The dominant economic paradigm has been under constant criticism since forever, it seems. But the crash of ‘08, the subsequent government bailouts and unwise austerity programmes brought critiques into the popular hyper-mediated political imaginary as never before. The assumptions underpinning this paradigm were discredited. Even Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman under whose watch it occurred, admitted that the dominant ideology which governed his and others’ thinking had been wrong.

In testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday, October 23, 2008, committee chairman, Henry Waxman, asked Greenspan about this ideology. Here’s the exchange::

Chairman Waxman. Dr. Greenspan, I am going to interrupt

you. The question I had for you is you had an ideology. You had

a belief that free, competitive--and this is shown--your

statement, ``I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free,

competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize

economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully

worked.’‘

That was your quote. You have the authority to prevent

irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime

mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others.

Now, our whole economy is paying its price. You feel that

your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you

had not made?

Mr. Greenspan. Well, remember, though, whether or not

ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal

with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need

an ideology.

The question is, whether it exists is accurate or not. What

I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw, I don’t know how

significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed

by that fact. But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the

question----

Chairman Waxman. You found a flaw?

Mr. Greenspan. I found a flaw in the model that I perceived

is the critical functioning structure that defines how the

world works, so to speak.

Chairman Waxman. In other words, you found that your view

of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

Mr. Greenspan. Precisely. That’s precisely the reason I was

shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with

very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally

well.

The transcripts of this and other Greenspan congressional testimony about the crash are interesting. He was a brilliant economist and his admission of error counts in his favour. The story here about the flaws in economic ideology, and the paradigm within which he and other brilliant orthodox economists have worked, isn’t so black and white, but this admission, I remember at the time, unleashed a wave of amateur economists keen to jump into the fray. Few economists predicted the crash with useful exactitude, nor fully understood its triggers at the time, but many saw that decades of deregulation and poor governance would come to no good. The crash saw a surge in the sales of economics books, and many new books coming from all quarters were being published with new, cleverly branded ‘[fill in the blank] Economics’ being sold as the next paradigm. The experts got it wrong, so why not? And if the admission by the USA’s leading economist that he and his profession got it wrong was the spark, an observation by Milton Friedman at the dawning of neoliberal world order, one of the godfathers of that dominant, but possibly now waning, ideology, was the invitation:

“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
Capitalism and Freedom, 1982

Understanding the dominant political-economic paradigm, along with its critiques and a plurality of alternative perspectives, should be part of a well-rounded democratic education. That the crisis woke many from an incurious consumerist slumber is a good thing. The crash showed some of the problems with conventional economic thinking, but the conclusion to draw isn’t that all conventional economic thinking is suspect, nor that all alternatives are better. That economics as a discipline has been dominated by a narrow view of society and the human being is a fundamental problem, just as the fragmentation of so much of the siloed university-dominated academic system is a problem. Given our complex world and the complexities of the crises we face, the kind of economic thinking we need now would be pluralist and transdisciplinary.

The premise that when a ‘crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around’ is an interesting one, but also only part of the story. The crucial part of this theory of change is ‘availability’, which depends on proximity to powerful elites and inclusion in their networks. Friedman was referring to the opportunity before the proponents of free markets, deregulation, privatisation, etc., vis a vis the Keynesians who had failed to resolve the ‘stagflation’ that had settled upon the US, UK and other Western economies. They were already part of, or had easy access to, ruling elites. And the debate, which centred on the role of government, occurred well within the dominant economic paradigm that continues to assume rational actors, the primacy of markets and growth.

While Friedman’s quip offers hope, perhaps false hope, to those innovating at the margins, mounting campaigns or publishing books or blogs or pummeling local MPs or Representatives with letters, which might inspire someone in government to introduce new policies, it isn’t nearly sufficient to overthrow an entrenched paradigm. Developing new theoretical and practical models, might have a bit more potency. But the question of how paradigms change - how the dominant political-economic paradigm that currently rules might change - is a little bit mysterious and complicated, and so, vexing, as well.

The word, paradigm, has come into common usage thanks to Thomas Kuhn’s book from 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This influential work has been variously described as philosophy of science and sociology of science, and it is both. What’s interesting is that he uses or implies over 20 different definitions, but all circle around the idea that any field of science is conducted by a community of practitioners who conduct their work within a set of assumptions about the world and the nature of their field of study. This includes values, ideologies, tools, models, illustrations and metaphors, prior achievements, and so on. These identify and legitimise the puzzles to be solved in the course of conducting ‘normal science’ and provide the discipline within the community itself, expressed in textbooks, training of new practitioners, and how university departments are organised and led. Anomalies sometimes appear in the phenomena under study which theories and models can’t explain. This may eventually lead to crises within the field and new ways of seeing, possibly leading to fundamental shifts, or revolutions, which change the course of that field’s development. But not always.

Greenspan’s testimony and his mea culpa offers a fine example of a practitioner who realises that the paradigm within which he worked, or more accurately his particular ideology accepted within that paradigm, obscured his ability to understand the phenomena unfolding before him. Whether and how this anomaly leads to a shift in the field of economics, both positivist and normative, is another question. The phenomena under study is human, constantly in flux with an enormous bundle of values, behaviors, technologies, bureaucracies, ideologies, politics and political institutions and more in constant interplay - and including the ‘observer’. Economic actors respond to economic theory and the other way around. Anomalies and counter theories are often absorbed or ignored. University departments are slow to change, still largely excluding those considered to be outside the dominant paradigm. The textbooks and curricula remain mostly unchanged, although since the crash there have been some efforts to introduce change, such as the work of Core-Econ and Rethinking Economics. The anomaly Greenspan recognised, and the resulting real-world crises that resulted, may or may not lead to fundamental changes within the field, or even parts of it.

Margaret Masterman provides a bit more clarity In her paper, ‘The Nature of a Paradigm’ (1970). She identified the many ways Kuhn used the word paradigm and categorised them into ‘metaphysical’, ‘sociological’ and ‘construct’ types. Within the metaphysical paradigm are to be found the deep philosophical beliefs about the world and how it works, such as her example from Kuhn, ‘something which determines a large area of reality.’ Sociological paradigms include the accepted achievements in the field, such as, quoting Kuhn again, ‘a set of political institutions’. In other words, the way the community of practitioners in a field uphold what are the accepted questions and problems to be solved, and its own sense of itself as a field. At the construct level are to be found the textbooks, tools, language, metaphors and analogies of the field, such as, my example, ‘the economy is like a household’.

My intuition is that the predominant assumptions in economics are mostly of the metaphysical kind stemming from deeper beliefs that the world is like a machine and can be understood as such. It follows, one might assume, that humans pursue rational self interest, markets are natural mechanisms, growth and poverty are part of the natural order of things. These are ideas about the world before any investigation takes place, therefore shaping the perceptions of practitioners, that is, how and what they see. This seems difficult and complex to change, perhaps changing over time as predominant ideas about the world and what’s important to pay attention to shift in the culture, at large. The organisation of the field comprising economists, professors, department heads, policy makers, seminal thinkers and their theoretical achievements, their accepted methods and lines of inquiry would fall into the sociological layer. Models, textbooks, vocabulary, metaphors, and so on, comprise the artefact or construct layer. Changes within these last two layers may change more easily and can lead to changes in fundamental, metaphysical assumptions, too. Sometimes.

There are scientific revolutions and there are evolutions, but we’re in a time when change does seem possible. The crises of ‘08 - the crash, austerity, and bank bailouts, offer an opening. The so-called replicability crisis in the social sciences, in general, may provide another. The interlinked crises of climate, ecological destruction, and inequality offer further openings, as well as urgency. New research programmes led by prominent economists at equally prominent universities are producing new work incorporating complexity, neuroscience, and insights from other fields, as well as refreshed takes on older ideas about the government’s role in regulation, shaping markets, and industrial policy. See for example, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Reimagining the Economy, Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, and Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity. Their efforts may have a positive effect, finding their way into the conversations of elite networks aspiring to gain power or influencing colleagues or inspiring new cohorts of practitioners who will eventually become department heads or policy makers. Friedman’s theory of change may or may not be relevant.

Pervasive and propagating

The ideological bubble that popped for Greenspan was that ostensibly free and competitive markets were efficient and self-regulating due to rational, self-interested actors making well informed decisions - at least in the financial sector. Risk would be minimised, as a result. Even though he earlier warned against ‘irrational exuberance’, he backtracked, investing his trust in the rationality of the bankers on Wall Street. In any case, he assumed this is the best way to organise the economy. We might infer, perhaps unfairly but with good reason, that he would have, along with many of his colleagues and supporters, extended this assumption to suggest that this was the best way to organise all aspects of society, as well. This view has been in play for about two centuries, according to Karl Polanyi, who described the ascendence of the ‘market society’ in the 19th century in his book, The Great Transformation (1944). He describes the transformation of the natural world and human beings into commodities - ‘fictitious commodities’, he calls them because, of course, they are not produced for sale. They are ‘enclosed’ and brought into ‘the market’, which is itself ‘disembedded’ from the norms of society and the living world. The whole process was justified at the time by belief that this was simply part of the natural order of things.

The rise of the market society also marked the beginnings of a maturing, systematic political economy as an academic discipline which took as its premise the creation of wealth for the nation through free markets. The primacy of markets is one of the fundamental pillars of the dominant economic paradigm which has now encompassed nearly every aspect of nearly everyone’s life across the globe. It has produced great wealth, concentrating much of it in the hands of a few, as well as lifting hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty. It has also produced the crises threatening the existence of thousands of species, including our own.

The neo-classical/neoliberal paradigm holds a revered place for markets, but it’s a picture built up from core assumptions about the nature of the human being. The picture looks something like this: individuals are the best judge of what is in their best interest, they make purchasing decisions in the market based on their self interest, informed by reason, seeking to maximise utility or benefit for themselves. Their purchases at given prices send signals to producers who compete with each other and who, also acting in their rational self interest, seek to maximise their profits by making more or less of a thing at the least cost. This idealised view of the human being is ‘Homo Economicus’, the origin of which is also the 19th century, especially through the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill. (While the work of behavioural economists like Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler have modified this view, introducing notions of cognitive bias, loss aversion, mental accounting, the underlying assumption of the utility maximising rational actor remains entrenched.) Through this simple dynamic, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market adjusts and develops, creating wealth while allocating resources, but always tending toward equilibrium. This is a simplistic rendering, of course. For pedagogical reasons I sometimes joke that this logic produces the best of all possible worlds. But of course it doesn’t, mainly because the decisions made at every level are not always rational and not always wise - in fact, all too often decisions are unwise and unjust with respect to human or ecological health, autonomy, and life.

If we consult economics textbooks, we find definitions of economics as a field of study, or a kind of science, that fail to capture the full picture. Most textbooks found in university programmes offer narrow and incomplete definitions along the lines of ‘economics is the study of how societies allocate and distribute scarce resources.’ This an impoverished and deceptive description of a domain of research and thought that has had such far reaching, near totalising influence on everyone’s lives with such negative consequences. The paradigm is assumed uncritically. Perhaps a more accurate description of what’s taught in these textbooks is more directly stated as ‘the study of efficiency and inefficiency in transactions concerning consumption and production, labour and management, ownership and capital allocation, government taxation, spending, and central banking occurring within the assumptions of free markets and rational self-interested behavior.’ In any case, Mohsen Javdani and Ha Joon Chang show in their paper, ‘Manufacturing Economics Minds: Ideology, Authority, and Economics Education’ (2025), that students at every level, from undergraduate to PhD, seem to embrace the dominant view uncritically, regardless of their espoused politics. These cohorts go on to find work in the public and private sector, rise through the ranks, make policy, then give way to the next cohort, and so on.

The models with which economics is taught, and through which economics is practiced, are built up from assumptions about an idealised aspect of self-interested human behavior, and have worked well enough for those in positions of power to explain their persistence for many decades, evolved, modified, refined as may be - hence Greenspan’s surprise. And because this academic field, its models, and dominant paradigm have been embraced by governing elites and the political institutions through which they rule, our societies have become their manifested consequences, for good and for ill.

Friedman, again, provides further insight:

“In such an economy, there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud.”

Milton Friedman
Capitalism and Freedom (1982)

The system concentrates wealth in the hands of a few which creates political power used to ensure that ‘the rules of the game’ favour, for the most part, the interests of those who benefit the most. The ruling elites that grow wealthy directly or indirectly from this system have little incentive to change it, nor question the paradigm that perpetuates it.

More to the point, this paradigm is the foundation of business and finance, the educational programmes that train their managers and leaders, and lies at the core of how most firms, institutions, and organisations govern themselves. In the USA, UK, and EU, the undergraduate and graduate programmes with the highest enrolments are in business and finance, graduating many hundreds of thousands each year. If we assume a similar uncritical embrace of this foundation as those in economics programmes, we can see how this set of ideas about business and economy have become pervasive in society at large. While marketing programmes have moved beyond the rational actor assumption to employ the latest insights from the behavioral sciences to develop the knowledge and know-how to persuade and influence, they also rest on assumptions of totalising markets and endless growth as givens.

While there are a handful of business programmes teaching alternative approaches to business, producing a few hundreds of graduates at best, it is a very tiny minority. These few alternative programmes are augmented by networks like B-Corps and others that seek to engage business leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs, and encourage them to adopt pro-social, pro-ecological business models or otherwise modify, adjust, and remediate business models already in play. But even here, the assumption that people are manipulable consumers or interchangeable factors of production is so pervasive in society, in general, it too often shows up in disturbing ways within even the most progressive, for-purpose organisations.

What is the human being?

In all of this, the dignity of the human being is lost, abstracted away from their communities and the rest of the living world. And the rest of the living world is abstracted away as resource serving utility maximising economic actors. And communities are simply abstracted away as a non entity. The insights from complexity and evolutionary science help us to see this political-economic-educational system and the paradigm which underpins it, as a complex adaptive system, in process, always adjusting. How it changes and toward what new state of affairs is dependent on too many factors to name. Maybe in the course of the polycrisis resolving itself, through collapse or just-in-time political awakening, a new and life-affirming paradigm will emerge. Maybe the efforts of the initiatives and research programmes I’ve mentioned above will be decisive, but certainly they are contributing in a positive sense. Teaching new approaches to economic thinking seems especially important, whether inside or outside the academy. In any case, there’s no way to predict where the ripple effects of even modest projects might lead, so all efforts to shift the system and its supporting academic apparatus are necessary.

If we were to begin building up a new picture of what the economy is for, how it is understood, and how it is managed, perhaps the place to begin is with the person, the whole person, rather than an incomplete and inaccurate abstraction. If the entire edifice of the dominant economic paradigm, and by extension, business and finance, rests on unsound metaphysical assumptions about the human being, then this may be a key leverage point for beginning the process of overturning it. This is a potential pathway for change that must be explored.

What is the human being? As big a question as any of the so-called ‘hard problems’: what are matter, life, and consciousness? For sure, there are scientific explanations to be found, but all of them are incomplete and epistemologically uncomfortable, ultimately resting on philosophical intuitions or religious belief. Robert Lawrence Kuhn recently created a taxonomy of theories of consciousness which are currently in play, ‘A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications’ (2024). There are hundreds of theories, many of which are incompatible with each other. There is no similar work that I’ve been able to find that does the same thing for theories of the human being, but there are many coming from many different fields. There’s no settled explanation from science or philosophy of what is consciousness or the human being, but we know both exist. Probably. This is not to say that there isn’t useful knowledge to inform such an inquiry, nor useful philosophy or religious belief. Imperfect knowledge is as good as it gets, so a little humility is necessary.

As an educator and practitioner, and as limited as my scholarship and reason may be, I feel that participating in this inquiry is called for, just as it is calling all those working for fundamental change in the human project. There will be many relevant wisdom traditions and research programmes to bring into the conversation, many of which are beyond my current experience. This is, in part, the beginning of a personal exploration meant to inform my own work and perspective, but this is also an invitation to share ideas and engage in an inquiry that may contribute to the wider systems change movement. From my own experience and cultural context, I would start with what paleoanthropology and related fields have to say.

Let’s remember where we come from. Our species emerged from a long line of hominids. The earliest species in our genus, Homo, were deeply enmeshed in their ecosystems, sourcing food, making tools, processing materials, using fire, modifying landscapes, interacting with plants and animals, finding or making shelter and clothes, caring for their children, families, and communities, and being cared for in return. Language and culture emerged from these conditions hundreds of thousands of years ago. The resulting interactions and relationships are the basic patterns of our form of life. All together it is the basic human package. One could argue that these patterns, from contemporary points of view, are economic, technological, social, cultural, and ecological all at once. While these origins help us to understand something about ourselves, we must also take into account that our kind of organism and our patterns of living evolve. We exist in time. We act in the world. We experience, think, remember, learn, create, feel, reason, intuit, wonder, love, hate, believe, solve problems, adapt and so much more, all of which has led to the kind of world we have now, with all its complexity. An account of the whole person can’t be a theory of the individual alone, but must try to take all of this in.

