About the Conference

The challenges we face today, such as climate change, energy supply, growing inequalities, global poverty, migration, food crisis, water stress, resource scarcity and conflicts, are interlinked. Understanding the relationships between them and the links between policies implemented in these different yet connected areas is an essential first step towards a holistic approach to realizing the vision of the SDGs, i.e. transforming our world.  

The holistic policy approach to transformation is not just adding a policy concern as a distinct problem to a list of existing concerns and then assigning it to a specific policy agency. It means identifying and diagnosing the “Social Questions”, new, renewed or intensified, of our time, and then establishing a strategy to deal with their structural causes. 

What are the social questions of our time and their structural causes? At the conference, we address the linked crises in peace, harmony with nature and development with a focus on borderlands.