This has resulted in an “epistemological delirium.” As the ordering principle of “the modern” dissolves into thin air, we don’t know which way is up or how to proceed. Hence the title of the original French version of the book, Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique – “Where to land? How to orient yourself in politics?”

Humanity no longer has a shared framework of “becoming modern,” says Latour. It is hard for everyone to believe that globalized markets, “development,” and consumerism will yield a steady march toward civilization and progress. Corporations have proven themselves to be consummate externalizers of cost and risk. And climate change among other eco-crises suggests that relentless economic growth is simply preposterous — and grossly mal-distributed in any case.

Hence our profound disorientation. It’s hard to deal with the slow-motion collapse of a once-universal story of human aspiration.

The rich nations, or at least the US, remain mostly in denial about climate change, if only because acknowledging the truth would upend so much. The remaining nation-states of the world, meanwhile, have no clear path in a fractured, divided world for constructing a shared vision.

Without the unifying normative framework of “development” and its claims of infinite growth and progress, how can we figure out a new consensus narrative for humanity, one that acknowledges the existential reality that we live on the same, finite planet? How can we find a way to share and co-manage our only habitable space?

Donald Trump arguably triggered our deep epistemological confusion when he withdrew the US Government from the Paris Climate Accord, Latour argues. By declaring that the US will continue on the same path as it has for decades, with no changes in American lifestyles or reductions in carbon emissions, he was in effect declaring war on the rest of the world.

Or as Latour puts it, “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!” Trump’s move officially ratified a mindset that President Bush I expressed so bluntly in 1992: “Our way of life is not negotiable!”

Down to Earth is a powerful look at how climate change is changing the tectonic plates of politics, economics, and culture. As the claims of modernity and globalized capitalism fall apart, revealed as ecologically and economically catastrophic, it has opened up an empty space that we don’t know how to fill. Latour brilliantly dissects why our epistemological delirium is happening, how it is transforming politics, and what a new paradigm might look like.

The coming shift is not simply a story of external institutions and nation-states; it’s mostly about our inner conceptualizations about the world and aspirations. For centuries, the Global, or modernization, has stood for scientific, economic, and moral progress. It later erected “the Local” to serve as a useful foil, a way of life that the Global helps us escape.

Modernization has meant progress, profit, development, innovation, and civilization — an escape from the Local, which situates our identities with secure geographic boundaries, ethnicity, and tradition. Modernity has positioned itself as “leaving our native province, abandoning our traditions, breaking with our habits, if we wanted to ‘get ahead,’ to participate in the general movement of development, and, finally, to profit from the world,” writes Latour.

The Local has served as a cautionary counterpoint — an impoverished realm of “the antiquated, the vanquished, the colonized, the subaltern, the excluded,” says Latour. “Thanks to that touchstone, one could treat them unassailably as reactionaries, or at least as anti-moderns, as dregs, rejects. They could certainly protest, but their whining only justified their critics.” 

Modernization has thus made “attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil” as antithetical to “having access to the global world.” One must choose between the two of them.

And so humanity has aligned itself with the ideals of global modernization, the grand project of moving forward in alliance with capitalism. Everything else is cast as lamentably premodern and backward-looking, a zone waiting to be properly modernized.

Defining modern life around these two poles of attraction may be coming to an end, Latour argues, saying “we have reached the end of a certain historical arc.” The onset of neoliberal policies in the 1980s marked a turning point for this change. Elites decided they were going to secede from the world, in effect, by privatizing wealth for themselves at the expense of sharing society and the polity with everyone else. This agenda is epitomized by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the Koch brothers, and the whole cast of neoliberal think tanks, PACs, Davos, survivalist billionaires, and more.

The Local – long the site of colonialist extraction – continues to be seen as “a rump territory, the remains of what has been definitely left behind by modernization.” While political movements have exploited sentimental notions of the Local using nationalist, authoritarian appeals – e.g., Trump, Brexit, Duarte, Bolsonaro, the National Front – these visions are ultimately cynical charades – attempts to capitalize on nostalgic, nativist reactions to the Global and its failures to deliver safety and security.

As the Global/Local framing of human development has fallen apart, Latour writes, it has exposed how neither is truly connected to the biophysical realities of the earth:

The terrifying impression that politics has been emptied of its substance, that it is not engaged with anything at all, that it no longer has any meaning or direction, that it has become literally powerless as well a senseless, has no cause other than this gradual revelation: neither the Global nor the Local has any last material existence.

Both are human projections, consensus fictions with little grounding in ecological realities. Climate change is blowing apart the fantasy of the Global as a realm of infinite possibilities and material extraction. It is also shattering the idea of the Local as a haven of sequestered safety, morality, and order.

What has propelled this change, says Latour, is that the earth itself is becoming a political agent. The earth can no longer be ignored as a powerful autonomous, living force in human affairs. This is making the grand project of modernization/development increasingly problematic because the finite and dynamic character of the earth is becoming quite visible, painfully so. Who can rally around the idea of modernization as a political project when its absurdly utopian dimensions and costs are increasingly plain to see? 

Latour argues that a new “third attractor” is gradually arising to harness political energies and revamp political alignments.The new attractor is based on a commitment to healing the earth and changing the dynamics of politics itself. The new vision, still emerging, is “perpendicular” to the Global/Local axis in the sense that it steps away from the arc of history plotted by capitalist modernization. It recognizes the gritty imperatives of living ecosystems and calls for a “sideway” shift of attention, energy, and innovation — a new narrative of the future.

This shift is occurring, says Latour, because earth systems are discrediting the idea of the world as a vast, limitless, and inert empty space in which human affairs take place. The Enlightenment idea that humanity and “nature” are separate entities is no longer tenable. As Latour notes, “How are we to act if the territory itself begins to participate in history, to fight back, in short, to concern itself with us – how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us?” (Paging John Locke….) 

In short, climate change is mooting many of the premises of modern consciousness itself. It is incubating a new attractor to organize our energies and imaginations. This attractor escapes the fantasies of the Global and Local by frankly recognizing the biophysical realities of the living earth as our destiny and mission. Humanity’s relationship to the earth becomes paramount. Latour decides to provisionally name this attractor “The Terrestrial.”

There is much else that Latour shares in his short book (at 106 pages, a long essay) that clarifies the macro-challenges we face in the coming years. Although he doesn’t mention the commons, it’s clear to me that the commons enacts Latour’s idea of the Terrestrial. Throughout the book, he cites the need for humanity to find “a place to land” – a way to escape the fantasies of modernity and to become more entangled with the biophysical life of the earth.

That’s what commons do! The commons has an ancient pedigree of being very “down to earth.” I think the commons holds great potential for serving as a new attractor for re-imagining life, politics, economics, and consciousness, in synergy with the Terrestrial. But how to hoist up this attractor and give it dynamic scope?

I suppose it takes a distinguished scholar of modernity to know how to critique modernity with such acuity and question some of its fundamental premises. By stepping outside of the conventional frames of discussion about climate change, Latour opens up a rich, grand structure for thinking about the future of politics in the Anthropocene. Now if only we can build out this new third attractor. Let us call it the Terrestrial Commons!

The post Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It’s hard to believe that current systems are the best we can do. They appear dysfunctional now and suicidal in the long run. It’s time to investigate what might work best.

It’s not news that human civilization and ecosystems are at risk of collapse in our lifetime or that of our children. Biologists, sociologists, ecologists and others have been issuing dire warnings for easily half a century on all the big issues. We’re well aware of them: climate change, habitat loss, pollution, topsoil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising rates of species extinction, financial meltdown, poverty and wealth inequality, and nuclear war, to name a few. A recent headline captures the flavor: Plummeting insect numbers threaten collapse of nature.

What might be news is that we can do something to help change course, without waiting for governments to act, or even asking governments to act.

First, let’s clarify the goal. We wish to thrive, not just survive. We want healthy communities where collective wellbeing runs high and the environment is protected and restored. Among other things, this means access to quality and affordable education and health care, meaningful jobs, eradication of poverty and excessive income inequality, and systems of organization that are just, transparent, and deeply democratic.

I believe we can reach this goal, in our lifetime, if we think outside the box. The first step is to ask this seemingly obvious question: Out of all conceivable designs for systems of social self-organization, which ones might improve wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability the most?

It’s a scientific question at heart, begging for rigorous study, not mere opinions. And yet it’s also a question to be pondered by everyone on the planet.

It has a natural follow up: If we were to develop new, high quality systems, how could we best implement and monitor them? This too is a scientific question at heart.

These two questions have the power to change our world. At face value both are utterly sensible to ask. Why wouldn’t we want to know the answers? But beyond that, they embody several profound realizations.

First, if we want bold change, we should look to science for demonstration and assessment of the possibilities, more so than to politics. While science might not have all the answers, it would certainly have a tremendous amount to say. We need and could obtain clear evidence of which system designs might serve us best, and how and to what degree our lives might improve.

Second, our big problems are symptoms of a deeper defect. As societies, we could have long ago taken sensible actions to address pressing problems. But we didn’t. Why? Because the systems by which we self-organize — governance, legal, economic, financial, and more — are too often inadequate, even dysfunctional, when it comes to solving problems, especially big problems.

