[3] King arranged a meeting with Peccei.The pair shared a lack of confidence that the problems faced by the world could be solved by development and technological progress.[citation needed]

In April 1968, Peccei and King convened a small international group of people from the fields of academia, civil society, diplomacy, and industry met at Villa Farnesina in Rome.The background paper to set the tone of the meeting was entitled "A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope", by Austrian OECD consultant Erich Jantsch.However, the meeting was described as a "monumental flop", with discussions becoming bogged down in technical and semantic debates.[4]

After the meeting, Peccei, King, Jantsch, and Hugo Thiemann decided to form the Club of Rome, named for the city of their meeting.[5]

First steps

[edit]

Central to the formation of the club was Peccei's concept of the problematic.It was his opinion that viewing the problems of humankind—environmental deterioration, poverty, endemic ill-health, urban blight, criminality—individually, in isolation or as "problems capable of being solved in their own terms", was doomed to failure.