Bec Sanderson: Today PIRC, the New Economics Foundation, NEON and the FrameWorks Institute are launching two story strategies that progressives can use to shift thinking on the economy. They’re built on values and metaphors that encourage the hope that change is possible and increase people’s support for progressive policies.

Download the report

Why we need new stories

Dominant economic narratives have gripped the public imagination and paved the way for regressive economic, social and environmental policies. Without the framing resources and co-ordination to challenge these narratives, campaigners often score own-goals when they talk about the economy.

The austerity story, based on the belief that Labour’s overspending ‘maxed out’ the nation’s credit card and left Britain in a mess, has been used to justify a regime of cuts to public spending that persisted in spite of the horrific social consequences and sluggish economic performance. More recently, the Brexit story has harnessed an unholy alliance between anti-immigrant sentiment and an aspiration for national self-reliance in order to ‘take back control’ from distant Brussels elites.

In the face of these stories, campaigners have often been on the back foot, using language that they haven’t shaped (like ‘Labour’s mess’), relying on oppositional politics (e.g. anti-cuts) and experimenting with frames(e.g. the ‘game is rigged’) without knowing how to use them most strategically –  rather than asserting their own vision of the economy.

How research can help us frame more effectively

Framing research projects can help campaigners be on the front foot, figuring out exactly what they want to say and how. In Framing the Economy, movement-building was an explicit aim alongside the empirical research: seeking to build up much needed coordination, resilience and support between movement spokespeople.

Working with the FrameWorks Institute, NEF, NEON and a large network of campaigners, journalists and press officers, we went through the key stages of framing research (more detail here).

First, we figured out our ‘untranslated story’: what we wanted to say, positively, about the values, principles and policies that a new economy should be based on. Next, we carried out extensive research into how people across the UK were thinking about the economy. We found that people thought of the economy a bit like a bucket—some people fill it up and others drain it out—a metaphor that lends itself to an simplistic understanding that the ‘economically unproductive’ (i.e. anyone not working right now) are the problem. However, people also had a strong belief that the economy is rigged to serve the interests of a nefarious and coordinated elite, and that this is dangerous and wrong. Coming away from this research, the biggest barrier to change didn’t seem to us to be people’s analysis of the problem. Fatalism— the attitude of ‘yes, we know that there are problems, but there’s nothing we can do’—seemed to pose a bigger barrier.

We looked for areas of alignment and divergence between these themes and our ‘untranslated story’ in order to identify the key framing challenge: to communicate that the economy is a product of design, and can therefore be redesigned.  We used this to develop a series of values, metaphors and policies, testing them with interviews and national surveys to see whether or not they worked.

The two stories we recommend

The following two approaches differ in tone and emphasis, but both work towards the same goals, complementing each other in a wider framing strategy.

 1: Resisting Corporate Power

“Over the last forty years, our government has become a tool of corporations and banks, prioritising the interests of the wealthy rather than giving equal weight to the needs of everyone. We need to reprogramme our economy so that it works in the interests of society rather than just in the interest of corporate elites.”

This story centres on how the economy is both unfair and broken and lays blame squarely on corporate power and wealthy elites. It argues that the economic system has been unfairly influenced by a powerful few for their own benefit, and that this manipulation is the source of the economy’s problems. This story draws either on the value of Economic Strength or the value of Equality as the rationale for supporting progressive policies and uses a reprogramming metaphor to show how the economy has been intentionally designed—and can be redesigned— through policy decisions.

 2: Meeting our Needs

A good society makes it possible for everyone to lead a meaningful and fulfilling life. Yet, our society is currently focused solely on profit, and people are forced to chase money rather than happiness. The laws and policies that we make lay down tracks that determine where the economy takes people. Right now, our economy is built around profit rather than being built to get people to their true needs.”

This story brings into focus the priorities of individuals and society. By drawing on the value of Fulfillment, this story identifies deeper needs—beyond the need to make money—and makes the case for an economy that prioritises happiness and fulfillment over profit. It utilises a metaphor of Economic Tracks to illustrate the significant role the economy plays in structuring opportunities, making it clear that society’s current priorities result from the way the economy has been designed.

Next steps

We hope, in using these stories, that campaigners and progressive spokespeople can build greater support for an economy based on equality, community, and stewardship of the environment.

Download our report to read our findings and recommendations in full!

Contact Bec to talk about PIRC’s ongoing research on framing strategies for a new economy.

The post Change is possible! How to frame the economy to support progressive politics. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Download the paper here: Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative, Policy and Practice

Photo by phedot

The post Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative, Policy and Practice appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This summer, I met a man who told me about his permaculture work. He was particularly proud that he was living outside what he termed ‘the old story’ where he didn’t need to depend on ‘old tools’. He told me, with an air of authority, that he didn’t use phones, had no use for money or Twitter, and was doing his best to live off the grid. He felt he was ahead of the curve, and that eventually the rest of the world would catch up with him.

