Transition Culture

Illuminating, cogent and balanced – thank you both! One senses opportunity here but TBS is very slippery. Local authorities are likely to reach out to Transition initiatives for guidance on community engagement and capacity building (ours has) but as resilience is conspicuously absent in existing service delivery it’s hard to see how we might build it into the service divestment process. Authorities will struggle to maintain service delivery whilst reducing costs – can we really expect them to take on new resilience/localisation objectives at the same time? Perhaps the opportunity lies in engaging with emerging social enterprises as they prepare their bids? And perhaps engaging with private companies as they step in when communities fail to bid?

Dear Rob
Many thanks for this very helpful commentary; many people have been asking about how Transition relates to Big Society which I have not been able to answer. This will be very helpful.
I was pleased you got to presenting a proposed narrative which you begin to support with some practical examples. I would suggest this needs to go much further with the examples of practical projects. The Big Society is still a concept that lacks concrete success stories, which Transition can now provide. Success stories of real, practical projects engage people (media) more than dialogue around the concepts and will therefore be very effective in further informing public opinion and policy development.

I would suggest this another of your great articles that needs to go way further than your bog. This belongs in the nationals either as a letter or, ideally, as a press release that is fronted up with examples of how Transition has been implementing the positive strands of Big Society thinking for several years, and then leading into our reservations.

Need to listen to yesterday’s ‘You and Yours’ about ‘Healthy Lives Healthy People’. crying out for the Transition response. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wdgms

Have I ever mentioned that we could really use a PR agency?

thanks and best wishes
Hal

I think you are making a mistake by not endorsing Big Society.

Big Society represents change, an opportunity to do things differently. The fact that there is no explicit narrative is a good thing. Let’s write it ourselves. Self organise, self realise the benefits of change and everyone is committed to an approach that may differ in relation to a local context but is moving step by step towards a new future. Look at the example of the ‘Big Society Revenue and Customs’ going out there to embarrass and publicise tax evasion. Individuals are attracted to its ingenuity and daring and feeling a part of something revolutionary and new.

Imagine if we could determine how big, and exactly where, a proportion of our taxes, could be spent on Transition friendly initiatives.

I took the idea of Big Society to be a huge pat on the back for the Transition Network, basically saying we want more of this. I don’t think you should try and second guess their motivations and objectives, just seize the day, take the idea as a compliment and run with it.

As a big fan of complexity theory I would not advise specific targets as you describe for 2014. Targets can detract from greater opportunities. Far better to stick with the broader objective “to catalyse and support community responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness” and take every opportunity that comes our way while nipping in the bud anything that gets in the way.

Being an American In Canada, I am not fully aware of the details of The Big Society proposal. However, it sounds very much like the Republican ‘Devolution’ plan devised under Newt Gingrich, which was carried out as actual policy under George Bush. It is basically your local, neighbourhood Neo-Liberalism

The hallmark of the Devolution policy was volunteerism, relying on local organizations and volunteers to do the work, unpaid, that governments and government-funded agencies used to do.

It was expected that most of these services would be carried out by churches. Churches, structured on families, were presumed to be the central institutions in any community. Funding and special rights were granted to so-called “faith-based organizations” to carry out services normally done by non-sectarian local government and non-profit organizations. Moreover, “faith-based organizations” were allowed to blatantly discriminate against homosexuals other “religious objectionables” in terms of employment and providing services.

So how did it work out? Pretty poorly. Churches all over the US are going bankrupt, just like every other business organization. Donations are down; unemployed people can’t afford to donate to churches to fund their programs. And no, people aren’t flocking to churches to volunteer their newly-found “free time,” otherwise known as unemployment. Church properties are in foreclosure and closing their doors, especially in the poorest neighbourhoods where they are needed the most.

What’s wrong with the Big Society policy? It doesn’t reduce the destructive impact of BIG GLOBAL CORPORATIONS which are literally raping the public purse, controlling all our resources, products goods and services, and hogging whatever public and private debt financing is available.

In fact, if anything, Devolution/Big Society policies only give Global Corporations even more room to cannibalize local markets. With greater deregulations, it allows Global Corporations to force more unemployment and underemployment at lower wages, and waste land and local infrastructure. Want proof? look at the USA.

The only way a government-led localism/localization policy could work-if at all-is if governments at the same time totally regulated Global Corporations enough to keep them out of local markets, and deconstructed all corporations that grew above a certain size (capital/market size) so that they don’t have an unfair advantage over small, local businesses and organizations.

Good, look forward to hearing more about this at ‘Confronting Change’ next week. I must say, most people I know from TTs are overwhelmed by their existing projects, so the “if you make powers available to people they will have the time and the capacity to use them” is what resonates most with me.

