Eliciting Potential Patterns of Governance from 16 Sustainable Development Goals

Interactive exploration of Goal 17 through a polyhedral compound of 16 tetrahedra in 3D

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Introduction

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals formulated by the United Nations can be upheld as the current culmination of reflection on coherent global governance. Whether this is the consequence of intelligent design in systemic terms, rather than merely an arbitrary outcome of political horse-trading, can however be challenged (Systemic Coherence of the UN's 17 SDGs as a Global Dream, 2021; Femi Asu, SDGs: the UN dreams big -- you should too! Your Commonwealth: Youth Voices, 29 September 2015).

Whether the set of goals is indeed systemically coherent in a recognizable manner, it could also be understood as implying a form of coherence  emerging from the collective unconscious. The organization of the set, and the 169 tasks associated with them, therefore invites continuing consideration of how that degree of complexity can be comprehended and rendered memorable. The nature of that challenge has been explored separately (Cognitive Embodiment of Patterns of Governance of Higher Order, 2022). As engendered by a set of values, their nature and organization also merits consideration (Values, Virtues and Sins of a Viable Democratic Civilization, 2022).

Such previous considerations have focused on a possible 16-fold organization of which the 17th Goal is the coordinating function or perspective -- however that is itself to be understood. This suggests the possibility of representing the configuration of goals in diagrammatic or geometrical form in order to highlight their potential relationships and the patterns they form that are integral to the systemic coherence of the set. To this end SDG iconography has tended to focus on a variety of circular diagrams and tabular arrangements. Understood in that way, any exploration of how the 16 goals might be more fruitfully configured -- as in the following -- can then be recognized as a pursuit of the 17th Goal: Partnership for the Goals.

The following argument is however based on the assumption that the current SDG iconography in 2D is inadequate to the challenge of articulating the recognized complexity -- given the questionable performance of global governance. This justifies recourse to eliciting a memorable sense of coherence from representation in 3D -- if not 4D or more. Previous exercises to this end have focused on use of a cubic configuration inviting the kinds of pattern exploration associated with Rubik's Cube (Interplay of Sustainable Development Goals through Rubik Cube Variations, 2017). Another approach explored the potential of a 16-fold toroidal configuration using the so-called "simplest torus" (Framing an operating context of 16 "dimensions", 2019; Functional dynamics of a 16-fold configuration of strategic goals, 2019). Combining the two in geometrical terms, another exericise made use of the toroidal drilled truncated cube (Implicate order through hypercube and drilled truncated cube? 2022; Polyhedral representation of Sustainable Development Goals including "Own Goals"? 2022).

The following exercise explores a compound of 16 tetrahedra, one of a number of such polyhedral compounds composed of simpler polyhedra sharing a common centre (a perspective usefully symbolized by the 17th Goal). Use of the tetrahedron as the simplest Platonic polyhedron derives from an assumption here that the subtle complexity of any "goal" in cognitive and systemic terms merits representation beyond its common indication in 2D using a "point", a "line", or a "field" (as a spatial framing of a topical focus) -- as typically characteristic of systems diagrams. As the minimal systemic configuration in 3D (of 4 points, 6 edges, and 4 faces), the tetrahedron therefore merits particular consideration. As argued extensively by Buckminster Fuller (and discussed below), the tetrahedron, as a basic vectorial model, is the fundamental structural system (Synergetics: explorations in the geometry of thinking, 1975).

This raises the question of the systemic patterns that might then be recognizable in a compound of 16 tetrahedra -- as a representation of the set of 16 SDGs as potentially fundamental to the governance of the global system with its psychosocial implications. A tetrahedral understanding of goal is then suggested below in the light of philosophical and psychological insights into quaternity, most notably as a consequence of the work of Carl Jung (Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1969).

Whilst representations of compounds of polyhedra have long been available as the focus of commentary, there are challenges to eliciting comprehensible patterns from their complexity. The compound of 16 tetrahedra used in this exericse consists of 224 geometrical elements -- potentially of a complexity of the same order as suggested by the 169 SDG tasks. The lengthy process of detecting patterns in that configuration, to enable their memorable representation, is presented here as one of trial and error -- a learning exercise in its own right. This suggests the value of such an exercise in evoking the kinds of engagement evident in the case of Rubik's Cube, or the construction of any mandala (Eliciting Insight from Mandala-style Logos in 3D, 2020).Â

The animations associated with this exercise are presented here as a means of eliciting imaginative ways of "thinking otherwise" about SDGs regarding any coherent response of global governance.

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