Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Though the community currency failed to materialize in Barcelona, the city immediately to its northeast, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, created a local currency this year. This currency — the grama — was designed to be an innovative way of enabling the city’s residents to protect their livelihoods from external economic threats
Degrowth means primarily the abolition of economic growth as a social objective. This implies a new direction for society, one in which societies will use fewer natural resources and will organize and live differently from today. Ecological economists define degrowth as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that will reduce societies’ throughput of energy and raw materials.
If climate crisis has a silver lining, it may be the power to provoke residents of high-GDP high-emission countries to question the portrayal of their own societies as “developed, ” in the sense of full-grown, perfected, complete.
Unlocking the Next Economy is about creating access to the physical assets of historical organisations to support local economic change. Stir To Action’s year-long pilot will explore how these physical assets can be an important part of Community Economic Development (CED), and how un- and underused churches could specifically be a part of this process.
The eight richest billionaires now command as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population. Analyzing the roots of such disparity has become a focus of economists; doing something about it, a focus of social justice activists. In his new book Success and Luck, behavioral economist Robert Frank asks, on the more granular level, why do some succeed in life while others do not?
The problem with the Eurozone is that it is a monetary union that does not have the necessary requisites of a fiscal union and political union that would set up the rules and mechanisms to allow the central authorities to move capital from surplus to deficit regions.
The Commons is maturing politically, its methods and principles becoming more visible and its participants winning municipal elections in a variety of European cities. How did this happen, and what happens next? First, a look at our present political context, and then some observations on the birth and trajectory of this new wave of commons politics.
Makerspaces, this essay argues, can serve as hubs and vehicles for citizen-driven transformation and, thus, play a key part in a more inclusive, participatory and commons-oriented vision of the smart city.
For centuries before and after the European colonization of the Mid-Atlantic region of North America, fishing and shell fishing using traditional methods fed the people of our Bio-region.
As an open source tractor, the Oggún uses common, off-the-shelf parts; uses the same components and subcomponents in multiple pieces of equipment; uses locally sourced parts, where possible; uses simplistic designs that allow the user to make unique adaptation and modifications.
As our focus shifts from individuals and individual species as the unit of survival to the collective of life — its complex dynamic interactions and relationships — we begin to see that collaborative and symbiotic patterns and interactions are of more fundamental importance than competition as a driving force of evolution.
Thankfully, the elements of a new imaginary are all around us. The outlines of a new political economy that is both humane and in which the fulfillment of the person is conjoined to the well-being of one’s community are already visible…
