Recommendations for Action
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The urgent challenge for politics and society is to steer digital change towards sustainability. In this regard, the WBGU makes a number of recommendations for action, which are primarily addressed to the German Federal Government, but also offer starting points for other actors. All states, organizations, businesses and individuals are called upon not only to participate in the discussions about our common digital future, but also to play an active role in shaping it. The WBGU recommends that digitalization should be explicitly placed at the service of sustainability. Unless it is actively shaped, global digital change involves the risk of further accelerating the threat to humankind’s natural life-support systems. Without regulation and democratic control, it can also endanger cohesion in our societies, violate fundamental and human rights, and weaken our democracies. The use of digital technologies needs to be embedded in a sustainable development strategy for it to make a positive contribution to our common digital future. This requires looking beyond 2030, the target year of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Unlike most of the studies on this subject conducted by international organizations, the WBGU therefore takes a longer-term perspective. From this perspective, adaptive policy-making and a culture of future-oriented thinking based on systemic longterm analyses and scenarios are required. Digital change is happening at a time when decisions on the strategic course of action need to be taken and undesirable path dependencies overcome in order for the Transformation towards Sustainability to succeed. Experience shows that the probability of fundamental changes (system changes) increases during such phases. The challenge for policy-makers and societies lies in ensuring that digital change can be steered towards sustainability. In order to grasp the opportunities for change that lie ahead, the WBGU distinguishes between three ‘Dynamics of the Digital Age’ and analyses their interactions together with sustainable development (Figure 9-1; Chapter 7). These Dynamics involve very
different challenges at different times, but all require immediate action. The First Dynamic focuses on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the question of which course to set in order to harness digitalization for achieving the SDGs. The focus here is on concrete, political implementation measures, for which the WBGU offers a package of recommendations, e.g. on urban and rural development (Section 9.1). The Second Dynamic concerns the profound structural changes to society, the economy and the individual brought about by digitalization, such as new challenges in handling privacy and extensive changes in market dynamics. Digitalization opens up new opportunities, but it can also generate enormous risks: digital change is currently moving in a non-sustainable direction. This dynamic is therefore about preventive policy-making and ensuring that societies prepare themselves better for profound, in some cases disruptive changes. Key elements here are technology-impact assessment, risk analysis, the interlinking of digitalization and sustainability research and their integration into politics (Section 9.2). In the Third Dynamic, questions are raised about the future viability and identity of human beings and human societies in relation to the developing natural and technical environment. This raises new normative questions concerning the relationship between human beings and machines. In order to meet these challenges, societal dialogue processes are central to staking out desirable futures. To this end, the WBGU recommends, among other things, establishing discourse arenas on fundamental issues of what it means to be human in the Digital Age (Section 9.4).
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