The dysfunction isn’t due to bad leaders in business or politics, although these exist. The rise to power of too many selfish, dangerous, or unqualified leaders is just another symptom. Rather, the dysfunction is due to the mechanics of our systems — their very designs, built-in motivations, concentration of power, and embodied world views. Because of these, they lack the capacity for solving today’s big problems.

This failing should not be a surprise. Our systems largely evolved to solve a different, older problem, which is how to maintain and concentrate wealth and power for those who already have it. In this they have been wildly successful. Consider how quickly the billionaire class is growing, and how fewer and fewer corporations control ever larger swaths of the world’s economy. Consider how the legal system favors the rich.

The last realization embodied in the question is that bold change is possible. Given advances in science and technology over the past 50 years, the hard work of many on issues of social and environmental justice, and the looming threat of collapse, we’re overdue for an evolutionary jump. We’re ripe for sweeping change.

You might think that universities or research groups would have long ago started work on such important questions. But almost no one has. Perhaps political pressures or funding realities have gotten in the way. Or perhaps it’s because core fields like complex systems science, cognitive science, and ecology needed to mature a bit before questions about societal self-organization could arise. Whatever the reason, the work has barely started.

So let’s get on with it. After all, it’s hard to believe that current systems are the best we can do. They appear dysfunctional now and suicidal in the long run. It’s time to investigate what might work best.

If in this moment you’re thinking about comparing socialism to capitalism, I’d ask you to think bigger and further outside the box. Those are economic systems, not whole-system, integrated approaches to demonstrably improve wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability.

Rather than thinking of isms, it might be better to think of biology. Humans are highly social animals. Our communities and societies are akin to living organisms — metaorganisms, if you will, composed of many interacting individuals. Just like biological organisms, the natural purpose of a society is to learn, rise to challenges, adapt to changing conditions, and solve problems that matter. Learning requires information, and so also information processing. Action requires decisions and thus decision-making processes.

Start there. What kinds of designs for whole, integrated systems might best help us to perceive, process, communicate, learn, predict, make decisions, and orchestrate action, at scale, as communities and societies, in order to solve problems and thereby increase social and environmental wellbeing? And how would they be monitored and measured?

Keep an open mind. In this exploration, the very concepts of business, money, wealth, voting, governance and more might evolve into something new. Wealth, for example, might be understood not as personal financial gain but as the degree of shared wellbeing. Money might be understood not so much as a static store of value but as a transparent voting tool in economic democracy, valuable only through use.

A Viable Path to Development and Implementation

The task of developing and implementing new systems of organization might seem daunting at first glance. But on closer examination, a viable and affordable path can be seen. I’ve described it elsewhere, along with results of a computer simulation that illustrates potential benefits (including eradication of poverty, higher and more stable incomes, greater income equality, and economic democracy).

One bedrock characteristic of the approach is that it’s science based. An R&D program lies at its core. New systems would be thoroughly tested, similar to the way new designs for a jet airliner would be tested. This means simulations, field trials, and more, using various measures of quality that address wellbeing, resilience, sustainability, and problem-solving capacity.

Another key characteristic of the approach is that new systems are designed for implementation at the local, community level through a club model. This allows progress without waiting for governments to act. And it allows for rapid field testing of multiple systems in parallel. A club can be started with just a small percentage of an urban population, perhaps a thousand people, without any legislation. Participation in a club is voluntary and free.

Once field trials demonstrate that better systems are both possible and popular, interest will naturally spread and new clubs will form in new communities. As they do, networks of clubs will also form. Part of the R&D effort is to ensure that these display the same characteristics that make individual clubs successful — like rich communication, deep democracy, and high transparency.

The R&D program is affordable. The annual budget in the first decade would likely be no more than several tens of millions of dollars, which is modest enough that the world’s young adults could fund the program alone through donations, if sufficiently motivated to do so. So too could any other group or set of groups. A social investor could fund it, and receive reasonable economic returns — a social business model exists.

We could fund it — the collective we who are aware, concerned, willing to think outside the box, and willing to take action and try something new. For arguments sake, let’s say we’re 5 to 15 percent of the world population. We’re large enough and powerful enough to see this through to fruition. It doesn’t matter if the other 95 percent or so have no interest. Enough will, later. All that’s needed to start are early supporters; feedback, ideas, and assistance during bench scale and usability testing; and in time, early adopters who will participate in scientific field trials. The rest will follow naturally.

If we initiate this R&D program, much of the scientific community will be on our side. They’ll understand its potential and view the project as exciting and timely. Even the big players — the Harvards, MITs, and Stanfords of the world — might eventually join in.

The potential gains are large and downsides small. With better systems of self-organization we could increase our capacity to solve problems and improve conditions within our communities. Transparent and deeply democratic systems could build trust and engender a greater sense of shared purpose and hope.

If systems are well designed and deliver what they promise, worldwide participation will grow. At some point along the way, and it might take several decades, a tipping point will be reached where new systems spread like wildfire to become the norm. When that happens, communities almost everywhere, or maybe everywhere, will be enjoying greater wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability. They will cooperate, by design and by choice, in successfully solving problems that matter.

By John Boik, PhD. To learn more about the wellbeing centrality R&D program, the LEDDA economic democracy framework, or to download (free) Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being (2014), visit https://principledsocietiesproject.org.

Please share and republish.

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The book will be reflective of quite a few people’s thinking – a real community effort, coordinated by a strong core team.

It will be mixture of short essays, personal reflections, collective thinking and really practical guides. It’s being written to be relevant for both entrepreneurs, founders and freelancers as well leaders and cultural influencers in larger organisations.

We’re aiming for this project to share our learnings, inspire action and help grow the global movement of people putting purpose at the heart of their work – so we hope has a wide appeal.

We would love your support.

Our crowdfunding campaign is live and you can be part of the special first edition release of the book here.

You can support our campaign here and pre-order your copy of the book here – and we would love all the help we could get to share the word as well!

Thanks so much!

betterworktogether.co

The post Better Work Together – The Book! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All these and much much more make up the Sustainable Development Goals – the globally agreed wish list for saving the world and building a better future. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re not alone. Their public outreach leaves a bit to be desired. In any case, they make up the UN’s development agenda up until 2030.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to what the SDGs are, what’s good about them, and my one problem with the SDGs that actually drives me crazy every time I think about it.

What are the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals (aka SDGs or Global Goals) follow on from where the Millennium Development Goals left off, in 2015. They will guide the development priorities for the UN and its agencies, the aid budgets of most wealthy nations and major development charities up until 2030, when it’ll be all change all over again. Here’s the full list:

• Goal 1  End poverty in all its forms everywhere
• Goal 2  End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
• Goal 3  Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• Goal 4  Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Goal 5  Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Goal 6  Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Goal 7  Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
• Goal 8  Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Goal 9  Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
• Goal 10 Reduce inequality within and among countries
• Goal 11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
• Goal 12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Goal 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
• Goal 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
• Goal 15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
• Goal 16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
• Goal 17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

As you can see, they’re… Let’s call them ‘stretch targets’.

The SDGs. Image credit: Reedz Malik

Others more cynical than I have called them a utopian wishlist more suited to a letter to your fairy godmother than a serious policy statement, or words to that effect. But you know what they say about ambitious goals: even when you don’t hit them you still end up doing pretty well. And to be honest, aren’t these exactly the things we should be aspiring to?

What is amazing about the SDGs

Before I get on to my one glaring problem with the SDGs, I want to take a moment to consider what’s so good about them, particularly in comparison to the old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

They apply to the whole world

.No country has locked down 100% of this stuff. The UK certainly hasn’t. These goals are for every country to work towards, and kisses goodbye to the patronising old development model of ‘developed’ countries that have apparently got it all worked out (yeah, right) and ‘developing’ ones who need help.

They’re holistic

.They cover a lot of ground because they understand that poverty and wellbeing are complex, multi-faceted and relate to a lot of different things at once. I like the way the goals are not split up into environmental, social, economic, but instead many of the goals cover all three aspects of sustainability. Goodbye silos.

They’re inclusive and collaborative

When the goals were being drafted, diplomats from each country got to contribute and they also engaged with charities, scientists and academics for their contributions. You may not have been consulted or even told about them until now, but compared to other high-level global policy, this was very inclusive.

My one problem with the SDGs

So the SDGs sound wonderful, right? They do. Really, they do, and overall I think they are a fantastic thing that will do a lot of good in the world. But there’s one problem that I think people should be aware of (and I want to get it off my chest).

One of the goals is liable to contradict the others. Yes there will always be trade-offs and that’s understandable, but in my opinion, one of these goals sticks out like a sore thumb because it just doesn’t fit.

Goal 8 calls for ‘decent work and economic growth’ and I take issue with it for several reasons.

What’s wrong with Goal 8?

Problem 1: it’s a means not an end

This may just be me, but I can’t stand it when you have a list of things and one doesn’t fit with the others. Like if you had a whole list of your favourite books and one of the list items is ‘Waterstones book token’. What the hell is this?! A book token isn’t a book, it’s just a way to get more books! Goal 8 is kind of like the book token here. It isn’t a goal in itself, it’s at best a means to reach other goals. As this article on postgrowth.org puts it: “Growth that is at best a means to reach certain welfare goals is redundant as a development goal in itself.”

