The Handbook of Diverse Economies 1788119959, 9781788119955

Table of contents :
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Tables
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Chapter01-Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies inventory as ethical intervention
Chapter02-Framing essay the diversity of enterprise
Chapter03-Worker cooperatives
Chapter04-Self-managed enterprise worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America
Chapter05-Community enterprise diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure
Chapter06-Eco-social enterprises ethical business in a post-socialist context
Chapter07-Enterprising new worlds social enterprise and the value of repair
Chapter08-Anti-mafia enterprise Italian strategies to counter violent economies
Chapter09-State and community enterprise negotiating water management in rural Ireland
Chapter10-Independent and small businesses diversity amongst the 99 per cent of businesses
Chapter11-Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation decentring authority and ownership
Chapter12-Framing essay the diversity of labour
Chapter13-Precarious labour Russias other transition
Chapter14-The persistence of informal and unpaid labour evidence from UK households
Chapter15-Paid and unpaid labour feminist economic activism in a diverse economy
Chapter16-Caring labour redistributing care work
Chapter17-Non-human labour the work of Earth Others
Chapter18-Collectively performed reciprocal labour reading for possibility
Chapter19-Informal mining labour economic plurality and household survival strategies
Chapter20-Migrant womens labour sustaining livelihoods through diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana
Chapter21-Framing essay the diversity of transactions
Chapter22-Gleaning transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste
Chapter23-Direct producer‚Ä consumer transactions Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots
Chapter24-Direct food provisioning collective food procurement
Chapter25-Alternative currencies diverse experiments
Chapter26-Transacting services through time banking renegotiating equality and reshaping work
Chapter27-Fair trade market-based ethical encounters and the messy entanglements of living well
Chapter28-Social procurement generating social good through market transactions, directly and indirectly
Chapter29-Sharing cities new urban imaginaries for diverse economies
Chapter30-Framing essay the diversity of property
Chapter31-Commoning property in the city the ongoing work of making and remaking
Chapter32-Community land trusts embracing the relationality of property
Chapter33-Urban land markets in Africa multiplying possibilities via a diverse economy reading
Chapter34-A Slow Food commons cultivating conviviality across a range of property forms
Chapter35-Free universities as academic commons
Chapter36-Diverse legalities pluralism and instrumentalism
Chapter37-Framing essay the diversity of finance
Chapter38-Islamic finance diversity within difference
Chapter39-Rotating savings and credit associations mutual aid financing
Chapter40-Indigenous finance treaty settlement finance in Aotearoa New Zealand
Chapter41-Community finance marshalling investments for community-owned renewable energy enterprises
Chapter42-Hacking finance experiments with algorithmic activism
Chapter43-Framing essay subjectivity in a diverse economy
Chapter44-More-than-human agency from the human economy to ecological livelihoods
Chapter45-On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies
Chapter46-Techniques for shifting economic subjectivity promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans
Chapter47-Affect and subjectivity learning to be affected in diverse economies scholarship
Chapter48-Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies challenging hetero- and homonormativity
Chapter49-Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation a shared narrative of scholars from the majority world
Chapter50-Framing essay diverse economies methodology
Chapter51-Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene
Chapter52-Reading for economic difference
Chapter53-Field methods for assemblage analysis tracing relations between difference and dominance
Chapter54-Visualizing and analysing diverse economies with GIS a resource for performative research
Chapter55-Working with Indigenous methodologies Kaupapa Māori meets diverse economies
Chapter56-Action research for diverse economies
Chapter57-Focusing on assets action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace
Chapter58-How to reclaim the economy using artistic means the case of Company Drinks
Index

Citation preview

© J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski 2020

Cover illustration: One of a number of maps created by artist Ailie Rutherford with groups of women in Govanhill, Glasgow as part of a long term project ‘The People’s Bank of Govanhill’, using artistic means to reclaim the local economy. Symbols were co-created with local residents to denote paid and unpaid labour, exchange with and without money, mutual support and emotional labour. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954468 This book is available electronically in the Economics subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781788119962

ISBN 978 1 78811 995 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78811 996 2 (eBook)

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:31PM

Contents

List of figuresx List of tablesxi List of contributorsxii Acknowledgementsxix 1

PART I

Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies: inventory as ethical intervention J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski

1

ENTERPRISE

2

Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise Jenny Cameron

26

3

Worker cooperatives Maliha Safri

40

4

Self-managed enterprise: worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America Ana Inés Heras and Marcelo Vieta

5

Community enterprise: diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure56 Jarra Hicks

6

Eco-social enterprises: ethical business in a post-socialist context Nadia Johanisova, Lucie Sovová and Eva Fraňková

65

7

Enterprising new worlds: social enterprise and the value of repair Isaac Lyne and Anisah Madden

74

8

Anti-mafia enterprise: Italian strategies to counter violent economies Christina Jerne

82

9

State and community enterprise: negotiating water management in rural Ireland 90 Patrick Bresnihan and Arielle Hesse

10

Independent and small businesses: diversity amongst the 99 per cent of businesses98 Peter North

11

Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation: decentring authority and ownership Jayme Walenta v J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:51PM

48

106

vi  The handbook of diverse economies PART II

LABOUR

12

Framing essay: the diversity of labour Katharine McKinnon

116

13

Precarious labour: Russia’s ‘other’ transition Marianna Pavlovskaya

129

14

The persistence of informal and unpaid labour: evidence from UK households 137 Colin C. Williams and Richard J. White

15

Paid and unpaid labour: feminist economic activism in a diverse economy Megan Clement-Couzner

146

16

Caring labour: redistributing care work  Kelly Dombroski

154

17

Non-human ‘labour’: the work of Earth Others Elizabeth Barron and Jaqueline Hess

163

18

Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility Katherine Gibson

170

19

Informal mining labour: economic plurality and household survival strategies Pryor Placino

179

20

Migrant women’s labour: sustaining livelihoods through diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana Chizu Sato and Theresa Tufuor

186

PART III TRANSACTIONS 21

Framing essay: the diversity of transactions Gradon Diprose

195

22

Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste Oona Morrow

206

23

Direct producer–consumer transactions: Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots214 Ted White

24

Direct food provisioning: collective food procurement Cristina Grasseni

223

25

Alternative currencies: diverse experiments Peter North

230

26

Transacting services through time banking: renegotiating equality and reshaping work Gradon Diprose

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:51PM

238

Contents  vii 27

Fair trade: market-based ethical encounters and the messy entanglements of living well Lindsay Naylor

246

28

Social procurement: generating social good through market transactions, directly and indirectly Joanne McNeill

254

29

Sharing cities: new urban imaginaries for diverse economies Darren Sharp

262

PART IV PROPERTY 30

Framing essay: the diversity of property Kevin St. Martin

271

31

Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking Anna Kruzynski

283

32

Community land trusts: embracing the relationality of property Louise Crabtree

292

33

Urban land markets in Africa: multiplying possibilities via a diverse economy reading Colin Marx

34

A Slow Food commons: cultivating conviviality across a range of property forms 308 Melissa Kennedy

35

Free universities as academic commons Esra Erdem

316

36

Diverse legalities: pluralism and instrumentalism Bronwen Morgan and Declan Kuch

323

PART V

300

FINANCE

37

Framing essay: the diversity of finance Maliha Safri and Yahya M. Madra

332

38

Islamic finance: diversity within difference Gemma Bone Dodds and Jane Pollard

346

39

Rotating savings and credit associations: mutual aid financing Caroline Shenaz Hossein

354

40

Indigenous finance: treaty settlement finance in Aotearoa New Zealand Maria Bargh

362

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:51PM

viii  The handbook of diverse economies 41

Community finance: marshalling investments for community-owned renewable energy enterprises370 Jarra Hicks

42

Hacking finance: experiments with algorithmic activism Tuomo Alhojärvi

379

PART VI SUBJECTIVITY 43

Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy Stephen Healy, Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra

389

44

More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods 402 Ethan Miller

45

On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies Nate Gabriel and Eric Sarmiento

46

Techniques for shifting economic subjectivity: promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans Abby Templer Rodrigues

47

Affect and subjectivity: learning to be affected in diverse economies scholarship428 Gerda Roelvink

48

Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies: challenging heteroand homonormativity Gavin Brown

49

Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation: a shared narrative of scholars from the majority world 444 Anmeng Liu, S.M. Waliuzzaman, Huong Thi Do, Ririn Haryani and Sonam Pem

411

419

436

PART VII METHODOLOGY 50

Framing essay: diverse economies methodology Gerda Roelvink

453

51

Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene Tuomo Alhojärvi and Pieta Hyvärinen

467

52

Reading for economic difference J.K. Gibson-Graham

476

53

Field methods for assemblage analysis: tracing relations between difference and dominance Eric Sarmiento

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:51PM

486

Contents  ix 54

Visualizing and analysing diverse economies with GIS: a resource for performative research Luke Drake

55

Working with Indigenous methodologies: Kaupapa Māori meets diverse economies502 Joanne Waitoa and Kelly Dombroski

56

Action research for diverse economies Jenny Cameron and Katherine Gibson

511

57

Focusing on assets: action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace Leo Hwang

520

58

How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: the case of Company Drinks 527 Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder

493

Index535

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:51PM

Figures

1.1

The diverse economies iceberg

10

14.1

Visualizing a multiplex of modes, difference and diversity of work

139

54.1

Overlay of 1940 neighbourhood data with a basemap of current locations of stadium, parking lots, streets and residential areas