A few years ago, I might have stood in his exact same spot; “the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house”, I would have said, nodding my head, and blinking slowly, with the self-righteous assuredness that closed me up to other perspectives. In writing, in speech, I was on a quest to discover the ‘new’ – shining in the lofty distance, removed from its morbid entanglements with the familiar. I imagined a world where formal education (and its project of colonial subjectivization), colonialism, racism, sexism, religious exclusivism, corporate fascism, ageism, phallic techno-utopianism, and the anxious notion of a world in progress…gliding through innocent space – like Latour’s arrow of time – would no longer exist. As such, I was quite taken by apocalyptic prophecies and end-of-the-line stories, promising a Golden Age after the fiery wrath of the old had been extinguished by its own toxicity. A new story.

When I read the accounts of people walking out of ‘old systems’, I felt deeply inspired to take leaps of my own. But leaps into what? What did the new look like? How could I know for sure that what I occupied was in fact an unadulterated space, unapologetically new, not just a regurgitated iteration of an old friend? In short, at what point does the old stop and the new begin?

***

These questions weren’t strange to me: I had been here before. As a young African Christian who was brought up in one of the most vivaciously charismatic hotbeds of Pentecostal Christianity – what with its virulent insistence on exclusive practice, keeping oneself holy, fighting off the devil, and keeping oneself ‘rapturable’ – I was unduly concerned about the ontological status of my faith. Apart from answering the pastor’s ‘salvation call’ every Sunday (you know, just to be sure that I had received enough of a supernatural dose of forgiveness for the effect to be real), I distinctly remember praying to God one day, asking to be gifted with an apparatus – which I imagined as a sphygmomanometer-like tool, similar to the ones my sisters and I played ‘doctor’ with when our parents were out. We were always fascinated with the silvery fluid bobbing up and down the glassy column of the box, seeking…straining…yearning for accuracy. Watching its mercuric dance, stimulated by the squeezing of the bulb, along with the tightening grip of the cuff on my arm, lent itself to an ideal of (and pilgrimage for) certitude that would define most of my life. So I prayed for a faith-sphygmomanometer: I wanted to be relieved of the angst of not knowing whether I measured up.

As much as we would like to laugh at the idea of a faith-measuring device, measurement is no small matter. In fact, measurements are how things come to matter – or how things stop mattering. By measurement, I do not refer merely to the set of practices some scientists are known for: pouring bubbly purpled things into other glass jars with strangely coloured liquids, creating perverse admixtures. I am not even honing in on something distinctly or solely ‘human’ (but this is an issue for another essay, not this one). Karen Barad writes that measurements “are agential practices, which are not simply revelatory but performative: they help constitute and are a constitutive part of what is being measured”[1] By that she means that the world is fundamentally entangled – in an utterly orgasmic self-enacting perversity of touch. The commonplace idea that the world entails already made things, with discrete boundaries and a priori values, bouncing off each other in a soup of interactivity, is summarily deconstructed by quantum theory. By popularizing the concept of intra-action, Barad compels us to notice that phenomena, not ‘things’, are the units of the physical world, where a ‘phenomenon’ is a mangled knot of multiple threads with no distinct shape or determinate measure. Things gain definition (and therefore boundaries and properties) only within the context of ephemeral relationships or intra-actions.

What then is a ‘human’? A ‘plant’? The ‘environment’? Some religious and quasi-scientific interpretations of the world would invite us to look with-in to find an answer: the soul makes us ‘human’, and therefore places us across an unbridgeable chasm from the rest of the world. Empirical science reacts to this and insists we look with-out, in the distant (and yet pressingly close) and unimpeachable principles of motion and the deterministic laws of the world. In very recent times, what with cross-cultural trends, haptic involutions in technological ‘innovation’, and other shifts that are difficult to characterize, the impulse has emerged to look with – in the spaces between.[2] With. Quantum theory at least disturbs the idea that there can be a decidable answer to any of those questions, since the identity of a thing is not an essence or property of the thing, but a co-emergent phenomenon.

Light is a particle in a delayed-choice double slit experiment, and a diffractive wave in a different iteration of the double slit test. Asking what light ‘really is’ is beside the point. It depends on the measuring apparatus with which we produce the phenomenon. There is no ‘really is’. A specific book is only 14 centimetres long within a measurement intra-action ‘with’ a ruler, and not prior to that sensuous encounter. Its 14-centimetredness is not ‘out there’, waiting for the right tool to find it out, seeking a home among the many numbers that line a column of numbers, like teenage mercury. Accuracy is therefore not a matter of aligning the finite with the infinite, or insisting that the temporal correspond with the fixed, as it is about awkward encounters and inaudible gasps – about form arising and collapsing into a soup of things, and not even in a way that leaves the duration between these seemingly double events intact or untroubled. Accuracy does not mean we cannot speak about objectivity. Conditioned by Cartesian ideas, we are used to thinking about objectivity in terms of ‘something outside’ or ‘what is – no matter who looks’, but objectivity is not synonymous with exteriority or stability. To point out that the world is entangled is not the same as saying there are no things, but that things derive their discreteness and difference within the context of intra-acting relationships, not prior to that encounter.

