Group items tagged

range of economic models that change both ownership and ecological outcomes. Co-ops, for instance,

system

The broad goal is democratized ownership of the economy for the “99 percent” in an ecologically sustainable and participatory community-building fashion. The name of the game is practical work in the here and now—and a hands-on process that is also informed by big picture theory and in-depth knowledge.

real world projects—from solar-powered businesses to worker-owned cooperatives and state-owned banks

Many are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs.

The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding

participation and green concerns

Other models fit into what author Marjorie Kelly calls the “generative economy”—efforts that inherently nurture the community and respect the natural environment

socially responsible

corporation designed to benefit the public

responsible banking

social enterprises” use profits for social or community serving goals

new banking

credit union

What to do about large-scale enterprise in a “new economy”

A range of new theorists have also increasingly given intellectual muscle to the movement. Some, like Richard Heinberg, stress the radical implications of ending economic growth. Former presidential adviser James Gustav Speth calls for restructuring the entire system as the only way to deal with ecological problems in general and growth in particular. David Korten has offered an agenda for a new economy which stresses small Main Street business and building from the bottom up. (Korten also co-chairs a “New Economy Working Group” with John Cavanagh at the Institute of Policy Studies.) Juliet Schor has proposed a vision of “Plentitude” oriented in significant part around medium-scale, high tech industry. My own work on a Pluralist Commonwealth emphasizes a community-building system characterized by a mix of democratized forms of ownership ranging from small co-ops all the way up to public/worker-owned firms where large scale cannot be avoided. The movement obviously confronts the enormous entrenched power of an American political economic system dominated by very large banking and corporate interests. Writers like Herman Daly and David Bollier have also helped establish theoretical foundations for fundamental challenges to endless economic growth, on the one hand, and the need to transcend privatized economics in favor of a “commons” understanding, on the other. The awarding in 2009 of the Nobel Prize to Elinor Ostrom for work on commons-based development underlined recognition at still another level of some of the critical themes of the movement.

Social Venture Network

Worker Cooperatives

Consumer Cooperative Management

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

Farmer Cooperatives

Community Land Trust Network

Sustainable Business Council

“When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn’t have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.”