Semester 2

Week 1

Blogs

Natural Resource Systems

Natural resources are the materials that exist in nature that have utility in human economies. They are distributed unevenly across the globe, with the resource type and quantity being determined by the geological processes within that context. There are several types of natural resources, but they can be divided into renewable and non-renewable. My research and the rest of this blog post focuses on non-renewable mineral resources.

This resource lottery has favored Africa as the most resource-rich continent on earth with 30% of global resources. These resources began to be extracted as technology industries grew in the 1970s and 1980s, which required a host of rare metals, including diamonds and cobalt from Sierra Leone.

As the technology industry has grown to unprecedented heights, nature has become a “standing reserve.” In the current natural resources system, ecological collapse is brought about as extractivism grows to reach impossible and exponentially increasing requirements. Environmental impacts arising from resource extraction include air pollution leading to global warming, poisoning of water systems through eutrophication, and habitat destruction while the human and non-human actors within extractive areas are subjected to toxic materials.

Despite the mass exploitation of raw materials in Africa, it has not seen the economic development of the nations it exports raw materials to. Richard Auty has referred to this as the “resource curse”, the counterintuitive phenomenon whereby endowment with natural resources has prevented economic growth. This is because natural resources and the hunger for them has led to “human rights abuses, authoritarianism, civil conflicts, and wars.  Furthermore, Western importers stubbornly refuse to pay the actual value for Africa’s natural resources, forcing its people to labor intensively for little reward. A striking example is Sierra Leone’s diamond industry, which exports $250 million of rough diamonds annually, which are then cut and sold for $6 billion..

However, extractivist states struggle to exit this system and seek alternative means of sustenance because they are caught within a neoliberal trap of free trade and conditional aid. In “An Aid Institutions Paradox?” Todd Moss and his colleagues conclude that international aid makes leaders accountable to the needs of the international community rather than their citizens. As their primary motivation is to keep money coming in so that they can survive in the neocolonial system, they are unable to break from it and must continue to allow unfettered extraction in their nation.

A Speculation Towards the Role of Transition Design in Natural Resource Systems

From the Berlin-Congo Conference until the present day, Africa has existed as the periphery whose resources have fueled Western development. Development theories brought to Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, have forced it into extractive obesity with aid tying the continent to the demands of the West. African leaders have become complicit in this extractive obesity, unable to reconcile the challenge of developing to provide for their people against securing the resilience of their ecosystems. This blog post will speculate on what Transition Design can offer to rectify these difficulties. 

Distributed Natural Resources Systems (DNRS)

Natural resource systems, the processes by which we extract and utilize natural resource opportunities, are a wicked problem of overwhelming scale. We extract 100 billion tonnes of raw materials annually when the world can only sustain half that. Mining this vast quantity of raw materials necessitates the exploitation of natural resource communities to the extent that they have become sacrifice zones. The people and communities within them are regarded as disposable to feed our uncontainable consumerism.

“Distributed systems operate on the basis of decentralized elements that become mutually linked to wider networks.” Reconciling the contemporary natural resource system into a DNRS will end extractive obesity by leveraging “communication networks, small-scale technologies, and distributed consumption and production systems,” with the aim of increasing the proximity between producers and the consumers. This heightened visibility will inspire the creation of interventions that lessen the extraction burden on sacrifice zones and changing the ways that natural resource economies function.

For those who have access to surplus resources in contemporary natural resource systems, welfare can be enhanced while also lessening the resources required through commoning, whereby resources are publicly owned and allocated within nested systems of mutual aid. The Nieuwland project in Amsterdam set a fascinating precedent of energy commoning, in which shared living spaces were created, and members of the collective were allocated resources and energy as required. Such living methods hold the keys for degrowth, as detailed in the below section, through the democratization of natural resources.

Meanwhile, in areas with insufficient resources, the priority of reformulated DNRS should be to prioritize the localities’ needs by reducing the exploitation of their resources, giving them the freedom to sustain themselves through in situ utilization. Experimenting with post-extractivism may allow localities to utilize their resources sustainably, and encouraging entrepreneurial endeavors may activate economic opportunities. Activating the power of the local will be particularly challenging in Africa, a continent from which design movements seldom emerge. In the subaltern world, substantial movements often emerge from a South American context. Buen Vivir is a key example of this. So therefore, designers must consider how African indigenous knowledge can be leveraged to form movements for a DNRS within an African context.

