The rocky road to a real transition: part three
By: Paul Chatterton and Alice Cutler from the Trapese Collective (following the link you get the PDF-file including photo)
Part three
WHAT MODELS OF ORGANISING ARE BEING USED?
As we mentioned earlier, the Transition initiative has its origins in the
permaculture-inspired Kinsale Energy Descent Plan. The three main
permaculture principles of earth care, fair share and people care are
the guiding lights of a system of design and implementation, which
involves designing systems that recycle energy as much as possible and
are self-sustaining. As the TT network say: “we used immense amounts of
creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy up slope, and
that there's no reason for us not to do the same on the down slope.”
This is a really progressive model. The bigger challenge is how this
model becomes shared by many rather than by a small number of
practitioners or gatekeepers. We need to question models that look to a
few experts for the answers, especially when these people are mostly
well-educated, white males. What other voices are not represented?
The most resilient and durable ways of organising are those where
decisions are made, understood and implemented widely, reducing
reliance on fixed leaders or fixed ideas. While it is understandable that
people look to effective projects and places for inspiration and
examples, a reliance on fixed ideas is also a potential weakness as it
limits creativity, flexibility to local contexts and does not allow for
autonomous decisions. Effective movements have to build in this broad
participation from the start. Sure, many people are used to having
someone in charge and charismatic strong leaders can be an effective
way to mobilise people. But they can also be non-constructive and
leave movements exposed to the whims and ideals of a small number of
people who could decide to leave at any point. If things don't work out,
leaders can easily be blamed, co-opted, and marginalised making the
wider group or movement vulnerable. Centralised organising also asks
the other participants to trust that leaders remain a benign influence
and don’t renege on promises, or worse create cliques to push their
agendas through.
At the moment in the national TT network, there are paid staff, who
aim to galvanise supporters and encourage new initiatives. In local
groups volunteers through working groups push the process forward. In
some cases this is through a hub group, where communication between
groups occurs and networks develop. Other TT projects have been
quick to look for funding for paid positions to do administration roles,
pay for office space etc. Setting up an office with paid staff raises
questions that have to be addressed. What relationship exists between
paid staff and other volunteers, and all the other people who are meant
to be part of the transition? Who does the money come from and what
restrictions or reciprocal arrangements do funders want? How are the
paid people accountable, chosen and democratically representative, if
this really is a participatory movement? What happens when the
funding runs out? This model is often justified by ideas of efficiency of
organising, but there is also a real danger that it will alienate people
from feeling responsibility for the process. Another guiding principle of
TT that is equally controversial is that of co-operation with the local
Council.
T he role for local government that is emerging, favoured by government
officials and transition initiatives alike, is "supporting, not driving". We always
knew that local government would play a crucial role in Transition Initiatives in
the UK and Ireland. And over the recent months, we're seeing that role emerge
from both the existing transitioning communities and from new communities in
the earliest stages of contact with us. Our first surprise was just how willing the
local councils are to engage meaningfully with existing transition initiatives. Our
second is the number of communities where the first person to contact us is from
the local council. This is a recent phenomenon, and one that we welcome
wholeheartedly. (From the Transition Towns Primer)
Again here, pragmatic arguments can be made for such an approach
but there are many lessons to be learned from the experience of
environmental charities and NGOs who have been working using a
similar model for the last thirty years. Agenda 21 was heralded as the
beginning of sustainable planning at a council level, but what
happened here is very instructive. As someone involved recalled, “This
global initiative that started at the 1992 Rio World summit for
sustainability had so much potential. In one group in Liverpool it
transpired that Cargill, (the agro-business giant), were sponsoring the
LA21 campaign. Very soon a potentially strong grassroots movement was
co-opted and lost within local authority structures and simply became a
useful greenwash alongside the ‘business as usual’ economic model.” It is
in governments’ interest to recuperate and co-opt this kind of initiative
as a way to deflect criticisms and to satisfy those calling for real
change. Elected representatives also bring resources and
‘professionalism’ and are trusted to make all the fundamental decisions
so generally people can defer responsibility and stay passive. An easy
way to neutralise a good idea is to simply employ your critics to work
for you - absorb the idea and deradicalise it. So transition towns could
become another adjunct of government policy. If we do not guard
against it, they will give it an office and it will sit alongside economic
growth as one of the shining examples that government can use to say
that it is doing all it can, when in fact it cannot do anything of the sort.
It is useful here to remember another context. Back in 2005, a large
coalition of NGOs and community groups joined the government under
the banner of ‘Make Poverty History’ during the 2005 meeting of the
G8 in Scotland. Despite the hard work by many people to achieve real
change, what resulted from this movement was largely a deradicalisation
and clever government co-option of a potentially
effective anti-poverty movement. The results are there for us to see. A
heady mix of Bono, Sir Bob Geldof and Gordon Brown convinced us
that everything possible was being done to tackle global poverty, when
looking back we now know that very little was done, especially in
relation to the pledge to increase the proportion of GDP (Gross
Domestic Product) that is spent on aid. One outcome was that the G8,
an unelected global institution, was further legitimised by the positive
publicity lent to it, which allowed it to evade criticism and scrutiny
even further. Some South African commentators drew the link from
Geldof’s previous attempts to solve global hunger twenty years ago,
which failed because they ignored the countervailing roles of imperial
power relations, capital accumulation, unreformable global institutions
and venal local elites.
