Disconnection and sustainability: the challenge of listening to everyone to achieve a common agenda

The Protection Agenda for the Maned Wolf, the largest canid in South America and an endangered species, forced us to rethink income generation for poor farmers in Brazil . It was 1991, and I was learning from my father how to implement sustainability projects with communities in the remote forests of Torreões, a municipality 200 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro.

Although we shared the Guará Agenda, public administrations, NGOs, and universities didn't get close enough to the field when designing and implementing their protection strategies. The contact they established with farmers—key stakeholders in protecting the wolf—was insufficient. As a result, we were unable to convince them to collaborate with the wolf agenda.

This was my first experience with the Ivory Tower phenomenon: the disconnect between those who design agendas and those who live the challenges to be solved. Back then, at 16 years old and a wolf lover, I was disconcerted that farmers, whose knowledge I admired, didn't collaborate with environmentalists, whom I respected for their commitment to nature. I never would have imagined that, years later, I would continue to see this same phenomenon undermining sustainability projects and agendas within the framework of Europe 2030.

Participatory agendas as drivers of collaboration

The 2030 Agenda , with its 17 goals and 169 targets, is designed to enable the collaboration necessary for a sustainable future. Agendas are intersubjective realities, agreed upon between groups, organizations, and individuals. They are narratives that align imaginations and perceptions, communicating the agreed-upon common purpose, underpinning it, and reminding us of it. But most importantly, agendas are a key pillar for enabling collaboration.

According to the United Nations, the 2030 Agenda surpasses its predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals. Above all, because it was conceived in a more participatory manner, involving communities facing social exclusion, such as favelas, young people, and farmers. But has the Ivory Tower phenomenon been managed?

In communities, we constantly deal with raw emotions in a way that we tend to ignore when we carry out proposals designed in formal contexts.

These communities experience firsthand the challenges facing a sustainable future: poverty, access to education, emancipation, and food production in a "free" global market and a changing climate. Therefore, their direct participation is a fundamental pillar.

However, as American sociologist Sherry Arnstein , who popularized the phrase "ladder of citizen participation," points out, true participation implies sharing power, which requires rapprochement. Often, as was the case in Guará in 1991, the 2030 Agenda and its sustainability projects are designed and implemented without community involvement.

Furthermore, the entities that create and promote 2030 and its sustainability projects tend to view communities as simply another stakeholder, remaining distant from the field. They provide training under this misconception, leading to ineffective projects and negative impacts. They fail to consider that, unlike formal actors (such as companies or NGOs), community representatives (if they exist) are typically unpaid and lack strategically aligned agendas or arguments. They face firsthand urgent subsistence challenges and disparate hierarchical systems, such as drug trafficking, as is the case in favelas . Communities constantly grapple with raw emotions in a way that we tend to ignore when we deliver proposals designed in formal settings. In business terms, these entities' customer focus is severely lacking.

Consequently, this lack of empathy and orientation toward the people in the communities aligns imaginations and perceptions. Collaboration is not enabled, and feelings of inadequacy, frustration, anger, or fear often surface among people because their knowledge is not considered in projects designed to improve their lives. Ultimately, they become disconnected, disengaged, and distrustful of the 2030 Agenda and sustainability projects. They may even break with organizations that champion the 2030 Agenda and support its detractors , such as some political parties that promote pre-Enlightenment, illusory patriotic, religious, and anti-science discourses.

An agenda that is distant from the field can contribute to conspiracy theories

After the Torreões farmers, I continued working in economically poor areas of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, guiding multinational clients through their sustainability and entrepreneurial projects. Valuing and admiring the informal knowledge of communities on the ground were pillars of differentiation.

I always ask about agendas related to projects. Since the launch of the 2030 Agenda, in numerous assessments I conducted in more than 800 interviews, 78% of respondents are unaware of what sustainability is. Of those who are aware of it, 93% perceive it as something alien to their realities, and 95% are unaware of the 2030 Agenda. Of that 5% who are aware of it, nine out of 10 perceive it as something distant, typical of politicians, companies, and universities. Very similarly, the Havas Institute concludes, based on more than 395,000 interviews worldwide, that society lacks trust in sustainability .

For a sustainable future, we need a shared project agenda as humanity. We need the ability to stop the cacophonous maelstrom of thoughts and understand the context more rigorously.

This distancing from people contributes to the growing popularity of the idea that powerful forces with hidden agendas are plotting and manipulating Agenda 2030. While this can happen with any agenda, it increases the perception that there is an organized and coordinated globalization plan, disguised as Agenda 2030, to seize power. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is unlikely that any specific group exists capable of coordinating our chaotic and unprecedented game board. In the last five years, a complex and rapidly changing global disorder has erupted. Furthermore, figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, paradoxically, have ended up exposing the lack of authenticity of organizations that championed the 2030 Agenda and are rapidly retreating in the face of political change in the US. All of this is extremely volatile, artificially "intelligent," unpredictable, and unstable; difficult to organize and difficult to master by a few minds or organizations.

The traditional elite, which conspiracy theorists claim manipulates the 2030 Agenda, is progressively losing its identity. It is fractured, polarized, frustrated, and fearful. New elites, counter-elites, and anti-elites are coming to power, including algorithmic elites that generate knowledge for humans who adopt it without understanding it. In times of immediacy, simplistic theories and conspiracy agendas gain ground across all political spectrums . Members of society, in need of identity, are divided under personalist agendas of "ists" and "isms," constructing identities based on barriers of rage and division while power is concentrated. All this at a time when we still lack the language to define the current context. For example, neoliberals like Trump and Musk are now interventionist and anti-globalization. The disorder is such that we lack the language to describe it. You can imagine the capacity required to control it. And what will happen when we no longer know if the agenda narratives are created by humans?

In this unprecedented chaos, increasingly incomprehensible to organic intelligence, the struggle for power becomes amorphous and diffuse. The ability to think collectively and collaborate fades. Distancing from the terrain, from agendas that may be fundamental, can foster " me first " agendas, which gain popularity like in war messes.

For a sustainable future, we need a shared project agenda as humanity. We need the ability to stop the cacophonous vortex of thoughts, understand the context more rigorously, respect the knowledge of "the other," and listen and converse, even when we disagree. This way, we are better able to collaborate, especially with people who are experiencing the challenges of a more authentic sustainability. in their skins. The distance between people paves the way for extremism. The better off we all are, the better off each of us can be.