Transitions like that required to create a pan-African unity behind a post-extractivist movement are not designed but are emergent, as is displayed through Escobar’s concept of “crisis and transitions.” Escobar argues that after a time of crisis, populations become more malleable to the next regime in their hunt for stability. There are precedent cases of transitional periods successfully occurring after African crises, as was seen after the Rwandan Genocide. The president was able to leverage the transitional “readiness” of the population for “the construction of six green built secondary cities and the modernization of the capital.” Therefore, can mindsets and postures that display “readiness” for transition be found as a result of the growing crisis in Africa’s natural resource systems.

Reformed DNRS are not only inward-looking but will also benefit from connecting the local to the global. Sustainable models can be created that center economic benefits for localities and allow them to be visible worldwide. The answer to finding this connection may lie in a blueprint that combines degrowth with post-development theories, as is tackled below.

Degrowth and the Challenge of Post-Development in African Nations

Alternative solutions to this wicked problem have emerged from the Global North and the Global South: degrowth and post-development. These concepts currently exist independently of each other and, in their current form, cannot be taken as rectification of DNRS.

Degrowth has emerged in the West as a challenge to the idea that renewable energy alone will be enough to prevent environmental collapse. It argues that as the economy grows, the energy use required will grow too fast for renewable energy to be introduced before ecological collapse.

Degrowth, therefore, challenges “economic growth as the number-one arbiter of what societies do” by proposing a period of “economic contradiction or downscaling” in the West to bring our consumption in line with the rest of the world.

Degrowth economists such as Serge la Touche and Giorgios Kallis haveproposed thatabandoning GDP as a metric of success will not lead to a decline in welfare, allowing oureconomies to be recentered around human needs.14Should these inalienable needs be de-commodified, they could be satisfied with far less capital.This idea also has decolonizing potential as it would free Global South sacrifice zones from thenecessity to extract natural resources at unsustainable rates as the Western industries theyfeed would no longer require ever-increasing yields.

However, the challenges felt by African societies has led degrowth to be unsuitable for thatcontext. The means to sustain life are abundant in the Global North, but a pragmatic roadblockis hit in the Global South. African leaders must ask, how can we secure the welfare of ourpeople without bringing ecological collapse to our ecosystems?

Post-development has emerged to answer this question, responding to development theoriesthat colonizers forced upon the continent in the mid-20th century. It argues that developmentisa “ruin in the intellectual landscape” and “alternative to development” are more appropriate forthe Global South.15These development theories brought Africa into the Western idea thatwelfare can be secured by maximizing economic growth. A “crisis of aspiration” has emergedfrom development theory, whereby African leaders consider themselves to have failed if they donot bring their economies closer to Western productivity levels. In many cases, they have givenfree rein to trans-national mega-corporations who extract their country’s resourcesunsustainably with tainted promises of providing jobs and economic progress.

Post-development can potentially end this self-destructive behavior by ending theconceptualization of the West as advanced and the South as backward. Freed from Westernhegemonic ideas of growth, global south communities can set their own agenda fordevelopment, able to prioritize individual wellbeing and ecological resilience.

These ideas undoubtedly can contribute to the conclusion ofextractive obesity and theecological destruction that comes as a result in their respective areas. However, unless theycan be brought together to work in conjunction, global natural resource systems will not bereformed. As my research progresses, I must search for the connection between degrowth andpost-development and ask whether interactions with natural resources can act as a crucialtouchpoint.

To speculate on what this blueprint for dismantling the “architecture of economism” may looklike, it could allow the global South to take ownership of their natural resource opportunities andsustain themselves through the in situ utilization of these resources. Meanwhile, a period ofglobal “degrowth”-particularly in the north-would end the consumptivepractices driving theneo-colonial practices that push the entire planet to destruction.

