By Dirk Holemans et a. Oikos, 2018: In order to find responses to current societal challenges, citizens increasingly take control, including in the form of citizen collectives that produce goods or services themselves, usually as a quest towards a more sustainable alternative. With the support of the King Baudouin Foundation and in the context of its Observatory of Associations and Foundations (Observatorium van Verenigingen en Stichtingen), Oikos think tank carried out the first research on these collectives throughout the country: who facilitates them, how important are they and how do they position themselves among other actors in society such as the classic civil society, governments and companies? With a desk study, a survey and in-depth interviews, Oikos mapped citizens’ collectives established in 2015 and 2016.

Increasing number of establishments

In 2015 and 2016, 249 citizen collectives in Belgium were launched spread over the entire country (map available). 127 among them answered the survey and 106 (48 from Flanders, 36 from Wallonia and 22 from Brussels) completed questionnaires were included in the analysis (21 respondents were found not to comply with the definition or were not established during the study period). Of those 106, most are active in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, social inclusion and the sharing economy; more than half classifies their activity under the label ‘environment and sustainability’ (graph available).

This is the first comprehensive investigation for the French-speaking citizen collectives. On the Dutch-speaking side, Oikos, on the other hand, has historical figures from 2004 onwards (graph available), indicating that 2009 was a turning point : the number of establishments has grown strongly ever since and nothing points to a stagnation of this growth.

What is a citizen collective?

Not all activities that citizens organize together are citizen collectives. A neighborhood barbecue or a temporary action group against logging is not. Then what is? Some elements are necessary to be able to speak of a citizen collective:

• to meet local needs, with the aim of long-term structural results;
• the members take control of the production / execution of the goods or services themselves (although sometimes it is possible to call on paid (service) suppliers);
• citizens are the promoters and determine who belongs to the group, and who can use or manage the resources, goods or services;
  the members have a say in the form, the organization and the action lines for the future;

A few examples: with a social grocery, cooperative library of things, or community supported agriculture where consumers are closely connected to a farmer and are committed to reducing production, or even participating in the harvest.

Pioneers: highly educated working M/F/X in their thirties and forties

Citizen collectives are largely the work of 25- to 45-year-olds, and the real pioneers are usually 36 to 45 years (graph available). Young people and seniors are hardly represented. There is a balance in the participation of women and men, and single people, cohabitants and married couples are fairly equal (graph available).

Among the pioneers in citizen collectives, highly educated people are strongly overrepresented: 86.3% have at least a Bachelor’s degree (graph available– compared to 45.6% of the population aged between 30 and 34 years according to Statbel’s figures). Most pioneers (84.8%) combine their engagement with a job (of whom four out of ten half-time).

53.7% of the respondents are politically engaged. Half of the respondents (48.6%) estimate that the political preference of the pioneers of their citizens’ collective is left on the political spectrum (graph available).

Relationship with government and industry: a healthy distance

Most citizen collectives (58%) are self-sufficient. 78% came about without public participation. But they think a good relationship with the government is important (80%). Approximately 1 in 3 consults with the municipal authorities about the activities and services they offer. The relationship with the (local) government does not always go smoothly: some are satisfied (“the city made our operations possible”), others less (“we mainly got headwinds”).

According to a minority (16.8%) of the citizen collectives, companies see them as competitors. They themselves see their own role in relation to the business sector as additional (in Wallonia), cooperative (in Brussels), or innovative (in the three regions). (graph available).

Little inclusive

The sectors in which they operate show that citizen collectives often strive for a more sustainable society. They inspire other actors from industry, government and civil society. Partly because of their urge for proximity and small scale in their approach, they still play a modest role as an alternative to production and / or consumption,  alongside those (more) dominant actors.

If citizen collectives really strive for a sustainable and inclusive society, then consideration must be given to ways of involving disadvantaged citizens in this citizens’ movement.

