Global Understanding

Film by Diego Galafass / Phi-Centre

Understanding the Global in All Daily Lives.

The programme for the 2016 International Year of Global Understanding (IYGU) highlights how closely linked our everyday lives are with global processes. It explores the global impact of the transformation of nature through our way of life. It demonstrates how social and political relations are transformed by digitalization. It showcases the global consequences of daily decisions in all cultures and societies. It also demonstrates how we can contribute to creating healthy living conditions for others, wherever they live, through our ways of living.

The challenges we address

Transformation of nature by ways of living

In the Anthropocene, it is ultimately our everyday actions that transform nature on a global scale. The ways we live, organise our societies and shape our cultures, how we eat, move, build, work and communicate, all have far-reaching effects on ecosystems and the Earth system.

Global Understanding puts ways of living at the centre of sustainability: instead of treating nature as an external background, we look at how cultural patterns and daily routines can be transformed so that they protect and regenerate nature rather than degrade it.

Overcoming territorial thinking in sustainability policy

Today’s biggest challenges – climate change, resource use, social inequality, biodiversity loss, are global by nature. Yet sustainability policy is still largely organised within a national, territorial logic that is obsessed with borders and difference.

This mental framework undermines effective solutions. Global Understanding argues that sustainability strategies must increasingly transcend territorial thinking: they require multilateral political approaches that recognise global interdependence and shared responsibility.

Culturally diverse paths to global sustainability

Truly sustainable sustainability policies cannot rely on universal recipes. They must promote culturally and regionally specific paths towards global sustainability.

Global Understanding takes seriously that different societies have different histories, values and everyday practices. Instead of a single model of the “good life”, we seek to understand and support multiple pathways that are compatible with planetary boundaries and social justice.

Integrating humanities, social and natural sciences

With a stronger emphasis on the cultural dimension, sustainability research and policy open up anew for the humanities and social sciences. To better integrate their expertise, we need new forms of cooperation with the natural sciences and new research perspectives.

Global Understanding works at this interface: it promotes applied, human-centred sustainability science that studies the social, cultural and natural embeddedness of human action – and that connects theoretical insight with concrete everyday decision-making, education and public information.

How we work

Global Understanding connects local actions and global challenges. It focuses on the global sustainability of local action and acknowledges that there are many culturally different paths towards sustainability. We look at essential everyday activities – eating, drinking, housing, working, travelling and communicating – and ask how these practices can become more sustainable worldwide.

Global Understanding brings together research, education and public communication to make global processes and challenges understandable and to support sustainable everyday action.

Our key messages

The core ideas of Global Understanding can be grouped into four key messages:

Linking the global and the local

Everyday actions matter for global climate change.
Everyday decisions depend on lifestyle and context.
A global view can reduce regional conflicts.

Human actions create global challenges – but they also offer solutions. Global understanding helps individuals and decision-makers to act more responsibly.

People’s practices

Global problems require sustainable solutions.
Sustainable change should emerge from the bottom.

We cannot wait for an ideal global institution. Change must start from everyday choices. Individuals vote, consume, and shape policies at all levels – local to national.

Science and everyday life

Everyday life and science belong together.
Global understanding relies on joint social and natural science research.
Research should address the logic of everyday life.

To change everyday practices, we need research that connects scientific insight with daily routines and real-world decision-making.

Sustainability and global understanding

Climate change shows how closely global and local effects are linked.
Global change is climatic, social, cultural and economic.
Societies need global understanding to manage change sustainably.

Message: Global sustainability requires local sustainability. Global understanding empowers people to recognise hidden connections and make more sustainable choices.

Legacy today

From an International Year to a long-term movement. Today, the legacy of the International Year of Global Understanding can be seen in three interlinked strands:

What began as an International Year in 2016 has evolved into a long-term effort – with a UNESCO Chair, a global declaration and a growing network – all dedicated to making global understanding a practical force for sustainable futures.

A concept – global understanding as a way of seeing how local everyday actions and global challenges are connected, and why cultural perspectives matter for sustainability.

Institutions – especially the UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability in Jena, which turns this concept into concrete research, teaching and policy advice.

A movement – articulated in The Jena Declaration and its network of partners, which calls for a cultural shift towards sustainable everyday living and mobilises actors worldwide to work towards it.

Why Global Understanding matters

Our Partners

Currently, the initiative is sponsored by institutions with global reach as well as by local partners. We envision a broad network of organizations working together to carry off the year. In this, the year will bring together scientific actors from wide range of disciplines from the humanities, social and natural sciences as well as engineering.