A Closer Look at Integral Theory

Adapted from the Drishti Centre for Integral Action website:

A Closer Look at Integral Theory

By Gail Hochachka

Integral is the farthest reach of inter-disciplinary to date. It links "divergent" disciplines (such as the natural sciences, economics, politics, culture, psychology, and spirituality), including both the exterior (objective) aspects of life with the interior invisible (subjective and inter-subjective) aspects of individuals and cultures. In doing so, the integral approach provides a more comprehensive framework for analyzing problems and for crafting elegant solutions that more appropriately reflect the complexity of life. This makes the integral approach useful for understanding, and working with, the current eco-social issues prevalent in communities throughout the world.

What follows is an overview of three key tenets of integral theory, with a final note on how these are brought together in an integral approach to social change and sustainable development.

The integral approach reveals the interior side of life

The integral approach weaves together the internal and external components of reality. Alongside an understanding of the nature and complexity of interconnected systems, there is also recognition of interior dynamics (psychological, cultural and spiritual) in the system. An integral approach, therefore, retains the existing practices that focus on the "exterior" components of life, such as biological systems, economic initiatives, social organizing, governance and sustainability, and also works with the interior components, such as worldviews, values, and awareness. These interior parts of society inform our opinions and decision-making, essentially guiding the ways we make meaning of our surroundings and interactions.

With an understanding of interiority, it becomes easier to identify the underlying values, needs, worldviews and motivations that arise when engaged in the work of social change. This enables a more effective working dynamic between and among individuals and communities, as well as more psychologically sophisticated way of collaborating with colleagues, staff, employees and project coordinators.

 

The integral approach recognizes and includes the individual and collective domains Integral theory recognizes both individual and the collective, interior and exterior domains of reality, or the four quadrants. These are depicted in diagram 3 and include:

• Behavior and physiology (individual, exterior, such as physical health, actions, land-use practices.
• Self and experience (individual, interior), such as awareness, values, and mental models.
• Systems (collective, exterior) like economic systems, political systems, judicial systems, and ecosystems; and
• Culture (collective, interior) like social norms, shared beliefs and worldviews, and traditions.

Why is this important? Well, firstly, each quadrant has its own methodologies, validity claims, and perspectives--all of which are important to understand and include in social change work. For example, the UL quadrant of self and experience has unique methodologies of reflection, phenomenology, and developmental psychology. The UR quadrant, on the other hand, has unique methodologies of the life sciences, like physics, chemistry, biology, as well as the behavioral sciences. The LR quadrant is where we find methodologies relating to the systems sciences, like ecology, political science, and economics. The LL quadrant we find methodologies relating to the socio-cultural domain, such as social psychology, cultural studies, anthropology, and participatory methodologies. Each of these domains influence the global issues we seek to address. Each cannot be reduced to the other, and each must be engaged based on their own particular validity claims and methodologies. (That is, we cannot be assessing the validity of systems in the LR quadrant with the validity claims from psychology, or vice versa.)

However, this does not mean everyone must become an interdisciplinary expert. Rather, that from whatever discipline we are most familiar and comfortable, we still need to factor in and acknowledge the influence of the other quadrants. Often, organizations create diverse teams to cover a broad expertise across all quadrants, while also maintaining a view of the whole picture.

The integral approach sees developmental stages

Working with environmental or social issues is working with the on-going process of change. Deep, fundamental shifts in our ways of thinking foster visible changes in society, such as new institutions, management plans, laws and economic systems.

But, new ways of viewing the world don't arise over night. Why and how do they arise? Integral Theory pulls together much of the developmental research that has studied that very question. What we find is that these emerging worldviews and values unfold in nested, developmental stages, moving towards the ability to hold multiple perspectives and thus a greater degree of care for others. Through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, this self-development actualizes the human potential within.

While this is firmed based on extensive and empirical research in developmental psychology, we can simply look into our own experiences to explore this: if you think back to your own process of change, you can trace the inner shifts that have occurred throughout your life.

