Imagining and Catalyzing System Transformation: Stewarding Eco-Social Narratives and Strategies

In a world where biodiversity loss is only one of numerous intersecting civilization-threatening crises, now labeled polycrisis, calls for transformative change increase daily. Transformative change is fundamental changes in purposes, values, goals, and power organizations and systems. Transformation shifts relationships, power structures, and institutional practices in significant ways. These calls for transformative change are generally normative, involving prospectively envisioning futures where human and nonhuman nature thrive together. Transformative change involves re-imagining how the human enterprise and its institutions, especially businesses, operate through an ecological-social (eco-social) not today’s dominant human-centric or social imaginary. Eco-social imaginaries place humans, economies, and human institutions into the context of nature, in relationship with not dominance over nature. Eco-social imaginaries recognize humans’ integral interdependence with nature and complete reliance on nonhuman nature’s resources and abundance, which is increasingly at risk as a result of human activities that have create the Anthropocene. Such imaginaries also honor and offer equity to other-than-human nature and species as part of that recognition of interdependence. This scale of narrative change and associated economic, social, and political changes creates a need for rethinking economics and business practice and strategies. It re-imagines how all beings, including nonhuman nature, are taken into consideration, and centers justice and equity for all beings. Conventional leadership, like conventional economics, is ill-suited for this challenge. That is because achieving such transformative whole system change requires a stewardship approach that catalyzes transformative change in multiple ways and by multiple people working both independently and collaboratively. Rather than top down ‘leadership’, such change involves the stewardship of people and institutions who can be called transformation catalysts, particularly around reimagining economics and business practice that affects crises like biodiversity loss. Transformation catalysts work by connecting, cohering, and amplifying the efforts of existing initiatives in multiple contexts to achieve needed transformative change. This presentation will explore the changes that are needed, especially in narratives and practices in economics, business strategies, and stakeholder thinking that transformative catalysts work to steward through these connecting, cohering, and amplification approaches.