David Korten

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Dr. David C. Korten is an author and a leader in the global resistance against corporate globalization. He is probably best known as the author of the book When Corporations Rule the World. His most recent book is The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community,[1] which places corporate globalization within the context of 5,000 years of "Empire," used as a generic term for organizing human relationships by dominator hierarchy. Korten argues that the human system has now reached the limits of domination that social and environmental systems will tolerate. To secure its future, the human species must turn away from the dominator way of Empire to the partnership way of Earth Community, as defined by the principles of the Earth Charter.

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[edit] Education and early career

Korten was born in Longview, Washington in 1937 and is a 1955 graduate of Longview's R. A. Long high school. He received a M.B.A. and Ph. D. from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He served during the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force.

[edit] Korten's Models

In When Corporations Rule the World, Korten used two models to describe man's relationship with Earth — the "Cowboy" and "Spaceship" models. According to the cowboy model, most people view the Earth having plenty of resources to support the human race and believe that these resources are constantly being renewed. In reality, says Korten, the earth is more like a space capsule in that resources are much more limited and steps must be taken to renew them actively.

[edit] Career and main body of work

He served as the Harvard Business School adviser to the Nicaragua-based Central American Management Institute. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs.

In the late 1970s, Korten left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, serving first as a Ford Foundation project specialist, and later as Asia regional advisor on development management to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

His work in Asia gained international recognition for its pioneering contribution to the development of strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources.

Disillusioned by what he came to see as an inability of USAID and other large official aid donors to strengthen community control over their natural resource base, Korten broke with the official aid system. His last five years in Asia were devoted to working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change.

Korten came to believe that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world -- including the United States and other "developed" countries. Furthermore he came to the conclusion that the United States was actively promoting -- both at home and abroad -- the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis. For the world to survive, the United States must change.

He returned to the United States in 1992 to help advance that change. He has since had a leading role in raising public consciousness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity, and environmental health.

Dr. Korten is co-founder and board chair of Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, a quarterly magazine, a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.[2], and a member of the Club of Rome.


[edit] Bibliography

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[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Great Turning – A reference website for the Great Turning book and a resource list for the Great Turning movement
  2. ^ International Forum on Globalization

[edit] External links