Monthly archive for April 2014
Showing results 1 - 5 of 21 for the month of April, 2014.
30 Apr 2014
One of the most in-depth pieces of research on Transition published recently was Failure and Success of Transition initiatives: a study of the international replication of the Transition movement by Giuseppe Feola and Richard Nunes at the University of Reading. Giuseppe is a lecturer in Environmental Development whose research focuses on issues around how sustainable development is pursued by local communities. Richard lectures on real estate and planning at the School of Real Estate and Planning and has a background in architecture and subsequently then trained as a planner. He is interested in human and environment interactions, looking at aspects of policy and governance specifically. I caught up with them via Skype to find out more about the paper, how it came about, and what they concluded.
I wonder if one of you might just start us off with how the study came about and what you did?
Giuseppe: We’re both interested in this type of movement, like the Transition movement and grassroots innovations. We came to realise that in the literature there are many studies that contribute to what can be called the success of this type of grassroots initiative or to their failure, but these studies usually address or take one or two case studies. They go in depth into analysing the experience of one particular community or one particular initiative, but there’s no overview of more general patterns.
We were unsure whether the results of the studies could be generalised through other communities and other initiatives. That was the spark of the study. What we tried to do was a different approach, a complementary approach to this in-depth research. We tried to research whether there were general patterns as well as across countries and different geographical contexts, urban and rural contexts, different countries. Not because there’s anything wrong with looking at single case studies in depth, but just because we might learn different things and we might confirm and challenge some of those results if we look at it in a more comparative way across different contexts.
We carried out an online survey asking a lot of questions about characteristics of the Transition initiatives and different factors that the literature suggests might play a role in the success of the initiatives. Also, critically of course, on how the initiatives themselves would define their success. We analysed this in a quantitative way, using statistics. This is mostly a quantitative study, and we came up with some patterns of factors that are associated with different levels of success of local Transition initiatives.
You developed a typology of Transition initiatives. Could you explain what that is to the layperson?
Giuseppe: You’ve got this long list of factors which might be external factors like the context, what type of local authority it is or if the media are more friendly or less friendly in a particular location, whether there are more or less resources available, whether the founding group of the Transition initiative was large or small, the age of the members involved in the Transition initiative and so on.
One might think you put all of these things together and come up with a formula of what you need to have to put together a successful initiative. This is not what we did. We tried to identify when some of these factors like the examples I just made came together more frequently. How frequently they were associated with high levels of success defined by the Transition initiatives.
For example, we found out the rural initiatives are more often successful than urban Transition initiatives, that co-operation with other actors like local authorities, media or also local businesses favours success more often than not and so on. This created four different levels of combination of these different factors, associated with four different levels of success of the initiative, if that makes sense.
What were the things that you felt constituted the key elements behind the success of the Transition initiatives? Were there two or three that really stood out to you as being the key things that made a big difference?
Richard: You can probably work back from where some initiatives identified weaknesses. I would say group governance within the initiatives itself where communication was good and membership or engagement of members was strong, that would have been a successful factor. We also identified, building on what Giuseppe just pointed out, in our concluding discussion, the role of place. The connection to places may encourage that success.
We also identified historically the background where members are coming from, so the extent to which they’ve been engaged in other initiatives before or even the extent to which places have a history of campaigning or active engagement on environmental issues and so on. These are some of my overall impressions that I brought to the discussion with Giuseppe.
When you say ‘place’, do you mean places that people feel a very strong affinity to or places that have that sense of being a very vibrant place rather than a satellite town or a dormitory community?
Richard: Yes, an extension of place identity, whether that’s through social networks, the amount of time that an individual has been in that place. One of the concluding discussion points that we had was the difference between urban and rural Transition initiatives, the fact that the rural initiatives have been more successful than the urban ones is possibly due to a lot of the mobility that happens in larger cities, hence possibly the attachment to a place is less than the attachment to a place in a more rural environment perhaps.
But these are all areas that we would have to research more extensively because this survey is clearly just a cross-sectional study so longitudinal states would be necessary to really scientifically establish these conclusions.
Having conducted one of the most in-depth studies of Transition, did you get a sense that you were looking at something that was vibrant and growing or something that was stagnant or something that was contracting? What was your take on that?
Richard: The project started with the intent of trying to understand both diffusion and scale-up, and this study is focused on the diffusion aspect, how it’s spreading out and so on. That’s where the factors of success and failure come in. In terms of the actual scale-up, we’re not addressing that so there may be healthy movement in terms of the existing initiatives now scaling up. It might not be expanding, but because it’s not expanding doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy or it’s still not a vibrant movement. It’s just that taking some of these initiatives are just maturing and going a step further in terms of scale-up, but the study’s not necessarily looking at that.
In terms of the actual expansion, I think we would need further studies to really determine the geography, let’s say, of Transition. Though some initiatives clearly are formalising, others are not. When I was talking to a colleague of mine just earlier today in Brazil, she was noting that oftentimes many individuals who are involved in Transition are also involved in other movements or other campaigns or other initiatives out of Transition, and so you might find that a lot of these individuals drive different movements, different initiatives at different points in time and there can be a slow down of this vibrancy around Transition but it can pick up with new engagement, new members and so on.
I think it really is quite variable. It would be very difficult to say where the movement stands on an international level in terms of its vibrancy or its health.