The major problem with the whole “Big Society” concept is that such initiatives can only, almost by definition, work if they are initiated at the grass roots rather than being imposed from above.

A secondary problem is that most people – well over the proverbial 99.9%, in my experience – are not sufficiently motivated or public-spirited to take part, even on a short-term basis. Most people see the provision of such services as the function of government, or at least, “someone else”, and nothing to do with them. To take one example I can see right now from my study window, no-one in my street has taken it upon themselves to clear snow and ice even from the front of their own house, let alone anyone else’s.

The government’s hidden agenda, of course – as it was with the various share issues in the 1980s – is that once these services have been devolved to voluntary/charity groups and the voluntary groups have proved themselves unequal to the task (through simple ‘care fatigue’ if nothing else), the services will be offered to private companies to run at a profit. These will not be small, local private companies, but large corporations run by people who have either donated to the Conservative (and/or New Labour) Party, or who served on the various boards and committees by which the Big Society was set up.

Rather than trying to collect crumbs from the Big Society’s table, my feeling is that we should be campaigning against it and for proper funding and prioritisation of government services – not least because, by its very nature, the Big Society will fragment the effort to address the two key concerns of Transition, global warming and peak oil.

The phrase “shooting ourselves in the foot” doesn’t quite cover it…

And what Shaun said.

Or as someone said at the recent anti-cuts demonstration in Norwich ‘like turkeys voting for Christmas’ . . . I think what Shaun is saying here about the US is really key.

Meanwhile here’s a local and independent take on Transition and Big Society published in the Eastern Daily Press this summer:

http://oneworldcolumn.blogspot.com/2010/07/big-society-or-big-con.html

Very glad Transition is not endorsing this for all the reasons stated. And more . . .

Dear Rob, Peter et al – This is a very helpful constructive review of the BS idea. And of course it’s based on Transition’s very relevant parallel experience. I think we should offer D Cameron, and/or the Minister for BS, a meeting to discuss. This would assist the BS idea and climate change.

The Big Society’s lack of definition provides an opportunity for us to tell (and show) the politicians behind it, what we think it should mean. If this is the political flavour of the month, we should use it to develop dialogue with the politicians in power, but only to help deliver the things we think are important. We should stay out of “conventional” party politics and we “endorse” anything at our peril: our independence is a core strength of the Transition movement.

It’s a basic principle of Transition that over-reliance on a single source of anything creates dependency and vulnerability. We should not argue that “government should properly and fully fund something” : The principle of government as an enabler, rather than the sole provider seems preferable. That may or may not be how the government envisages The Big Society, but I don’t see why we should not interpret it and use it that way – to help deliver the changes that we believe to be essential.

I think that you are quite right in your concerns regarding the Big Society initiative.

Here in the U.S., corporations receive massive subsidies at taxpayer expense, and in particular there is an unending military effort projecting the power of our corporation-supporting government into other nations that drags down the entire national economy.

Naturally, the effects of this massive transfer of wealth upward are largely felt locally. Those engineering this rapaciousness give lip service to local autonomy only to the extent that it enables them to further restrict the trickle of wealth going back to communities, but not in any way with an intention to reduce the torrent of wealth that continues to flow toward the top.

The many years of operating this system have left communities here quite drained. Much more has been taken out than has been put back in, and the result of such looting is depletion. In particular, children are less educated and capable than their parents were, the environment is contaminated, soil is eroded, people have mental and physical illnesses, and many are without homes.

Under such circumstances, even a proportional restriction of resources both upward and downward would be no more than a way of cutting loose localities that have already been damaged, so that they can die a lonely death without further inconvenience to the “masters.” In the case of the “Big Society,” the fact that it is targeted at “deprived areas” reinforces that view. And I can’t help thinking that those who devised that name intended it as a cynical reference to the “Great Society” of the Lyndon Johnson administration in the U.S., which involved exactly the opposite – a centralized distribution of subsidies downward to the less privileged of society, as a way of appeasing and coopting the social ferment of the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movements.

I agree that leaving decisions regarding environmental impact to localities without providing any additional powers or resources to them will cause environmental concerns to be ignored in favor of short-term economic ones. There is also a diabolical aspect to this, which is that because of the continued dominance of large corporations (as Shaun has noted), the localities may be competing with one another to provide the least amount of environmental protection, for fear that some corporation will choose to invest in a neighboring area that opens its environment more fully to such exploitation.

Although at first it seems paradoxical that the transition movement should resist the cutting of funds from central government for communities while supporting localization, it is no more so than the movement’s acknowledgement that fossil fuels will have to be consumed in the process of transitioning to a non-fossil-fuel economy. There is a big difference between supporting community autonomy over local economic decisions in a way that strengthens those communities, on the one hand, and robbing them and then leaving them to their remaining meager resources, on the other.