Post-Extractivism

Such a blueprint could be the gateway to a post-extractivist utopia, as imagined by EduardoGudynas.16Post-extractivism could increase the proximity between sacrifice and privilege zonesby reducing the burden of extraction on Global South communities. Arturo Escobar summarizesthe role that Gudynas’ theory would have after the dismantling “economism”:

“The post-extractivism framework does not endorse a view of untouched nature, nor a ban on allmining or large-scale agriculture, but rather the significant transformation of these activities tominimize their environmental and cultural impact. It posits ahorizon with two main goals: zeropoverty and zero extinctions, to which we need to add, from a political ontology perspective,zero worlds destroyed.”

Therefore, to design a post-extractivist DNRS would mean asking two fundamental questionsthat the resource utilization infrastructure could be designed around. Firstly, will nature allowresource utilization in this specific place? Answering this question requires investigating whetherthe ecosystem is stable enough to remove resources from it. Having concluded it is possible todo so, considering the feasibility of extraction based on the practices available is required. Thisinvestigation must ask, will our mining practices significantly undermine the resilience of thisecosystem?

Transition Design andthe Ecologizing Technology in Natural Resource Systems

Simply generating frameworks for degrowth, post-development, and post-extractivism isinsufficient to heal the wicked problem of extractive obesity, generating systems-level change.Ivan Illich argues that we should seek transitions from selfish and destructive industrialcapitalism to convivial societies driven by mutualism.

While a DNRS must center around Illich’s convivial societies, designers cannot ignore the factthat businessis deeply embedded within the current system, and will be near impossible todisplace. Business forms an ever-present force in our everyday lives that drivesoverconsumption and surplus in the name of progress, growth, and profiteering.

Therefore, if aDNRS will require some elements of the contemporary capitalist model for it tobe possible, can business be altered to focus on ecological resilience to the same or a greaterextent than the profit motive?Altering the nature of business will not be easy,but it is necessarybecause it has formed a pillar that, as Thomas Berry argues, keeps “the story in place frombeing replaced.”19Therefore, Transition Designers must ask, how can we reorientateentrepreneurs’ and business’ goals and solve the business question for Transition Design? Andhow can we present social innovation as a legitimate form of entrepreneurship?

Current Transition Design techniques that are centered around mapping stakeholder relations,identifying tensions, and proposing interventionsthat can heal the tensions may be insufficientfor natural resource systems. Natural resources supply chains are complicated and fractal in theextreme, built upon layer after layer of sub-contractors, each of whom exploit the sub-contractorbelow them tomaximize profits.20Reconciling this near untraceable supply chain exploitationwill require Transition Design to provide interventions that can persuade all actors within it tomove away from the profit motive, and cease their exploitation.

Whether thisis even possible within Pope Francis’ conceptualization of a “technocraticparadigm” is questionable. Pope Francis observes how this contemporary paradigm is soembedded in society that our ability to act and change has faded as we are controlled by new“blind forces of the unconscious, of immediate needs, or self-interest, and of violence.”

Francis observes that technology is here to stay, and assuming this is the case, is it possible torepurpose and reimagine this innovation? Is it possible to shift the goals of business’technological progress to enhance “human dignity,” “social justice,” protect the “intrinsic value ofnon-humans ( biocentrism),” and ecological sustainment? An accomplishment of this task willbegin to turn the tides of our current landscape. Yet, these goals may be contradictory totechnology itself. Perhaps with the process, development, and use of modern technology, therelies fundamental mechanistic and reductionist tendencies that decontextualize everything ittouches for the sakeof progress and optimization? And perhaps the issue is furthered still if weconsider that the issue is not with technology itself, but with a society that has embedded thesewicked problems within it. Therefore, can we ever imagine technology as somethingthat can beecologized, or must this happen within wider systems change?

Precedents for the Ecologization of Business

Luckily, there are precedents of organizations that have created interventions to alter business’motivations and break the connectivetissue that holds exploitative stakeholder relationshipstogether. For example, B Corp has aimed to “make business a force for good” by guidingenterprises on how they may “alleviate poverty, preserve ecosystems, and build strong communities and institutions.” They provide resources that help businesses to measure theirimpact, measure their alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and getinvolved with community collective action.

