There was a time when I felt warmly toward the Frick Collection. I was a teenager when I first visited the mansion-turned-art-museum on New York’s Upper East Side. Around every corner was a painting that I had seen before in school or books—Hans Holbein the Younger’s 16th-century portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, El Greco’s St. Jerome, the Vermeers. I did not know much about the paintings, or what they had to do with each other, except that they were all so important. And there they were, all together in this benefactor’s home, arranged (except for the gift shop and ticket desk) as if he still lived there. What a guy.

Last time I visited, I experienced the place quite differently. I had spent some of the intervening years reporting on social movements for a living, witnessing the violence and other forms of repression frequently wielded against those who take stands for their own dignity—as workers, as students, as migrants, as neighbors. I had learned that the history of my subject included Henry Clay Frick. During much his life, the public imagination associated his name not with famous art but with the breaking of the Homestead Steel Strike in Pennsylvania in 1892, a deadly operation that involved the use of Pinkerton mercenaries and the state militia. Mr. Frick spent most of his life organizing the production and sale of steel and other industrial products. Fine art was, in comparison, a hobby. Yet now, nearly a century after his death, certain masterworks can be viewed only by paying a visit to his home, frozen in time, where they are indefinitely imprisoned.

Frick-like behavior is such a familiar feature of cultural and economic practice in the United States that we rarely pause to question it. Mr. Frick was not alone. His contemporaries, like Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Leland Stanford, had philanthropic hobbies of their own, in some cases to greater effect. Each found ways of wiping away spotty business reputations with unrelated beneficence, supplanting the public ambivalence or notoriety they had accumulated in life with enduring gratitude in death. Like feudal lords endowing monasteries, they bought themselves a measure of salvation in the afterlife—and we continue to let them do it.

We like to think that the selling of indulgences was an error of the past, yet the practice has passed into secular forms, and there are few Martin Luthers complaining of it.

We like to think that the selling of indulgences was an error of the past, yet the practice has passed into secular forms, and there are few Martin Luthers complaining of it. What goes by the name of philanthropy—literally, the love of people—and what the tax code regards as giving can rival the cynicism of the feudal indulgence business.

Microsoft Windows remains the world’s most widely used desktop computer operating system, but its chief salesman, Bill Gates, is now best known in relation to matters like health care, combatting disease in Africa and school reform. There is no question that Mr. Gates has proved his skill in turning buggy, insecure software into a global near-monopoly. Less clear is the meritocratic rationale for why this man’s foundation should rival the power of the World Health Organization, which is at least partly accountable to elected governments. One might also ask why a private-school-educated college dropout skilled at selling software holds singular influence over the future of the U.S. public school system—which his foundation consistently steers in the direction of Microsoft products. Yet long after anyone remembers the misfortune of running Windows Vista, Mr. Gates can expect enduring praise for pouring money into humanitarian pursuits. Just as I took Frick’s collection for granted as a teenager, we may even forget that there were choices to be made about public health and public education, and that Mr. Gates had an outsized role in making them. When most of us donate from our small excess, we express a concern and entrust the money to those with expertise; when Gates donates, he sets the agenda.

Now a new generation may out-Gates Mr. Gates. In December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Facebook, announced plans to transfer nearly all his Facebook stock to a vehicle for unrelated activities. He chose to do this through a limited liability company rather than a foundation, forgoing even the tax code’s spacious definition of philanthropy. The intended targets for this wealth, as for the Gates fortune, are health and public education, although, like the Gateses, they have limited direct experience in either field. (Mr. Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, at least, received a medical degree in 2012; neither she nor Zuckerberg attended public high schools.) Mr. Zuckerberg has demonstrated expertise in turning surveillance of people’s interpersonal activities into a profitable revenue stream through micro-targeted advertising. But there is as yet little reason he and his wife should be entrusted with the sway over our systems of health and public education that they are in the process of claiming. If we are to go on tolerating the self-canonization and attempted do-gooding of wealthy donors, we should expect them to actually be engaged in donating—not in the buying of indulgences, not in a vast privatization scheme to replace what could be public decision-making. This is advocacy; advocacy is fine, but we should call it what it is. If philanthropy means love of others, it must prove itself by entrusting the material of that love to the intended recipients. To believe in the dignity of other human beings is to honor their capacity to choose.

If philanthropy means love of others, it must prove itself by entrusting the material of that love to the intended recipients.

Philanthropy, that is, should be regarded as a subdomain of democracy, not an exception to it. We live in a time when economic stagnation and an authoritarian mood have put political democracy on the run around the world. Yet we also have more ways of hearing each other’s voices and making decisions together than ever before. Philanthropy could be a means for diverse, creative, collaborative acts of democracy—just what we need to regain the capacity to trust ourselves again, to remember the essential dignity that is our birthright. But only if it is real philanthropy. Giving should mean really giving, or giving back.

Natural Law and the Tax Code

The latest edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church contains, among its many now-peculiar-sounding phrases, a doctrine called the “universal destination of goods.” Says the catechism: “In the beginning God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind to take care of them, master them by labor, and enjoy their fruits. The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race.” To the eye of God, as among the earliest Christians in Acts, all things are common to all people. Nothing is mine or yours, but it is ours because we are part of the same divine communism.

