Global Disintegration and Integration

As we are shocked every day by new headlines about our disintegrating civilisation, I struggle to apply complex systems science and my Bahá’í spiritual values to understand the driving forces behind these events. A combination of recent sources in the last month have each shed some light on this challenging question. The leading experts on post-growth economics have prepared a joint review on the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries (see my summary at https://iefworld.org/post-growth2025). The leading American climate scientist and his colleagues have documented how global warming has suddenly accelerated, making tipping points to climate catastrophe unavoidable (https://iefworld.org/node/1676), while the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has estimated that climate change impacts will reduce global GDP by 50 percent by 2070-2090 (https://iefworld.org/node/1669). A leading UN expert has just published a book on complex systems science for adaptive global governance facing accelerating complexity which I have reviewed and summarised (https://iefworld.org/Dahl_forever). Then I participated in a meeting of leading specialists on global environmental governance, including that expert, with enlightened reflections on global diplomacy today.

It has been clear to me for some time that the rise of autocrats and populist movements on the political extremes is the result of the materialistic neoliberal economic system, whether capitalist or communist, emphasising greed and power. The system profits from and manipulates the anger, frustration and hate of the majority of the world population that see wealth increasingly concentrated at the top while their own living standards and well-being have declined in recent decades, often trapping them in poverty. Political leaders both defend the interests of the winners in the system that enable them to stay in power, and promote scapegoats like immigrants to deflect the anger of the losers. The actors in this system, through lobbying and corruption, control most governments and undermine democracy to protect their short-term interests, while doing all they can to deny the science and resist efforts to control climate change and protect the environment.

The same driving force is behind the diplomatic failures of the climate change, biodiversity and pollution regimes. The same anger felt by individuals against the economic system that subjugates them is also reflected in the position of most Global South countries that continue to be victimised through their economic colonisation by high-income countries and their corporate emissaries that appropriate materials, energy, land and labour through traded goods while depressing their prices and draining the South of its productive capacities. For many leaders in the Global South, any mention of the environment, planetary concerns, halting fossil fuel or mineral extraction, saving biodiversity or strengthening global governance just seems like a cover-up to prevent them from developing like the Global North.

It is thus the economic system with its profound injustices that is behind the fragmentation and growing conflict both within and between countries. Attempts to improve the institutions of governance or to alleviate other symptoms of this problem are bound to fail as long as such injustice continues. Indeed, complex systems science that describes how systems evolve shows that increasing inequality is a sign of a system on the way to chaos and catastrophic collapse.

What is encouraging is to also discover forces of integration. Leading scientists researching these issues are coming to conclusions close to the values of the Bahá’í Faith. In December 2024, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) approved its Transformative Change Assessment (https://iefworld.org/IPBEStransformative) showing that transformative change requires fundamental system-wide shifts in views – ways of thinking, knowing and seeing; structures – ways of organizing, regulating and governing; and practices – ways of doing, behaving and relating. It defines the drivers of environmental destruction as the disconnection of people from nature and their domination over nature and other people; the inequitable concentration of power and wealth; and the prioritization of short-term individual and material gains. The report identifies four principles to guide deliberate transformative change: equity and justice; pluralism and inclusion; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and adaptive learning and action. These are so close to Bahá’í principles, yet come from a scientific body.

The recent review of post-growth, the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries (https://iefworld.org/post-growth2025), shows that the transformation of the economic system is possible by creating alternative provisioning systems (both infrastructure and technology; and markets, governments and culture), and applying distributional dynamics to radically change current relationships between resource use and human wellbeing. Increasing beneficial provisioning factors like public services, income equality, and democratic quality, and reducing detrimental factors like economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence, will meet human needs at much lower levels of energy use.

Adam Day, in his deeply-reflective book on complex systems science for adaptive global governance, shows that it is necessary to change the underlying rules to create a cascading effect across the system. Collective behaviour change results from an emergent property of the system, not top-down control, but we can try to exert influence or affect the underlying pattern, since relationships drive change. Change has to fit across different scales with multilevel adaptive governance. He emphasises how rules and constraints on behaviour should shape how actors relate to each other, including collective actions to manage common resources.

At the local community level, he suggests bottom-up initiatives to empower communities to address conflict dynamics themselves. This includes conflict prevention by addressing the deeper causes of conflict such as ethnic divisions, inequality, poverty, and unfair access to resources. He cites the Earth4All group that has demonstrated that addressing poverty and global inequality would do more for the green transition than almost any other set of actions.

In environmental governance, he calls for orchestration by UNEP as a conductor to set a common direction across all the environmental actors, just as I have proposed. There should be a right to truth, to scientific information about issues that matter to our collective security and welfare. Our collective safety requires a common, empirically-founded understanding of risks.

For global security, governance needs to disrupt the endless opposition between countries, turning towards peace-positive activities or new incentives supporting non-violent actors or processes, disrupting bad information loops and misperceptions with processes that generate solid information that builds trust, and making small changes to entangle peace efforts in the root structures of society. This should lead to deliberative and designed transformative global governance with some kind of world government to address catastrophic and existential challenges while respecting the needs of future generations, with radical, systemic shifts in deeply held values and beliefs, patterns of social behaviour, and multilevel governance and management regimes, realigning our worldview. All this seems so close to the present efforts of the Bahá’í community around the world to transform society from the bottom up at the community level, with unity in diversity. We truly have reasons to hope despite the headlines.