In the following class, we review together with the professor Ashish Kothari, what are alternatives that challenge the mainstream idea of development, top down transition towards a more democratic, self empowered and local creation of alternatives that approach together the needs for a sustainable living with the consolidation of social resilience. The following two articles nicely explain what has been done, what is the framework that gathers but continuously evolve to support such innitiatives, as well as the principles underneath it. They do not aim to replicate to scale, but rather engage in an open learning journey that recognises the pluriverse of views and transitions that are sufficiently radical from the South.
These Alternative Economies Are Inspirations for aSustainable World
During Covid and in India alone, 75 million people fell below the poverty line in 2020; globally, hundreds of millions who depend for their survival and livelihoods on the long-distance trade and exchange of goods and services were badly hit. Threats to survival also emerge when war or other dislocations stop the movement of goods. In such crises, communities fare better if they have local markets and services and can provide their own food, energy and water while taking care of the less fortunate.
Economic forces are intimately link social injustice and ecological destruction. The era of colonization and slavery vastly expanded the economic and military reach of some nation-states and their allied corporations, enabling the worldwide extraction of natural resources and exploitation of labor to feed the emerging industrial revolution in Europe and North America. Economic historians, anthropologists , and others have demonstrated how this painful history laid the foundation of today’s global economy. Apart from driving irreversible ecological damage, this economic system robs many communities of access to the commons—to rivers, meadows and forests essential for their survival—while creating a dependence on external markets. The massive suffering during the pandemic has merely exposed these historical and contemporary fault lines.
Though dazzlingly diverse, the alternatives emerging worldwide share certain core principles. The most important is sustaining or reviving community governance of the commons—of land, ecosystems, seeds, water and knowledge. This alternatives successfully avoided food shortages during the lockdowns, Emerging from a situation of extreme malnutrition and social and gender discrimination in the 1980s, Indian farmers engaging in this alternatives now enjoy food sovereignty and economic security. Not only are they weathering the pandemic, but in 2020 each family in DDS contributed around 10 kilograms of food grains to the region’s relief effort for those without land and livelihoods.
“This is the outcome of 20 years’ consistent work in relocalizing our food system, from a time when we had become too dependent on outside agencies for our basic needs,” farmer Mariano Sutta Apocusi told Local Futures , an organization dedicated to strengthening communities worldwide, in August 2020.
“Focusing on the local has helped us improve access to and affordability of a great diversity of food products—especially native potatoes, quinoa, kiwicha, other Andean tubers and maize, which we cultivate using Indigenous agroecological methods.” The communities instituted strong health and safety measures when the pandemic hit, even as they harvested a bumper crop and distributed more than a ton of potatoes to migrants, the elderly and a shelter for abused teenage mothers in Cusco town.
In Europe, many “solidarity economy” initiatives, which promote a culture of caring and sharing, swung into action when COVID-related lockdowns rendered massive numbers of people jobless. In Lisbon, Portugal, the social centers Disgraça and RDA69, which strive to re-create community life in an otherwise highly fragmented urban situation, reached out with free or cheap food to whoever needed it. They provided not only meals but also spaces where refugees, the homeless, unemployed young people and others who might otherwise have fallen through the cracks could interact with and develop relationships with better-off families, creating a social-security network of sorts.
The value of these alternative ways of living goes far beyond their resilience during relatively short-term upheavals like the pandemic, however. The worldviews of peoples who live close to nature should be incorporated into global strategies for wildlife protection, such as at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. Fending off calamities such as biodiversity collapse will require not only environmental adaptations but also radical changes to the dominant economic, social and even political paradigms.
AN ENLIGHTENING JOURNEY
Activism would teach us at least as much as we learned in school and college. While investigating the sources of Delhi’s air pollution, for instance, we interviewed villagers who lived around a coal-fired power plant just outside the city. They turned out to be far worse affected by its dust and pollution than we city dwellers were—although they got none of its electricity. The benefits of the project flowed mainly to those who were already better off, whereas the disempowered experienced most of the harms.
In late 1980 we traveled to the western Himalayas to meet the protagonists of the iconic Chipko movement . Since 1973 village women had been protecting trees slated for logging by the forest department or by companies based in the Indian plains with their bodies. The deodars being felled, as well as the oaks, rhododendrons, and other species, were sacred, the women told us, as well as being essential for their survival. They provided cattle fodder, fertilizer and wild foods and sustained their water sources. Even as an urban student, I could see the central role that rural women played in protecting the environment—as well as the injustice of distant bureaucrats making decisions with little concern for how they impacted those on the ground. Soon after, my friends and I learned that 30 major dams were to be constructed on the Narmada River basin in central India. Millions worshipped the Narmada as a tempestuous but bountiful goddess—so pristine that the Ganga is believed to visit her every year to wash away her sins. Trekking, boating and riding buses along its length of 1,300 kilometers, we were dazzled by waterfalls plunging into spectacular gorges, densely forested slopes teeming with wildlife, fields of diverse crops, thriving villages and ancient temples, all of which would be drowned. We began to question the concept of development itself. Surely the destruction would far outweigh any possible benefits? Almost four decades later our fears have proved tragically true. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people still await proper rehabilitation, and the river downstream of the dams has become a trickle—enabling seawater to reach 100 kilometers inland. During my wanderings over the decades and especially while researching a book with economist Aseem Shrivastava, I became aware of a far more hopeful trend. Across the country and indeed around the world, hundreds of social movements are empowering the marginalized to wrest back control over their lives and livelihoods. In 2014 Kalpavriksh initiated a series of gatherings called Vikalp Sangam , or Confluence of Alternatives, where the drivers of these spirited efforts could come together, share ideas and experiences, and collaborate, helping to build a critical mass for change.These interactions and eclectic reading gave me insights into a vital question I was investigating: What are the essential characteristics of desirable and viable alternatives?