There is, of course, a very big but.

The catechism goes on, “However, the earth is divided up among men to assure the security of their lives, endangered by poverty and threatened by violence.” Our flawed and fallen nature makes God’s communism impracticable. Therefore “the appropriation of property is legitimate for guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons and for helping each of them to meet his basic needs and the needs of those in his charge.”

So, there is a pass for possessions. Property of some kind is needed and useful. It can even be good, since it can be a means of serving others. The ample theory and practice of Catholic capitalism, from the Medicis to Domino’s Pizza, depends on this exception to the underlying, communist rule. But then there’s another but; the exception goes only so far.

“The ownership of any property makes its holder a steward of Providence,” says the catechism. Property is not fully ours; it must be stewarded, and taken care of, and shared. “The universal destination of goods remains primordial,” the catechism insists. Thomas Aquinas put the matter this way in the Summa Theologica: “Man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.” We hold property, yes, but we should hold it as if it is not completely ours. We should dispense with it that way, too.

The tax code has a way of confounding useful distinctions, including among kinds of giving. U.S. law may give us the impression, for instance, that any contribution to a 501(c)(3) or similarly tax-exempt organization equals a gift. But many such gifts are simply acts of either obligation, preference or reciprocity—like tithing at one’s church, or supporting organizations that promote one’s social opinions, or underwriting a public radio station to which one listens. That is a normal part of being a good community member, and it’s praiseworthy, but it is not really giving. It is more a matter of responsibility than philanthropy. Actual philanthropy, the love of people, the stewarding of Providence—these expect a fuller kind of gift.

Such gifts can come in different forms. They might be in the form of sacrifice—giving what it seems one cannot afford, expecting no worldly reward. They might alternatively be a matter of forfeiting excess—the wealth beyond one’s own needs, which the world’s imperfect property arrangements have delivered into one’s hands. In either case the gift, once given, is no longer one’s own. It never really was.

Pope Francis has made a point of challenging the common habit of mind in contemporary philanthropy that second-guesses the person in need, that presumes to know better. Will the food-stamp recipient spend it on junk food? Will that man on the street use your dollar for drugs or alcohol or a doomed lottery ticket? Francis denies us these questions, together with their presumptions. He reminded an interviewer just before Lent this year that, for the homeless man, maybe “a glass of wine is his only happiness in life!”

Democracy can be a tool, or a family of tools, for achieving the humility that wealth can otherwise lift beyond reach.

Giving to those who ask, said Francis, “is always right.” Before trying to instruct the asker, the giver should listen and learn. “In the shoes of the other,” the pope added, “we learn to have a great capacity for understanding, for getting to know difficult situations.”

Catholic Relief Services has adopted a framework known as “integral human development” to guide its work of giving around the world, drawing on statements from Pope Paul VI and St. John Paul II. It is an attempt to give in a way that presumes the dignity and autonomy of the recipient, that seeks conditions under which people can become more fully themselves through choices and relationships. It is also an attempt to back away from the presumption that a philanthropist is typically entitled to: the presumption of knowing what other people need better than the people in need do.

Another framework for dispatching such presumptions is democracy. Democracy can be a tool, or a family of tools, for achieving the humility that wealth can otherwise lift beyond reach. We tend to think of democracy as the purview of government, but it can also be a means of real giving. It can be a vehicle of Providence.

Participatory budgets

Mr. Zuckerberg, in a lengthy manifesto he published last February on “Building Global Community,” turned to a sort of democracy out of necessity. He admitted that Facebook’s employees, whether in Silicon Valley or satellite offices around the world, cannot fully predict the cultural sensitivities and local anxieties of its nearly two billion users. Combined with artificial intelligence, the platform would be relying on a kind of “community governance,” he wrote, and said that users should expect to see experiments in “how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

The kind of governance Mr. Zuckerberg describes strikes me more like disguised focus groups than a truly accountable democracy; the company’s structure would remain chiefly accountable to profit-seeking investors. But his nod to collective, digital decision-making is instructive. Democracy often gets blamed for the bureaucratic outgrowths of government, so we forget its efficiencies; spreading decision-making processes widely across a large and diverse society is, in principle, a far better way to meet people’s needs than trying to anticipate them through central planning. To the degree that markets work, this is why. But the trick is choosing the right processes for the right situations.

We are living through what could be a renaissance in techniques for doing democracy—and, potentially, for doing philanthropy.

Mr. Zuckerberg comes by his techno-utopianist enthusiasm for the challenge honestly. Alongside the present authoritarian revival in global politics, we are living through what could be a renaissance in techniques for doing democracy—and, potentially, for doing philanthropy. There has never been less reason for tolerating feudal, unaccountable pretenders to generosity.

Private markets have generated a proliferation of decision-making software—from tools designed for running a private company’s board elections to project management platforms for teams scattered around the world. Some tools require more tech-savvy users than others, and they rely on varied means of encryption and authentication. Old-fashioned elections can be organized more cheaply and securely than ever.