The long arc of evolutionary history suggests we have flourished as a species, but while we have proliferated, the quality of most of our lives suggests many other less appealing characterisations. Evolutionary success does not necessarily entail health, happiness, or transcendence. Our early Homo ancestors would have experienced suffering alongside sublimity, enduring hardship and enjoying abundance, so let’s not romanticise or diminish our origins. We are them, just as our descendents will be us. If our ancestors wondered about the future, surely they would have hoped that their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, and so on, would endure fewer hardships and less suffering, and made decisions in whatever their current circumstances with this in mind, just as we do, now. In this care for future generations is to be found the drive to do what is good for us, as organisms, humans, and whole persons, whether wisely or foolishly, informed by reason or superstition.

We are ‘nature naturing’

In the Western philosophical tradition, Baruch Spinoza provides a deep intuitive understanding of the wholeness of our form of life. He was motivated by the incongruities of 17th century Netherlands, the political upheaval, the dualism and mechanism of Descartes, the hypocrisies of the religious. He put forward the idea that being is one thing - substance, nature, God - the terms all refer to the same thing. Consciousness and the physical world are two of the infinite attributes of this whole. Human beings are finite modes of substance/nature/God, limited but perfect in their participation in this whole, interrelated and interacting with other human and other-than-human finite modes. We’re embodied and ‘en-minded’; mind and body are two attributes of our being and unified. Reason, emotion and imagination are unified, too, not as one mental phenomenon, nor strictly hierarchical, but always in play together. The apparent multiplicity of the world is simply a variety of finite modes interacting, interrelated and mutually interdependent. Living things are driven to persevere in their being and to fully become what they are. He calls this drive ‘conatus’ and it is intrinsic. Becoming intuitively aware of this drive and one’s participation in the whole, increases one’s power and freedom to act, minimising the effects of passive conditioning and negative emotions toward greater understanding of the process of ‘nature naturing’ within one’s self and within the interdependent nature of the world. His philosophy is worked out in his Ethics, titled so because it points the way to loving kindness toward one’s self and others, and toward a virtuous, good life for all.

We are nature and whatever we do is part of the process of nature - our theories, systems, technologies and institutions, too. When we develop our awareness in this direction, that we’re part of a whole interrelated and entangled complex of causes and effects, we increase our understanding of what is good for us, and our power to act to do what is good for us. We also understand that our actions have effects on the rest of the natural world and the rest of the natural world has effects on us. What if we saw our economic activity in this light, not as separate from nature, as has been the case, nor even ‘embedded’ in nature, such as ecological economics asserts, but rather as the process of ‘nature naturing’? Surely this deep insight would have us consider more carefully the causes and effects, especially those that are bad for us and the underlying conditions upon which we depend. This suggests a potential conception of economics as the study of how we make our livings in the context of all living things making their livings.

Spinoza’s philosophy of wholeness is also a guide for flourishing, not without its shortcomings but intuitively beautiful. He was a product of his time, exhibiting some views we might find questionable today in light of current moral and scientific knowledge. There would be plenty for contemporary students to question, just as there is in every philosophical project, especially those from 17th century Europe. But in his time, it was radically dangerous. He was warned by religious authorities, which had real consequences. His family had fled the Inquisition in Portugal to the more tolerant Amsterdam. But the rabbis there thought his views were dangerous, labeling him a heretic and excommunicating him. He was exiled from Amsterdam. The Ethics, his great work, was published posthumously due to fears of greater repercussions, and circulated through friends and networks of progressive thinkers. Meanwhile, Descartes’ philosophy and the rise of mechanistic, dualistic thinking took hold, became dominant, and heavily influenced the development of the Western scientific view.

While many today point to Descartes as the decisive turn that separated Western civilisation from nature, Spinoza provided the powerful, if suppressed, corrective at nearly the same time. What might a counter factual history look like had his work been embraced in those times? The difficulty of The Ethics - it’s written in a highly deductive, geometric framework with propositions, proofs, axioms, postulates, etc - has also limited its influence beyond the academy. Einstein famously declared himself a Spinozist. But more pertinent for our inquiry is that there are many similarly inspired thinkers who have something to contribute.

Arne Naess, who developed Deep Ecology, was deeply influenced by Spinoza’s ideas on the wholeness of nature, human freedom developed through self inquiry and reflection on this wholeness, and the implication that all living beings participate equally as instances of nature on the same ontological level, so to speak. Gaia Theory, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, expresses the wholeness of life on earth in ways that reflect Spinoza’s insights. Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, Francisco Varela and others whose work, inspired by Spinoza or aligned with his insights, deepen our understanding of the wholeness of nature and the nature of whole persons - relational, entangled, enmeshed, embodied. Their views may be at odds with some of Spinoza’s claims, and each others’, but this tension would fill out our inquiry down the line. And while these thinkers are from the Western tradition, there will be others from other cultures and traditions, including indigenous communities from all parts of the globe, whose work I’m not yet sufficiently familiar to include in this essay. But the foundations of a new conceptualisation of economics as a discipline would include a wide range of sources congruent with scientific and philosophical insights positing the wholeness and relationality of nature and the human being. It would, as a result, be better suited to meet the challenges of this century and beyond.

Spinoza sought to bring wisdom and ethics into the cultural imaginary of his time, founded, he thought, on a correct understanding of the world and the place of the human being in it, especially with regard to how we might live well together. He failed at that time, but many of his insights have persisted. It was one of many efforts throughout history to put the flourishing of life at the centre of everything. And yet, here we are in an unravelling world of our own making, but perhaps on the cusp of making this kind of shift before the end of this century.

Capabilities and fundamental human needs

Over 50 years ago, in Small is Beautiful (1974), economist E.F. Schumacher critiqued the industrial growth system of the time and the economic thinking underpinning it, arguing for the dignity of work, human-scale enterprise, and appropriate technologies that reconfigure economic relationships to value the person and communities. He wasn’t influenced by Spinoza, as far as I know, but inspired by Buddhist thinking. He attempted to show an alternative to the dominant paradigm which put the wellbeing of people and the whole of nature first. Above all, he argued that wisdom and ethics should form a prominent part of economic teaching and practice. He says, ‘Economics, and even more so applied economics, is not an exact science; it is in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a branch of wisdom.’ Of course, proponents of the dominant economic paradigm would reply that this is exactly what the thinkers that comprise their canon have done, grounded in the primacy of markets and self-interested individuals. Not all philosophy is wise, and not all wisdom is oriented toward the flourishing of life. It’s all to be worked out in the messiness of human affairs, relative power relationships, clear and clouded thinking, struggle and debate. Perhaps this represents the sociological paradigmatic layer where practical action guided by wisdom can play an important role. He helped to spark movements for economic change that continue to grow.

The work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum also focus on the whole person, attempting a corrective aimed directly at the economic paradigm status quo, joining this debate media res. They’re not explicitly influenced by Spinozist ideas, but offer ways of thinking about the wholeness of the human being that can inform practical action. Sen calls himself a mainstream economist and Nussbaum calls herself a feminist philosopher. Both are influenced by Aristotle and Marx, among others, however, interestingly, Jorge Buzaglo finds that Spinoza anticipated the fundamental ground of their approach. Their focus is on individual capabilities and it emerges from an economic development context in India. Nussbaum developed this line of thinking into a framework, the Capabilities Approach, which brings justice and equity into the discussion, and attempts to reorient political economy toward understanding, prioritising, and taking action toward creating the conditions for human flourishing.

In her books, Women and Human Development (2000) and Creating Capabilities (2011), she lays out her arguments for what a just society would look like from both a feminist and universalist perspective, asking ‘what are people able to do and to be?’ It suggests that people must have the explicit political freedoms and real-world capabilities to grasp the opportunities that enable full lives with dignity. She takes on a lot in these books and in her writings elsewhere, picking up a range of issues having to do with addressing gender inequality, poverty and disadvantage, the roles of the state and the UN, political philosophy, the problems with GDP as a proxy for wellbeing, criticisms and modifications of her approach, and more that would sidetrack us, here. What I’m drawn to is both the purpose of this approach and that it provides a straightforward framework for understanding human flourishing that can, at least, spark productive conversation toward positive change.

The purpose of this approach is to draw our attention to what the economy and society are for and toward what ends economies and societies should be managed, in terms of market shaping, business activities, and state-produced goods and services. She’s inspired by Aristotle, who, she says:

‘... believed that polit­i­cal planners need to understand what human beings require for a flour­ishing life. He explicitly said that his ethical writings about the flour­ishing human life were intended as guides for his society’s future politicians, so that they could see what it was they were trying to achieve.’

Martha Nussbaum
Creating Capabilities (2011)

Her framework consists of ten central capabilities that should form the basis of policy goals and for measuring how well people in a society are actually doing. What’s attractive is that it’s easily graspable, offering a conception of what’s practically required for a dignified life, what I see as minimum conditions for the flourishing of the whole person in society. These are:

1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.

2. Bodily health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.

3. Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.

4. Senses, imagination, and thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and sci­en­tific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both po­lit­ical and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonben­e­fi­cial pain.

5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and jus­tified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)

6. Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)

7. Affiliation. (A) Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.) (B) Having the social bases of self-­respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of nondiscrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.

8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.

9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

10. Control over one’s environment. (A) Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. (B) Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

Martha Nussbaum
Creating Capabilities (2011)

A just society wouldn’t diminish people, it wouldn’t allow people to be exploited, it wouldn’t exclude people from the social whole or the whole of nature. Rather a just society would ensure that everyone is included, safe in pursuing their life plans, free and capable to be who they can be. Nussbaum’s framework provides a practical way of thinking about the whole person in society which has deep implications for considering economic purpose, measuring progress, and creating policy. Clearly, the nature of our current economic system and its consequences have reduced these capabilities in one way or another for significant numbers of people, including in rich societies. An authentic reordering of economic thinking toward ensuring that everyone has these capabilities would represent a dramatic shift away from the current state of affairs.

Around the same time, Manfred Max-Neef independently developed a similar framework for conceptions of whole persons within whole communities. Both Nussbaum and Max-Neef should be considered together, I think, because they come at the issue of human flourishing from different perspectives and derive slightly different conclusions, however their frameworks are complementary, reinforcing, and together form a rather complete picture.

The late Max-Neef was a development economist who had the epiphany while pursuing his development work in the 1980s that his profession had gotten it all wrong. Economics is about people, not things. He was inspired, in part, by Schumacher’s work. This led him in his own work in Latin America to find out what people actually need to flourish. He and colleagues, Antonio Elizalde, Martin Hopenhayn, and others, worked with everyday people in communities in Latin America who shared insights from their lived experience. They ran workshops, interviewed and surveyed, gaining extensive experience and data. From this they developed a holistic framework for understanding fundamental human needs, following Carlos Mallman, who had earlier sought to categorise human needs. This fundamental human needs framework occupies a central position in their first Spanish language articles in 1986 (link to English version) and subsequent book, Human Scale Development (1991).

Their model consists of nine fundamental needs, which they helpfully also describe as potentialities to be realised. They are Subsistence, Protection, Affection, Understanding, Creation, Freedom, Leisure, Identity, and Participation, which together form an interrelated dynamic complex present in all human life all the time. This isn’t a hierarchy where we work our way up toward transcendence as in Maslow’s pyramid. Rather, these potentialities can be seen as aspects of the whole person in community. For Max-Neef, the meaning of these potentialities and how they might be realised is for the members of the community to discover and work out for themselves. With some humility he also points out that this is just a model and may only approximate reality, but it is useful for understanding some intrinsic human motivations and for understanding the underlying conditions for wellbeing.

People are motivated to fulfill these needs, or realise these potentialities, individually, with others, in community, and in all aspects of their experience in the world. It’s more or less the same case for everyone, everywhere, and for all, or most, of the long history of human existence. If our fundamental needs are more or less the same, what’s different is how we go about satisfying them which are contingent on the whole array of circumstances - culture, economy, political system, landscape and ecosystem, and so on. Needs and satisfiers of those needs are two different things. Satisfiers can be positive - sitting in a mountain forest, for example, or hosting a dinner party with friends, either of which can satisfy many needs at the same time. Negative satisfiers prevent, one way or another, the fulfilment of some or all needs, or are deceptive, something Max-Neef calls a pseudo satisfier. Status goods and brands, for example, may promise identity (Gucci or Manchester United) or understanding (Fox News) or affection (Kit Kat) but ultimately don’t.

The model is deep and nuanced - much more than can be adequately captured in a paragraph, but enough to serve our present inquiry. It was developed as a way to guide development in communities, led by communities, aiming to help them understand the underlying conditions which could enable members of the community to adequately fulfil their needs. When they are fulfilled, there is wellbeing, when they aren’t, there is deprivation which can lead to pathologies, such as alcoholism and domestic violence. It’s practical, directing the attention of a range of actors toward what society and culture can provide, what’s missing or is having negative impacts. Importantly, it provides a way of understanding wholeness for the person and the community.

Together, Nussbaum’s and Max-Neef’s work provide some understanding of what we need and must be fulfilled, and what capabilities people must have secured for both social justice and wellbeing to obtain. Those in Degrowth and similarly aligned post-growth movements emphasise the priority of meeting human needs, so we should aim to understand what that really entails. With Nussbaum and Max-Neef we have practical frameworks, informed by philosophy and on-the-ground research, with which we can begin to sketch what the economy should be for and what society - inclusive of economic, social, political, cultural, ecological systems - should aim to guarantee and produce. In other words, if we’re asking what are the enabling conditions for the flourishing of all life, including human beings, these frameworks contribute something important toward understanding what these conditions might be. Not the end of the conversation, but progressing it.

Toward a new holistic paradigm

According to the IPCC, we must radically change our approach to business, economics, politics, and governance, both in theory and practice, if we’re to avoid greater catastrophes that a superheated earth is on the brink of unleashing. Much of this catastrophic process is already baked in, so to speak, in terms of physics and chemistry, our systems and institutions, and the deeply held beliefs of the people perpetuating the status quo. At the same time, many admirable and capable people are engaged in the necessary work of changing destructive systems and policies now. We also need to be addressing the underlying economic assumptions about the human being and the natural world that have led to our current predicament, and lay the foundations for what comes next.

An economics founded on an understanding that the human being is not an isolated individual but embodied, interrelated and interdependent with others, in community, with other living things and the rest of the natural world, would begin with this wholeness in mind. It would take into account these relationships as fundamental units of analysis. It would seek to understand the nature of value in this context and how it flows through the tangle of relationships. It would seek to understand capital allocations and redefine returns in a way that prioritises the health of these relationships. What’s needed is an approach to theorising and practice that is explicitly holistic.

The above is just a modest sketch of what the foundations for a new economics based on the whole person within the wholeness of nature might look like. It’s a start that will benefit from additional thinking and research moving in this direction from many fields, including economic sociology, economic and human geography, ecology and ecological economics, complexity economics, the humanities, and more. Ultimately, our educational systems, public or private, inside or outside the academy, must embrace this kind of thinking and research, and play a more effective role in preparing our young people and future leaders for the world they’re inheriting. This is an invitation to those in academia and education everywhere to reimagine and reorient curricula, teaching and research in this direction. Imagine how different things would be if economics and business students today were taught this sort of approach.

If we begin with even a not yet robust theory of the whole person, but one that takes into account our needs and capabilities, our relationships and interdependencies, human and non-human communities, and the rest of the natural world, we’ll be in a good position to accomplish the renovation work that the IPCC calls for. Among those taking practical action to prefigure new pro-social, pro-ecological models, some, perhaps many, in the wider systems change and post-growth movements have already adopted this kind of thinking. At the very least, this is a call for all those working for change, whether in for-purpose enterprises or campaigns, to model the behaviours that treat the other with the dignity that every person deserves. This is necessary, but insufficient. Putting the whole person in the heart of the narratives we spin, just as it should be at the heart of a holistic, life-affirming approach to economic change, would be another necessary step in a positive direction. The cumulative effects of academics, educators, activists, entrepreneurs and managers, influencers and campaigners may ultimately create the conditions for the overthrow of Homo Economicus and clear the way for a new paradigm. This essay adds another small push in that direction.

