Changing the game

In the preceding pages we chronicled the rise of a global civil society, based on the core values of human dignity and ecological sustainability, which exemplifies a new political movement, independent of traditional national and international institutions and typical of our Information Age.

To place the political discourse within a systemic and ecological perspective, we observe that the global civil society relies on a network of scholars, research institutes, think tanks, and centers of learning that largely operate outside our leading academic institutions, business organizations, and government agencies. There are dozens of these institutions of research and learning in all parts of the world today (see Box 18.1 for a short list). They all have their own websites and are interlinked with one another and with the more activist-oriented NGOs, for whom they provide the necessary intellectual resources. Their common characteristic is that they pursue their research and teaching within an explicit framework of shared core values.