499

x J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:57:59PM

Tables

1.1

Enterprise diversity

11

1.2

Labour diversity

13

1.3

Transactions diversity

14

1.4

Property diversity

15

1.5

Finance diversity

16

5.1

Features of community enterprise

58

14.1

Labour practices used by UK households to complete 44 everyday tasks

142

15.1

Australian feminist activism in the diverse economy

151

38.1

Some forms of Islamic financial contract

349

40.1

Te Arawa entities

363

41.1

Forms of investment accessed by CORE enterprises

372

xi J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:58:03PM

Contributors

Tuomo Alhojärvi is a PhD candidate at the Geography Research Unit, University of Oulu, Finland. His work explores diverse modes of postcapitalist theory and practice and focuses on staying with the trouble of capitalocentric inheritances. Maria Bargh teaches and researches in the area of Māori and Indigenous politics and resource management. She is an Associate Professor in Māori Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. Elizabeth Barron is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Her research interests are broadly on understanding different knowledge systems for addressing human–environment challenges in the areas of conservation and resource management, alternative economics, and sustainability. Kathrin Böhm is a London based artist whose collaborative work focuses on the collective (re)production of public space, trade as public realm and the everyday as a starting point for culture. Gemma Bone Dodds recently completed her PhD in diverse economies of finance. She works on alternative finance and banking systems, particularly in Scotland and has set up a systems change consultancy ‘All In’ (allin.agency). Patrick Bresnihan is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. He works across the interdisciplinary fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental anthropology. His work to this effect, combines in-depth empirical research and critical theory to examine questions of power, knowledge and politics as they relate to nature and society. Research areas include the fisheries, the city, water, and energy infrastructure. Gavin Brown is a Professor of Political Geography and Sexualities at the University of Leicester. He has written widely on LGBTQ lives and examined the diverse economies that sustain them. Jenny Cameron is a Conjoint Associate Professor in Geography and Environmental Studies with the University of Newcastle, Australia, and is Secretary of the Community Economies Institute. She is a co-author with J.K. Gibson-Graham and Stephen Healy of Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Megan Clement-Couzner is a feminist interdisciplinary scholar with a specialization in labour, work and diverse economies. Louise Crabtree is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Her works focuses on community-led housing and urban sustainability. Gradon Diprose is an environmental social science researcher at Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research. He has a background in environmental planning and human geography, and is xii J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:58:08PM

Contributors  xiii particularly interested in how people come together around shared concerns to create more sustainable communities. Huong Thi Do served as a government official in Vietnam, specializing in water resources management and climate change adaptation. She has just submitted her PhD thesis with the title ‘Embodied knowing for climate change adaptation interventions: Moving beyond monitoring and evaluation in Thai Binh, Vietnam’. Kelly Dombroski is a feminist geographer based at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, researching in the area of community economies, postdevelopment and postcolonial theory and practice. Luke Drake is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at California State University, Northridge. His work focuses on the spatial networks that link places together, and particularly how communities improve livelihoods by using local resources and by connecting to other places through networks. Projects have included urban agriculture and farmers’ markets in the USA and grassroots disaster response and resilience in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Esra Erdem is a Professor of Social Economics at Alice Salomon University Berlin, Germany. Her fields of research include solidarity economies and the commons, Marxian political economy, urban studies and migration studies. Eva Fraňková is an ecological economist working at the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. She is interested in alternative economic practices, eco-social enterprises, the social metabolism of local food systems, and the concept of sustainable degrowth. Nate Gabriel is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. His research focuses on contemporary and historical struggles over urban socio-natural systems, focusing especially on the relationship between economic development and urban environmental politics. Katherine Gibson, a Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, is an economic geographer with an international reputation for innovative research on economic transformation and over 30 years’ experience of working with communities to build resilient economies. J.K. Gibson-Graham is the collective authorial presence that Katherine Gibson shares with the late Julie Graham, Professor of Geography, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Cristina Grasseni is a Professor of Anthropology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her ethnographic work examines the politics of food heritage (The Heritage Arena, 2017) and the different types, premises and consequences of collective forms of food production, distribution and consumption in solidarity economy networks (Beyond Alternative Food Networks, 2013). From a methodological point of view Grasseni is known for her ‘skilled visions’ approach to visual ethnography (Skilled Visions, ed., 2007; Developing Skill, Developing Vision, 2009). Ririn Haryani is a PhD candidate based at the Department of Geography, University of Canterbury currently doing research on women’s leadership in disaster management in ASEAN countries using a postdevelopment lens.

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xiv  The handbook of diverse economies Stephen Healy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. His research has concentrated on the relationship between economy, subjectivity and the enactment of new modes of life across an array of concerns: health care reform policy, cooperative and regional development, and the solidarity economy movement. In each instance his abiding concern has been to apply insights from Marxian and psychoanalytic theory to understand the desires, fantasies and anxieties that compose the restive human subject. Ana Inés Heras is a National Researcher at the Argentinean Research and Technology Council (CONICET) and a Professor at the University of San Martín, Argentina. She specializes in sociolinguistics and ethnography for the study of learning processes in self-governed organizations. She is the President of the Instituto para la Inclusión Social y el Desarrollo Humano, a self-managed organization recognized by the Ministry of Science as a national research institution. Jaqueline Hess is a fungal evolutionary biologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, in Halle, Germany. Her work focuses on the evolution of different nutritional strategies in fungi, and in particular the repeated emergence of symbiosis between plants and fungi. Arielle Hesse is an environmental health geographer and postdoctoral researcher in Drexel’s Department of Sociology, working on the research project WISDOM: Learning from Group Water Schemes, a study funded by the EPA to examine the development of community managed water supplies in Ireland. Her research examines the regulatory politics of occupational and environmental health exposures, drawing influence from environmental history, science and technology studies, public health and health geography. Jarra Hicks has a PhD in Law and Built Environment from University of New South Wales and is the co-founder of the Community Power Agency, a not-for-profit workers’ cooperative that supports communities to participate in the renewable energy transition. She has co-founded and worked for a range of community organizations and social enterprises, from food to energy, advocacy to banking. Caroline Shenaz Hossein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power and Violence in the Black Americas – winner of the 2018 Du Bois Distinguished Book Award (University of Toronto Press, 2016); editor of The Black Social Economy: Exploring Community-Based Diverse Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-author of Business & Society: A Critical Introduction (Zed Books, 2017). Currently she is working on her fourth book project, Mutual Aid Groups among Black Women. Leo Hwang is the Dean of Humanities, Engineering, Math and Science at Greenfield Community College where, in addition to his other duties, he engages in participatory action research with the community economies of the creative economy and how asset-based community development can be utilized to address diversity, equity and inclusion issues. Pieta Hyvärinen is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Social Sciences in Tampere University, Finland, researching small-scale and subsistence food production from the perspective of diverse economies and more-than-human nature. Christina Jerne is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Global Criminology, University

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:58:08PM

Contributors  xv of Copenhagen. She specializes in economies of organized crime and political economy. She has consulted for several enterprises on the themes of critical design and experience economy. Nadia Johanisova is an ecological economist based at the Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Her research is centred on heterodox economic practice and theory. Melissa Kennedy teaches and researches in community planning and human geography, specializing in community economic development. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on community economies and rural regeneration including: community activism, commoning and cultural and creative economies including local food and festivals. Anna Kruzynski is an Associate Professor and activist based at Concordia University, Quebec, conducting participatory action research on emancipatory economic initiatives at the margins of the social economy. Declan Kuch is a research fellow in the School of Humanities and Languages and the Centre for Convergent Bio-Nano Science and Technology at UNSW Sydney. His work connects economic issues with public engagement practices in the life sciences, climate change policy and energy systems. Anmeng Liu is a PhD candidate based at the Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her research is concerned with social transition and everyday lives in county towns of northwestern China. Isaac Lyne gained his PhD at the Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University (Australia), for a thesis on social enterprise and community development in Cambodia. His disciplinary fields are human geography, development studies and social enterprise. He lectures in development studies and previously coordinated a British Council-funded social enterprise project at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambodia). Anisah Madden is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, and an activist working with transnational food sovereignty movements to push for transformative transitions in food systems. Her participant-research in the UN Committee on World Food Security imagines global food governance as caring for the planetary commons, and engages with grassroots experiments to remake international political institutions. Yahya M. Madra teaches economics and history of economic thought at Drew University, Madison NJ. Previously he taught at Skidmore and Gettysburg Colleges and Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His research interests include the history of neoliberal reason in economics, the political economy of Turkey, economic alternatives, and the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Colin Marx is a development planner in The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, researching postcolonial theorizations of African cities and their economies. Katharine McKinnon is a human geographer and Tracy Banivanua-Mar Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe University. She is also Director of the Community Economies Institute. Her work engages with community economies, gender, development and care. Her current research in Australia and the Asia-Pacific focuses on women’s economic empowerment and community-based indicators of gender equality, and on the politics of childbirth and maternity care.

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xvi  The handbook of diverse economies Joanne McNeill is a Research Project Manager and Research Fellow currently working across multiple universities. Her research and 15+ years’ prior professional experience engage with social innovation ‘ecosystems’ – around social enterprise, cooperatives, social procurement, financing, legal structures, capacity building and demonstrating ‘impact’. She is a Founding Director of the Community Economies Institute and has been a Churchill Fellow since 2008. Ethan Miller is an activist-scholar and homesteader committed to co-creating cooperative, resilient and liberatory forms of collective livelihood. He lectures in environmental studies, politics, and anthropology at Bates College, Maine, lives and farms at the Wild Mountain Cooperative, and organizes for land justice with Land in Common community land trust. His book, Reimagining Livelihoods: Life Beyond Economy, Society, and Environment was released in March 2019 by University of Minnesota Press. Bronwen Morgan is a Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney and a socio-legal scholar with a particular interest in how technocratic regulation shapes collective commitments to democracy, conviviality and ecological sustainability. Her current research explores new and diverse economies, mostly of the kind affiliated with solidarity and the creation of a commons, and the tensions between these and recent developments in sharing or platform economies. Oona Morrow is an Assistant Professor in Food Sociology with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. Her work is broadly concerned with the economic politics of everyday life, a theme she explores through the practice and politics of food provisioning in cities, communities and households. Lindsay Naylor is a feminist political geographer based at the University of Delaware, United States, conducting research on diverse economies, decolonial praxis, and the geopolitics of food systems from the global to the site of the body. She is the author of the 2019 book, Fair Trade Rebels: Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas, which is part of the Diverse Economies and Liveable Worlds Series with the University of Minnesota Press. Peter North is Professor of Alternative Economies at the University of Liverpool, UK. His research focuses on the social and solidarity economies as tools for constructing and rethinking alternative geographies of money, entrepreneurship, and livelihoods. Ceren Özselçuk is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her interests are economy and subjectivity, desire and enjoyment in diverse economies, and the relation between psychoanalysis and Marxism. She is an editorial member and the managing editor of Rethinking Marxism journal. Marianna Pavlovskaya is a Professor of Geography at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Her research examines experiences of transition to capitalism in Russia including the production of poverty there. In addition, she investigates social transformation away from capitalism through engagement with solidarity economy and how it intersects with geographies of class, race and gender. She also writes on mapping technologies as tools for constructing social imaginaries. She co-edited the book Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime. Sonam Pem is a consultant based in Bhutan. She studied a Master of Science in Water Resource Management at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her thesis ‘Negotiating gross national happiness as community economy: A case study on Thimphu River’ was about