----------------------

Further reading:

Reading Spinoza in the Anthropocene (2024), Genevieve Lloyd

Some of us see ourselves as working for deep civilisational transformation, sensing the potential for epoch-defining structures to give way to new thinking, relationships, and patterns of living, which may in turn spin the early filaments of a wiser new era. It isn’t so cut and dry, of course. For the utopians among us, let’s hold lightly our expectations and temper our zeal. Utopian projects have a way of becoming counter productive and ending very badly. But let’s also hope - there are plenty of good reasons for it.

Pragmatists will find something to like in these perspectives. I do. Each offers a way of thinking about ‘making change’ and giving it meaning. Practical questions ensue. How to be a useful and productive participant in this process? What kinds of knowledge are called for that can bring diversities of people together across divides for the good of everyone? What kinds of know-how are needed to be and act ‘in the world’ to bring possibilities into being? How to acquire and distribute widely knowledge of what to do and how to do it?

When discussing these topics, the conversation nearly always identifies education as both fundamental problem and fundamental solution. This is just shorthand - the conversations are much more nuanced. I don’t want to imply there is nothing of value in our current educational systems, from early years to post-graduate. Educators are committed and often heroic. Secondary and university educations can be transformative for young adults. University research and innovation can save lives and enlarge our knowledge of the world. But there are valid critiques.

The umbrella critique is that our systems of education - painting with very broad brush strokes, here - are not adequately forming citizens capable of coping with the challenges of democratic governance nor the rapidly developing crises shaping our future. Perhaps it isn’t possible in the short run. But the need to evolve, reform, and reimagine how we educate in our societies seems obvious.

These are probably unfair generalisations, but from primary to secondary the state-funded educational systems in many countries teach conformity, obedience, and other qualities desired by employers. They teach the approved histories that reinforce the patriotic and nationalist agendas of those in power and elite establishments. Educators at these levels are motivated, caring, but disillusionment and burn out are too common. They’re overworked and underpaid. Some manage to break through the many limitations, including lack of funding and rigid state-mandated curricula. Teachers are wonderful and are not the problem. These systems and their governance is the problem.

Higher education is problematic, too. I loved my time as a university student studying philosophy and economics, but in those days it was clear that some schools and departments were in thrall to ideological assumptions about the primacy of the market, the role of business, and the science of economics. These assumptions developed and intensified over the past many decades.

People now talk of the ‘neoliberal university’, both in terms of serving the dominant paradigm and in adopting its market logic. The business models of many, perhaps most, in countries like the US and UK, are just that, business models, where students are consumers purchasing degree and certificate products. Educators are customer service providers, many of whom are overworked, underpaid, and precarious. Top administrators enjoy employment contracts that make them wealthy. Much of this is fueled by massive debt racked up by student-customers, amounting to trillions of dollars worldwide. Marketers promise fulfilling careers and abundant opportunity. But the jobs and careers are scarce for graduates who discover they’ve invested in a false promise that a university degree is the ticket to enjoy the benefits of the global wealth-creating meritocratic economic system.

One could further critique many universities, especially elite institutions, for producing the kinds of political, economic, and business leaders who are either ill-equipped to address the unfolding interconnected crises of climate heating, biosphere destruction, corporate monopoly, political oligarchy, techno-social tyranny, poverty and inequality, or are making them worse. This is despite the fact that some academics within many of the same universities are producing the necessary critiques of the system, the science that deepens understanding of these crises, and the thinkers and leaders of movements for change across many domains.

It’s through our educational systems that our societies reproduce themselves. But reproduction isn’t what’s called for in these times. Our societies must also change dramatically if we’re to adequately deal with these challenges before it’s too late. While our default educational systems must change to meet the moment, laying the responsibility for driving societal level transformation on our conventional educational systems and institutions isn’t realistic. These systems and institutions evolve slowly.

___

In 1944, Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation which explained the shift from feudal society to the market society, a process that took generations. It took as long to gain the necessary perspective to understand the processes that were at work. In fact, his book was about that great transformation and the smaller ruptures and shifts that occurred along the way, including the rise and fall of the liberal period of economic organisation which had lasted over a century. That period ended with the first world war, which created the conditions for the second, and ultimately the rise of the welfare state. It’s a brilliant piece of scholarship which created the field of economic sociology and remains relevant today in understanding the populism and fascism of our time. If universities played a role in the ‘great transformation’, it was in consolidating the thinking, codifying the knowledge, and reinforcing the logics of that liberal capitalist paradigm.

The cheerleaders of AI suggest that this technology will bring the next great transformation or even the next renaissance, changes of epoch-defining civilisational scale. Maybe they will be proved right. But others have been talking about historic shifts in a different direction toward an ecological and ethical ‘great turning’ or ‘great transition’. Maybe somehow both will come to pass in the messy processes of human historical development in which we find ourselves.

I’m interested in directing my attention and work toward creating the conditions for a society based on the flourishing of all life, whatever words one wishes to use for that potential great metamorphosis. This might be contingent on shifting political-economic systems toward models and approaches that might be summed up as ‘post growth’, which includes among other things meeting everyone’s needs, regenerating ecosystems, expanding democratic political participation, and reweaving the social fabric. Because our current ‘market society’ centralises wealth and power, the peripheries and hinterlands have been impoverished and excluded. This in turn creates the conditions for anger and resentment, fueling the rise of fascist and authoritarian demagogues.

I’m very much generalising here, but these are the phenomena that emerged during the interwar years, according to Polanyi, setting the stage for the Nazis and aligned movements in Europe and the US. Creating the conditions for ecological prosperity in the peripheries and hinterlands - in other words, wealth, inclusion, opportunity, regeneration flowing through to the smallest capillaries of the system - is the key toward addressing the valid grievances of those animating the fascist and authoritarian political movements of these times. In short, this entails the political-economic transformation of places and why many currents in the post-growth movement prioritise decentralisation, relocalisation, conviviality, the commons, bioregionalism, resilience, etc.

While there are initiatives working toward these goals, they are as yet few in number and unevenly distributed. They will all claim that more resources are necessary, and rightly so. But what useful knowledge and know-how could help them get it and overcome the challenges they face? How might more people in more places be attracted and become involved in this movement? Maybe there are more effective strategies for accomplishing these goals, further innovation, undiscovered leverage points? While our conventional educational systems may or may not play a positive role toward these ends, I cannot shake the intuition that the educational process, one based on genuine curiosity and depth, not mere ideological indoctrination, is fundamental for diffusing the knowledge and know-how needed to accelerate this shift and grow the movement.

There are some initiatives, schools, and university programmes contributing to this process. I was part of Schumacher College for many years which saw itself as a model for what higher education focused on social and personal transformation could be. It has spawned a few alumni-led initiatives like Escola Schumacher do Brasil, Siendo Naturaleza in Peru, and The Sprouts, just outside of Brussels. I’m acquainted with KaosPilot in Denmark, which has been running for 35 years, and the Degrowth programmes at Autonomous University of Barcelona. Black Mountains College in Wales and the London Interdisciplinary School are two new degree-granting schools focused on forming adults of character and capability that might meet the challenges of the world to come.

I recently spent time with Dr. Enzo Essenza, in Prague, who has designed an inspiring proposal for the University of the Future, the foundational programme of which is grounded in big history, future studies, the introspective arts, transdisciplinary studies, character formation, and transformative project work in communities. If this vision comes into being, I imagine students would find this course of study and personal development a good match for the world they’ll face.

There are dozens more such examples offering alternatives to the many thousands of conventional colleges and universities and their programmes. They’re niche innovators existing somewhat precariously at the margins but indicate what’s possible when we begin to think of reform of the larger educational system. They all see themselves as contributing to ‘the big shift’. Whether their vocabulary includes ‘post-growth’ or not, their work is aligned in that direction.

How might they be strengthened, become firmly rooted, and find the nutrients to thrive? If they formed a network, could that elevate the visibility of their offers, attract more learners and educators, develop their pedagogical practices, share resources and find more funding? Perhaps it could become an alternative networked academy, an alter-academia, through which courses could be delivered and a mutual self-governing accreditation could be developed. The idea of such a network isn’t new - it’s even been suggested by Schumacher College co-founder, Satish Kumar. The neo-liberal university model seems to be crumbling which creates opportunities for innovation. Could such a network point the way for a new model of higher learning, or at least learning that could accelerate the uptake and implementation of new economic thinking? Is now the time for it to come into being?

___

I’ve been thinking about these questions for years - especially the last two or three. I wondered if the Schumacher economics course I was co-teaching could be delivered as a hybrid or blended course in multiple places, simultaneously or sequentially. It was worth considering since there were few courses on post-growth economics anywhere, and our annual cohort of 15 didn’t add up to a robust theory of change. Something like that would surely amplify our impact, I thought. My friend, Natasha Hulst, and I started thinking about experiments in this direction. She is with the Schumacher Center for New Economics in Massachusetts and was just about to launch Schumacher Action Labs in Amsterdam. But then the College, as we knew it, was closed.

I was part of a small group of faculty and supporters who organised to relaunch the College, adopting the name Schumacher Wild until we could acquire the former assets of the College, including the brand, Schumacher College.1 During 2025, we co-organised over 20 ‘wild’ courses and learning experiences, including with Schumacher Action Labs and many others, in the UK, Estonia, Netherlands, Greece, Japan, and Brazil. The experience of co-organising Schumacher Wild courses in different countries was incredible on many levels and I’m grateful to everyone who made it possible. It was an epic and profound learning journey. My colleagues and I participated in exchanges with people with different lived experiences across culture, class, history, race, gender, generation and participated in the depth and beauty of the human being. People light up in these settings. All of us experienced some kind of wonderful transformation. And it demonstrated that transformative education through and with a network of place-based initiatives is possible.

Imagine such a network. When I do, I think first of a light-touch community of practice of educators who are interested in serving those who might lead and organise the transformation of local and regional economies toward post-growth, resilience-building models. Meeting periodically, they would exchange experience, teaching practices, and resources of various kinds that might inform and develop their own work as educators. Perhaps collaborations develop and they begin to teach on each other’s courses. Such a network might formalise, developing a structure and launching a website through which courses are advertised, becoming a hub that makes it easier for potential learners to find the courses that meet their needs. Participants in the network might begin thinking of themselves as a faculty across the constellation of locations. Over time, course offerings grow in breadth and depth, leading to a mutual accreditation scheme among the initiatives, ensuring quality for on-the-ground practitioners and professionals.

There would be challenges and benefits. Funding for such a network would be needed and this would be a not insurmountable challenge. The economic challenges for small independent, place-based educational initiatives are many, but perhaps a network amplifies student recruitment efforts and attracts funding opportunities. Partnerships with aligned schools and university departments might become easier, with benefits flowing each way. Academics frustrated in their university roles might find relief and inspiration by involving themselves. Cross-cultural exchange brings many benefits, including for place-based practitioners who will discover that the challenges of making economic change in their place fall into similar patterns as those in other places, perhaps solved here or there, offering useful insights that can inform their own work. Working for change is necessarily a normative enterprise with attendant ideological assumptions, so perhaps the biggest challenge is educating for change that aims for a dialectical process that can move beyond ideological predilections and overcome the polarities that currently exist in our societies.

Whether such a network could become an ‘alter-academy’ is an open question. Whether it could accelerate and spread positive change is another, however there is some evidence that it could. Complexity theorists, Ricardo Hausmann and César Hidalgo, identified the crucial role that know-how plays in economic development in their work at Harvard’s Growth Lab. While their focus was on growth and diversification, it applies to economic change, in this case toward economic models congruent with overcoming the default, shareholder value maximising models of the market society. If the goal is to establish models like the commons, or community land trusts, or worker cooperatives, people have to know how to implement these models in whatever context. A network that makes the knowledge and know-how of these kinds of models more widely available and accessible seems a plausible strategy for establishing these approaches in many more places. Downloadable toolkits don’t really do the job. In-person learning experiences are essential, and anyway with online information overload and the rise of AI, more people are seeking person to person connection and dialogue, if only for a few days.

Could this be more than a thought experiment? Might there be funding available? Would this interest the kinds of educators I’ve mentioned, or others? Could it make a difference? Or is all of it just naive? These are among the questions I’m holding.

Students of history know empires, economic paradigms, and cultural eras are impermanent, and that the attending patterns and contingencies have something to teach us. But they’re not fixed, deterministic, or applicable in every case. Interpreting these patterns, seeing into the future, and calling forth the new age are the vocations of some, both the wise and self-serving. There’s an abundance of literature on big trends, techno-economic development, collapse, spiritual and civilisational awakening. They suggest the conditions for large-scale change are all around us. Is the next great transformation, turning, transition, renaissance close at hand? Impossible to know. Through luck or deep foresight, some of us may be carried safely into the future by the grand forces of global history, and some may simply be carried away. The future is open. The forces at work are immense, but perhaps some parts of the future we can choose.

++++

Not comprehensive, but here are links to a few more European learning initiatives of the kind I’ve alluded to, above. Apologies for any obvious omissions. Please feel free to share more in the comments.

• Apricot Centre

• Bioregional Learning Centre

• Campus de la Transition

• Cargonomia

• Fundación Arboretum

• Future Food Institute

• Hola* Academy

• P2P Labs Research Collective

• Regenerative Economy Lab

• School of Systems and Complexity

• Shift School

• The Southern Lights

• Ulex Project

Some of the hopeful talk circulating through various ‘systems change’ networks is this: ‘The System’ must change to resolve the crises we face; it’s a complex adaptive system within which new possibilities emerge; all human efforts to shift the system create ripples that could lead to positive cascades of change through societies, eventually shifting ‘The System’ into a better state; self-organisation is a key dynamic.

What sort of dynamics produce self-organisation? What are the enabling conditions? What calls people to take notice of what’s going on, then to mobilise themselves, and then to act? What might lead an ‘activated’ person to move in this direction and not that? And then to stick with it long enough to acquire the wherewithal to participate in a self-organising process? And then the knowhow to participate well, applying one’s own agency toward immediate objectives and the greater goal? And then, how to discern the aptness of this particular process for its intended aims? After all, self-organisation, in a way, has a life of its own, not always producing intended outcomes or evolutionarily successful new forms. And to what degree is any of our participation freely chosen in the first place? If we do freely choose to act, then what should we be paying attention to that will help us discern the wisest investment of our time and resources?

This is one web of inquiry. The questions are big and alive and fruitful, even if clear and certain answers are not possible. Asking them is an enjoyable habit. This is a good place to mention Judy Marshall’s essay “Life as Living Inquiry”, which was an early encounter for students on our Regenerative Economics MA course. A practice of open-minded and open-hearted life-long learning, such as Marshall describes, can deepen self knowledge, develop one’s agency, nurture compassion, and generally enlarge one’s being.

This leads me to think about the practices, including inquiry and the introspective arts, through which agency, responsibility, and the drive to flourish are expressed. Participating in ‘self-organising processes’ seems inherently relational, democratic and self-sovereign, and may reveal pathways toward a better society. If we’re interested in participating well, might it be useful to think of our participation as a practice, or a bundle of practices, that can be intentionally developed? Inquiry and self inquiry, along with any number of introspective arts would be foundational.

I think of movements as big ideas about how society should be, motivating people to form relationships and networks through which dialogue and exchange occur, and through which practical action is strategized and implemented. Movements invite self-organisation. Roughly speaking, I feel part of a worldwide movement for post-growth and ecological economics, just energy transition and just society, decentralised power and deeper democracy, but my participation is through relationships and networks. This gives shape to my own inquiry.

Just to acknowledge, there are other worldviews, movements and established paradigms spawning self-organising activity. For example, the ‘Global Capitalist Paradigm’ engenders self-organising processes of all kinds oriented toward different pathways. Its proponents are exercising their agency, responsibility, and drive to flourish, as they understand them, investing their time and resources toward their vision of the best society, which, for some, entails AI-enhanced self-interest, ‘no society’, as an old prime minister once proposed, and rigid hierarchy. This dominant paradigm is perpetuated by entrenched power hierarchies that already shape much of our reality and what’s possible, at least in the short run. My point is that the future is open, not determined, and that in our global societies there are countless self-organising processes unfolding. There is a lot at stake.

For movements countering and proposing alternatives to this dominant paradigm, trust seems a necessary condition for self-organisation to emerge, develop, and persist. Where trust is thin, potential relationships are thin, diminishing the potential for collective action of whatever kind. Trust can be about the honesty and integrity of individuals. But self-organisation also relies on trust that the number of participants will grow, they’ll be somewhat aligned with the collective goal, have the capability to do their part, and then do it. This trust implies expectations of care, reciprocity, and solidarity. To participate well takes practice, which builds capability, knowhow, and knowledge.