You place Transition in the wider context of what Gill Seyfang and Noel Longhurst call ‘Grassroots Innovations’. What’s your sense of the potential that grassroots innovations have to scale up, and what are the challenges that they face in doing that?
Richard: Actually there’s a lot of potential at the moment. I’m currently investigating community food enterprises, looking at the scale-up of alternative food networks and there are many initiatives around food within the Transition movement. Clearly funding is one. Issues of group governance is another, so a lot of this comes up through the survey in terms of success and failure, so I think a lot of the points I would raise in the paper would be issues to be addressed in the scale-up as well.
Giuseppe: I think from the study, it’s quite clear that there is this potential and there’s an interesting exchange between the local level which is very diverse and the international or global level and they’re all played by Transition Network for example in the case of the Transition movement as a centre of exchange, learning, an engine of collecting experiences, collaborating, favouring learning basically, learning processes.
This process of learning is where I think the potential for innovation lies because this fertilisation of different contexts and experiences that in their unique contexts take their unique form. But then there’s the global level and the network elaborates this. It was quite clear that those Transition initiatives that had stronger links with Transition Network and had gone through trainings and had followed certain principles more closely, they were actually doing more stuff, more things on the ground.
In that sense, going to your question of the potential for innovation, I fully agree with Richard that there’s a lot of potential and this process of learning and fertilisation I think is really what makes me think that the potential is there and probably not fully exploited yet.
In the paper you write “Transition initiative members tend to focus on internal and overlook external factors of Transition initiative success.” What did you mean by that?
Giuseppe: We found that there’s a lot of focus on the number of members. On leadership, on group governance which are of course important factors, and they are internal factors. They concern how the group and the members interact amongst themselves and how they organise themselves and so on.
But our analysis also took into consideration contextual factors and external factors so the role for example played by the local authority, local business, the fact of being rural or urban and so on. They were mentioned by the Transition initiatives and we found out that actually they do play a role, they might constrain or enable the Transition initiative.
Our conclusion was that perhaps many Transition initiatives tend to focus on their internal governance, because of course it’s the first thing you want to do to reinforce the group and make it work internally. But actually thinking about the medium or long term success of that initiative, we shouldn’t forget about the context and interaction with other actors and the constraints of being in an urban or rural context.
One of the things from reading it and being very involved in Transition that was a bit frustrating was the degree to which you focused on the 12 steps of Transition, which is a model that we haven’t really used since 2010, which seemed a little bit out of date somehow. Why was the decision taken to focus on that?
Giuseppe: There are two reasons, both very practical. It’s fully clear to us that of course Transition is not all about following a sequence of steps. We wanted to compare the subjective, so how Transition initiatives themselves define their success with something more objective that we could measure just observing the Transition initiatives, not asking them directly. The 12 steps together with the size and the duration of the initiative served this purpose, so this was one of the reasons.
The second reason is that more recent elaboration of those 12 steps, like for example the ingredients, were a lot more recent, so we couldn’t ask about the ingredients to initiatives that had a longer history. We had to ask the initiative about something they were more familiar with, and they were more familiar with the 12 steps, which have a longer history. They are not the most up to date thing, but since we are asking about the history of the Transition initiative itself, the 12 steps also serve that purpose.
One of the findings that struck me was when you said that the more Transition initiatives there are in a place, then the better they tend to do. There seems to be a positive reinforcing thing. It reminded me of research about how the more solar panels go up on roofs, the more people put up solar panels. There’ this cycle. Is that me misreading it or was that an observation that you made?
Richard: I think it’s a fair observation that we deduced from the concentration of initiatives in a place or a locality, and how they might explain some of the crossover of that learning and exchanging information. We fully realise that there is also the internet and other channels for disseminating information but the element of proximity of initiatives we still hold to be an explaining factor for this diffusion, and that’s why we have it as one of the discussion points.
Giuseppe: All initiatives are in theory networked, but some have more contact and exchange with other networks than others, and this was associated with success, so that’s where this conclusion came from.
One of the surprising findings for me was that diversity and inclusion was lowest among urban groups. I would have thought it would be the other way round, because urban communities tend to be more diverse to start with. Did you have an explanation for why that might be?
Both: No, we didn’t.
Richard: I think you have to remember that this is one cross-sectional study. There’s still potential for exploring a lot of these aspects in more depth. If you think about large cities, there are areas that are more and less diverse. Many of the initiatives did claim that they reached out and they were inclusive.
But being able to explain why a community fully representative of its cultural diversity is not engaging in this initiative, we couldn’t explain that. The initiative can only remain open and make claims that it’s open and it’s inclusive. If the wider community, the wider populace in that area is not engaging with the initiative, we couldn’t explain that through the study. That would have to be a different study altogether.
Having immersed yourselves in what’s already been published about Transition in the last 7 years or so, what’s your sense of how good the existing research base around Transition is? How thorough and comprehensive it is?
Giuseppe: There’s a growing body of research on Transition and it’s good. The short answer would be that there’s a lot of good work done on the Transition movement in particular and the area of grassroots innovation in general.
We tried to complement other approaches. There tends to be a few, even one initiative in these studies, so there could be a little bit more diversity of approaches to look at Transition from different angles. This is what we tried to do, to look at it from this more international angle.
