The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the world’s extraordinary fragility and highlighted trenchant societal inequalities. Managing the pandemic has been hard enough and doing so while addressing other urgent stresses – like climate change, discrimination and violence – has added to the difficulty. The challenge is further heightened in the face of what may soon become recurrent interlocking patterns of environmental, economic, and social disruption.
What should be done to move forward? How can the world find a way out of this difficult situation?
These were the questions tackled by participants in 17 Rooms 2020, a yearly convening of leading experts and practitioners brought together by the Brookings Institution and The Rockefeller Foundation to channel ideas and energy into actions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A clear consensus from this year’s convening was that the SDGs are more relevant than ever, and should be used as a “North Star” to guide action out of the Covid-19 crisis.
The 17 Rooms Report sets out four Great Transitions: for justice, for the environment, for technology, and for the next generation. These transitions take us from today’s place of fragility and inequity to one of resilience and equal opportunity. The four transitions offer a fresh take on the SDGs as a guiding reference point out of the crisis, drawing from the insights of the 17 different working groups that came together in this year’s 17 Rooms process.
The transitions are inspired by, and anchored in, actionable ideas emerging from across the 17 Rooms community. They aim to serve as organizing concepts that can help channel widespread societal energies looking to answer questions about “What should we do next?”
The four transitions are:
- Towards integrated justice for all → From tackling economic and social inequalities independently to recoupling economic and social progress for everyone
- Towards blue-green replenishment → From valuing natural capital at the margin to actively stewarding nature at scale
- Towards equitable technology infrastructure → From celebrating novel applications to building inclusive systems for innovation
- Towards generational transition → From preparing young people for the future to partnering with next generation leadership today
