A Just Transition and Progressive Philanthropy

Remarks by David Bollier

EDGE Funders Alliance Conference Berkeley, California

April 19, 2016 In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of evidence that our general system of governance and production – and our own complicity in it – is the problem. We’ve experienced the runup to the 2008 financial crisis and its dismal aftermath…..and seen how ineffectual governments are at addressing the existential problems of climate change. We’ve seen stark wealth and income inequality surge, with a few dozen people owning as much economic wealth as half of the world. We continue to see the failure of so-called market-based solutions and international trade treaties and fiscal austerity policies. It’s really quite obvious that The System is the problem. Now, no socially thoughtful person can avoid working within The System to solve our problems. But no serious advocate for social change can deny that the neoliberal market/state is incapable of dealing with the problems of our time. It has neither the motivation nor the credibility nor the tools. We need to struggle for change within conventional electoral and policymaking arenas, to be sure, but they are too often corrupted by money and commercial news media imperatives, not to mention the limitations of bureaucracy, party politics and even competitive markets when they work. So what to do? I think we start by orienting ourselves to the idea of a Just Transition as part of the long-term project to build a new system. Michelle just outlined the strategic approaches being used by Movement Generation and its partners. I’d like to focus on what I’ve learned as an advocate for the commons, particularly in Europe and the global South, with my colleagues at the Commons Strategies Group – and soon, with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.

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My remarks are drawn from an essay that I wrote a few months ago for EDGE Funders Alliance called “A Just Transition and Progressive Philanthropy.” A shorter version is in the conference program and the complete version is on the EDGE website. It is not generally appreciated how building new projects that in various ways build a new system are consequential in the Big Picture. They all seem too small. They tend to take place in out-of-the-way locations. They are often championed by idiosyncratic visionaries working with unusual peer groups who have scruffy offices and too little money. The are not darlings of the media, and no one in Washington has heard of them. But I’d like to suggest that these are precisely the people who are pioneering the new models of “development” and “progress” and post-capitalist sustainability that we need. I’m talking about projects like Farm Hack, which is building open source farm equipment that is inexpensive, modular and locally producible without patents. Things like the Bangla-Pesa currency that has helped poor neighborhoods in Kenya revive themselves. The New System is being built by proponents of the buen vivir ethic in Latin America and by the many food relocalization projects in the US and Europe; and by the FabLabs and makerspaces that are reinventing production for use. My colleague Silke Helfrich and I described dozens of these in the anthology that we edited, Patterns of Commoning. The members of the next panel embody this spirit, too. Millions of ordinary people acting as householders and permaculturists, citizen-scientists and community foresters, digital commoners and cooperators – among other titles -- are building new types of bottom-up self-provisioning and self-governance systems. They function independently of conventional markets and state programs, or sometimes as interesting hybrids. In other words, structural change is already happening. It’s really happening. The future has already arrived, but it’s unevenly distributed, as the saying goes. The question is: Do we see it? And if we do, how can we help it expand and consolidate? The projects that I mentioned are all challenging the dominant cultural and economic narrative of our time – the story about freedom and progress through economic growth and markets as the fundamental ordering principle for our societies and our lives. The creators of the New World do not celebrate unlimited growth as an indicator of social progress, nor do they celebrate competition and individualism unconstrained by community. The new narratives tell a more hopeful story that stress:

• the importance of stewarding the earth and all living systems;