Photo by European Parliament

Photo by European Parliament

The post When citizens take matters into their own hands: a closer look at citizen collectives established in 2015 and 2016 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

• June 8th 2018 19:30 – 21:30
• Location: IHECS Brussels School for Journalism and Communication, Stoofstraat 58, Brussel, Brussel, België
• Category: Evenementen denktank

Will cities change the world? At least, cities are becoming a new and hopeful transnational governance level. They are organizing themselves in a whole tissue of networks (Fearless Cities, Fabcities, …), working together in domains like climate policy, renewable energy and urban economy.

At the same time, citizens are developing a whole range of urban commons, based on co-operation and an ethics of care. Tired of only being a powerless consumer or a passive citizen, we get active as maker, urban farmer, solidarity volunteer, user of shared resources, civic or social entrepreneur, etc. This goes along with the establishment of new organisations and infrastructures like fablabs, energy co-ops, co-working spaces, urban food production plots, etc.

Recent years, we have seen cities like Ghent and Bologna moving a step further, establishing structures and processes that aim at building synergies between the public and the commons domain. This is part of a new political vision, the Partner State. So, a partner city sustains and gives incentives to alternative civil and economic institutions, like the commons and cooperatives. Taking these developments of collaborative city-making together, we see the emergence of a prototype of transformative cities, that could be the driving force towards socio-ecological societies.

Thanks to these transitions institutions, research groups and organizations where created to investigate how commons could be sustainable integrated in the vivid networks of cities.

How can a commons transition in cities be realized to create sustainable Eco-Cities? Experts from different projects and institutions will inspire you with their knowledge and findings about sustainable commons in cities. At this conference you can get inspired and motivated to start, or strengthen, your own project, common initiative or cooperation.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Michel Bauwens

Founder and director of the P2P Foundation and expert in peer production, governance and property. Bauwens is a well-known public speaker and thought leader. In 2017 he wrote the Commons Transition Plan for Ghent, after a similar project for Ecuador.

Elena De Nictolis

Research associate at LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons. She prepares a Phd thesis on public policies for urban co-governance and the relation with the quality of city democracy at LUISS University of Rome.

Photo by Dominic’s pics

The post Creating Eco-Societies through Urban Commons Transitions, with Michel Bauwens and Elena De Nictolis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before we start talking about your book, can you tell us a bit about the context that prompted you to write it, and how it fits in your personal quest for understanding social change? I mean, can you say a few words about yourself, your engagement in green politics, and your work with OIKOS?

Twenty-five years ago, I started working as an academic researcher in the field of environmental philosophy and bioethics. With degrees in engineering and philosophy, I tried to understand the role of technology in how people shape their world and dominate nature, to analyse what the importance is of the dominant value system in a society. So, I learned how Modernity radically changed our relation with nature, which from then is an object we as subjects can dominate and manipulate. While this was a rewarding time, it was maybe my engineering background that made me feel that only writing articles and lecturing is not enough to stop the destruction of our living planet. So I joined the Green party and within a few years I first was elected as local councilor of the City of Ghent and subsequently as member of the Flemish Parliament. I learned that politics really matters, being in government we were able to introduce innovative changes in e.g. the care system and energy policy (a law as voted to close the nuclear plants the coming decades). At the same time I experienced that our representative democratic system, established in the 19th century, needs a thorough update. So the first book I wrote was about the need for Deliberative Democracy, acknowledging the value and importance of citizens engaging in an active dialogue.

After being a member of parliament, I founded the green foundation OIKOS, because I believe innovative ideas are the core fuel of societal change. You cannot develop new sustainable systems – think of mobility, energy or food- with old concepts. At the same I noticed how citizens are taking their future back in their hands, becoming from consumer producer again. These citizens’ collectives, commons, are the basis for what I see as the most promising actor of change in our current times.

Your book centers around the tension between freedom, which I read as individual freedom, and security, which I read as more of a collective reality. Can you describe how you see that tension and how you see it as resolvable or not.

