Workshop: Sustainable peace and systems thinking
The recent United Nation Secretary General’s report on sustaining peace speaks to an urgent crisis of complexity in global affairs, where a wide assortment of nonstate actors wields more political power than ever before. In response, policymakers are calling for more holistic or systemic approaches to peace and development. However, these responses often only give lip service to such approaches, with very little changed in terms of how actors change the way they engage in “the system”. The dominance of projectized approaches and organization silos means that while there may be a growing recognition of the need for a systems approach, very little is done to translate this recognition into action. In an effort to reflect on these challenges as a network – and also to get an understanding of practical tools and experiences relating to the application of systems thinking to peacebuilding – the network will host a working lunch on Tuesday 3rd of September. The workshop will be led by Pedro Portela, a systems-thinking expert who has experience on working on systems thinking and peacebuilding in South Sudan and elsewhere.
- Target group: Practitioners who (wish to) work with systemic approaches to peace and development
- Time and Place: September 3rd, 2019, 11:00 to 13:00 at Room 6 Conference Room, Oxfam IBIS, Vesterbrogade 2b (Lunch will be provided)
- Sign up here...
Short Bio of facilitator Pedro Portela:
Pedro Portela was born in Porto, Portugal in 1980 and his childhood dream was to become an astronaut and explore the galaxy in a spaceship.
He graduated in mechanical engineering in Portugal where he soon became involved in projects with the European Space Agency (ESA). He was the managing partner of a space hardware company in Portugal for 6 years.
After leaving this company, he took up permaculture and twice visited one of the most radical sustainability schools in the world, Schumacher College in the United Kingdom taking courses on sustainability, complexity theory, systems theory and social collaboration technologies.
Today, he collaborates as an external consultant for the Humanity United Foundation, based in San Francisco, on Peacebuilding and Conflict transformation. He works to bring the hard science of complex systems thinking and its tools to the hands of systems changemakers and peacebuilders on the grassroots.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedro-portela-9a40423/
Medium: https://medium.com/instituto-de-inovação-sistémica
