MAHB Global

• Oslo Sustainability Summit – 2011: The Age of Stupid or the Age of Wisdom? 

Monday 23 May, 2011
The Old Ceremonial Hall, UiO, Downtown Oslo

The ambition of The Oslo Sustainability Summit is to create a "mini-Davos" on sustainable future: a forum, where international researchers, experts and students can debate innovative solutions to the current environmental and social crisis. The Summit, which is a joint venture of the University of Oslo and BI Norwegian Business School, comprises The Arne Naess Symposium and the Business and Governance Forum.

The overarching theme of the 2011 summit has been inspired by the famous apocalyptic film, The Age of Stupid - a futuristic documentary which points to the tension between stupidity and wisdom in human actions. Modern Western cultures have made a fetish of specialized knowledge at the expense of wisdom. We ask what is wisdom in culture, business and governance?  And does wisdom hold an underestimated adaptation potential for addressing the sustainability crisis?

• Sustainability Workshop: Present MAHB Developments and Future Preparations.

This workshop was held on December 13-14, 2010, at Stanford University, organized by CIES/ISCTE, MAHB Portugal, and MAHB Stanford.

A researcher from CIES/ISCTE, Tom R. Burns participated with researchers from MAHB Stanford as well as other researchers. The workshop started off with a discussion of Robert Horn’s work with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), developing new ways of addressing questions such as:

• How shall the business community and other key societal agents think together about the responsibility for creating and maintaining a sustainable world by 2050?  
• What would such a world look like and be accomplished?  
• How will business and other agents have to change in order to prosper in a different, but possibly economically abundant world?  

The 2^nd day of the Workshop was devoted to discussing details of future coordination and planning between the International Human Dimensions Programme for Sustainability (IHDP/UN) and the international MAHB network (with nodes in Africa, China, Brazil, the USA, and Europe). See here the agenda of the Workshop

• Workshop on the societal responses to climate change.

On November 4-5, 2010, researchers from the Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade dos Açores, from the Centro de Investigação e Estudos em Sociologia do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, from the network Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior / Stanford University, and from the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo, meet together  to discuss the societal responses to climate change, namely the related challenges in the Azores, other Iberian islands, and Nordic islands. See here the agenda of the Workshop.

• Workshop on Governance. The Theory and Practice of Governance: An International Comparative Perspective.

This workshop was held on November 27, 2010 at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Science in Sweden.

Researchers from the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Science, Sweden, from the Centro de Investigação e Estudos em Sociologia do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, from the network Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior / Stanford University, and from the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo will meet together to discuss a book project on the theory and practice of governance. See here the agenda of this workshop.