How do our worldviews impact how we practice development?

I’m working with Duane Elgin, an elder in the field of social visionary - creating new ways to look at old problems; new ways to understand the world. He’s someone who’s contemplated, sat with and peered into the problems of the world from the perspective of both intellect and scholarly rigor, as well as deep intuition and spirituality. 

I remember being at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN think tank focused on the Sustainable Development Goals, and being at the center of conversations by the world’s leading experts on sustainable development. The multisectoral approach to sustainable development meant that we had folks who specialized in agriculture, early childhood development, water and sanitation, natural resource extraction, education.. The field, rightfully, moving in the direction of integrated, holistic understandings of economic development.

But even though it’s moving towards an integrated approach, it’s a technical field. A technical field that values left brain intelligence over right. A field that doesn’t know what to do with right brain intelligence - intuition, feelings, creativity - because you can’t measure it, therefore can’t manage it. 

I saw a gap in the conversation being had - it lacked spiritually-informed narratives to make sense of where we’re going as a world. Instead it only offered relatively myopic, technical solutions to our problems. Attempting to hold and integrate the systemic reality of our world, yet using tools that truly limit one’s ability to do so. 

How can the invitation to broaden our thinking around the state of the world impact our ability to serve it? How can the invitation to look at and be curious about the underlying narratives and world views that our decisions come from be of service to development practitioners? 

We have all of this information about what’s happening in the world and what’s going to happen in the not-so-distant future. Do we give ourselves the opportunity to sit with that and really feel that in our bodies? Know that in our hearts? Do I even do that? I, who has all of these opinions and intuitive feelings about the state of the world - do I even do that?

I’ve begun to, will continue to, and need more space to. Because I wonder:

What happens when practitioners and leaders make decisions from a place of overwhelm? Or even worse, a place of dissociation.. 

.

.

.

This post is part of a series of personal reflections on how to make sense of the world, the future and this time of Great Transition. It’s part of my process designing a workshop that will use Duane Elgin’s poignant and poetic report “Humanity’s Great Transition: A Middle Path to a Sustainable and Surpassing Future” to live into this inquiry.

The workshop - A Purposeful Pathway: Humanity’s Great Transition - is scheduled for February 10, 2019 in Brooklyn, NY. Click here to join us and reserve your spot.

Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