But some of the most important experiments enable new forms of participation altogether. Liquid democracy, for instance, is a system used by some of the new internet-based political parties spreading across Europe and South America. One of the leading implementations, DemocracyOS, comes from Argentina; there, the candidates for a political party agreed to vote however the users of the DemocracyOS platform directed them.

It is a system of cascading proxies, a blend between direct democracy and deference to expertise. Rather than electing a representative to make every decision on my behalf for a fixed period of time, under liquid democracy I can decide on every proposal for myself. But in most cases I will have neither the time nor knowledge to do so. I can therefore designate a proxy to vote on health-related matters, and another to vote on education. Maybe those proxies choose other proxies in turn. I can change my proxy at any time or opt to vote for myself. I choose my own level of involvement and step back responsibly.

Loomio, developed by a worker-owned cooperative in New Zealand, has become a popular platform for discussion and decision-making for online groups. An allied project, Cobudget, enables groups to pool donations and allocate them collaboratively. More examples are emerging from the “blockchain” technology that underlies the Bitcoin digital currency—enabling secure, transparent governance without need for a certifying authority. But not all of these democratic developments depend on boutique software; to reach people most in need, they must not. Participatory budgeting, for instance, is a technique developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, that has spread to U.S. cities like Chicago and New York. There, largely through in-person meetings, neighborhood residents work together to determine how funds should be spent in their communities.

Democratic tactics such as these might be aids in a kind of philanthropy that gives more than it directs, that entrusts gifts more fully to recipients. But they are just tactics. What matters most is how they are deployed. I conclude with three possible strategies for a more democratic philanthropy.

Giving directly

Maybe the most obvious thing to do when wealth accumulates excessively should be to return it, recycling it to those from whom it came. The John Lewis Partnership, for instance, is a large retail chain in Britain. When one of the founder’s sons took over, starting in 1929, he began transferring ownership of the company into a trust, which would become owned jointly by its employees. This was not an outright gift; the employees gradually paid the family back. But the choice ensured that, from there on out, the company’s profits would go toward the many who produced them, not just the founding family or outside investors. It prevented further excess accumulation.

Mark Zuckerberg might consider doing something similar. Rather than transferring his Facebook stock into his own pet projects, he could put it in a trust owned and governed by Facebook users—say, through some of those “community governance” mechanisms he wrote about. Then users could benefit from and help to steward the valuable, personal data they post and share. Mr. Zuckerberg himself might find his own skills put to better use that way. Instead of seeking to transform fields in which he has little expertise, he could help guide the user community to being effective stewards of the company he did so much to build.

Instead of seeking to transform fields in which he has little expertise, Mr. Zuckerberg could help guide the user community to being effective stewards of the company he did so much to build.

A vast number of businesses face impending transition as their Baby Boomer owners depart without succession plans. Some are large factories, others are small stores and offices. It is a historic opportunity to share that wealth, through forms of cooperative ownership, with the very workers and customers who make those businesses work. This is a kind of philanthropy that honors the human beings in an enterprise, the people who might otherwise take a back seat to the imperative of profits.

Cooperative conversion, however, is not an option for many who are in a position to give. A second kind of philanthropy more closely resembles the forms we are used to: delivering a set of resources to a community or cause.

When donors discern the need to direct funds toward some particular purpose, they can at least step aside after the gift has been made. Conventionally, philanthropic foundations remain, after the original donor’s death, under the control of family members or the donor’s stringent directives. Givers seem unable to allow themselves to fully give. We should expect better; even when the donor frames an original purpose, a more appropriate set of stakeholders can steer the gift afterward.

For instance, if a donor wants to set up a foundation for education in a given city, it could ensure that a significant portion of the decision-making process includes ordinary students and parents there. Rather than imposing elections, the foundation could assign rotating oversight positions through random sortition, just as juries are chosen. Or it could hold open meetings for a participatory budgeting process. If the recipients of the gift are more widespread, such as patients with a rare disease, online tools like liquid democracy or Cobudget may be more appropriate. One way or another, in order for a gift to be regarded as truly a gift, it should be given in a way that is accountable to its recipients, rather than as an imposition on them.

In order for a gift to be regarded as truly a gift, it should be given in a way that is accountable to its recipients, rather than as an imposition on them.

A third strategy for democratic philanthropy relinquishes donor control even further, and it is already starting to become popular: direct cash transfers. Just give people money and trust them to decide how best to use it.

GiveDirectly, a Silicon Valley darling, is a charity that uses mobile payment technology to deliver money into the accounts of poor people in Kenya and Uganda. The Taiwanese Buddhist charity Tzu Chi has also made lower-tech cash transfers integral to its disaster relief programs. This kind of giving includes no stipulation about how people use the money, but evidence appears to support positive outcomes; when people receive money with no strings attached, they tend to use it well. GiveDirectly has also become involved in research around universal basic income—a system by which every person (or adult) in a society would receive a livable income just for being alive. Advocates believe that, rather than disincentivizing work, a basic income would free people to make more valuable contributions to society than dead-end jobs by freeing time for education, family life and innovation. Some even contend that as more jobs become automated by technology, basic income could turn into a necessity.

