If we wish to develop sustainably, we must learn more about development, and the way it is managed over time. Knowledge about development has traditionally served the interests of dominant political and financial ideologies. By “dominant political and financial ideologies,” we mean those ideologies that influence every area of our lives (to varying degrees), and which have had a decisive impact on the market. Universities and other research organs have contributed very little—virtually nothing, in fact—by way of response to the major challenges of 20^th (and now 21^st) century.

It is frequently noted that the complexity of modernity - and the constant changes associated with globalization - make it difficult to develop realistic and feasible solutions capable of addressing projected (or desired) evolutions. Science and technology can not satisfy our individual and collective expectations; one might even go so far as to say that they have contributed (if indirectly) to the problems of segregation that we currently face. The most important demands of the European occupy movement - demands that have been expressed by individuals all over the world - reflect the great lassitude concerning current social, political, and environmental policy. We are all burdened by the negative side effects that this attitude has produced.

While we are currently in a time of global crisis, it is also a time in which civic action—on the part of citizens who have, for decades, been lulled and/or silenced by the reign of the market—is beginning to inform global change. Tools that previously contributed to social segregation are now being used to achieve integration, mutual understanding, and horizontal communication. Through these tools, collective frustration is being transformed into ambition for a different, and better, world.

Throughout this process—from the initial suggestion that an International Citizen’s Earth University (Université Internationale Terre Citoyenne, UITC) be created, through the process of its pedagogical journey, to its official creation in 2011-- we have done our best to ensure that human knowledge be managed in accordance with long forgotten principals. Popular knowledge and political action must be reintegrated with science and technology; together, they will allow us to reevaluate the role that humanity must play in a context of constant evolution. This process, which has already begun within social movements, will become more culturally diverse and complex as it expands beyond these circles.

The current educational and/or training system is often criticized for its loss of ethical values and its tendency to focus more on the “price” of alterity than on its “value.” This disregard for the value of otherness has made us into individualists and consumers. While the rational foundations of science have made the world more efficient, they have ignored the human, and humanist, components of education and human integrity. Many economists are now demanding that education and training make us more competitive, and create new forms of well-being; the idea being that everyone must fight to be better than everyone else.

The University’s concerns are, above all, ethical. Life is a good of great value, and individuals—along with the people that surround them—are a force of personal and collective change. Any learning process, or process of transformation, must take our collective intelligence into account.

The proliferation, as well as the rapidity, intensity, and influence of global interactions, flux, and networks is forcing states to examine the links between education, politics, the economy, society, and culture. Moreover, the development of technologies including information and telecommunications systems is accelerating these processes and creating new forums for education and training. These processes have above all contributed to a series of imbalances which have, in turn, created significant gaps in our knowledge. This reality cannot be ignored as the University tries out different training methods and experiences; it must act as our lens as we attempt to interpret social, economic, and environmental upheavals.

Generally speaking, “globalization” refers to the growing interconnectedness of global activities. This explains current interest in the increasing interdependence of places that are geographically far apart, and in the unpredictable consequences that can result from said interdependence; or, in spacio-temporal compression and the fact that certain activities function in “real time” on a planetary scale. In political terms, these processes have resulted in the blurring of the distinction between external and internal, and in the appearance of new forms of sovereignty or in a reconsideration of the role of the Nation’s State. Questions concerning the legitimacy of government are slowly but surely being replaced by questions about global “governability.” In the economic realm, the relationship between the state and the market has significantly shifted; and there has been an intensification and a reorganization of global trade. As competition between nations becomes more pronounced, so do “systemic risks” such as severe environmental destruction, or contagious financial crises. Social changes include the appearance of a transnational civil society and a growing recognition for the public role of private corporations. We have also seen the emergence of opposition movements and identity struggles that come together to denounce the impact of globalization on local communities. In the cultural realm, we have seen the emergence of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural societies, globalized communication enterprises, transnational symbolic flux, and the proliferation of conflicts around questions of religion, values, and traditions.

In its initial stages, the International Citizen’s Earth University will provide an opportunity to make and to be a university and training center that breaks with traditional learning methods. The University is a human adventure that will take both current day problems and their historical evolution into account, without losing sight of the difficulties inherent to the creation, and the maintenance, of a more “human” version of modernity.

Pedro Avendaño Garcés, UiTC