A few key points regarding self-development that appear throughout the research are:

• That the process of growth involves emerging stages of development that transcend and include lower stages;
• That earlier stages are more fundamental and later stages more significant, yet all are important; and

Each emergent stage has greater complexity, awareness, and care than the former stage.  Integral theory explains how fostering health in this "unfolding of complexity" is what is important, rather than trying to speed up the process of change. In fact, the latter can only happen once there is health in the existing developmental stage. For instance, nurturing a healthy expression of existing value systems is more important that trying to change those value-systems. Assisting with this healthy, full translation of the existing stage, can lay the emergent conditions for transformation to the next stage. But in either case, one must start with where people are at, helping to form a developmental pathway between the existing way of being to the emerging one.

Thus, to truly engage in "awareness raising", which is a part of eco-social change work, one must be able to meet other people where they are, both in terms of their value-systems and their ways of making meaning. Communication with a developmental view is more connected and effective precisely because it can relate with where people are coming from, their worldview, values, and meaning making. This approach has immense implications in project design, community development, campaign messaging, as well as in fostering meaningful dialogue between sectors.

Putting It All Together

Growth and change occurs differently in each quadrant. For example, in the UR quadrant, we need to know how the body's physiology changes over time and when it will have certain nutritional requirements at particular ages. In the developing world, this is crucially important, to ensure children are well nourished while they are at critical stage of physical development. In the UL quadrant, personal growth follows certain patterns as well that can be studied and included in social change work. Researchers have found clear stages of psychological development--from ego-centric, to socio-centric, to world-centric, to kosmos-centric--that give rise to different worldviews and awareness. Clearly, these two domains of experience change in very different ways, and it is important that we consider the differences in how we approach social change.

Similarly, social change in the collective quadrants again is dramatically unique. Culture seems to change via predominant mode of discourse--what people are talking about and how they are communicating is essential to what the shared beliefs and worldviews will be. Historically, we have witnessed an unfolding of worldviews from animistic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral, woven into being via social discourse. Systems too have followed their own change process. The socio-economic systems, for example, can be looked at historically, moving from hunting/gathering, to horticultural, to agrarian, to nation-state, to industrial, and to informational systems.

The Integral Approach suggests that finding long-lasting solutions to global issues will involve a deeper understanding and engagement in change processes in all four quadrants.

By seeing individuals and the collective as distinct but inter-relating wholes, it becomes easier to identify the root causes and possible solutions for problems that arise within organizations, groups and communities. Examples include communication break-down, management dysfunction and clashes between differing worldviews.

Integral theory can be applied in various ways in social change and sustainable development. An understanding of interiority and developmental unfolding in individuals and the group provides for more comprehensive project design, strategic planning and problem solving. For more, continue with integral applications.

About Drishti:

Drishti was founded in February 2003, with a vision for transformational environmental and social change. As we founded Drishti, we looked at the constellation of global issues that humanity faces and poised our work to address them. We saw that the issues were not exclusively addressed in just one thematic area nor by using one angle of approach. Rather, the complexity of issues seemed to require a more comprehensive approach. We have sought to explore such comprehensive approaches, one prominent approach being the Integral Framework. At that time, Integral Theory remained mainly a theory, yet we saw its extraordinary potential in sustainable development. Drishti became a vehicle to explore that potential through research, writing and community conversations.


Since then, aspects of an Integral Approach has been applied in numerous fields, such as health care, business, psychotherapy, education, and notably in sustainable development. Some of the organizations that have used Integral Approach in development work include the United Nations Development Programme’s HIV/AIDS Group, various NGOs in Latin America, and community groups worldwide. Please see the Resources page as well as Links to read about Drishti’s and other organization’s applied work with the Integral Approach in fostering sustainable development.

More Here.

In Defence of Difference

“Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.”

From SEED Magazine:

In Defense of Difference
by Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin

This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog’s legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.