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Contributors  xvii a river in Bhutan and how the current development pathway has affected the status of the environment focusing around the river. Pryor Placino is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His PhD dissertation examines how concrete is implicated in livelihoods of informal aggregate miners in the Philippines, and looks into the relation between livelihoods and new building materials. Jane Pollard is a Professor of Economic Geography at Newcastle University, UK. Her research focuses on the social and spatial constitution of money and finance. Abby Templer Rodrigues is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University. Her research interests are in community-based research, social inequality, and economic development. Her research has included working collaboratively with academic and community-based researchers to investigate the creative economy in rural communities. Gerda Roelvink is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. She is the author of Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action and the co-editor of Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, both published by University of Minnesota Press. Maliha Safri is the Chair of and Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Drew University NJ, and has taught and published on political economy and migration in many journals and edited book collections. She has also been involved with popular education seminars and courses with activists, especially with worker centres, and cooperatives in the NJ and NY metropolitan area. For the last five years, she has been working on a National Science Foundation-funded project examining the solidarity economy in New York City. Eric Sarmiento is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Texas State University. His research examines the political, economic and cultural dimensions of urban development, particularly with respect to environmental issues. Chizu Sato does research at the intersection of transnational feminist studies, international development studies, and political ecology and teaches at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Darren Sharp is an urban transitions researcher with a PhD from Curtin University where he undertook doctoral research into transformative urban experimentation funded by the CRC for Low Carbon Living. His main research interests are sharing cities, urban governance, the city as a commons, urban living labs and grassroots innovation. Darren is the Director of Social Surplus, Australian editor of Shareable and co-author of Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons. Lucie Sovová is a PhD candidate at the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and the Rural Sociology group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She is interested in non-capitalist economies particularly in relation to food provisioning. Kevin St. Martin is an Associate Professor of Geography at Rutgers University. He is a human geographer who works at the intersection of economic geography, political ecology, and critical applications of GIScience. He is interested in critical analyses of economic and resource

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xviii  The handbook of diverse economies management discourse as well as participatory projects engaging alternative economies. His current research examines new forms of marine governance such as ecosystems-based management and marine spatial planning and their implications for economic and environmental well-being. Kuba Szreder is a curator and lecturer in art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Theresa Tufuor is a Director of Housing, in the Housing Directorate of the Ministry of Works and Housing in Ghana. She holds a PhD from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Her research interests include issues associated with human settlements such as housing strategies, financing and planning for female-headed households, housing development policy and land tenure. In studying such issues she takes particular interest in the socio-material practices by which social categories such as gender interact in the evolution of housing issues. Marcelo Vieta is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Adult Education and Community Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) and co-founder and executive committee member of the Centre for Learning, Social Economy and Work (CLSEW). Vieta’s research, teaching and activist interests are in workplace and organizational learning and social change, social movement learning, critical theory, community economies, social and solidarity economic initiatives, the worldwide worker cooperative movement, and worker-recuperated enterprises. Joanne Waitoa is a Ngāti Porou researcher based in Wairarapa, Aotearoa New Zealand. She currently works as a Treaty Implementation Ranger at the Department of Conservation. Jayme Walenta is a feminist economic geographer teaching at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research area broadly concerns the spatial and social justice dimensions of environmental policies. S.M. Waliuzzaman is a human geographer and urban planner. He is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research is concerned with the place making process in the slum area of Bangladesh. He is interested in the study of space, people–place relation, qualitative GIS and visualization. Richard J. White is a Reader in Human Geography based at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Greatly influenced by anarchist praxis, his research explores a range of ethical, economic and activist landscapes underpinned by questions of social and spatial justice. Ted White is an interdisciplinary scholar and filmmaker who teaches geography and film production in New England. His work at NGOs and in higher education explores diversity and sustainability through self-inquiry. Colin C. Williams is Professor of Public Policy in the Management School at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is currently working full-time as adviser to the European Commission’s European Platform Tackling Undeclared Work (2016–2020).

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Acknowledgements

A book this lengthy and diverse does not come about without input from a large number of people. First we would like to thank Matthew Pitman at Edward Elgar for suggesting the project and following it to completion. Way back when the Handbook was first proposed we received wonderful suggestions and guidance from many members of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), for which we are very grateful. We would especially like to thank those members of the CERN who contributed topic chapters for the time, energy and enthusiasm they have put into this project. They have helped to realize our vision for a book that was accessible to people all over the world. A very special thanks is due to the authors of the framing essays: Jenny Cameron, Gradon Diprose, Stephen Healy, Yahya M. Madra, Katharine McKinnon, Ceren Özselçuk, Gerda Roelvink, Maliha Safri and Kevin St. Martin. They helped us frame not just their chapters but our approach to this Handbook overall, as well as assisting us with reviewing. To Ilene Grabel and George DeMartino we owe a huge debt of gratitude for their insightful and supportive input and generous reviewing of drafts for all of us. Thanks also to Maria Bargh and Yvonne Underhill-Sem for extra reviewing. We also are very grateful to Sandra Davenport for stepping out of retirement to once again provide her excellent copyediting and indexing skills to support one of our publications. We acknowledge generous financial support from the Julie Graham Community Economies Research Fund and the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University provided financial support for copyediting and a conducive environment for the kind of focus that editing this volume has required. We would like to acknowledge an Erskine Fellowship from the University of Canterbury that supported Kelly’s travel in 2018, including time in Sydney and Italy working on this book. Thanks to David Conradson who took on parts of Kelly’s teaching duties during two periods of leave contributing to this book, and to Peyman Zawar-Reza who distributed her departmental administration elsewhere. We would also like to thank our families who, as usual, offered their support and encouragement (distractions!) in multiple ways. Katherine thanks David, Daniel and Lillian Tait for their ongoing familial support and entertaining texts. Kelly thanks Travis, Imogen, Analiese, Emmaus and Casimir Dombroski for all such support and grounding in real life, as well as a team of extras that enabled her to return to editing work alongside caring for a newborn baby. This Handbook is the productive outcome of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s invitation for scholars to contribute to the Diverse Economies research programme that she offered in the 2006 Progress in Human Geography Annual Lecture at the Chicago meetings of the Association of American Geographers. We would like to thank Roger Lee for the invitation to present this lecture and his unfailing support for our work. In just over one decade this field has proliferated in ways JKGG would never have imagined possible and our one regret is that Julie did not live to see this flourishing.

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1. Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies: inventory as ethical intervention J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski

When economies are discussed today the looming image is the capitalist economy – the system of production, exchange and finance that has grown exponentially over the last 200 years. It is hard not to be awed by the rapid spread around the globe of market relations and industrial production associated with capitalism. It is also hard not to be alarmed by growing levels of inequality and the devastating environmental impacts that the growth in commodity production, material consumption, population and urbanization has had, especially since the 1950s when what has been dubbed ‘The Great Acceleration’ took off (Steffen et al. 2015). The research presented in this handbook offers a head-on challenge to narratives that valorize a monolithic neoliberal capitalism and the assumed benefits that are purported to stem from it. It presents a range of strategies for ‘doing economy’ differently – starting with an understanding of the economy as diverse and heterogeneous (rather than monolithic) and mutable rather than fixed in form. It is our view that empowering and supporting these differences can promote ethical and solidaristic modes of interdependence and help mitigate some of the key challenges of our time (such as environmental destruction and increasing inequality). Underpinning this handbook is an observation – that the attention given to a monolithic capitalism belies the diversity of economic activities. If 90 per cent of the world’s fishing activity is conducted by small-scale fishers (FAO 2015, p. ix), on boats where labour and compensation are organized by community or kin relations, why do so many commentators focus only on the capitalist fishing industry? If almost 10 per cent of the world’s employed population (some 274.9 million) work ‘in or in the scope of’ cooperatives (Eum 2017) and 61 per cent of the employed population (some two billion) work in informal activities and businesses (Bonnet et al. 2019) why do capitalist enterprises command so much attention? If so much care work is done by unpaid workers in homes and neighbourhoods, why is the focus so often on waged employment or its loss or lack? If gifting and reciprocity are used to share wealth and effort, and ethical fair-trade networks are gaining ground, why does economic theory foreground abstracted market exchanges governed by competitive logics of supply and demand? There is something going on with the representation of economies that allows for certain activities to be highlighted and thus valued, and others to be made less visible. The Handbook of Diverse Economies takes up this issue. It introduces a body of work that challenges the ways economies are represented and counters the powerful effect of these framings with research that prompts other imaginaries and actions. One effect of representing the capitalist economic system as so dominant is that people assume it is insurmountable. Despite the social inequities and degraded ecologies it produces, capitalism appears to many as a system that is here to stay and to which ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). Indeed, despite its crises and breakdowns, capitalism appears to be resilient, seemingly immune to revolutionary transformation. At the same time critics point to the way this ‘system’ fails to cater to the material needs of the majority world, or how the 1 per cent 1 J.K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 07:59:03PM