One thing perhaps, in the literature that we also tried to do is to look at cases of failure and not only at cases of success. One tends to focus on those case studies that are particularly interesting because they succeed in having an impact on the community or bringing their initiative forward. Perhaps it also helps to look at those cases where Transition initiatives stop, for example. To look at why they stopped and look at the other side of the coin in a sense. This can also help to confirm theories that we’ve got on why the Transition movement and grassroots innovation successfully spread and diffuse or not.
Is your intention to follow this up with subsequent research?
Richard: Yes – we have discussed this and we have continuing discussions on what might be our Transition research programme or masterplan as we’ve referred to it a couple of times already. The point that we noted in the paper about the need for longitudinal studies, I think that’s important. If we’re going to talk about what the lasting impact of Transition is, we certainly do need these longitudinal studies.
They need to be cross-sectional as the way that this survey has been carried out, but in terms of looking in some depth, case-study based research which there is a lot of at the moment, I think it would also be important to begin to think about where Transition happens even within organisations, so a Transition from within. Not within in terms of individuals but actual organisations.
My colleagues in Brazil are currently taking some of those principles, some of that Transition ethos to big global organisations and are they’re starting to carry out a lot of the same processes that Transitioners are carrying out in communities, but within the workplace. I think research at that level – I think activity of that nature should also be looked at in terms of lasting impact.
Our theme this month is around impact, the impact of Transition. From your perspective of having reviewed the research and the wider context of grassroots innovation and the wider field around that, what’s your sense of the impact that Transition as a movement has had over the last 6 or 7 years?
Giuseppe: I think the impact was in two main areas. One is the social impact. This has to do really with building community. The fact that there’s an active group of people interacting, being together, building a sense of community, conviviality, organising itself based on democratic principles of decision making; these are the things that were mentioned very often in terms of impact in our study.
The other one is the external. Sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s economic. Through the projects that the initiative brings forward, which of course can be in different areas like energy, food housing and so on, this is the other type of impact.
I must say, at least from our study, the impression in this first area (building community and networks and social capital) is that it is predominating compared to the other one. Presumably because many Transition initiatives are just starting, and there tends to be a focus more on internal aspects rather than on the external. This might be explained by this sort of dynamic, but overall there are these two areas. Internal, social impact and external impact in the community through the projects that are carried out.
Richard: I would probably build on that by saying that some of the work we’re currently looking at in terms of community food enterprise, that enterprise element is being enabled through building up the community capacity to raise awareness about particular issues, bringing about a greater critical mass behind such entrepreneurial projects, facilitating that scale-up in a way that ensures that scale-up is sustainable and can be resilient in the interests of the local community and so on.
That’s essentially where there is some scope for exploring where this social innovation also blends in with technological innovation even. The incorporation of new technologies into projects that are community supported. That’s where I get quite excited because I came at this project from that and from looking at regional development and innovation policy.
Having had a background in community planning and economic development, I extended that into this idea of eco-entrepreneurship and social innovation. That’s how I came into this project and met Giuseppe and then we started talking about Transition. So I get excited by projects like REconomy and discussions about scale-up. I think that’s where a lot of the future of the grassroots impact is going to be.
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29 Apr 2014
The question “what’s our impact?” went with me to Israel and the West Bank, where Naresh and I were invited to run the first Transition:Launch training. As part of our trip we ran a one day Transition workshop in Bethlehem in the West Bank. Although it’s just a few miles from Jerusalem, the bus drives through a checkpoint (passports and permits are checked on the way back into the city, not out) and along the huge wall that Israel has built, including overhangs to prevent anything being dropped onto the traffic.
From Bethlehem we could look across to the Israeli settlement built on the site of the last forest in the West Bank – the protest to prevent its construction bringing together Palestinian activists with Israelis wanting to defend the trees. Our host, from the Holy Land Trust, warned us that of those who said they would come any number between 1 and 20 might make it – plans change at the last minute, travel becomes impossible.
In the end we had 8 people who stayed for different lengths of time. People from Hebron explained that an Israeli settlement has been constructed in the town centre, causing huge disruption to those who live there. One night a street of shopkeepers woke up to find their shop doors had been welded shut in the night by the Israeli army, so some had to get out through their neighbour’s back gates. Children find it difficult to get to school. Permission has to be granted from Israelis for any kind of building work, even repairs – so if they fixed the leaking school roof without permission the whole building might be bulldozed.
Naresh and I wondered what we could possibly have to offer to people living in such extreme circumstances. The piece which seemed to be most relevant and of use was about visioning. Firstly, understanding that there are four stories of the future around. Of these the one which is most useful is the one which is least seen – of “Energy Descent”, or how we make a successful, inclusive transition to a low carbon way of living.
We have written elsewhere of the “aha” moment for us – that although we appear to be free in the UK we are still constrained by those with power. We can travel freely (in Bethlehem, two participants arrived two hours late, held up at a checkpoint), and are unlikely to wake up to find our doorways blocked, or armed soldiers outside. But we are also limited in what we can build, who has access to land, what we can do to take care of the future for our children. (And of course, the rules are also there to protect us all from the wishes of people who would build things that I might hate, so there’s a process we all have to follow.. it just hasn’t caught up with the realities of our present situation).
The use of Visioning to support this – to understand realistic constraints on the future, and them imagine things being the best they possibly could – also seemed to create a shift in thinking for some. Some who came already had a powerful vision of building a peace community and ecovillage in Palestine, and are attempting to build it despite finding it very difficult to get permission from Israeli authorities. For others it was to vision a local street where the shops have largely closed down as a bustling busy thoroughfare again and imagine the partnerships and conversations that would be needed to help this move forward.
