Grundlagen sozial-ökologischer Transformationen: Gesellschaftsvertrag, Global Governance und die Bedeutung der Zeit

A decade ago, the main report of the German Advisory Council to the Federal Government on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) was published. It was an attempt to take stock in 2011. It provided impetus and orientation nationally and internationally. The WBGU went all out: the urgency of change aimed at sustainable development was to be shown in the interplay of politics, economy, society and nature. The central message was a "social contract for a Great Transformation" that had to be implemented by 2021. How is the report to be assessed today? We will summarize the positions of the WGBU, cite its merits and comment on them constructively and critically. Our approach is based on five main themes of the report: the global social contract, global governance using the example of the Paris Climate Agreement, acceptance of those involved and affected, the urgency of economic, political and social action, the problem of time, and finally the concept of the Great Transformation, originally coined by Karl Polanyi in his controversial book of the same name (1941/44). In our critique, we develop proposals for a constructive further thinking of what is laid out in the WBGU report but has not been thought through to the end. Our focus is particularly on the issues of dealing with time and the concept of the Great Transformation. In doing so, we will also address the significance of technical progress, innovation and ignorance. The title of the report uses the term "Great Transformation" as a leitmotif. In the WBGU's parlance, this term is intended to address the far-reaching changes that a shaping state, with the participation of the global citizenry, would have to undertake in order to overcome the ecological crisis in the coming decades. We will show that the term Great Transformation is misleading in this context. In our conclusion, we argue that different actors in different places have worked at different speeds not on a Great Transformation, but on a multitude of socio-ecological transformation processes. The effectiveness of such movements is increasing up to the present and is even accelerating, with no end in sight. Hope can be drawn from this.

Manstetten, Reiner, Andreas Kuhlmann, Malte Faber und Marc Frick (2021), Grundlagen sozial-ökologischer Transformationen: Gesellschaftsvertrag, Global Governance und die Bedeutung der Zeit, ZEW Discussion Paper Nr. 21-034, Mannheim.