Peter Jones
Fifty years have passed since the original Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome. Since then, many of the original controversies triggered by the dire scenarios produced by the MIT research team have been accepted as current outcomes of their prediction, anchoring its position as prescient in climate and economic policies, as well as in foresight studies. Yet many of the original critiques also remain justified, as several significant predictions were not realised. The World Model simulation project was the winning proposal of two programmes offered in response to the original Club of Rome prospectus, The Predicament of Mankind. Also known as the global problematique, the predicament was a multi-crisis problem framing Continuous Critical Problems produced by Hasan Özbekhan. After 50 years, the technocratic approaches of systems thinking still pervade methodology and design approaches to the megacrisis. The inherent assumptions of Western globalism in the problematique have rarely been, if ever, criticised. With rapidly developing, non-aligned economies in the Global South, these assumptions ought to also be reconsidered. I discuss alternative non-Western frames that indicate differences in priorities if the Global South is centred instead of the West. The original view of “the global” is critiqued as originating from the Club of Rome expert-centred framing, and the Western policy mindset is contrasted with a social systemic stakeholder-centred view.
KEYWORDS: globalisation, problematique, value base, civilisational systems, global south
