The International Society for the Systems Sciences

Advancing Viable Governance I am more than honored to assume the responsibility of president of the International Society for Systems Sciences – a post that has been held by so many pioneers and practitioners in our field. And I am happy to
announce that the 2010 Conference will be held from July 18 to 23 at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo Ontario, about 70 miles from Toronto. The conference theme will be Governance for a Resilient Planet.
Let me start by saying that it would be great if we can survive the next hundred years without massive damage to our planet or ourselves. If we are going to be able to act effectively, we’ll need to pull all the information we have together. I propose that one step in this direction could be a global viability index. Why?
Because there is a big gap between our knowledge our ability to make use of it within our present organizational and governance structures … in traditional science, in the systems fields, and in participatory decision-making. In the rest of this talk I’m going to give you three views on this problem: First, I’ll discuss the prevailing views on regulation and multi-system governance. Then we’ll look how
governance was handled in one very special situation – the Chile of thirty-five years ago. And finally, we’ll talk about how we can begin to create a global viability index to support the changes that are necessary for sustainability.