MCCHE Convergent Innovation Webinar Series with Dr. Marie Harder
How articulation of local shared values creates a portal for bottom-up input into multi-scale governance
Dr. Marie Harder
Dr. Marie Harder is a Distinguished Professor at Fudan University since 2011, while continuing part-time at the University of Brighton. She was the lead Coordinator of the EU research project ESDinds which first developed the WeValue concept of crystallizing group shared values, which initially focussed on Civil Societies and has since branched into schools, businesses, faith groups, and village committees. She has co-written one book, some chapters and 25 papers on underlying theory and applications of WeValue, within her 80+ peer-reviewed articles. She is currently CoInvestigator on the £18 million UKRI Interdisciplinary Hub, “Action Against Stunting”; and a UKRI project on Infrastructure investment in UK coastal towns; a MOST-China project on urban climate change in China and Vienna. In all these she elicits local shared values to interface with policy development or assessment. She would love collaborations to scale up to ESG and new economics.
Abstract
Input from local people is highly sought by policymakers – health, infrastructure, sustainable development – so their policies will be better embraced and more effective. So important is the social interface to projects, that investment banks and businesses are strengthening the ‘social’ requirements of ESG and CSR considerations, and urban planners are striving to capture social elements into dynamic system modeling, creating indicators they can apply for efficient application. But there seems to be a ‘gap’ in understanding: the indicators often have poor meaning to the local people. Participatory methods ‘simplify’ these external constructs so local people can respond…with limited success. But external and local ways of knowing and thinking might be fundamentally different: is there any solution to bridge them? Here we present a novel approach, where local knowledge is assumed to be more tacit, and groups are facilitated in accelerated meaning-making in a specialised process which results in concisely articulated statements of ‘what is important to us’, and a narrative to describe how they are linked. These are authentic, face-valid proto-indicators for immediate use in decision-support tools. Furthermore, opinions expressed in subsequent focus groups will show linkages to these underlying shared values. In short, every locality can have its own priorities with indicators, useful for voice, assessment, interfacing, and ultimately for deeply revising ESG and CSR indicators. Applications in many cases, countries will be given.
Chair: Professor Laurette Dubé (Scientific Director of MCCHE)
ABOUT THE SERIES
The Convergent Innovation Webinar Series features cutting edge science, technology and innovation in agriculture, food, environment, education, medicine and other domains of everyday life where grand challenges lie at the convergence of health and economics. Powered by data science, artificial intelligence, and other digital technologies, this disciplinary knowledge bridges with behavioural, social, humanities, business, economics, social, engineering, and complexity sciences to accelerate real-world solution at scale, be it in digital or physical contexts. Initiated in the agri-food domain, the series is now encompassing other grand challenges facing modern and traditional economies and societies, such as ensuring lifelong wellness and resilience at both the individual and population levels.