There’s something about the intensity of Israel and the West Bank, the feeling that situations of life and death, belonging to the land or exiled, peace and war, are ever present, that stayed with me throughout our visit. In Jerusalem we visited the Holocaust museum, and were reminded of the horrors of that time. It’s was striking and painful to see the documentation of the early days of the Nazis in Germany, the constriction of freedoms, intimidation, and disregard for a people’s lives, having just come from Bethlehem, and hearing echoes in the stories from people there. We reflected with Israeli friends later on how the unhealed scars of the past can recreate past situations in the present.
How can Transition have an impact in such circumstances? I realised how important the capacity for visioning is, that in a situation where there is very little freedom, the willingness to vision something different can be a radical and empowering act. Perhaps the circumstances are very constrained in terms of freedom, or resources, or people to work with. But still we can acknowledge reality of what is, and create a vision for something better, even if it’s only something small within my inner world – where I choose to put my attention, to see beauty, or remember something I love rather than focus on my fear or hatred. And the act of doing so frees me from a state of fear or hatred, giving me some control and choice within my life.
In Israel we met people already creating community gardens, working with residents in city areas to create more connection, beauty, recycling. One local group inJerusalemhad saved a whole strip of land that used to border a railway line from development. Now it’s a series of parks, a community garden, and a cycle and walking path that – unusually – links and brings together people from the different neighbourhoods it passes through, who otherwise rarely mix. The Transition: Launch workshop in Haifa was a success at least in bringing together many people in Israel working for similar ends, and supporting them to network. And as often is the case I felt that Transition had some unifying vision to offer, to see how each is working for a piece in a larger, meaningful whole.
As ever with these trips I felt I learnt at least as much as I could offer to others. I am deeply grateful to all those who gave us their time and hospitality, and shared their journey and learning. I often say that running trainings is the best job in Transition, bringing the opportunity to meet and work at depth with people in different countries who share the same impulse to create a system that really works for everyone, now and in the future, for humans and for all life on earth. This visit left me feeling inspired by the courage and love I saw in action, whether in the West Bank or in Israel, and moved by the depth of difficulty and suffering people have experienced – in past generations or in the present. I felt connected to the resilience of the healthy part of us as humans, the part that longs to heal the past and create peace in the present – which is as strong among Israeli activists as it is in this country. An impact for which I am very grateful!
I want to end this piece with some writing of Victor Frankl, a prominent Austrian psychiatrist in the 1920s and 30s, who spent three years in concentration camps under the Nazis. It’s not directly relevant to this writing, but there’s something about the choice that we humans can make, even in extreme circumstances, that reflects something about the spirit of Transition. He describes walking through the freezing night as part of a forced labour group, and calling up the feeling of love through the memory of his wife. It starts when the man next to him whispers:
If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.
In a position of utter desolation, when Man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position Man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
Man’s Search for Meaning, Part One, “Experiences in a Concentration Camp”, Viktor Frankl,
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29 Apr 2014
At Transition in Kitchener-Waterloo, we have recently achieved a lot of new things, and it’s been exciting. We have launched our Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit, and we have also become an official Transition initiative. We have a lot to be celebrating – and we’re definitely doing that – along with some of our new volunteers (the best part about success = people want to be with you!). But after that celebrating comes some reflection.
We’re getting attention and we’re getting new people in TransitionKW. But how are we doing at reaching the broader community? How are we doing at getting projects that are targeting the kind of change we need? Is our work contributing to the Great Turning? Does our community know that we’re part of the Great Turning?
One way we’re trying to measure the impact and reach of the toolkit is to look at the numbers – how many people are reading the toolkit? We have tracking on the website – we know how many people visit, from where, and how long they spend on the website. We track how many times the toolkit is downloaded. We can contact the libraries to find out how many people are checking them out. Therefore we know how many people in our community have been exposed to the toolkit.
But we don’t know how many people have made changes because of our work.
That brings us to another way we’re trying to measure our impact – finding stories. We want stories of what people are doing to make changes in their lives, and how they are sharing that experience with their community. Stories are hard to collect, they take time, and they’re personal. The main way we plan to collect stories is in person, at events, workshops, meetings, festivals, and just generally being out and about. We are also doing an online survey – but that’s more a requirement of our grant funding than a good idea.
We needed to show our funders that we were doing something to collect data from users of our toolkit – and a solution they liked was an online survey. From my personal experience with online surveys, I find no one fills them out unless there is a prize incentive, or they tend to give you the answers you already know. But an online survey is more tangible than the vague idea of “collecting stories”. However, talking with real people in real time, and asking good questions, is what is going to get us the feedback we need to make our work better.
Instead of just intending to collect stories and hoping for the best, we should have some kind of strategy, and I think this is where our work will be as we work on getting our toolkit out into the public even more. I’m thinking the strategy will follow with one of the lessons from the Transition Launch Training about connecting with groups in your community. In the training, the exercise was to learn about other organizations in your community and rank them from 1-5, with 5 being “right on par with our mindset” to 1 being “arguing the opposite of our mindset”.
TransitionKW is already really well connected with lots of local groups (we could not have completed the toolkit without all the expertise and input of a broader network of community organizations), but we haven’t kept track of these relationships or what that has accomplished. Tracking our relationships could help us with knowing how they are changing over time, and means that we know who to go back to to ask good questions.