All these seemingly disconnected events are the symptoms, you could say, of a global epidemic of sameness. It has no precise parameters, but wherever its shadow falls, it leaves the landscape monochromatic, monocultural, and homogeneous. Even before we’ve been able to take stock of the enormous diversity that today exists — from undescribed microbes to undocumented tongues — this epidemic carries away an entire human language every two weeks, destroys a domesticated food-crop variety every six hours, and kills off an entire species every few minutes. The fallout isn’t merely an assault to our aesthetic or even ethical values: As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Experts have long recognized the perils of biological and cultural extinctions. But they’ve only just begun to see them as different facets of the same phenomenon, and to tease out the myriad ways in which social and natural systems interact. Catalyzed in part by the urgency that climate change has brought to all matters environmental, two progressive movements, incubating already for decades, have recently emerged into fuller view. Joining natural and social scientists from a wide range of disciplines and policy arenas, these initiatives are today working to connect the dots between ethnosphere and biosphere in a way that is rapidly leaving behind old unilateral approaches to conservation. Efforts to stanch extinctions of linguistic, cultural, and biological life have yielded a “biocultural” perspective that integrates the three. Efforts to understand the value of diversity in a complex systems framework have matured into a science of “resilience.” On parallel paths, though with different emphases, different lexicons, and only slightly overlapping clouds of experts, these emergent paradigms have created space for a fresh struggle with the tough questions: What kinds of diversity must we consider, and how do we measure them on local, regional, and global scales? Can diversity be buffered against the streamlining pressures of economic growth? How much diversity is enough? From a recent biocultural diversity symposium in New York City to the first ever global discussion of resilience in Stockholm, these burgeoning movements are joining biologist with anthropologist, scientist with storyteller, in building a new framework to describe how, why, and what to sustain.

Read More @ Seed Magazine

Earth Day 2010

Happy Earth Day everybody!!! Earth Day was founded by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in held on April 22, 1970. It has fast become a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. Earth Day is now observed on April 22 on virtually every country on Earth.

Below is an interesting post from one of our favorite bloggers. We couldn’t have said it better. From Archive Fire: 

So here we are: April 22, 2010, another Earth Day.The 40th such day in fact. Earth Day is the only institutionally recognized day I actively celebrate. Our species emerged from the thin organic layering of flora and fauna covering this big bad space rock. Scientists call this intricate web of life enveloping the Earth a biosphere. We simply call it home. To be honest, it feels great each year to join millions of people around the planet in celebration of this wondrous and lonely planet.

Here are some things you may or may not know about our home: First, the name "Earth" derives from the Anglo-Saxon word erda, which means ground or soil. It became eorthe later, and then erthe in Middle English - yet humans did not perceive the Earth as a planet until the 16th century.

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. Earth is also the largest, most massive, and densest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets. Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago. Life first appeared on its surface within just a billion years. Earth's outer surface is divided into several rigid segments, or tectonic plates, that gradually migrate across the surface over periods of many millions of years. About 71% of the surface is covered with salt-water oceans, the remainder consisting of continents, islands and small pools of fresh water we call lakes. The planet has a circumference of 40,041.47 km (mean), but a surface area of 510,072,000 km2! The Earth's interior is constantly active, with a thick layer of relatively solid mantle, a liquid outer core that generates a magnetic field, and a solid iron inner core. At present, Earth orbits the Sun once for every roughly 366.26 times it rotates about its axis. This is a sidereal year, which is equal to 365.26 solar days. 

The planet is expected to continue supporting life for another 1.5 billion years, after which the rising luminosity and expansion of the Sun will gradually eliminate the plant's biosphere. Rising luminosity? Yep.

Usually on April 22 I set aside my online explorations and spend the day outside – engaged in activities i believe actually contribute to cultivating a more humane and creative world. But this year, in addition to my offline strategies, I wanted to spend some time with you, the readers, and bang the virtual drum for Mother Earth so that we can celebrate together, in some small way.

Read More: Here

Integral Ecology and Forest Innovation in British Columbia

Humanity, Forest Ecology, and the Future in a British Columbia Valley: A Case Study

by Stephan Martineau.

