The 21st Century, however, presents us with a new, harsh and unpredictable reality. The righteous promises of development based in limitless economic growth have given way to a landscape of social inequality, financial unease and stretching of ecological limits as never before. Regions like the Global South seem increasingly unwilling to continue internalizing the evils and externalizing the benefits of the current model of development; it is increasingly evident that investing blind hope in new technologies as a manner in which to solve these challenges, without first correcting the regimes of accumulation, will lead us to an even more profound inequality.

In spite of everything, the good news is that this challenge generates the ideal conditions in which to confront these paradoxes, which have become normalized in our current world system. And it is in facing this pressing challenge, which is no small feat, that the Common Action Forum proposes to inaugurate its events in Mexico: we are encouraged by the new political ethos of reconciliation and innovation that pervades the country, which makes it an unparalleled laboratory, with potential to inspire not simply the whole region, but also the world.

Problems such as poverty, which affects half of humanity, or the global warming that affects us all, are only part of a dystopian reality that no longer allows us the luxury of time for local utopias. Citizenship and the intellectual, political and economic elites must invariably obtain a new regenerative heterotopia. This means going beyond reformism and changing conceptually how we think, act and exist. Reconceptualizing a new path to development and beginning its implementation is a mission that awaits us in the coming years. It’s time to usher in a new era.

Accelerated transformations in the past decades have brought with them profound challenges in understanding the world’s entities and the laws that govern them. Within this there is a difficulty in administering our shared commons, which would allow us to solve the present’s precarities and correct our paths to the future. While massive extinction of animals and plants occur and natural resources are contaminated at unprecedented speeds, technology becomes hybridized and hyperlinks society. The concept of the cloud essentially becomes a more comprehensible virtual sphere than the phenomenon of water condensation in the atmosphere.

This session lends itself to identifying a new state of the world, in which the natural, the human and the technological are more interconnected than ever, to explore principles of governance that maximize the potential of these new formulations to reverse trends of transforming the marginalized into the permanently excluded.

Value is created, extracted and destroyed. Historically, traditional economists have attributed an overstated influence to companies in the creation of wealth, while minimizing the contribution of the state or the worker. The real nature of the theory of value is quite different: the creation of wealth is a complex process of co-creation and co-participation. The current manifestation of globalization is at a crossroads: there is a choice between whether to distribute wealth or to extract and circulate it through flows that are far from transparent.

Capital flight is a threat that endangers the domestication of what has become a savage globalization, that of a capitalist system fed by an unbridled financial economy. The regulation of and fight against capital flight, offshore companies and tax havens is a necessary condition, but not enough, to draw closer to an economy of hope.

According to the famed Platonic allegory of the Cave, contact with a projected reality limits and obscures the complexity of reality itself. What if we conceptualized of the Cave as our current perception of the world, governed almost exclusively by an economic dimension? Would the GDP, that unit of measurement so repeatedly mentioned in the news, not then symbolize the referential projection in this dimension? Would it not embody the tension between the sensible and intelligible worlds at the zenith of the so-called «Information and Knowledge Society»?

Based on the lessons learned precisely on the margins of this society, we have discovered that growth becomes a paradox when the planet approaches the point of demographic saturation and common resources are at risk of collapse, overexploited by barely or non-sustainable lifestyles. It was not so long ago that the promise of social progress, the true indicator of collective benefit, proved a disappointment and was replaced by the debacle of a growth oriented towards division. Now, more than ever, we need to allow social progress the transformative protagonism it deserves.

The absence of immediate global strategies to address the climate crisis hast the potential for incalculable impact, and we must look beyond Paris. For almost a decade, the possibility of a Green New Deal has been gaining momentum among progressive actors, serving as a common agenda for international political platforms. The idea appears simple: to end austerity, invest locally, restore social welfare and found a sustainable economy based in resources and technologies that do not harm the environment.

But can the most vulnerable countries afford to adopt this vision? Is it compatible with the accelerated and extricative digital transformation of developed countries? No matter which version of the Green New Deal we look at, there always seems to be a reproduction of colonialist and North-Atlantic tendency amidst an era of transnationalization, with no consideration for the future vision of the Global South. This is where the imbalance driving this unequal world is lived and suffered, but it is also where the possibility for a radical change in the system lies, and where new leaderships, voices and ideas must emerge; they must hold the relevant actors accountable in taking action regarding the current climate catastrophe, to ensure a prosperous future for all.