So what is the impact Transition is having in Kitchener-Waterloo? We don’t really know. We clearly have more reflecting to do before these strategies can be figured out and implemented. But if we can take 8 committed volunteers, a small grant, and lots of community connections and turn that into the successful Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit in a year, I’m confident we’ll get there.
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28 Apr 2014
Originally published last week at Co-operative News under the headline The ‘Silicon Valley’ of community resilience.
My town, Totnes, on the south Devon coast, is the UK’s first Transition town. Over the past eight years, it has catalysed over 40 projects, many of them co-operatives – such as a community energy company, and initiatives creating truly affordable housing for local people. People come from around the world to see what is, for some, a ‘Silicon Valley’ for community resilience.
Yet time spent walking around our local Co-operative Food store would yield absolutely no indication that any of that is happening. There is no local produce, no organic vegetables, no very local beers or wines, no local bread. Something is happening in the community around the store which resonates with many of the Co-operative Group’s values, yet they are disconnected, and may as well be happening entirely in parallel with each other.
My sense is that the time is right to change that. The Co-operative’s USP – the reason I shop there (and it certainly isn’t because of the extensive range of local, seasonal vegetables) – is its commitment to co-operative values. These values are the very thing that makes Co-operative stores stand out from the rest of the increasingly predatory, vampiric and community-trashing supermarkets taking over our high streets.
So, how might Co-operative stores re-imagine themselves? Give each branch the autonomy to decide how it wants to interact with initiatives in the local community that resonate with co-operative values. They might decide to invest some of their turnover every year into a community energy company or, even better, work with that community energy company to install renewables in the store, partly funded through community investment. Great examples of this already exist. Budgens supermarket in Crouch End, for example, has a market garden on its roof, which both creates a great community and training resource, and supplies fresh produce to the store itself.
In places such as Bristol, Brixton and Totnes, where communities have their own local currencies as powerful tools for supporting local economies, Co-operative Food stores could accept them, and use them as a tool for encouraging more local procurement. As we build up to relaunching the Totnes Pound here, these are conversations we are trying to have with our local store.
Stores could also be given the ability to take responsibility for procuring locally, where local produce is available. They could support the creation of new market gardens to supply the shops, train local young people to become growers, and sell beer produced in local craft breweries. In other words, play a key role in giving profile and support to local producers and look at how our communities feed themselves in a different, entrepreneurial way.
Such an approach needs to go beyond a token CSR gesture and really get into the heart of the how the Co-op functions. Local communities have a key role to play in the global push to stay below the 2°C increase of global warming, both as innovators and as pioneers – implementing change without waiting for permission or instruction.
The co-operative movement has a powerful story, a powerful vision, and it needs to start celebrating and telling that story more loudly. Communities are here to help and Co-operative stores need to get behind local initiatives that embody those shared values.
If is doesn’t, it is in danger of being overtaken by models such as hiSbe (How It Should Be), which, at the moment, embody co-operative values far better than the Co-operative Group itself. There is nothing to lose, and so much to gain.
Rob Hopkins
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28 Apr 2014
We last spoke to Michael Shuman just over three years ago. He is author of several books on local economic development, the most recent being Local Dollars, Local Sense. He is an attorney, an economist, and his current job title is Director of Community Portals for Mission Markets. Not every day you meet one of those. As someone who knows more about economic localisation than most, I was keen to pick Michael’s brains on the impact he sees it as having, and how Transition initiatives pushing in that direction might be able to measure the impact they are having.
Our theme this month is about the impact that Transition has had. From where you sit, what’s your sense of the impact that Transition has had as a movement, as an approach?
There’s two ways that I would look at that. One way is Transition as an idea and the other way is Transition as an organisation. I think Transition as an idea has been tremendously effective. In the United States it has many different names. Some of it comes from the Post-Carbon Institute, some of it just comes from the environmental community, some of it comes from BALLE and other organisations. But the idea that the global economy has become unreliable and that we need to rebuild our community economies from the ground up has taken hold everywhere.
I don’t travel to a lot of places around the world, but maybe to a dozen countries, and every single one of those countries that I have gone to including developing countries like Brazil, there is evidence of this Transition underway. A couple of years ago I did a study for the Gates Foundation called Community Food Enterprises where we looked at 24 examples of great local food businesses. Half of them were outside the United States. In every one of these countries that we looked at there was an interesting profound localisation movement taking place.
The second part of the question is Transition as an organisation. To what extent are people using Transition materials as opposed to other things? My sense is that Transition is very strong in Canada and Australia and through much of Europe. I don’t see Transition having quite as much visibility in most of the United States yet, or having as much visibility in places like Japan or a lot of developing countries. But I think that’s changing and I appreciate there’s only so many hours in the day and you guys are working as hard as you can to get the message out.
A lot of your work, and increasingly a lot of what we do at Transition Network, is about trying to model and communicate and show in practice how localisation is a form of economic development, and is as valid, if not more valid, than the current approach. Where are we at, do you think, in that pursuit of being able to model and argue and present the case that localisation and more resilient local economies are a form of economic development?
I mostly follow evidence inside the United States and from that I would say that we are winning. There’s just been study after study that’s come out showing that localisation is good for job growth and good for per capita income growth, good for reducing poverty and good for environmental restoration, good for resilience. It is much easier, I think, to identify the small number of holes that remain in the localisation argument than to talk about all the good things that are happening.