In the dominant narrative of our society, we see freedom as an individual quality. But this creates the illusion that we are independent actors that can create our own future and lifeworld on our one. While freedom is maybe the most collective concept we now. How free is someone who is born in a poor country, without a decent educational system? What kind of choices (s)he can make? If freedom is the ability to influence the future development of our world, we can only do it if we work together. That was what the green thinker Ivan Illich meant with autonomy: ‘the joyful capacity to shape the world together’. Anyway, how free are we if the corporations and multinationals determine what we (can) buy. Everyday, we see thousands of advertisements and marketings signals (like logos). Do you really think they don’t influence us in a profound way? So the paradox is that enhancing you personal freedom is working together to change the environment you live. Like the Green mayor of Grenoble did, but getting rid of advertisements boards in public spaces and streets.

Does our welfare system have to change, and if so, how so.

Our current welfare system was built on the assumption of full employment with man working 40 hours a week, staying 40 years with the same employer, in the framework of a decent fiscal system with rich people and big companies paying the fair share of taxes. No need to say that our society has changed in many fundamental ways.

We need what I call a new ‘security package’ for the 21th century, empowering people and allowing them to enrich their community and society. This package is based on the fact that there are three different kinds of work: next to our job, the paid work, there is the care work we do while raising kids, cooking at home etc. and also autonomous work, things we find important, like establishing with people in your town a commons, think about an energy co-op or growing vegetables together. If our goal is a good life for all, we have to make sure people can combine these types of work in a relaxed way. Hence, I suggest the combination of a shorter working week of 30 hours with a universal basic income of 500 euros that for low and middle incomes compensates for the lower salary, in combination with an affordable education and health system.

The number of hours, 30 a week, is not randomly chosen. It is the weekly number most women work who have to combine their job with their family work and personal development. I see the ‘security package’ as a transition model, in the evolution towards a social-ecological society. The more things we do in our autonomous work, products and services who are cheaper and last longer than produced by corporations – think about Wikipedia or platform co-ops for car sharing – will enable to live better with less buying power, allowing to maybe lower the normal working week to 21 hours, as the New Economics Foundation proposes.

What I found very useful in your book is the historical context you are offering about how current social movements, and the surge for the commons in particular, are related to the earlier struggles post-1968. Can you elaborate a bit?

Big corporations – think about Apple – want to make us believe that they invented all the new stuff in our society. Mariana Mazzucato has in a convincing way shown that corporations only can make these products and profits because governments invested loads of money in research and development. On top of this, I want to add that quite a lot of crucial innovations where introduced not by companies or public authorities, but by citizens’ initiatives. Who build for instance the first wind mill to start the transition towards a renewable energy system? It where villagers in the north of Denmark in the 1970’s. Who invented the recycle or thrift shop, the starting point for the circular economy: wise citizens in the Netherlands. The same goes for sharing, with people in Amsterdam experimenting with a bike sharing system, already in the mid 1960’s? These initiatives are part of a broader emancipatory movement with a lot new social movements..

Overall, the emancipatory movement wanted to create more space for citizens by reducing the reach of the state, other traditional structures and multinationals. Looking back, we can say that this movement has been successful, but did not achieve its goal. This is connected with the greater success of the neoliberal freedom concept. This concept of freedom succeeded in reducing the build-up of identity into an individualistic project, where consumption plays a crucial role.

How did it happen? The 1980s and 1990s are the battleground of these two freedom-based concepts. A crucial difference lies in scale: while businesses are organised worldwide, this is less evident for new civil movements and unions. Only the anti-globalisation movement would later bundle forces across borders. Meanwhile, large corporations have taken up the free space for the most part.

