Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson will discuss our polycrisis, and the swift and holistic reform of global governance institutions that is needed to respond to these urgent transnational and planetary challenges we are facing.

We are living in an age of exceptional complexity and turbulence. What distinguishes this period in human history is the confluence of forces— political, geo-strategic, economic, social, technological, and environmental, as well as the interactions amongst them. These crises have no regard for borders and are not responsive to solutions devised and implemented by individual nation-states or the existing ecosystem of multilateral institutions.

Throughout history, we can find examples of hinge moments when human resilience, imagination, and cooperation spurred change once thought impossible. We are in a period of elasticity, a time when there is greater capacity for stretch in our conceptions of global relations and thinking about the international system. Humankind must strive to develop an international framework that can guide us toward a more peaceful, more humane, and more equitable global society, as well as a thriving planetary ecosystem.