Something like a basic income would require more resources than philanthropy is likely to provide (even though eight men now hold as much wealth as half the planetary population); full implementation needs public policy. But some philanthropists—including Facebook’s co-founder, Chris Hughes, now co-chair of the Economic Security Project—are putting the idea in motion by funding local experiments in cash distributions that could later lead to policy shifts. It is hard to imagine a way of giving more in tune with the universal destination of goods than this—recycling wealth among as many people as possible, with no stipulations whatsoever about how they use it.

These proposals, I realize, run the risk of inhibiting the philanthropic supply. If philanthropy cannot be a means of buying glory and immortality, one might ask, who would do it? Useful things have been done in the world by well-meaning but self-serving philanthropy. Are we ready to lose that by raising expectations?

Michael Edwards, a former Ford Foundation grantmaker, contends that the current system is not worth protecting. “Philanthropy is supposed to be private funding for the public good,” he has written, “but increasingly it’s become a playground for private interests.” However much the Zuckerbergs and the Gateses of the world succeed in their mighty ambitions, their chief achievement will be the cultivation of dependence on people like them.

“The more you try to control social change,” Mr. Edwards warns, “the less you succeed.”

Providence might do better.

Photo by J.Gabás Esteban

The post The Case Against Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Philanthropy As We Know It appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The weak reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crisis….the ineffectuality of climate change negotiations over the course of twenty-one years….the social polarization and stark wealth and income inequality of our time. Each represents a deep structural problem that the neoliberal market/state seeks to ignore or only minimally address. As more Americans come to see that the state is often complicit in these problems, and only a reluctant, ineffectual advocate for change, there is a growing realization that seeking change within the system of electoral politics, Washington policy and the “free market” can only yield only piecemeal results, if that. There is a growing belief that “the system is rigged.” People have come to understand that “free trade” treaties, extractivist development, austerity politics and the global finance system chiefly serve an economic elite, not the general good. As cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has put it, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy. The economy is not broken. It’s simply unjust.”

Struggle for change within conventional democratic arenas can often be futile, not just because democratic processes are corrupted by money and commercial news media imperatives, but because state bureaucracies and even competitive markets are structurally incapable of addressing many problems. The disappointing Paris climate change agreement (a modest commitment to carbon reductions after a generation of negotiations) suggests the limits of what The System can deliver. As distrust in the state grows, a very pertinent question is where political sovereignty and legitimacy will migrate in the future. Our ineffectual, unresponsive polity may itself be the problem, at least under neoliberal control.

The failures of The System come at the very time that promising new modes of production, governance and social practice are exploding. Twenty years after the World Wide Web went public, it has become clear that decentralized, self-organized initiatives on open networks can often out-perform both the market and state – a reality that threatens some core premises of capitalism.[1] The people developing a new parallel economy – sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, as in Greece and Spain – are neither politicians, CEOs or credentialed experts. They are ordinary people acting as householders, makers, hackers, permaculturists, citizen-scientists, cooperativists, community foresters, subsistence collectives, social mutualists and commoners: a vast grassroots cohort whose generative activities are not really conveyed by the term “citizen” or “consumer.”

Through network-based cooperation and localized grassroots projects, millions of people around the world are managing all sorts of bottom-up, self-provisioning systems that function independently of conventional markets and state programs (or sometimes in creative hybrids). They are developing new visions of “development” and “progress,” as seen in the buen vivir ethic in Latin America, relocalization movements in the US and Europe, and the FabLabs and makerspaces that are reinventing production for use.

The new models also include alternative currencies, co-operative finance and crowdequity investments to reclaim local control….transition and indigenous peoples’ initiatives to develop sustainable post-growth economies….the growing movement to reclaim the city as a commons…. and movements to integrate social justice and inclusive ethical commitments into economic life. The scope of this blessed unrest suggests that even as establishment politics continues as if the 2008 crisis never happened, insisting that austerity policies are the answer, the actual terrain of governance, production, social economics and vernacular culture is shifting radically. For those with eyes to see, serious structural changes are underway.

The challenge facing members of the EDGE Funders Alliance is how to comprehend these tectonic shifts and develop a fresh vision with practical alternatives. How can philanthropic practices nourish the emerging paradigm of progressive change? For EDGE, this inquiry is a natural progression. EDGE has long focused on the need for a Just Transition that can bring forth new configurations of fair, democratic and inclusive governance and provisioning.[2] Still, the complexity and diversity of the system changes occurring suggest that grantmakers need to explore better ways to make sense of innovation at the edge, and to leverage it more aggressively. Progressive foundations need new venues and tools for identifying the most promising strategic opportunities, reinventing grantmaking processes, and collaborating more closely with vanguard thinkers, activists and policy innovators — as well as communities advancing systemic alternatives on the ground. This essay is an attempt to give better definition to what a process of Just Transition might look like in 2016 and beyond – and how progressive philanthropy might adapt to new realities and support transition efforts around the world.

1. Portrait of a Paradigm Shift: The New Emerging from The Shell of the Old

If an old paradigm is indeed waning, then the ways in which we understand new patterns of action cannot unthinkingly incorporate the worldview and vocabularies of The Old. They must reflect a new set of values and operational logics. They must give closer attention to fledging projects and ideas on the peripheries of the mainstream. Our discourse itself must slip the shackles of prevailing economic thought, such as the idea that money and wealth are identical; that the state and policy are the most important drivers of change; and that top-down, hierarchical control structures, whether state or corporate, are the best systems for meeting needs.

