Strategies for surviving dangerous climate change: localisation
Thursday 29th March 2007
University of Sheffield
Informatics Collaboratory of the Social Sciences (ICOSS)
219 Portobello Street
Sheffield, S1 4DP
This seminar on ‘localisation’ is the second of six seminars in a two-year ESRC-funded series that examines what climate change and resource constraints might mean for local economic development strategies.
For this second seminar, we look specifically at what Peak Oil and Climate Change might mean for debates about the ‘localisation’ of economic activity. Normative arguments advocating some form of ‘localisation’ strategy have long been central to notions of alternative local economic development as well as to ideas about potential green futures. Haughton (1999) for example places localization at the centre of a vision of local economic development that involves restructuring for community and ecology.
Economically and socially, localisation is about building on endogenous resources, rethinking ideas of value, and re-empowering communities in an era of purported globalisation and ruthless economic restructuring. Environmentally, localisation resonates with the goals of reducing the ecological footprints of people and places, and rebalancing the urban metabolism. A growing range of academic and popular literature attests to the appeal of localisation as a possible route out of economic and ecological crisis.
And yet ‘localisation’ still remains very much at the margins of local economic development theory and practice. There is scepticism about whether it can ever be possible to decouple the ‘local’ from the ‘global’, or to forge sustainable local alternatives (be they non-capitalist, extra-capitalist, social, or green) when local action is apparently so thoroughly bound up with what happens elsewhere. It is in this context that the second ESRC Seminar seeks to address three main sets of issues:
(1) How might localisation offer a basis for local economic strategy?
(2) What does localisation imply and what is required to localize local economies in terms of resources, value systems, incentive structures etc?
(3) To what extent might dangerous climate change and peak oil open up possibilities for localisation strategies?
In order to address these issues the Seminar brings together provocative discussion papers from four leading localisation thinkers:
Dr Molly Scott Cato, University of Wales Cardiff
'Carbon, Community and Conviviality: The Bioregional Economy and the Economics of Empowerment'
Molly is an economist working at the Cardiff School of Management at UWIC
and is also the Green Party speaker on economic matters. Her approach to
economics is to seek to replace capitalism with an economic system which is
benign for people and the planet. She is author of Market, Schmarket:
Building the Post-Capitalist Economy which displays not only how capitalism
is a recent and insecure template for organizing economic life but also how
many alternatives exist and that it is wholly feasible to imagine and enact
alternatives to capitalism.
David Boyle, New Economics Foundation
”Small is still beautiful: localism and public services”
David is editor of Radical Economics and a long-standing fellow of the New Economics Foundation. He is author of many books, including Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make us Happy and the Joseph Rowntree report Hidden Work.
Dr Gill Seyfang, University of East Anglia
”Carbonopoly: Localisation and Carbon Reduction Using Complementary Currencies”
Gill holds an RCUK Academic Fellowship in Carbon Mitigation and Management, in the Centre for Social and Economic Research in the Global Environment (CSERGE) at UEA. Her research in 'Low Carbon Lifestyles' focuses on grassroots initiatives for sustainable consumption, including community currencies, local food systems, and low-impact eco-housing.
Dr Valerie Fournier, University of Leicester
“The Politics of De-Growth: questions and possibilities for a sustainable future”
Valerie is Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies and Co-ordinator of the Collective for Alternative Organisation Studies (CAOS) at the University of Leicester School of Management. Her research interests centre on imagining and enacting alternatives to ‘carbon-based’ capitalism, and include: rural economies and sustainable development, alternative forms of exchange and markets, co-operative and communal organisational possibilities. She has written several papers on organisational and economic alternatives, and is co-author, with Martin Parker and Patrick Reidy, of the forthcoming Dictionary of Alternatives Possibilities (Zed, 2007). For the past 3 years, she has divided her time between Leicester University and various rural communes in France and Italy.
Background to the series
For the past twenty or thirty years local economies have been having to cope with long term structural changes associated with the decline of manufacturing and the growth of the new service and ‘knowledge’ economies. This restructuring process is now largely complete, and given that there has been a long period of uninterrupted economic growth in the UK since the mid-1990s, seemingly there is a consensus about the way forward for local economies. The current ‘taken for granted’ local economic development paradigm focuses on:
• Competition for investment within the national and international division of labour
• An overwhelming emphasis on global competitiveness, place-marketing and the knowledge-based economy as the basis for sustainable economic and social regeneration
• Maximising urban assets such as infrastructure and communications development;
• A social emphasis on ‘creative’ middle-classes as the new drivers for growth.
This new consensus is carbon- and oil-intensive, with local and national governments reluctant to impose restrictions that might threaten potential competitive advantage. The result appears to be a race to the bottom in social and environmental terms as ‘going for growth’ takes precedence. However, the new consensus takes little cognisance of three of the major threats that all local economies will have to deal with over the next twenty years:
• Climate change, leading to extremes of and greater instabilities of weather, or economic activities which fit current climatic conditions becoming no longer viable;
• The end of the era of cheap and plentiful oil, with the knock on that will have for carbon-fuelled economies.
• Growing international pressure to re-regulate human resource use, with the soft focus of sustainable development gradually giving way to the hard economics of the low-carbon society;
Registration
The seminar is free and lunch will be provided, but the seminar is restricted to 40 participants. Places will be allocated on a first come, first served basis, and prior registration is required. Please contact either of the seminar organisers: Colin Williams ([log in to unmask]) or Aidan While ([log in to unmask]).
There are also a limited number of ESRC-funded travel bursaries available on a strictly first come first served basis for postgraduate students and practitioners – again, please send applications to Colin or Aidan.
More details of the seminar series and forthcoming seminars can be found at:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/seminars/ESRC-funded_seminar_series.htm
Please note that from 1st September 2006, my new e-mail and address is:
Colin C Williams
Professor of Public Policy
School of Management
University of Sheffield
9 Mappin Street
Sheffield S1 4DT
United Kingdom
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Editor, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, http://www.emeraldinsight.com/info/journals/ijssp/ijssp.htm
Editor, International Journal of Community Currencies Research, http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/ijccr
To see my book, 'Cash-in-Hand Work', visit http://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalogue.aspx?is=1403921725
For details of my book, 'A Commodified World? mapping the limits of capitalism', visit:
http://zedweb.cybergecko.net/cgi-raw/a.cgi?1%2084277%20354%202
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