I’ve seen and experienced this kind of participation in the Transition network over the last 15 years. It’s a great example of a self-organising process. It includes Transition Network International, Transition Brasil, Transition Japan, and other country and regional hubs, formal and informal networks all the way down to thousands of local initiatives, like Transition Town Totnes. It originated from relationships facilitated by networks, then became a network, spawning more relationships and networks. It exudes self-organisation and attracts many fine humans who have plugged into the process with intelligence, creativity, and a genuine inquiry into the common good and how we might achieve it. Many participate well, and a few have taken their practice to levels of mastery. Many are still doing it 20 years on. It’s become a practice comprising many practices - individual and collective ones, including those that spark further self-organising processes and help potential participants do their part. Some look at their work through a social permaculture lens, or economic relocalisation, or community development. It’s also relational. There is a lot of well-earned trust.

At the heart of Transition is an invitation to participate in figuring out how to live well together in a place, and then, working together to somehow bring it into being. Everyone can be a Transitioner. Co-founder, Rob Hopkins, and others have articulated this more eloquently and completely than I can. There are toolkits and trainings, too. Of course challenges arise - misunderstandings, incompatible understandings, mistrust, conflict, ego, status seeking, and dysfunction - this is part of the human experience. Some people learn and develop their practice(s), and some don’t. After 20 years, the network persists and is still evolving. This is due, at least in part, to so many participants who have developed the capability, knowhow, and knowledge to do what they do together, well.

At times, the conditions as they are, change. The financial crash of ‘08 and its aftermath created a pulse of interest in economics. It sparked interest in self-organising networks already in motion, like Transition Towns in the UK, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies in the US, the P2P Foundation, and solidarity economy. It spawned new self-organising activities like Cooperativa Integral Catalana in 2010, 15M/Indignados in 2011, Schumacher College’s Economics for Transition MA in 2011, Rethinking Economics student-led network in 2012, and Leipzig Degrowth Conference in 2014, a landmark moment for that movement. Coincidentally, Elinor Ostrom won the economics Nobel in 2009. Interest in the commons grew. Kate Raworth published Doughnut Economics in 2017 and launched the Doughnut Economic Action Lab in 2020. The Wellbeing Economy Alliance launched in 2018. The Global Tapestry of Alternatives emerged in 2019. A recent Substack post lists 146 flavours of ‘new economy’ forming the current landscape.

Participation in economic systems change has grown across a broad spectrum of interests and projects, representing, perhaps, the headwaters of a free flowing confluence in the near future. In her book, Raworth explicitly invites us to join in. The full title of her book is Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist, which offers a framework for thinking about the kind of economics we need now, drawing on ecological, feminist, complexity and other economics research strands. This is accompanied by the brilliant doughnut graphic.

In the last chapter, ‘We are all economists now’, she invites the reader to think of all the roles we play “in the economy throughout our lives, whether as citizen, worker, consumer, entrepreneur, saver or commoner.” Throughout the book there’s good advice about being open minded, pluralist, transdisciplinary. She wraps up with this:

“As Donella Meadows made clear, the power of self-organisation – the ability of a system to add, change and evolve its own structure – is a high leverage point for whole system change. And that unleashes a revolutionary thought: it makes economists of us all.”

Kate Raworth
Doughnut Economics (2017)

This is a hopeful invitation for people in society to exercise their agency toward reimagining, reconfiguring, and remaking the economic aspects of our societies. But it’s more than a neutral invitation. If we’re all economists, then we have some responsibility to understand what that entails, and then to do something, and explicitly, to participate in some self-organising process. This goes beyond the necessary but insufficiently low bar of changing our individual consumption habits. Human existence requires life sustaining activities such as working together, acquiring food, shelter, energy, gathering and exchanging resources, and so on, which makes everyone an economic actor, or just simply a human being. We’re also constituents of the economic system, just as we are of ecological, social, and political systems. Embracing this fact might help us realise our relationship with the wholeness of life and some measure of responsibility for its flourishing. Developing some understanding of these systems, the relationships and interrelationship amongst and between them, and their evolutionary dynamics would be useful practice. This might be one distinction between the ‘economist’ we’re invited to realise we are, and the ‘economic actor’, which I would expect most people already know they are.

If everyone is an economist, this invitation is also democratic, asking everyone to do their part for a better system at any and all scales, which would lead to a better society. This has complementarities with many traditions that emphasise autonomy, self-governance, free association, mutual aid, conviviality, commoning. It bears a family resemblance to the self-reliance and do-it-yourself quality of permaculture and Transition, as well.

Everyone is an economist, or everyone can be an economist, or everyone can practice economics - what this might mean for a person is discovered through inquiry, self-reflection, unlearning old assumptions, learning new perspectives, reading a few books and papers, engaging in conversation and dialogue, getting one’s hands dirty and participating. If this leads in the direction of pluralist, holistic, transdisciplinary, then that might entail the practice of trying to understand phenomena from multiple perspectives, building up a tool box with a diversity of useful concepts and techniques, developing the facility to know and feel which model or tool is called for, how to apply it, where, and when.

Asking good, generative questions would be fundamental to this kind of practice. What are other valid interpretations, diagnoses, prescriptions? What might be viable approaches for this particular situation? Is the work we think we’re doing working, or might it be doing something else? What should we do and not do, and what are the opportunity costs? Experiments and tinkering ask their own sorts of questions. Certainties, ideologies, and biases of all kinds can get in the way. Regular reflection on this potential might diminish their effects.

Since 2008: the crash and austerity in Europe and other countries, Brexit and right wing populism, the pandemic, Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, war, oligarchy, AI, planet overheating. The conditions as they were have accelerated into hyper-dynamic, super-kinetic disequilibria. Are the assumptions of last year still valid? What kind of economists are called for in these times?

I’m curious about change - How does it happen? What makes it possible? In what ways can it be ‘made’? Complexity thinkers encourage us to be open to ‘adjacent possibilities’ and pay attention to the crucial role played by human knowhow. How will that evolve as AI, world models, robotics, and their data centres find their way deeper into our societies? What does economic resilience mean now at every geographic scale?

In a teaching session years ago, Kate Raworth told the story of her love of jazz and Dizzy Gillespie, and how her development of Doughnut Economics was like making jazz music by ear. It’s an artform that can transcend symbols on a page into a shared flow of creativity and expression. I love this metaphor and it has me thinking of phenomenology and a brilliant film, Being in the World. It’s about the embodied nature of our conscious experience and how this is expressed through creative practices. Practices soften and deepen awareness, revealing the flow of the world. This leads to mastery. Hubert Dreyfus is among the philosophers on hand to interpret the work of Heidegger and other thinkers in the context of jazz, cooking, flamenco, traditional Japanese carpentry, and other creative practices.

If we’re all economists, does that include the practitioners of jazz, cuisine, flamenco, and carpentry? Or rather, we’re all creatives and creators, as well. Economists benefit from paying attention to what the artists are doing. If you want to know what’s next, what’s coming, pay attention to the artists because they’re sensing new realities and what’s possible before the rest of us, a wise economics professor advised us. I’ve kept that nugget with me for a long time. Art makes the invisible, visible. Perhaps a symbiosis of economic and creative practices is possible? After all, we have been makers and creators for millions of years; food providers, landscape and ecosystem shapers, energy gatherers and material processors, too.

Joseph Beuys sensed this possibility in ways that are still relevant. He was a post-war German artist, responding to his experience and developing insights about nature, the whole person, art, politics, economics, and society through his creative practice. He was an iconoclast who broke all the boundaries between art, economics, politics, and ecology on his way to a view of human creativity as the science of freedom. He expanded the scope of art to include everything and everyone. He advocated for imbuing every aspect of society with creativity and for this to be the focus of education, forming ecological citizens who participate in co-creating a better society. His life was his practice. It was about remaking society and human beings - and himself - to become whole with nature, creativity, and life. That’s my interpretation, anyway.

A few notable works, actions, and operations:

• “Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum” in 1972 - a performance of 100 days, 8 hours each day, where he occupied an office and discussed green politics and direct democracy.

• Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, launched with a manifesto in 1973, co-founded with Heinrich Böll and others, which prototyped a model of democratic creative education oriented toward political, economic, social change.

• Lecture actions in Chicago and London in 1974, (See “Sun Slate” and “Art into Society–Society into Art”), where he performed with chalk and blackboard, drawing detailed diagrams that explained his view of economics, society, and the person.

• “7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration” in 1982, which planted 7000 oak trees along with black basalt plinths in Kassel, which included the plinths piled en masse in a visible part of town, reducing in size with every tree being planted.

• A long-term operation in the 70s and 80s known as Difesa della Natura, comprising collaborations, debates, artifacts, and activities like planting trees in distressed landscapes, growing food, making wine and tools, all of which bearing resemblance to what people working for place-based, local economy, and bioregional change advocate.

The idea that brought these and other works together is ‘social sculpture’, his invitation to everyone to apply their creativity to shape flourishing ways of living together. Wrapped up in this are his ideas about ecological citizenship, which sharpens the invitation - it’s our responsibility as a collective to, ideally, work through direct democratic means to care for and repair the ecosystems of which we’re a part.

This is much too brief a summary of Beuys and his work, of course, but I think ‘Beuys, the operation’, is an attempt to articulate and embody what it might mean to fully inhabit our own lives and personhood. It provides another way of thinking about and embodying one’s economist nature as belonging with one’s own nature. I’m sure that ‘social sculpture’ practitioners today would see in the work of ‘economic change’ practitioners examples of embodied creative natures, as well. Beuys’ life practice and his works express a kind of wholeness that we might recognise in many people working for change in these times. Having lived through the trauma of war and the guilt that permeated post-war Germany, its divisions, and its ecologically and socially damaging economic development, he responded with creativity, responsibility, and commitment to change society.

Such dark times as he experienced might come again. The signs are on every horizon that what’s on the other side could be quite dark. Perhaps we’d rather not know. But we do. This awareness can bring overwhelming feelings of anxiety and responsibility, both of which can be paralysing. It can also bring calmness and clarity about doing what’s right simply because it’s the right thing to do, come what may.

There are innumerable examples we may know and may never know, of people who faced, and are facing right now around the world, inescapable catastrophes by investing themselves in the roles of whole personhood with whatever freedom, responsibility, capabilities and courage one can exercise individually and collectively. Those who live through such events are forever changed.

One such example that comes to mind is Socrates, which might have particular resonance for Europeans. When he was about 40 years old the Peloponnesian War broke out and lasted for over two decades. He served as a foot soldier. At the same time, the great Athenian plague hit which killed over a quarter of the city’s population. Athens lost the war with Sparta, resulting in the oligarchy of the 30 Tyrants. These events propelled him into his practice of inquiry and dialogue into the big questions which have become central to the western philosophical tradition. He lived it fully with integrity to his values and beliefs all the way to his unjust execution.

In her brilliant essay, “A Ship from Delos”, Jan Zwicky suggests that the way in which Socrates faced his personal doom might help us think about our response to the climate catastrophe we all face. One difference, however, is that he was innocent of his supposed crimes and unjustly executed, while many (most?) of us are implicated.

She asks:

“What could constitute virtue in these circumstances? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: what has constituted virtue all along. We should approach the coming cataclysm as we ought to have approached life.”

Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky
Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (2018)

She explores the virtues that Socrates cultivated in his life and that formed his character, beginning with the Greek word for virtue, areté, which means something like achieving excellence in being one’s true self. Sophia, which we normally render as wisdom, meant something like encompassing ‘skill in practical tasks’, ‘to be aware’, ‘to know what’s what and to act accordingly’. She develops and interprets further core Socratic virtues including humility, which goes with sophia, courage, self-control, justice, contemplative practice, compassion, all of which come to us through Plato.

Socrates the man, his character and practices, is the archetype of the philosopher, seeking knowledge and developing character through reflection, investigation, dialogue, and relationship. He paid attention to what was going on around him and was concerned with what mattered most, such as justice, knowledge, virtue, friendship, the soul, the good. His enduring invitation is to explore these questions together in open-ended inquiry and in relationship. If we do these things, we’re practising philosophy.

Plato was his student and wrote the dialogues. The early ones are possibly more faithful to the words of his teacher. In the later ones, he uses the dialogues and the character of Socrates to develop more fully his own views. He came from an aristocratic family and saw power from both the inside and outside, so to speak. He served in the war and lived through civil unrest. One of his family were among the 30 Tyrants. The unjust execution of Socrates, his friend and mentor, whom he loved deeply, had an enormous effect, obviously. While Socrates knew that he knew not, pursuing his dialogues until fatigue set it, Plato reached conclusions.

In The Republic he develops the case for organising society such that it and its leaders embody and exude the sort of character that he might have seen in Socrates. Or at least, I think the trace is evident. Excellence in living up to its own best nature, the wisdom to engage the world without self-delusion, just in every regard, skilled in steering toward the common good - this vision of an ideal society would be very nearly the opposite of what he experienced in his life. While his stratified, somewhat totalitarian-meritocratic design draws robust criticism, what’s fascinating and insightful is the educational programme he proposed to form the best character of those who would become leaders. We get the kind of leaders and society we educate for, he might have thought.

He founded the Academy years before writing The Republic and it became an influential centre for education, research, and dialogue. One might look at the broad range of inquiry pursued by its students and friends as holistic and pluralistic. It was a convivial learning community from which emerged a far-flung network across the Mediterranean world. The programme described in the book is informed by this experience. It places high value on the dialectic and open inquiry, which is the focus of what today we might call post-graduate level studies, before going out into the world to gain practical experience in government.

If we expand this educational programme to include all constituents of society, not just the few, it becomes foundational for a democracy constituted by democrats equipped to participate in the responsibilities of self-governance. I wonder what the influence of The Republic might have been had Plato emphasised this more democratic education and developed the idea of democrat or citizen, rather than education of the few.

Following this inquiry all the way down, so to speak, I end up thinking about this concept. It could be foundational for unifying the practices of agency and character that I’ve been exploring in the context of self-organising processes toward systems change. What would our societies be like if the idea of the democrat, in its fullest sense as practitioner of self-governance, formed the basis for our political cultures? What if the people animating the various movements and self-organising processes for systems change framed their work as an expression of their whole democratic selves?

‘Citizen’ is a contested concept. These days it’s being used in a variety of contexts to advance this or that ideological goal. Its meaning is diminished by our consumerist approach to electoral politics, where sometimes many citizens express their consumer preferences even if they lack important information or knowledge. How the legal systems in many societies officially define it make it existentially consequential to those who might be excluded, deported, and erased. Racists and nationalists use it to incite and excuse violence. It also confers a measure of courage for the relatively few choosing to act for justice, empowered by constitution, statute, or simply existence. Can their actions alone rescue the concept of citizen from the clutches of consumerism, fear, and hate?

I’m woefully ill-equipped to answer many of these questions, but my inquiry continues. There may be some conclusions to draw, one of which is that educators and the organisations through which education is delivered have important roles to play in helping people develop their democratic practices of agency and character - economist, creator, philosopher, democrat. These practices offer pathways to become whole persons, and possibly for our societies to become whole and flourishing, as well. Are our educational systems equipped to meet this historical moment? Can they be evolved, dissolved, reinvented? Is education foundational for building trust in our societies and in each other? Could it be that we’re all educators, as well?

Further research and reading

• Social Sculpture Research Unit

• The Republic by Plato

• Plato of Athens : a life in philosophy (2023) by Robin Waterfield

‘Don’t try too hard. Make little effort’ - let’s set that aside for a moment. I’m interested in bottom-up, citizen-led processes for change, so I try to attune myself to what’s possible in a place, the people, my relationships, others’ relationships. Big, splashy, well-funded projects sometimes do a lot of good, of course. Maybe more than I suppose. But that’s not where I’d begin. Place-based transformation of the kind I think we need in these times - resilient local and regional socio-economic relationships that absorb shocks, increase community income and financial security, and create an abundance of ways in which people can meet their needs - is ultimately dependent upon the people who inhabit and animate the place.

Perhaps the people must be transformed, too. Or rather, we the people have an opportunity to step into our roles as citizens, in the broadest, deepest sense. We exist. Our particular kind of organism is endowed with an inherent right to pursue and develop health and wellbeing for ourselves, our families, and our communities. This includes working with others toward these ends. A community stocked with such folk, exercising their agency based on that foundation, would have the wherewithal to initiate, govern, and sustainably reproduce the sort of holistic transformation of place suggested above. Turning Plato on his head - philosopher citizens instead of philosopher kings. Perhaps equally utopian.