The dominant narrative of contemporary politics and public life is, of course, free market economics as the fundamental ordering principle for society. It enshrines the primacy of unlimited growth as an indicator of societal progress, aggressive competition for selfish gain, individualism unconstrained by community, and centralized hierarchies of administration and control. Insurgent narratives attempting to challenge the neoliberal framework, while fragmented and diverse, tend to emphasize certain common themes:

o Production and consumption for use, not profit;

o Bottom-up, decentralized decisionmaking and social cooperation;

o Stewardship of shared equity and predistribution of resources;

o An ethic of racial and gender inclusivism, transparency and fairness;

o Community self-determination and place-making over market dictates;

o A diversity of models adapted to local needs.

If there is a common thread to be seen in the great variety of movements seeking system-change, it is a rejection of a machine-like economy and Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” System-change advocates assert a humanistic vision of society as a living, biodiverse system. Countless social and moral economies stress the importance of stewarding the earth and all living systems; the priority of people’s basic needs over market exchange; and the importance of participation, inclusion and fairness in successful resource management and community governance.

The Twelve Principles of Permaculture, for example, emphasize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that we cannot focus on any separate element in isolation. We must focus on the proper relationships within an ecosystem, of which human beings are but one part. As first principles, permaculturists thus urge that any human interventions aim to care for the earth (so that all life systems can continue and multiply), care for people (so that they have access to resources necessary to their existence), and return any surplus (so that the system can continue to meet the needs of the earth and people). From these ideas flow many related ideas such as “catch and store energy,” “apply self-regulation and accept feedback,” “produce no waste,” and “design from patterns to details.” These principles may provide useful guideposts to funders as they consider what types of projects will “break the frame” of the current system and advance sustainable, humane alternatives.

The principles of permaculture complement the design principles for successful commons identified by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom, and highlight the need for focusing on new types of governance. A commons of farmland, a forest or a fishery succeeds, Ostrom found, because people are able to devise their own locally appropriate governance rules from the bottom up. Everyone is invited to participate in the governance, and everyone has access to low-cost conflict-resolution mechanisms. A variety of system-change movements around the world are now exploring ways to re-imagine governance structures – not just for commons, but for the state as well, and its relationship to markets.

Open Networks, Activism and Emergence

What’s notable about so many system-change movements is that their sovereign visions of change are incubating on the edges of mainstream politics and policy. They are often small-scale, grassroots endeavors that go unrecognized by conventional political discourse and policies. Even large progressive NGOs may marginalize or ignore these initiatives (as enumerated in Section 3) as too small or disaggregated to matter. Yet just as the best ideas that emerge on Internet platforms generally arise on the edge, where diverse innovation flourishes, so countless grassroots projects around the world serve as indispensable embryos of system-change. They are focused on building out their distinct vision on their own terms, eschewing reliance on law and macro-policy as their primary drivers. The DIY predisposition stems in part from the sheer difficulty of achieving things through government, the general lack of public funding, and the inherent limits of law and bureaucracy in actualizing change. But it also stems from a recognition of the great creative powers of individuals and communities, which the state and market as now constituted have no use for.

At both the grassroots level and in digital culture, system-critical organizations are reconfiguring themselves to leverage the power of open networks. Examples include the rise of the peasant farmers’ group La Via Campesina, the System for Rice Intensification (a kind of open source agriculture developed by farmers themselves), and transnational collaboration among indigenous peoples. Rather than trying to manage themselves as hierarchical organizations with proprietary franchises, reputations, and overhead to sustain, they are reinventing themselves as flexible players in open, fluid environments – as players in dynamic, collaborative movements. These new modes of network-driven activism succeed through the efficient self-organization of self-selected participants, supple coordination of activities, and fast cycles of creative iteration.

Such convergences can spur system change through emergence. In ecological terms, open networks often resemble “catchment areas” of a landscape in which numerous flows – water, vegetation, soil, organisms, etc. – come together and mutually give rise to an interdependent, self-replenishing catchment area: a lively, energy-rich zone.[3] Social change movements should emulate this dynamic as a way to foster emergence and system-change. As two students of complexity theory and social movements, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, write:

When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.[4]

The old guard of electoral politics and standard economics has trouble comprehending the principle of emergence (or catchment), let alone recognizing the value of policy structures that could leverage and focus that dynamic power. It has consistently underestimated the bottom-up innovation enabled by open source software; the speed and reliability of Wikipedia-style coordination and knowledge-aggregation; and the power of social media and open platforms. Politicians have been stunned by the swarms of protesters that rallied for “net neutrality” policies in the US, and by the viral self-organization of the Occupy movement, the Indignados and Podemos in Spain, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and Syriza in Greece. Conventional schools of economics, politics and power do not comprehend the generative capacities of decentralized, self-organized networks. They apply obsolete categories of institutional control, as if trying to understand the ramifications of automobiles through the language of “horseless carriages.”

