The day’s moderator Nik Gowing, International Broadcaster and Visiting Professor, Kings College London and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, invited the last panelists to share their impressions regarding the conference’s takeaways, saying “I see this more as a take-off moment.” He proceeded to ask the speakers to “reflect on what we have achieved, what we should’ve achieved, and what we didn’t achieve.”
In reply to Gowing’s remarks, Ruben Vardanyan, Impact Investor and Social Entrepreneur; Co-Founder, Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, joked: “I think we made a good step forward, but I am a perfectionist. Don’t ask me that question, I will always say that we could have done more!” However, he became serious when discussing what possible obstacles had prevented the panelists from doing that. “The key challenge [and the reason] why we didn’t achieve more, and this is a problem we need to realize, is that we’re coming from an industrial society. In industrial societies, we’re all living in our own tunnels. And today it was clear during the debate sometimes – there were a lot of monologues, but not much dialogue,” he stressed out.
Christof Bosch, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Robert Bosch Stiftung, has warned the participants against striving to look for achievements in the wrong place, when it was new lessons and information that was crucial to be found instead. “I like this conference, but I think the question whether we have achieved something makes us look in the wrong direction. Achieving happens where the refugees are, where actual things happen on the planet. For us it’s to learn, to understand what’s happening,” he explained.
Winfried Kneip, Executive Director of Stiftung Mercator, pointed out that different lessons were to be learned by different actors and drew everyone’s attention to the mere scale of the task in hand. “The question is, what do we take away, as part of the civil society? First of all, we have found out that doing it alone won’t work. And this coalition that we have already formed here is not by far enough to fulfill what we have to do,” he said.
Ingrid Hamm, Founder and CEO, Global Perspectives Initiative, one of the organizing partners of the 2017 Aurora Dialogues Berlin, has once again highlighted the importance of fighting people’s prejudice and misconceptions when it comes to staying open to the right ideas. “People have wrong perceptions. With wrong perspectives and the wrong language, you can foster that nationalism and populism that we see so much of,” she noted. Nevertheless, she was quite optimistic about the individual’s impact. “People, if they want, can make a change. If somebody has an idea and commits to that idea, then in the end something happens that is influencing a whole region. That is something I learned today,” she concluded.