Problem 2: Growth doesn’t necessarily benefit the poor

Problem 1 on its own would just be a grammatical pet peeve. What makes it problematic is that it isn’t even a very effective means to achieve the other goals. In fact sometimes it can do the opposite. The most important goal of all the SDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty. The thinking is obviously that economic growth helps with this – but that isn’t actually necessarily true. Of all the wealth produced by growth since 1990, the poorer 60% of the world population only received a pitiful 5% of it. And that’s not even the poorest, that’s over half of all humanity. The very poorest people who need it most got such a tiny sliver it’s almost nothing. Growth is a very inefficient way of helping the poor out of poverty because the vast majority of the wealth goes to the rich, a slice goes to the middle class and the poor just get some crumbs. So, Goal 8 could easily conflict with goals 10 (reduced inequality) and Goal 1 (no poverty).

Problem 3: Growth probably isn’t compatible with a safe climate

There’s no hard evidence that economic growth is compatible with the kind of emissions cuts we need to keep climate change to below 2 degrees. The only time global emissions went down is when we had the 2008 global crash and recession. People get all excited about decoupling when they see that the UK’s economy grew while our direct emissions went down, but that figure for direct emissions doesn’t include ‘embedded emissions’ in consumer goods, and it doesn’t include aeroplane flights or international shipping. We have seen that emissions can hold steady while growth rises, but we need emissions to go down, and fast, and we just don’t know that that can happen with growth. If not, then we need to prioritise climate action (Goal 13) rather than growth (Goal 8).

Problem 4: it shouldn’t be 2 in 1, it’s already an important goal

Unlike the others, goal 8 is a double whammy: decent work and economic growth. They obviously thought those were a natural pair, but they could easily be in conflict, as a company that abuses its workers could make more profit and so contribute more to economic growth. Well-paid workers contribute more to growth than poor ones, because they have more spending power, but healthy workers could contribute less to growth than sick and stressed ones because they won’t be paying for medicines and therapies. All this is because of what a strange and unhelpful metric GDP growth is. Decent work – good jobs that are useful and fulfilling with fair wages and rights – is already a very important goal. Why stick something else in there as well? The way it stands, Goal 8 could even come into conflict with… Goal 8.

Problem 5: it gives companies/governments a loophole to keep doing the same

As well as being unnecessary and counterproductive, the growth part of goal 8 also gives regressive companies and countries a loophole where they can say ‘we’re working on the SDGs!’ when they’re doing anything that will boost growth, even if it goes against the other goals. A study by Ethical Corp found that Goal 8 was in the top 3 of the SDGs that corporates are most keen to engage with. I recently saw a major brand boasting on their website that they were making progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 8. Like… Every other company out there.

The SDGs also sidestep deep systemic issues (but that’s understandable)

The Sustainable Development Goals were never going to be perfect. They have flaws because they are trying to make progress from within the capitalist system we have. They sidestep fundamental causes of poverty like structural readjustments, unfair debts, unfair trade deals, and of course the history of colonialism. They seek to bring the poor and ordinary up, but don’t dare to mention the elephant in the room: that the elite have too much. None of this is surprising and I don’t think the drafters of the SDGs or the UN can be blamed for that. They weren’t going for a radical political statement that would be divisive. They wanted to get everyone on board. Like sustainable development itself, it’s very hard for anyone to disagree with the SDGs as a whole. That means that as well as the UN, charities and governments, they have also had excellent buy-in from corporates, with the likes of Unilever, Coca Cola and H&M using them to inform their ‘corporate responsibility’ and sustainability work. 46% of corporate reps said their business would engage with the SDGs, according to a survey by Ethical Corp. Their engagement is worth a little watering down, given their immense scale.

Conclusion

The SDGs represent real progress. They give everyone across sectors a common language for sustainable development and gets everyone on the same page. They represent a clear roadmap on where we collectively want to go from here. The progress they aspire to can be best realised if we ignore growth and work on the things that matter – which are summed up perfectly with all the other goals.

Photo by Davezilla was taken

The post My one problem with the Sustainable Development Goals that drives me crazy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

San José de Apartadó, Colombia — This is a significant feat, given that it is the leading peace community in Colombia, born in the heart of a civil war between the Colombian government, right-wing paramilitaries and the guerrilla army of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-Ep). Dignitaries from around the country and the globe have gathered in San José de Apartadó, including high-level officials from the United Nations, European ambassadors and heads of international non-governmental organizations like Peace Brigades International. Despite the international awareness of this community among certain circles in the human rights movement, most notably Noam Chomsky’s deep admiration for the community’s work, most people have never heard of San José de Apartadó. A little history might help us better understand why this is the case.

A Peace Community in the Heart of a Civil War

Founded by 1,350 displaced farmers in March 1997, after paramilitaries roamed the region pillaging and massacring, the community came together to protect themselves and their land, declaring themselves neutral in the war. The armed groups made them pay a huge price for this decision, killing more than 200 of their members, including most of their leaders. Almost all victims died by the hands of paramilitary and national armed forces, largely trained by the US government, working in the service of local landowners and multinational corporations.

Despite the horrors they have faced, the members of this community have stood their ground and continue working together bound by a commitment to nonviolence and reconciliation. Eduar Lanchero, one of their late leaders, once said, “The power of the community consists of its ability to transform pain into hope …” With their community, the people of San José have shown other communities in the region and country how to break the vicious victim-perpetrator cycle and to create a self-sufficient community outside the dominant resource extraction economic model that surrounds them. This level of economic autonomy and independence from state influence has been seen as a grave threat to the interests of multinational corporations looking for development opportunities in the region.

Conscious of the larger systemic effects of their resistance, Lanchero further elucidated,

The armed groups aren’t the only ones who kill. It’s the logic behind the whole system. The way people live generates this kind of death. This is why we decided to live in a way that our life generates life. One basic condition, which kept us alive was to not play the game of fear, which was imposed upon us by the murders of the armed forces. We have made our choice. We chose life. Life corrects us and guides us.”

Peace vs. “Development”

Despite international accompaniment through various non-governmental organizations, the persecution of the community has actually increased since the peace deal was signed. According to the February 24, 2017, newsletter of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, the community has faced paramilitary invasion, with their remote hamlets continually occupied, threats that the community remain silent about the atrocities they have been afflicted by or face further retaliation.

As Todd Howland, Colombia representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told Truthout, “Many claim that now there’s peace, there’s no longer any need for a peace community” and according to sources who wish to remain anonymous for their safety, the state has offered community members money to lure them out of the community. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartadó, the municipality governing the region, says, “Parts of the government and multinationals use the cover of apparent peace to manage what they so far haven’t — ending the peace community.”

Why is the Colombian state so worried about a community of peaceful farmers? And is the answer to this question the same reason the story of San José de Apartadó has been so hidden from international media? The Colombian army has been clear on this answer, often stating that the community is in the way of”development.” What do they mean by development? Clearly, they are not referring to peace and human well-being, but rather the standard narrow definition of extractive-based GDP growth.

Edward Goldsmith, one of the fathers of the British environmental movement, reminds us, “Development is just a new word for what Marxists called imperialism and what we can loosely refer to as colonialism — a more familiar and less loaded term.”

For 20 years, the community of San José de Apartadó has been living a working alternative of nonviolent resistance to the brutal agenda of displacement and oppression. It seems to be the imperative of the state to dismantle it so it won’t be replicated or emulated by other communities living through the same struggles across the country.

Ati Quigua, leader of the Arhuaco people, who served as a spokesperson for Colombia’s Indigenous nations in the Havana peace negotiations, mirrors those worries. “They are making ‘peace’ in order to get rid of the guerrillas, so that paramilitaries can take over the countryside, drive out farmers and Indigenous Peoples and carry on with what they call ‘economic development’,” Quigua told Truthout. “This isn’t our peace. We want peace with the Earth. If things don’t change, Colombia is going to face a cultural and ecological genocide.”

The Possibility of Genuine Peace in Colombia

Colombia is a country at the tipping point, at a fragile moment of uncertainty, pregnant with both the prospect of a genuine humane transformation and the imminent danger of a violent backlash that could be even more brutal than the violence of its recent past.

One thing is clear: Peace will only be possible by addressing the root causes of the war. In other words, peace cannot be achieved without changing the rules of the global system that require perpetual exploitation of natural resources for maximum private profit, and therefore, necessitates the displacement of people from their lands.

Communities like San José de Apartadó can serve as living laboratories for the necessary next phase in the Colombian peace process: initiating a process of reconciliation and social peace-building in the country. They can also provide an alternative to traditional Western-led economic development. This is why knowing about this community and its peace work is an important part of creating a post-capitalist future. What better place to start than communities that have fostered reconciliation and resilience in the heart of violence and oppression?

Photo by Fellowship of Reconciliation

The post Peace vs. Development: The Untold Story of the Colombian Civil War appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Today’s challenges, from the flight from war-refugees to the management of the commons, and the environmental crisis, are being tackled at the local level from some City Councils across Europe. Some cities are proving to be spaces with an outstanding capacity to confront and face reality with reachable solutions.