A second explanation concerns the evolution of most of the new social movements. Starting mostly from a position of a radical critique, professionalisation and building a relationship with mainstream politicians leads to a pragmatic attitude. Proposals must now be feasible within the framework of the current policy. The increasing dependency on subsidies of many non-governmental organisations has sometimes led to uncritical inscription into government policy options. As said, at the same time, more and more citizens were seduced by the neoliberal narrative that a good life means work hard, earn money and spent it all to be happy. If you don’t feel well, just buy a ticket for a wellness club.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930’s, which started ten years ago, changed everything again. The crisis is a real wake-up call for a lot of citizens, they realize that if they want a sustainable future for their children, they have to build it themselves. So, we see all over the world a new wave of citizens’ initiatives, rediscovering the emancipatory concept of freedom and autonomy. A crucial difference is that we know live in the age of internet, lowering the transaction costs of cooperation dramatically. What was very hard to realize in the post-68 period, e.g. sharing cars in a neighborhood, is now a piece of cake with digital platforms.

What can we learn from this history? That if social movements want to be successful in a globalized world, they also have to build translocal and transnational networks. It for instance makes no sense that in ten cities in the world, people are trying to build their own digital platform as an alternative for companies like Airbnb or Uber. Transnational networks of commons cities can be the fundament of a new governance model in the future.

Do you have a prescription for our future, and a way to get there? Also to which degree does your book also apply to non-European or non-Western countries?

I don’t have of course the prescription for our future, what I did in preparing my book was observing society carefully, looking for the places and processes of hope. I found two very relevant developments: citizens starting new collective initiatives, commons, for the production of sustainable products and services, and local governments implementing very ambitious policy plans in fields like climate, energy, food and mobility policy.

Slowly but surely, there is a new range of autonomous activities that together form a transformational movement towards a socio-ecological society. It is important to note that we are not only talking about small or isolated projects. Take, for instance, the 20 majestic wind turbines at the coastline of Copenhagen. This project was started by a group of habitants of the city who developed the idea and went with it to their Minister of Energy. Instead of refusing or taking it over, the government decided to start a co-creation process. Civil servants give technical and judicial advice. Half of the shares were owned by a citizens’ co-op, after completion, thousands of families every year receive a financial dividend. Similarly, following the Energiewende in Germany, half of the renewable energy installations are owned by citizens and their co-ops. Even in smaller towns, governments support the local population in setting up renewable energy projects. This adds up to really big business. So, citizens and local governments really can make a difference, and build together the counter current.

My book starts from the history and developments in Europe, so I am really modest on what it has to say to other continents. At the same time, I see the same developments in cities all over the world. There I think the crucial concept of action developed in my book based on the work of André Gorz, revolutionary reformism, really can be very useful. It answers the question how to move a step further, beyond all the individual great citizens’ initiatives and local policy proposals.

The two concepts are each in themselves insufficient. A political revolution that will change everything for good at once – we should not hope for that. And a few reforms of the existing system will not lead to a real structural change. For example, while it’s good that people share cars, this alone will not lead us to sustainable accessibility and mobility. This needs strategic cooperation and planning.

Revolutionary reformism can be defined as a chain of far-reaching reforms that complement and strengthen each other and, at the same time, raise political awareness. In system terms, it is a matter of implementing reforms that are complementary and reinforce each other. This will generate synergy and even positive feedback: virtuous circles. For example, in progressive cities like Ghent you see the establishment of commons if the field of renewable energy, mobility, food, etc. But for most of them they don’t cooperate beyond the borders of their domain. Imagine a food coop distributing their food boxes by another commons specialized in delivery by electric bikes, that in turn only uses green energy produced by the urban energy coop. When they then, supported by the local government, introduce and use the same local currency for connecting their economic transactions, you put in motion a chain in action that will reinforce itself. It is this kind of thinking and action that is crucial for the future, and can be useful all over the world.

The post Freedom, Equality and Commoning in the Age of the Precariat: an interview with Dirk Holemans appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this series of podcasts, we explore pathways for climate justice in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch shaped by humans. Should we become stewards of our planet or live in harmony with nature to achieve a good life for all? We take our listeners on a journey to find out how we can reach the Paris goals. Through the lens of activists, experts, and scientists around the world, we reflect on this exciting challenge and explore paths that might lead us into a better future.