A company that B Corp uses as their model business for ecologization is the clothing companyPatagonia Works, who they have awarded with a 151.4 “Overall B Impact Score.” This is 100points higher than the median business and 71 points higher than their boundary score for BCorp Certification. B Corp notes that Patagonia aims to “cause no unnecessary harm” byrecognizing that their activities are part of the environmental problem and therefore changingtheir business models accordingly. Patagonia also aims to “use business to protect nature,”therefore going significantly further than simply reducing harm.23A key example of this is their“Regenerative Organic” program which pushes back against industrial farming to prioritize“pasture-based animal welfare, fairness for farmers and workers, and robust requirements forsoil health.”

Moving forwards, my research will use cases like Patagonia Works and other B Corp certifiedcompanies to ask what counts as Transition Design for natural resources, business, andtechnology within the dynamic African context and for the natural resource space in Kono? Thisquestion will help designers to consider how Transition Design can account for aspects ofeveryday life such as business relations, sickness, and education. If Transition Design canoperate within these systems, it maybecome practical, not just theoretical.

Processes for Interventions in the Natural Resources Space

Framework 1

A roadmap for making natural resource systems sustainable on a local and global scale.	Begin a creative and interdisciplinary movement for a wave of natural resource systems reformation and interventions.	Resilient responses to the ongoing crisis continuum.
Action Plan Turning challenges within natural resource systems into opportunities for economic empowerment and welfare enhancement.	Action Strategy Combining degrowth and post-development as a new cultural project globally.	Systemic Intervention Program Developing resilience in DNRS through designs with intentionality.

Framework 2

Phase No. and Description	Approaches
1: Reframing: Past and Present	Mapping the Problem The History of Natural Resources research project is used to map the evolution of the wicked problem, and how natural resource epistemologies change over time.   Mapping Stakeholder Concerns The deployment of a pilot study in Kono that will engage with the indigenous people to gauge their thoughts on land and extractivism.   Developing visions of the Future Creating an experiential future for the Kono people, where they can experience their natural resource system reaching an even greater crisis point, and consider pathways for transition.   Backcasting to Create Transition Pathways Lorum ipsen[1]
2. Designing Interventions	Multi-Level Perspective Leveraging a reformed ecocentric cosmopolitan localism to engage stakeholders at all levels at the local level, while connecting them to global systems.   Domains of Everyday Life Applying transition design principles to the organizations and institutions that stakeholders are in constant contact with: TNCs, Government, healthcare, and education.   Max-Neef’s Theory of Needs Ensuring that the designed interventions follow Ezio Manzini’s SLOC framework, ensuring they enhance the wellbeing of the Kono people while connecting with other communities globally.   Social Practice Theory and Design for Behavioral Change Developing means to gauge and create readiness for transitions through facilitating mindset change.   Winterhouse Social Pathways Matrix Lorum Ipsen[2]    Linking and Amplifying Connecting with pre-existing land reclamation projects run by Resolve to enhance the work they do in creating alternative livelihoods to diamond mining in Kono.
3. Waiting and Observing	Slow Knowledge/Long Time Horizons/Patience Aiming to make small and meaningful impact rather than aiming for a single intervention that will facilitate systems change, with the hope that the small impacts will build in scale over time.   Design with Living Systems Principles Reacting to emergent changes amongst the Kono people, and designing interventions accordingly, not forcing interventions onto them.   Speculation vs Certainty Reacting pragmatically to developments and adjusting interventions accordingly, therefore ensuring that interventions can work in symbiosis with local communities and their ecosystems.