While the European Commission is set soon to examine Poland’s response to its recommendation of December 2016, regarding the rule of law in this Member State, a number of NGOs have submitted an open letter to the European Commission demanding to take action against Poland for its “complete disregard and undermine” for the rule of law. The Polish democratic crisis is only one of the many examples of states where national political institutions are not longer responding nor dealing with the global trends affecting the rule of law in their countries. Today’s challenges, from the flight from war-refugees to the management of the commons, and the environmental crisis, are being tackled at the local level from some City Councils across Europe. Some cities are proving to be spaces with an outstanding capacity to confront and face reality with reachable solutions. It is in the city where dynamic and organic transformations of social struggles are happening thanks to citizens-led measures and new forms of political participation. Barcelona, Madrid or A Coruna, are some of the most cited cases of successful municipalists governments in Europe. But these are not the only existing examples. In the Polish case, in a country accused of systemic threats to the rule of law, the city of Lublin is successfully translating the political struggles at the national level into political participation and re-appropriation of the public space for its citizens. Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland and the capital of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 349,103 people. In 2010, Mr Krzysztof Źuk was elected the Mayor of the City of Lublin and he was re-elected for the second term securing a majority of 60.13% in the first round of the local government elections held at the end of 2014. We spoke to Piotr Choroś, political scientist and head of social participation office in Lublin’s Municipal Office. He is specialist in the field of cooperation with local government, intercultural competence and anti-discrimination policies, and in the Lublin municipal office, he is responsible for the use and development of new technologies in communication with the residents.

In the Lublin Municipal Office you have a person responsible for the participatory budgeting and initiative of local residents. Can you explain what this means and what is the process of creating these budgets? How is this a tool for engaging citizens in public participatory life?

Civic budget is part of the city budget, which directly decide residents by voting. In the procedure of the Budget Citizens residents will decide on the disbursement of 15 million polish zloty. We are fortunate that participatory budgeting is a tool very close to people and their affairs. At the city level, each person who wants to change something in your immediate surroundings may propose an amendment and infect your idea to others. And it happens. They form local alliances residents encouraging others to vote for specific projects. From year to year we observe an increasing number of people who engage in civic budget.

The Mayors of Barcelona, Madrid and Paris have argued for greater recognition of the role that cities can play at a transnational level. They explain that at the international level it is increasingly necessary to take cities into account, and that at the European level, “this is an absolute imperative” What is Lublin’s position in this regard?

Lublin many years ago had already understood that networking and trans-nationality is the natural state of the modern city. Cooperation with cities, NGOs and other entities not national is profitable for everybody. Our city is involved in a number of networks in different thematic areas: culture, economy, environment, education and civil society development. The sharing experiences and mutual support is just one side of the coin. On the other hand there are informal relationships that naturally generate new solutions, and thus create a policy of European cities.

Some European cities have criticised the policy of closing European borders while at the same time calling on the European Union to provide more support for migrants and refugees. What is Lublin’s position towards migration? Would it be possible for Lublin to contribute to a network of cities supporting the inclusion of refugees?

For over twenty years, until 2014, one of the governmental centres for refugees was located in Lublin. During this time many local institutions, such as Municipal Social Services Centre, primary and secondary schools, developed tools and strategies for supporting persons applying for refugee status and those who were granted the status and decided to stay in Lublin for the future. This local system of support was backed by three NGOs which specialised in providing care for the persons living in the Refugees Centre. When, due to logistical reasons, the Refugees Centre in Lublin was closed, the Municipality of Lublin advocated its reopening and declared support for the persons who stayed in Lublin outside of the Refugees centre.

In Lublin, we believe in diversity advantage and want to support and help every resident of our city, regardless of their status and life history. We feel that we grow as a community when people from distant parts of the world choose Lublin to be their place of residence. Openness and friendliness are among the pillars of Lublin’s Strategy of Development 2013-2020! Unfortunately, the amount of refugees accepted in Poland and the location they are directed to is not local government’s decision, so in these matters we depend on the Polish government’s migration policies. But over the past 8 years, since we have become a part of the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities Programme, a number of programmes and initiatives have been put in place to make sure each new Lubliner is properly welcomed and taken care of. We cooperate closely with other Polish and European municipalities in matters of migration and inclusion of refugees and plan on continuing to do so in the future.

Lublin city photo – cc pixabay

Photo by SammCox

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That idea hasn’t worked out so well.

As climate change intensifies, the ecological implications of growth-based “development” are now alarming if not fatuous. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the sham of self-regulating “free markets” and the structural political corruption, consumer predation and wealth inequality that they tend to entail.  And culturally, people are starting to realize, even in poorer countries, that the satisfactions of mass consumerism are a mirage. A life defined by a dependency on global markets and emulation of western lifestyles is a pale substitute for a life embedded in native cultures, languages and social norms, and enlivened by working partnerships with nature and peers.

AFD Chief Economist Gaël Giraud

It is therefore exciting to learn that Agence Française de Développement (AFD) – the French development agency, based in Paris – is actively considering the commons as a “future cornerstone of development.”

A key voice for this shift in perspective at AFD is Chief Economist Gaël Giraud, who boldly acknowledges that “growth is no longer a panacea.”  He compares the current economic predicament to the plight of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who had to keep running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.  (For a short video interview with Giraud, in French, click here.  Here is an AFD webpage devoted to various commons issues.)

In a blog post outlining his views of the commons and development (and not necessarily reflecting those of AFD), Giraud cited the loss of biodiversity of species as a major reason for a strategic shift in “development” goals. “The last mass extinction phase [of five previous ones in the planet’s history] affected dinosaurs and 40% of animal species 65 million years ago,” writes Giraud. “At each of these phases, a substantial proportion of fauna was lost within a phenomenon of a massive decline of biodiversity.”

Cultural diversity is equally important to our survival, Giraud noted. He noted that “the wealth of languages, and therefore of cultures, has as much value as biodiversity….We destroy a lot at the cultural level, and consequently the possibility of coming up with solutions tailored to specific environments. It involves fighting against cultural uniformity, which Jacques Derrida called “Global-Latinization.”

Why is all of this a concern to a development agency like AFD?

Citing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals adopted in September 2015, Giraud writes that it is becoming quite clear that the whole idea of a Global North separate from the Global South no longer makes sense. “The bulk of our problems are now shared, in a world where the North-South border is tending to disappear.” Faced with existential global problems, the us/them distinctions of another era are a diversion from finding the solutions we need.

Giraud explains:

“Our greatest challenges concern the resilience of societies, in the North and South alike, faced with climate change, pollution and the progressive scarcity of mining resources, but also faced with the disruption of social ties caused in particular by the violent political reactions to ecological problems. The Syrian disaster was triggered by the 2007-2010 drought, without, of course, all of this crisis being due to the drought alone.  The congress organized by the World Bank last spring on ‘The State of the Economy – The State of the World’ recorded this point:  we economists have the unfortunate tendency of underestimating the impact of these upheavals. The truth is that they now represent a greater threat than the nuclear risk, for example.”

Giraud sees the commons as helping the world deal with many problems because “pooling resources with rules for sharing is an essential resilience factor.  Development must involve a renewed understanding by institutions, which have already allowed communities in the past, and will allow them in the future, to preserve, develop and promote common, cultural or natural resources.”(original emphasis).

By this understanding, a preeminent development goal must be to preserve diversity – in species, habitat, culture – and the uniqueness of life wherever it may be.  Given the nature of the global economy and capitalism as now structured, however, this means that we need to re-imagine “development” itself.

Giraud concedes that there are many major challenges in understanding the commons in today’s context:

How can we move from local experiences to more globalized management methods for the main global commons? What is the State’s role in the management of commons? Some people, such as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, the authors of The Common: An Essay on the 21st Century Revolution (La Découverte, Paris, 2014), argue that the State has nothing to do with the commons and embodies an obstacle to their management.

At AFD, we feel that while the State must not necessarily directly manage these commons, (which would ipso facto become public goods), it must create the conditions for possibilities for the emergence of commons within civil society and the private sector.(original emphasis)  For example, promote the creativity of civil society to form coalitions and manage commons – through NGOs, cooperatives, etc. The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDI) network is a wonderful example of joint management, at international level, of the cheap drugs industry in order to fight against diseases for which there is no solvent customer base with regard to the standard criteria of the traditional private sector. (original emphasis) It is a fundamental initiative for health in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, and who can have any doubt today, after H1N1 or Ebola in particular, that health for all is a global common good?

The AFD took a major step toward actualizing a new vision when it convened a major conference on the commons in Paris on December 1-2, 2016, bringing together a variety of academics, policy experts, commoners, economists, and activists.  I have not seen any formal presentation of the conference on the AFD website yet, but I have heard from colleagues that it was a remarkable event that augurs promising new steps toward commons-oriented development.

In the meantime, the AFD website states its ambitions plainly:  “AFD has set up a crosscutting process of reflection on these subjects, involving research and operational officers. It calls on academics from all disciplines, as well as consultants and politicians, with the aim of building a common knowledge and understanding of the operationalization of the Commons for a development assistance agency. To what extent do the Commons renew our understanding of contexts, and our support for the public policies and projects we finance?”