I’ll give you an example. There was a nice study that came out from the Federal Reserve of Atlanta last August that looked at hundreds of counties across the United States. It performed a very empirically rigorous analysis and found that those counties with the highest density of local and small business were those that actually had the highest level of per capita income growth and were doing the best job of reducing poverty. Which is quite an extraordinary finding.
It’s extraordinary because there’s also a whole bunch of data that says that the wages paid by smaller businesses are lower, a little bit lower than those of larger businesses. The question of causality, the question of how these two facts ought to be related to one another is an interesting one.
Among the things that I think about are that at the end of the day, even with somewhat lower wages, local businesses spending more money locally are generating higher economic multipliers that generate more healthy public sectors that come back to people in other ways. That’s one way of thinking about it.
Another way of thinking about it is that the wage gap may in fact be narrowing. There is some evidence of this although I would like to look at the data again. The last time I looked at this data was maybe 5 or 6 years ago. Generally speaking, larger businesses paid more specifically because unionised manufacturing plants had significantly higher wages for the average worker. Most of these plants have moved overseas.
Instead, what has taken their place in a lot of US cities is Walmarts and large-scale retail which pays very, very low wages. That’s contributing to the shrinkage of the gap. But probably the most important thing, and this is where I think the research that we do is going to be very important, is that we’ve got to start a segment about where wages are better or worse. One of the things that we will soon find is that businesses that take on a set of socially responsible standards, that are mindful about environment, and mindful about labour actually do wind up paying better wages than the typical small business.
In my mind what that means is that localisation, part of the reasonable localisation agenda must be to educate smaller, newer businesses about the importance of embracing these higher labour and environmental standards in their day to day operations.
Where do you stand on the debates about what’s possible in terms of the political change that can be leveraged from the local scale? Some people say climate change, peak oil, these are huge global issues and they can only be solved through concerted international effort and that anything you do at the local scale is irrelevant and not making any kind of a difference. What meaningful change can local communities leverage, do you think?
I think local communities can have a huge impact and I say this not to disparage or discount the importance of other approaches that are national or global. But I think there is a very strong case to be made for local action on global problems. For the first 10 years or so of my professional life after I graduated from law school, I ran an organisation called the Centre for Innovative Diplomacy. We had several thousand mayors and council members, primarily in the United States, that we were educating about the impacts of so-called municipal foreign policy and how and why it ought to be done.
One of the first things that we did was we held a conference called SPA, the Stratosphere Protection Accord. I believe it was in 1996 but we brought together about 2 dozen American and Canadian cities that basically have the chutzpah to put together a treaty on ozone depletion issues. The treaty outlined certain goals that the mayors involved in this treaty would implement in their own communities with respect to the emission of halons and chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs). That treaty, I believe, was a rough draft of the Montreal Protocol because that treaty led to a lot of other cities beginning to take initiatives on CFCs. It translated into profound political impact in the United States because there was a debate early on about federal standards with respect to CFCs and some of the national environmental community was prepared to basically sell out local initiatives by having federal standards that were, in the locals’ view, weak, pre-empt, that is override, the local standards.
There was a huge political fight and because of the clout of the mayors, that compromise failed. Instead, states and localities were allowed to take on tougher standards and then Montreal ultimately took place under the Bush 1 administration and I think it has been, while not a perfect accord, a pretty good accord on that issue.
In my mind, without local action, this never would have happened. I feel like we’re seeing a lot of local action now on carbon reduction. In some ways it’s a tougher issue than the ozone depletion issue because at least as I understand from pollsters and sociologists, that carbon is invisible and viewed as a benign gas makes it less fearsome than, say, CFCs which are very much chemical and not part of the day to day environment. So that’s one of the additional things that we’re up against. Plus the organised opposition of climate deniers is so much deeper, better funded, more entrenched than with the CFC manufacturers, so that’s another thing we’re up against.
But that said, I think every city ought to try to pursue this agenda as far and as deep as possible, share its successes with other communities and this is the way I think national change will finally take place.
If you’re a group such as a Transition group who are actively working to build resilience, localise the economy, what would you argue would be the best ways to measure the impact you’re having? What indicators would you be looking at?’
There’s a bunch of ways of thinking about the problem. Let’s start at the very top and most general level. In my view, there are three basic criteria for a successful localised economy:
- To maximise the percentage of jobs in locally-owned business
- To maximise local self-reliance
- To maximise the deployment and spread of high labour and environmental standards
There are tools that one can use on each of these criteria. So for the percentage of jobs in locally-owned business, I don’t know what the databases look like in the UK, but in the United States really down to the zip-code level we can get a pretty good picture of the number of jobs in different sizes of business in different sectors of the economy. We have 1100 sectors that we measure, so a very high level of detail and then we look at how many of those jobs are in self-employed businesses, how many of one to five persons and all the way up to very big businesses.
And so because we know that something like 99.9% of all businesses with fewer than 500 employees are locally owned, it’s easy to make a good determination of local ownership. It’s not going to be perfect, but it’s pretty good. What one can then see is year by year, the percentage of jobs in locally owned businesses has expanded.