References

• Carrington, Damian (2020) “World’s Consumption of Materials Hits Record 100bn Tonnes a Year,” The Guardian, available online https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/worlds-consumption-of-materials-hits-record-100bn-tonnes-a-year, [accessed 02/11/2022.]
• Clay, Karen (2010) “Natural Resources and Economic Outcomes” in Economic Evolution and Revolutions in Historical Times, ed. by Paul Rhode, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Crawford, Kate (2018) “Anatomy of an AI System: The  Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources”, Anatomy of AI, available online https://anatomyof.ai/, [accessed 02/15/2022]
• Downey, Liam et al (2010) “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation”, Organ Environ, 23.
• Duruigbo, Emeka (2005) “The World Bank, Multinational Oil Corporations, and the Resource Curse in Africa”, U. Pa. J. Int’l Econ. L., 26, pp. 1-67.
• Escobar, Arturo (2017)  Designs for the Pluriverse : Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, Durham, N.C.
• Gudynas, E, (2011), “Transitions to post-extractivism: directions, options, areas of action”, Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America, Permanent Working Group on Latin America, pp. 165-188.
• Handby, Michael. (2015) “The Gospel of Creation and the Technocratic Paradigm: Reflections on a Central Teaching of Laudato Si.” Communio. 42. pp. 724-747.
• Hudani, Shakirah Esmail (2020) “The Green Masterplan: Crisis, State Transition and Urban Transformation in Post-Genocide Rwanda.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(4), pp. 673-690.
• Illich, Ivan. (2001) Tools for Conviviality. Marion Boyars.
• Irwin, Terry (2018) “The Emerging Transition Design Approach”. Design Research Society Conference, University of Limerick.
• Kallis, Giorgos (2011), In Defense of Degrowth: Opinions and Minifestos, Amsterdam: Elsevier.
• LaTouch, Serge (2004) “Why Less Should be so much more: Degrowth Economics”, Le Monde Diplomatique, pp. 1-5.
• Kinsella, William J. (2007) “Heidegger and Being at the Handford Reservation: Standing Reserve, Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory.” Environmental Communication, 1(2), pp. 194-217.
• Kossoff, Gideon (2019) “Cosmopolitan Localism: The Planetary Networking of Everyday Life in Place.” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación, 73, pp. 51-66.
• Lebert, Tom (2015) “Africa: A Continent of Wealth, A Continent of Poverty”, New Internationalist, Available online https://newint.org/blog/2015/06/24/africa-a-continent-of-wealth#:~:text=Their%20absence%20speaks%20volumes.,significant%20oil%20and%20gas%20reserves, [accessed 02/15/2022].
• Matthews, Sally (2004) “Post-development Theory and the Question of Alternatives: A View from Africa”, Third World Quarterly, 25-2, pp. 373-384.
• Moss, Todd et al (2005) “An Aid-Institutions Paradox? A Review Essay on Aid Dependency and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa”, The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, 11, pp. 1-26.
• “NieuwLand”, available online https://nieuwland.cc/, [accessed 02/15/2022]
• “Patagonia Works.” B Corporation. Available online https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/patagonia-inc/, [accessed 03/07/2022.]
• “Programs & Tools Overview,” B Corporation, available online
• https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/programs-and-tools, [last accessed 02/11/2022]
• “Why Regenerative Organic?” Patagonia Works, available online https://www.patagonia.com/regenerative-organic/, [accessed 03/07/2022.]

Wireframe

Constants

DNRS at a local and a global scale.

Overall Goals

(1) pragmatic solutions that prioritize localities’ needs and reduce exploitation in natural resource extraction. (2) Activate opportunities of sustainable models that center “economic” benefits for localities and engage in new ways of connecting the “local” to the “global.”(3) Experiment with alternative transition pathways to post-extractivism through speculative experiential futures.

Blog Theme

Course introduction: raising key framings and ideas that Transition Design raises for DNRS generally.

Natural resources have clear colonial connections.

Key Insights

• Degrowth and the Challenge of Post-Development in African Nations – Interesting friction between degrowth and post.
  • Degrowth needed in West, because the more you grow, the higher your energy demands are. Therefore changing how we gain energy isn’t enough.
    • Scaling down material economy because that is the main use of energy.
    • A fall in GDP doesn’t necessarily mean a fall in people’s welfare, but thinking it is justifies perpetual growth and extraction.
      • Abandon GDP as an objective, and refocus on what people actually need.
      • Scale down unnecessary and destructive industries.
      • Sharing necessary work more equitably.
      • Decomodify public needs, so that we need less private income to flourish.
    • Degrowth as decolonizing because it frees global south sacrifice zones from extraction.
  • Degrowth economies don’t work in the Global South, because a degree of development is required for their sustenance. .
  • A concept based on how the West is increasing their consumption and causing ecological collapse. They must work out a way to reduce their consumption to protect the environment.
  • Post-development created in response to the development ideas brought to the global south by the West in the 60s and 70s.
    • Development ideas have come to hinder the global south.
      • Aid and NGOs coming in to develop Africa.
    • Dilemma for African leaders is that they want to develop and industrialize, while at the same time reducing extraction and ecological collapse.
      • Real issue that challenges the global potential of degrowth.
  • Key Question – What can Fas bring that can connect degrowth and post-development?
    • Removing paternalism, development theory, aid etc.
    • How can the two theories touch each other through interacting with DNRS?

