Dartmouth Events

Jon Kohl '92, PUP Global Heritage Consortium, "The Future Has Other Plans..."

...Transcending Barriers to Plan Implementation in a Complex World.” Jon works internationally developing ecotourism and park governance to conserve natural and cultural heritage.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017
5:30pm – 6:30pm
Room 001, Rockefeller Center
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Government and Environmental Studies, and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center.

A silent crisis afflicts parks and heritage areas throughout the world, sentencing so many management plans to office shelves unimplemented. Managers and planners often blame lack of resources, but this argument diverts their attention from examining deep assumptions that lurk in the collective mind about the nature of planning and a world needed for it to succeed. Kohl explores how old ideas place a premium on technical, scientific rationality that unleashes waves of unimplemented plans. Instead, he offers a new worldview which integrates emerging paradigms across many disciplines to transcend barriers that planners so often — and unwittingly — erect around themselves.

Since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica (1993-95), Jon Kohl works internationally developing ecotourism and park governance to conserve natural and cultural heritage. After graduating from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, he worked with RARE Center for Tropical Conservation. While stationed in Honduras, he faced the challenge of discovering why so many management plans end unimplemented. He founded a planning approach that diverged greatly from conventional planning wisdom. After RARE, Jon continued to develop his theory and practice with UNESCO’s World Heritage Center. In 2013, he founded the PUP Global Heritage Consortium to leverage his alternative approach to transcend plan implementation barriers. His book about Holistic Planning followed last December. Though he has worked 17 years in heritage, non-implementation afflicts all sectors of society. Indeed, without a more holistic approach, agencies of all kinds falter when confronted with complexity wasting resources on plans that never contribute. Drawing on responses from many fields, his talk illuminates deep causes of non-implementation, much beyond superficial resource lacks. He then reveals a new worldview for planning and governance.

Jon double majored in Government/ENVS and Biology. He attributes his holistic perspective to his mentor, the late Professor Donella Meadows.

For more information, contact:
Joanne Needham
603-646-2207

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.