Read the whole paper on The Less Net website: http://www.lessnet.co.uk/sufficiency1.html

The author, Dr Steven Schofield (The Less Network: local economic sufficiency and security) is a freelance researcher who has written on arms conversion and international security for various peace organisations including BASIC (link now inactive), CND, CAAT and for trade unions. His main interest is workers’ control of industry and the transition to a post-capitalist economy owned by working people. Extracts, emphasis added:

The combined effects of resource depletion and climate change are leading to civilization collapse. For too long the warning signs have been ignored because globalised capitalism continues to be driven by the delusions of resource abundance, environmental stability and exponential growth.

The over-riding concern of our political and corporate elites is to maintain the pattern of post-war growth through exploiting non-renewable energy supplies and raw materials. As these become depleted, they also become increasingly inaccessible. Whatever efficiency gains are made from energy-saving technologies and from the use of renewable energy, will be outweighed by the continued pressure to support the globalised network of production and distribution and the energy-intensive requirements for extracting non-renewable resources.

Until very recently, suggesting radical alternatives to the globalised capitalist economy would probably have been dismissed as either heretical, or futile, or both.

According to the orthodox mantra, we have entered a period of unprecedented prosperity through the internationalisation of trade and production; and even if we wanted to consider alternatives, the power and the influence wielded by transnational corporations and their network of political support are such that no realistic prospect existed of developing an alternative economic system.

But the image of capitalist dynamism is crumbling, to expose a system of inherent crisis and collapse. More and more people are willing to challenge that orthodoxy and demand real, urgent and radical economic change.

Local economic sufficiency provides a radical approach, where the necessities of life, including food and water supply, energy, housing and transportation are produced and maintained at the level of local communities.

The objective will be to dramatically reduce the energy and material throughput of the economy in a way that eliminates carbon emissions, resolves other environmental stresses like air and land pollution, while at the same time, enhancing the prospects for skilled employment.

A body of work exists on localisation, with various proposals for the promotion of local alternatives. This includes:

• Colin Hines, Localisation, A Global Manifesto (Earthscan, 2000),
• Michael H. Shuman, Going Local – Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age (Routledge, 2000)

Alternatives must be provided to the existing networks through which the globalised economy operates and which are the root causes of resource depletion and global warming 

The first stage of the process will be to identify those technologies that fit into a local sufficiency framework and can achieve its objectives in a rapid timescale. At one level, there is a range of innovative technologies that can be, and to some extent, already is being applied to address these issues, notably renewable energy, and energy efficiency equipment.

Using the example of energy, a radical decentralisation of production could be carried out, based on a range of micro-systems including solar power, and community-based schemes like combined heat and power and community-owned wind farms.

In both cases, these incentives have led to the development of major new industries that employ tens of thousands of skilled workers in the design, production, installation and maintenance of equipment. By way of contrast, the UK has a truly appalling record, focusing its main government research support and subsidies on non-renewables, particularly nuclear power.

The challenge of local sufficiency is much greater since it involves both adapting and developing a range of technologies across different sectors of the economy concurrently and, by historical standards, rapidly, to provide alternatives to the existing networks through which the globalised economy operates and which are the root causes of resource depletion and global warming.

Local Technology Networks

Technologies are, normally, only acceptable when they are not disruptive to existing networks or where innovations can be subsumed within them. Local sufficiency requires major disruption across leading sectors. The state’s role will be to signal that a fundamental transition is taking place by creating an investment pool and devolving economic development powers so that local communities can implement their own programmes for local sufficiency.

In the first phase of transition, central government would prioritise the use of indigenous, renewable resources and minimise those from external, non-renewable resources, including imported oil, gas, coal and uranium.

In the UK’s case, there would be funding made available for research and development and other incentives for investment so that the country had a base line of electricity-generation of at least 50% from renewables by 2025. Necessarily, some will be large-scale systems including offshore wind and wave power, to maintain sufficient capacity, alongside incentives for smaller-scale and local projects.