The story of the Local Entrepreneur Forum & Community of Dragons, at least in this telling, illustrates what I’m talking about. First, a little background. We started in 2011. We had failed to get the hoped-for funding for an incubator project. The ‘we’ in this case was a handful of us involved in Transition Town Totnes and our new ‘theme group’, the Totnes Reconomy Project. Failing forward, so to speak, we sketched out an idea for an ‘incubator in one day’ that included speakers, unconference, pitching, and investing. Many conversations ensued. We were off.

We’re about to run our 14th one. So far, 55 pro-social/pro-ecology ventures have pitched and received support from members of the community - hundreds of them - who have made well over a thousand offers of funding, expertise, labour, introductions and access to networks, homemade cakes and heartful hugs. Those who have pitched turn around and invest in others. Some are now co-organisers. This year we have 15 expressions of interest - promising enterprises applying to pitch, including a few that would contribute significantly to our food system. Our process includes talking with everyone, doing a little due diligence, offering some coaching, sometimes more hands-on engagement, so we have probably met with another 60 or 70 local entrepreneurs who have been through part of our process over the years.

A network of diverse relationships has emerged naturally from all of these conversations - those entrepreneurs, myself and a few collaborators with enterprise experience, lots of other interesting people with life experience, expertise, and good will. The way we’ve been organising these events over the last many years is by getting in touch with a few of these folks to get things rolling. Word travels around that ‘it’s that time again’ and prospective pitchers begin emerging. Hal and I have been hosting, so we find a date when we’re both available and book the Seven Stars. Gillian at LeftBridge designs the posters. Scott at Reconnect Magazine writes an article. John, Emma, Matt, Bob, and I meet with prospective pitchers. Guy and Transition Town Totnes add their support. We and a few more people meet to select, coach, rehearse, do the event - we make it fun. Sounds like a lot, but everyone chips in some of their time. Often we’re bumping into more friends who can contribute a little something, too. Sound equipment, video and photo documentation, delicious finger food. It has become a beautiful expression of conviviality, powered by relationships with minimal effort. There’s no burnout and very little budget. Overall, we spend only a few hundred pounds.

This convivial state of affairs didn’t just happen, but developed over the years just as the organising of this event has become a shared practice. There are ample opportunities to cross paths, have a chat, and find common cause with people in this small town - that’s an advantage. But years of Transition organising, the impact of Schumacher College, and over the past 10+ years, the increasing number of pro-social, pro-ecology initiatives clustering here, have resulted in a ‘cultural vibe’ that motivates even more people to participate in the life of this place. And among all of these people are those who see this activity not as ‘volunteering’ but as their activism, helping to bring into being a resilient, inclusive, ecological, flourishing state of affairs. As a practice, it is evident in the patterns that take shape in the timing, content, flow of the event planning and its implementation. It also shows up in the conversations and chance encounters that happen throughout the year. It’s still a fun, climactic event but it’s also part of an annual rhythm and a year-long dynamic.

We can think of this conviviality extending to many of the collaborations between enterprises that have emerged easily. A famous example is from our very first event. That year, Rob pitched the New Lion Brewery and promised to host the afterparty the next year. GroCycle also pitched a new urban mushroom farm. In the meantime, Rob and the brewery team wondered if GroCycle could grow oyster mushrooms on the brewery waste. They could and they did. Then the brewers wondered if they could make a delicious stout with those oyster mushrooms. They could and they did, making the locally famous Oyster Stout - ‘the circular economy in glass’, as Rob quipped. In the following years, Rob would ‘invest’ a specialty brew with whatever people were pitching - oats from Grown in Totnes or nettles foraged by Wild and Curious. This kind of thing happens almost all the time.

Sometimes these collaborations are examples of failing forward. Not every enterprise makes it. This is part of the innovation process - iteration, productive failure, reorganising the nutrients, so to speak. Holly started Grown in Totnes (GiT) to fill a niche in the local food system while adding to its resilience. She pitched in 2015. Alongside the support they received from the community, they also secured a sizable grant from a large foundation. They invested thousands in milling and processing equipment and worked with local growers, including the late and legendary Marina O’Connell, co-founder of the Apricot Centre. They tried to grow oats for human consumption (unheard of in Devon), then heritage wheat, which GiT would then process, mill, and sell. After a few hard lessons, they eventually ran out of runway and faced imminent closure. They called on their community and over 60 people showed up to help figure out what they could do - at the very least, how they might leave behind fertile soil for whatever could take root in its place. As it happened, Apricot joined with another farmer and a well-loved local baker - all part of the GiT value chain - to found Dartington Mill CIC, acquire their assets, and implement a field to loaf business model. Dartington Mill pitched in 2019 and they’re still going.

Over the years, our little collectivity has grown into something nurturing and worthwhile. It enriches my life and the lives of my friends. This collective enterprise has also become part of the cultural fabric of this town, I think. We haven’t tried too hard and we’ve made the least effort possible. I think this makes it open and easy to sustain. Is this ‘minimum viable systems change’?

This is how I like to work. I’ve tried to apply the insights of phenomenology since my university days, as well as my understanding of complexity and networks - imperfectly, for sure, but they have helped shape me as a person and how I go about my work, whatever it is. For the last many years, I’ve come to understand this emerging phenomena - our collective, the event, the ongoing practice - through these lenses. On the one hand it’s an approach or an attitude, informed by a little philosophical inquiry. On the other, it’s a practice that enables people to exercise their agency for the common good.

As an approach to building relationships, reading the field, anticipating adjacent possibilities, and then reflecting, questioning, making sense, engaging one’s own perceptual capabilities, phenomenological inquiry is useful. It’s personally fulfilling, too - at least, for me. I would propose that any sort of community organising would benefit from philosophical inquiry from whatever wisdom tradition.

A few more words about phenomenology. It’s been part of Schumacher College for decades. It has inspired my friend and colleague, Dr. Emma Kidd, who in turn has inspired me and deepened my understanding. She’s a student of Henri Bortoft. We also studied the work of Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff. Their essay, ‘Delicate Activism - a phenomenological approach to change’ (2014) was assigned reading in our economics course and Allan was a frequent guest, usually at the beginning of our course. Jonathan Dawson, former head of the economics programme, gets credit for that. The essay is deep, insightful, and eloquent - and so are they. In the year-long conversation that was our course, their perspectives were frequently referenced and elaborated. Many dissertations cited it. Rereading it now, I see that it has influenced me in wonderful ways, too.

Here’s a brief passage:

“A delicate activism is truly radical in that it is aware of itself, and understands that its way of seeing is the change it wants to see…

“Activists begin by questioning many of the norms which have come to characterize their social world, yet often end up endorsing one of the most normative current practices in our culture – the tendency towards management. The tendency to set objectives, to strategize, to construct elaborate plans, to focus on the shortest way to quantifiable results, to hold to a center, to insist on bureaucratic forms of accountability.

“...it is something that contradicts the essential activist project of freedom, responsibility and consciousness. When we ignore the demand for reflection, when we become emphatic about the rightness of our cause, and when we impose too mechanistic and too facile a frame onto the flow of human process and endeavor, then our project becomes an instrumental project that diminishes rather than enhances the possibilities of what it means to be human.”

They make a case for ‘delicate activism’ as an alternative to ‘management’, which might spark further inquiry and debate. I like their spirit. And there may be many more ways to understand and practice relational organising than these two. The pluralist’s conceptual toolbox would include many approaches.

Let’s turn from the philosophical attitude to the other part of the story illustrated above - the Local Entrepreneur Forum & Community of Dragons as a practice for enabling people to exercise their agency for the common good. I think this is what it does for most participants - entrepreneurs, investors, collaborators, supporters of all kinds. We like to say it offers a platform for mobilizing financial and social capital, as well as knowhow. It does more than that. Platform as invitation to another way of being, perhaps. But people pick up the invitation and participate.

Through this participation we learn more about our collective concerns and desires. The event is a forum of people gathered to support the kind of economy that addresses these concerns and desires, so participants express them, in person and in front of their fellow citizens. This makes our forum a tiny public square. Many of these concerns don’t fit the default economics-as-usual categories. Rather, these concerns come from a whole, lived experience, and though not necessarily articulated in this way, are ultimately about living well together in a community that aspires to recognise everyone as whole persons. That’s my interpretation, anyway. But in the end, this isn’t a design problem. Rather, it’s something that gets worked out through collective processes like this. It calls for more than economics, narrowly defined. It requires something holistic, transdisciplinary, participatory.

Our collective capacities and talents are also revealed - and what we’re prepared to put on the line. Hospitality, reciprocity, generosity, and care for the common good emerge and grow in this medium. In fact, they renew the fertility of this social soil year after year. I’ve used the word ‘conviviality’ many times already. Surely all of this is aligned with the kind of conviviality that Illich advocated, and that Degrowth thinkers have picked up and integrated with their proposals. People coming together to figure out how to create and reproduce their own just and ecological prosperity. Or at least, exercise their agency toward that end.

This annual practice brings tangible benefits, too, contributing another layer to our local and regional economic resilience, something creative that goes beyond talk of ‘provisioning’ or ‘the foundational economy’. It provides an open pathway for a diversity of local entrepreneurs, enterprises, and the whole community to become part of a civic process oriented toward creating the future together.

I’ve shared our story, told from my perspective. For sure there will be other ways to understand what we’ve been doing together here. It’s working and could work elsewhere, both what we are doing and how we are doing it. It isn’t the only way, of course. This is just one story among maybe millions of others around the world, of people inhabiting their roles as citizens of this earth and their place in it, coming together in common cause for the common good. My friends Mel, Ana, and the UMMA network in Brazil may be a good example. Cooperation Jackson might be another. Cienture Aliment Terre Leigoise, as well. And Cargonomia in Budapest. Perhaps many farmers markets have similar stories, such as Crystal Palace Food Market or EcoFeira in Granja Viana. Wherever these kinds of things are happening, they point toward a reimagined and reanimated civic life from which greater possibilities emerge for the kinds of transformation called for in these times.

If you were to start ‘making change’, where would you begin? Begin where you stand, many people would say. Making economic change in a place - in your place - can really mean something. It’s achievable, it’s tangible, it’s human scale. It’s also part of many initiatives and narratives about economic change that emphasise decentralising economic and political power, spreading ecological prosperity, and creating the conditions for effective democratic citizen participation.

These times seem urgent and profound. The crises we face are real. It’s natural for attention to be directed toward big, inspiring ideas of a better world that might offer the kind of hope and understanding that matches the import of this historical moment. In this we can find relief from our anxieties and meaning for our life projects. Some of the initiatives and narratives thus inspired can take on a kind of religiosity, offering certainty, belonging, and identity, a role the church might have filled a few generations ago. This can be wonderful but problematic for a few reasons, including limiting participation to true believers, even if some of the ideas involved are otherwise worthy.

Clearly, it’s wise to engage with like-minds locally, or through trans-local or place-less networks. Engaging with people who are different and ‘not like us’ can be uncomfortable and difficult, but it’s necessary. If we’re only interested in engaging with people like us in ways that reinforce in-group belonging and identity, especially if disembodied via cloud-based platforms, then what kind of change are we really making?

Acting locally or regionally, or bioregionally, can be practical and focused on tangible outcomes. The practical is itself a kind of narrative. If stripped of unnecessary ideologies, practical work in a place can bring together people with diverse world views and political affiliations. If we are interested in bridging ideological divides, practical projects can create opportunities for authentic dialogue and collaboration. This isn’t a unique observation, but dialogue is the foundation for creating mutual understanding and is at least part of the antidote to the political divisions we face. Adequately addressing some of the valid economic grievances which are driving people to the extremes, demanding quick and simplistic solutions, is another.

Actually, many of the grievances that animate both right and left wing populism are very nearly the same - inequality of wealth and income; diminished status, dignity, and availability of meaningful livelihoods; exclusion from consequential economic and political decisions; immiseration of the places and communities we love; ecological and atmospheric pollution; lack of opportunities for our children to have better lives than we did. There’s plenty of evidence to overturn the political arguments that merit and university degrees would enable everyone to enjoy the benefits of an integrated globalised free-market economic system. The same with market-based ‘solutions’ to the ‘externalities’ produced by unaccountable corporations - it’s hit and miss. All of this should be common ground on which to build a more united popular political-economy from local to national scale.

The need to change at the national scale is apparent. I feel aligned with much of the discourse around eco-socialism, Degrowth, and related efforts to enthuse and empower political party formations to pick up the ideas and policy proposals that might shift the system at the roots. Of course, we must tax the wealthy much more, regulate the excesses of the financial sector and powerful corporations, fully fund health care and education, provide energy efficient and secure housing, transition the energy system, and more. These are old ideas, but relevant. What’s required, perhaps, is new thinking about how these ideas can become politically possible.

There is well-founded celebration of the successes of Ada Callau and EnComú in Barcelona and the recently elected New York mayor, Zorhan Mamdani, often described as a democratic socialist. The Green Party in the UK is now led by Zack Polanski who has picked up some of these ideas, too, and has energised the party. They now have five MPs. There are many other bright spots, promising new faces and political initiatives, but this route to systems change, at least in the UK, USA and perhaps most other wealthy countries, may take a long time.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of practical work that can begin to make a difference in places that can bring people together, relocalise pro-social and pro-ecological economic activity, and ameliorate the concerns that fuel populist extremism. One of the powerful drivers of economic change is entrepreneurship and the innovations they can bring into being - social, organisational, financial, business model, relational, technological, and so on. They can create opportunities for meaningful livelihoods and expand our ideas about what’s possible. If we’re interested in the kinds of change represented by the various streams of, let’s say, the wider post-growth economics movement, then it will take people to put those ideas into practice, conceiving and starting up the enterprises and institutions that bring these ideas of change into tangible existence.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

The role of the entrepreneur is important. The meaning of ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘entrepreneurism’ is shaped, in part, by culture. We should ask, what kind of entrepreneurs are called for in these times? Where do they come from? How might we create the conditions for their emergence? And not only entrepreneurs, but how can new beneficial economic actors of all kinds emerge? Cultures evolve in the context of complexity, one might argue. Culture change isn’t a design challenge that can be solved from an objective perspective, but rather one that demands participation and doing practical things in public. Imagination is important, obviously, it’s part of the human package. There is no crisis of imagination but rather a lack of visible, accessible pathways for achieving practical aims which then might inform the collective imaginary. If there are no pathways, why would anyone imagine that they could, for example, start up a ‘regenerative enterprise’ in a place?

The historical development of Silicon Valley offers some important lessons. (This talk of entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley may be disturbing to some of my fellow travelers, but we must be willing to keep an open mind and take the learning from wherever it might be found.) The roots of Silicon Valley can be traced to the California Gold Rush of 1849. East Coast financiers bankrolled the mining operations and the development of industrial mining technology. The resulting cluster of finance capital, steel making, and engineering expertise were then applied to ship building. At the turn of the last century the US Navy’s ‘Great White Fleet’ was built in the San Francisco Bay Area marking the beginning of the ‘military industrial complex’ there. UC Berkeley and Stanford University were part of this story, too. Government spending increased then ballooned during the world wars, giving a start to first-wave electronics and digital technology companies like Hewlett-Packard. The co-inventer of the transistor moved to the Bay Area in the 1950s to start Shockley Semiconductor, then the key innovators there left to start Fairchild Semiconductor, then several of those characters went on to start other companies and venture firms, transforming the South Bay and Santa Clara Valley into Silicon Valley. The clustering of engineering talent, organisational knowhow, finance and venture capital, research universities, and links to government funding continued. It became the growth engine for the US economy for decades and led to what we might now call the ‘technological crisis’ of cloud-based oligarchy.

During the 80s and 90s, academics and economists studied this history and the resulting phenomena of this cluster and its ecosystem. By now, it had a life of its own, so to speak. They identified key elements, such as cross-pollination of ideas, knowhow, and talent; the ‘watering holes’ and network events where people met; the roles played by the research universities who were also spinning out their own entrepreneurs and companies; the availability of funding from private individuals, venture capitalists, banks, and government agencies; incubators and readily available office and research spaces.

Emerging from these elements was a culture that valued risk taking and productive failure, collaboration alongside competition. Soon, nearly everyone knew the stories and the idea that someone could start up a world-changing technology company in their garage was accepted as common sense. It seemed anything was possible. Nearly everyone knew someone who had started a company, was about to start one, or who had invested in one. The cliché that every taxi driver and food server in Hollywood is an aspiring actor or screenwriter developed here, too. ‘Oh yeah, I’m just bartending to cover rent until we complete our angel round.’ The collective imaginary included the possibility that almost anyone could start something up because the pathways were visible and accessible.

