Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

1. Reclaiming the Crisis Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

2. 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

3. 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)

4. Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?

5. What really happened?

6. What really happened

7. 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’

8. Money: Unstable and Unsustainable

9. 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

10. 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

11. Who Owes Whom?

12. Where do we act? • Lobbying? Pointless because of the finance coup • Local action in communities? • Move your money • Reframing the debate?

13. 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

14. 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)