But the objective would be to signal a fundamental restructuring towards local sufficiency where all future electricity generation is through renewable sources, backed up by energy efficiency and energy saving technologies that substantially reduce overall demand.  A similar process would be carried out in other sectors, including:

• local food production,
• housing
• and public transport

This would ensure that progress is made to significantly reduce the energy and material throughput of the local economy, over a ten-to-fifteen year period.

Given the radical scale of the transformation, a key element will be the capacity of local communities to create the framework for local sufficiency and to act as a catalyst for local economic development. To overcome the problems of uncertainty around the application of new technologies, communities could set up Local Technology Networks around a hub of accessible centres that provide technical and funding support, coupled to training and job experience. These Networks would be mutually supportive, cross-fertilising ideas across different sectors as the local sufficiency economy developed and matured. See Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left – Answering the Free Market Right (Blackwell, 1993), for a review of the Technology Network set up by the Greater London Council in the 1980s.

A full range of innovation, adaptation, and maintenance would be required for local sufficiency, given the diverse elements, from basic agricultural techniques for organic farming, through to advanced sensors in energy efficiency equipment.

Under a local sufficiency framework, the mix, in any case, would be determined by specific local conditions. Indeed, during the transition phase, there must be opportunities for experimentation, including schemes for local currencies and investment banks to support new programmes. Inevitably, as part of that experimentation, some initiatives will fail, but a pool of knowledge and expertise will grow as to the most appropriate and effective applications.

This raises issues about forms of ownership for local sufficiency that can support long-term investment

Certainly there is a case for local government to own natural local monopolies like water supply and public transport.  It could also be in a position to own a substantial stock of land, and to allocate it for various essential activities, including the growing of local food and the building of social housing. Here, it could enter into a range of contracts for service provision with locally-owned companies, including co-operatives, for community housing, transport and energy schemes.

These companies would, in turn, become strong local multipliers of income and investment that will provide further resources to develop the local economy.

In the medium term, some difficult issues will have to be addressed about the relationship between the local and the globalised economy. For example, when local food production and distribution has reached a stage of maturity, it must be within the powers of the local state to close down globally-dependent sites like supermarkets if it is judged that their material and energy throughput and negative environmental impact contributed to resource depletion and global warming in ways that jeopardised the resilience of the local system that was now providing a viable alternative.

Local Economic Democracy

One possible method for achieving a fair assessment of the balance between the local and the globally-dependent elements of the economy is through a democratically accountable body. A Local Economic Forum could be set up, where elected representatives assess how the local economy was functioning, based on the criteria of local sufficiency and environmental recovery. It would be its responsibility to produce an annual report, assessing the state of the local economy against agreed objectives, and to produce forecasts and recommendations, including where necessary, on the closure of sites that were damaging the prospects for local sufficiency.

Further stages in the democratisation of economic decision-making could include a Regional Economic Forum, where again, assessments of the various local programmes are made against regional objectives such as an integrated public transport network based on rail and bus travel. In this case, when the network is sufficiently robust, the forum could recommend the closure of regional airports.

These sorts of policies would release substantial areas of land that could be brought into public ownership. Land released by the closure of supermarkets could be passed on to community land trusts as community-supported agricultural schemes, or more remote sites like regional airports could become market gardens.

Local communities and locally-owned companies could work together to design new housing estates with no underground sewerage, where all waste was composted and recycled, water supplies treated through organic processes on site and all the materials for build, energy efficiency and maintenance provided locally. New forms of public transport could also be developed such as a hybrid, road/rail bus that can use an expanded rail network and continue journeys to remoter areas by road.

These are practical examples of the sorts of technologies that have already been applied or developed to the prototype stage, many others exist, and there would be no insuperable barriers to their application if a local sufficiency framework were adopted.

 

 

 

 

 

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