2  The handbook of diverse economies benefit while the 99 per cent suffer. Continually describing the many negative effects of capitalism can lead to hopelessness and a sense that as economic subjects we are not able to take responsibility for our world and its forward trajectory. This is a despairing legacy to leave to the next generation of scholars and activists. This handbook presents a different way forward, by highlighting the diversity of economic practices that make up our shared world. In doing so, it opens up the possibility of identifying multiple economic trajectories and discovering the distributed nature of power relations. The field of research known as ‘diverse economies’ is quite new, having been first sketched out by feminist economic geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham in 1996 in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy.1 While elements of economic diversity are studied in many different disciplinary contexts, what distinguishes diverse economies scholarship is its commitment to theorizing the economy as a site of ethical action. To this end it has generated a discourse of economy that is open to multiplicity and possibility, in which capitalism is not seen as an ‘economic system’ defined by an essential identity with universalizing dynamics, nor as the most efficient and advanced model of economy. Diverse economies scholarship involves detaching from such powerful structures of thought – ones that continue to inform both those who support and see themselves as benefiting from a capitalist world and those who struggle to replace it with something more equitable and environmentally sustainable. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) proclaimed, not an end to the material realities that many associate with capitalist development, but an end to a way of thinking that was beholden to capitalism as the ultimate toe-stubbing ‘real’ – the bottom line which underpins, determines and constrains action (see the methodology framing chapter by Roelvink, Chapter 50 in this volume). In The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) and the subsequent book A Postcapitalist Politics which followed a decade after in 2006, Gibson-Graham identified the crucial role that economic experimentation and subjectivity play in adopting such a different stance towards the economy (see the framing chapter on subjectivity by Healy, Özselçuk and Madra, Chapter 43). In more recent times, there has been a flourishing of diverse economies scholarship investigating and reflecting on the multiple dimensions of economic life, as the following chapters demonstrate. The handbook is organized into seven parts, the first five addressing the ‘what’ of diverse forms of economic activity (Enterprise, Labour, Transactions, Property and Finance). The sixth part focuses on Subjectivity, the ‘who’ of diverse economies, and the seventh part addresses Methodology and the ‘how’ of this approach. Each part contains multiple topic chapters aimed at students who may not be so familiar with economic concepts. At the start of each part is a framing chapter aimed at a more advanced readership that addresses in more depth the theoretical groundings of each section. This introductory essay looks back on the origins of this new field of study and looks forward to how it is developing in exciting new directions that have implications for action. It begins by elaborating why this kind of scholarship is timely and how it might be used. It briefly discusses the contextual theoretical groundings of this field of study in anti-essentialist Marxian political economy, post-structural feminism, ecological humanities and science and technology studies. It introduces some critical thinking techniques that have been deployed to ‘take back the economy’. It elaborates the diverse economies framing and how the practice of inventorying can become a strategy for opening up the economy to exploration, to new kinds of examination and to different kinds of economic subjectivity. It discusses the important role played by inventorying economic diversity in the project of building ethical community

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  3 economies. Finally, it reviews some of the emerging frontiers of research in the field of diverse economies and highlights areas where new scholarship is extending and reshaping the field.

DIVERSE ECONOMIES: WHY NOW? WHO BY? AND WHO FOR? All over the world communities and nations are facing economic crises and crises of democracy. Different segments of society are voting and taking actions that are driven by anger and resentment, making their concerns known in myriad and sometimes unpredictable ways. Meanwhile the challenge of addressing climate change requires global cooperation, but standing in the way of change is adherence to established economic paradigms and the inability of governments to act. Young people, even schoolchildren, are on the streets – utterly dismayed with the lack of action by what appears to be a self-interested and myopic older generation. Now, more than ever before, people are calling for a different way of going forward as humans in a multi-species and more than human world (Plumwood 2007). Numerous blueprints have been proposed for how to fundamentally transform society and build more resilient economies. With state socialism no longer seen as offering an ‘alternative’ pathway, other paradigms such as sustainable development or degrowth have been suggested. Almost all are premised on a critique of the status quo – of belief in growth for growth’s sake, of mindless consumerism, of the drive to accumulate and of corporate control of markets. Or to put it in sharper relief, most are premised on critiques of ‘capitalism’ and what are seen as its inherent ‘systemic’ tendencies. The blueprints proposed are thus premised on the need to transcend capitalism and its hegemonic articulation of production, exchange, finance, property, governance, culture and social relations. The term ‘postcapitalism’ has recently been enrolled (in quite a different register to that used in this handbook), to signal a clean break from the exploitative system of capitalism (Mason 2016). These visions may be inspiring, but pathways to their achievement are only vaguely identified, and the attractions of embarking on such pathways are assumed, without recognizing the very different starting points for people in different situations around the world. The motivation for diverse economies scholarship is similarly grounded in a critique of the status quo, of business as usual, of capitalist practices that are exploitative and extractive and that, in association with multiple forms of concentrated power, exert undue influence on trajectories of change. But our approach to building postcapitalist futures is very different. Our starting point for imagining and enacting radically different, sustainable, non-anthropocentric, postcapitalist futures is what we have here at hand. Focusing on what we have here at hand offers a different way of responding to the dire challenges of now, of ‘thinking the world’ and enacting change – one that has been developed out of dissatisfaction with the despairing and debilitating effects of systemic theories and revolutionary programmes of change. We do not diminish the importance of identifying with greater precision what we are up against and what is lacking or problematic. But at the centre of our analysis is a reframing of the more-than-capitalist economy, what we loosely call a ‘diverse economy’.2 And the energy that drives our scholarship is directed at bringing into being economies of ethical interdependence, what might be called ‘becoming community economies’. All of the contributing authors of this book are part of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), a loose association of over 200 scholars around the world who are creatively engaging with the ‘diverse economies approach’ and are interested in thinking about the

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4  The handbook of diverse economies ‘what next’ of economies. Inspired by the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and (initially at least) US and Australia based members of the Community Economies Collective (see for example Community Economies Collective 2001; Community Economies Collective and Gibson 2009; http://​www​.communityeconomies​.org [accessed 31 July 2019]), CERN’s tentacles of interconnection have dispersed worldwide and the diverse economies approach has spread into many intellectual arenas. The authors of chapters in this handbook include geographers, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, business studies scholars and artists from 20 different countries. Most are involved in teaching at undergraduate and graduate level across a range of fields. In collaborating together to work on this handbook, we have reflected on the possible ways in which this handbook might be used. One way in which we hope the book will be useful is to those working in the traditions of feminist and critical research who have long been frustrated with analysing capitalism as a monolith because such a perspective stands in the way of appreciating the promise of actually existing world-making contributions. Diverse economies scholarship offers new theorizations of livelihood and economic interconnection – of multiple trajectories of economic change that are not captured by unidimensional and unidirectional studies of economic practice and change. A second area in which the book will be of use is in environmental studies and political ecology amongst researchers who are interested in integrating conceptions of the more-than-human as well as the more-than-capitalist into their work. Recent engagements between diverse economies thinking and ecological approaches, especially environmental humanities, have seen a shift away from a focus on human economies by diverse economies scholars. This handbook includes new thinking about the more-than-human nature of livelihood and interdependence, the work of non-humans (Earth Others) as well as humans, and the dynamics of resilience rather than growth. A third area in which the book might be used is in the context of Indigenous struggles to gain greater legitimacy for life-affirming economic/ecological practices from which the world has so much to learn (Bargh 2012; Sepie 2017). Diverse economies research challenges the Eurocentric nature of economic theorizing that has been the subject of severe critique from the perspective of ‘epistemologies of the South’ (see for example de Sousa Santos 2014). Homogenizing development agendas that deploy dominant economic theory have actively de-legitimated Indigenous and folk knowledge of economic and ecological diversity (Escobar 1995). The true extent of this continued violence is increasingly coming to the fore (Kothari and Harcourt 2004). Yet livelihood practices informed by different cosmologies and collective ethics are still operating – in some contexts more strongly than others – as selected chapters in this handbook demonstrate. A fourth use speaks to those challenging the fetishization of capitalist modernity. It is still the case that capitalist modernization dominates the global development imaginary, despite the blatant failures of this model to promote equitable and sustainable ways of living on this planet. In rapidly growing economies such as Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa (the BRIICS) the attractions of modernity and consumerism have a powerful hold on desires and individual subjectivities. To talk of a postdevelopment agenda in this context is to invite incredulity, if not derision (see Liu et al., Chapter 49 in this volume). Yet there are many in these contexts who are looking for another way forward and are interested in surmounting the subjectivity challenges to pursue a different development pathway. This

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  5 handbook contains case material from selected BRIICS countries that shows how a diverse economies perspective might play a role in directing this path. Finally, in many parts of the world, young people are asking what might replace our current Earth destroying systems and what role they might have in bringing that about. Some are succumbing to anxiety and depression because they see no way forward. One recent popular article interviewed Anglophone millennials who were not paying into pension funds, finding that it was not only because they do not have stable employment, but also because many believe that capitalism will have collapsed by the time they reach retirement (Spencer 2018). Others, such as millennials leading the New Zealand government have recently drawn on aspects of sustainable and inclusive ‘doughnut economics’ thinking (Raworth 2017) to produce a ‘Well-being budget’ premised on increasing well-being rather than GDP (Robertson 2018). Still others are taking matters into their own hands: members of the Extinction Rebellion Network are acting in 650 localities in 45 countries around the world to rebel non-violently against ‘business as usual’ in the name of human survival itself (http://​www​.xrebellion​.org/​ [accessed 31 July 2019]). For many reasons, the time is ripe to cast a spotlight on the many diverse economic activities going on around the world that also seek well-being over profit. This handbook offers many examples of action to build community economies and will be of use to millennials who are fed up with the TINA stance.

THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS At the time of publication of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) in the late 1990s Marxian political economy had become mainstreamed as a mode of social analysis in many fields, such as Economic Geography. This was a remarkable turnaround from two decades prior when, under the influence of the radical social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, academic researchers who sought to make their work more relevant to the problems of poverty, inequality and colonialism had turned to Marx’s analysis of capitalism to explain the uneven development that was increasingly evident (Harvey 1973). Even in the late 1970s, engaging with Marxist theory identified one as a ‘radical’ in academic contexts. This did not stop whole cohorts of scholars from applying Marx’s late nineteenth-century analysis of the capitalist accumulation dynamic and class struggle to the ways that globalization was shaping new production systems and spatial patterns of industrialization, spreading consumer cultures, changing habits, reshaping national economic policy and undermining social democratic gains. The conceptual clarity offered by a Marxian approach appealed to those who sought to pierce the veils of ideology, to dig deep to expose whose interests the status quo served, and to inform struggles for liberation and equality. Marxian analyses were elaborated and extended to understand processes of environmental degradation and ongoing uneven global development in post-colonial contexts. But with the collapse of the socialist Soviet Union in 1991, there appeared to be no alternative to capitalism with a big C – even to those on the left side of politics who had agitated for its demise for decades. The ultimate hegemony of capitalism seemed to be locked in, now supported by neoliberal economic policies (embraced by policymakers and elites in many nations during the 1980s and foisted upon others through multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund) in which individualism, rationality and competition are privileged and the equilibrating mechanisms of ‘free’ market forces are relied on to distribute

