Professor of Strategy and SustainabilityUniversity of RoehamptonGreen Party Economics Speaker

A Bioregional Economy

Regeneration and Provisioning: Moving on from Money

Nature is not a place to visit, it is homeGary Snyder

Where We’re Going

• What is the economy for? From financialisation to a provisioning economy

• Who do we think we are? Replacing status competition with re-embedding

• Where do we belong? The bioregional economy

• The lubrication of a fully functioning economy is the most basic role

• But it is incompatible with the role as a commodity in international speculation

Finanancialisation: Loss of Values

• ‘Art critic Alastair Sooke tracks down the ten most expensive paintings . . . Gaining access to the glittering world of the super-rich, Sooke discovers why the planet's richest people want to spend their millions on art.’

Loss of Control

• ‘The most striking revelations in the 322-page prospectus launched the Glazer family last week to seek £500m in new bond loans for Manchester United were the five short paragraphs detailing the millions of pounds the family is personally taking out from the Old Trafford football club.’

A Balanced Economy

• ‘the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system’

• ‘previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets’

Challenging our preconceptions

Welfare and community• Side by side with family

housekeeping, there have been three principles of production and distribution:ReciprocityRedistributionMarket

• Prior to the market revolution, humanity’s economic relations were subordinate to the social. Now economic relations are now generally superior to social ones.

Citizens’ Income

• Automatic payments depending on need• Tax-free and without means• Income tax and employees’ national insurance

contributions would be merged into a new income tax

• The tax-free allowance would balance out the Citizens’ Income for higher earners

Important changes in welfare• Citizenship becomes the basis of entitlement• The individual would be the tax/benefits unit• The Citizen’s Income would not be withdrawn

as earnings and other income rises• The availability-for-work rule would be

abolished• Access to a Citizen’s Income would be easy and

unconditional

Can we imagine buying happiness?

Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?

Income and Social Connectedness

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

Low Income Low-MediumIncome

MediumIncome

High-MediumIncome

High Income

Lif

e S

ati

sfa

cti

on

(0

-10

)

Strong Social Connections

Average Social Connections

Poor Social Connections

Do we spend enough time making friends?

Transition and Innovation

• Market drives only profitable innovation

• Built-in obsolescence works to stimulate further demand

• Pheobus cartel: evidence of pressure against innovation

• What alternative incentives can we find?

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’ Wordsworth

• ‘As a nation we are already so rich that consumers are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy a very large share – perhaps as much as 40 per cent – of what is produce, and the pressure will get progressively less in the years ahead. But if consumers exercise their option not to buy a large share of what is produced, a great depression is not far behind.’

• A McGraw-Hill executive writing in Advertising Age in 1955

Opportunities offered by the transition to a green economy

What is a bioregion?

• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries’

• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region

An economic bioregion

• A bioregional economy would be embedded within its bioregion and would acknowledge ecological limits.

• Bioregions as natural social units determined by ecology rather than economics

• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic resources such as water, food, products and services.

• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity

Key characteristics of the bioregional economy—

• Locality• Accountability• Community• Conviviality

Cosmopolitan Localism

• Cultural openness and maximisation of exchange that can be achieved in a world of limited energy, within a framework of self-sufficiency in basic resources and the limiting of trade to those goods which are not indigenous due to reasons of climate or local speciality.

Accountability as reconnection• Your bioregion is

your ‘backyard’• Each bioregion

would be the area of the global economy for which its inhabitants were responsible

Community not markets

• Reclaiming of public space for citizenship and relationship.

• ‘putting the economy in its place’

• Market as agora—public space for debate and sharing of ideas, not just commerce

Conviviality instead of productivity• I choose the term

‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment

• I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members. (Illich, 1974).

Three key concepts for the Transition

• Resilience: ‘the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.’

• Ecological citizenship: intrinsic and ethical motivations towards protecting the environment

• Critique: the importance of political economy

Locality: Walking the Land

Accountability: Stroud Community Agriculture

Community: Stroud Pound

Conviviality: Stroud Farmers’ Market

The Seeds of a Greener Future?

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

Green Economics: AnIntroduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)

Environment and Economy(Routledge, 2011)

www.greenhousethinktank.org