On the second criterion, on self-reliance, this is where leakage analysis is very important. In the United States for BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, I developed a set of calculators that you basically plug in a county or zip code and you can instantly see what your level of self-reliance is in every one of 1100 sectors. I worked for BALLE a couple of years ago. When I left BALLE, they did not upkeep the tool and so we’re now trying to basically transfer the tool back to me and then I will upgrade them and try to make it available again.
One can clearly do these kinds of leakage calculations in a very expensive way using input-output computer programmes. Again in the United States, in order to use them and do a calculation for a community probably is going to cost anything from 1-10 thousand dollars. The whole idea behind the BALLE calculators is we’ll give you slightly less accurate estimates about how your sectors are performing in terms of self-reliance but it’ll cost you $20 instead of $1000.
That still is an objective of mine and we can talk more specifically about the methodology of doing that. But I think broadly speaking it can be done, it should be done and when you start looking at those numbers year by year, you start to see these are the sectors we’re becoming more self-reliant in, these are the sectors we’re losing self-reliance in and you can start measuring what your progress is. Obviously the goal here is to increase your level of self-reliance in as many sectors as possible but particularly those sectors, I would argue that are closest to basic human needs like housing, energy, food and health.
The last criterion about social responsibility – you know there’s a bunch of tools that are out there to measure companies triple bottom-line performance. Among them the B corporation measurement gears. I’ve seen an article recently that said they’ve counted something like 500 of these tools out there which means that it’s a very tricky enterprise to know which tool to use and which is going to give you the best information for your community.
I have a very simple standard, which is how many of your businesses are using any tool whatsoever to get feedback on their triple bottom line performance? Just measuring that in the community and seeing if one can press that one indicator higher will give you a fairly good sense of where you’re making progress on this third criterion. As I said, that’s the highest level. Underneath there one can then start to look at specific sectors: energy, food, health again, and look at specific indicators of progress or lack of progress around localisation.
The one thing that I would just say for focus on the Transition movement is that the most serious mistake that people make on indicators is they raise a bundle of money to do a terrific indicators report in year one and they are never able to do it again, to raise that amount of money again in years two, three etc. It’s really important, I think, in the short run, to use readily available data already compiled by the government or other private entities that’s not expensive and develop indicators around that.
Might an additional one to that be something around inward investment and the degree to which the community is mobilising and able to bring investment into these projects?
Yes, and in fact with the BALLE calculators we actually have three types of calculators. The first is the one that I described to you which is overall leakage, but it’s mostly about leakage of consumption dollars. Because US databases for weird historic reasons don’t measure farming and some of the food sector in the rest of the economy, we have a second food calculator using those specific data. And then our third calculator is around capital.
Now, again speaking for the United States, we have very good data on local banking and also the performance of non-local banks in re-investing in community, and this is because of a law that we passed in the 1960s called the Community Re-investment Act. Unfortunately banking…if you add together all forms of banking in the United States it’s about 8 trillion dollars. But if you add together all forms of long-term investment that people have in stocks, funds, pension funds, mutual funds and insurance funds that’s 30 trillion dollars. So that’s more than three times larger than what the banking capital is. And we have no data whatsoever, national, local, regional on how that money flows.
Just through logical deduction, one can see how almost none of that money has any local contact whatsoever. That is, when you put money in stocks and the stocks are all traded on a global stock exchange, all that money is non-local. This would be an area at least again for the United States that I would like to see at least States, if not the Federal government, try to compile more data, household by household so we can get a better handle on the movement of capital.
What we’re seeing, and you capture it beautifully in your most recent book, is new models emerging around local currencies, around local investment, new community energy company models and new food models. What kind of meaningful support would make a difference to these really being able to flower, do you think? At the moment they really just have to get going under their own steam and raise money wherever they can philanthropically. What would meaningful support in terms of finance, in terms of peer to peer, in terms of skills and so on that would really mean that this could gain some traction, do you think?
The theory that I think many of us have been working on in the United States is that if we can change the law that currently makes it difficult and expensive for the 99% of investors who are so-called unaccredited, that is not wealthy, if we make it easier for that 99% to put any money into local business, we will set in motion a whole bunch of changes in behaviour and institutions that will begin to shift money away from bigger business to smaller business.
Just so that folks have a sense of the scale of this, again, the number of our long-term investment is 30 trillion dollars. I would estimate that more than half of our economy is in locally-owned business. That means there is a fundamental misallocation of capital. Every single American is investing in Fortune 500 publicly traded companies and under-investing, that is not investing at all in local small business. If we can fix the laws that have led to this misallocation, I think something like 15 trillion dollars will move, not immediately but over time, from Wall Street to Main Street. That movement will have profound impacts in two ways. One way is because you’re putting a lot of new capital into promising resilient businesses at the community level, but the other way is that you are pulling money out of all these businesses that are doing lots of environmental harm in the world.
What people have not appreciated is that poor or outdated structure of securities laws is responsible for the single biggest subsidy that goes into unsustainable business. By reforming these laws we are beginning to dismantle that subsidy to large-scale, global unsustainable business.
Changing the law is not enough for individual behaviour. That’s why in Local Dollars, Local Sense and other things that I’ve written, I try to point out a whole bunch of very specific tools that people can use to begin to localise their money. But the problem is really twofold right now. One problem is that it takes a lot of work and energy to be a successful local investor and people just don’t have the time and the ability to do that. We haven’t made it easy enough for people yet.