T hese problems repeated and indeed amplified in Live 8 and the message
became one of handouts and charity, not one of liberation defined by Africans
themselves or the reality that we are actually resisting neo-colonialism and
neoliberalism ourselves. (Charles Abugre, head of policy for Christian Aid, one of
the organisations in the MPH coalition, from the Carbon Neutral Myth.)
The history of the Green Party is also fascinating in this respect. I n
the UK, a set of really transformatory ideas have emerged from the
Green Party based around low carbon, relocalised economies which are
quietly put to one side when they enter the pragmatic negotiations of
coalition power in local government. While one of the most progressive
Green Parties in the world in Germany has brought many
environmental changes, it has stopped being an oppositional force to
transform society, and instead has become a useful way to green the
capitalist economy. Concessions were made in order to stay in power
rather than sticking to the more radical guiding principles, such as
dropping the commitment to a nuclear disarmament policy. Other
instances include active support for deployment of German troops and
the overseeing of repressive policies against those resisting trains
transporting nuclear waste. These acts have seriously damaged the very
potent German environmental movement.
The TT movement needs to have a serious discussion about its
relationship to central and local government, as these might be the
biggest obstacles there are to a real transition. In the end, groups will
develop models and ways of working which reflect the nature of their
town or neighbourhood – each with their own mix of local institutions
and individuals. In one place, a progressive council may play a strong
role; in another it might not play a role at all, or even be a major block.
Whatever happens, local control over how the process evolves should
be respected. TT is well placed to fulfil the Government’s objectives for
‘complimentary government’. In the whole move to ‘double devolution’
(from White Hall to Town Hall, then to the people), the Government is
looking for opportunities to “empower” local communities, as long as
they implement government policy that doesn’t rock the boat, which
normally has little to do with transition, as we understand it. So in the
push for community empowerment, TT initiatives could quite quickly
find themselves running bits of the welfare state – gardens, community
services, local food - absolving the local state even more of its
responsibilities. This may be a good thing in terms of getting things
running along the lines of a transition, but currently taxes are paid to
ensure free access to these services. Would local taxes be accordingly
reduced, and would transition initiatives receive their slice of the
municipal budget? And where would Government put the savings in
public expenditure? Can cycle lanes, allotments and renewable energy
contend with surveillance, military spending, subsidies for big business
or the public debt in the current model of organising society?
Looking at anti-globalisation, feminist, peace and peasant movements,
from around the world, one can see that there many other ways of
organising that involve participatory tools to enhance direct democracy.
Consensus decision-making, participatory budgeting, spokes councils,
group facilitation, skill sharing and popular education are just some of
the ways to ensure people genuinely participate rather than just being
consulted on issues. The open source movement (including everything
from Indymedia and Wikipedia to freeware) is also a great example of
how peer-to-peer democracy can work, and how many eyes focused on
certain problems can come up with more workable solutions that are
widely consented upon and collectively owned. What is key here is that
deferment of responsibility is one cause of the current situation, people
are largely divorced from the most important decisions and the effects
of everyday actions. Taking back control and responsibility will not
come from a quick fix but will need time for people to learn cooperation,
mutual aid and solidarity.
BUT DOESN'T THE HUGE THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE MEAN
THAT THIS TIME, PEOPLE REALLY WILL CHANGE?
All the evidence about the real prospect of ‘dangerous’ climate change
is there, especially through the recent IPCC Fourth Synthesis Report.
Climate change does present more striking evidence than ever that a
finite planet cannot support infinite growth. Although there are
certainly positive signs of action, it is dangerous to assume that
knowledge about any particular issue will result in any set of actions,
as people's responses will depend on their education, background,
family and economic position. We are up against so many problems on
a global scale: wars, slavery, the loss of common assets, colonisation,
privatisation, environmental devastation, massive social inequality,
spiralling debt, neo liberal free trade agreements, racist immigration
controls to name a few. One way to understand the lack of real change
is that in face of this barrage of problems, a large proportion are often
too disempowered, defeated or distracted to respond to, or act upon,
climate change. However, focussing on individual action negates the
importance of structural change and working on the way we do things
collectively. It is not just powerful groups of people who obstruct
change but the many complex systems of race, gender, class that
maintain social hierarchies.
It is useful here to clarify between two very different types of changes.
There are possible environmental improvements in a place (recycling or
reducing pollution in a local river for example) and environmental
improvements to a system (stabilising carbon in the global atmosphere
for example). The crucial point is that no causal relationship can be
assumed between the two types of change. For example making
environmental improvements in our communities does not necessarily
make improvements of the second type, like protecting global
ecosystems. For this we need very different kinds of changes such as
institutional reorganisation, curbing corporate power and drastically
shifting the way the economy and consumer society works. These
involve confronting all sorts of vested interests and wealthy elites and
it is here that we have to be realistic about what kinds of changes we
can achieve without some kind of overarching societal change. Many
changes to a place can be made, but they don’t really add up to a long
lasting and substantial transition, not least globally. So while local food
or local recycling and sustainable consumption are essential to inspire
and galvanise people equally important are the movements that are
committed to making more difficult changes which will protect the
wider shared global eco systems. Depressingly, what previous struggles
would suggest though is that powerful groups will do everything they
can to dig themselves in and protect their position rather than give up
concessions. Essentially this is because they are protecting and
sustaining the current system at whatever cost. Acceptance that it is
this system that lays at the root cause is the only way to truly tackle
climate change.