In this time of dismal political news, AFD’s leadership on the commons is a sign of hope, sanity and the potential for planetary reconstruction.

Photo by psyberartist

The post French Development Agency Champions the Commons as New Vision for Development appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I am grateful to be back in your lovely city, and I am grateful for your invitation to speak today about the commons as a new vision of “development.”  As the planet reels from the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change, we are seeing the distinct limits of the prevailing paradigms of economic thought, governance, law and politics.  While collapse and catastrophe have their own lurid attraction to many, the human species – and our governments – have a duty to seriously entertain the questions:  What new structures and logics will serve us better?  How can we better meet basic human needs – not just materially, but socially and spiritually?  And can we move beyond rhetoric and general abstractions to practical, concrete actions?

After studying the commons for nearly twenty years as an independent scholar and activist, I have come to the conclusion that the commons hold great promise in answering these questions.  But it is not a ready-made “solution” so much as a general paradigm and organizing perspective – embodied, fortunately, in thousands of instructive examples.  The commons is a lens that helps us understand what it means to be a human being in meaningful relation to other people and to the Earth. This then becomes the standard by which we try to design our social institutions.

Talking about the commons forces us to grapple with the checkered history of “development” policy and what it reveals about global capitalism and poorer, marginalized countries.  We have long known that development objectives tend to reflect the political priorities of rich, industrialized western nations, particularly their interests in economic growth and private capital accumulation.

Strangely, the once-heated political conflicts over the proper focus of development are starting to implode as new realities engulf them.  The brute facts of climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals are calling into question the idealized models of economic development, transforming the very terms of debate.  If we are to take the Paris climate accords seriously, the global North must now revisit its own historic mythologies of development and growth, and quickly imagine credible alternative paths forward. Suddenly, the social economies of indigenous peoples, traditional communities and localized systems seem highly relevant to the challenges ahead.

We are now witnessing the limits of the standard development vision and its faith in capital-driven innovation, fiscal austerity, deregulation, global free trade, and consumerism.  That schema, which requires the administrative and coercive power of the state, and sometimes violence, is under siege.  We are seeing that it is structurally impossible to sustain constant economic growth, expand debt and promote relentless consumer demand while alsoavoiding great inequalities of wealth and income, shrinking government budgets and services, and cascading environmental crises.  It just won’t work any more.  Planetary ecosystems are registering their own vote of no-confidence in this vision of “development.”

The structural crisis of the global system, according to my colleague Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, is its fundamental faith that the world’s natural resources are infinite.  At the same time, the global economic system believes that knowledge and culture – which in the digital age are plentiful and virtually free to share – should be made artificially scarce. That is the point of copyright and patents, after all – to create artificial monopolies over knowledge, seeds, software code and much else, on the assumption that only artificial scarcity and profit will produce the goods that we need.

Not only is this logic empirically incorrect – patents and copyrights are often impeding genuine innovation and progress – this scheme invariably concentrates more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands, thanks to compound interest, rent-seeking, and corporate dominance of the state and law.  The system is structured to yield greater inequality, social injustice, and unmet needs, as Thomas Piketty explained in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Douglas Rushkoff put it well:  “I’ve given up on fixing the economy.  The economy is not broken.  It’s simply unjust.”

History has shown that development discourse is a shape-shifting trickster, constantly adapting its linguistic face to accommodate shifting political winds.  We’ve seen the rise and disappearance of participatory development….integrated development….endogenous development…. redevelopment….and now, sustainable development.  (I’m sure I’ve missed some!)  How much longer can this go on?  As our climate and social crises intensify, we cannot merely look for another re-branding strategy for “development” to disguise hyper-marketization strategies such as REDD [Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation], patents for genes and lifeforms, and financial instruments to securitize flows of nature.

I submit that we need to take a longer view and abandon the whole mindset of “development” itself.  I have no illusions that this shift will occur easily or happily; too many generations have been invested in these ideas.  But without a very different conceptualization and lexicon for improving the human condition, we will continue to flail at our problems and sink deeper into dysfunction.

I. The Commons and Human Flourishing

To start, I propose that we start talking about human flourishing, not “development,” so that the social relationships ordained by markets are not the default or exclusive norms.  Let’s also stipulate that our foremost priorities should be meeting ecological and human needs, not propping up an unsustainable economy based on extraction, growth, expansive private property rights, and capital accumulation for the few.  Markets remain vital, of course, but markets should be in the service of regions and communities, not absentee finance and investment.

To achieve this, we must begin to give due recognition to the vital importance of nonmarket forces that exist outside of “the economy” – that is, to the intrinsic value generated by natural ecosystems, place-based communities, care work, digital collaborators and other self-organized commoners.   These are realms of aliveness and value-creation that standard economics ignores or misconstrues.  But if we can bring them into a constructive realignment with the behaviors and institutions that we call “the economy” – crafting markets that respect the commons – we could unleash enormous human energies while building a better world.

In my remarks today, I’d like to explain how the commons can serve as a powerful shared imaginary that can take us beyond “development.”  It provides a realistic framework to invent different means of provisioning and governance, with a more humane, socially equitable and ecologically responsible logic.

It’s important to understand that the commons is not a PR gambit or “messaging strategy” for giving a fresh face to leftist politics or development policy.  Nor is it a political ideology or policy agenda as such; it’s an evolving, open-ended discourse and creative social action. The commons is an invitation to a collaborative process, not a declaration of universal answers.  It is something that must be socially enacted from the bottom up.  It is not something that benevolent nations and technical experts can impose; it can only be encouraged.

Thomas Berry, the historian of cultures, once wrote, “The universe is the communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”  That is the sensibility that informs the commons.  It’s all about honoring agency and aliveness of human beings, not objectifying them to serve as pawns in someone else’s design plan administered from afar or coerced through global finance.  I see the commons as a quasi-autonomous realm for managing common wealth, especially at the local level, through a multitude of approaches.  I believe the commons paradigm offers many promising, practical approaches for dealing with archaic economic ideas, inequality, precarious work, migration, climate change, the failures of representative democracy, bureaucracy.  Personally, I am inspired by visionaries like Ivan Illich, E.F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, Karl Polanyi, Lewis Hyde, Jane Jacobs and Aldo Leopold.

Even though commons are often criticized as “wastelands” or “tragedies,” the truth is that they are generative.  Commons quietly meet important household needs – the original goal of economics.  They also disproportionately benefit women, who rely so much on commons to provide household food, care work and community.  Natural systems, too, are more likely to be happily integrated with a culture of commoning than with the culture of global capitalism.  For all these reasons, the commons can help us move beyond the problematic history of conventional development because it proffers different theories of value and human aspiration than those of the price system and the state.

Let me present a few examples as references points:

Seed-sharing is one way that local communities can assert greater control over their lives by controlling the knowledge that their lives depend on.  I visited the village of Erakulapally, two hours outside of Hyderabad, India several years ago.  I was deeply moved when I encountered Indian women who had revived the use of traditional agriculture with very old seeds that they found in their mother’s attics and storage chests.  “Our seeds, our knowledge,” is how they spoke about the seeds, which cannot be sold.  They can only be shared, borrowed or traded.  Seeds have deep meaning in a woman’s life, and are a source of dignity.  By recovering these seeds, which were more ecologically appropriate to their semi-arid region than the monoculture crops sold by multinational seed companies, they were able to improve their yields and provide two meals a day for their family instead of one.  They also reduced their dependency on global markets and their volatile prices.

Community lands in Africa – forests, rangelands, farmlands – have long been governed by custom as traditional commons.  But many lands in Africa are under grave threat these days by an international land grab by foreign investors, especially sovereign states and hedge funds.  Following the classical development paths to wealth creation, African states have colluded with investors to give sellers legal title to common lands, converting them into market assets.  Land is being made a mere machine to produce food, a commodity to be managed by the “free market,” without regard for the famines, urban migrations and cultural desolation that will surely result.  For hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and indigenous peoples, land is not a mere asset.  It is “the foundation for shared culture, practical social security, and an ultimate bulwark against bad decisions and involuntary losses,” in the words of Liz Alden Wily, an African land specialist.

The System for Rice Intensification is a global community of rice farmers who use the Internet to trade advice on agronomy practices for raising traditional rice – without GMOs, pesticides or herbicides.  It amounts to a kind of open-source agriculture that engages farmers from Sri Lanka and Cuba to Indonesia and West Africa.  I call it an “eco-digital commons” to emphasize how Internet collaborations and natural resources are integrated. The SRI methodology has increased yields by 20 to 50 percent, and often more, and made farmers more knowledgeable, active stewards of their land.  The system has developed entirely outside of government ministries and markets, with helpful coordination by academics at Cornell University.

The Potato Park in Peru is a “living library” of genetic knowledge about potatoes.  This region near Cusco grows about 2,300 of the world’s 4,000 potato varieties, making it one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.  What’s remarkable is that the Quechua natives in the Sacred Valley of the Incas have secured legal recognition for their right to act as stewards of this biodiversity.  They can manage their potatoes as sacred gifts without worrying about ag-biotech corporations trying to steal the genetic knowledge to patent it. The Potato Park model flourishes because it integrates agroecological practices with people’s spiritual traditions and cultural values, making it a holistic, regenerative system rather than an extractive market system.

