Foundational inquiries

At Foundations Earth, we nurture the capacities and capabilities needed for inclusive and effective planetary-scale governance - and we do this through our foundational inquiries.

    • To help reflect the entangled roots of the problems that we currently face on ontological, epistemological and methodological levels.

    • To offer design provocations to innovators, activists and funders who want to work together.

    • To offer scope to find coherence among a plurality of place- and community-based governances.

We approach our inquiries with a commitment to being inclusive, relational, connected, generative, multi-generational and in-service - and we embrace the deep personal, collective and institutional transformations required along the way.

We are constantly seeking to build on these inquiries and we welcome feedback and participation; please get in touch to share your thoughts or explore collaborations with us.

A note on care

We recognise that engaging with this work can often feel overwhelming - this is OK. Holding uncertainty and complexity amidst the dire challenges facing the planet and its inhabitants is not easy, and nor should it be.

We try to approach this work with care and a commitment to be alongside people in their journeys, both at an intellectual and embodied level. We do not hold ‘the answers’ (spoiler: no one does), but together we can hope to ask better questions and co-create better responses.

Our foundational inquiries, into new ways of…

Being

Knowing

Doing

Being

How can we create the conditions to practise new or since-forgotten ways of being that hold uncertainty and complexity, challenge dominant understandings of separability and human exceptionalism, and continuously move us towards new systems and paradigms?

  • Many of us have few opportunities to practise alternative ways of living outside of our dominant systems and paradigms.

    We believe that to address the roots of our planetary-scale problems, we need more opportunities to live in and through these alternatives. This involves exploring new ways of being and relating - not only to each other and the other-than-human world, but also to uncertainty and complexity - that respond to notions of separability and human exceptionalism.

Knowing

How can we create, maintain and evolve systems of learning that improve our capacity to respond to planetary-scale problems, while being proportionately accountable to those affected?

  • Our capacity to evaluate and respond to planetary-scale problems is limited by narrow understandings of knowledge, learning and intelligence.

    We believe that to make wise decisions, we need to be able to access, harvest, analyse and synthesise data at a planetary scale.

Doing

How can we create and make accessible systems of governance that enable people to participate in response-making processes for the issues that they care about and which affect their lives, while ensuring sufficient coherence to interoperate at a planetary scale?

  • Our current systems of governance do not enable us to participate equitably in the response- and decision-making processes that affect our lives, nor do they generate inclusive and effective outcomes at a planetary scale.

    We believe that enabling equitable participation in governance systems is a prerequisite for improving outcomes for the people and places affected, and that such processes must interconnect with multiple governances at different scales.

What next?

We recognise that embracing new, complex and uncertain information can often feel overwhelming, and would like to offer some potential pathways for moving through and beyond this state.

While we do not have ‘the answers’, we do have ideas about how we can increase our capacity to hold complexity and uncertainty, and co-create better responses to the problems that we face. 

    • Experiences that support people in making sense of the entangled roots of our planetary-scale problems, and move us towards alternative futures - contact us to find out if there is an experience happening near you.

    • Convenings that bring together people and organisations actively working on different pieces of the puzzle to build relationships and co-create new responses - reach out if you would like to get involved in transboundary collaboration.

    • Generative journalism that invites explorations into the possibilities emerging from within and around us - explore our blog, or express your interest here in being interviewed, or even trained how to interview others.