The editors explore a variety of possibilities of organizing value terms as a prelude to any justification for the current preoccupation with so-called basic values. The third volume of the Encyclopedia, published mid-1995, profiles over 15,000 thousand strategies currently employed by international bodies, whether in response to world problems or to enhance particular values or modes of development. It will also provide the first systematic identification of several thousand vicious problem cycles to which such strategies need to respond. The challenge is to find meaningful ways to navigate through such complexity and to evoke imaginative insights in response to it. In a section on transformative approaches, the editors explore the implications for computer graphics, transformative conferencing and the design of policy cycles capable of responding to vicious problem cycles.
Much emphasis is placed on the potential of new metaphors for governance as an unexplored resource.
The suggestion is made that many institutions and policies are trapped in inadequate policy metaphors. The Encyclopedia offers radically different perspectives to policy-makers, social researchers and those concerned with development strategy. Most encyclopedias focus only on positive, sanitized aspects of society, presenting an idealized worldview that denies the shadow of humanity. It attempts to present the world as many experience it, whether negatively or positively. Users of the Encyclopedia are encouraged to discover new approaches to understanding and action through the deliberate juxtaposition, within the same context, of contradictory perceptions and fundamentally incompatible viewpoints.