The pictures of our planet from a distance are beautiful and insightful. They show us a fragile marble in space that is ours to protect. But these pictures have also brought us another belief: that what happens on the ground is too small to count. We think that only global solutions can solve our global problems. But at the most local level, communities are already developing solutions. And this is why it’s time to zoom in again – back down to Earth.

In this podcast series, we’ve looked at different strategies to address climate change. We’ve discussed the risky ideas of geo-engineering and heard about climate cases in courtrooms around the world. We also considered the failures of carbon markets and talked about the links between climate change and agriculture.

In this final episode, we will take a look at the broader transformations that are necessary. Climate change is such a unique challenge that each and every sector of our society will have to change. At the same time, it is just one of the many urgent crises we face today. To get to the root of all of them, we need to consider a fundamental shift in thinking about our economies and lifestyles.

Do we need a master plan to get there? Maybe not. Because right now, people are already developing local solutions. They are experimenting with new paths toward just and sustainable lifestyles across the world. It’s a diverse set of approaches, but they share a common vision: The idea, that a good life for all is possible.

Do you know these moments when you reflect on your life and it feels like everything is accelerating?  We feel pushed to work more, to work harder and to always compete. Not because we want to move forward, but just because we want to keep up with everyone else.

This treadmill is part of a larger paradigm that we live in. It’s the logic of growth, says Barbara Muraca. Barbara lives in the United States and teaches Environmental and Social Philosophy at Oregon State University:

Modern, capitalistic societies are completely built around the idea of increasing economic growth. The retirement system in many countries, the taxation system, employment etc. So, if modern industrialized societies stop growing, they collapse. We call one year with reduced growth recession or crisis!

When you read the news, it may seem as if we’d be lost without an ever-growing economy. Growth is considered essential for a stable and booming society, and it comes with huge expectations. It’s supposed to guarantee employment, ensure peace, and provide wealth for everyone. We treat growth as the promise of a good life for all. But unfortunately, growth hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Now, the problem is that we have reached a point at which growth has turned from a means to improve quality of life to a goal of its own. Now, we can imagine what it means if we apply that to our own body. What would it mean if we grew every year 3 percent more than the year before? That would be completely crazy, and the balance of our body would indeed collapse, says Barbara Muraca

What seems crazy for our bodies is an accepted paradigm in economics: that we can grow and grow forever. In the process, our societies have become more and more divided. A few people get very rich, but the vast majority struggles. Growth doesn’t mean employment for everyone. And the financial market has stumbled into crisis. So why do so many of us still believe in the logic of growth?

I like the idea of mental infrastructures. You can imagine the highways that are built in our mind that we are used to take and stop seeing the side-roads and possible alternative paths, because we are used to take these highways, says Barbara Muraca

We want both: More energy, and clean energy. Can the two go together without doing harm to nature and other people? Technology is the focus of the so-called Green Economy, but it doesn’t come without side-effects. And while we green our energy systems, we are also consuming more and more resources. So if we really want to reduce our footprint, we need to change our lifestyles and habits. Like eating less meat for example, since breeding livestock produces high carbon emissions.

So, the good news is that especially in countries, like Europe and the US, meat consumption has been significantly reduced in the last years. The bad news however, is that, precisely because of the logic of growth and profit, the export of meat from Europe and the US has increased in the last years as well. And the OECD countries have really been celebrating the creation of new markets for meat in China and India and even issued dietary recommendation to increase meat consumption in these countries, says Barbara Muraca

This is just one example of how the logic of growth reproduces itself  against our best intentions. We are unable to simply stop growing no matter how much we try to size down. Sowe must change the basic structure of our societies in order to make them less dependent on economic growth.

Did you know that many rich countries have already hit their limits of growth? Their economies don’t grow as much as they used to anymore. This is the case in Germany, Canada or the U.S. In such countries economies grow only slowly by just one or two percent each year.

