the 'polluter pays' principle," she says. "And if you believe the polluter should pay, the coal industry is the classic case because for the last 100 years it had made massive profits at the expense of the atmosphere and the climate and now is the time for them to pay for their own research."'

As someone who served on the programme Committee of WWF(UK) for a number of years I find the stance of the Australian office on clean coal to be ill-considered. Their rationale just does not stack up, especially in a country where the resources for new investment are not so great. Resources available to Government deserve to go anywhere but 'clean coal' and associated sequestration technologies.

It is of note that at last the shareholders of Exxon, one of the main funders of climate sceptics, have at last begun to speak out about the company's policies. These include members of the Rockefeller family, descendants of the company's founder. It is to be hoped that these moves by shareholders take effect at Board level. If they do not they will be yet another example of how too many current institutional arrangements stand in the way of transformations in business practices in a climate change world.

Academics speak out at last …but will it change things?

A group of 34 British Academics under the banner of ‘The Weston Manner Group’ have produced a manifesto calling for major changes in how Universities assess their students. It will be a great triumph if their efforts re-orientate current assessment fashions characterised by an ‘obsession with marks and grades to one which puts more emphasis on developing effectiveness for learning, rather than assessment of what sometimes passes as learning. The main points from their ‘Assessment standards: a manifesto for change’ were:

• "Put more emphasis "on assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning";
• Move beyond systems focused on marks and grades towards assessment of the achievement of programme outcomes;
• Recognise that standards may be difficult to articulate explicitly;
• Develop assessment and feedback processes that engage staff and students in dialogue about standards;
• Make discussion of standards between staff and students an integral part of course design and the learning process;
• Establish forums for the development and sharing of standards within and between disciplinary and professional communities".

Sassari, hidden gems amongst an eclectic, sometimes Stalinist, architecture

I have just spent a week in Sassari, the second city of Sardinia. Compared to other Italian cities I have experienced it feels somewhat forgotten. This is typified by all the building activity at the moment in which the city authorities are making a valiant attempt to resurrect the many medieval and 19^th century gems that are scattered through the city. But compared to neighbouring Alghero, or say Montpelier, which has a similar medieval centre, they have been slow starting and there is much still to be done. The Piazza D’ Italia with its fine surround of 18 and 19^th century buildings looks excellent but does not yet seem to have been embraced in the daily living of the citizens – there are no cafes with chairs sprawling out into the piazza, for example.

The flurry of current redevelopment effort seems the first since the 1960s when there was clearly another development boom. At that time the city authorities turned their back on Sassari’s heritage and the legacy of that move is some of the ugliest 1960’s building I have seen anywhere! At times it is almost possible to believe that one is in some former Eastern Block city.

Once away from the haphazard peri-urban development around Sassari the countryside is very scenic; the island is one of the few in the Mediterranean that has more stored surface water than demand. On the other hand there are problems with aquifer depletion and contamination due to poor sewage and household water management.

Sardinia is an attractive place to visit; I was delighted to be invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Sassari.