San José and other cities played roles that enabled them to harness this juggernaut for the economic development of their places. This experience inspired industrial and redevelopment strategies in cities and regions around the world, attempting to replicate the ‘Silicon Valley miracle’, with mixed results. But this story spawned a wealth of academic literature on clusters, innovation hubs, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. This literature is useful, drawing out the lessons which might have broad applicability no matter the economic system change one wishes to develop, the business models one desires to see implemented, or relationships one hopes might be reconfigured.

Of course, we must be critical of the Silicon Valley experience and its dark history. There is plenty of academic work and investigative journalism highlighting this darkness, the long history of which includes genocide, ecological destruction, worker exploitation, surveillance, data theft, pollution, military links, oligarchy, and more. But understanding the evolutionary process through which it developed and continuously recreates itself can be abstracted for good purpose.

Applying the lessons

There are other cluster examples that confirm some of these lessons. Mondragon is a well-known case which is somewhat unique, problematic, and inspiring. It demonstrates what democratic cooperatives can achieve in a place under conditions of poverty and political oppression. It might be understood as an intentional, endogenous process which aimed at creating employment through cooperative business structures, leading eventually to a kind of pro-social conglomeration. It developed a cooperative ecosystem from within, so to speak, acknowledging the need for education, finance, entrepreneurship, and health care. It has been difficult to replicate but efforts to do so draw on some of the lessons of Silicon Valley whether they know it or not, creating incubators, networks, drawing in educational institutions and local governments, establishing pathways to finance, etc, but often these are piecemeal and without an explicit ‘entrepreneurial ecosystemic’ approach in evidence. In any case, the process is evolutionary, marked by increasing complexity, growing and diversifying knowhow, and bringing key enabling actors into productive relationship.

What might an abundant entrepreneurial ecosystem look like in a place; one that is oriented toward ecological and pro-social thinking; embraces regenerative, cooperative, convivial, pro-social, and commons models; founded on ethics, fairness, and inclusion; aims to drive the transformation toward creating meaningful, dignified livelihoods while addressing the crises of our times? The broad outlines of this picture might include:

• incubator and accelerator programmes that offer below market rents, easy access to experts, perhaps structured learning programmes and introductions to funders;

• co-working hubs, coffee houses, and ‘watering holes’ where interesting people gather to work and interact;

• ample opportunities to learn start up skills and gain sector specific knowhow through talks, workshops, courses, apprenticeships, internships

• networks and public events that create opportunities to build relationships with a diversity of professionals, policy makers, and potential team members

• angel investor networks and venture (post)capitalist institutions that make ‘friendly and patient’ seed and early-stage investments

• local banks and community development financial institutions (CDFI) that offer lending for growth and working capital lines of credit

• professionals and experts able to assist with business model development, legal and finance issues, marketing, and organisational development

• media coverage that raises the visibility of both successful and unsuccessful ventures, the people who animate them, the opportunities to participate, the various institutions comprising the ecosystem, as well as the wider story of economic change - why it’s important, what kind of change is called for, how it is happening, who are the various actors involved, etc.

• local and regional universities, colleges, and vocational schools that participate and offer access to knowledge, knowhow, expertise, innovation, and facilities, while shifting their procurement toward locally/regionally produced products and services

• local and regional governments that offer tax incentives and subsidies, office and production spaces, while shifting their procurement toward locally/regionally produced products and services

• growing cross pollination and collaboration amongst and between local and regional enterprises

• a local and regional culture that values and encourages participation in the entrepreneurial and economic change processes underway, including the risks, successes, and failures

The above outline isn’t a formula but rather a pattern. How it might come to life in a place depends on the place and what people do. Understanding this pattern can help proponents of local or bioregional economic change think clearly about their theories of change, strategies, development roadmaps, and practical projects. There are some places where aspects of this pattern are emerging, mostly through progressive local government initiatives aiming to drive green, sustainable, and/or circular agendas. Some examples include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Freiburg, Preston, among others. In some places, citizen-led initiatives have contributed to the emergence of this pattern, such as Cienture Aliment-Terre in Liege, Ujima Project in Boston, and The Industrial Commons in Appalachia, Torino Social Impact in Turin. I’ve not uncovered anyplace where this pattern has fully blossomed and the economic system of a place has been completely transformed, yet. But these examples represent a start and should be encouraged, critiqued, improved, adapted wherever it makes sense. And where this kind of thing hasn’t yet begun, perhaps now’s your opportunity.

The case of Totnes

In Totnes, where I live and work, this pattern is emerging as well, imperfect and incomplete as it may be. It’s the home of the first Transition Town initiative in 2006 from which sprung several projects that contributed to this ecological, pro-social entrepreneurial ecosystem. The Totnes Renewable Energy Society emerged from an early TTT open space event and is nationally recognized as a leading innovator in the community renewable energy space. The Totnes Reconomy Project started in 2012 and began running the annual Local Entrepreneur Forum & Community of Dragons. After 14 years, it has coached 55 pitches from over 50 local, pro-social/pro-ecological, entrepreneurs, mostly in food production but also including a range of other activities like clean energy tech, trade-by-sail, and car sharing. And it has facilitated the investments of financial and non-financial support from hundreds of local citizens, creating a relational, reciprocal, and convivial system in the process. Transition Homes CLT has been developing a project to build 39 energy-efficient social housing units, expected to be completed by the end of this year. Food in Community CIC, a food gleaning social enterprise project, is poised to launch a sizable food distribution hub this year, as well, that will contribute to food security in our area. Totnes Grows Flax is a new collaboration with Liflad which aims to regenerate the local fibershed and textile economy.

Transition Town Totnes has been a productive incubator for local economy projects, but the town’s culture was already primed for supporting change having been reinvigorated by the arrival of the Elmhirsts early last century and their experiments at Dartington Hall in education, local economy, and the arts. The School for Social Entrepreneurs operated there for a number of years. Schumacher College started there in 1992 and has been an important contributor of ‘new economy’ knowledge, knowhow, ideas, entrepreneurs, as well as deeper philosophical perspectives on economics, ecology, holistic science, and consciousness.

In recent years, the local governments have been supportive of change, offering material support from time to time. The district council offers the use of office space for another project, the Reconomy Centre, which is a community-run co-working and incubation space, launched in 2013. The county council offers funding for the Apricot Centre, supporting their regenerative agriculture educational programmes. (Apricot Centre also pitched at two of the Local Entrepreneur Forum events.) The town council has contributed, too, but with fewer tangible resources at their disposal they have been enthusiastic and encouraging supporters.

An entrepreneurial, problem-solving culture supporting new economic actors, models, and relationships has evolved alongside the development of these various elements of the ecosystem. Rob Hopkins, one of the co-founders of TTT and the International Transition Network, author and speaker, has helped to elevate this story and situate it within the larger context of aligned activities elsewhere. Local publications like Reconnect Magazine have covered all the local developments, as well. Many events provide platforms for publicly sharing narratives of change, which has helped to make this kind of conversation commonplace. Anyway, it’s a small town of about 9,000 people, so the intersections of lives and conversations are many. Almost everyone knows someone in a pro-social, pro-ecological enterprise and the idea that positive change is possible seems to be widespread.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem in Totnes is oriented toward pro-social and pro-ecological economic change. Progressive enterprises have clustered here and regularly collaborate. Workers of various kinds cross pollinate among them and the other organisations comprising this ecosystem. The community buys their products and services, or otherwise invest themselves in the initiatives animating the evolution of this ecosystem and culture. Difficult and underfunded as this kind of work might be, there is fertile soil in this relatively middle-class place. The soil is less fertile just a few miles away.

We’re trying to bring this kind of thinking and doing to Torbay, a coastal conurbation of 140,000 residents, ranking high on measures of inequality and social deprivation, and a place where extreme right-wing populist politics has a strong foothold. We started Local Spark Torbay in 2019 and have since provided advice and mentoring for dozens of social entrepreneurs, organised a network, helped start up the People’s Parkfield community hub, run a number of hackathons, and have just organised our 5th Local Entrepreneur Forum & Community of Dragons event. We’ve been playing a role in the local council’s Community Wealth Building programme, as well.

Through these activities, we’ve engaged with people with much different lived experiences and world views than one encounters in a place like Totnes. A few years ago, one might have characterised the local culture as doubtful that change for the better is possible, distrustful of local institutions, despairing for the future of the city’s young people. People here don’t want more ideology, just practical solutions to poverty, opportunities for young people, and a better quality of life as measured by steady incomes from ethical enterprises, public safety, affordable food, housing, and energy, clean air and healthy sea. Today, one sees more social enterprises and efforts to affect positive change. One hears more people talking about possibilities and more people are getting involved. Whether or not any of the work here will sufficiently resolve the economic drivers of right wing extremism remains an open question. We are very early in the process here, but along with a few other collaborators, like People’s Parkfield, Torbay Communities and LocalMotion Torbay, we hope to be creating the conditions for more good things to emerge, including development of the local pro-social, pro-ecological entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Pathways to economic change

How does economic change happen? We have many friends in this growing movement for economic change who assert that changing the narratives will change the system. And we have many friends who assert the primacy of tangible, practical deeds. We need both in the process, obviously, but the material conditions for change toward an economic state of affairs that many of us desire - just and inclusive, ecologically wise and regenerative, socially and culturally flourishing, resilient and adaptable - must exist or it probably isn’t going to happen as we might like. Which isn’t to say change isn’t coming - it is, one way or another. Or that there aren’t good things happening - there are, the ripple effects of which may lead to unforeseeable cascades of positive change through the complex-adaptive eco-socio-political-economic system. But we don’t have to leave it to fate. We can take action, informed by an understanding of the systems and patterns that lead to intentional economic change.

Change needs to happen at every scale. If economic and political power is to be decentralised, people outside the core metropolises must experience some form of green and social prosperity which addresses poverty and inequality, creates dignified work opportunities, reverses the immiseration that people feel, and brings local ecosystems back to life. This will require new economic actors, models, and relationships in those places. The roles of pro-social, pro-ecological entrepreneurs, financiers, experts, supporters of all kinds in driving economic change are essential. A systems approach that bring them into productive relationship, along with other key actors and functions, can create pathways for assembling the nutrients to start up and grow new ventures. Local culture can be positively influenced by this practical work, inspired by the public events and stories that ensue. It can evolve to value participation in the process and remake its own shared identity. A well-developed system would create the conditions for reproducing itself, circulating the capital, amplifying and diffusing the knowhow, innovating in the wake of productive failure and outside shocks, creating livelihoods, and so on. For folks working for place-based economic change, under whatever ‘post-growth’ banner, this kind of thinking puts more tools in the conceptual toolbox and provides less-ideological language with which to engage policy makers and other powerful local economic actors.

My hypothesis is that this sort of approach to economic change can help develop the good work already happening - spread it, deepen it. There are a number of places where this is in evidence. Most, perhaps all, enjoy relatively progressive or left of centre political orientations, just as in Totnes. My own agency is limited but I’ve participated in this process in Silicon Valley and in Totnes and experienced its potential. The scale in Totnes is small and local. Relatively speaking, we’re doing very well compared with towns our size, but our ecosystem is ready for more ambition and further development. A few powerful actors with greater agency could significantly add to this process. More sources of startup capital would be a logical next step, for example. If an angel investor network of high-net worth individuals emerged, or if the South West Mutual Bank were to spring back to life, one can imagine our small local economy’s shift could be amplified and accelerated.

I’m more interested in what’s possible in Torbay where the local council and college could play higher impact roles. The stakes are higher, here. The pathways for starting up new enterprises are few. This leads to my second hypothesis that this approach to economic change could begin to resolve the grievances animating the extreme right-wing populism. It will take some time, but if that can happen here, perhaps it can happen in other places, as well. I will keep you posted.

----

Further research and reading

I’m interested in other examples of where place-based economic change is happening and their guiding ideas. I’m especially interested in where it has had an effect on local political leanings, left or right. My research in this area continues. If you have examples to share, please do.

I have found these articles and the book to be very useful.

• Daniel Isenberg - https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/Isenberg%20-%20How%20to%20Start%20an%20Entrepreneurial%20Revolution.pdf

• Erik Stam and Andrew van de Ven - https://www.uu.nl/sites/default/files/rebo_use_wp_2019_1907.pdf

• Philip Roundy, et al. - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3106061

• Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice, Geoff Mulgan - https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/The-Open-Book-of-Social-Innovationg.pdf

What do I think I really do? What am I working toward? Through questions like these I make sense of my life, my agency, my place in this world. They’re entangled with each other and with many more questions arising from our being alive in these times, potentially the twilight of an enduring darkness to come. Perhaps the work to which I am an infinitesimal contributor is about flipping that potentiality to the dawn of a new day.

Life, a human life, is endless beginnings and endings until the end, it seems. Life, in general, emerged billions of years ago, shaping the world, enduring millions of extinctions and speciations, and will until - the death of our star? Or maybe sooner? This was the theme of my reflections and contemplations around solstice time - beginnings and endings, not total extinction. My Schumacher Wild adventures came to a close, and indeed, my time with Schumacher College also came to a natural transition. There are other things. I’m just the age of an elder and feeling the pressure to learn how to be a good one before time’s up. There are lives beyond my life heading off in all directions. With endings come new beginnings and new possibilities. That’s just how it is.

My work is about ‘system change’, I think. But the POTUS is way upstream undertaking rapid systems change at national and intercontinental scale. What am I to make of my contributions to ‘the dawn of a new day’ in the face of that dark power, and the growing cohort of Fascist enablers, the Cloud Lords and their AI Surveillance States, the Global Bankers, the Land Grabbers, the Polluters, and all the rest hellbent to warp the system in their financial/ideological interest. Our situation on this planet seems to be getting worse in almost every important measure.

I’m taking a long moment to reassess and look around for wisdom. I’ve gone back to the beginning, sort of. Wild, whole, and free. This is straight from Gary Snyder, one of my poet philosopher heroes since way back. Growing up in California (thank you Mom and Dad!) was a blessing. I’ve had many ‘peak experiences’ in the mountains, at the coast, in the ocean, in the creeks, literally hugging redwood trees, losing myself in surreal desert lake beds gazing at the cosmos. The depth of feeling connected to all life and the universe also deepened my disappointment in modern society. This was when I was turned on to Gary Snyder’s work by a dear professor. Earth Household wore a hole in my back pocket that year. He gave words to my feelings and courage to my own intuitions. Peak experiences in the wilderness and the feelings of connection to everything should be common, easily available to everyone. Yes! Feelings of connection shape our ethical concerns and motivate our politics, too.

In the essay, “The Etiquette of Freedom”, Snyder explains how wildness, wholeness and freedom are deeply interrelated, expressing somehow the ineffable condition in which we find ourselves and its implications.

“To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence…

“Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of ‘wild systems.’ When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive...

“To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be whole.”

Gary Snyder
The Practice of the Wild (1990)

These beautiful passages sum up the work of our time. But really, this is the work of being human, I think, going all the way back. Our earliest hominin ancestors would have cared for their campsites and settlements, passed down the wisdom accumulated through study, reflection and experience, and ‘ousted tyrants’ through exile or worse.

Taking care of our home entails understanding our interrelationships with the rest of the natural world. In the broadest sense this includes our technologies and bureaucracies, some of which are extremely damaging to life of all kinds including our own. What kind of organisms are we, implicated in a planetary-scale web of life and chemistry, dependent on many life forms and each other? Let’s figure that out and organise societies in ways that are flourishing for ourselves and the whole Assembly everywhere we call home.

The evolutionary journey of our genus, homo, has led to our intelligence and awareness grasping - imperfectly, incompletely - that we live in a vast universe. We’re plausibly connected to everything in it, from the dandelion pushing its head up through the pavement to the oldest most distant quasar. We’re implicated in spacetime, as well as our earthly web of life. In our modern global culture, it’s plausible that billions of us have images in our minds of our planet seen from the moon and from the edge of the solar system. Almost every culture, from now going all the way back, has reflected connectedness and relationship with the natural world. They would have developed explanations for how things are and why things change. Modern global culture has the potential to reflect deep connectedness and relationship with the natural world. Modern global culture has produced an enormous set of evidence-based explanations for the phenomena of the natural world, astounding in its scope, depth, practical application. It’s plausible that people in modern global culture can feel deep connection to life, the universe and everything, and yet, in my experience, it is not so common.

