Next System Studies is bridging community ingenuity with heterodox scholarship and teaching to foster new ways of seeing, understanding and designing our political economic world. Its aim is to facilitate a paradigm shift in political economy that centers democratically distributed power, equitable social and economic outcomes, and ecological regeneration. By igniting and supporting partnerships of learning and doing across communities and higher education institutions, Next System Studies plays a foundational role in building the movement for systemic change.

Higher education is critical to a paradigm shift in political economy  

Higher education is an important pillar of both intellectual and socioeconomic stability and perpetuation, serving as an anchor institution for communities, government, business, and the arts. During periods of significant moral or technological upheaval, it also can play an important role in advancing social change. It can challenge stale beliefs and structures, generate new ideas and empirical evidence, advance new scholarship and pedagogy, help scale innovative strategies, and increase awareness and ambition. 

Today’s intersecting and increasingly severe economic and social crises are bringing into sharp relief the flaws in the economic ideas that dominate our thinking about markets, regulation, and the role of the state. Ideas from two centuries ago have proven to be not up to the challenges exposed by the 2008 financial crisis, continuing racial and economic inequities, growing authoritarianism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and fossil-fuel-induced climate change. As mainstream approaches continue to lose credibility in the face of challenges to the very future of our civilization, new economic ideas are critical to filling the vacuum left by the collapse of neoliberal ideology. 

The role of Next System Studies

We need higher education to step boldly into this vacuum. Transformative change requires that mindsets, social agreements, and governance structures evolve across whole societies. TDC’s Next System Studies program spotlights higher education’s key role as a powerful facilitator of change because it sits at the headwaters of our values, governance systems, and institutional structures. It's where new ideas, methods and models are generated, legitimized, replicated and controlled. It’s where the future leaders we need will be nurtured who will design and build a next system, or set of systems, that will improve humanity’s odds of thriving for generations to come without destroying the rest of the natural world. 

Just as Black, gender, and LGBTQ+ studies expanded our understanding of both our past and present, fostering pathways for building a more inclusive society, our vision is for Next System Studies programs to be prevalent across the country and the globe, changing the questions we ask and the answers we discover in our quest to build a new political economy. 

We hope you’ll join us as we map out Next System Studies in collaboration with partners across academia, community groups, and nonprofit organizations.

Stay tuned and if you’d like to know more, drop us a line at nextsystem[at]democracycollaborative.org.