At the same time, many developing countries are growing quickly, like China and the Senegal. Their growth can be as high as five or six percent a year. The rate is much slower than it used to be but still high compared to some of the old industrialized countries. A big part of this boom happens in Asia.

In India’s, for example, the economy is expected to grow by up to eight percent each year. And this boom comes with huge changes. We reached out to AshEEsh Ko(h)thar(EE) to understand how such a fast-growing world looks like. Ashish is based in Pune in the West of India:

It’s a very large city, well small by Indian standards, about 4 million people.

Ashish is an environmental activist and co-author of the book “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India”. The miraculous growth of his country has come at a huge cost, he explained to us:

Well, in India, as I guess across the world, we have a model of development which essentially focuses on economic growth and industrialization and commercialization. You know, a uni-directional approach which says that we have to move from agriculture and pastoralism to industrialization to services to digital economy etc. etc. And what this has meant for very, very large sections of India’s population is dispossession, because this kind of an economy needs the land and the forest and the waters to be taken away from those who traditionally depended on them. It holds to be primitive and outmoded their own knowledge systems, very sophisticated ways by which people have dealt with or have lived within nature. All of that is considered to be out-modeled and is supposed to be discarded.

The city of Pune has become one of India’s tech centers. International companies working in information technology, agribusiness and renewable energy have set up camp in the region. The car industry here accounts for a third of the Indian market. More and more Indians are buying cars. And they are finding jobs in the tech sector – and not just in Pune:

In all the schools if you look at the kind of teaching that happens, people are taught that doing farming, and pastoralism or fisheries or forestry work is no longer cool. It’s not something that one needs, should be doing in the 21. Century, the 21. Century should be about computers, it should be about being in industries, it should be about learning sophisticated technologies, being savvy with gadgets and so on. So, what we’re seeing is a kind of dispriviledging and displacement of nature-based livelihoods, which in India, most of the population actually still is living that.

Half of India’s people still work on farms, in forestry or in fishing. But their numbers are decreasing. People are moving away from the rural areas and into the cities. They give up their traditional livelihoods, hoping to succeed in the new economy.

And from those livelihoods where people are being offered are what I call deadlihoods. Because essentially their mass jobs there, there is no dignity, there is no meaningfulness with this, people are just part of a much larger chain of production. They are subject to the whims and fancies of a small number of owners, whether it’s government or it’s capitalist. And even in the so-called modern sector, things like computers and all, most of the jobs that people have are extremely deadening, there is no liveliness and then there’s no passion. And so, really, the replacement is by jobs with actually what I call deadlihoods, says Ashish Kothari.

Oftentimes, this means repeating the same action in a factory over and over again for a tiny payout. As you heard, AshEEsh calls these jobs ‘deadlihoods’. They separate people from nature and from the products they make, and expose them to tough and toxic working conditions that can be extremely dangerous. Here, global companies can produce at a lower cost, because the rules for the protection of workers and the environment are still less stringent. In many cases, the products are then shipped abroad.

So, there is also then a significant impact on the environment. In India, we already know that we are on a very steep, unsustainable path, using twice the amount of natural resources that can be regenerated. We’re already seeing severe, very severe shortages of water, problems of deforestation, flooding, droughts. And, of course now, combined with all that, the impacts of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

India is both fueling climate change and suffering from its consequences. More and more cars are crowding the streets, and coal-fired power plants pollute the air. To AshEEsh, the current system perpetuates inequalities, to the benefit of a small elite. Simply greening the economy, he says, won’t solve the larger problem.

If one wants to change the situation we’re in, we have to tackle the system at its roots. We have to tackle the system in terms of the political concentrations of power in the state, the economic concentrations of power in capitalism, the gender concentrations of power and patriarchy. And depending on where we are in the world, in India for instance, castism, which is very old. These fundamental actors of society have to be challenged and changed, if we’re really want to try and solve this problem, says Ashish Kothari.

