The following principles form key elements of the
philosophy behind Living Communities™. These principles have been what has guided us through the first 2 years of our development. I thought it may be interesting for everyone to have a clearer idea of where we are coming from.
1. Re-Localisation
Relocalisation is the principal that if a community is capable of
providing a good or service locally it should do so. It is called ‘re’
localisation because in many cases, these services may have once been provided
locally.
Generally, assessment of relocalisation of goods/services is based on; the inherent need for the service from
within the community, the level of the
benefit to the community rather than the enterprise providing the service
and the capacity of the community to
support it.
In relation to the last of the points above; because a product/service
may not always be capable of providing a profit for a private owner/s it may
need to be provided on a non-profit basis by the community.
An example: A
hypothetical regional community of 15,000 needs transportation at a cost of $32
million a year and food at a cost of $30 million a year, to function. It
is highly likely that in an Australian rural economy neither of these goods
would be provided locally to any great level. However, only one is capable of
being highly localised.
The community probably has water, soil and the capital,
labour, knowledge and expertise to run its own food system to provide a great
majority of its food. However it is most probably unlikely it would be capable
of manufacturing vehicles or trains without outside ownership and investment.
If the population was too small for private operator/s to
produce the food required at a profit, then the community may be able to
produce it together collaboratively on a non-profit basis.
In this example, the community has an inherent need for
food, would gain an enormous benefit from producing it (keeping a percentage of
the $30 million it usually sends out of the community when it imports food into
the local economy) and has the capacity to do so with ample land, knowledge
etc.
However manufacturing vehicles is not possible because,
although the community needs vehicles and one could argue the community would
benefit by retaining some of the $32 million it spends on transport it may not
necessarily have the capacity to do so. Therefore vehicles are probably best
imported.
However, as the community and technology changes and
develops, it may, in theory, become possible to manufacture transport vehicles
or develop a locally owned transport system at some time in the future.
Living Communities believes that
relocalisation is the foundation of a truly resilient (see resilience below) local economy. Relocalisation increases capital
available for ongoing community development of the social, environmental and
economic systems within the community. All communities should attempt to relocalise their
economy as much as possible in order to increase this resilience.
2. Entrepreneurship
Definition: The
common definition of an entrepreneur is one of a person who organises, operates, and assumes the risk
for a business venture for a profit. In the context of Living Communities™ the
definition of an entrepreneur can be expanded to; a person who organises,
operates, and assumes the risk for a new
for profit business venture, non profit social enterprise, for profit social
enterprise or one such entity currently in existence that is capable of change, enhancement or development.
Context: Living
Communities simply do not exist without the organisational effort,
implementation and risk taking of local entrepreneurs as defined above.
A town made up entirely of employees of non-local
companies (or even one with low levels of local entrepreneurial activity) can
only survive as long as the non-local companies that employs the population
remains in the town.
A town with a good quantity of entrepreneurs can adapt and
make opportunity out of changing circumstances, both good and bad.
Living Communities aims to promote and encourage
entrepreneurship in order to facilitate this element of resilience and to plug
the leaks in the local economy.
3. Resilience
Definition: Jamais Cascio, fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging
Technologies, defines resilience
thus;
“Resilience, accepts that change is inevitable and in many
cases out of our hands, focusing instead on the need to be able to withstand
the unexpected. Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but,
barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results
without its overall health being threatened.
Like
sustainability, resilience encompasses both strategy and design, guiding how
choices are made and how systems are created. Stripped to its essence, it comes
down to avoiding being trapped or trapping oneself on a losing path. Principles
of resilience include:
- Diversity: Not relying on a single
kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure.
- Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup.
Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue.
- Decentralization: Centralized systems look
strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically.
- Collaboration: We’re all in this
together. Take advantage of collaborative technologies, especially those
offering shared communication and information.
- Transparency: Don’t hide. Your systems
transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. Share
your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws.
- Fail
gracefully:
Failure happens, so make sure that a failure state won’t make things worse
than they are already.
- Flexibility: Be ready to change your
plans when they’re not working the way you expected; don’t count on things
remaining stable.
- Foresight: You can’t predict the
future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare. “
Context: Living
Communities™ aims to build resilient communities. The principle of resilience
enables a community to ensure that they can create strategies that enable their
community to thrive.
4. Sustainability
Definition: “Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In
ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and
productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance
of wellbeing, which in turn depends on the wellbeing of the natural world and the
responsible use of natural resources.” - Wikipedia
Context:
Sustainable communities must take into account their environment as much as
their economy as it is the economy that survives based on the viability of the
local environment. This is even more pronounced in rural communities where
economic fortunes are even more obviously linked to environmental events such
as drought and salinity. Living Communities™ introduces principles of
sustainability into local economic thinking by ensuring that natural resources
are taken into account.
5. Community
Definition:
Generally, a community has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common
location.
Context: In
recent years centralised governments, both state and federal, have responded to
the problems generated by their implementation of economic rationalist policy
by establishing bodies to manage the needs of rural and regional Australia.
However, due to the centralised nature of the overseeing department or
organisation, this response has focused on ‘regions’.
While appropriate at one scale, the regional approach has
not accounted for a ‘group of interacting people living in a common location’.
Living Communities™ believes
that communities are a real physical thing that can be described by location,
interacting people and their common interests (although the ways of responding
to those interests may be diverse).
As people identify with their community (the people they
interact with and the land they live on) and not regions, Living Communities™ believes
that focusing on working inside a community and making communities resilient is
vitally important to the success of any larger system such as a region.
6. Thinking in Systems
Definition: We
believe a community is a system and is part of a series of larger systems –
economic, social and environmental. Like all systems, a community has elements,
interconnections and a purpose. The purpose can be found by observing the
behaviour of the system.
Context:
Acknowledging that your community is a system allows you observe how the parts
work with each other to achieve its purpose. It also allows you to see how your
community is a vital part of the larger economic, social and environmental
system too and make adjustments accordingly.
We re-label community visioning in a systems thinking
context, as a ‘community purpose’, as it can help to highlight the behaviour of
the community and connect it to the greater system it influences and that
influence it.
So, if the current behaviour of a community system is part
of a redundant purpose (e.g. a town builds catches and exports fish but the
fishery has been depleted) then a new or additional purpose may be required to
provide resilience in the system.
When you think about the real reasons humans live in
communities it is much more than just an economic one. We come together to be
safe (groups provide a level of protection), happy (by having relationships
with others, a certain type of lifestyle and sense of place) and wealthy
(communities provide better ability to trade). All three are equally important.
However, because our thinking is skewed toward the
‘wealth’ reason, we tend to define our community’s purpose purely from a single
economic viewpoint. We start to describe ourselves this way; ‘we’re a mining
town’, ‘a farming community’, ‘a tourist town’, a ‘fishing village’, a
‘tree-change’ or ‘sea-change’ community etc.
While these may be entirely accurate, they reduce the
capacity of a community to think about itself in any other way, stifling
creative solutions and limiting possibilities. Communities are encouraged, by
traditional economic developers, to build ‘clusters’ around what they already
do (or what they are good at) when they should be able to think about building
locally owned clusters of anything they can put their mind to so as to
diversify(1).
To remain a single purpose community (and a cluster of farming related
industries in a ‘farming community’ is still a single purpose) is to invite
brittleness and collapse as opposed to resilience and strength.
