This book is about the design of connections between places, communities, and nature. Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, I describe the practical ways in which living economies thrive in myriad local contexts. When connected together, I argue, these projects tell a new ‘leave things better’ story of value, and therefore of growth. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. 

The signals of transformation I write about are not concepts, and they are not the fruits of a vivid imagination. They are happening now. But in conversations about the book, I am often asked the same question: Are small local initiatives an adequate response to the global challenges we all face?

The sheer number and variety of initiatives now emerging is my first answer to that question. No single project is the magic acorn that will grow into a mighty new oak tree. But healthy forests are extremely diverse, and we’re seeing a healthy level of diversity in social innovation all over the world.

My second answer concerns scale. Many people – for example in government, or in large foundations – tell me that large-scale solutions are essential if we are to deal seriously with the large-scale challenges we face. But that’s not how healthy nature works, I answer. Every social and ecological context is unique, and the solutions we seek will be based on an infinity of local needs. There is no such thing as a correct approach for the whole planet.

My third answer concerns history. Big transformations in history have seldom been the result of a single cause or action; they were a consequence of multiple, interacting, processes and events that unfolded at different tempos. The German word eigenzeit – “proper time” – describes this phenomenon well: The timescales of change for a bacterium, a forest, or an economy, are very different – but they are all interconnected.

History also contains numerous examples of profound transformations that seemed impossible at the time – until they happened: the end of slavery in the United States; women gaining the right to vote England; or the end of apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela’s famous words on the subject – “it always seems impossible until it’s done” – have inspired millions of people – and rightly so.

The assumption that the future is all about cities is another ‘inevitability’ now being reversed.

Designers have taken the lead in rediscovering the qualities and value of rural life Design Harvests, for example, led by Professor Lou Lou Yongqi at Tongji University, leads the way internationally in the creation of of new links – both cultural and economic – between city and rural.

Designing for change, in this context, is less about single, problem-solving actions, and more about the continuous search for value in neglected contexts, and the creation of enabling conditions for system change.

The first and most important enabling condition is a capacity for ecological thinking – the ability to see the patterns of life as a connected whole. Experiencing the world as a web of connection – between humanity, place and nature – is deeply rooted in Chinese culture, but has been forgotten in most of the West.

These connections – or their absence – are best explored at the scale of the bioregions that surround our cities. A bioregional focus re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, food sheds, energy sheds, fiber sheds – not just downtown or in ‘the countryside’.

Thinking ecologically gives new meaning and purpose to the concept of growth. Rather than measure progress against such abstract measures as money, or GDP, growth in a bioregion means observable improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities. Value is created by the stewardship of living systems rather than the extraction of ‘natural resources’. The language used is one of system stewardship rather than ‘productivity’.

A second enabling condition for system change is a focus on the social. In the North, the sharing or Peer-to-Peer economy has been presented as a novelty in recent times – but throughout history, people have collaborated, and shared resources, to raise and educate their families, take care of the land, and support each other in times of difficulty; social systems based on kinship, and ways to share resources, have deep roots in China, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Although these practices have been neglected during the modern age, they have enormous potential today. We need to ask: who has answered a similar question in the past? How might we learn from what worked before?

A third enabling condition for system change design is a shift of focus in design from place making to place connecting. In place of an architecture concerned with discrete buildings, – or the design of stand-alone products – the new priority is relationships. As the biologist Andreas Weber points out, this is how nature works, too: The practice of ecology is the forging of relationships.

A fourth enabling condition for system change is that a new kind of infrastructure – social infrastructure – takes precedence over the concrete kind.

As we change the way we govern our communities and our ecosystems, a variety of different actors and stakeholders need to work together. The exploration of social and cultural assets, for example, can involve a range of skills and capabilities: the geographer’s knowledge of territory; the biologist’s expertise in habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources. This convergence of expertise requires institutional support.

The scale and complexity of learning we have to do now is demanding, but it is not not unprecedented. During the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, numerous regional institutions were invented to ease our transition. Many of these can be repurposed to do so again.

New sorts of enterprise are also needed: food co-ops, community kitchens, neighbourhood dining, edible gardens, and food distribution platforms. In these new kinds of enterprise, paying attention to the process by which groups work together is just as important as deciding what needs to be done, if not more so.

The social infrastructure we need is beginning to appear in the form of new social and business models: Sharing and Peer-to-Peer; Mobility as a Service; Civic Ecology; Food and Fibersheds; Transition Towns; Bioregions; Housing as a Service; The Care Economy. Platform Co-operatives, in particular, promise to be to effective ways to share the provision of services in which value is shared fairly among the people who make them valuable.