You’ve heard it from our guests in the United States and India: Ashish and Barbara are convinced that we need a new kind of thinking and a new way of doing. They say we need to work on creating a fundamentally different world. This might sound utopian. But there are already projects emerging that try to do just that. Take the concept of Degrowth:

The movement on Degrowth in Europe, is a very, very important one, because we have to really challenge and say that not only have we gone too far and too much, too big. Actually, we have to degrow, we have to scale down considerably our use of materials and energy. Especially if we are genuine about other parts of the world that have got left behind. Being able to at least meet their basic needs. I’m not saying they should be able to develop in the same pattern, but at least be able to do away with the kind of deprivation that there’s an unequal form of development has caused.

The Degrowth idea comes in many shapes. Initially, the movement formed in France, under the name décroissance. It was taken up in Italy and Spain, where Degrowth is called Descrescita, or Decrecimiento. And in Germany, economists are working on so-called post-growth societies. Barbara is among those who support this Degrowth movement.

I do not think that growth is in the long term possible at this rate and I think that if we don’t move on with a radical transformation, we will end up in recurrent crisis, even worse than the crisis of 2008. So, for me, Degrowth is not just a utopia, it’s a necessary path to transform society, says Barbara Muraca.

But Degrowth seems a rather vague term. So what would this transformation actually look like? The people working on Degrowth won’t be able to send you a copy of their master plan. They don’t claim that they even know how it’s going to work. Instead, they are all about leaving the beaten path, and venture into uncharted territory.

And for this we need spaces in which we can experience and experiment what the difference might be like.) We have to experience what it means to live differently. Not only to think about that, but to make the experience in our bodies, in our minds, and in our desires. And I don’t think that this is not just an abstract idea or wishful thinking. Around us, there are so many different projects, social experiments and initiatives, that are already embodying this perspective. And they are already creating spaces where we can experiment alternative futures and start working on them. And I think they are contagious and powerful, says Barbara Muraca.

One space in which such alternative worlds are being explored is the Transition Town movement. Barbara says this is a great example of how we could develop new solutions.

You have small towns or neighborhoods, where people get together and the leading idea is to develop a plan to make their community no longer dependent on fossil fuels. But it is more than that. People build learning networks and start from their potentials and the skills that are there at the local level and they start to re-imagine the place where they live. They really rethink the economy, they reimagine work, they re-skill in order to develop the competences that are necessary to implement a different way of living, but they are also very concerned about social justice for example, says Barbara Muraca.

One of the most well-known Transition Towns is Bristol in the United Kingdom. The people there have developed creative ideas like the Bristol Pound. It’s a local currency, and it cannot be accumulated like normal money in the bank. Instead of generating profit, the Bristol Pound sustains the local economy. There’s a food network and there’s a community-owned farm. In these projects, what’s also being tested are new models of ownership:

It’s not just about sharing the use of tools, but about really rethinking the way we produce stuff. If we can generate production which is independent from the logic of profit, we don’t have to keep going with the idea of mass production and mass consumption. We can produce things that are modular, that can be highly recycled by local communities, that can tackle and address the needs of communities, and that are completely independent from the necessity of generate, recreate and accumulate increasing profit – which is what is happening now with the standard model of production.

If we produce locally, share our stuff and repair things when they are broken, we can decrease our footprint on the planet. And we can defy the logic of growth, by taking back control over our local resources. An interesting example of this comes from Mendha Lekha in India.

