Professor of Strategy and Sustainability University of Roehampton Green Party Economics Speaker A Bioregional Economy Regeneration and Provisioning: Moving on from Money

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman

99% of UK food imports depend on our ports: unsurprisingly they are at sea-level. In 2007 the IPCC predicted a 0.35m rise in sea levels by the end of the 21 st century. In 2009 scientists declared that sea-level rise was occurring at twice the rate they had estimated just two years earlier Why the globalised economy is insecure

Where are the world’s ports?

Prosperity without Growth? Sustainable Development Commission suggested ‘flourishing within limits’ This means switching our focus from quantity to quality, and asking whether we get social value for our energy investments

CO2 intensity of GDP across nations: 1980–2006

Carbon Intensities Now and Required to Meet 450 ppm Target

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:  Reciprocity  Redistribution  Market Prior to the market revolution, humanity’s economic relations were subordinate to the social. Now economic relations are now generally superior to social ones.

Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?

‘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

[We] have ‘forgotten’ that the economy and all its works is a subset and dependent upon the wider ecosystem... Modern citizens have not only lost contact with the land, and their sense of embeddedness in the land, but at the same time they have lost those elemental social forms of more or less intimate and relatively transparent social relations. Thus a basic aim of bioregionalism is to get people back in touch with the land, and constitutive of that process is the recreation of community in a strong sense. (Barry, 1990: 9).

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

Locality but not autarky 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).

Find out more gaianeconomics.blogspot.com Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009) Environment and Economy (Routledge, 2011)