The second problem is that in the big scheme of things, creating a local investment revolution really requires four different kinds of changes. To just run through them briefly, first you have to make it easier and cheaper for the average person to put money into a local business. So that means you have to make it easier and cheaper for that business to issue stock or debt notes or other forms of security.
The second thing you have to do is you have to make it easier and cheaper for people, once they buy these securities to sell them again so that they have some value. Everyone needs to cash out at some point.
The third thing we need to do is to make it easier and cheaper for to put these securities in a pool so they can create diversified portfolios of local business, because otherwise the types of investments people have are too risky.
And then the fourth thing to do is to make it possible and easy forthose who run large-scale investment institutions on behalf of big numbers of people; pension fund managers, people who run foundations, people who run university endowments, people who run big church chunks of money, you have to change the rules to make it possible for them to put money into these local businesses.
The thing about the way the law works in this area is that these things follow sequentially, which is to say as an institutional manager you cannot justify putting money into a local fund, i.e. a fund of local securities, unless it actually has a performance record of several years to show that it is doing pretty well and has a good rate of return. You cannot run a local fund unless you have the ability to buy and sell securities on a local exchange. And you cannot run a local exchange until you have a critical mass of local securities.
In the Unites States, and my sense is that this is also true in the UK, we are really at step one. We are at stage one now of making it easier and cheaper for people to buy securities. We still have a lot of work to do on that, but we have to then sequentially go through these other steps and it’s going to take a while to do that in terms of both legal and institution building. We’re talking about a process here that’s going to take at least 5 to 10 years to fundamentally reshape the investment environment.
When I last spoke to you, I asked you something like “what advice would you give people involved in Transition who would like to be as effective as possible in their local economy?” and your advice was “go to business school”. As somebody pointed out in the comments afterwards, if you went to business school nowadays the chances are what you would be learning is neo-liberal growth-based economics. If you were to design the Michael Shuman business school one-year diploma, what would that course cover? What do you think are the things that people would need to learn from an enlightened business school?
Well it’s not hypothetical, in the sense that I’ve been working with some wonderful people at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver to design and test out different modules for this programme. Some of what needs to be taught is sustainable micro and macro economics from a sustainability perspective. Some of it is looking at the topics of growing business but from a perspective of either triple bottom line for-profit business or triple bottom line social enterprise, which is usually non-profit.
But you could go through the process of how do you do financial statements, how do you do cash flow, how do you think about raising capital, how do you manage a workforce successfully, how do you do marketing. So all these things are important topics but it’s important to teach case studies of successful social enterprise or triple bottom line for profits, particularly small-scale triple bottom line for profits so that people can carry those lessons into their work.
I also think that economic development which is a topic that’s a little bit different than how to run your own business, but what can a community or what can a government do as a way of nurturing business. I think that also can and should be taught in a fundamentally different way. The new book that I am working on right now is called Reinventing Economic Development and one of the messages that I try to convey is that even as we are undertaking programmes in Transition towns around our style of economic development, it’s important to figure out models that pay for themselves.
For example, one can conceive of lots of ways of doing a ‘buy local’ programme. One way of doing it is campaigns, signs on billboards and buses and putting all kinds of messages out there to the general public. Unfortunately that costs money, and that money usually has to be fronted by government or foundation grants.
What I think is a better approach is you might undertake say a local loyalty card or a local debit card, and those cards have a business structure underlying them, so you’re really accomplishing the same thing, only you figure out a way to self-finance. I would include in that promoting entrepreneurship, raising local capital, developing partnerships among local businesses so they’re more competitive. These activities can be reframed in revenue-generating ways that allow them to be self-financing and grow, and also in a way to insulate themselves from the inevitable changes of government.
What we see in the United States is that economic development programmes yo-yo as various governments come in and out and it’s just a very unstable environment for doing anything. So getting a bunch of more modest small-scale, self-financing programmes supporting local business is a much better way of doing economic development. That’s part of what I’d want to teach as well.
Lastly, what’s your sense of what a tipping point looks like? You said at the beginning that your sense is that as an argument localisation is winning. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s really hard to know whether things are moving or whether they’re not moving. The thing with tipping points really is you can only see them with hindsight I guess?
There’s probably a bunch of them. The one that I think about the most goes back to this shift of money from global companies, of investment capital from global companies to local companies. Because the level of misallocation of capital is so profound and frankly complete right now, I think that once people begin to figure out how to shift money into local business, that could proceed very, very quickly.
In the United States, as I’ve argued, there will probably be a 15 trillion dollar shift over time, from Wall Street to Main Street. The first trillion dollar move hasn’t happened, won’t happen for a while. But when the first trillion dollars moves, people are going to notice, and one of the ways people are going to notice is that when there’s less capital chasing global companies, the value of those companies is going to go down. As more capital chases local businesses, the value of those companies is going to go up.
As that happens, people will take notice. People who are sitting on the fence, saying they still don’t see the evidence that local businesses are that successful or profitable. But when people start seeing those data, I think others will start to move their money. And so the next trillion moves, and another and another until all 15 moves. That inflection point will be an extremely important movement.
Hard to know when it happens, but capital moves very quickly, as countries like Argentina have realised to their peril. I think capital exiting out of Wall Street could happen very quickly and when you start to see articles about people fleeing the mainstream markets, of course many of those articles will be put in terms of panic, that’s when we’ll know that what we are doing has really taken hold.
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