In short, this strange affair of entanglement haunts ontology as the study of ‘what is’. Little wonder, Derrida, concerned with spectres and ghostly figures and things ‘out of joint’, suggests that we speak of ‘hauntologies’ instead – where identity is always in the making, always ‘to-come’, always partial, neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive, and never “completely constituted prior to experience”[3].

How ‘we’ measure the world enacts the world, and excludes other complementary worlds from mattering. The world is a constant deconstruction and reiteration of itself. Every moment, every morsel, every critter, every gesture, every unseemly movement in the dark, is ‘part’ of a palimpsest of bodies and stories, or body-stories (or material-discursivity) that enacts the real. If I were to pay homage to my formative Christian years, I would now say that the project of creation described in Genesis is still unfinished, in part because it is still ongoing, but – more profoundly – because the very notion of an endpoint, of a finish line, of a tape to cross, is also up for reconfiguration. Still to come.

***

And so by way of quantum deconstructions, queer light, ghosts and Christian quests for certitude (with the colonial undertones of wanting to be approved by a foreign standard!), we return to (or re/turn!) the concept of the new or, to be specific, how the new is co-enacted and performed.

Our times are shot through with unwieldy, but nevertheless consequential, desires and hopes for justice – and these yearnings mark our bodies in very material ways. My wife and I, parents to a three year old magical creature – our daughter Alethea-Aanya, still struggle with what education ‘means’, or rather how to comport ourselves in a nurturing way with a little girl who mostly prefers the pale face of a phone to the lyrical greenness of the plants in our balcony. When we left our teaching positions at the university, we did it – like so many other younger people today – wanting to live a life in keeping with our authentic quests for presence in a very complicated world. We no longer had much faith in the educational system and its colonial heritages of story-eliding, language-banishing, method-homogenizing and knowledge-sterilizing practices. Rising in stature as young PhDs and widely published authors on an infrastructure of legitimized snobbery no longer excited us.

Our disenchantments with institutionalized public education soon metastasized, flowing with tentacular promiscuity, touching everything else, and infecting our visions of economics, of politics and even science. Soon, we came to believe there was something wrong with the world – maybe not an evil lurking in its veins, but something just as fundamental. We had lost our way, and we now inhabited a story that didn’t serve. A story of economics in which meaningful things no longer counted, and only the things that could be counted were meaningful. Where work suffocated our deepest interests and affinities. A story of politics that was established on the patriarchal dominance of the few above the many.

We wanted justice. We went to the Himalayan Mountains to join our voices with an unschooling community of alternative education practitioners that insisted on many streams, instead of a mainstream. We co-founded an initiative to spark the proliferation of radical political imaginaries, economic alternatives and new educational pathways. All the while, the vagaries of being immersed in many streams of thick thought opened us up to different conceptions of the sacred, many of which were jarring to us at first, but eventually became part of our rapid experiential furniture. And, even though the academic world in the so called Global South felt like a Fanonian ordeal – black people doing their utmost to polish their white masks – we kept having conversations in the intellectual spaces we once called home, debating systems change theories, localization, and strategies for scaling up (or, as we later revised, scaling down).

In many of the conversational circles that I was personally privileged to enter, there was a palpable feeling of betrayal – something akin to what old apartheid-era South Africans feel today when they look back on the early histories of the ANC, Mandela’s party, and then contrast that with its present metamorphosis into the party of power-hungry elites. People are asking: when will we inhabit a world where people matter, and not just giant corporations? What would it take to live in a world that truly respects the environment, not as resource or mute other or dead background to the drama of human becoming, but as ally? Will our crazy dreams of a greener world where technology blends seamlessly with the temporalities of soil and sky ever see the light of day? A world where diversity thrives so abundantly that contemporaneous binary racial tensions between whites and blacks are eviscerated by the impressive multiplicity of colours between? Where officials are held accountable for their actions, and where work isn’t about ascending a ladder of escalating consumption but about chasing your affinities? Where women can thrive with just as much levity as men, without that levity rendered as reprehensible lasciviousness?

Godot hasn’t come. The Gordian knot is still as knotty as ever. Excalibur remains lodged in Apollonian stone.

The new story seems to be taking its sweet time coming.

While I take issue with the ubiquity of the phrase ‘a new story’ – especially when it is used in singular form (in the same way that I hesitate to speak of the ‘Anthropocene’, because it seems to treat ‘mankind’ as a homogeneous group, making everyone everywhere equally responsible for the alteration of biophysical landscapes), it does have its utility. For all its New Age obscurantist suppositions (including the universalism at work in its framing), it serves as a rallying point for increasingly globalized concerns about the world and our place in it; it also serves as a holding place for the belief that our troubles are somehow all connected and not as incongruent as we think. In my experience of its popular use, the ‘new story’ contains the uncontested anthropocentric idea that humans are solely burdened with the responsibility for change, and that we are to blame for where we are as a species. At the very least, speaking about ‘a new story’ challenges our ways of seeing the world – inviting us to ‘connect the dots’, ‘lean in’, and ‘recognize our collective agency’ to contest exploitative powers…which is ironic, since ‘the new story’ itself (or rather, the ways we have come to speak about ‘it’) seems to be produced by very particular ways of seeing the world.