The city as a commons.  While traditional “development” has focused on rural regions of the world, I think that we need to regard cities themselves as commons.  A growing number of proven legal, administrative, social and digital innovations are empowering ordinary citydwellers to design the spaces and programs in their cities. One pioneering example is the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons – a public/commons partnership by which the city government invites self-organized citizen groups and neighborhoods to take charge of parks, kindergartens, abandoned buildings, and more, with the active support of city government.

Other urban commons include participatory budgeting; community charters for managing collective assets; multistakeholder cooperatives for social services; and urban land trusts to make housing more affordable.  San Francisco has developed “urban prototyping,” a kind of open-source citizen participation for urban planning.  There are also many experiments that are reinventing production value-chains so that the benefits can be mutualized for collective benefit, not privatized for investors – for example, global open design and manufacturing networks that use FabLabs and makerspaces as infrastructures for local production.

These are just a few commons that I could cite.  I could just as easily have mentioned agroecology and permaculture….water committees that manage public water supplies in Bolivia….community forests in India…..coastal fisheries managed as commons….theacequias for managing irrigation water in New Mexico…and many others.

The International Land Association estimates that two billion people around the world depend upon forests, fisheries, farmland, water, wild game, and more, managed as commons, for their everyday subsistence.  Amazingly, if you consult any introductory economics textbooks, you won’t find any mention of the commons as a social system. While some textbooks are daring enough to mention “common resources,” the authors are quick to reference the “tragedy of the commons” parable.  Economists usually ignore the commons despite its enormous role in meeting basic needs because commons do not participate in the magic of the marketplace.  There is usually no transfer of money, and no production of (monetized) wealth.  So commons can be safely ignored as trivial and uninteresting.

To be sure, not all subsistence commons are sustainable or well-functioning.  Many are plagued by patriarchal norms and power abuses.  Governance systems in commons can fail.  The state may interfere on behalf of corrupt politicians or investors.  Bureaucrats may resent local commons as competing regimes of authority.  Still, even with their problems, commons enable hundreds of millions of people to meet their everyday needs in ways that are fairly stable, resilient, ecologically respectful and culturally rooted.

A recurring theme in so many commons is their ability to manage shared resources responsibly and at an appropriate scale.  They can be effective, trusted and legitimate in ways that governments and markets often are not.  The focal point in a commons is not thetransaction, but ongoing relationships.  Commons cultivate lasting social affections and obligations among people.  Duties and entitlements are linked.  Commoners care about earlier generations and future ones.

II. The Commons as a Verb – Commoning

Let me pause and quickly take note of the rampant confusion that seems to attend conversations about the commons.  As you may know, Garrett Hardin in his famous essay on the “tragedy of the commons” was not really describing a commons, but an open access regime or free-for-all in which everything is free for the taking.  Commons scholar Lewis Hyde has puckishly called Hardin’s “tragedy” thesis “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Commons-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Non-Communicating, Self-Interested Individuals.”

Hardin was focused on the resource, and had little interest in exploring the empirical social realities of people or commons.  The late Professor Elinor Ostrom helped rebut Hardin by documenting the many ways in which hundreds of communities, mostly in rural settings in poorer nations, do in fact manage natural resources sustainably.  Sadly, economists, politicians and the public persist in seeing the commons simply as unowned resources. NATO routinely refers to the oceans, space and the Internet as commons, when in fact these are common-pool resources – resources that are threatened precisely because they are not yet governed as commons.

So these are two familiar ways of talking about commons — the commons as an unmanaged resource (Hardin), and the commons as a social institution (Ostrom).  But I would argue that these discourses are inadequate because they tend to treat the commons as a noun when it is really a verb.  As the historian Peter Linebaugh has put it, “There is no commons without commoning.”

Commoning consists of a distinct, active community that sets boundaries around the resource, negotiates rules of access and use, assigns responsibilities and entitlements, monitors for and punishes free riders and shirkers, and so on.  So what many regard as aresource or as a social institution is more fruitfully understood as a dynamic, evolving social activity.  Commoning is carried out by people who love and care about their resources, community and culture – sometimes because their very survival depends on it.

It helps to understand the commons as a living social system of creative, mutually committed agents.  This third level of discourse is unsettling to conventional academics because it moves the entire discussion out of the familiar economistic framework based onHomo economicus.  Instead of relying on a cardboard caricature about what a human being is – selfish, rational, utility-maximizing, and so on – we brashly welcome a more complex, open-ended idea of human capacities and character.  Most economists are wary of entering the precincts of anthropology, psychology, sociology, geography, and other “soft,” humanistic sciences because they can’t build tidy quantitative, mechanical models that predict the future.  When there are so many idiosyncratic local, historical, cultural, and intersubjective factors at play, as there are in a commons, it is virtually impossible to set forth a standard, universal typology of commons.

Of course, this is precisely the point – to honor the natural, robust, unpredictable diversity and creativity of life itself, as it is actually lived on the ground.  A commons does not attempt to subordinate the vagaries of history, social practices, geography, and culture to a universal market logic – to make everything a fungible commodity on a global grid.  The commons paradigm seeks to leverage these attributes.  Properly aligned, they are what make a commons work well.

This third level of understanding commons is often disregarded because it frankly creates problems for certain sectors of society.  Commoning requires that we begin to rethink the ontological framework of standard economics and go beyond the rational-actor premises ofHomo economicus.  It invites us to make a larger macro-political analysis of the structural deficiencies of markets and the state, and by favorable contrast, the generative power of commons.  Needless to say, a lot of people just don’t want to go there.

III.  Standard Economics and the Commons:  A Clash of Worldviews

Once you start to take the commons seriously, a clash of worldviews is nearly inevitable.  In a world of high modernity and global capitalism, where “everything solid melts into air,” as Marx put it, the commons is often seen as hopelessly premodern and even tribal.  The commons insists that many things must remain inalienable – not for sale or commoditization.  This enables commoners to preserve their humanity and the beloved landscapes and cultures that define their lives.  Unfortunately, the state, bureaucratic systems and economics usually want to impose their own regularities on the messy local realities of human existence and social organization – a theme nicely explained by James Scott in his book Seeing Like a State.

Commoning remains nearly invisible first because it is assumed that the state and market are the only governance structures worth talking about.  Second, taxonomies that attempt to classify commons and make them more visible fail because the commons paradigm is not a regularity; each is distinctive.  I have been astonished to discover, for example, that there are commons out there that revolve around community theater, the design of open-source microscopes, and neighborhood currencies in Kenya.  There are commons based on open-source mapping to aid humanitarian rescue, and self-organized commons in Greece to provide hospitality for migrants.

Once we acknowledge that the ontological premises of a commons matter, and that those premises may vary immensely, we enter a new cosmology of social phenomena.  The inner subjective and spiritual lives of people must be taken seriously.  Social practices, norms, ritual and tradition are the fabric of successful commons.  Each commons becomes a unique exercise in “world-making.”

Once we recognize this fact, we start to move from abstract systems-thinking to a realm of experiential meaning.  We must behold the mysteries of organic, living systems! Understanding living systems as living systems requires a more holistic perspective and humanistic values.  It requires new heuristic methods.  None of these are easily apprehended through the universal, mechanistic categories of western modernity.

It becomes hard to see the commons when even language and law have been warped to banish the commons down a memory hole.  I learned from Professor Benjamin Coriat ofUniversité Paris 13 that the French Napoleonic civil code negated any form of common property when it went into effect in 1804.  The French people had long managed forests, fisheries, farmland and lakes as commons, but the new civil law denied any form of common property.  The juridical privileging of property rights, defined in terms of individuals, also served to override collective human rights because individual property rights in practice can be used to negate human rights.

And so the commons begins to disappear from world consciousness, at least in the West. Let me illustrate this loss of a different way of being by showing you a map of the Great Sandy Desert in Australia.  To the western mind, no surprises here.  But now look at this same land mass, known to the Aborigines as Ngarrara.  A very different landscape!  The first map is gray and schematic.  The second is a colorful, breathtaking work of art.  Each embodies different ways of seeing, different relationships to the land, and different conceptions of human society.  This is entirely normal in commons, where people’s relationships to each other and to their resources constitute the commons.

The ontological variability of commons is supremely maddening and incomprehensible to economists and others living within the modernist worldview.  No wonder most of them persist in regarding the commons simply as a resource!  It’s as if they cannot abide the idea that everything cannot be classified into standard, operational categories, the sine qua nonof neoliberal market culture.

IV. Commoning as Relationality

I do think there is a middle ground between the universalism of high modernity and the chaotic diversity of countless unique commons.  There is a practical heuristic for making sense of commons, and it’s called patterns.  This idea was developed by Christopher Alexander in the early 1970s through his brilliant analysis of pattern languages.  Alexander wanted to know why certain architectural designs in buildings and public spaces have been so persistent and powerful over thousands of years.