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6  The handbook of diverse economies material well-being. Those in the West who had once been committed to revolution, now opted for a larger piece of the capitalist pie, replacing their demands for radical transformation with reformist claims on wealth distribution. In the academy, critique of this new neoliberal capitalist system and its violence abounded. New research largely focused on identifying and mapping the ever changing, ever more destructive ‘varieties of capitalism’ – folding phenomena from all spheres of life, not only the economic, into one big narrative. Yet the liberating appeal of Marxian analysis had been that it was premised on an intervention that placed understanding at the centre of world making. Karl Marx’s famous adage from his 1845 writing was inscribed on his grave. It reads: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. Marx advocated that scholars and strategists should seek to understand the world in order to change it. Indeed, the measure of success of any intellectual endeavour is the change that it provokes and enables. But by the early 1990s it seemed that no matter how much radical interpretation there was of capitalist crisis and restructuring, it was not generating strategies aimed at major socio-economic transformation, instead it was capitulating to the ever-inventive power of capital. It was in this context that Gibson-Graham proposed to abandon the study of a capitalist system (an ‘-ism’ with essentially immutable laws) and move to the study of capitalist economic practices, as well as other kinds of economic practices. The emphasis on practices focused in particular on the capitalist class process – the distinctive mode of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour (realized in the market as surplus value) that arose with the rise of waged employment involved in generalized commodity production in the context of private capitalist firms (Resnick and Wolff 1986).3 This decision to refocus on practices was a refusal on a number of accounts. One, it was a refusal of economic determinism and the ontological commitment to certain economic processes (such as capitalist accumulation) as more determining of world outcomes than others. Second, it was a refusal of empirical realism and the epistemological commitment to a simple separation between reality and reflection that could be directly mediated by neutral empirical evidence. Gibson-Graham began to conceptualize a world of overdetermination in which all existing conditions are the outcome of their myriad conditions of existence. Here they were influenced by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff’s anti-essentialist analysis of class as a process, itself an operationalization of Louis Althusser’s concept of overdetermination (Resnick and Wolff 1986, 1987; see also Madra 2006).4 In an overdetermined world, knowers accept both the indeterminacy of all knowledge and that knowledge making itself has powerful effects. They need to employ a way of knowing (an epistemology) that is suitably non-hubristic and unpretentious, taking steps, for instance, to be transparent about their entry point from which they trace connections and make meaning in the entangled mess of the world. In this modest way of knowing, we use capitalist as an adjective that describes a particular version of a practice. Researchers are compelled to unpick the practices and enactments usually conflated or aligned, and are encouraged to ask what is capitalist about this or that. Of course, what is referred to as capitalism does not just disappear when this move is made. But what is revealed are the effects of our representation when it is totalizing, that is, combining diversity into a coherent, homogeneous whole, and when it is essentializing, that is, promoting a capitalist economic essence that ignores, devalues or conceals diversity. Researchers can thus refuse to totalize or essentialize, and instead attempt to stand back and assess whether the effects of our representations are opening up spaces for change and transformation or not. Refusing a conception of ‘capitalism’ is a discursive move, focused on representation and

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  7 language, yet it also has material effects in terms of helping to imagine and enact ‘more than capitalist’ economies. Importantly, Gibson-Graham, along with many other social and feminist theorists at the time, began to pay attention to the way that research is performative, that is, it brings into being that which it theorizes. Research makes some things ‘more real’ by the very act of focusing on certain objects or relations, by developing language with which to identify and distinguish these objects or relations, and by devising discursive framings that situate these objects and relations in hierarchies of meaning. Research can have the effect of demarcating what is reasonable, possible, legitimate and modern.5 The performative act of theorizing and researching has the potential to move from the symbolic realm of language and discourse into the material realm of affordances and embodied action – creating states of being, shaping subjectivities and directing experiences. Such a conception of knowledge production acts as a salutary warning to researchers to consciously examine what effects (objects, relations) they are participating in making ‘more real’. At the same time, it is an invitation to upturn and yet still build on Marx’s adage that we understand the world in order to change it. As Gibson-Graham (2008) once put it – changing our understanding of the world is to change the world (if only partially and locally). By participating in the act of discourse creation, we are actively inviting shifts in bodily being and subjectivity. As diverse economies thinking has matured and new scholars have joined in the conversation, other theoretical interventions and political concerns have influenced its development. Some of these scholars have challenged the false separation of economic and ecological thinking and the privileged status of the human subject in Western thought (Miller 2019). Diverse economies scholars have welcomed engagements with ecological humanities, political ecology and science and technology studies and these have stimulated new formulations (see, for example, the collection edited by Gibson et al. 2015). While one of the inspirations for theorizing economic diversity came from ecological thinking, in which diversity is seen as a key contributor to resilience, new work is exploring greater connections between ecological dynamics and the dynamics of community economies that might be activated by ethical intervention (Barron 2015; Gibson et al. 2010; Gibson-Graham et al. 2016). Assemblage theory and material semiotics has greatly informed new thinking about how change occurs – extending the conception of who and what acts (St. Martin et al. 2015 and the framing chapter on subjectivity by Healy, Özselçuk and Madra, Chapter 43 in this volume). At the centre of these new developments is the more-than-human subject – a reconceived agent of a very different kind of decentred and distributed politics (Miller 2019; Roelvink and Zolkos 2015). As can be seen by this brief intellectual genealogy, the theoretical groundings of diverse economies research are understood to be perpetually evolving as new thinking and political concerns challenge previous formulations. The performative view of theory and research opens up the possibility of making worlds, but it offers no easy recipe for social transformation (Cameron et al. 2011). The work of knowledge production in the service of making other worlds possible must harness and deploy many different strategies in order to pull against the mainstream. In the diverse economies research programme, we have drawn on and developed a suite of ‘thinking strategies’ to help this effort.

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8  The handbook of diverse economies

CRITICAL THINKING STRATEGIES Diverse economies scholarship proposes a reframing of the economy. Reframing involves first, the work of critique to disempower the framing that is standing in the way of change, and second, the work of building a new framing that can enable different kinds of action. This section briefly introduces critical thinking strategies that challenge the framing of capitalism as the ultimate real, as something we can’t imagine the world without, as the inevitable container and constrainer of possibility that operates outside of society. The next section elaborates how inventory is utilized to produce a new framing of economy.6 Capitalocentrism is a term that was coined by Gibson-Graham to describe the way a set of economic practices and relationships ascribed to capitalism are established as the dominant, most efficient, modern, innovative and dynamic forms of economic activity that have hitherto existed.7 The specific practices that are foregrounded in capitalocentric representations are waged labour, commodity production, private enterprise, private property and institutional finance. The dynamics that are privileged are those of supply and demand and capital accumulation motivated by competitive rational self-interest. Against this self-reinforcing constellation of practices and dynamics other forms of economic activity are deemed subordinate, inefficient, pre- or non-modern, static or stagnant. One effect of capitalocentrism is thus to situate all other ways of labouring, transacting, enterprising, owning and allocating investment in a subordinate, complementary, oppositional, or outsider relationship to capitalism. Another is the conflation effect whereby the appearance of commodity markets or paid labour is read as an indication of the presence of capitalism and not as an empirical observation whose connections to other phenomena need to be traced and theorized. Capitalocentrism is associated with a kind of strong theory that knows where power lies, that suspects how phenomena line up to consolidate power and that cannot be surprised. Research conducted in this mode appears to be bold and innovative because it quickly identifies the new, but merely rolls out cookie cutter analysis folding the new into a familiar embrace. The critical work of identifying capitalocentrism is a task in itself. Challenging capitalocentrism is not easy. This is because capitalocentrism invades so much thinking that it has become normalized. It is now ‘common sense’ to think that getting a paid job is the only way to survive, or that capitalist growth benefits all, or that eliminating any barriers to the free movement of traded goods is for the greater good, or that big banks and other financial institutions are best equipped to manage our investments. It is increasingly difficult to think otherwise, and yet as the chapters of this handbook demonstrate, there is a rich world of economic difference out there to learn from. Deconstruction is a technique that helps to identify how power is distributed by meaning making into a binary structure based on opposition and exclusion (A/not A) (Derrida 1967). It exposes how, in the Western philosophical tradition, meaning is constructed around presence and essence to the exclusion of absence and difference (Derrida 1967; Gibson-Graham 2000; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). In economic theorizing the dominant term ‘capitalist’ is associated with a train of linked concepts – capitalist business and private accumulation, waged and salaried labour, commodity production and exchange in markets, private property, especially privately owned means of production, and interest-bearing finance. Each of these concepts is in turn defined by what it is not – that is, its outside. Chains of association link these dominant terms building up the representation of a powerful, coherent, dynamic whole against which any constellation of ‘outsides’ cannot stand up with the same power, coherence and dyna-

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  9 mism.8 Yet deconstruction reveals that each dominant term cannot be comprehended without its opposite. Thus markets in which goods and services are quickly and ‘freely’ exchanged in transactions with finite ends can only be understood by reference to gift transactions that bind the givers and receivers into lengthy time-spanning relations of obligation. The presence of the dominant term is only ever constructed out of its inherent dependence on its other. The deconstructive move reveals the moments of contradiction and undecidability, that is, the multiple failures that allow the outsides to destabilize meaning making (Ruccio 1998). This move thus clears the way for a form of weak theory that is able to describe, appreciate, connect and analyse, identifying strengths to build on and constraints to work around. The diverse economies intervention mobilizes weak theory to achieve a mighty effect – the destabilization of capitalist hegemony. The primary ‘weapon of destruction’ is thick descriptive inventory that breaks down the powerful presence of any dominant term, showing how it contains difference.9 Inventory makes both sides of the binary multiple.10 Drawing on the contaminations that deconstruction points to, weak theory can then make its advances – challenging capitalocentrism, queering alignments and opening up the potential for making new alliances.11 What results is a prolific and detailed heterogeneity. When applied to capitalism this produces the fecund landscape of diverse economies where the range of what can be imagined and what is possible is considerably widened (Hirschman 2013).