So, today: If we are serious about effecting system change, we need to emancipate ourselves from backward-looking concepts and vocabularies, and learn new ways of understanding social movements pioneering new patterns of human potential, provisioning and governance. Although system-change is often focused on transforming societal institutions and policies, it is equally an inner transformation — a re-examination of the concepts and words to which we have become acculturated. Wemust learn to change ourselves in light of the unfolding realities. And we need to hoist up new imaginaries as placeholders while we explore the field and experiment with the particulars.

Instead of clinging to the old left/right spectrum of political ideology, for example – which reflects the centrality of “the market” and “the state” in organizing society – we need to entertain new narratives that allow us to re-imagine new drivers of governance, production and culture. The challenge is to popularize new models from the edge that are more inclusive, participatory, transparent and socially convivial – ones that go beyond what is offered by electoral politics, the administrative state and market structures. How can the dozens of loosely associated transnational “tribes,” all sharing aspirations for system change, begin to collaborate more closely and federate themselves? Can they create new types of local/global culture and political power? The answers can only emerge through mutual exploration and co-creation.

These insights underscore the importance of the long view. It takes time to cultivate emergent structures – to learn from experiments, failures, peers, changing conditions, etc. It is therefore important to hold fast (yet flexibly) to a larger vision of society rather than chase isolated transactional reforms that do not contribute to to transformational goals. Many commentators such as Jeremy Rifkin argue persuasively that we are in the midst of epochal transitions in technology, communications, energy, and so on. With commensurate resolve and intelligence, funders must take full cognizance of long-term structural trends and design grantmaking strategies that assure socially equitable, democratic and ecologically sustainable outcomes..

2. Twin Strategies: Starve the Old While Building the New

A major problem in building a “new system” is that so many urgent contemporary problems must be addressed through the “old system” – existing government systems and law; concentrated, extractive markets; and corrupted electoral processes – at least in the short term. No socially concerned person can ignore these arenas of power. Yet it is equally clear that these systems will not self-reform themselves or automatically give rise to the transformational changes needed. Disruptive external catalysts and pressure are essential because “working within the system” tends to diminish the impetus and ambitions for change, as the past fifty years of citizen activism has shown.

It is therefore imperative to break the “attention frame” of the existing system of power – in economics, law, politics, culture — which subtly dictates the spectrum of credible, “respectable” options. So long as the neoliberal market/state remains the governing framework for acceptable change, the range of permissible solutions will be inadequate. Only a structural reconfiguration of power and new sorts of institutions will open up transformative solution-sets. And this can only be achieved by artfully engineering, sector by sector, a new socio-ecological economy with its own efficacy, values and moral authority.

Thus, along with a grand strategy of “Starving and Stopping” (within the Old), serious support must be given to “Building the New.” This means active, informed support for experimentation, outlier projects, deep conceptual thinking and analysis, strategy convenings, relationship building, and movement-building. It means developing an infrastructure to support an expanding web of learning, institutions and affiliations that help Build and Replicate the New. Since the basic goal is to catalyze a paradigm-shifting emergence (which arises in unpredictable, nonlinear ways), it is misguided to try to apply old-paradigm quantitative metrics to the early-stage instances of a new paradigm.

To give a rough sense of the Big Picture, this infographic depicts some key strategic fronts in the struggle to Starve the Old and Build the New. (This image was developed by Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project with the Climate Justice Alliance’s Our Power Campaign.)

As a matter of practical politics, it is complicated to simultaneously try to dismantle the old system from within while also attempting to Build the New. This is well illustrated by the struggle to develop transition strategies for climate change. Moving away from carbon-based fuels and finance capitalism and towards renewable energy and a post-consumerist economy must take place primarily within the old (corrupted, archaic) political and policy apparatus. But the fight to Starve the Old can be greatly assisted if it is connected to and coordinated with efforts to Build the New. The demonstration of feasible alternatives (renewable energy, cooperativism, relocalization, etc.) is itself a way to shift political momentum and the moral center of gravity toward system change. To work, this requires that alternatives incubated outside the existing system achieve a sufficient coherence, intelligibility, scale and functionality.

Two analogues illustrate this dynamic: The rise of Linux and other open source programs were significant socio-economic events because they weakened the market power and stature of Microsoft and other types of proprietary software; suddenly other options were credible and available. Similarly, a constellation of local food and anti-GMO movements, working mostly outside of policy arenas, have pioneered an alternative vision for growing, buying and enjoying food. This has forced agribusiness to change, stimulated new policy initiatives (anti-GMO labeling, e.g.) and shifted the conversation about what’s possible. Political and policy dimensions are not the primary focus but the secondary effects of Building the New. In both of these cases, the impetus for change came from innovative provisioning models; robust participatory communities; and an earned moral credibility that is widely recognized.

So rather than regard the Building of the New as too risky or marginal (because it is seen as peripheral to mainstream politics debate and today’s headlines), it is important to see emergent ventures as the real engine for long-term system change. A focus on Building the New is the only way that we can break out of the logic of the current political and economic system, and begin to validate and develop viable alternative systems. Building the New helps us see the limitations of what can be done within the parameters of existing paradigms while opening us up to alternative systems of knowledge and social practice. We need to draw upon diverse ways of knowing and being – culturally, ecologically, politically – as embodied in indigenous communities, peer production networks, ethnic and gender minorities, urban movements, and others.

