Transition movement

Local Economic Blueprint highlights potential of community resilience

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Today sees the publication of what may well turn out to be one of the most important documents yet produced by a Transition initiative. Over the next few weeks we will be returning to it, to hear a range of perspectives on it, and hope it will generate debate and discussion. The document is the ‘Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint‘, and you can download it for free here. The Blueprint is the first attempt that I am aware of to map in detail a local economy and to put a value on the potential benefits of an increased degree of localisation. If you like, it identifies “the size of the prize” of Transition.

Communities, co-operatives, and social businesses: Towards a systemic proposal

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The inability of economics to internalize social and environmental externalities makes it so that it essentially serves capital through a debt-based economic growth; thus moving away from its primary goal: the correct distribution of scarce resources in order to satisfy human needs. As a consequence, unless a dramatic change in the path of development is implemented, it (the economy and our economic system) is leading us to an abyss. On the flip side, the re-localization of economies and lifestyles, linked to the rise of social businesses and to the potential of cooperatives as a social form for a more equitable distribution of wealth, inspires an opportunity to reorient human evolution towards wellbeing-generation and the creation of a system that is resilient to the threats that the world is facing. Hundreds of cases now exist in which neighborhood communities are assuming an increasing role in the decisions that affect their own future. The key to an encouraging future might lie in providing these socially and environmentally desirable approaches with economical viability.

Transition, Permaculture and Peoplecare: an interview with Looby Macnamara

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Looby Macnamara is a permaculture teacher and author of ‘People and Permaculture: caring and designing for ourselves, each other, and the planet‘. According to the publishers, it is “the first book to explore how to use permaculture design and principles for people – to restore personal, social and planetary well-being. People & Permaculture widens the definition of permaculture from being mainly about land-based systems to taking it right into the heart of our own lives, relationships and society”. I caught up with Looby via. Skype, and started by asking her how she came to the work that led to her writing the book (you can either listen to this podcast, or the transcript is below).

What is this Resilience, anyway?

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Change doesn’t come easy to us humans. We like to know what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next year. Sudden change can be severely upsetting; a death, unemployment or illness has the ability to turn our lives upside down for weeks, months or even change it completely. Most of these unexpected and unplanned changes are therefore unwelcome and a lot of people would find it difficult to discover silver linings in these kinds of challenges.

System Innovation and a New ‘Great Transformation’: Re-embedding Economic Life in the Context of ‘De-Growth’

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Abstract: The political-economic limits to system innovation are explored through the Polanyian concepts of disembedding and the ‘double movement’. The Keynesian Welfare State is examined as the final outcome of a much broader ‘counter movement for societal protection.’ In place of reciprocity and autarchy, the Keynesian social compact involved the establishment of new, top-down circuits of redistribution, designed to facilitate continuing processes of capitalist modernization. Where social innovation is directed at the broad dynamics of marketization and the commodification of goods and services, this growth imperative continues to present an insuperable obstacle to system-level change. But as ecological capital at the level of the biosphere becomes a critical focus for a new protective ‘counter-movement’ and ‘degrowth’ becomes the de facto context for social innovation, systemic transformation becomes more thinkable. Hodgson’s ‘evotopia’ is recommended as a heuristic for a provisional, experimental and incremental exploration of the ‘adjacent possible.’