And this village in the last 40 years has kind of declared that in its village and for all the ecosystems around it, the…nobody else will be taking decisions but the village assembly itself. So their slogan is that while we elect the government in New Delhi and Mumbai, in our village, we are the government. (Now, through all of this they have upturned 200 years of colonial and forced colonial history, where the forests have been taken control off by the state.) They’ve taken control back to themselves and they now manage the entire forest, 2000 hectares around them, and they manage it in such a way that it is sustainable, that the conservation is taking place, they also recently agreed communized all the agricultural land, which means there’s no private land on the village anymore. And this also helps them to control cropping patterns, to make sure what lands are not being sold off for mining or industries, and so on, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish calls it a form of direct and radical democracy. Around the world, communities have reclaimed control over important resources, such as water. In another case, in the Western Indian district of Kachchh (Kutch), local people are taking care of their water in a new way. It’s an area where water is extremely scarce. So one hundred villages have banded to collect and use rainwater in a local, equitable and decentralised way. They manage it through local committees. In this way, the system provides enough water for the basic needs of every village:

This becomes very important because when one is talking about  the mainstream model of water, creating a big dam somewhere and then transporting that water somewhere else,  we now know that large reservoirs can also be serious sources of emissions.

When a valley is flooded to build a dam, it buries the soil and vegetation. The plants start rotting and emit methane. This powerful greenhouse gas can warm the planet. The second issue is that big dams often change the agricultural practices around it. Farmers shift from dryland farming to irrigated farming and start using chemical fertilizers, says Ashish. So the people of Kutch are saving planet-warming emissions, as well as their traditional farming practice.

When they are able to do local water harvesting, they continue with mostly their dry land farming agriculture, which necessarily is more diverse, it’s more localized, has less emissions, it’s mostly organic – and because it is diverse it is also more adaptable and able to deal with aspects of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

Our addiction to growth has reached its limits. It’s threatening our environment as well as human dignity. Can we imagine a world beyond growth? Let’s look at our bodies when we get older.

After a certain threshold, our bodies stop growing physically, but do not stop being creative and learning and developing in a different way. And for the economy it’s similar, says Barbara Muraca.

Degrowth activists like Barbara are convinced that another world is possible. But she also says we need more than small reforms and green technologies. We need a fundamental change. What could this look like? There are many people already out and experimenting. Barbara says that the key is to build alliances among them:

So, stopping coal extraction in Germany for example, per se is not enough, because it leads to coal being imported now from Colombia. And in Colombia, pristine forests are destroyed and indigenous people are evicted for the coal mines. So, we to have to combine the blockage of coal mining in Germany with the things that the Transition Town people are advocating which is transforming the economy and society to make it less dependent on fossil fuels at the same time.

Modern culture tells us that we count mainly as individuals. We are divided into producers and consumers. This makes us easy to control. But if we reconnect as collectives, we can realize our power to shape the world:

If all goes well I think the world is moving towards what I call the radical ecological democracy, where the basic unit of decision-making is the collective, in the village or in the city neighborhood or in a school or college or wherever there are electives and communities are forming and being self-defined, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish tells us more about his vision for the future. It’s a world, where people take back the means of production from states and corporations, and organize locally. Here progress is not measured by growth, but in terms of happiness and relationships. His is a vision of justice without the great inequalities between genders and classes we know today. It’s a world where humans are much more in tune with nature, and their knowledge is a common good.

These are the sorts of things we are seeing already in hundreds of initiatives in India, thousands across the world. And I think the more we are able to network them, bring them together, the more we can actually practice, bring into practice, a very very different vision for what the world would look like in 2050, says Ashish Kothari.

Does it sound idealistic? Well, yes. But idealism is the start of any meaningful process of change. And it’s about time that we take our knowledge on crucial issues like climate change and social justice, and turn them into reality.

This is a radical change in the view that we have. So, in other words, moving from the globe to the home, to the Oikos which is the word that is in the word ecology and in the word economy. Starting to shape together an alternative house, an alternative home for us, and not considering the globe as an abstract thing that can be organized from above, and managed from above and reproduce the logic of management as the solution to our problems, says Barbara Muraca.

The first photograph of planet Earth was taken in the late 1960’s. It made us conscious of the fragile place that we share. But it also planted a bias into our minds: That any solution to a global problem must be global in scale as well. But maybe that’s not true. We can start on the ground now, and develop our own, local solutions. In this respect, climate change is a wake-up call, and a real opportunity: To change our world for the benefit of everyone.

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