The lessons gleaned from Building the New can be affirmatively used to advance a Just Transition. Two examples: Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation is now documenting the thermodynamic efficiencies of peer production (i.e., mass networked collaboration), such as the open design and local manufacturing of motor vehicles, household appliances and countless other products. These findings could help validate a whole universe of actors that are considered fringe phenomena in mainstream climate policy debate. Similarly, various commons activists are documenting how subsistence commons for farmlands, fisheries, forests and water, among other resources, function as more ecologically responsible alternatives to the extractive market economy, while still meeting people’s needs in locally responsive ways. Such commons represent attractive post-growth models. But this theater of action, too, is largely ignored by macro-policy players who prefer capital-friendly pricing of “ecosystem services,” “market solutions” and regulatory approaches.

How to Starve the Old while Building the New is obviously a complicated topic that demands much more scrutiny and debate. But this general framework provides a solid, holistic orientation to the broader challenges. It shifts the focus from individual project silos to the web of relationships among them, and to the larger vision of change. It also makes clear the intimate connections between Starving the Old and Building the New, and the need to align the flow of players and resources to create a new “catchment area for change.”

3. Building the New Requires Different Processes and Institutions — and a New Narrative

Building the New has a special importance in our times because we increasingly live in an institutional void of politics. As Dutch political scientist Maarten Hajer: “There are no clear rules and norms according to which politics is to be conducted and policy measures are to be agreed upon. To be more precise, there are no generally accepted rules and norms according to which policy making and politics are to be conducted.”[5] (original emphasis) The machinery of politics and government still exists, of course, but it has been captured by the large market players and its processes warped. Neoliberal policies have “hollowed out” government over the past generation, literally and politically, by crippling many state functions or transforming them into empty formalisms or distractions. The notional social contract that has stabilized conflicts among capital, labor and the general public is being incrementally dismantled.

Many NGOs and movements persist in “working within the system,” gamely hoping that success there will matter. This path is inescapable, of course; The System is too important to ignore. But it is also true, as massive protests in many countries have made clear, that neoliberal capture of representative government is arguably the biggest structural barrier to change today. The resulting void in legitimate governance, intensified by impediments to democratic participation, makes it even more imperative strategically to Build the New as a way to transform The Old.

Many citizens who in earlier generations might have engaged with politics and policymaking now see that route as pointless or secondary; they have shifted their energies toward “transnational, polycentric networks of governance in which power is dispersed,” writes Hajer. We thus see the emergence of new citizen-actors and new forms of mobilization seeking system change. This consists not just of periodic cultural surges such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Syriza, but long-term movements focused on cooperatives, degrowth, the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, relocalized economies, peer production, the commons, and countless niche projects. Voting and other classical notions of citizenship now seem archaic and even futile, especially when contrasted with open Internet platforms and local projects that enable more meaningful forms of participation and results.

Much of the political energy for change in the late 1960s and early 1970s came from the invention of a new organizational form, the public interest group – a body of expert-advocates acting as proxies for the general public in various policy arenas, and mostly funded by individuals and institutional philanthropy. In 1969, nearly one-third of the Harvard Law School class applied to work with Ralph Nader in his brand of public-interest advocacy. Nearly two generations later, following the neoliberal takeover of the body politic and the rise of the Internet, creative idealists intent on making social change are far more likely to apply their energies to practical projects in local circumstances and digital apps, wikis and collectives. They are inventing network-based guilds like Enspiral, alternative currencies like the Bangla-Pesa in poor neighborhoods in Kenya, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to provide online mapping to assist first-responders after natural disasters. In such spaces, there are simply many more opportunities for participation, control, responsibility and satisfying outcomes than conventional politics and policy.

But if the two realms could somehow work more closely together? It could be tremendously catalytic. To be sure, the initiatives of many social entrepreneurs do not necessarily move beyond their niches or transform the mainstream paradigm. The challenge of catalyzing emergence remains something of a mystery and art. However, based on its study of living systems, complexity science suggests that there must be a “requisite variety” before a new order can sufficiently develop and supplant the old. To be able to address the external complexity of the world, the archetypes of the insurgent order must have a corresponding internal complexity of their own; resilience theory and the open source paradigm suggest that the new order will be based on a certain modularity, redundancy and diversity. Finally, as Donella Meadows and her colleagues argue in their 1992 update to Limits to Growth, the old order must not only reach its limits to grow, it must also “run out of the ability to cope” with rising incremental costs, declining marginal returns and soaring (unmanageable) complexity.

This analysis suggests some of strategic points of intervention for Building the New and making social change today. We need to learn more about promising new provisioning and governance models – i.e., new organizational forms. System-change players need focal points around which they can organize themselves, build relationships and learn from each other. New “sense-making” projects and institutions are needed to synthesize and interpret unfolding developments. All of these approaches require new modes of philanthropy to support them. But since Building the New is likely to occur in out-of-the-way, unfamiliar and international locations, some timely questions include: What do some of these efforts look like? What are they trying to accomplish? What new logic and vision are they trying to actualize, and how?

