Archive news: Global Futures 2030 Project

The 2030 Project on Global Prospects was jointly sponsored by the Orfalea Center and the United Nations University, Tokyo. The four-year project, chaired by Orfalea Center Fellow Richard Falk, considered future challenges given current trends, and tried to reflect on alternative scenarios projected to the year 2030. The project hopes to produce a publishable series of multi-disciplinary interpretations from different cultural perspectives, policy priorities, and empirical assessments.

This collaborative project enlisted outstanding scholars and thinkers who are representative of the world’s civilizations, including those of indigenous peoples, to offer diverse interpretations of what it is reasonable to expect and to hope for by 2030. The year 2030 was selected to strike a balance between being too preoccupied with immediate realities and looking so far into the future as to become detached from present realities.

A two-day meeting in New Delhi in 2009 focused on global issues that would be confronting the world in the next decades and for which transnational solutions would be sought. Research was presented by a dozen leading Indian intellectuals exploring future concerns over such issues as global climate change, the eroding confidence in the nation state, the rise of religious nationalism and transnationalism, and the capacity of international organizations such as the UN to deal with these and other new crises. The meetings were held in tandem with a conference co-sponsored by the Orfalea Center on “Social Development and the Human Civilization in the 21st Century.” A follow up workshop in Delhi was held in September 2010. The contributions to the “2030 Project” are being edited into a book manuscript for publishers in India and the US.

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Ben Smith
Ben Smith
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