By Yuet Mee Ho-Nambiar
We often hear about the technological marvels that will solve our sustainability challenges – renewable energy, advanced waste management, and sustainable agriculture. While these are essential, the most significant sustainability challenges are not technical; they are rooted in leadership, governance, and collaboration.
Effective leadership is crucial for advancing sustainability initiatives. Visionary leaders who can inspire and mobilise people, resources, and organisations toward common goals are essential; leaders who cultivate culture of sustainability within their organisations and communities, prioritising long-term benefits over short-term gains; leaders who are adaptable, innovative, and willing to take calculated risks to implement sustainable practices.
Robust governance is another critical factor. Sustainable development requires policies, regulations, and frameworks that support environmental, social, and economic objectives. Good governance ensures accountability, transparency, and inclusiveness in decision-making processes. This involves creating and enforcing laws and policies that promote sustainability and ensuring that institutions are equipped to manage and monitor these policies effectively.
Collaboration is perhaps the most challenging yet critical aspect. Sustainability is a global issue that transcends borders, sectors, and disciplines. It requires collective action and partnerships between governments, businesses, non-governmental organisations, and communities. This also involves sharing knowledge, resources, and best practices, as well as building trust and aligning interests among diverse stakeholders.
These challenges are deeply interconnected. Weak leadership can undermine effective governance, while poor governance can hinder collaborative efforts. Without collaboration, even the most innovative technologies may fail to deliver meaningful impact.
We are aware that if we want transformative change, our mental models need to shift. Our current collective mental model, indicated by the prevailing economic model embraced across the world, is often characterised by scarcity and competition for the fittest to survive. (contrast this with Mahatma Gandhi’s wisdom reminds us that the Earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed.) Crucially, it is also overwhelmingly clear that there is a huge deficit of trust in institutions by their people.
The way we interact with each other is both, a manifestation of, and directly impacts our ability to lead, govern, and collaborate effectively. The old ways of interacting—rooted in division, inequality, and disunity— which have brought us to the state of the world today, are no longer sufficient.
Lest we forget, institutions are composed of individuals with their own biases and beliefs. Cultivating personal understanding such as moving away from a “they and them” mentality towards a “we and us” mindset, contributes towards building just and unified communities and institutions. After all, individual and societal development are inextricably linked.
As humanity faces complex global challenges, from environmental crises to social inequalities, the need for a new understanding and reconfiguration of our relationships between individuals, communities, and societal institutions, which impacts the way we lead, govern, and collaborate, becomes even more critical.
So this question remains: What kind of mental model help us to lead, and govern and collaborate more harmoniously?
Guided by personal ethics of ‘do more good’, Yuet Mee Ho-Nambiar has a long involvement with sustainability and community building activities. Belief in the oneness of humanity and the nobility of man underpins her interest in matters relating to unity and social cohesion of communities, while her background in a finance-related profession focuses her interest to the area of inclusive economics and development.
The views expressed here are that of the writer’s and not necessarily that of Weekly Echo’s.