10th International (Hybrid) r3.0 Conference 2023

Activating Restorative Norms

– Healing Harm, Connecting for Change –

A Hybrid Global Conference from the 12th to the 13th of September 2023, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Thank you to all of our speakers, participants, sponsors & the whole r3.0 Team. We hope to see you again next year!

You will find the pdfs of the presentations from the speakers in red colour on the agenda tab and on the speaker tab.

Videos will be made available mid-October 2023 on the gallery tab, bookable per session, day package or complete package (on a dcent fee basis for those that weren’t registered for the conference).

About the Conference

The 10th International (Hybrid) r3.0 Conference:

About the Conference

r3.0 was holding its 10th International Conference, from 12 – 13 September 2023 in hybrid mode (in-person in Amsterdam and online globally), building on the success of rolling out this hybrid set-up in our 2022 Conference. We at r3.0 consciously take a “margin-centered” approach to programming our Conference, drawing on the wisdom of communities that are pushed to the edges (tapping into the “abundant edge effects” Principle of Regenerative Vitality). Our Conference also fostered what Joanna Macy calls “Active Hope” — in other words, not blind faith, but rather trust in the actions we take together to tackle our predicaments. One important aspect of this is the ability to collectively grieve what’s dying, killed off by humanity’s status quo systems (an economic systems predicated on perpetual growth and institutions that entrench this status quo) as inspiration to nurture the birth of new ways of being. And we strategically schedule our Conference to coincide with the shifting seasons, to support participants in reassessing priorities as cracks increasingly emerge in the status quo.

Conference Theme: Activating Restorative Norms — Healing Harm, Connecting for Change

Social norms determine our fate: in the Anthropocene, our collective action is adding up to cumulative harm that’s overtaxing our earth’s provisioning systems while simultaneously undermining livability for billions, leading us to the cusp of crossing catastrophic ecological and social tipping points.

On the flip side, social norms also hold the key to our salvation: the most efficient and effective way to heal our cumulative harm is to transform from destructive to restorative social norms, harnessing the exponential power of prosocial collective action.

Here, the very same dynamic that threatens our survival — tipping points, or sudden phase shifts from a stable state of being to a radically different state — can instead deliver our redemption. So, just as our collective action can tip the systems we rely upon into collapse, so too can our collective action tip us into desirable states — in particular, stabilizing our systems against the threat of adverse tipping points.

Working together in solidarity is the only way for humanity to navigate through the predicament we’ve created for ourselves. The Conference will explore ways to connect to create the change necessary to heal the harms that are embedded in many of our systems, by activating new social norms that restore balance in humans’ relationships with each other and with nature.

2023 Conference Structure

We structure this year’s Conference around four Interconnected Themes:

RESTORATIVE ECONOMICS – Redesigning economies to thrive through regeneration & distribution. To heal the harms wrought by predominant economic systems, we must collectively embrace more just, life-affirming economic systems that have long thrived on the margins. This session, which supports r3.0’s development of the new Regenerative & Distributive Economy Blueprint, invites positive maverick economists to share their vibrant work on re-asserting economies that serve life.

ESSENTIALS FOR SURVIVAL – Indigenous and Majority World voices, Technologies, and Struggles. Indigenous Peoples have cultivated cultures, value systems, and toolsets that have thrived for millennia, sustaining resilience into the present context of competing modernist / colonialist cultures, value systems, and toolsets that are inherently unsustainable and violent. In parallel, peasant farmers and other Majority World communities have similarly cultivated strategies for asserting food sovereignty, self-determination, and collective liberation in the face of the violence and unsustainability of predominant systems. Indigenous and Majority World voices have much wisdom to share in terms of surviving and thriving in the polycrises and systemic collapses increasingly unfolding.

COMMON GOOD GOVERNANCE – Reorienting governance from individual ownership to collective stewardship models. The sun is setting on governance by institutions that entrench the status quo to defend the territories they “own,” and rising on governance in service of collectively stewarding the commons to cultivate abundant resource flows in perpetuity. This session continues to build on the activation of r3.0’s Funding Governance for Systemic Transformation Blueprint.

TIPPING INTO PROSOCIAL NORMS – Triggering beneficial social norm tipping points to avert adverse tipping points. Social norms that reinforce antisocial outcomes (carbon hogging, extreme inequality, biodiversity destruction) and risk triggering catastrophic social & ecological tipping points, can be transformed by triggering beneficial tipping points into prosocial norms. Speakers in this session, which builds on r3.0’s thresholds & allocations work, explore the double-edged sword of tipping points.

We will update the Conference Program continually with agenda points and speakers.