Technology has an important support role to play as the supporting infrastructure needed for these new social relationships to flourish. The re-emergence of gift exchange can be made possible by electronic networks. Mobile devices, and the internet of things, make it easier for local groups to share equipment and space, or manage trust in decentralised ways; technology can help us transition from an economy of transactions, to an economy of relationships. Technology can help reinvent cooperative practices in rural contexts: sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging, & swapping – in which money is but one means among many of holding or exchanging value.

A focus on the local and the social does not mean abandonment of collaboration at a national or international scale. We can use technology to link projects, initiatives, and individuals in a global ecosystem. Learning in a bioregion – and between them – can also be enhanced by the ways people in the software world find what they need on a day-to-day basis. They ask each other, in real time. The Tech For Good community, for example, keeps up to date on GitHub.

This book is not about pre-cooked solutions. It’s about building on what has already been done, in our various social and cultural histories, and on what’s being done, right now, in diverse contexts around the world. It’s about positive change that is top-down and bottom up; long-term and short-term. It challenges us all to search for connections that are working, and those that need to be made, or repaired. The health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, are one story – but it has many different versions.

The post How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Preface to the Chinese edition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So much of the lefty US political discourse is focused on a huge scale. Environmentalists want to save the planet. Progressives want to mobilise millions of people on the #OneTrueHashtag. In preparation for this trip, one of my first meetings was with an organisation who are doing great work locally, but they’re freaking out about how they can possibly expand their efforts to encompass a national scale. My advice: don’t waste time growing a nationwide bureaucracy, just stick to what’s working, and publish everything so folks can copy you.

I know Americans are going to keep building huge movements, but for what its worth, I wanted to share my reasoning for focussing on the tiny scale. This is a snapshot of my current thinking — my intention is to come back in a few months and learn how wrong I was, rather than to convince you that I’m right.

An increasing mass of people agree that long term human survival depends on us replacing the status quo with a fundamentally different set of behaviours and structures. I believe the root of that challenge is essentially cultural, and the best place to grow culture is in small groups. And until we’ve got a critical mass of activists that are embedded in a new way of thinking, relating and communicating, any mass movement is going to replicate the errors of the past.

So here goes… 5 reasons to focus on the small groups.

Reason 1: A Place to Learn New Habits

I was raised a boy in a patriarchy. Before I could even speak, I was learning epically stupid lessons about gender. Some of them are pretty harmless, like boys don’t wear nail polish. But most of them were toxic, like men don’t show vulnerability, and it’s not important to listen to women.

I was also raised White, working class, straight, cisgender, Protestant, monogamous, right-handed, English-speaking, neuro-typical, able-bodied, and carnivorous. Each of these different dimensions formed a multi-faceted container that I grew into: they all left an impression. Some of those impressions were pretty harmless, but a lot of them result in profoundly shitty behaviour.

For a long time I went through life expressing my shitty behaviour and having shitty relationships as a result. It was only once I found small, committed groups to work in, that I learned to unpick the patriarchy from my masculinity.

One example: in Loomio, we made an explicit agreement that all the work should be shared fairly, nobody should be forced to do stuff they don’t want to, and everyone’s contributions should be acknowledged. It was only after we made that agreement that I slowly started to notice a whole class of work that I didn’t even know existed: emotional labour. In the same way I was trained to not look for toys in the pink section of the toy store, I was trained to not see the work of caring, supporting, soothing, adapting, preparing, inviting, gathering, and cleaning up after. I only learned about this labour because the feminist men and women in our co-op drew my attention to it, and taught me how to do my fair share. Now we have structures that systematically distribute emotional work around the team.

In a small committed group you can choose the behaviours you want to encourage, and you can choose how much energy you want to spend helping each other learn new habits.

As I’m learning to detoxify my masculinity, I have a hunch that the same method will help me undo some of my other shitty biases too. And I have another hunch: that the same method will work for others.

So if you’re organising with people raised within oppressive structures: do you think you can design protocols of interaction that bring people out of their old toxic habits?

Reason 2: A Place to Practice Tolerance

A lot of lefty folk love to talk about tolerance, but frankly most of us are pretty crap at doing it.

I was at a co-op last week where someone corrected me for saying “illegal immigrant” when I meant “undocumented worker”, but then literally in the next sentence dismissed all Trump supporters as “crazy”.

I agree, “illegal” is a dumb thing to call people, but so is “crazy” — the point is, most of us say dumb stuff all the time! If you’re highly educated and sufficiently careful, you can learn how to purify your vocabulary, but that is no guarantee that you’re not a jerk. We need to learn how to work together, even before we are fully sanctified.

When you work in a small, committed group, you have an opportunity to prove to each other that you’re all fairly decent human beings, all trying your hardest, all willing to get better educated and to be more considerate with your language… and still occasionally say a stupid thing that hurts people.

