Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

Reclaiming the Crisis

Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Milton Friedman

The Last Great Depression

• Failure of aggregate demand

• Repayment of debts• Failure of lending and

borrowing• Recessionary spiral: ‘the

death spiral’

= wealth creation

= taxation

= private sector = public sector

= consumption

The Linear View

= wealth circulation

= wealth creation

= taxation

= private sector

= public sector

The Systems View

= third sector

= wealth circulation

= recirculation of taxed wealth

Economic crisis causes decline in environmental concern

• In 2011, 37% thought many claims about environmental threats are exaggerated, compared with 24% in 2000 (British Social Attitudes Survey)

• A YouGov poll commissioned by EDF energy indicated that of 4,300 adults questioned during the week after the general election, interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62% (published in The Guardian)

Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?

What really happened?

What really happened

Money: Unstable and Unsustainable

Resilience hierarchy

• Economics enables the extortion of resources from people and planet via a process of abstraction

• We need instead to engage in re-embedding

• Refocusing our attention on the least abstract: money → fossil fuels → land

Citizens’ Audit Committee

• The concept of ‘odious debt’• Transparency to facilitate a

public debate• Prioritise citizens and not

the financiers• Irish audit led to ‘zombie

banks’ campaigns• Show Debtocracy film

Who Owes Whom?

Where do we act?

• Lobbying? Pointless because of the finance coup

• Local action in communities?

• Move your money• Sign the Barclays

petition

Positive directions

• We predicted this and are prepared• Local Liquidity: local currencies can be

reframed as a means of injecting new liquidity into floundering local economies (paper from Green House) Bristol Pound

• Revitalising our local economies

Three key concepts

• Resilience: ‘the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.’

• Ecological citizenship: intrinsic and ethical motivations towards protecting the environment

• Critique: the importance of political economy

• Economics as Re-embedding

• Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

• Falling in love with your native soil

What is a bioregion?• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than

political) boundaries’• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-

place’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region

An economic bioregion

• A bioregional economy would be embedded within its bioregion and would acknowledge ecological limits.

• Bioregions as natural social units determined by ecology rather than economics

• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic resources such as water, food, products and services.

• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity

Locality but not autarky

• Cultural openness and maximisation of exchange that can be achieved in a world of limited energy, within a framework of self-sufficiency in basic resources and the limiting of trade to those goods which are not indigenous due to reasons of climate or local speciality.

Accountability as reconnection• Your bioregion is

your ‘backyard’• Each bioregion

would be the area of the global economy for which its inhabitants were responsible

Community not markets

• Reclaiming of public space for citizenship and relationship.

• ‘putting the economy in its place’

• Market as agora—public space for debate and sharing of ideas, not just commerce

Locality: Walking the Land

Accountability: Stroud Community Agriculture

Community: Stroud Farmers’ Market

The Seeds of a Greener Future?

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

www.greenhousethinktank.org

Green Economics (Earthscan, 2009)

Environment and Economy(Routledge, 2011)

The Bioregional Economy (Earthscan, 2012)