INVENTORY AS A STRATEGY FOR OPENING UP ‘THE ECONOMY’ Diverse economies scholarship focuses on both the heterogeneity of economic practices and the unfixed nature of the alignments and connections between them. The iceberg has emerged as a powerful tool for communicating the idea of a diverse economy (Figure 1.1).12 Above the waterline we see the economic practices that are associated with the capitalist economy – waged labour, production of commodities for exchange in markets, in capitalist businesses. Below the waterline we see a host of heterogeneous practices – some of them explicitly ‘economic’ (such as barter, in-kind payment or cooperatives), others more social (such as child and elder care, activities in churches or temples or schools) and others decidedly ecological (such as photosynthesis, soil formation or fungal growth). Versions of this image have been used in countless conversations with different constituencies. Its effects are multiple. One is to make ‘the economy’ suddenly something different than what gets reported on in the nightly news. It is expanded and opened up to its outside – to the ‘others’ who also contribute to maintaining livelihoods alongside, and in many cases, supporting those who earn wages, trade commodities and generate new wealth. This in turn promotes another effect – a subjectivity shift for those who usually see themselves as marginalized or excluded from the ‘real’ economy above the waterline. The iceberg image positions them as economically active and possibly able to engage in discussions about how economic futures might be shaped. When the iceberg economy is collectively produced it can also illustrate the gender division of labour and prompt discussions about how different kinds of activities are valued or devalued. This representation thus provokes ethical reflection and prepares the ground for discussion about what kinds of economic activities could be strengthened and how. While the iceberg image is useful in practical settings, a more systematic framing of the diverse economy has been developed for use in research. This framing relies on an inventory

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10  The handbook of diverse economies

Source: Drawn by the Community Economies Collective. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Figure 1.1

The diverse economies iceberg

of economic activities drawn from a range of sources – including established research in various disciplines and ongoing field work. An inventory is usually a complete list of terms – but the inventorying associated with the diverse economy research programme is never complete and does not aspire to total coverage (as would be expected when operating from the stance on ontology and epistemology laid out above). Its main purpose is to challenge the de-legitimation of certain economic knowledges, working therefore to bring into question practices and discourses which homogenize dominant economic knowledges. The inventory employs a loose classificatory framing that broadly defines ‘types’ of economic activity.13 It acts as a provocation to ‘take back the economy’ – populating it with what is at hand and valuing the productivity of many kinds of economic endeavours. Economic activities in the diverse economies analytical framework are arranged into five ‘types’ relating to enterprise, labour, transactions, property and finance.14 The first five sections of the handbook are organized around these activities. Each type of activity relates to

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12  The handbook of diverse economies slave owners. In the ‘more than capitalist’ firms that may have many attributes of mainstream business, what surplus there is left over from distributed payments to all the claimants on surplus is deployed to a range of ends, not only private accumulation. This could include to ‘other’ ends, such as the national commonwealth, the environment, a social grouping that may be marginalized, registered members of a tribe, or a constituency of stakeholder producers or consumers. The assumption usually made is that all capitalist firms distribute appropriated surplus to the private accumulation funds of owners and CEOs. While this is undoubtedly the case for many firms, some (more than) capitalist firms incorporate into their business model distributions to genuine environmental stewardship or community resilience. The diverse economy researcher approaches any assumptions about business practice with a questioning mind and empirical curiosity (see Cameron, Chapter 2 in this volume). Labour Labour is at the centre of making and providing livings. It involves expenditure of energy in the production of goods and services – from child minding, to steel making, opera singing, programming, cooking and making honey (see the framing chapter by McKinnon, Chapter 12 in this volume). The diverse economies framing has been heavily influenced by feminist thinkers who have drawn attention to the immensity of unpaid labour performed by women in all economies. More recently, the work of Earth Others has been acknowledged. The entry point for distinguishing different types of labour is the form of remuneration or compensation (monetary and non-monetary) they receive. For some labour, remuneration is directly tied to securing material survival needs and variation in the amount of remuneration dramatically affects the kind of livelihood that can be supported. Other forms of labour are unremunerated in monetary terms, but receive compensation in other forms, for example, love, enjoyment, connection or habitat protection. Table 1.2 shows a range of types of labour and identifies the related form of remuneration in each case. As this table shows, many important forms of labour are unpaid or unremunerated, and only some labour is remunerated with monetary wages or salary – yet this ‘paid work’ occupies the attention of most labour analysts such as labour economists and geographers, sociologists of work, industrial relations, productivity and labour process experts. Certainly the rise of precarious work (here represented by non-unionized, part time, temporary and seasonal labour) is a serious concern. Precarious labour is unprotected by regulations or union agreements and monetary remuneration is not sufficient to meeting material survival needs (see Chapter 13 by Pavlovskaya in this volume). So too is the continued prevalence of slave labour conducted under conditions of unfreedom. But alongside these less desirable forms of labour are a plethora of forms of labour that are ‘remunerated’ in other ways via a range of monetized and non-monetized transactions reflecting a multitude of relationships. These should not be ignored. The effect of open inventorying is to bring to light all the kinds of labour working to sustain life on Earth alongside all those that are not life-sustaining or just, in order to guide actions that promote the ethical negotiation of greater parity and sustainability of labouring.

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  17 To conclude this discussion, it is important to reiterate that the purpose of this representation of economic heterogeneity is to undermine the power of a capitalocentric world view. As diverse economic practices are proliferated and named, it becomes clear that capitalocentrism is an overwhelmingly neocolonial approach to thinking about the world, one which erases the diverse epistemological, ontological and even cosmological standpoints of peoples everywhere. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos writes, ‘such diversity should be valorized’ because ‘the understanding of the world far exceeds the Western understanding of the world’, and social justice is impossible without what he calls ‘cognitive justice’ – that is, the recognition that ‘emancipatory transformations in the world may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory’ (2014, p. viii). In what Arturo Escobar (2018) calls this pluriverse, different practices and different rationalities of enterprise, labour, exchange, relationships to things and land, and ways of investing in the future coexist in multiple ‘ecologies of productivity’ (de Sousa Santos 2014). Inventorying diverse economies performs this pluriverse of potential productivity in ever more visible and material ways.

POWER, SCALE AND UN/DESIRABILITY The diverse economy framing as elaborated above is an intervention that opens up the economic landscape, and the mind, to many different projects. This approach prompts researchers to question what they are investing in when they opt to study one or other aspect of this diversity. In this sense the framing is a politico-ethical intervention. It opens up a space of indecision that must be filled by action. The performative research actions taken by diverse economies scholars have often been questioned by those concerned about: power and the dangers of co-optation; scale and the potential ineffectiveness of ‘small-scale and often intimate practices of alternative or diverse economies’ (Leyshon 2010); and the undesirable and unwanted diverse economy. In this section these concerns are addressed. One way the diverse economies framing challenges power is by tackling capitalocentric representations and exposing their effects. Beyond that, the framing makes no claims about how power is distributed in the economy. What it does do is enlarge the scope for explorations of how power is enacted. The tables above distinguish types of economic activity according to certain processes of negotiation – all of which cannot be known ahead of their practice. It is through the actual negotiation – constrained as it might be by institutions, laws, alliances, technologies, natures and so on – that power is enacted. Whether it is power over, power with, or power to, this power is not a pre-distributed stock permanently held in place by one agent, but is fluid (see Chapter 45 by Gabriel and Sarmiento in this volume). The language of economic diversity can be an aid in understanding what is often represented as the ‘power of capital’. For example, the inordinate influence of financial institutions in governing daily life might be usefully unpacked by reference to the ways that bribery, patronage, gift giving, state allocations, underground trader agreements and patronage figure in the operations and crises of financial markets. Rather than assume that an assemblage is inherently capitalist and thus powerful, the diverse economies approach uses weak theory to expose the workings of power – including its strengths and fragilities. In a similar vein, empirical curiosity and a resistance to theoretical closure informs the response to critics who are concerned that any experiment with intentional economic activities directed towards economic justice or ecological sustainability will suffer the fate of ‘co-optation’ by capital or the state. The

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18  The handbook of diverse economies diverse economies approach has been specifically developed to avoid reliance on essentialist arguments of inevitability and the unidirectionality of change. This approach provokes inquiry with an open mind – one that avoids the simplified short-termism of coarse-grained judgements regarding the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of economic experimentation. Indeed, it challenges researchers to consider the role their research plays in strengthening certain understandings of power and co-optation. Questions of scale are usually another way of broaching power (Gibson-Graham 2002). The economic practices described in this inventory are not present in every sector of the economy or every place in the globe – again it is an empirical question as to which of these (or other as yet unspecified) diverse economic activities are operating in any one context. But many of the non-capitalist practices that might be thought of as ‘local’ are ubiquitous and in this sense are ‘global’. For example, the practices of care labour, housework, family lending, migrant remittances, household flows of goods and services are everywhere – they are global and local – and together they exert inordinate power over population dynamics, one of the most important determinants of liveability on this planet (Safri and Graham 2010). Similarly, the work of (and exchanges between) Earth Others take place in ecologies and atmospheres the world over. The incredible power that these place-based and Earth system-contributing activities have to construct a thin membrane of liveability for all living species is only now being understood, just as it is being threatened by the actions of humans (Latour 2014). It would be ridiculous to ask whether the powerful work of households and Earth Others could be ‘scaled up’ for greater effect. Yet this question is often asked of diverse economies scholars who research intentional ethical economic practices in diverse economies the world over. Behind this question is a nested conception of scale and a distributed hierarchy of power: the local is small and less powerful – the global is large and more powerful (Cameron and Hicks 2014; Marston et al. 2005). This concern will be revisited in the context of the discussion to come on building community economies. Inventorying diverse economies reveals undesirable and unwanted practices, where coercive power, inequality and environmental destruction are played out. To bring these economic practices to visibility is not to condone them, nor is it to neutralize them. Many such practices are conducted by capitalist enterprises, but they are clearly also part of the operations of non-capitalist enterprises and practices. It is as important to recognize, for example, the extent of the involvement of modern-day slavery in global capitalist supply chains, and actions to expose and eradicate it,16 as it is to identify the extent of cooperativism and practices of mutuality and actions to support them. Studying diverse economic practices is not only for finding possibilities, but also for ruling out possibilities, for laying out other projects of transformation. All economic practices and the subjects who perform them can be involved in change. For example, the meagre remuneration paid to indentured migrant domestic helpers may become an investment stream that funds community enterprise in their home countries (Gibson et al. 2001). And the appropriation of rotating credit associations by the state to control narratives of womanhood, as in Indonesia (Niehof 1998), is not to deny the empowerment these schemes offer women in other parts of the world (see Chapter 39 by Hossein in this volume). The diverse economy framework is thus a good tool for working against certain practices, although much scholarship has so far been dedicated to working for others. The aim of inventorying economic diversity in an anti-essentialist framing is to ‘affirm that lives unfold in a “pluriverse” rather than a “universe”’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2017). Within this pluriverse, diverse economies researchers are interested in devising pathways towards

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  19 more sustainable and equitable worlds, ones that recognize and attempt to avoid being enrolled in the dominant capitalist pathway of growing inequality and environmental degradation. This involves a positive project of strengthening and creating those diverse economic practices that have the potential to support ethically oriented community economies. In the last section of this introduction we clarify an important distinction (sometimes lost on critics and collaborators alike) between conducting a diverse economies inventory and imagining and enacting community economies.