At Enspiral we’re seeing these little “livelihood pods” emerge, like this one, this one, this one, and this one. Each is a group of 3–5 freelancers who could make a precarious living on their own, but have decided they’d be better off working together. Members of each pod pledge to share some fraction of their income to smooth out the peaks and troughs of the gig economy.

In my experience, when you are forced to collaborate to meet your material needs, you get much better at tolerating difference. You quickly learn to distinguish “let’s agree to disagree” from “if this proposal passes I have to leave the group”. This is a skill I never learned anywhere outside of small, committed groups.

I believe that one of the side effects of individualism (by which I mean, the systematic training that individual effort delivers individual returns, and that all your needs can be met by impersonal transactions) is that we’re all pretty crappy at dealing with difference. If we’re not bound to each other in some way, why should I care if we disagree? There’s no incentive to learn from difference when you can always go out and make another choice.

So if you’re organising with people who are not all exactly the same, maybe it would be useful to ask: how can we increase our capacity for difference?

Reason 3: A Place for Amateur Therapy

I believe we can structure our working relationships to provide healing.

I think we’re all traumatised, just by being born to imperfect parents in an imperfect society. Then many more traumas and setbacks are layered on top of us, depending on how lucky you were in the genetic lottery.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone needs therapy, basically. Some of us are lucky enough to get professional treatment from someone who suits us, but most of us won’t.

I have a pretty shallow understanding of therapy: I think it is some combo of intimate dialogue with a trusted partner, regular recurring reflection, asking, ‘how does that make you feel?’, listening to the answer with unconditional positive regard, looking people in the eyes, nodding, and saying things like ‘mmm… mmm… I hear you.’

Maybe there’s more to it than that, but the point is, it’s a game for two or more players. So some of us pay for a professional therapist, or expect a lover or close friend to do it. Personally, I’d like all my relationships to be therapeutic, including my working relationships.

So one focus of my work with Loomio and Enspiral is to design therapeutic organisational structures. This healing happens in 1-to-1 relationships, and in big transformative events like festivals and retreats, but for sustained, reliable, ongoing treatment, I’m a huge fan of the small group.

I’ve observed that when people find a small group of people to commit too, they can grow enough trust and intimacy to become amateur co-therapists. We practice talking about our feelings in just about every group meeting. We learn from each other’s experiences. We remind each other to be careful with ourselves and with others. In our little groups we practice showing up, messing up, forgiving each other and going on together.

So if you’re organising with traumatised people, maybe it would be interesting to ask: how can you structure the work to be therapeutic?

Reason 4: A Place to Produce Living Proof

It is much easier to demand ethical behaviour from institutions, than it is to demonstrate it in our own organisations.

We’ve spent the last 5 years at Loomio proving that it is possible to manage a small software company without a hierarchy. I know our context is unique: we are an ultra-privileged little tiny bubble in the South Pacific. But by sharing our methods, we are adding credibility to the claim that it is possible to coordinate people without using coercion. I’m proud to say that more than 50,000 people have read our co-op handbook in the past 6 months — that’s maybe not “proof” on its own, but a good contribution to a growing body of work that demonstrates that the commons doesn’t always have to be tragic.

Enspiral is composed of co-ops like Loomio, and other livelihood pods learning how to organise non-hierarchically at a tiny scale. But we also are learning how to connect the small groups together and grow our self-governance practices to accommodate the next order of magnitude. We’re currently about 250 people, with a pretty robust, highly adaptive, increasingly distributed system for sharing ownership throughout the network (read about it here). With the trans-regional experiments currently underway, it’s reasonable to imagine we’ll expand this pool to include thousands of people over the next year or two. And many of us have an appetite for much bigger scale, like the Scuttlebutt crew, who are quite seriously building a social network for the Galactic Council.

So if you’re organising to end oppression, how can you demonstrate equality and respect in the way you work together?

Reason 5: A Place to Prepare for the Worst

Maybe our experiments in decentralised leadership, commons management, and self-governance are too little too late. Maybe we won’t stop the mega-deaths of WWIII or climate catastrophe. I know plenty of clear-thinking people who expect to out-live this current iteration of civilisation. From time to time I ask myself, if we’re approaching Apocalypse, what it is the best use of my time? I keep coming back to the same answer: learn how to work together, and learn how to grow commons. Maybe I’m delusional, but I gotta tell you, it feels pretty good to try. And while we’re on this tour of US activist spaces, I want to test the hypothesis that it feels good for other folks too.

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Photo by Marcos Fernandez Diaz Vj Catmac

The post 5 Reasons to Build a Network of Small Groups, Rather than a Mass Movement of Individuals appeared first on P2P Foundation.

These lessons are exemplified by The Nubian Vault Association (AVN). With a mission is to serve the one hundred million people living in the Sahel region of West Africa who are either homeless, or live precariously in short-life structures, AVN has spent 16-years, on the ground, developing a multi-dimensional approach that works.