His conclusion, after studying an eclectic range of designs across cultures and centuries, was that certain patterns of design are used again and again because they are so elementally pleasing to humans and supportive of life.  Certain patterns are not merely fashionable or profitable; they speak to something deeper and mysterious in human beings while meeting functional needs.  Using this methodology, Alexander identified a coherent pattern language for architectural design.

My colleague Silke Helfrich and I drew upon the idea of pattern languages in our recently published anthology, Patterns of Commoning, which features more than fifty examples of commons from around the world and in different resource domains.  A pattern analysis allows us to identify recurrent types of design and governance within commons.  The heuristic of patterns allows us to honor the particular social relations of each commons while letting us also draw general conclusions about a class of commons.  There is no need to impose a false regularity on the crazy jumble of human life.  I also think that fractal motifs help us understand the character of commons – differences are nested within self-same patterns.

This approach helps us to see relationality as an organizing principle.  We don’t focus on resources as objects or crude Newtonian schemes of direct cause-and-effect; we focus instead on how everything interrelates and evolves over time.  The more appropriate framework for studying the commons is complexity science, which studies the dynamics of living systems.  The German physicist Hans Peter Dürr puts it nicely: “Basically, there is no such thing as matter.  At least not in the common sense.  There is only a fabric of relationships, constant change, vitality.  We have trouble imagining this.  What is primary is only the interrelationships that exist – that which connects.”

I realize that this is a bracing idea that is not easily absorbed by politics, policy, donors and agencies involved in development.  But I think we need to entertain these realities.  My colleague Silke Helfrich recently told a conference of commons scholars:  “A coherent theory of the commons [that addresses relationality] could mean to social sciences what quantum physics meant to the natural sciences.”  The power of relationality in commons may throw many deeply entrenched ideas into disarray, but it may also open up some breathtaking new vistas for deeper understanding and practical action.

Leading evolutionary theorists such as David Sloan Wilson, E.O. Wilson and Martin Nowak and complexity theorist Samuel Bowles are confirming that reciprocal social exchange lies at the heart of any society.  It is the basis for human identity, community and culture.

Reciprocal exchange is a vital brain function that helps the human species survive and evolve.  Theorists of natural selection are now spending a lot of time focusing on the dynamics of group selection over individual natural selection.  As E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson put it, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups.  Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.  Everything else is commentary.”  David Sloan Wilson, who worked briefly with Elinor Ostrom before her death, has even founded a new organization, PROSOCIAL, to use the findings of evolutionary science to improve the functioning of organizations and communities.

Other scientists such as German theoretical biologist Andreas Weber go even further, challenging the credibility of scientific method that has no place for subjectivity, consciousness, meaning and spirituality in the grand march of evolution.  Modern science declines to study the aliveness inherent in all living creatures, complains Weber.  It sees living organisms as sophisticated machines that can be more or less explained through cause-and-effect processes.  The world is seen as governed by large, abstract forces, and human agency and consciousness are cast as trivial, ephemeral bubbles in an empty universe.  These are the tacit metaphysical premises of the neoDarwinian grand narrative and of free-market ideology.

But many scientists are starting to see the standard neoDarwinian storyline as profoundly incomplete and misleading.  It does not take into account how the rational and the non-rational, the subjective and the objective, the personal and the collective all blur into each other…..just as in a commons.  The are seeing life as a system of cooperative agents. Competition still exists, of course, but it is interwoven with deep, stabilizing forms of cooperation, which itself is shaped by feelings, culture and social meaning.  These insights are not merely of arcane, academic interest; they are strategically important in helping us reorient ourselves to a new vision of “development.”

V. Practical Steps to Support Commoning

I’ve given a lot of conceptual and philosophical framing here.  Now let me suggest some practical steps that could help support commoning as a way to improve human flourishing. I don’t offer these as “magic bullets” that will solve challenges, but rather as important vectors for further research, debate and creative implementation.

1: Stop the enclosures. One lesson of the history of economic development is that the neoliberal idea of development and progress is the commoners’ experience of enclosure, dispossession and cultural loss.  The process of privatization and marketization creates only certain forms of value while redistributing wealth and power and creating a lot of “illth,” in John Ruskin’s phrase – the opposite of wealth.  We can see this with so many neoliberal trade treaties, the African land grabs, and neoextractivist politics and practices in Latin America.  We see it in the facile conflation of Gross Domestic Product and human well-being.

So the first step toward protecting commons is to stop the market enclosures of farmland, fisheries, forests, rangelands, water and other natural resources.  These are destabilizing forces.  They quite often serve the interests of global finance more than the long-term interests of local communities.

2: Recognize commoning as a regenerative paradigm that opens up new solution-sets. Instead of regarding the state and the market as the only consequential forces for improving human life, development policy needs to recognize commoning as generative and regenerative.  It is a holistic framework that re-invests in a commons, helping to maintain it.  It is not extractive of either resources or people.  Its benefits belong to all commoners and can be mutualized among them.

This is the very point of the commons – to introduce a new vocabulary to start to name things and social activities that the dominant financial paradigm has little interest in (primarily because nonmarket aspects of nature and care work have no price and therefore are treated as if they have no value).  The social ethics of Buen vivir and Pachamama are attempts to bring a very different worldview into the foreground.  The language of “affective labor,” as geographer Neera Singh puts it, is the kind of language that helps validate the importance of commoning.

We need to start building new types of policy mechanisms, legal innovations, financial instruments and organizational forms that can move us in this direction.  Here are some promising organizational forms:

•         Stakeholder trusts for common assets such as the Alaska Permanent Fund can help everyone share in whatever financial benefits flow from a shared resource;
•         Stewardship charters such as the Potato Park can give a customary community enduring legal and administrative control over its land and culture.
•         State/commons partnerships as we see in Italy can help move beyond the structural limits of bureaucracy, empowering people to become commoners while retaining state oversight;
•         New organizational forms such as “omni-commons” need state recognition and support so that they can incubate and host commoning.  An omni-commons is a administrative and financial organization such as the Omni-Commons of Oakland, California, or Cecosesola of Venezuela, which provides the overhead systems and infrastructures for small-scale commons to start up and function more readily.

3: Reinvent law for the commons.This is a long-term challenge that I recently addressed in a strategy memo called “Reinventing Law for the Commons.”  Historically, commons have either been dispossessed through enclosures – or they have had to create their own creative hacks of the law, because law tends to protect the sanctity of individual rights, private property, markets and state authority.  Remarkably, there are many successful adaptations of laws dealing with contracts, trusts, co-operatives, municipal government, copyrights, patents, among other bodies of law.  I like to see these expedient hacks against an indifferent or hostile state as a not-yet-recognized body of socio-legal-political innovation, “Law for the Commons.”

Law for the commons is needed first to decriminalize commoning in certain instances, such as seed-sharing or customary land use.  Law for the commons is also needed to affirmative support acts of commoning, by giving the “vernacular law” of social practices formal state recognition.  Law needs to recognize the “unofficial” social norms, procedures and customary institutions that peer communities devise to manage their resources.  The various land commons in Africa need to have their customary rights recognized in law, for example.

Creating Law for the Commons can also help bridge the alarming gap between law andlegitimacy – an idea that I learned from legal scholar Étienne Le Roy.  One of the big problems today is the gap between the formal strictures of state law and bureaucratic rules adopted by political and corporate elites – “legality” – and the experiences, norms and practices that ordinary people regard as legitimate.  We will never make progress against climate change or many other problems if people do not feel that state law is legitimate or that they are excluded from playing a meaningful role in the laws that govern them.

4: Reinvent finance for the commons. This, too, is a huge topic, but one that deserves much greater attention.  To support commoning, we need new sorts of finance that can share equity among people as an alternative to conventional debt-driven investment.  The Commons Strategies Group recently held a three-day workshop on “Democratic Money and Capital for the Commons” to explore the range of options, from public banks and social and ethical banking, to new forms of co-operative finance, digital currencies that use blockchain software from Bitcoin, and even “quantitative easing for people,” and not just banks.

There are some interesting experiments going on to raise money for commons-based guilds using redeemable stock shares with caps on the return on investment.  This would allow equity to be raised for commons-based ventures without forcing them to surrender control to venture capitalists; they could remain co-operatively run.  We need new sorts of macro-finance to accelerate transition strategies to a new economy.  One great idea is for “transvestments” – a term coined by Dmitri Kleiner to describe investments in technologies and projects that help us move toward the commons paradigm.

5: Leverage sharing on open networks to support commoning (not Uber-ification). There are huge opportunities to reinvent the idea of development through digital technologies and open networks.  But a key question that should be addressed is whether the design and benefits of the innovation will be monetized and siphoned away to Silicon Valley investors – or shared by participants themselves?  The tech world often talks about the virtues of “disruption” – but much less about how social needs and the public interest will be fulfilled.  State policy and development policy could play a critical role here by providing infrastructures, technical protocols and standards designed to support commoning.

We’ve seen, for example, how people in Austin, Texas, built their own smartphone app that will enable co-operative benefits and better public protections than the app that Uber was insisting on using.  There is a burgeoning new movement called “platform co-operativism” seeking to spread this ethic as a feasible alternative to winner-take-all, highly extractive business models such as Uber, Airbnb and Task Rabbit – business models that lead a “race to the bottom” to extract value from the workforce rather than pay living wages.

