Raul Espejo

Raul Espejo (born 1964) is an international expert in organisational cybernetics. His most recent book “Organizational Systems: Managing Complexity with the Viable System Model” was published by Springer early in 2011 (co-authored with Alfonso Reyes) and is co-author of two other books and co-editor of three. He has published over a 100 articles in journals and books. In the early 70s, during the Allende’s government in Chile, he was Operational Director of the CYBERSYN project under the scientific direction of Stafford Beer. Since then until 2003, he worked at the Manchester Business School in the UK, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria and the universities of Aston and Lincoln in the UK.

Load video YouTube YouTube might collect personal data. Privacy Policy ContinueDismiss Presentation of the ONLIFE Manifesto at the European Parliament on Dec 2, 2014

Reinventing Democracy

He is interested in inclusive democracy and he has been working on this subject for 45 years. He is concerned about the fact that there is a distance between citizens and politicians and a lack of proper engagement in the policy processes. Years ago and in collaboration with others, he developed a project called Autonomitas, which intended to send real life messages to policy makers about the pain or pleasures that their actions and policies had on the population. He identifies a dramatic change in this issue over the years and he sees that nowadays we have all kinds of social media which help people to send messages to policy makers/politicians in instant time (twitter/facebook etc). His view is that the real problem now in terms of inclusive democracy is that politicians are overwhelmed by these messages and the challenge now is to create mechanisms, structures and communications which can be used in an effective balance between citizens’ views and the capacity of politicians to respond.