In an era of rapid globalization, issues of human rights, conflict & security, sustainability, and equity are increasingly interconnected. A new complex dynamic has emerged in which global and local economic-, social-, and cultural trends and developments shape each other in ways and with speeds not experienced before. The relationship between a Global North and Global South is changing as both zones are developing and integrating through common technologies, social media, and trade. This rapid dynamic between the global and the local has far-reaching consequences for the world we live in and the ways we confront global challenges.
Confronting global challenges in an era of rapid globalization requires a focus on transformation. Business as usual will not be sufficient to address the challenges of our time, even if we become radically better at improving our current solutions. Transforming our world is the strapline of the UN Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It implies systemic change: it entails changing behaviors, beliefs, and values that are embedded in skills and infrastructures, technologies, institutions, legal procedures, governance structures and regulations, market demands and cultures.
Transformations are complex. To critically understand and confront global challenges through the lens of transformation requires unlearning, relearning as well as deep learning; e.g. a questioning of the assumptions on which our modern institutions are built, and an understanding of the historical processes and contexts that led to these institutions. Transformation necessarily has a normative character, forcing questions to the fore about transformation for whom? For which purpose? Who is involved, and who may benefit and who may not? What are the ethical and moral principles that govern these transformations?
The learning process needs to reflect this complexity. The complexity inherent in transformations requires insights from many disciplines and forms of knowledge, scientific as well as stakeholder knowledge. Transformation faces radical uncertainty about possible futures. Therefore, it needs to be grounded in collective experimentation with new institutions, legal procedures, technologies, infrastructures, regulations, consumer practices, business models, and ways of looking at the world. It requires processes in need of spaces to play up and play out the politics of transformation; creative processes leading to the emergence of new paradigms, ways of thinking and practices.
Collaboration and experimentation together with societal stakeholders is a key element of this learning process. Experimentation is an avenue for opening up new transformative pathways for development. University researchers and students therefore need to collaborate closely, yet critically, with governments, businesses, and civil society organisations, including transnational ones, whose interests, views, and needs, vary. A critical research and education process is needed which facilitates the integration of knowledge from different disciplines and the collaboration between stakeholders from both science and society, often across different geographies.
UGlobe encourages different approaches to transdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation. Experimentation ranges from a more instrumental testing of new policy models to attempts to increase reflexivity and learning in governance. It has generated a thick and dense web of transnational communities of people and organisations, including a wide range of international organisations and a host of smaller and bigger formal and informal transnational networks, navigating and contesting the nature of and solutions for global challenges.
UGlobe aims to be an open university platform for this participatory creative learning process. UGlobe’s main stakeholders are university researchers working across different faculties and strategic themes, its students, and societal stakeholders spanning different geographies. The stakeholders share a common interest to use this collaborative experimental process to better understand and confront complex global challenges. Since interest in experimentation is not unique to UGlobe for Global Challenges, UGlobe will collaborate with others both inside and outside the university.
UGlobe will focus on transformations that confront those global challenges that intersect human rights, conflict & security, sustainability, and equity. These are areas of particular strength within Utrecht University, reflecting the expertise and work of a range of researchers from different disciplines across the university. Importantly, critically understanding and addressing each of these four areas in transformative ways cannot be done in isolation from the others, thus requiring the integration of knowledge from multiple disciplines, and the active participation of (international) stakeholders.
