BUILDING

GLOBAL RESILIENCE

The Call to Action

By

Dr. Walter L. Christman, Chairman and Co-Founder

Global Challenges Forum Foundation

THE CALL TO ACTION

A PROCLAMATION

In the name of the Geneva Declaration of 18 September 2015 and in fulfillment of the Global Partnership Declaration of 16 November 2020, the following PROCLAMATION of the Global Challenges Forum Foundation announces a grand strategy for the the 21st Century, going from “From Challenges to Opportunities to Solutions.”

How humans think about connectedness is at a turning point in world history and life on earth. Everyone lives in a rapidly changing world of accelerating crises needing clear goals and shared values for a sustainable future. People from all countries learn to be together in spirit, even while physically distancing. The world is facing a crisis brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic, resulting in the possibility of a new model of global partnerships for the future. Clever ideas from rising generations will, we hope, break through the emerging 21st Century global challenges. And we support that hope through the publication of the book Building Global Resilience: A Call to Action and the events that will follow it.

Building Global Resilience creates the future through a new global partnership model, which speaks to urgent needs and potential benefits for humanity even beyond the present crisis. Based on the premise that the international experience of the pandemic can awaken today’s global youth into a powerful force of shared connectedness, a new tomorrow is possible. We must seize the moment for new thinking, create action models to chart the pathway ahead, address emerging 21st-century global challenges, and foster sustainable development by cultivating a new global resilience culture. The Action Plan urges a combination of community and city-level bottom-up partnerships beyond traditional United Nations and the member states’ top-down partnerships to create new models for action through impact financing for social value investments.

The Global Resilience Consortium is initially building itself around the following five global resilience model elements as explained in the Action Plan:

  • One Million Youth Leaders for Sustainable Development Beyond 2030 (1M2030), supported by:

  • A global network of regional hubs for knowledge and activities, the Resilience Readiness Centers.

  • A Global Challenges Situation Room coordinating the two elements above and undertaking strategy analysis related to emerging societal threats and risks at diverse points in the Regional Centers network.

  • A global program of education for Global Resilience Partners supported by:

  • The permanent establishment of an online Global Resilience University.

Building Global Resilience encourages a growing and interconnected trust among global youth to support worldwide resilience, produce enlightened experience, prevent conflict, and promote sustainable development. The world is on fire, so climate change inaction cannot and must not continue. We, therefore, have the chance to change everything to make the future better. Building Global Resilience is about power: the power to change. To this end, the Global Resilience Consortium’s signature challenge is to: be love, have joy; have courage, be empowered!

From Challenges to Opportunities to Solutions

Challenges

Challenge #1: the acceleration and diffusion of global risks necessitate a new theoretical approach to understanding emerging opportunities and cultivating transformative solutions.

Challenge #2: a new model of international partnerships is needed to empower the next generation to adapt, innovate, and promote sustainable development beyond 2030.

Challenge #3: globalization brings about change within nation-states inscribing new identities within individuals, thus creating the opportunity to forge a new global resilience culture.

Challenge #4: the new approach must help humanity withstand natural and manufactured calamities and stresses while creating conditions that foster global resilience for the remainder of the 21st Century.

THEREFORE, THE FOLLOWING OPPORTUNITIES AND SOLUTIONS ARE OFFERED FOR UNIVERSAL ADOPTION:

Opportunities

Opportunity #1. There must be a renewed global commitment in the spirit of the United Nations Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, which states: “Tolerance is respect, acceptance, and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. … Tolerance, the virtue that makes peace possible, contributes to the replacement of the culture of war by a culture of peace.”

Opportunity #2. The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda offers a pathway toward a more resilient planet. The 17th sustainable development goal, global partnerships, will be fulfilled by a worldwide resilience culture initiated by youth empowerment combining bottom-up and top-down collaboration approaches through impact financing for social value investments.

Opportunity #3. A new global resilience culture can emerge from a co-development design process via relational trust and involve stakeholders’ input no matter how geographically scattered they may be.

Opportunity #4. Next generation leaders can build a global resilience culture through civil society and private sector collaborations called global resilience partnerships at local, national, and international levels.

Opportunity #5. Today’s global environment demands emancipation from contemporary constraints with a transformation in outlook leading to new forms of organizational collaboration and “communities of practice.”

Opportunity #6. A new global partnership model should emphasize the ideals and values born from a sense of mutual obligation to one’s fellow man.

Solutions

Solution #1. A global resilience consortium approach is required for “unity of effort” among diverse players. It must offer new possibilities for examining strategy, structure, technology, and leadership styles.

Solution #2. Our networked global society’s growing connectedness and self-awareness have created the crucible for a new understanding of collaboration. This approach in the Action Plan is called connectivism, whose driver is action learning and begins with knowledge curation.

Solution #3. Global resilience needs to draw from past precedent concepts and embrace cultural differences toward emancipation. Resilience thinking must avoid the overreach to utopianism.

Solution #4. The new model of global partnerships for the future will be built upon composable organizations for global resilience, requiring an ad hoc model to connect multiple communities of practice worldwide.

Solution #5. To be successful, we need a Global Resilience University to share knowledge of partner capabilities, promote skills in building rapport, negotiating, and influencing; and enhance positive attitudes toward unfamiliar approaches.

Solution #6. Cultivating a global resilience culture through emancipatory politics and community networks will lead to the transformation of the nation-state into an actor concerned with the welfare of all of humanity.

The validity and universality of Building Global Resilience are not self-authenticating. It must be taken to the world for debate, revision, and further co-development in theory and practice. In its court of appeal, there needs to be a negotiation between the present and future concerning all humanity. It foresees the transformation of the nation-state as an actor in partnership with all of humanity. It seeks the empowerment of next-generation leaders to navigate through bottom-up approaches and learn to address complexity through inquiry for action. Cultivating a global resilience culture does not have to save the world; it merely needs to preserve it for the next generation.

Accordingly, principles focused on global resilience can reinforce the relationship between theory and practice and move beyond national security paradigms of “security threats” toward a worldwide resilience paradigm of “shared risks.” The stewards of the current order will need to promote new thinking without imposing a hegemonic cultural frame of reference: research and policy must foster informal, networked governance globally, with deference to local cultures and values. It is necessary to inspire partnerships that combine educational and social networks transcending local, regional, global, public, and private sectors. It calls for new approaches to bottom-up empowerment of cities, communities, investors, and youth to develop new and practical self-organization and adaptive behavior strategies. Thus, investment in global resilience must be a central pillar and should be the end state of sustainable development.