“One of the most important and challenging issues facing humanity in the 21st century is the increasingly complex human-ecology interface”, says Stephan Martineau.

In this article, Stephan suggests the potential that integral mediation and integral ecology hold in addressing this interface. Stephan distinguishes two categories of ecological challenges, removed and local tangible, and indicates that they require adapting methodologies to address them. Using a local tangible challenge—a 35-year old conflict over land use issues in the Slocan Valley, British Columbia, Canada—as an example, Stephan outlines an integral mediation approach.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: HERE / OR AT: THE INTEGRAL REVIEW

Climate Change, Integral Urbanism and the Question of Human Intelligence

Linked below is another fascinating offering from the folks at Integral Life. Marilyn Hamilton, author of Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, talks with Jim Garrison about applying the integral model to city design and development, emphasizing the important roles that the cities of the world have to play in responding to the climate change crisis.

Listen Now: Here

Dr. Marilyn Hamilton is the founder of Integral City Meshworks Inc, www.integralcity.com and TDG Global Learning Connections.

Jim Garrison is the chairman and president of the State of the World Forum, which he cofounded with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1995. The State of the World Forum is often thought of as a "shadow UN," in that it is the largest forum of world leaders outside of the United Nations. From Margaret Thatcher to Ted Turner, from the Queen of Jordan to Desmond Tutu, from Jimmy Carter to George Bush Sr., all have been part of the extraordinary dialogue that is the State of the World Forum.

The Future of Gaia

How to Think About Science
The Future of Gaia

Forty-years ago British scientist James Lovelock put forward the first elements of what he would come to call the Gaia theory. Named for the ancient Greek goddess of the earth, it held that the earth as a whole functions as a self-regulating system. At first many biologists scoffed. But Lovelock never meant his theory to imply that the Earth is a conscious individual entity - but rather a system (social holon) composed of other systems and individuals (individual holons). Unfortunately much of his work has been distorted by the pre-rational discourses of 'newage' popularizers.

Today, Lovelock’s ideas are more widely accepted, even in circles where he was initially scorned. But even as he has been winning scientific honours, James Lovelock has been growing more pessimistic about the prospects for contemporary civilization.

In this episode of How To Think About Science David Cayley presents a profile of James Lovelock. It tells the story of a career in science that began a long time ago.

LISTEN HERE: Episode 6

Emergence, Panarchy and Civilization

Our Panarchic Future

by Thomas Homer-Dixon

Buzz Holling, one of the world's great ecologists, is a kind and gracious man, with a shock of white hair and a warm smile. Born in Toronto and educated at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, he worked for many years as a research scientist for the government of Canada, where he pioneered the study of budworm infestations in the great spruce forests of New Brunswick. Later, as an academic researcher and eventually as director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, he created powerful mathematical models to explain the ecological phenomena he saw in the field. Using these models, he achieved major breakthroughs in understanding what makes complex systems of all kinds-from ecosystems to economic markets-adaptive and resilient.

Since the early 1970s, Holling's research has attracted attention in disciplines ranging from anthropology to economics. His papers have been distributed like samizdat through the Internet, and Holling himself has become something of a guru for an astonishing number of very smart people studying complex adaptive systems. Some of these researchers have coalesced into an international scientific community called the Resilience Alliance, with over a dozen participating institutions around the world. Although Holling is now retired from his last academic position at the University of Florida, he's still terrifically vigorous and focused on furthering the Resilience Alliance's work.

Holling and his colleagues call their ideas "panarchy theory"-after Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature. Together with anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter's ideas on complexity and social collapse, this theory helps us see our world's tectonic stresses as part of a long-term global process of change and adaptation. It also illustrates the way catastrophe caused by such stresses could produce a surge of creativity leading to the renewal of our global civilization.

Read More: Here

THOMAS HOMER-DIXON holds the Centre for International Governance Innovation Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. He received Ph.D. from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy. Dixson's research focuses on threats to global security and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His books include The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, The Ingenuity Gap, and Environment, Scarcity, and Violence.