Localized Resilience → Tag → Sustainability

Green economic planning for rapid decarbonisation

Sustainable futures require deep social and economic transformations to address climate change adequately. The current landscape of intergovernmental and market-based coordination is not delivering...

Urban problems: nature-based solutions and a Green New Deal everywhere

Nature-based Solutions with localised Green New Deals could save our settlements, and provide a just transition to a low-carbon society

The ecosystem is moving

Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize....

From global trends to local realities: A multi-scale scenario-building methodology for community infrastructure planning

This paper details a multi-scale scenario-building methodology designed to explore transport infrastructure futures in rapidly changing Circumpolar North communities, bridging global trends and national contexts with local realities. Focusing on Churchill, Canada, and Kirkenes, Norway, we employed a hybrid approach that combined top-down adaptation of existing global and regional socioeconomic scenarios with bottom-up, participatory ethnographic research to ensure local relevance and incorporate stakeholder knowledge. We developed coherent scenarios across global, regional (national), and local scales, allowing higher-level archetypes to manifest differently depending on locally specific features identified through fieldwork. This consecutive, nested process utilized morphological analysis and the Factor-Actor-Sector framework to maintain consistency while accommodating local specificities. The methodology centered not just on scenario creation but also on the function of scenarios as a tool for community dialogue, utilizing artistic visualizations in workshops to engage diverse stakeholders. This approach demonstrates a way to navigate the tension between global and national drivers versus local community needs, yielding distinct yet comparable local futures grounded in broader development pathways. It offers practical insights for deliberations and planning in uncertain environments, both built and unbuilt.

Home - Schumacher Center for a New Economics

  Our mission is to envision a just and regenerative economy; apply the concepts locally; then share the results for broad replication.   Programs Library Lectures & Publications The Decentralism File Community Land Trust Local Currencies Reinventing The Commons All Programs eNewsletters All News “Since there is now increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, particularly in … Continued

ORGANISING PRINCIPLES — THE ALTERNATIVE

This makes the difference between a localism that cannot sustain itself because it is simply too small with limited resources of skills and expertise. And one that is able to build its own regenerative economy, entirely through access to the global commons.

Global Program on Sustainability

The Global Program on Sustainability (GPS) helps countries value nature as a driver of jobs, resilience, investment, and long-term prosperity.

The Coming Ecological Cold War

How the green transition is reshaping geopolitics

The New Geopolitics Of The Green Transition

The only path forward for tackling the climate crisis hinges on cooperative industrial strategies to coordinate clean energy investment and infrastructure development.

CommunityRule

A governance toolkit for great communities

Leveraging agency for climate change mitigation

Climate debates often frame individual behaviour and systems change as distinct pathways to action. We suggest that social change arises from individuals’ agency within their roles in societal systems, and that this agency should be actively leveraged to achieve meaningful climate change mitigation.

Smart Climate City Strategy

This post is also available in: German

The Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry

Allusions to the “problem of metropolitan government” are often made in characterizing the difficulties supposed to arise because a metropolitan region is a legal non-entity. From this point of view, the people of a metropolitan region have no general instrumentality of government available to deal directly with the range of problems which they share in common. Rather there is a multiplicity of federal and state governmental agencies, counties, cities, and special districts that govern within a metropolitan region.This view assumes that the multiplicity of political units in a metropolitan area is essentially a pathological phenomenon. The diagnosis asserts that there are too many governments and not enough government. The symptoms are described as “duplication of functions” and “overlapping jurisdictions.” Autonomous units of government, acting in their own behalf, are considered incapable of resolving the diverse problems of the wider metropolitan community. The political topography of the metropolis is called a “crazy-quilt pattern” and its organization is said to be an “organized chaos.” The prescription is reorganization into larger units—to provide “a general metropolitan framework” for gathering up the various functions of government. A political system with a single dominant center for making decisions is viewed as the ideal model for the organization of metropolitan government. “Gargantua” is one name for it.

Bioregionalism, Commoning, and Relationalized Finance | David Bollier

Have you noticed how the term “bioregional” is becoming a new eco-buzzword and greenwashing term? At the same time, many ordinary people are genuinely excited about the idea of bioregionalism as a constructive way to focus activism and socioeconomic innovation. Bioregionalism offers a practical, politically accessible space for addressing climate change, social inequality, the eclipse of democracy, out-of-control oligarchs, and capitalist growth.

An ecological perspective to master the complexities of the digital economy

Economic and social interactions are shifting to digital platforms which grow into vast ecosystems where user engagement creates value for members while ecosystem orchestrators harvest massive revenue. The digital ecosystem business model succeeds by adeptly navigating fast-changing environments, including new technologies and volatile demands, through dynamic innovation in a decentralized decision-making setting. This renders digital platform ecosystems complex adaptive systems. Recognizing that natural ecosystems are a prime example of complex adaptive systems, we propose a systematic hierarchical framework for describing and understanding digital ecosystems, rooted in ecology and evolution. Our framework compares digital ecosystems hosted by societies to natural ecosystems embedded in biomes, products to species, and technologies and elements of business strategy to the genetic makeup of a species. As digital platforms face heightened scrutiny about their socio-economic power and societal value, our approach contributes to the development of deeper understanding and sustainable governance of the digital economy.