What is at stake here is an accounting for what is brought to the foreground and what is, as a result, excluded (or made invisible) in our enactments (measurements) of ‘the new story’. Without attempting a historical analysis of some sort, I think it is noteworthy to point out that the usage of the term ‘the new story’ is co-emergent and produced by certain ‘regimes of visuality’. Consider our circumstances: because we are immersed in digital media and daily traffic in the commerce of images – whether on the internet, taking a selfie, or recording one’s tourist experiences with a phone’s camera app – the conditions of seeing are radically different from what they used to be a mere 30 years ago. The very ontology (or identity) of seeing has changed. To borrow that American cliché, with regard to visuality, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

The same is true about how we process information. The agential influences of technologies like Google have so shaped our cognitive activity that Emmelhainz, borrowing from the work of Franco Berardi, writes that “at the core of the Google Empire is the capture of user attention in order to translate cognitive acts into automatic sequences. The consequence of this translation is the replacement of cognition with a chain of automated connections, effectively automatizing the subjectivities of users.” In today’s app-saturated society, if you want something done or seek something, you enter the appropriate search criteria and an automated response offers feedback. And we repeat this process to find directions, make purchases, conduct research, organize our to-do lists, and even make friends. This dependence on computerized systems to navigate everyday tasks disrupts the idea that the mind is some kind of pure quality ensconced in the human brain, behind human skin. The ‘parity principle’ of the extended mind (by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers) states that “if, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is … part of the cognitive process.”[4]

Further still, Emmelhainz argues that it is not just that images are now an indispensable part of our lives, it is that we now see the world in the reductionistic terms of images. “Aside from the fact that images and data are taking the place of or giving form to experience, they are also transforming things into signs; welding together image and discourse, images have inaugurated a tautological form of vision. With the widespread use of photography and digital imaging, all signs begin to lead to other signs, prompted by the desire to see and to know, to document, and to archive information.”

This optical shift has real consequences. Susan Sontag writes that “taking photographs […] is a way of certifying experience, [but] also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”[5] It means we approve as ‘real’ only the picturesque and – given our attendance to cognitive linearity – only those ‘things’ that are amenable to plot conventions or orthographic/narratological imperatives.

Since seeing is just as much a matter of taking into consideration as it is about taking out of consideration – an exclusionary dynamic, if you will – accounting for the ways we speak about and yearn for ‘the new story’ necessarily raises new questions about what we are leaving out of our frames. I would argue that this sequentialization of thought and reiteration of visuality as photogenia, inaugurated by the ongoing digital alteration of our landscapes, are at work in the co-production of the more popular ideas about ‘the new story’. As a manifestation of these constraining conditions, the ‘new story’ discourse

1. coincides with the logic of developmental linearity and its implicit promise of gratification down the evolutionary-historical line
2. makes invisible the agential contributions of the more-than-human world in how the world materializes
3. leaves intact classical assumptions about the nature of nature (and time and space) – especially the idea that we inhabit a single Euclidean temporality where the past flows into the future, or that we can speak with any sense of finality about the ‘old’ and the ‘new’
4. feeds an imagination and yearning for a pure, totalizing (or complete) response to current challenges – while eliding the mutuality between supposed binaries

I feel these are important to note. Encoded in the performance of ‘new story’ discourse is a postponement of the sacred and a stabilization of justice. In place of living in the incommensurability of the present, we live forward…denying the old, the contemporary, the now, its work with us. But rather than speak about a ‘forward’ – as we are wont to doing if we take ‘new story’ talk at face value – we might as well speak about an awkward.

“Not upward or downward, backward or forward, but awkward. Awk-wards: a vector. The (now obsolete) word awk means out of the way, strange, even sinister in nature and disposition. As an adverb, awkward suggests an action in the wrong, or at least a tangential direction. It evokes disjuncture, discord and incompatibility. Things have gone awry. As an adjective, awkward describes the unfamiliar, the clumsy and the unskilled. It conveys embarrassment, inconvenience and risk. To be awkward is to be ill at ease, uncomfortable or untoward.”[6]

More specifically, awkward suggests “a recalcitrance or obstinacy to human aspiration and endeavour”. The world we live in is fragile, negotiated between multiple agencies, non-linear, thick and perverse. Like a teenager at the frothing edge of her awkwardness of flailing limbs and coming-to-age features, she is always unexpected…visibly unnerving…never fitting the models and maps we seek to discipline her into. This is as much a vibrantly ‘accurate’ redescription of the world according to quantum theory – shot through with ‘visiting’ philosophies from indigenous non-western worlds. The world is awkward, out of joint, showing up partially (since identity is always exclusionary or complementary), and never not broken. Therein lies its magic.

We cannot brand the next. Which is to say that the identity of a new story isn’t pre-set, merely awaiting its approximation or the right assemblage of words to activate it. The ‘new story’ is indeterminate. It’s not even a matter of not knowing what it is; it is not that we are uncertain about it and that with more information we can trace out the contours of a new world that works for many rather than a few. Uncertainty is not the issue here. Indeterminacy is. In this context, the ontological status of ‘the new story’ is still being made and always to be deferred.