It seems we have much to experience and learn. There’s more to consider. There are determined efforts to stop global heating but average global temperatures continue to rise. The implications are frightening and we’re not very well prepared for what’s coming. We, while we’re still here, our children, their children, and so on, will need to deal with increasing numbers of crises of various scale and duration - political, economic, ecological, technological. What knowledge is needed now and in the coming decades? What knowhow? More importantly, what kind of character is called for that can ‘take on the conditions as they are’ and act as the situation demands? How might we imbue our peers and our young with intelligence, wisdom, and courage to work together to make the changes required, sooner rather than too late?

Our political and economic systems are overabundant with tyrants, grandiose and petty, inside and outside governments and corporations, threatening everything and feeding off the fear they engender. They’re unaccountable, maybe unstoppable, and their various projects seem aimed at dystopia for the many, utopia for the few. They’re people, just like everyone else. Perhaps they have a different relationship to the natural world, a different relationship to life. Maybe this gets to the heart of the dichotomy that must be resolved? That would be too tidy a story. In any case, is it possible to resolve these issues without killing each other? Through dialogue and mass civil disobedience? Somehow, if we must become whole in order ‘to resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild’, it must require investing ourselves in renewing, maybe reinventing, democracy and citizenship. Collectively, do we have the character for that?

Wise people these days are saying that we need the poets now more than ever. I agree, and many others are needed, too. There’s a role for everyone if we’re to fill up our assembly. I’m not a utopian, nor a dystopian, but more interested in the next steps and adjacent possibilities, which the artists and poets may detect before the rest of us. What is our line of work in these times? The present is impermanent and the future is open. Gratitude to Gary Snyder for reminding us of these precious gifts.

I’ll continue sharing reflections because I’d like to draw attention to some of the initiatives happening there and contribute to the bridge-building between the communities of South Devon, where Schumacher College calls home, and the many communities of Japan who are working for regenerative economic change.

In Chiba, for example, our ‘Retreat to the Future’ short course was mostly held at Brown’s Field, a macrobiotic permaculture centre, with days at the Peace and Permaculture Dojo, an amazing permaculture project attracting young people from Tokyo, and Small Earth, a project emerging from the satoyama landscape and focused on regenerating the local village. For that matter, all of these projects are working to attract young people, develop place-based livelihoods, and regenerate depopulating towns and villages. They’re connected with each other, as well as with initiatives in other parts of Japan. Some of the people, like Kai Sawyer and Nao Suzuki, are already connected with Schumacher College.

These connections include Tsuwano, a tiny Takugawa-period town about 100 km west of Hiroshima. Here, a collective of people are working to regenerate this magical place. It’s similar to Totnes in many ways. A river runs through it in a protected valley formed by an ancient volcano. (There’s an ancient volcano near Totnes, too, apparently.) There’s a castle ruin above the town and many other attractive features that belie the steady decline of population and economic activity.

For the last 6 or 7 years, or so, TCM has been the main protagonist, led by architect, Shinobu Nakanishi, and civic leader, Masahiro Tago, and supported by many others, including ethical urbanist and frequent Schumacher College guest, Brendan Barrett. They organise an annual international conference here focused on regeneration and the local food system, and has also featured Schumacher faculty and our friends at Future Food Institute. Importantly, they have included the local high school in this work which has proven to be a stroke of genius. The kids are engaged and many stay involved during and after university. The workshops Shinobu organised for us and the high school students went brilliantly. They were absolutely ready for the Schumacher approach, including a huge helping of phenomenology and regenerative economics.

It’s clear to me the value of intercultural exchange at this level where bottom up, human scale, communal, convivial, life-affirming, commons-oriented change is happening. There have been a number of Japanese study visits to Schumacher and Transition Town Totnes. The best way to learn about place-based change is by doing it and visiting others to experience how are they are doing it. As EF Schumacher famously provoked, ‘an ounce of practice is generally worth about a ton of theory.’

This was also true in the ‘What is Eudaimonia in These Times’ course we co-created in a mountain village on Lefkada, Greece this past summer. It, too, is in a process of regeneration after decades of depopulation. In that course, we really tried to live the inquiry, so to speak, making the island our classroom and the villagers our teachers.

The problems created by globalised economic growth and capitalist expansion fall into discernible patterns - in Greece, in Japan, in the UK. The attempted solutions seem to follow common patterns, too. But the differences in culture and context are incredibly interesting and provide lessons for the curious who are willing to invest the time and attention. I intend to investigate more deeply the possibilities for further collaborations, perhaps connecting our friends in Europe with our friends in Japan through courses that ‘live the inquiry’, or as part of a longer course on ‘place-based transformation’. Let’s see what will emerge…

Believe it or not, that kind of talk is more or less how we normally begin our graduate course in Regenerative Economics and is emblematic of an aspect of our inquiry here at Schumacher College. We describe our course as pluralistic and transdisciplinary. We begin with a deep dive into holistic science, deep observation and phenomenology, then move on to systems, complexity, ecology and deep ecology. We practice interrogating our presuppositions, reflections and observations. A foundational element of our epistemology concerns making sense of our reality as human beings as it plays out in time and space, and in our case, paying special attention to the social, political, economic, cultural, ecological systems near and far, and from multiple perspectives. ‘There are many ways of knowing’, one would hear us say; ‘many paths to many mountaintops’, a favourite metaphor.

We try to put that into practice in our teaching through a ‘head, heart and hands’ approach, a shorthand way of describing the pedagogy that has made courses at Schumacher College transformative experiences for thousands of people over the years. It’s very challenging to pull that off, speaking from my own experience, of course, but so satisfying when it happens! A couple of examples from this academic year:

• in our first module, Troy Vine led our students through the process of making 3-d Platonic shapes with bee’s wax and sticks, and then using that experience again to reveal deep insights about non-Euclidian geometry and Einstein’s general relativity, finally explaining through this collective experience how scientific paradigms can change;

• in our last module, Malé Lujan Escalante, opened a time capsule from the future, full of strange artifacts with which our students constructed archeologies of the future, expressed through collective ritual and storytelling, thus through praxis revealing insights into how new narratives about the future might be discovered.

There have been a multitude of such days here at Schumacher since its founding in the early 1990s, composed of countless teachable and learnable moments, profound, diverse, enduring. With and alongside these interventions this year, our inquiry into ‘the kind of economics we need now’ includes copious lectures and readings, including from over 40 guests – academics, thinkers, practitioners – another distinguishing feature of our programme. Our guests contribute heft and insight, sharing their hard-earned knowledge and wisdom, ensuring our course is relevant, rigorous, and always evolving. They invest incredible value into this course. Like most educators, they’re not paid enough – many forgo the modest fee we offer – but they teach because they believe in the intrinsic virtues of this kind of educational process, foundational for changing the world for the better. They’ve become part of the wider Schumacher community worldwide, which includes alumni embedded throughout the growing movement for systems change. We humbly offer them our abundant gratitude.

I mentioned above that our course is pluralist and transdisciplinary and, as an economics course, our areas of concern are appropriately broad and deep – perhaps broader and deeper than most economics graduate programmes. This is evident in the titles of our modules: Ecology and Economics, Beyond Growth, Regenerative Enterprise, Changing the Frame. We explore the problematics of the current dominant paradigm, and cover even more territory exploring what sorts of new models might provide life-affirming alternatives. More importantly, we investigate how to bring them into being. After all, this is what EF Schumacher was all about – critiquing the existing system for its exploitation and damage to people, planet and life, in general; and developing and putting into practice better, life-affirming systems at all scales, especially human scale.

From Doughnut to Degrowth, Social Ecology to enterprise and commons models, social accounting, governance structures, ethics, leadership, and so on. We seek to understand with clarity the issues and proposals, the models and algorithms, as well as how systems change might emerge in the context of complexity and through our own agency. We consider numerous cases and exemplars while interrogating their theoretical claims, the relevant literature and evidence. And by ‘we’ I mean that we approach our learning journey together as a learning commons, a community – yet another distinguishing aspect of this programme.

Right now, I’m preparing for our next class session, re-reading JK Gibson-Graham’s brilliant, ‘Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory’, which has shown up right on cue, so to speak, apropos of everything and aligned so well with points I’m making here. And so, I’m very tempted to elaborate this point and then go on to tell a very big and detailed story about just how incredible this course is, diving into all the topics we’ve considered in over 100 class sessions this year, the brilliant papers, lectures, discussions, revisiting all the insights, grappling with all the puzzles and contradictions, unlearning our old presumptions about how the world works, acquiring new powers of observation and understanding, forging new confidence and capabilities, and weaving the convivial relationships through which we experience how we can be the change we want to see in the world. I’m tempted because this is how I’d like to remember this course and this College, especially because this is possibly the last time this course will run.

***

In September, we became a very alive teachable moment – a very long moment, in fact, still very much present and resonating. We became a relevant and salient case study for our own course – we’re a regenerative economics course, we can’t ignore what’s happening here because it’s uncomfortable. Because Schumacher College, as a particular exemplar institution in higher education, and its thousands of alumni play important and visible roles in movements for change, to be open and transparent about what’s going on here, now, seems congruent with our own values and teaching. We should be diving deep into our own case to learn the relevant lessons, both for our own sake and for the common good. Afterall, we are now in a time of having to reimagine and reinvent what we do and how we do it, in our society and in our College. This is what I think needs to happen and what follows is my own unofficial account.

For years, the relationship between Schumacher College and Dartington Hall Trust has been problematic. In the late 80s and early 90s, progressive education icon Michael Young and Maurice Ash, son-in-law of the Elmhirsts, were both Dartington trustees who worked with Satish Kumar to locate and develop Schumacher College on the estate. Dartington would, in effect, become its endowment and the Old Postern would be its home. But during the last several years, it has been evident to students that there’s a mismatch of values and culture between the two organisations. In fact, a former Dartington CEO once told a Schumacher student he was tired of hearing about Schumacher College and that it should just go away! Naturally, in almost every academic year before this one, our students have raised the issue and investigated these problematics, sometimes turning their work into group projects, often concluding that independence for Schumacher would play an essential part of a healthy remedy. Addressing the governance issue would be another. Based on publicly available reports, the Dartington Hall Trust board of trustees have seemed to have done their job poorly over the years, providing insufficient oversight and investing too much power in the Chair. There’s been a lack of transparency and a lack of local community of involvement, too. Students easily notice and comment on these things, and more.

But in September, 2023, something new occurred which has put the future of the College in question. That spring, the outgoing Dartington Hall Trust leadership team, including the CEO and Chair of Trustees, left the incoming Chair with a financial crisis. There have been a few Dartington financial crises over the last 20 years, usually resulting in asset sales to cover deficits. This time, a turnaround specialist consultancy was brought in. We were told that while this was a real financial crisis, an expected deal would soon offer a bridge. We were assured that Schumacher’s September-start courses were not in jeopardy. Our accredited MA courses, Regenerative Economics, Ecological Design Thinking, and Poetics of Imagination, were due to start on Monday, September 18th, with two BSc cohorts beginning their academic year the following week. Welcome week began as normal on the 11th and students started arriving, moving into their accommodation, getting acquainted and getting excited for the life-changing experience they had envisioned which was about to start. Many came from very far away. But then on Wednesday the 13th, the Chair sent an email to the Head of the College ordering that all courses were to be postponed indefinitely.

Imagine the scene: Thursday at 1pm, the staff and faculty met to hear the news. At 2pm, the 80 or so students and volunteers bounded into the room for what was supposed to be a pre-scheduled session with course leaders, excited to take the next welcoming step toward their first class meeting. After our Head of College welcomed them, he delivered the incredible news. Shock, then anger. Why? The Chair had given no clear reason. Where is he? The Chair was on the estate but chose not to deliver this news in person nor offer an explanation. Students demanded to meet him. Emails were sent entreating him to come and meet with them face to face – staff and faculty, too, for that matter – and explain this decision. No reply. Immediately, one is presented with questions about leadership and governance, judgement and decision making, ethics and integrity. How is this possible in an organisation that professes progressive values? These kinds of questions were raised but the only person who could have answered was the Chair, who was only a couple of hundred metres away. But he failed to make an appearance or otherwise account for his decision.

What happened next was an astounding burst of positive action. Students lept from their seats and meditation pillows, and began organising their response. They formed groups – attorneys over here reviewing contracts and Office for Students policies – communications experts over there putting together the story, phoning the BBC and ITV – another group organising a protest for the next morning demanding a meeting with the Chair and Trustees – another group organising care and support for each other. It was beautiful, reflecting the character of those who choose to study here. Staff and faculty, also full of character and grit, organised themselves, too, focused first and foremost on our duty of care. ‘This is what anarchy can look like in its best moments,’ we would point out weeks later during our session on Social Ecology.

The next day students protested and the news media showed up. No meeting with Chair or Trustees ensued. In fact, there was no sign of the Chair – nor has there been to this day. The Head of College resigned. Faculty met with their students, most of whom had booked their two week residencies – some coming from very far away had booked for several months. All were stressed and anxious. Staff and faculty made sure the weekend experience for students was nurturing and safe. Perhaps we’ll teach anyway, we’ll adapt, we’ll find a way to make these two weeks, at least, a positive learning experience – we were all committed to making this crisis a productive one.

On Monday, the day courses would have started, faculty met. ‘What the ___ is going on?,’ we asked ourselves. No news. We met with students to begin organising for a democratic, peer-led, anarchist learning journey. If there can be no teaching, let there be abundant learning! We also let our guest lecturers know that, we’re very sorry, but our planned sessions were not happening. The next couple of weeks would be challenging but maybe a little innovative and exhilarating, too, some of us began saying, as if anticipating that we may be swept up in a fascinating learning journey ourselves. But then another swerve, which signalled the beginning of a new phase. At the end of the day, the CEO sent an email ‘unpausing’ the courses, saying that whatever had been the mysterious cause of the postponement had now been resolved. We scrambled to re-organise our class schedules, reconfirm guests and/or improvise. But this was far from a return to normalcy.

This next phase was all about trying to make sense of what was happening while receiving virtually no meaningful communication from the DHT ‘change team’. This included staff and faculty organising to resist the imposition of ‘flexible hours’ contracts and to self-manage our now headless organisation. All this while teaching our courses. Students made their sense of what was happening, too. They pointed out that what was happening with Dartington Hall Trust was a fractal of what was happening in the wider world, that ‘business as usual’ logic was playing itself out with ruthlessness and little care for people, that this unfolding situation was riven with negative examples of leadership, management, governance. Isn’t communication an essential ‘best practice’ of good leadership, management and governance? What could we do but make lists of questions, email them to the ‘change team’ and hope for answers? My colleagues and I began to joke that this absurd situation has been, in some ways, a unique pedagogical blessing. We all had to acknowledge what was happening because it seemed to go right to the core of what the College and its global community stood for.

After a couple of weeks, Satish Kumar signed a letter that has become known as our declaration of independence, asking the Chair and remaining trustees (by now, some had resigned) for an amicable parting of the ways, a divorce between adults who have grown apart, acknowledging the many good times over the years, but who now see the diverging paths ahead.

It could have been an amazing story. After this letter was first ignored, then acknowledged, a face to face meeting with the CEO ensued on October 10th. A promise was made that a fast path to independence was agreed in principle and within a week it would be put down in words in a ‘memorandum of understanding’. The MOU never came. Instead came news that our accreditation partner, Plymouth University, had found Dartington Hall Trust in breach of contract, or close enough. What roles did governance, financial position, and the postponement play? Accreditation was pulled – ‘suspended’, we learned later, meaning that this would likely be the last year our MA courses would run. Our other accredited courses would not run, either.

The weeks skittered by. We learned that faculty contracts would not be changed – a small victory – and would be moved into the Schumacher College Foundation, a subsidiary charity under Dartington Hall Trust. It had quietly existed for years and was essentially a container for some grant money. It might have served as a vehicle for independence, but probably not now given that the DHT Chair, CEO and their education consultant, installed themselves onto the board of this entity. This seemed, at least, a complication. Then they made themselves a committee of three, the ‘education committee’ who would now, it appeared, chart the future of the College. The irony has not been lost on students or anyone else. It’s clear that Schumacher College must become independent but it remains uncertain how this will happen. Because of ‘teach out’ – DHT has lost our accreditation but remains contractually obliged to complete the courses for students already enrolled – the College will remain under DHT for at least another two years or so.

