Oxford Ministry for the Future (OMF)

 

Our vision

OMF is an emerging interdisciplinary network of academics that convenes high-profile events and educational activities that amplify voices from the humanities and social  sciences, inspiring a sustainable and more equitable political economy for the future.

Our mission

By organizing high-profile public events, focussed interdisciplinary discussions and educational activities, the  Oxford Ministry for the Future amplifies the voices of the humanities and social sciences. Our mission is to give a nuanced and unflinching view of the political-economic challenges of our times, and seek solutions to them. Understanding the realities at the science-policy and the corporate-government interfaces, the humanities and social sciences can help turning good ideas into good policies and intended action.

Who?

OMF are academics, writers, policymakers and corporate leaders interested in the political-economy challenges of a sustainable, more equitable future.

Why?

We need to stimulate moral imagination; connect the dots; and galvanise urgent, practical responses to the climate and environmental (poly-)crisis.

How?

We convene high-profile interdisciplinary events – connecting business leaders, public intellectuals and Oxford academics.

OMF Intellectual agenda:

We convene prominent authors, public intellectuals and world-class researchers to accelerate the dissemination of their insights and innovative into policy and action.

Moving from diagnosis to solutions, topics include:

 

• The political economy of a sustainable future. Describing in some detail a new political economy that emerges from the present one, so it is not just utopian or theoretical, but practical and applied, even to the extent of drafting policy and legislation.
• Measuring progress. Building on ideas of the circular economy and planetary boundary models, we work on the replacement of GDP to measure progress towards fair and flourishing, sustainable political economies.
• Land use and wildlife welfare. Exploring the (re)turn towards Gaian (or “Ecotopian”) thinking with emergent and coherent projects that feed and sustain humans, draw down carbon from the atmosphere, and give space to our wild fellow citizens.
• Energy security, green energy. Understanding technologies, capacity and efficiency issues, bottlenecks, risks. Techno-economically feasible solutions still need their specific social and political organization: we’ll discuss the appropriate mix of distributed, community-based energy generation, market-based and government-driven practices.
• Financing the green transition. We desperately need trillions of dollars that are not easily available now, but they could be generated as fit to use where needed. We address funding challenges and opportunities ranging from carbon quantitative easing and government spending, to loss and damage funds and financial help for ‘virtuous petro-states’.
• Policy-making. From good idea to legislation— in our educational activities and events, OMF scholars and students help generate good new legislation to pass on to relevant legislative bodies, and discuss the methodology and procedures involved in creating proactive and needed legislation for the political groups to enact.
• Fairness and equality of opportunity. Incentive structures for a fair transition to a sustainable and fair society include not only subsidies and taxes, but innovative organizational structures, and the full engagement of the whole population. Declaring justice as fairness to be a moral and practically effective commitment is a stance that will enrich our political discourse.
• Structures of feeling: OMF seeks to position work for a sustainable political economy as a meaning-giving existentialist project for all who wish to participate in it, leading to meaningful work and lives. OMF also treats hope as an active process, and a social phenomenon, and investigates the conditions for nurturing constructive hope, social movements and multi-generational projects towards a still achievable, more equitable, and sustainable future.

Events

Our next OMF event is planned for Monday 28 April at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford

Speakers: Musician Brian Eno, and authors Kim Stanley Robinson, Laline Paull, and J.M. Ledgard

Find out more, and book your place, HERE.

 

Our most recent event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on 6 November 2024. Watch the recording below.

Watch a recording of the inaugural OMF event at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on 13 June 2024.

A panel discussion with Kim Stanley-Robinson, which took place in the Weston Library on 14 June 2022, planted the seed for an Oxford Ministry for the Future.