The ‘old’ is not an ‘other’ of the ‘new’, any more than light is ontologically separate from darkness; the ‘old’ haunts the ‘new’, innervates the ‘new’, conspires with the ‘new’ – so that to add darkness to darkness is to produce light. The old is the generativity of the new, and the new is the generativity of the old. The old is how the new grounds itself in the ‘previous’ and how it experiments with the possible. We need the old – even the villainous old. As quantum field theory suggests, nothing is not new, even the old. Drawing tenuous connections from scientific experiments that queer the nature of matter to socio-econo-political conditions like neoliberalism might seem farfetched. But that is exactly what quantum theory disrupts – the idea of scalar distinction where ‘small things’ have their own logic that has nothing to do with the goings and comings of ‘big things’.

The implication of all this is that we cannot ‘walk out’ of systems as such, since boundaries aren’t fixed in the classical sense. There is neither a prelapsarian return to the garden of Eden nor a label that can subsume meaning in a final sense. As such, the notion that the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house is, ironically, an enactment of the master’s invisible narrative. What’s hard at work here is a story of difference that equates it with separation, or a matter of an ontology that starts off with things having pre-given boundaries and already determinate properties. The master’s claim to ownership is as unfounded and as hasty as the slave’s testimony of freedom at last.

***

After all is said and done (well, not quite all – but you get the point), the ‘new story’ offers a fragile, haunted, valuable discursive site for the assembly of common aspirations and common projects committed to reconfiguring social systems for ‘justice’. For a ‘better’ ‘future’.

Yes, those commitments are ordained and threaded through by particular ways of seeing that often exclude the awkwardness of a more-than-human world where linear expectations are risky ventures; they are silent about the indifference of the world to the tenets of anthropocentrism; they do not engage the sensuous entanglements between old and new – thus, leaving the ‘old’ behind in a puritan attempt to ‘start from scratch’; and, they make invisible the agency and intelligence of matter due to ideas about the predominance of language (and story). And yet, there is a lot more room for play here…right here in this site of yearning and justice-seeking. There is room for a different ecology of questions exploring fragile emergence.

Instead of merely asking how we can unilaterally bring about a new story, we can listen to the invitation of the wilds to open up to the fragility of map-making projects. We can gather round a set of inquiries that bring us to investigate the contours of our seeing and the textures of our knowings – and, as such, the world we are co-performing with many, many others. We can wonder about the contributions of stones to world-making, and embark upon quests to eavesdrop on the gossip of trees.

If this feels like navel-gazing work, especially in these times when critical action is called for – if this feels politically stultifying – I would suggest that it feels so because our visions have created an anorexic self, and then set it against the uncharted muteness of a world outside it. Perhaps new topographies of responsiveness and radical political imaginaries might emerge when we co-enact the self as dispersed, distributed and strange – layering and infusing soil, cloud, rivers and stranger.

A new story? Why set the bar so low? Why deny ourselves the spontaneity of the unexpected?

[1] Karen Barad, ‘What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice’, [100 Notes, dOCUMENTA]

[2] Astrid Schraeder explores the fascinating case of Pfiesteria piscicida, the ‘fish killers’, which defy known taxonomical arrangements that have persisted for similar micro-critters. Their life cycles are confusing and complex, queering the distinctions between the organism and its surroundings. In ‘Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology’ [Social Studies of Science 40, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 275-306].

[3] Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Images do not show: The desire to see in the Anthropocene’ (p.133). Chapter in the book ‘Art in the Anthropocene’: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies’ (Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 2015)

[4] ‘The Extended Mind’, an essay by Andy Clark and David Chalmers

[5] Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Images do not show: The desire to see in the Anthropocene’ (p.135). Chapter in the book ‘Art in the Anthropocene’: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies’ (Edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 2015)

[6] Jamie Lorimer, ‘On Auks and Awkwardness’, Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, 2014, pp. 195-205

www.environmentalhumanities.org

The post The Burden of the New Story appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Rural natives of course have a culture in place. As they interact with urban newcomers social innovation can occur.  Rural Hub is a project aiming to formalize this innovation process.

Extracted from: http://www.ruralhub.it/project/

Rural Hub is the rhizome of a network of researchers, activists, scholars, and managers interested in identifying new models of economic development. All those people are motivated to find new solutions to the needs (both social and market-related) of the new rural enterprises.

It was founded as a research union, in order to facilitate the connection between new and innovative enterprises, investors and trade associations. This “response” to the lack of business incubators and service providers could really entail a renewal of the business, for a sustainable development of the agri-food industry.

Rural Hub is the first Italian hacker space allowing connection and sharing among people, ideas, technologies and projects concerning social innovation projects applied to the rural world.

