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Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

Explore the shift towards a bioregional economy, focusing on resilience, ecological citizenship, and political economy. Learn about reclaiming public space, local currencies, and community agriculture for a greener future.

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Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

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  1. Reclaiming the Crisis Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

  2. 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

  3. The Last Great Depression • Failure of aggregate demand • Repayment of debts • Failure of lending and borrowing • Recessionary spiral: ‘the death spiral’

  4. 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)

  5. Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?

  6. What really happened?

  7. What really happened

  8. Money: Unstable and Unsustainable

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. Who Owes Whom?

  12. Where do we act? • Lobbying? Pointless because of the finance coup • Local action in communities? • Move your money • Sign the Barclays petition

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. Economics as Re-embedding • Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness • Falling in love with your native soil

  16. 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

  17. 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

  18. 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.

  19. Accountability as reconnection • Your bioregion is your ‘backyard’ • Each bioregion would be the area of the global economy for which its inhabitants were responsible

  20. 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

  21. Locality: Walking the Land

  22. Accountability: Stroud Community Agriculture

  23. Community: Stroud Farmers’ Market

  24. The Seeds of a Greener Future?

  25. 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)

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