Ecological Footprint and Governing the Anthropocene through Balancing Individualism and Collectivism

ABSTRACT The current way of life is unsustainable (Papadimitriou, 2014) and in a bid to maintain the status quo – profit is extracted from people and the environment. The challenge of scaling up efforts to engage people in an alternative forms of democracy and governance is that currently the response to social, economic and environmental  challenges is that internationally politics is being shaped by so-called realist politics (Beardsworth, 2011) based on a) competition for resources, b) the notion that profit and loss, win and lose is contained /carried by ‘the other’ and c)  Huntington’s ‘clash of cultures’ thesis rather than an understanding of our interlinked, co-created and co-determined fate