Description
Global forms of violence, climate change, populism, and fake news represent some of the global challenges directly affecting local communities. However, local communities are, if at all, little prepared to understand and address such challenges. While lacking capacity, know-how, and adequate organization, local communities experience various facets of unsustainability. The dynamic between global challenges and local communities is further uncovering a transformation of IR phenomena, slowly attracting the attention of the discipline. Building on this literature, the paper focuses on contexts of unsustainability and related reactions of local communities. The paper provides a conceptualization of “unsustainability” to explore how local communities respond to global challenges. To answer this question, the paper employs a qualitative-interpretive methodology and data collected through empirical case studies. The cases focus on the practice of community foundations, organizations that have a broad mission and work to consolidate the capacity of local communities. The cases analysed will focus on challenges such as war, climate change, hybrid war, and authoritarianism, and how they unfold in local communities. The gathered data will be used to construct a matrix of factors that enable local communities to effectively address global challenges.