“No wood, no iron – we build with the earth”


One hundred million people are living precariously in the Sahel region of West Africa. Deserts are spreading, the bush timber they once used to build homes is no longer available; as a result they are forced to use imported wood and corrugated iron to build houses.

These modern materials have poor insulation properties, are unhealthy and uncomfortable to live with, and cost cash to purchase that many poor families simply don’t have.

The traditional development model is either to give people money or, in social impact design projects, to treat the situation as a production challenge.

The Nubian Vault Association has evolved a quite different approach: the long-term, muti-dimensional cultivation of living local economies based on three kinds of value: a roof, a skill, and a market.

The roof in question is inspired by a building type, the nubian vault, invented by  Egyptians 3,500 years ago. Adapted for today’s conditions, these vaulted earth roofs are built with locally-made adobe bricks whose raw materials are free and locally available.

Because nubian vault structures contain no wood, or iron, they are affordable, ecological, and – with their excellent thermal properties – comfortable.

They are also durable: AVN houses built more than fifteen years ago are still in daily use and can be expected to last 50 years or more. This compares with an average life expectancy of 7 – 10 years for a house with a corrugated iron roof and thin concrete block walls.

Skills are created as the cohort of masons trained by AVN grows. Since 2000, more than 440 masons have been trained, and a growing cohort of apprentices is following in their steps by learning and working on new sites. This transmission of know-how between master and apprentice is at the core of AVN’s approach.

AVN has evolved a nuanced approach to the creation of self-sustaining local markets They begin with a demonstration project – for a small mosque, perhaps – and then recruit a dynamic and confident individual to be their ‘ambassador’.  He or she looks for new customers among up within a 100km radius of the demonstration project. New customers, as they are found, are connected with a mason.

Unlike many architecture-for-good efforts, AVN does not build homes for local people, and has not donated lent them money to do so. On the contrary: new clients usually participate in the construction of their own house and pay the masons directly. AVN’s core objective is to create autonomous local markets that do not depend on external inputs of cash.

AVN supports this process with advice on the recruitment of local apprentices, and helps with the logistics and planning of the first construction sites in new markets.

Its local teams also organise two to three day congresses at the start and end of each construction season to which all NV masons are invited. They swap experiences and tips, make contacts, and network. AVN also provides training workshops on  skills needed to run a small business and become a successful entrepreneur.

Right now, a large proportion of new customers are found by the builders themselves.“It’s like priming a pump”, explains AVN co-founder Thomas Granier; “our work expands on the famous saying: we teach a man to fish; we teach him how to mend the nets; we teach him how to sell the fish”.

In the language of impact and outputs, AVN’s record is impressive: Masons trained through AVN’s Program have built more than 2,000 homes and other structures for their clients. More than 800 villages contain at least one nubian vault, and AVN  offices have been opened  in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali and Senegal.

Looking ahead, progress, for Granier and his team progress,  is not like ramping up production in a factory. Although the number of new buildings completed has been growing at an impressive 25% a year – that rate would mean the completion of just 200,000 buildings by 2040. Probably ten times that number are needed.

A growth rate of 35% would multiply that number by six – to 1,200,000 buildings – which gets a lot closer to the scale of the need. But how?

Thre are no easy precedents to learn from. As Tom de Blasis points out in an interesting new book called Leap Dialogues, only a handful of programmes have been succssful at the million-plus scale: vacinnations for measles and rubella; anti-malarial bed nets; mobile phones; and micro-finance. None of these is comparable to building houses.

AVN therefore needs to develop an operation that works at a system scale. It needs to figure out what factors determine the readiness of an area to become self-sufficient – its ‘market-readiness’?  And to achieve that, it must decide what kind of platform it must become if it is to enable the exponential growth of its approach.

Funding is important, of course. It can take AVN staff several months to research and write a grant application. They must wait more months for a decision to be made. And once they have the go-ahead, it takes more time to ramp up activities.

This heavy back-office work diverts energy from
 AVN’s most important work: curating the exchange of value among multiple actors in diverse and changing contexts.

In sixteen years so far, AVN has fostered working relationships between actors in different domains. local, regional and national public authorities; international donors; civil society actors such as NGOs; and so on. The diversity of agendas and cutures invoved in one programme is mind-boggling.

During this process, system conditions on the ground have continued to change; AVN must adapt continuously in an environment shaped by changing demographics, migration, armed conflict, and climate change.

In traditional development projects, with their clearly defined vendors and suppliers, a legacy support infrastructure exists: laws, business models, financial management systems.

AVN, in the absence of a legacy support system, proceeds on the basis of sensitively  cultivated trust.

A new kind of business model is needed to support this kind of complex long-term system-shaping work.

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