Rural Hub is:

• A co-living and co-working space;
• A study center leading a permanent research on social innovation applied to rural;
• Local and global venue of events;
• An incubator carrying on Mentoring e Project Financing for Rural Start-ups:
• Connector between innovators and rural change-makers;
• A laboratory, concerned with new business and communitarian realities, both formal and informal, involving agri-food;
• A task force for projects of activation of rural communities;

Extracted from: http://www.ruralhub.it/rural-social-innovation-manifest/

In the current economic model, the creation of value has shifted from the physical product to the immaterial dimension. In the Conventional Value Chain, the product has become a ploy for the enhancement of other dimensions, such as logistics, branding and finance.

The new rural economy demands to regain possession of these processes and reorganize them on a Community-basis, in order to return the value to the material product itself. The challenge is to combine People – Planet – Profit, in order to create economically sustainable businesses, finally able to assume social responsibilities and – at the same time – respect the environmental balance of a region.

Rural economy oriented to Societing: a Rural Social Innovation

This new economic model borrows from the past those values which seem to be useful to the present (frugality, solidarity, respect for the ecosystem and biodiversity protection) and aims to transfer them in the contemporary space and time – thanks to the current technologies.

Many young innovators are taking into the rural areas, in the agricultural context, the high job skills they have acquired through their urban life or stays abroad; they express a global culture and share the network ethics, thus enhancing powerful new semantics of the categories of the contemporaneity.

So, the life choices of these young people, projected in the ionosphere, and narrated through social networks, are no longer a private matter but something that becomes strongly public and political. This operation reduces the space-time distances between a metropolitan modernity, where the facts of the future seem to happen, and a rural backwardness that we assume anchored to the past.

That’s how we introduce the concept of #smartrurality, a rurality which becomes fundamental to re-read the contemporaneity through a dialectic of sustainable lifestyles and new possibilities

The Rural Social Innovation System is a new model: the concept of disintermediation takes the place of logistics, storytelling replaces marketing and redistribution supplants finance, subverting the conventional value chain and finally projecting the focus on the product, in a ratio of osmosis with the community.

Disintermediation works in a community dynamics, bringing together manufacturers, producers and local communities. Branding is replaced by an authentic storytelling – able to convey the evocative and real value of traditional products. Redistribution triggers mechanisms of return of the value (both tangible and intangible) within the very same community.

The measurement of the impacts of the Rural Social Innovation System could provide evidence on the generated value. The point is: we need to build tools able to measure the results produced by the rural activities in order to project a more sustainable world.

Extracted from: http://www.ruralhub.it/2016/07/06/summer-school-foodhacker-dal-foodporn-al-foodlove/

The FoodHacker Summer School 2016 aims to create an experience that involves the Digital storytelling withing the principals of real food made in Italy.

The Summer School  will, therefore, train operators ready to respond to the sustainability era interactive, collaborative, participatory, hybrid of ‘ infosphere. Rebuilding a relationship of love with the food quality and its story fitting into a new dimension: the #foodlove .

The technologies and the new media are also valuable tools to describe the rural area: the universe in which we live can be digitized now represented as a domain of complex narratives, in which the storytelling techniques become powerful tools that can be used to give new light to the elements that characterize the history and culture of the rural places. Through the narrative quality authentic food on  digital storytelling  communicates and promotes the identity, traditions and landscape.

Telling these elements means to redefine and redesign the structures of local communities , using methods and tools offered by technology.

The food made in Italy acquires a new meaning, far from that of #foodporn  metropolitan and offers important clues to rethink critically and social dynamics, economic mechanisms, the digital, political and cultural.

Participants will be given handouts, teaching materials and tools of very high quality and can be used immediately in the field.

 Photo by bygdb – Gianni Del Bufalo (CC BY-NC-SA)

The post Project Of The Day: Rural Hub appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Although cultivated food is a private food, several food-related elements are yet considered as commons, such as traditional agricultural knowledge accumulated after thousands of years of practices, agricultural knowledge produced by national research institutions, cooking recipes and national gastronomy, ocean fish stocks, wild fruits and animals, genetic resources for food and agriculture, food safety considerations and, more recently, maintaining food price stability and attaining global food security. Food and nutrition security should also be considered a Global Public Good (GPG), since it is neither rival nor excludable – unless we want starve somebody to death – but unfortunately food and nutrition security is yet an aspirational “situation”. But what about food itself?

Food, a limited but renewable resource essential for human existence, has evolved from a common local resource to a private transnational commodity. This commodification process, understood as the development of traits that fit better with the mechanized processes developed by the industrialized food model, is the latest stage of the objectification of food, a human-induced social construct that deprives food from its non-economic attributes just to retain its tradable features (durability, external beauty, standardisation). The nutrition-related properties of food were much undervalued in this process. The value of food is no longer based on its many dimensions (see below) that bring us security and health, including the fact that food is a basic human need that should be available to all, a fundamental human right that should be guaranteed to every citizen, a pillar of every national culture, certainly a marketable product that should be subject to fair trade and sustainable production and finally a GPG that should be enjoyed by all humans. Those multiple dimensions are superseded by the tradable features, being value and price thus mixed up. And everybody knows that only fools confuse price with value.