Key Questions for DNRS at a Local and a Global Level

• What counts as Transition Design in entrepreneurship/business?
  • Can there be ethical consumerism under capitalism?
    • When capitalism itself is the problem
  • How can entrepreneurship be reorientated?
  • What does it mean to take seriously the insights of Transition design in business/entrepreneurship work?
    • B Corp
    • La Patagonia
  • How does the state become an adversary for transition design?
    • 60% ish of mining lands owned by TNCs (check)
  • Finish with, what counts as Transition Design? What counts as TD for natural resources, business, and technology?

Week 2

Blogs

Wicked Problems in the Natural Resources Space at a Local and Global Level

In their 1973 article “Dilemmas in General Theory of Planning,” University of California scholars Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber created their “wicked problem” concept. They observed that science tended to deal with “tame” problems and ignore the “complex workings of open societal systems.” Transition design emerged to tackle these “unsolvable” problems by intervening in societal transitions. It leverages “wicked problems” to diagnose the complexity of issues within a space and map potential interventions that could form mitigation.

However, globally applying the “wicked problems” framework that emerged from a contemporary western landscape is insufficient as fundamental Western theories are rarely effective in non-Western contexts. In “Wicked Problems in Africa: A Systematic Literature Review,” Niskanen, Rask, and Raisio understand the “limitations of using the concept in a non-Western frame of reference.” They observe that articles on “wicked problems” in Africa constituted just 3% of the total, often because the issues described as “tame” when Rittel and Webber created “wicked problems” are of utmost seriousness in Africa.^[1] Examples include infrastructural problems, severely restricting people’s movement in Africa, and creating isolation between rural areas and population centers.

Furthermore, “wicked problems” challenge to “tame” problem solving is peculiar to a pertinent criticism of “technical problem-solving approaches” that were emergent in the United States during the 1970s. This criticism of “technical problem-solving approaches” was less at the forefront of public discourse outside of the West. Therefore, if the societal framing posited by Rittel and Webber holds little relevance in other contexts, it calls into question the ability of “wicked problems” to diagnose issues in the global south.

Do Non-Renewable Mineral Natural Resource Systems Qualify as a Wicked Problem?

Beyond this critique of “wicked problems,” it is worth considering if non-renewable mineral natural resource systems even fall within the boundaries of “wicked problems.” In “Transition Design as a Strategy for Addressing Urban Wicked Problems,” Irwin and Kossoff establish six critical facets of “wicked problems” that can be taken as criteria when establishing if something is a “wicked problem.” The following section will show how non-renewable mineral natural resource systems and the extraction of non-renewable resources fit these criteria.

Multi-scalar, Multi-Causal, and Interdependent “Wicked problems are “multi-scalar, multi-causal, and interdependent,” meaning that they exist from a local to a global level, are caused by an array of social, cultural, and political factors which are connected with other “wicked problems” as part of nested, interdependent systems. The multi-scalar nature of non-renewable mineral natural resource systems is explicit because there are many problems from a local level – ecological destruction, exploitation, sacrifice zones – to a global level (climate change, neocolonialism.) Moreover, problems of non-renewable mineral natural resource systems are multi-causal and connected to broader wicked problems. The most significant of these is Capitalism and the overconsumption that results. Embed within this economic globalization is extractive obesity and “social inequality and social exclusion.”

Self-Organizing

Kossoff and Irwin note that the essential component of “wicked problems” is “people.” They argue that society is constructed from the principles of “chaos and complexity theories,” and therefore, how it will respond to interventions is “self-directed,” “unpredictable,” and generates “emergent forms of behavior.”