The big-picture economic story here is the growing structural reliance on social sharing and collaboration, as documented by commentators like Jeremy Rifkin, Yochai Benkler, Donald Tapscott and Michel Bauwens.  This trend could result in a kind of neo-feudalism led by corporate giants – or to a democratization of governance and production.  We could have large telecom monopolies creating artificial scarcity and high prices – or commons such as Guifinet, the self-organized wifi service in Catalonia, perhaps the largest community network in the world with its plentiful bandwidth for everyone.

State leadership could help us navigate a transition to this sort of world, where commons using network platforms could manage all sorts of knowledge-sharing, open-book accounting and commons-based peer production.  Preliminary estimates by the P2P Foundation suggest that the mutualization of knowledge and production infrastructures could produce an “80-80” improvement – 80% less physical matter and energy would be needed to produce 80% of what we produce right now.  Citizen-science could improve reporting about all sorts of environmental problems in tandem with state bureaucracies. Open design/local production communities like Farm Hack is already producing cheap, modular, locally sourced agricultural equipment for rural regions around the world.

6: Rethink state power to decriminalize and support commoning. It is an open question how the state may need to change in order to accommodate, if not support, commoning.  Given the state’s close alliance with capital, there is certainly little appetite for exploring post-capitalist, post-growth forms of provisioning.  Moreover, as my reference to the Napoleonic civil code suggests, the state and commons do not have a formal or natural juridical relationship.  This means that the claims of individual property rights generally override the concerns of the commons and collective human rights.

That said, the relationship between state power and commoning is very complicated.  It is possible to imagine the state developing new structures to support commoning, just as it is in Bologna, Barcelona and Seoul.  (Interesting that cities appear to be in the vanguard of redfining state power and commoning.)  Clearly one important tension between the state and commoners is the shrinking capacities of centralized bureaucracies in the face of open networks and social collaboration.  David Graeber brilliantly critiques the limits of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules – and astutely that the left has no substitute, humane system to propose for bureaucracy.

I think there is a compelling alternative to bureaucracy in the form of commoning, however. But first we must devise ways for state law and bureaucracy to authorize commoning and oversee it from a distance, just as the state delegates its powers to corporations through corporate charters.  We must also go beyond policy discussions of “private goods” and “public goods” to talk about how the state and commons can co-operate to managecommon assets and relational goods.  The term “common assets” introduce the idea that the state cannot privatize a resource or service.  This is a new conceptual category, not just another word for “re-municipalization” of assets and services. As for “relational goods,” this is a term coined by Stefano Zamagni to describe public goods that by their very nature are social in character and whose value increases through sharing.  For example, watching a film or sporting event as a collective experience, or intimate, authentic experiences such as friendship and caring are “relational goods.”

There are many unresolved questions, however.  How should boundaries around commons be drawn, and what new tensions might these boundaries engender?  The German environmental scholar Wolfgang Sachs pointed out to me that “a commons perspective has to struggle with the neoliberal economy on the one hand and nationalist movements on the other.”  Commoners may celebrate diversity, localism and participation, he said, but that does not resolve the age-old tensions between natives and strangers, traditionalists and cosmopolitans, and authoritarianism and social justice.

My provisional response to this is that the commons has transideological appeal and does not fit neatly into the left/right political spectrum.  As my colleague Silke Helfrich points out,conservatives like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility; liberals and social democrats are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement; libertarianslike the emphasis on individual initiative; and leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the market.  In this sense, champions of the commons cannot be neatly labeled.  I think that Pope Francis was aware of this, too, in his manifesto about the environment and poverty,Laudato si’, in which he stresses the value of our common wealth beyond market and state and offers a vision of human diversity grounded in unity.

7: Learn to live with ambiguity, paradox, and experimentalism (because we are living in a transitional period). We must learn to live within two very different socio-economic logics and construct practical transitions that strives to sharpen its vision and commitment to commoning – while acknowledging unavoidable constraints and paradoxes.

8: Commoning is not just for “developing” countries. As should be obvious by now, commoning holds many important lessons and possibilities for those of us living in “advanced” industrial societies.  In fact, there is an enormous amount of activity related to the commons in Europe these days – from the European Parliament’s task force on the commons to festivals in Greece, Italy and France, to books, workshops, and grassroots projects that policymakers have not yet discovered.  All of these offer some promising new opportunities for North/South cooperation if not solidarity.

*          *          *

So what does all of this add up to?  I’m not prepared to make grand predictions that the commons can usher in a political revolution at the global scale, as Dardot and Laval argue in their book Commun.  I wouldn’t rule that out, but for now I prefer to think more modestly of the commons as an indispensable complement to market and state with enormous potential for catalyzing transformations at both macro- and micro-scale levels.  This will require that we imagine and invent new sorts of governance institutions that go beyond the nation-state and international treaty organizations:  a rather ambitious vision indeed.

Still, we need to start exploring such ideas.  I lay out some of my speculations on this topic in a recent essay published by Friends of the Earth U.K. called “Transnational Republics of Commoning:  Reinventing Governance Through Emergent Networking.”  In the next few days, just north of Paris, I am co-hosting a workshop with international law scholars and activists to try to imagine what commons-based systems of governance might look like for managing large-scale ecological resources such as regional ecosystems, oceans or the atmosphere, which are comprised of so many smaller-scale systems.

Let me close with two quotes – the first a warning, the second, an inspiration.  A proverb of the indigenous people of southwestern Colombia warns:  “The word without action is empty, action without the word is blind, and action and the word outside the spirit of the community is death.”  Of course, many of us are on the quest to figure out precisely the opposite — how to integrate word, action and community, and thereby create flourishing commons that can unleash cascades of creativity, aliveness and innovation.  That is precisely what we need right now.

The inspiration comes from the anonymous Invisible Committee in France, which wrote: “Revolutionary moments do not spread by contamination but by resonance….It takes the shape of music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations.”  Listen closely and you will hear the music of the commons!Photo by vitroid

The post Beyond Development: The Commons as a New/Old Paradigm of Human Flourishing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We would argue that there are other winners in what Hickel calls “the microfinance game”. Corporate interests of all stripes have a vested interest in seeing millions of people drawn more deeply into the debt-based globalized money economy.

Reposted from Local Futures Helena Norberg-Hodge talks about the false promise of Micro-finance.

Ever since Bill Clinton and the World Bank enthusiastically embraced the microfinance concept in the 1990s, we at Local Futures have been skeptical of its benefits, seeing it as part of a whole package of “market solutions” to our social and environmental crises that, in the long run, make things much worse. We have pointed out that these loans often target rural populations who were not previously in debt: they represent the long arm of capitalism reaching into remote rural areas, encouraging a shift away from dependence on the land and the local community, towards competition in a resource-depleting global economy.

It has not been easy to oppose micro-credit: many well-intentioned grassroots activists have bought into the idea that giving ‘Third World’ women a loan would eradicate poverty and reduce population. This thinking was promoted with missionary zeal, and spread rapidly across the world. In trying to counter it, we have often felt like heretics. (One of the most difficult moments was when I was asked to debate Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, at the height of his popularity, on BBC radio.)

For this reason we’re very happy to see this article by Jason Hickel, a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, in the UK Guardian: The microfinance delusion: who really wins? As Hickel says, “microfinance usually makes poverty worse”, because the vast majority of microfinance loans are used to fund the purchase of consumer goods that the borrowers simply can’t afford: “they end up taking out new loans to repay the old ones, wrapping themselves in layers of debt.” Even when used to finance a small business, the most likely outcome is that the new businesses fail, which leads to “vicious cycles of over-indebtedness that drive borrowers even further into poverty.” The only winners are the lenders, many of whom charge exorbitant interest rates. Hickel concludes that “microfinance has become a socially acceptable mechanism for extracting wealth and resources from poor people.”

We would argue that there are other winners in what Hickel calls “the microfinance game”. Corporate interests of all stripes have a vested interest in seeing millions of people drawn more deeply into the debt-based globalized money economy. Interestingly, at the bottom of the webpage where Hickel’s article appears there are links to articles sponsored by the credit card giant Visa, all of them urging more “financial inclusion” in the global South – in other words, bringing more people into the economic system that corporate interests like Visa dominate. “Helping the world’s one billion unbanked women” turns out to be about how “more than 200 million women lack access to a mobile phone, meaning they’re excluded from digital banking opportunities.” Another article argues that one of the greatest challenges facing policymakers involves “providing some 2.5 billion people with access to formal financial services.”

This is propaganda, pure and simple: it is part of a drumbeat coming from think-tanks and corporate-friendly pundits that have been very effective in convincing people – including well-meaning philanthropists and activists – that the solution to global poverty requires pulling ever more people into the global economic system. That system is failing the majority even in the “wealthy” countries, while spurring rampant consumerism and unsustainable resource use worldwide.

The solutions to our many crises – including poverty – will not come from a global marketplace rigged by de-regulatory trade treaties to favor the biggest multinational corporations. They depend on preventing further deregulation of global corporations, while shifting towards more localized economies in which people can have real control over their own lives.

The post Small Loans, Big Problems: The False Promise of Microfinance appeared first on P2P Foundation.