There are several implications of treating food as a mere commodity, and we just name a few of the most devastating. Food has many different uses other than direct human consumption as the best use of any commodity is where it can get the best price; a commoditised food is meant to be speculated with, no moral considerations seem to deter that. An out-of-control race for land- and water-grabbing for food production is taking place in vast areas of Africa and Latin America. Transnational corporations are major drivers of obesity epidemics from increased consumption of ultra-processed food and drink. And hunger is definitely not abated by means of GMOs or patented seeds.

Human beings can eat food as long as they have money to buy it or means to produce it. Some of those means are also considered as private goods (land, agro-chemicals) although not all (seeds, rainfall, agricultural knowledge). The enclosure mechanisms, through privatization, legislation, excessive pricing or patents, have played a role in limiting the access to food as a public good. The conventional industrialised food system is operating mainly to accumulate under-priced food resources and maximize the profit of food enterprises instead of maximizing the nutrition and health benefits of food to all of us.

The dominant industrial food system is increasingly failing to fulfil its basic goals: feeding people adequately and sustainably, and avoiding hunger. The ironic paradoxes of the globalised industrial food system are that half of those who grow 70% of the world’s food are hungry, food kills people (the hunger-related death toll is 3.1 million children per year, the single major cause of child mortality in 2011), food is increasingly not for humans (since more and more food is diverted towards biofuel production and livestock feeding) and food is wasted due to its low price and low considerations (1/3 of global food production ends up in the garbage every year, enough to feed 600 million hungry people). Hunger still prevails in a world of abundance and obesity is growing steadily, already becoming a pandemic. We humans eat badly.

It was amply believed that market-led food security would finally achieve a better nourished population. However, reality has proven otherwise as a food system anchored in the consideration of food as a commodity to be distributed according to the demand-supply market rules will never achieve food security for all. It is evident that the private sector is not interested in people who do not have the money to pay for their services or goods, weather videogames or staple food. None of the most relevant analyses produced in the last decades on the fault lines of the global food system has ever questioned this nature of food as a private good, produced by private inputs or privately harvested in the wild, and therefore the common understanding sees food access as the main problem. If food security is a good thing for every human and cannot be provided exclusively by one state, the two features of the political definition of a GPG, the food and agriculture private sector does not seem to be the best institution to provide that public good, as it cannot completely capture the utilities of its trade.

The standard economic definition of public goods is anchored on non-rivalry and non-excludability features. In political terms, however, excludability and rivalry are social constructions that can be modified by social arrangements. Goods often become private or public as a result of deliberate policy choices and many societies have considered, and still consider, food as a common good, as well as forests, fisheries, land and water. For instances, fishes are continuously produced by nature and by human beings, so it is no longer restricted in number as there is not a limited number of fishes on Earth. As long as the replenishment rate outpaces the consumption rate, the resource is always available and food is considered a renewable resource with a never-ending stock such as air. Therefore, the main features that traditionally have been assigned to food as a private good can be contested and reconceived in a different way.

Food is a de facto impure public good, governed by public institutions in many aspects (food safety regulations, nutrition, seed markets, fertilizer subsidies, the EU CAP or US Farm Bill), provided by collective actions in thousands of customary and post-industrial collective arrangements (cooking recipes, farmers’ seed exchanges, consumer-producers associations) but largely distributed by market rules. These collective actions for food share this multidimensional consideration of food that diverges from the mainstream industrial food system’s uni-dimensional approach of food as a commodity.

The re-commonification of food is hence deemed an essential paradigm shift for the transition from the dominating agro-industrial food system towards a more sustainable food system fairer to food producers and consumers. Along those lines, based on Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance, food as a GPG could be produced, consumed and distributed by hybrid institutional arrangements formed by state institutions, private producers and companies, and self-organized groups under self-negotiated rules. The transition will require experimentation at multiple levels (personal, local, national, international) and diverse approaches to governance (market-led, state-led and collective action-led). This commonification will take several generations and self-governing collective actions cannot do the transition by themselves, as food provision and food security shall involve greater levels of public sector involvement and market-driven distributions. Governments have a vital role to play in countering the tendency toward economic concentration, through genuine tax, credit, and land reforms to disperse buying power toward the poor, so as to maximize the well-being of their citizens and providing an enabling framework to enjoy the right to food for all. Two recent examples of governmental rules that may contribute to facilitate the transition are taxing meat to incentivise a reduction in consumption or overtaxing junk food with high contents of sugar, fat and salt as unhealthy products. Nevertheless, that leading role should gradually be shifted to the self-negotiated collection actions by groups of producers and consumers, as the State provision of food does not surpass the net benefit that consumers would receive through the self-organized and socially negotiated protection, production and use of their own resources.

Civic collective actions for food (or alternative food networks) are key units for this transition and they are built upon the socio-ecological practices of civic engagement, community and the celebration of local food. The commons are gaining ground as a third force of governance and resource management by the people as a supplement to the market and the state. Unlike the market, the commons are about cooperation, stewardship, equity, sustainability, and direct democracy from local to global, and they are mushrooming all over the world, mostly in urban areas and usually at local level.