***

That part of this story is a mire. The part of this story we control – our intentions, analyses, dreams, and practical actions – is full of possibility. The opportunity we have before us is to reimagine ‘higher’ education and us as an institution of ‘higher’ learning. Can we innovate a model (or models) that addresses what is needed now in these times of ‘polycrisis’ and transformation, is accessible to more young people in more places, and is financially sustainable in the long run? Can we become an organisation that is a positive exemplar from top to bottom, being and acting in alignment with our values, ‘walking our talk’? Answering these and related questions with humility and in service is the work we must do.

One interesting line of thinking concerns having a good death. Every organism, every organisation, every enterprise has a life cycle. Should businesses exist forever? Can an enterprise truly be regenerative unless it is willing to ‘compost itself’ at the appropriate moment for the greater good? If Schumacher College were to end up winding up, how could it do so in the most productive way possible, making the stock of nutrients accumulated through its decades of endeavour available to flow to the next iteration(s)?

The notion of ‘hospicing modernity’ comes into our course inquiry, thanks to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and her book of the same name. The last few hundred years of our modern era sowed the seeds of our polycrises many would argue and with good evidence. For modern institutions and their extant exemplars – for example, corporations like Exxon – the same question must be asked – should they continue to exist? Should they be ‘hospiced’? What is the process to a just transition?

These questions have also come into the world of big philanthropy, where the provenance of foundation wealth includes culpable histories. In a well covered case, Lankelly-Chase recently decided to give away all its wealth once and for all, saying in a statement on its website, ‘…we view the traditional philanthropy model as so entangled with Colonial Capitalism that it inevitably continues the harms of the past into the present.’ Should great stocks of wealth, especially modern historical wealth, be conserved and concentrated in any entity that exists forever? These questions and many more are developed in depth by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy in their book, ‘Post Capitalist Philanthropy’. (Thanks for lending me a copy, Felipe!)

These questions are relevant for us here, right now. A hundred years ago, the founders of Dartington Hall, an American billionaire heiress (in today’s money) and her English husband, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, bought and renovated the medieval estate along with thousands of acres of surrounding lands. Dartington Hall became an innovator in local economics, education and the arts. The Elmhirsts have been dead for fifty years. Maybe it’s time for Dartington Hall Trust to hospice itself, just as Lankelly Chase is doing? Instead of becoming just another landlord, it could divest assets to the surrounding communities. This part of South Devon is one of the most innovative clusters of regenerative and social enterprises in the country. There would be an abundance of creative energy that could put these assets to work for the common good – just what’s needed in these times of polycrisis and transformation, we would argue. What if it were community owned?, as Rob Hopkins asked a few years ago in response to earlier episodes of community distrust. More to the point, what would Dorothy do? Perhaps she might say the right thing to do is to simply grant Schumacher College its independence along with the small patch of land and buildings it occupies.

That scenario is unlikely. And whether Schumacher College continues or not – most of us think it probably will – the energy grows for new models, successor organisations and other innovative progeny. We’d like to stay where we are in this place, occupying the Old Postern where so many memories have been made. Perhaps leaving on our own terms could free us to address more interesting questions. What kind of education is called for in these times? What curricula? What pedagogy? Accessible to whom? Why? Our community, believe me, is astoundingly capable, creative, innovative. They’re animated and mobilised by these questions. They’re already on the way to what’s next.

Schumacher College lies at the heart of this worldwide community, at least as ‘the source’. EF Schumacher was a progenitor of what is a growing movement for economic change, especially to those movements and models that bear an easily recognisable family resemblance. His words are often repeated within the walls of the Old Postern – ‘an ounce of practice is generally worth about a ton of theory.’ The work of this century is about that – putting into practice ‘regenerative economic/social/culture change’, from the bottom up, top down, side to side. Pragmatic, critical, willing to question our ideological biases and presumptions, pluralistic, transdisciplinary – in our best moments, what goes on at Schumacher College is unique in the world and powerful.

This is how I have treated this in class, as an immersive case seen and experienced from the inside out. Yep, I could be biased by my own desires, of course. But imagine the possibilities, now: a worldwide community of educators and entrepreneurs aligned around this kind of education for change, for the ‘great transformation’ called for in this century; an emerging network of cooperative and community-owned Schumacher College-like platforms delivering courses accessible now to thousands, multilingual online sessions complemented by local residentials in many places; a campus nestled in abundant convivial relationships stretching across borders and boundaries of all kinds.

These kinds of conversations are happening now. Let’s see what comes next.

I don’t consider myself a consumer. I might have simply borrowed one from The Share Shed, the mobile ‘library of things’ based in Totnes, but they don’t have one to lend. Buying used is the next best thing and something I’ve done for years to reduce my own ecological footprint. So I bought it and am now just waiting for the next clear night …

—

In a way, my little story contains many elements of what a transformed economy might look like here in Devon – more connection with nature, less consumption, more sharing, or at least buying pre-owned things to keep them from going to landfill. One can imagine being more ‘circular’ and being more aware of impacts, both personal and systemic. Less consumption implies less production, reduced material throughput, less energy consumed, less CO2 emitted, and so on, rippling out through the wider economic system.

While the very little saved by my personal choice in this case is minute, it’s necessary. In the aggregate, it might even be significant. But this implies that the ‘consumer’, or ‘re-consumer’, in this case, has agency and the power to leverage economic change simply by changing their buying habits. Consumption is two thirds of UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP), so one might imagine that consumers have enormous transformative potential. This logic may be sound, but the rate of change in consumer behaviour is slow and messy, especially while producers, investors, and politicians are promoting growth in consumption, profitability and overall economic activity.

The economic system we have now – powered by fossil fuels, fed by resource extraction, concentrating profits and wealth, accelerating inequality, leaving communities and places behind – is largely responsible for the crises we face. While some suggest that ‘green growth’ is possible, that is, we might ‘decouple’ growth in GDP from negative impacts such as biosphere damage and green house gas emissions, this argument has been largely refuted by the data. In their recent reports, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body of the world’s leading scientists informing the international process attempting to deal with the climate crisis, suggest that the system must be utterly transformed if we’re to avoid the worst consequences of global heating.

Transforming the global economic system is a huge and complex project – obviously. It is THE project of this century. One can just about grasp the challenges and complexities of transforming our regional economic system – also daunting. The scale and scope of change required here is significant, but a holistic approach to reconfiguring our regional economy could create new abundance and higher quality of life.

Let’s imagine that future.

Let’s begin with justice and fairness. In Devon, we have high levels of poverty, many areas of high deprivation, a lack of decent and affordable housing. Some groups may bear the brunt of institutional biases that keep them from realising their full potential in life, let alone as employees, entrepreneurs, or citizens. A just and fair system would be, well, fair. It would focus on meeting everyone’s needs. It would be inclusive, allowing everyone to participate in a fair share of the work and the profits. One would imagine more employee-owned enterprises, cooperatives, and so on – and no more exploitative employment contracts. Many leading economists now call for a ‘just transition’ to ensure that the costs of change are borne fairly, as well.

Another quality we might imagine is ecological wisdom. This goes beyond mere ‘ecological friendliness’ and reducing CO2 emissions. Our existence depends on the biosphere, the diversity of life and the food web. We must meet our needs while investing in ecological restoration, regeneration, rewilding, protection, etc. Imagine farm fields abundant with life from the soil up, thanks to regenerative agricultural practices – the Apricot Centre in Dartington is at the leading edge of this movement. Imagine rivers and seas free of plastic and chemicals and full of life, too.

Since we’re reimagining our systems and institutions, we can ensure they’re conducive to life at all scales. Biomimicry might inform shifts in design and engineering practices. Doughnut Economics and bioregionalism might inform policy frameworks that understand the relationship between the economy and the wider natural world within which it is embedded. There’s already a group of citizens working on the Devon Doughnut.

We would also imagine that the system works so that our communities are healthy and thriving. If our economic system is reoriented toward meeting our needs, what are our needs? Imagine everyone having access to fresh, nutritious food and warm, affordable, secure housing. Economist, Manfred Max-Neef, developed a model comprising nine fundamental human needs, which also include the need for identity, understanding, participation, affection, creation, idleness and freedom. Along the same lines, the Inner Development Goals also show that human needs are complex. These models give us a way of understanding how we might reconfigure our economic relationships to increase wellbeing at work and in our communities.

We might also think of this as a convivial society where people are consuming less and experiencing more, both individually and in in a variety of collective ways. More sharing of resource heavy goods like electric cars and telescopes. More care and education – perhaps through social enterprise, as well as through state services. More participation in community life, too, through groups, hubs, festivals, and so on. Where production is happening it is through non-polluting processes and fulfilling livelihoods. This is what Degrowth thinkers and Transitioners emphasise – that dramatically reducing our carbon and ecological impacts can allow us to co-create any number of versions of the ‘good life’.

One final essential quality of our transformed bioregional economic system to mention is resilience. There will be more shocks – drought and heatwaves, damaging winter storms, swept away rail lines, global financial crashes. The recent pandemic will have taught us many lessons in this regard. By emphasising diversity, redundancy, and modularity our system will be able to bounce back, to adapt, and hopefully to continue to thrive.

Our transformed and resilient economy will be ‘re-localised’ as we re-invest in local producers of all kinds, re-weave local economic ecosystems, and keep more of the financial wealth we generate in Devon, circulating in Devon. This is already beginning to happen in places like Totnes where local residents put on an annual ‘local entrepreneur forum’. In Torbay, the council are pursuing their Community Wealth Building agenda which seeks to use the economic power of the council and other large institutions to help drive this process of change. There is also an initiative to create the first regional bank serving the needs of local people and enterprises – the South West Mutual Bank.

These four qualities – just and fair, ecologically wise, socially thriving, resilient – are interrelated, each contributes to the other. They provide a basic starting point for beginning to think about and work toward the kind of future we deserve and might co-create together. Take a moment to really imagine what life could be like. Did you see farms full of produce, bicycle paths lined with fruit trees, pedestrianised town centres full of art, music, cafes and independent little shops, libraries of things, clean and green manufacturers, bird song? It isn’t hard to imagine. What’s difficult is imagining how we get there in the next few decades.

Among the many circles of people working for economic change, discussions about the future often quote science fiction writer, William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” It has become a cliché, but it’s a useful way to recognise that the models and relationships that will comprise our future system likely already exist in exemplar projects here in Devon or elsewhere. They’re ‘beacon’ projects, such as the ones I’ve mentioned above, that attract attention and inspire others to emulate in their own places.

If we think of possible pathways to a ‘net zero’ future, a very practical place to start is by supporting the beacon projects that exist, creating the conditions for new ones to emerge, and helping these models spread.

As citizens and consumers – or re-consumers or non-consumers – we can buy from them, invest in them, volunteer with them. As enterprise leaders we can co-create mutually beneficial collaborations. As entrepreneurs we can start similar projects or innovate new regenerative models. As network weavers we can bring together elements of entrepreneurial ecosystems to enable transformative, regenerative entrepreneurs to start up and thrive. As educators we can empower our young people with the knowledge and knowhow they’ll need in the coming decades. As councillors and council officers we can work with these networks to provide enabling resources, helpful policy, buildings and meeting spaces. As artists and storytellers we can anticipate the future with our work, bringing to life our ideas and intentions.

Systems change theorist, Donella Meadows, co-author of the Limits to Growth report 50 years ago, identified 12 key places to intervene in a system in order to change it. The three most powerful things we can do are to change the goals of the system, change the mindset out of which the system emerges, and develop the power to transcend paradigms. In other words, we have to decide to change, be willing to let go of pre-conceived ideas and assumptions about what is possible, and use our imaginations and dare to dream.

My telescope is for observing the heavens where the light that I see may have taken years to reach our earth. It’s like a time machine, seeing the moon as it was a second and a half ago or Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way, as it was 2.5 years ago. If I could use it to look into the future, I am certain I would see lots of regenerative farms, solar panels and wind turbines, a thriving eco-tourism industry, electric buses and bicycles everywhere. And I’d see happy people working together in all sorts of ways that are mutually respectful and worthwhile. There are problems, of course – we’re human beings. But life is better, healthier, connected. Perhaps you see it, too?

This article was originally published in the The Net Zero Visions Book.

If we’re to avoid catastrophe, then this political-economic reality must change from being its cause to becoming its solution, both in the extremely short run and in the very long. This is the central challenge for all the generations of this century.

Naturally academia, political manifestos, think tanks, the blogosphere and social media-scape are well populated with proposals and certainties about what’s needed right now. Millions of us are consumed with thinking about this and taking action – researching, writing, experimenting, organising. It’s an exciting time in terms of ideas and new possibilities, as well for the urgency of our situation. There is so much excellent work being developed now, so much established and ancient wisdom being made visible, so many pathways emerging. And yet still there is a din of noise and nonsense blaring at full-volume in the background, alt-certainties being pushed into the foreground for popular consumption.

So, in addition to solving the crises of the day, the kind of economics we need now will be capable of breaking through the noise to provide a clear narrative and compelling pathways forward.

I wish I were capable of articulating what this might be. There are already many ‘transformative economies’, (to borrow a handle I quite like from the World Social Forum, transformadora.org,) many streams of a growing movement of possible ‘new economics’ trying to break through and capture the popular imagination. Is it possible to converge all the worthy streams into one powerful narrative or banner behind which we all might rally? Maybe this is the wrong question.

If I were to begin afresh, I would start with first principles. The kind of economics we need right now must affirm life. It seems to me everything else might follow from this simple foundational proposition. It’s supported by the wisdom of indigenous peoples, engaged Buddhists, and deep ecologists. And from a practical perspective, it doesn’t seem possible to do otherwise – we’re running out of living planet and time. Empirical evidence suggests we’ve come to the limits of what more damage our earth systems, ecosystems, social systems can endure without collapsing.

Affirming life is a philosophical position. We might operationalise it, so to speak, by elaborating a bit further. Justice, or fairness, and inclusivity must be principles, too. Everyone’s needs must be met. Again, there’s ample support for this position from a diverse array of wisdom traditions. We must also go about meeting our needs with ecological wisdom, regenerating and working with natural systems in ways that create the conditions for life of all kinds. This is foundational. How else will we cut GHG emissions, protect biodiversity and repair our biosphere? As social beings, we must also make thriving together in communities a foundational principle – health, wellbeing, neighbourliness, art, play, participatory governance and so on. Finally, I would add resilience. Abrupt change, crisis, extreme weather – these challenges will remain for a very long time. This implies that we must develop with diversity, modularity, redundancy, and adaptability in the mix.

These principles have worked well to frame my own inquiry as a thinking practitioner over the years. I might have cited above the works of a hundred or more economists, philosophers and poets, artists, scientists of natural, holistic and social kinds, who are articulating and testing ideas, approaches, frameworks, and/or models that contribute in ways large and small to fulfilling these principles. They’ve taught and inspired me – as has life experience. I’ve been surprised, too. It’s often not possible to know a priori what sorts of ideas, innovations and initiatives might fulfil these principles. Figuring that out is part of the intellectual excitement of these times. The kind of economics we need now is transdisciplinary and always learning.

The next and more important question is: how to bring it into being now? We have about 10 years to halve emissions. There’s much more work, besides. Just about all of it is urgent. We need to change – maybe it’s safe to say almost everything at almost every scale. In order to do it we need some understanding of the ways change can happen, and people – ‘new economists’ and others – need to acquire the skills for making it happen. If we need to establish new models for production, consumption, governance, finance, politics and policy, etc, we will need the knowledge and knowhow to design and implement them. If these models are to spread, or be scaled out, diffused, propagated, etc, then the knowhow must also be spread, from person to person, enterprise to enterprise, city to city. I’m inspired by the work of Ricardo Hausmann and César Hidalgo in this regard, who provide some understanding of this process.

I’m inspired by the work of Marianna Mazzucato, as well. Given the urgency of our situation, surely ‘mission-led’ government-backed economic transformation programmes of the kind she advocates offer clear pathways for policymakers. Perhaps they will need to develop the knowhow to make it work? Certainly, they will need the political will. So, how can that be inspired and nurtured?

I’d like to say that the kind of economics we need right now is normative and robustly practical – maybe I’ve overplayed this rhetorical device? For practitioners and policymakers, this seems fundamentally important, but there remains much to be explored and discovered. The story of how the dominant economic paradigm might change is not so neat and tidy. The upcoming COP26 in Glasgow will prove this point. It may produce some hope that positive change in government action is happening, but while necessary it won’t, of course, be sufficient. The fires and heatwaves, hurricanes and extreme weather events happening all over Earth make this abundantly clear. We need more people actively working for better alternatives at all scales, with a robust set of tools, the skill and wisdom to use them, and always asking better and better questions. The new economics we need is inviting and pluralist, collaborative and constructively critical, and open to revision. But above all, it is full of life and love.