Transition Towns and Participatory Economics
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Transcript of Transition Towns and Participatory Economics
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Reclaiming the Crisis
Transition Towns and Participatory Economics
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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
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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)
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Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?
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What really happened?
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What really happened
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Is ‘peak money’ helpful?
• It links the exhaustion of a finite, natural resource with a socially determined tool
• It suggests a powerlessness in terms of taking control of money systems
• It supports the economist’s flaw of equating abstract with the real: undermines money as a ‘fictitious commodity’
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Money: Unstable and Unsustainable
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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
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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
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Who Owes Whom?
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Where do we act?
• Lobbying? Pointless because of the finance coup
• Local action in communities?
• Move your money• Reframing the
debate?
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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)
• Transition to support Citizens’ Audit?• Resilience hierarchy• Lobbying is pointless because of the finance
coup
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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)