Nowadays, in different parts of the world, there are many initiatives that demonstrate that a right combination of collective action, governmental rules and incentives, and private sector entrepreneurship yield good results for food producers, consumers, the environment and society in general, and the challenge now is how to scale up those local initiatives to national level. People’s capacity for collective action is an agency that can complement the regulatory mandate of the state and the demand-driven allocation by the private sector. Millions of people innovating have far more capacity to find adaptive and appropriate solutions than a few thousand scientists in the laboratories. It is interesting to note the collective actions for food share a consideration of food as a commons that radically diverges from the mainstream industrial food system that merely considers food as a commodity. Moreover, these collective actions for food also contribute to the reconstruction of the infrastructure of civic life that has been eroded by our individualistic growth-oriented behaviour, as Michael Sandel explains so well.

For those who love to find concrete recommendations out of theoretical narratives, some practical consequences of this paradigm shift would be to maintain food out of trade agreements dealing with pure private goods and thus there would be a need to establish a particular governance system for production, distribution and access to food at global level. That system would entail, among others, binding legal frameworks to fight hunger and guarantee the right to food to all, cosmopolitan global policies and fraternal ethical and legal frameworks, universal Basic Food Entitlements or Food Security Floors guaranteed by the State (i.e. one leave of bread for every citizen everyday), levelling the minimum salary with the food basket, a ban on financial speculation of food, or limiting the non-consumption uses of food such as biofuels. In any case, all those political implications are geared towards establishing a Universal Food Coverage, a social scheme paralleling universal health and education, the very foundations of the social welfare state. If it was possible in the XVIII century to propose health and schools for all, why not such absolute need as food for all in the XXI century? Prof. Amartya Sen is already campaigning for that goal in India.

Finding the adequate equilibrium between this tri-centric institutional setup to govern food production, distribution and consumption will be one of the major challenges the humankind will have to address in the XXI century, as long as the population grows and Earth’s carrying capacity seems to be surpassed by human’s greed for resources, as Ghandi once mentioned. A fairer and more sustainable food system is possible, but we need to reconsider the food narrative to be applicable to transit towards that goal. I do not expect to see this change during my lifetime, but I hope my descendants may.

The post Crowdsourcing the food commons transition: de-commodifying food one movement at a time appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from our friends at The Extraenviromentalist.

Today’s textbook notions of business were developed during an unprecedented global economic expansion – a cultural condition that faces diminishing returns in today’s world. Can we build enterprises for a post-growth future that thrive among challenges of the next century? By reversing the process that privatizes profits, would unsustainable trends and drivers of inequality be subverted? Can a modern media and journalism industry flourish within a not-for-profit framework?

In Extraenvironmentalist #89 we first speak with Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute about their organization’s upcoming book, How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050. Donnie explains ways that organizing business activities under the framework of not-for-profit enterprises can make meaningful change in the face of a seemingly intractable situation wrought by immense private wealth accumulation and slowing global growth.

In the second half of the show, we talk to Chris Nelder, host of the Energy Transition Show – the first regular podcast on the forthcoming XE Audio Network! We ask Chris about the ongoing contraction in US shale oil production during 2015 and the deteriorating financial condition of the industry in the face of a global deflationary undertow. The conversation is Episode #0 of the Energy Transition Show, which launches with Episode #1 beginning September 23.

//Segments on Soundcloud

Bonus Segment

// Links and News Items

The Energy Transition Show – launching September 23rd

As We Lay Dying –
Stephen Jenkinson On How We Deny Our Mortality

// Books

How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050 by Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hilton

// Music (in order of appearance)

Lazy Knuckles – Polyglot via Soundcloud
Eric Clapton – Change the World (Mac DeMarco Cover) via IndieShuffle
Freddie Frank – This Old Rig (1961)
Cavaliers of Fun – Wiki via Tracasseur
Tube & Berger – Disarray Feat. J.U.D.G.E

// Production Credits and Notes

Our editor Kevin via Sustainable Guidance Youtube Channel

Episode #89 was supported by donations from the following generous listeners:

Stephanie in North Carolina
Wally in North Carolina
Stephen from Australia

The post Podcast of the Day: How on Earth with Donnie Maclurcan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From our friends at The Extraenviromentalist Podcast.

From the episode notes:

The catastrophe at Fukushima presents the opportunity to re-evaluate basic assumptions about energy and technology but the temptation to double down on business as usual becomes incredibly strong. Will our species obtain a paradigm shift in the face of an energy emergency? Could we create new models for business that regenerate ecological functions rather than destroy the planet?

In Extraenvironmentalist #66 we speak with Michael Stone and Ian MacKenzie about their new film Reactor which covers their recent trip to Japan. Is the social fallout from Fukushima a template for social change elsewhere? Then we speak with Willem Ferwerda of the Ecosystem Return Foundation about scaling up the ecosystem restoration techniques we discussed on XE #65 with John Liu. We talk about the potential for regenerating ecological functions through new models for business and investing. Can we develop a process for launching permaculture businesses around the world?

The post Podcast of the day: The Extraenviromentalist: Changing Reactions. appeared first on P2P Foundation.