transition towns and participatory economics
DESCRIPTION
Reclaiming the Crisis. Transition Towns and Participatory Economics. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
![Page 1: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Reclaiming the Crisis
Transition Towns and Participatory Economics
![Page 2: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Milton Friedman
![Page 3: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
The Last Great Depression
• Failure of aggregate demand
• Repayment of debts• Failure of lending and
borrowing• Recessionary spiral: ‘the
death spiral’
![Page 4: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
= wealth creation
= taxation
= private sector = public sector
= consumption
The Linear View
= wealth circulation
![Page 5: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
= wealth creation
= taxation
= private sector
= public sector
The Systems View
= third sector
= wealth circulation
= recirculation of taxed wealth
![Page 6: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
Economic crisis causes decline in environmental concern
• In 2011, 37% thought many claims about environmental threats are exaggerated, compared with 24% in 2000 (British Social Attitudes Survey)
• A YouGov poll commissioned by EDF energy indicated that of 4,300 adults questioned during the week after the general election, interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62% (published in The Guardian)
![Page 7: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?
![Page 8: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
What really happened?
![Page 9: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
What really happened
![Page 10: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Money: Unstable and Unsustainable
![Page 11: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
Resilience hierarchy
• Economics enables the extortion of resources from people and planet via a process of abstraction
• We need instead to engage in re-embedding
• Refocusing our attention on the least abstract: money → fossil fuels → land
![Page 12: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
Citizens’ Audit Committee
• The concept of ‘odious debt’• Transparency to facilitate a
public debate• Prioritise citizens and not
the financiers• Irish audit led to ‘zombie
banks’ campaigns• Show Debtocracy film
![Page 13: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
Who Owes Whom?
![Page 14: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
Where do we act?
• Lobbying? Pointless because of the finance coup
• Local action in communities?
• Move your money• Sign the Barclays
petition
![Page 15: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
Positive directions
• We predicted this and are prepared• Local Liquidity: local currencies can be
reframed as a means of injecting new liquidity into floundering local economies (paper from Green House) Bristol Pound
• Revitalising our local economies
![Page 16: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
Three key concepts
• Resilience: ‘the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.’
• Ecological citizenship: intrinsic and ethical motivations towards protecting the environment
• Critique: the importance of political economy
![Page 17: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
• Economics as Re-embedding
• Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
• Falling in love with your native soil
![Page 18: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
What is a bioregion?• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than
political) boundaries’• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-
place’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region
![Page 19: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
An economic bioregion
• A bioregional economy would be embedded within its bioregion and would acknowledge ecological limits.
• Bioregions as natural social units determined by ecology rather than economics
• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic resources such as water, food, products and services.
• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity
![Page 20: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
Locality but not autarky
• Cultural openness and maximisation of exchange that can be achieved in a world of limited energy, within a framework of self-sufficiency in basic resources and the limiting of trade to those goods which are not indigenous due to reasons of climate or local speciality.
![Page 21: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
Accountability as reconnection• Your bioregion is
your ‘backyard’• Each bioregion
would be the area of the global economy for which its inhabitants were responsible
![Page 22: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
Community not markets
• Reclaiming of public space for citizenship and relationship.
• ‘putting the economy in its place’
• Market as agora—public space for debate and sharing of ideas, not just commerce
![Page 23: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
Locality: Walking the Land
![Page 24: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/24.jpg)
Accountability: Stroud Community Agriculture
![Page 25: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/25.jpg)
Community: Stroud Farmers’ Market
![Page 26: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/26.jpg)
The Seeds of a Greener Future?
![Page 27: Transition Towns and Participatory Economics](https://reader035.vdocuments.site/reader035/viewer/2022070423/568167f2550346895ddd6712/html5/thumbnails/27.jpg)
Find out more
www.greeneconomist.org
gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
www.greenhousethinktank.org
Green Economics (Earthscan, 2009)
Environment and Economy(Routledge, 2011)
The Bioregional Economy (Earthscan, 2012)