REFOCUSING ON ETHICAL ACTION Representing the economic landscape as heterogeneous is an ethical intervention that has the effect of reducing the discursive dominance of capitalism and opening up the space of possibility in an economic pluriverse. But this is not the endpoint of analysis. Diverse economies scholars are committed to describing, theorizing and inventorying a range of ethical economic actions that enable more-than-human flourishing and those that stand in its way. ‘Community economies’ is the shorthand term used to denote the complex interdependence of such actions (Gibson-Graham 2006). The term ‘community’ is used here to imply the hard and joyful negotiation of ‘being in common’ (Nancy 1991). Community is never set and stable, it is not pre-given nor can it be assumed to be homogeneous. Community is always in the process of becoming, especially through negotiation. This handbook contains many chapters that address different ethical actions that are building community economies. In Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy (2013) make the case for transformative action based on negotiations around six key areas of shared concern – which broadly map onto the diverse types of economic activity already discussed. These concerns, or coordinates, are framed as open questions that loosely relate to the entry points used to differentiate diverse practices. ●● For enterprise, the concern is wealth distribution and the question is: How can surplus be produced, appropriated and distributed so as to enhance human and planetary well-being? ●● For labour, the concern is livelihood well-being and the question is: How can different forms of work and remuneration be combined so that humans and Earth Others survive well? ●● For transactions, the concern is with ethically responsible encounters and the question is: How can human–human and human–Earth Other encounters enhance well-being for all? ●● For property, the concern is with access to the benefit of property and the question is: How do communities make and share commons? ●● For finance, the concern is present and future security and the question is: How does investment provide us with returns that protect against risk now and into the future? Underpinning all these is a fundamental concern for sustainable consumption and the economic subject. Here the question is: How do consumer subjects become subjects of sustainable community economies? The topic chapters of this handbook showcase creative research around these questions and concerns. Some chapters document new experimentation that is place-based, others discuss interventions in state and international agendas. All are based on new empirical and theoretical research. The cumulative contribution of these chapters constitutes a powerful programme of action towards building other possible worlds. The community economy is revealed here and

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20  The handbook of diverse economies now in its specificity as a ‘macro actor’ that works in and through multiple sites and transnational networks to transform places, sectors and subjects. It is not yet two decades on from the millennial World Social Forums that shook the world and provoked a widespread awakening to the fact that another world was not only possible but desperately needed. In the intervening years diverse economies researchers have explored the ‘seemingly insignificant nooks and crannies of everyday business and domestic life’ (Leyshon 2010, p. 122) theorizing other-than-capitalist practices that might be harnessed to produce something else, something more-than-capitalist. It is these glimmers that community economies research attempts to string together into larger constellations of possibility (Morrow and Dombroski 2015). In doing so, diverse economy scholars ‘cultivate a politics of horizontal extent, reach, and association rather than a “politics of scale”’ (St. Martin et al. 2015, p. 16). We take inspiration here from the activism that women and Indigenous peoples of the world have undertaken, and we place some of our hopes on the numerous movements the young people of the world are engaging in. In these movements the scale of action is never anything less than global. Because women are everywhere and therefore always somewhere, change can be enacted in all those many somewheres (Dombroski 2016; Gibson-Graham 2005). And because of the ubiquity of Indigenous struggles, local place-based activism is also everywhere. Because young people are increasingly interconnected with each other and questioning the ‘way things are’, we have hope that in the same way, change-making practices can travel and spread, scaling out (rather than up) through relational networks and associations. There is no expectation that change will look exactly the same everywhere. Indeed, there is no sense in dictating or designing one grand action strategy, because that impulse is where many of the world’s problems might be traced to – forms of imperialism embedded in a Eurocentric understanding of the world requiring abstraction and universalism (Escobar 2018). What we can do is adopt shared thinking strategies that activate hopeful inquiry (Hirschman 1971), to refuse to crush the activism of the hopeful with academic critique that only lines things up and closes off options for transformative action. We hope that this handbook will contribute to mobilizing global community economies building collective power via extensive meshworks linking multiple gatherings of diverse liberatory economic practice.17

NOTES 1. J.K. Gibson-Graham is the joint authorial subject shared by feminist economic geographers Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham. J.K. Gibson-Graham was conceived in 1992 and born in published form in 1993 after more than a decade of co-writing under separate names. Since the death of Julie in 2010, J.K. Gibson-Graham has continued to publish both alone and in collaboration with others. 2. In this handbook authors use ‘diverse economy’ and ‘diverse economies’ interchangeably. In an emerging field such as this, terminology is still being worked out. Originally the focus on diverse economic practices in a falsely named ‘capitalist economy’ led to the concept of ‘a diverse (not only, or more than, capitalist) economy’. As thinking has developed in relation to what ‘an economy’ is, there has been a greater resort to use of the plural ‘diverse economies’. 3. How this class process was supported and enabled by other practices associated with capitalist development, such as formation of the joint stock firm as a legal entity, the rise of mechanization and fossil fuel production, the formation of capitalist business associations and trade unions and so on, is, in this approach, a question for historical analysis not theoretical assumption. 4. The term ‘overdetermination’ was taken from Sigmund Freud’s dream analysis and used by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to describe this anti-essentialist approach to ontology. Resnick

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  21

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

and Wolff (1987) demonstrated how overdetermination could be a key way of analysing multiple class processes and their economic effectivity. Often valuing coherence at the expense of incoherence and messiness (DeMartino 2013; Grabel 2017). A new framing of economy in no way implies that capitalist practices are not of interest to diverse economy scholars. We are concerned to research the contingencies and fragilities of what is portrayed as systemic and powerful, pulling capitalism down off its pedestal and revealing how it is assembled and made to seem durable. The chapter in this volume by Gabriel and Sarmiento (Chapter 45) discusses how genealogy is employed to this end. The neologism ‘capitalocentrism’ is analogically related to ‘phallocentrism’ and ‘phallogocentrism’, terms coined by Jacques Derrida to highlight how the masculine (phallus) is privileged in the construction of meaning and used to productive ends by feminist post-structuralists (see Gibson-Graham 1996, Chapter 1). Some have experimented with proposing a simple reversal of power whereby the subordinate ‘not A’ terms are elevated to a position of dominance (for example, by representing the figure of the feminine as superior to that of the masculine, or the worker-owned cooperative as superior to the private capitalist business, or socialism as superior to capitalism). The binary structure of meaning remains intact and difference is once again suppressed but in a different way. We are using the phrase ‘weapon of destruction’ in an ironic sense here, much as Gibson-Graham did when she wrote the paper ‘Waiting for the revolution, or how to smash capitalism while working at home in your spare time’ (1993). Showing, for example, that ‘A’ is A1, A2, A3 and so on, and that ‘not A’ is not A1, not A2, not A3 and so on. When presence is many presences and absence is many absences, it becomes difficult to sustain any hard barrier between all the heterogeneous elements. Queering is a strategy of dealignment proposed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) to challenge the policing of gendered identity that Gibson-Graham cross-appropriated and employed in the economic realm. The iceberg image has taken on a life of its own over the years since its creation by a hybrid research collective (Community Economies Collective 2001). This simple trope of visibility/invisibility that Freud first used to distinguish the conscious from the unconscious has morphed into a floating coconut economy in the Pacific, a drinks cabinet in the UK, an ant-hill/house in South Korea. But still the iceberg is a preferred template – even becoming a 3D cardboard wearable device developed by artist Ailie Rutherford to help initiate conversations about taking back the economy in Scotland (see https://​thepeoplesbankofgovanhill​.wordpress​.com/​author/​ailieprojects/​page/​3/​ [accessed 31 July 2019]). This is done with a standing invitation to researchers and activists to reclassify, rearrange, add to and elaborate it, remembering that the diverse economy inventory is decidedly not a typology to be applied in an unthinking manner. It is an ordering that has certain effects, so the researcher who employs any framing of the inventory needs to make clear what they are trying to achieve by grouping activities under certain headings. Early iterations of the framing included only enterprise, labour and transactions (see, for example the discussion of a language of economic diversity in Gibson-Graham 2006, Chapter 6). Property and finance were added to the framing in Gibson-Graham et al. (2013). In the current iteration the term ‘alternative’ has been removed to avoid the common misconception that this framing elaborates an ‘alternative economy’ (see Healy 2009). Many enterprises do not produce new wealth but employ people to produce services that support new wealth generation (e.g. accountancy, retailing, advertising). In the class process analysis, their operations make claims on distributed surplus payments from the direct wealth producing firms and are seen to be involved in non-class processes of surplus distribution. Note the very recent passing of Modern Day Slavery Acts in the UK 2015, France 2017, and Australia 2018. Recently this mobilization, or translocal contagion, has been named ‘The Interdependence’ and there are moves afoot for registration of a domain name (.idt) that will allow community economy initiatives to identify and be identified.

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22  The handbook of diverse economies

REFERENCES Bargh, M. (2012), ‘Rethinking and re-shaping indigenous economies: Māori geothermal energy enterprises’, Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, 6 (3), 271–83. Barron, E. (2015), ‘Situating wild product gathering in a diverse economy: Negotiating ethical interactions with natural resources’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 173–93. Bonnet, F., J. Vanek and M. Chen (2019), Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Brief, Manchester: WIEGO. Cameron, J. and J. Hicks (2014), ‘Performative research for a climate politics of hope: Rethinking geographic scale, “impact” scale and markets’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 46 (1), 53–71. Cameron, J., C. Manhood and J. Pomfrett (2011), ‘Bodily learning for a (climate) changing world: Registering differences through performative and collective research’, Local Environment, 16 (6), 493–508. Community Economies Collective (2001), ‘Imagining and enacting noncapitalist futures’, Socialist Review, 28 (3–4), 93–153. Community Economies Collective and K. Gibson (2009), ‘Building community-based social enterprises in the Philippines: Diverse development pathways’, in A. Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Solidarity, London: Zed Press, pp. 116–38. de Sousa Santos, B. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press. DeMartino, G. F. (2013), ‘Ethical engagement in a world beyond control’, Rethinking Marxism, 25 (4), 483–500. Derrida, J. (1967), Of Grammatology, G. Spivak (trans.), Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dombroski, K. (2016), ‘Seeing diversity, multiplying possibility: My journey from post-feminism to postdevelopment with JK Gibson-Graham’, in W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 312–28. Epstein, G. (ed.) (2005), Financialization and the World Economy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Escobar, A. (1995), Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. (2018), Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eum, H. (2017), Cooperatives and Employment: Second Global Report, Geneva: CICOPA International Co-operative Alliance. FAO (2015), Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Alleviation, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Gibson, K., A. Cahill and D. McKay (2010), ‘Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippines municipality’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (2), 237–55. Gibson, K., L. Law and D. McKay (2001), ‘Beyond heroes and victims: Filipina contract migrants, economic activism and class transformations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (3), 365–86. Gibson, K., D.B. Rose and R. Fincher (eds) (2015), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, New York: Punctum Books. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1993), ‘Waiting for the revolution, or how to smash capitalism while working at home in your spare time’, Rethinking Marxism, 6 (2), 10–24. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2000), ‘Interventions’, in E. Sheppard and T. Barnes (eds), A Companion to Economic Geography, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 95–110.