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• the priority of meeting people’s basic needs over market exchange; and • the importance of participation, inclusion and fairness in managing resources and

governing communities. One might say that these are the hallmarks of a Just Transition. They are still hybrids working within the existing Old System – but they have a deep logic and ethic that points to a new way. They embody a new culture. The projects of this New World tend to rely on bottom-up, decentralized decisionmaking. They rely on social cooperation to manage collectively owned resources – otherwise known as commoning. They cultivate an ethic of racial and gender inclusivism and respect, They make transparency and social equity and fairness priority concerns. And they respect the fact that people and places all differ, so we need a diversity of solutions. The initiatives that I mentioned share another commons denominator – they are all emerging from the edge. As the Internet has shown us, that’s where transformative ideas originate. Out on the edge, away from the suffocating influence of mainstream respectability, people are building out their own visions, without worrying what the press, entrenched institutions or elected officials or even foundation officials may think. The innovators tend to bypass markets, law and macro-policy as the primary drivers of change, relying on these only as necessary. The “Do it Ourselves” approach is motivated in part from the sheer difficulty of achieving serious change through government these days because of the general lack of public funding and the inherent limits of law and bureaucracy in actualizing change. The Do it Ourselves ethic instead looks toward the underappreciated creativity and grassroots power of individuals and communities – if only these can be unleashed. Which is why I think we need to be more aggressive and deliberate in focusing on new projects that can attract new energies and innovators…..and give them some genuine space in which to grow. The point is to change the moral center of gravity for transformative change by showing that Another Way is entirely feasible – and to help these scale. This is what Linux and free and open source software have done in challenging Microsoft and proprietary software, for example. This is also what local food activists have done in taking on Big Agriculture and

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industrial food…..and how Occupy put wealth inequality on the national agenda. I like to think that this is what the commons movement is doing as well. But how do we ensure that such projects will grow and mature, and reach a higher level of organization and sophistication? I think it helps to think in terms of emergence. Evolutionary science teaches us that when a requisite variety of living forces are brought into closer alignment, a seeming miracle occurs – everything suddenly evolves to a higher level of system organization. In ecosystems, a self-replenishing, self-sustaining “catchment area” emerges. This is the place where natural flows of water, nutrients, plant seeds, birds, animals, and other forces, all come together to create an interdependent web of life. It is a stable, evolving and regenerative system that “magically” arises from a cruder, less developed system. These findings from complexity science help explain why certain social movements on the edge abruptly and unexpectedly break out. When people have the freedom and motivations to come together to do the things that excite them and meet their local needs….and when they can efficiently coordinate with each other…..and innovate in fast, iterative, bottom-up cycles -- a dynamic new system arises. People are not locked into old hierarchical forms, organizational and command structures, and political tactics. They are not imprisoned by the perceived imperatives of the Old System. I think that the challenge for grantmakers is how to foster radical, bottom-up innovation that can lead to emergence. Two students of complexity theory and social movements – Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze – write: When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emerge is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale. Emergence is how Occupy broke through….and how the Arab Spring arrived out of nowhere. Emergence is how Wikipedia came out of nowhere to challenge Encyclopedia Britannica, and it is how The Indignados in Spain, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and SYRIZA in Greece arose. It is how the improbable Bernie Sanders campaign went from 5% in the polls to challenge Hillary Clinton.

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The old guard of electoral politics and standard economics has trouble comprehending the principle of emergence – or creating catchment zones – because they tend to live in a world of cause-and-effect, mechanical change. They don’t know how to honor open-ended creativity and leverage the dynamic power of emergence. So today: If we are serious about effecting system change, we need to emancipate ourselves from backward-looking concepts and vocabularies, and learn new patterns for eliciting human potential, provisioning for need and self-governance. Instead of clinging to the old left/right spectrum of political ideology, for example – which reflects the centrality of “the market” and “the state” in organizing society – we need to entertain new narratives that. We need to popularize the new models emerging from the edge that are more inclusive, participatory, transparent and socially convivial – ones that go beyond what is offered by electoral politics, the administrative state and market structures. How can the dozens of loosely associated transnational “tribes,” all sharing aspirations for system change, begin to collaborate more closely and federate themselves? Can they create new types of local/global culture and political power? The answers can only emerge through mutual exploration and co-creation, and the taking of risks to build a new kind of future.

### These remarks are adapted from a longer essay of the same title, prepared for EDGE Funders Alliance with the generous support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin Germany.