Helping Local Innovation Ecosystems to Become Custodians of Global Sustainability

Global ecological sustainability requires urgent attention. Yet, it seems unlikely that we will have an effective global resource governance system in place quickly enough. Could local communities rise to the occasion and start taking care of global sustainability? We know from research on collective action that this will not be easy, since competing local interests easily obstruct the governance of global commons. However, recent advances in networking and learning theories suggest that local communities can learn to rise to the occasion. This requires that the locals learn to look at the whole instead of the particular, to jump from one-loop learning to double-loop learning, and to engage in open rather than closed dialogues. We engaged in action research to study such learning processes in the Keilaniemi-Otaniemi-Tapiola area in Espoo, Finland.