While the position of the movement on Big Society should clearly be the one that you have implied, this discussion does bring to the fore what I consider to be one of the movement’s central dilemmas: that transition requires a redistribution of resources downward from those who presently have them at the top to those who need them in communities, while at the same time lessening the influence of central power over those communities. The enormously positive initiatives that the movement has undertaken thus far have generally avoided making the kinds of “negative” demands upon government that such an inversion would require. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but it seems that the resources for transition have come from people’s sweat, and later from local budgets, but not from central government. There is a limit to how far those local resources can take the movement – especially in communities that are already suffering from exploitation and neglect.

As you’ve noted, the present demographics of the transition movement reflect the above reality. Only those communities that are privileged enough to have their own social surplus to invest, in the form of both human leisure and financial capital, are presently involved in transition initiatives.

While it’s true that nothing good ever happens without positive content, it seems inevitable to me that the movement will eventually be drawn into confrontations over resources with established dominance hierarchies. If we look at the experience of the Navdanya cooperative in India, that is a regular feature of their political organizing work. Am I mistaken in thinking that so far no provision for this kind of a struggle has been made by the transition network?

If there is going to be such a struggle, perhaps this Big Society initiative would be a good place to pro-actively make such a stand, rather than waiting for the issue to come to the more privileged communities in a way that, by that time, might overwhelm the fledgling initiatives there. And perhaps this could be the moment for building solidarity between the organizations of the poor and the transition network. Although I have no doubt that if you do that it will bring hell down upon you, and that many of those who are smiling at you now will be gnashing their teeth, or at the very best ignoring you.

Instead of a right to buy, one might demand a right to take over privately held resources that have gone fallow as a result of economic decline, or that are contaminating the environment. For example, if there is land that is sitting idle for a certain length of time, the right to occupy and plant it could be made to revert to communities. There have been measures like these in the new progressive administrations of South America, for example, under the heading of agrarian reform. If a factory has been shut down for a certain length of time, it could be taken over and repurposed for local sustainable production. There were factory takeovers of that kind in Argentina during the economic collapse there around the turn of the century (that eventually gained the partial support of government), as documented in the film “Take It.” If there is a point source of local pollution owned by a corporation, or that consumed energy in a manner that was inconsistent with sustainability, its failure to ameliorate that satisfactorily could cause it to come under local control, and the local community could own that capital equipment as a penalty and prevention method for the damage done.

These are the kinds of localization initiatives that would challenge corporate power while building the political and economic power of local communities. But as Frederick Douglass said in a metaphor that seems tailor-made for this movement, there are no crops without plowing up the ground through struggle.

Apparently the Big Society promoters would like to put the transition towns movement into a “volunteerism” box and use it as an example of how all defects caused by corporate and central government exploitation can be thrown back upon already overburdened communities. You are very wise not to step into that box, because it is made out of pine and headed six feet under the ground. But that leaves the question of what the next step regarding this issue actually ought to be.

I’d like to replace the last two sentences with the following one:

You are very wise not to step into that box, but that leaves the question of what the next step regarding this issue actually ought to be.

That pine box reference was just a bit grim, and we need to stay cheerful, don’t we?

Nicely written article, however anyone can criticise a policy the skill comes in stepping up and showing how you can help/improve it, what additional opportunities may the transition nework provide for the big society? By suggesting these you don’t have to endorse it.

Business with the best interests of society at its heart…. good luck with that. Company directors are required by law (Companies Act) to put shareholder value before all else. Read “The Corporation” by Joel Bakan. We need to encourage the honourable exceptions like John Lewis and the Co-op, and get consumers to use their power to support them.

The Big Society so far looks suspiciously like central government delegating work to local level, but without the money. Probably part of the Conservatives’ now exposed privatisation agenda. See above re drawbacks of letting private sector run everything.

You say ‘the Big Society is little more a small sticking plaster on a large and gaping wound’. I would go further – TBS is a smoke screen, pure rhetoric designed to obscure the continuation by the Tories of the neo-liberal agenda, their ideological attack on the welfare state, and to make the working class and those least able to pay for the bank bailouts. The idea that all these cuts are essential is a lie. Our deficit has often been much higher proportionally than it is now. It was higher at the end of the 2nd World War when the welfare state, the National Health Service and free state education were introduced.
Keep building resilient communities but Don’t Believe The Hype!

An excellent article. There is no underlying narrative and the Coalition Government has misread community organising. It is not about founding community groups and running services. Community Organising is about equipping people with the skills and confidence to effectively challenge those who hold power based on shared values.