Preventing International Crises through Consensus Projects

This article presents a theoretical description highlighting how consensus can constructed to avoid international crises. Perspectives onto reality are the elemental units of our world. They are changed through learning processes. Societal learning can enlarge and approximate spaces of understanding. Social spaces are a type of “social capital”. Design of learning procedures refers to the design of structures in time, space and in the space of opinions that facilitates multi-perspectivist and multidisciplinary understanding of involved stakeholders. In a series of cases for learning settings, especially dialogic intercultural learning is identified as a key path to a harmonious development of nations. The following section of this case dwells on several cases of cooperative learning through dialogue: the UniNet network in Kyrgyzstan and Nepal, Global Studies, the ESD forum, the Environmental Systems Analysis Curriculum USW, and the European Union Twinning tool applied in Slovakia, Slovenia, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Keywords: Perspectives, Constructivist, Consensus, Approximation, Training, Twinning, Interdisciplinary, Intercultural.

Web-Based Instruction Revolutionizes Environmental Systems Analysis

For university teaching in general, and specifically for the transdisciplinary curriculum of “Environmental Systems Analysis”, web-based learning procedures provide excellent opportunities for socially induced understanding and consensus building. This chapter describes how the social processes emerging in a five-level web-based negotiation game may be conceived in such a way that these form a sequence of growing and decaying intensity in various modes of social interaction. Similarly to individual learning in a classroom, a procedure could be applied to collective learning, namely to social procedures among humans who are starting to create institutional networks for combating global climate change – one of the most urgent tasks at present. A coordinate system of the four main social archetypes of action, namely “information”, “team”, “debate”, “integration” is symbolically called soprano, alto, tenor and bass; these four basic dimensions of social action tend to peak one after the other along a suitably designed gaming procedure.