We can find self-organizing behavior throughout non-renewable mineral natural resource systems, notably in acquiring mineral resources to construct electronic products, as can be seen from Phillips’ tens of thousands of contractors and sub-contractors within their untraceable supply chain. This unfathomable quantity of mining, sourcing, transportation, and manufacturing firms shows how when a technology company orders minerals, the non-renewable mineral natural resource systems self-organize to fulfill the requirements.

Multiple Stakeholders with Conflicting Agendas

Conflicting stakeholder relationships adds further complexity to “wicked problems,” with each stakeholder – human and non-human – holding different positionalities inside the problem and having alternative ideas of how they should solve the problem.

As is the case in non-renewable mineral natural resource systems, it is not guaranteed that all stakeholders will acknowledge there is a problem. It is prevalent in non-renewable mineral natural resource systems as it is common for a stakeholder to exploit another stakeholder. It took the leaking of the Panama Papers in 2016 for Kono’s primary mining firm Octea’s exploitation of the local community to be revealed. Discoveries that Octea owed $150 million in loans to Tiffany and Co. and Standard Chartered Bank led to investigations revealing that Octea had agreed to 5% profit sharing with the local community and 1% annual profit contribution to the community development fund return for tax breaks. The following blog post will go into more detail by mapping the stakeholders within non-renewable mineral natural resource systems, showing how cases like these have exacerbated wicked problems.

Moreover, the conflicting agendas of stakeholders are further complicated by the fact that they may have agendas that are not in their best interest. The global “crisis of perception,” which is used by Capra to refer to how most people and institutions “subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview” within “a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world,” has manifested in Africa through the “crisis of aspiration.” I have observed this amongst the Kono community that has emerged from development theory. This colonial influence has convinced many Kono’s that they must match Western hegemonic development even if it leads to a destruction of their traditional values, indigenous knowledge, and ecosystems.

Feedback Loops

“Wicked problems” are exacerbated by positive feedback loops, which amplify the effects of an intervention, and are sustained by negative feedback loops, which exist as barriers to resolutions. Kossoff and Irwin explain how difficult it is to remove negative feedback loops, stating,” the habits of a lifetime cannot be broken via a single financial incentive, so the potential for change is “damped down” by the feedback loop of entrenched, non-sustainable behavior and practices.”

Both positive and negative feedback loops are present throughout non-renewable mineral natural resource systems. A key node that prevents resolution is the tendency for the police to side with mining conglomerates, making it impossible for locals to challenge ecologically and socially destructive operations. Events such as those in Bumbuna in 2012, where police shot live ammunition at unarmed protesters leading to one woman’s death, are commonplace in non-renewable mineral natural resource systems sacrifice zones.

Another prevalent feedback loop that furthers the severity of sacrifice zones amongst extractivist populations is that of population growth and poverty, which Capra argues is a “self-amplifying feedback loop.” This is because almost every human actor consumes technologies that are “energy-intensive and fossil-fuel-based.” The more that population grows, the further resources are required to sustain their consumption. This leads to further extraction being required and then resource depletion. Once resources are depleted, extractivist may either expand their extractivist operations at the detriment of their local ecology and the wellbeing of indigenous people or accept reduced yields and the resultant financial insecurity.

Straddling Institutional, Disciplinary and Sectoral Boundaries

An important note for “wicked problems” to separate itself from other problem-solving approaches is its ability to cross disciplines, institutions, and areas of expertise. In non-renewable mineral natural resource systems, the “wicked problem” is economic (how the value of resources are shared), political (who gets to decide which resources are extracted), and cultural (how much overconsumption exacerbates the issue).

Manifesting in Place, Cultural, and Ecosystem-Specific Ways

We can find the same “wicked problem” in multiple contexts. However, how people experience the “wicked problem” will vary as the “wicked problem” will encounter others unique to that context. Kossoff and Irwin rightly use the example of water shortages as a “wicked problem” that manifests differently where there is also the “wicked problem” of gender inequalities. They note a unique character arising from the cultural expectation that women and girls will trek miles to gather the water.