4. Some Key Movements Creating System-Change (An Incomplete List)

While this paper has focused on large conceptual themes, it is important to locate the struggle for a Just Transition within a sprawling universe of concrete initiatives. Specific projects pioneered by grassroots innovators and participation are the engines for system change – complemented, as possible, with supportive policy structures and infrastructure. This grassroots base is arguably the first priority because no political advocacy and policy change will succeed or endure without a diversified foundation of locally engaged practitioners. Moreover, experimentation and collaboration are essential in developing the practical new models for change. So….here are brief descriptions of some salient clusters of system-critical movements (among many others that could be named).

Cooperative Movement: Multistakeholder cooperatives / urban land trusts / cooperative finance / platform cooperativism

Global South Advocacy: Resistance to extractivism / Via Campesina / indigenous peoples / buen vivir / Nature’s rights

Social Inclusion: Racial and gender equity / migration and immigration / wealth & income inequality / Black Lives Matter

Climate Justice: Divestment & reinvestment / renewables & efficiency / North-South equity / finance reform

Post-Capitalist Local, Living Economies: Transition towns / Social and Solidarity Economy / Degrowth / Relocalization

Eco-Responsible Provisioning & Stewardship: Socio-ecological farming, fishing and forestry / renewable energy / decentralized infrastructure

Care Work: Families & eldercare / ecosystem stewardship / community work / arts & culture

Cities as commons: Collaborative cities / Public-commons partnerships

Digital Culture: Creative Commons / Open access publishing / Net neutrality / Intellectual property reform

Commons-based Peer Production: Open Source / Open Design and Manufacturing / Platform Cooperativism

Food Sovereignty: Agro-ecological / permaculture / Slow Food / CSAs / Fresno Common / seed sharing

Alternative Finance and Money: Money system reform / public banks / blockchain ledger / complementary currencies

Transversal Meta-Work: Commons analysis & discourse / post-capitalist economics and culture change / deep research / inter-movement relationship-building

5. Challenges for Philanthropy in Building the New

Building the New poses new challenges for traditional philanthropy because it can be quite difficult to step into the unknown. It’s not necessarily clear how to distinguish between credible and far-fetched plans, or to predict suitable timelines for progress — or even how to define success in a world in which “failure” is often a necessary building block of learning. It can be difficult to make intelligent evaluations of new-paradigm bellwethers, who tend to be idiosyncratic individuals acting in singular circumstances, and among small peer groups and underdeveloped fields. Finally, it can be difficult to assess whether and how a proposed project truly advances system change, or whether it simply modestly improves things within existing structures. There are no definitive answers to any of these concerns, but it is important for grantmakers to ask these questions of themselves and grantees.

If we accept the premise that a new paradigm will be emergent, then the process of fostering the new world struggling to be born will be different than known processes. It will be more of an immersive, participatory process of collaborative discovery and co-creation, rather than something that influential experts will design in advance, implement and impose. Open networks have underscored the point that change occurs through many independent agents operating in a holistic living system. It is not just the Earth’s ecosystems that are interconnected, but our cultural behaviors and political institutions. Thus change-making in a globally integrated world is highly dynamic, evolving and participatory. It is necessarily collaborative, not just with other change-agents, but with a larger web of other grantmakers and institutional allies.

In light of these realities, the EDGE Funders Alliance is structuring its annual Just Giving gathering in 2016 to be less a conference than a facilitated retreat that actively engages all participants. Traditional workshops will be replaced by ongoing “engagement lab” discussions led by EDGE members and many inspiring and thoughtful civil society partners. In other words, the dialogues between grantees and grantmakers will aim to deepen mutual understanding of Just Transition narratives and practice. The goal is to encourage learning from each other and identify timely, strategic opportunities that promote systemic alternatives at the local, national, and international levels. Instead of segregating initiatives by “issue areas” or movements, it is our hope that the interconnected nature of social, economic, environmental and governance challenges will be highlighted. We hope this leads to closer coordination in moving money for resourcing change.

We believe that the struggle to imagine and build a post-neoliberal capitalist system can only emerge through iterative, exploratory processes. It will require many small, decentralized projects that speak to local needs and sensibilities. Top-down policies and infrastructures are often needed to assist this process, but the horizontal connections among frontline innovators, and between them and conventional policy advocacy, must be robust.

Orchestrating a better alignment between these two theaters of action – Starving the Old and Building the New – is likely to unleash new self-feeding energies and collaborations and, one hopes, new catchment areas for change. Conventional politics and advocacy will not rally for paradigm-shifting initiatives unless they are allied with outsider visionaries. Conversely, if these visionaries have only thin ties to conventional political and legal players, their bold new ideas may well wither on the vine, unable to protect themselves in a hostile environment.[6]

Through its Just Giving 2016 conference, periodic retreats and a Co-Learning Collaborative, EDGE Funders Alliance seeks to instigate better ways to stimulate system-change and promote equity and sustainable practice today, within a framework that recognizes the need for deep social and ecological transformation over the long term. These processes are admittedly experimental and some may not succeed. But intelligent forms of mutual collaboration, learning and support are absolutely necessary in building a philanthropy commensurate with the challenges facing the world.

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This essay was developed with generous support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin, Germany.

The post Progressive Philanthropy Needs to Spur System Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.