It’s inevitable that governments will eventually adopt green policies, the climate crisis will reach such a state of severity that a sustainable approach will be the only productive and profitable way forward…

While the great work of tackling the climate crisis will require all aspects of society to adopt changes and implement consistent action, government policies will drive much of the transformation and hold the various societal contributors legally accountable.

The Brexit Disaster was playing out while I was studying the bulk of my Environmental Sustainability concentration so the powers and limits of government policy; as well as the re-thinking of governing policies was a topic that was very much on my mind.

When it came time to bring together the learning of my Solving Complex Problems specialization into a briefing paper presenting the problem I wanted to solve and how I proposed to solve it, I decided that I would focus on re-formulating the UK’s governing policies for tackling the climate crisis.

Titled Radical Green Liberalism in the 21st Century, the briefing paper proposed reforming the UK Liberal Democrats political party into a strategically overt centre-left green liberal movement for empowering a sustainable and flourishing United Kingdom in the specific areas of economics and education.

I decided to focus on the Liberal Democrats because, in 2019, when I put my briefing paper together, I had become incredibly disillusioned with the other major UK political parties and the Lib Dems seemed to be the only party aligned with my political beliefs (not least to see a reversal of the Brexit Disaster).

The Lib Dems are also a smaller party and I felt this gave me greater scope for arguing a more radical change in their overall political direction.

The Lib Dems also have a very close affiliation with the Green Liberal Democrats, which is an environmentally focused think tank originally formed in 1977.

The Green Lib Dems have been instrumental in helping the Lib Dems forge their green policies; as well as holding the political party accountable to its green policies.

The fact that the Lib Dems already had such a rich and fundamental green focus within the party’s value made it all the more easier for me to propose my re-orientation towards becoming a more overtly green party.

In a nutshell, my briefing paper proposed a Green Movement Innovation (GMI) for bringing about this strategic change within the party.

The GMI was made up of three elements…

(1) Green Liberalism – I argued that the Lib Dems needed to re-position their political stance to an overtly green liberal stance, both for the strategic advantage it would give them and because how it would benefit the UK overall.

(2) Green Economics – I argued the need to adopt an economic model akin to Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics that supports: “a social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below and an ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond,” and utilize all the economic benefits of implementing a Green New Deal to satisfy voters on both sides of the political spectrum.

(3) Green Education –  I argued the need for reforming the UK’s education system into that has the pillars of environmental sustainability, social wellbeing and big picture thinking at its core and geared towards producing graduates who can positively contribute to their personal wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of the nation and planet as a whole.

Deep down, I always felt as though I was going to look at a climate crisis focused problem for the Solving Complex Problems specialization.

The big picture focus of Solving Complex Problems sequence of courses always felt like a good fit for my Environmental Sustainability concentration.

However, the specialization moved around my MTA Portfolio and resided in various different concentrations before it found its final home in the Environmental Sustainability concentration.

It also took me a good while to get beyond viewing the entirety of the climate crisis as the problem to be tackled and work it down into a more specific complex problem that could realistically be solved.

Eventually, greatly influenced by the thinking of the Global Citizenship concentration, the Education Innovation concentration and the realization of my personal education philosophy, I settled on tackling the complex problem of the UK national education system.

I then explored the national education problem further throughout the three courses of the specialization.

In Course 1: Analyzing Complexity I defined the problem to be explored as…

“The education system’s current curriculum outline and how that outline – both in its design and application – is a highly inefficient and ineffective means of producing proactive graduates who can fully take charge of their lives and create long-term financial stability, both for themselves and collectively as part of the national economy.”

In Course 2: Evaluating Problems I presented the various knowledge domains and sources of information that would assist me in building a workable solution for the complex problem I had identified.

The areas identified included the disciplines of education, economics, positive psychology, global citizenship, big history, entrepreneurship and innovation.

In Course 3: Creating Innovation I proposed my solution…

“The Innovation I am proposing for this problem is for the UK government, and more specifically the Department for Education, to reformulate the national Primary and Secondary curriculum to bring it in line with the demands of the twenty-first century. A reformed national education system with a reformed curriculum has the potential to produce proactive graduates who can maintain financial stability and contribute massively to the national economy and reputation of the UK through personal and professional expressions of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

The full outlines I submitted for the first three courses can now be read in this collected blog post – The Complex Problem of the UK National Education System.

However, within the capstone for the specialization, I then had to take my initial problem and solution and refine it even further into a workable solution that could be outlined and evidenced to a professional level within a briefing paper.

During the process of further refining my complex problem, I found my way round to more specifically connecting it to my desired focus of the climate crisis by arguing that better educated graduates would be more effectively positioned in helping to solve the larger climate crisis problem.

However, I also realised that the issue was heavily tied up with the subject of economics and, by the time, I had decided to focus my solution within the framework of reforming of the Lib Dems into an overtly green liberal party, I knew I also had to present the case for green economics.

Thankfully the additions of green liberalism and green economics to my solution was not a huge challenge because I had already covered these subjects in great detail as part of my Global Citizenship concentration.

By the end of it, not only did I have a more clearly defined complex problem with a more realistically workable solution, but I had also had a practice at producing a policy briefing paper to a very high standard.