There is a pluriverse of alternatives, movements of radical transformation, across the planet. What if they “outscaled” together?
We posted about the Global Tapestry of Alternatives earlier this year, which (independently of us) is pulling together a planetary network of alternative initiatives. This is similar to an incubator we are running at he moment (titled 'Ecocivilisation And The CAN of CANs’).
In association with the GTA, and the website Great Transition Initiative (GTI), we were delighted to be asked to contribute to GTI’s forum pages, where many elements of this tapestry expressed themselves. This contribution will appear as our editorial this week - but we thought we’d print the opening provocation on GTI from the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. Both for context, and for its overview.
Weaving Transformative Connections
Ashish Kothari and Shrishtee Bajpai
The Challenge
Proactive responses to the multiple crises the world faces—ecological, socio-cultural, political, economic, spiritual—are widespread and diverse.
They range from movements of resistance to the dominant ecologically destructive and socially inequitable model of “development” that has been imposed across the world, to people’s initiatives at constructing or sustaining ways of life that meet human needs and aspirations without despoiling the earth and exacerbating inequalities.
They are emerging from Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities, from urban neighborhoods, from both the Global South and Global North, from both marginalized sections and the privileged elite.
However, countertrends to the destructive processes unleashed by neoliberal, growth-at-all-costs “development,” authoritarian states, and continuing forms of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism have a mixed record.
Yes, resistance movements have often won victories—stopping, delaying, or replacing oppressive regimes, or successfully defending Indigenous and community territories from extractive projects and processes. Anti-racist, feminist, peace, and decolonial movements have pushed back forces of oppression and violence in many instances.
Yet many, perhaps most, such movements have fallen short of their goals, while destructive forces continue to dominate across the globe, taking the earth to the brink of survival, and subjecting many peoples and regions to war, violence, deprivation, and dispossession.
Time and time again, protest movements have placed a relatively low priority on developing strategies for systemic transformation towards structures and relations that do not replicate or approximate those being resisted.
For instance, “revolutionary” parties have managed to defeat neoliberal opponents and gain control of the state in many countries. But lacking prefigurative visions of holistic transformation grounded in practices emerging from communities, such ruling parties often revert to conventional macroeconomic and governance policies.
Many people’s movements, on the other hand, are moving towards more radical, autonomous forms of governance and greater economic localization and self-reliance. In these groups, there is a resurgence of ways of life that centre respect of nature (including humans), co-existence, and justice.
Although such radical movements can emerge within ancient cultures or within industrial societies, all share core ethical values that put life (in its various forms) at the center of their practice.
Thousands of such movements and groups remain largely scattered, not yet a collective force broad and deep enough to shift the macro-picture.
The most notable attempt to bring them together has been the World Social Forum, which has for two decades provided a platform for networking on action and vision.
While its slogan of “Another World is Possible” pointed to a politics of hope, the WSF has remained largely a forum for amplifying critiques of the dominant neoliberal order, rather than for amplifying and consolidating constructive counter-initiatives.
Seeing such a need, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) was initiated in mid-2019 as a confluence of movements of radical transformation for collaboration, solidarity, and visioning from local to global levels.
The Opportunity
Many movements of radical transformation already exist worldwide, representing a pluriverse of worldviews and cosmologies, and exhibiting a bewildering range of practices.
These include, to quote from GTA’s introductory document:
“sustainable and holistic agriculture, community led water/energy/food sovereignty, solidarity and sharing economies, worker control of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, and inter-ethnic peace and harmony, to more holistic or rounded transformations such as those being attempted by the Zapatista in Chiapas and the Kurds in Rojava.”
These diverse initiatives form a veritable pluriverse—to paraphrase the Zapatista movement, “many worlds within a world”—in which we can discern key common threads.
Such movements seek systemic, radical transformation (i.e., in the structures and relations of oppression, inequity, and unsustainability, including capitalism, statism, patriarchy, racism and anthropocentrism), not succumbing to the superficial and often counterproductive solutions of market measures and techno-fixes.
It is in their shared resistance to mainstream forces and policies that these initiatives can be called “alternatives” (though many in their own traditional contexts would be part of everyday life).
These movements are based on a foundation of values and ethics, including solidarity, interconnectedness, cooperation, diversity and pluralism, autonomy, rights with responsibilities, mutual respect, equality, non-violence, and peace.
The worldviews they embrace differ fundamentally from the cutthroat, competitive, selfish individualism promoted by industrial modernity and capitalism.
This pluriverse of movements and initiatives is effecting change across five spheres:
Ecological integrity and resilience, which includes conservation of nature and biodiversity, maintenance of ecological functions, respect for ecological limits (local to global) and the rights of nature, and ecological ethics in all human actions.
Social well-being and justice, which entails facilitating the pursuit of fulfilling lives (physically, socially, culturally, and spiritually); equity between communities and individuals; communal and ethnic harmony; and erasure of hierarchies and divisions based on faith, gender, caste, class, ethnicity, ability, and other such attributes.
Direct and delegated democracy, which locates critical decision-making in spaces that enable every person to participate meaningfully. It then builds toward larger levels of governance by downwardly accountable institutions, and reconceptualizes political boundaries to align with ecological and cultural flows (“biocultural regions”).
Economic democracy, which ensures that local communities and individuals have control over the means of production, distribution, exchange, and markets. This is based on the principle of localizing the provision of basic needs and nurturing the commons (as opposed to private property). It also replaces GDP as an indicator of progress with meaningful measures of human and ecological well-being.
Cultural diversity and knowledge democracy, which encourages multiple co-existing knowledge systems in the commons; respect for a diversity of ways of living, ideas, and ideologies; and creativity and innovation.
These spheres, of course, intersect with one another, and life is mostly lived in these intersections. Almost no initiative is achieving transformation in all spheres, but as a rough rule of thumb we can consider them an alternative if they are doing so in at least two, not seriously violating any of the other three, and considering actions in those as well.
Macro-transformation does not happen from individual initiatives acting alone. Large shifts become possible when a critical mass of movements for radical resistance and constructive alternatives is able to coalesce, through horizontal networks.
It is not about the replication of successful initiatives (or simply copying from one to another, which different contexts make inappropriate). Nor is it about upscaling (since making one initiative bigger and bigger tends to lead to bureaucracy, lack of nimbleness, and the weakening of original values), but rather about outscaling.
In this mode of outscaling, collectives and institutions learn from such initiatives, attempt transformation with modifications suited to their own contexts, and then network across geographic, cultural, and sectoral spaces to achieve scale.
Such networks are grounded in place-and-interest-based collectives, with responsive and accountable larger-order institutions for coordination and amplification.
Such outscaling does not necessarily happen on its own, especially from the local to the global. Communities on the ground are often too caught up in their own struggles to find time or capacity for outscaling.
There are also powerful cultural, geographic, and resource constraints with which they must contend. Larger-scale networking requires a special effort.
This is where the vision of a Global Tapestry of Alternatives comes in…
Ashish Kothari is a member of the core team of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, a coordinator of Vikalp Sangam in India, and co-editor of Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary
Shrishtee Bajpai is a member of the core team of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, a coordinator of Vikalp Sangam in India, and a researcher on alternatives to development