COMMONALITIES
The most important commonality is sustaining or reviving community governance of the commons—of land, ecosystems, seeds, water and knowledge.
As Elinor Ostrom, demonstrated, however, the commons are far more sustainably governed by the communities from which they are wrested than by the governments or corporations that claim them. This awareness has given rise to innumerable grassroots efforts to protect the surviving commons and reestablish control over others. What constitutes the commons has also expanded to include “physical and knowledge resources that we all share for everyone’s benefit,” explains sociologist Ana Margarida Esteves, who helps with the European Commons Assembly, an umbrella organization for hundreds of such endeavors.
In the economic sphere, we need to get away from the development paradigm—including the notion that economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is the best means of achieving human goals. In its place, we need systems for respecting ecological limits, emphasizing well-being in all its dimensions and localizing exchanges to enable self-reliance—as well as good measures of these indicators.
We also need freedom from centralized monetary and financial control. Many experiments in alternative currencies and economies based on trust and local exchanges are underway. Perhaps the most innovative of these is “time banking,” a system for swapping services founded on the principle that all skills or occupations merit equal respect.
Work itself should be redefined. Globalized modernity has created a chasm between work and leisure—which is why we wait desperately for the weekend! Many movements seek to bridge this gap, enabling greater enjoyment, creativity and satisfaction. In industrial countries, people are bringing back manual ways of making clothes, footwear or processed foods under banners such as “The future is handmade!”
In the political sphere, the centralization of power inherent in the nation-state, whether democratic or authoritarian, disempowers many peoples. The Sapara nation in Ecuador and the Adivasis of central India argue for a more direct democracy , where power resides primarily with the community. The state—insofar as it continues to exist—would then mainly help with larger-scale coordination while being strictly accountable to decision-making units on the ground.
Moving toward such radical democracy would suggest a world with far fewer borders, weaving tens of thousands of relatively autonomous and self-reliant communities into a tapestry of alternatives. These societies would connect with one another through “horizontal” networks of equitable and respectful exchange, as well as through “vertical” but downwardly accountable institutions that manage processes and activities across the landscape.
THE SEARCH FOR RADICAL ALTERNATIVES: KEY ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES
There is an ongoing process called Vikalp Sangam (‘Alternatives Confluences’), a platform for networking of groups and individuals working on alternatives to the currently dominant model of development and governance, in various spheres of life.
The Sangams are a space for people to exchange experiences and ideas emerging from practice and thinking in a whole range of endeavour: sustainable agriculture and pastoralism, renewable energy, decentralised governance, community health, craft and art revival, multiple sexualities, inclusion of the differently abled, alternative learning and education, community-based conservation, decentralised water management, urban sustainability,
The Framework notes the structural roots of ecological unsustainability, inequity and injustice, and loss of life and livelihoods, including: “centralised and heirarchical state systems, capitalist corporate control, patriarchy and other forms of social and cultural inequality (including caste), alienation from the rest of nature and from our own spiritual selves, and undemocratic control of knowledge and technology”. The focus here we focus on “paths and visions forward” assuming a “broadly shared sense of the crises”.The Framework proposes that alternatives are built on the following key elements or pillars, interconnected and overlapping:
- Ecological integrity and resilience, including the conservation of nature and natural diversity, maintenance of ecological functions, respect for ecological limits (local to global), and ecological ethics in all human actions.
- Social well-being and justice, including fulfilling lives (physically, socially, culturally, and spiritually), equity between communities and individuals, communal and ethnic harmony; and erasure of hierarchies and divisions based on faith, gender, caste, class, ethnicity, ability, and other attributes.
- Direct and delegated democracy, with decision-making startingin spaces enabling every person to participate meaningfully, and building from this to larger levels of governance by downwardly accountable institutions; and all this respectful of the needs and rights of those currently marginalised.
- Economic democracy, in which local communities and individuals have control over the means of production, distribution, exchange, and markets, based on the principle of localization for basic needs and trade built on this; central to this would be the replacement of private property by the commons.
- Cultural diversity and knowledge democracy, with multiple co-existing knowledge systems in the commons, respect to a diversity of ways of living, ideas and ideologies, and encouragement to creativity and innovation.
What strategies could lead us to such alternative futures?
- Resistance, civil disobedience, and non-cooperation (both collective and individual) towards the forces of unsustainability, inequality and injustice, and the decolonisation of mind-sets and attitudes and institutions
- Re-common what has been privatised or ‘enclosed’ in the past, facilitating the voice of dalits, adivasis, women, landless, disabled, minorities, nomads, ‘denotified’ tribes, workers, and other marginalised sections.
- Engaging with political formations in both party and non-party form, and using available democratic means of redressal and transformation while pushing for further enhancement of such spaces.
- Art and crafts are also not for instrumentalist use only; it is vital to integrate these “into everyday lives, fostering the creative in every individual and collective, bringing work and pleasure together.”
- Mutual learning with other peoples and civilisations across the world
Conclusion
The VikalpSangam process has, as one of its long-term objectives, the creation of a political mass of people who can affect larger change. It is too early in the process to say whether it is moving in this direction. The Framework described above could be one basis for an alternative, grassroots-up visioning of the future of India; but for this much more churning and dialogue is needed, and much greater work on creating peoples’ agendas in every sector or field of endeavour.
Comments
Post a Comment