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Introduction to The Handbook of Diverse Economies  23 Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2002), ‘Beyond global vs. local: Economic politics outside the binary frame’, in A. Herod and M. Wright (eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 25–60. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2005), ‘Building community economies: Women and the politics of place’, in W. Harcourt and A. Escobar (eds), Women and the Politics of Place, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, pp. 130–57. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for other worlds’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, K. Dombroski, S. Healy, E. Miller and the Community Economies Collective (2017), ‘Cultivating community economies: Tools for building a liveable world’, in G. Alperovitz and J. G. Speth (eds.), The Next System Project, accessed 29 July 2019 at http://​ thenextsystem​.org/​cultivating​-community​-economies/​. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., A. Hill and L. Law (2016), ‘Re-embedding economies in ecologies: Resilience building in more than human communities’, Building Research Information, 44 (7), 703–36. Grabel, I. (2017), When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harvey, D. (1973), Social Justice and the City, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Healy, S. (2009), ‘Economies, alternative’, in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Volume 3, Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 338–43. Hirschman, A.O. (1971), A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hirschman, A.O. (2013 [1971]), ‘Political economics and possibilism’, in J. Adelman (ed.), The Essential Hirschman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 1–34. Kothari, S. and W.J.D. Harcourt (2004), ‘Introduction: The violence of development’, Development, 47 (1), 3–7. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. Latour, B. (2014), ‘Some advantages of the notion of “Critical Zone” for geopolitics’, Procedia Earth and Planetary Science, 10, 3–6. Leyshon, A. (2010), ‘Classics in human geography revisited: Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996: The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell’, Commentary 2, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (1), 120–122. Madra, Y. M. (2006), ‘Questions of communism: Ethics, ontology, subjectivity’, Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2), 205–24. Marston, S., J.P. Jones III and K. Woodward (2005), ‘Human geography without scale’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4), 416–32. Mason, P. (2016), Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mazzucato, M. (2011), ‘The entrepreneurial state’, Soundings, 49 (Winter), 131–42. Miller, E. (2019), Reimagining Livelihoods: Life Beyond Economy, Society and the Environment, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Morrow, O. and K. Dombroski (2015), ‘Enacting a postcapitalist politics through the sites and practices of life’s work’, in K. Meehan and K. Strauss (eds), Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 82–98. Nancy, J.-L. (1991), ‘Of being-in-common’, in Miami Theory Collective (ed.), Community at Loose Ends, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–12. Niehof, A. (1998), ‘The changing lives of Indonesian women: Contained emancipation under pressure’, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 4 (2), 236–58. Plumwood, V. (2007), ‘A review of Deborah Bird Rose’s reports from a wild country: Ethics for decolonisation’, Australian Humanities Review, 42, 1–4. Raworth, K. (2017), Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, London: Random House. Resnick, S.A. and R.D. Wolff (1986), ‘Power, property and class’, Socialist Review, 86 (Spring), 97–124.

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24  The handbook of diverse economies Resnick, S.A. and R.D. Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, G. (2018), Budget 2019: Budget Policy Statement, Wellington: New Zealand Government. Roelvink, G. and M. Zolkos (2015), ‘Affective ontologies: Post-humanist perspectives on the self, feeling and intersubjectivity’, Emotion Space and Society, 14, 47–9. Ruccio, D. (1998), ‘Deconstruction’, in J.B. Davis, D.W. Hands and U. Maki (eds), The Handbook of Economic Methodology, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 89–93. Safri, M. and J. Graham (2010), ‘The global household: Toward a feminist postcapitalist international political economy’, Signs 40, 99–125. Sedgwick, E.K. (1993), Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sepie, A. (2017), ‘More than stories, more than myths: Animal/human/nature(s) in traditional ecological worldviews’, Humanities, 6 (4), 78. Spencer, K. (2018), ‘Some millenials aren’t saving for retirement because they believe capitalism will not exist by then’, Salon, 18 March, accessed 29 July 2019 at https://​www​.salon​.com/​2018/​03/​18/​some​ -millennials​-arent​-saving​-for​-retirement​-because​-they​-do​-not​-think​-capitalism​-will​-exist​-by​-then/​. St. Martin, K., G. Roelvink and J.K. Gibson-Graham (2015), ‘An economic politics for our times’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–25. Steffen, W., W. Broadgate, L. Deutsch, O. Gaffney and C. Ludwig (2015), ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The great acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, 2 (1), 81–98.

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2. Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise Jenny Cameron

INTRODUCTION In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and concerns about the deepening climate crisis, there is growing recognition that many business practices have to change. Milton Friedman’s infamous proclamation that ‘[t]he social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’ (1970, p. 1) is under question today. We could say that business-as-usual is ‘on notice’. The questioning of the role of business is reflected in public discussions, in media reporting, and within the university sector in the introduction of courses on topics such as business ethics, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship and ‘green capitalism’. At the same time, however, there is scepticism about whether businesses are able to make deep and genuine changes that can match the challenges of addressing economic inequality and halting the warming of the planet. There are concerns that these issues are simply a new opportunity for businesses to increase their profits by expanding their operations into emerging markets such as those in Africa, and to make only the smallest adjustments to their environmental practices (enough to be able to ‘greenwash’ their activities). The questions that are being asked about the societal role of business as well as the concerns raised about the capacity of business to contribute to a more equitable and environmentally sustainable future are well suited to investigations based on the diverse economies framing of enterprise.1 This chapter serves as an introduction to this framing, with a focus on three important features. It starts with a discussion of the understanding of class that is the basis of the diverse economies framing. As outlined in the introduction to this volume, this understanding sees class, not as a social grouping, but as a way of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour. The second section discusses how this understanding has been used by diverse economies scholars to study various types of enterprises and the distinctive edge that results when this understanding is combined with what is known as a ‘weak theory’ approach. The third section turns to enterprise dynamics and the drivers of enterprise change, and discusses class dynamics within the enterprise as well as wider factors that provide the enterprise’s conditions of existence.

CLASS AS A PROCESS The diverse economies framing of the enterprise is based on Resnick and Wolff’s (1987) reading of the three volumes of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, and the understanding that class is a process of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour. Surplus labour is what workers produce above and beyond what they need to survive. In the context of waged labour, wages are meant to cover the workers’ survival needs (but there can be vast differences in wages between different countries and within different sectors in the same country). In their working day, workers produce goods and services that are equiv26 Jenny Cameron - 9781788119962 07:59:08PM

Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  27 alent in value to their daily wage, but they also produce more than the value of their wage. This ‘extra’ production is their surplus labour (or surplus value once the value of the service or product is realized in the market). In a non-wage setting, the survival ‘payment’ may be an allowance of food and the provision of some form of shelter. Surplus labour then refers to the ‘extra’ goods or services that workers produce above this survival payment. The appropriation of surplus labour refers to the ‘taking’ of the extra that workers produce, and distribution refers to the various ways that the extra is dispersed. In this Marxian class analysis, it is important to ask who takes the surplus labour that workers produce and to whom the surplus labour is distributed. In the most familiar enterprise type, the capitalist firm, surplus labour is appropriated by the capitalist owners. The owners may be the individuals who own and run a private capitalist firm or the shareholders who own a corporation that is publicly listed on the stock exchange and run, on their behalf, by a Board of Directors. The taking of surplus labour by non-producers is recognized as a form of theft and named exploitation. The new ‘owner’ of surplus labour has the power to make decisions about how the appropriated surplus labour is distributed. In a large capitalist enterprise some will be distributed to help maintain and expand operations. For example, some may be distributed to managers to oversee the workers; some to the advertising and social media department to increase the visibility of the firm and thereby increase sales; and some to accountants to streamline the financial operations and even minimize taxation payments. Some of the appropriated surplus labour will be distributed more widely. For example, some may be distributed as profit to individual owners or as dividends to shareholders; some as taxation to governments and thereby the wider public; some as membership payments to business associations that lobby governments on behalf of business; and some as donations to sporting groups, arts projects, charities and the like. In this Marxian class analysis, other enterprises in which non-producers appropriate and distribute the surplus labour produced by workers are feudal enterprises and slave enterprises. In a feudal enterprise, the workers produce what they need for their own survival (say by growing enough food to feed themselves) but the feudal ‘lord’ that they are obligated to takes and distributes the extra they produce. In a slave enterprise, the workers are unfree. They produce much more than the costs of food and lodging that their owner provides them and this ‘extra’ is taken and distributed by their owner. There are also enterprises in which the workers who produce the surplus labour also appropriate and distribute this surplus. This occurs in worker-owned cooperatives, a type of enterprise which is owned by workers and in which the workers, via a communal class process, cooperate to make decisions about how to distribute the surplus they have produced. Another example is what is known as independent enterprises, businesses in which a self-employed person produces and then owns the surplus labour that she or he produces. This diversity of enterprises can be found across the globe today, and includes, for example, a capitalist mining company that is listed on the Canadian stock exchange but operates globally (Garibay et al. 2011); tenant farmers in India who are in feudal-like relationships with land owners and manage up to one-fifth of India’s land holdings (and up to half in some states) (Chandran 2016); the 9000 or so illicit massage businesses operating in the US that use force, fraud and coercion to enslave women as sex workers (Polaris 2018); the worker cooperatives that were established in the early 2000s in Argentina in the wake of a devastating economic crisis (see Chapter 4 in this volume by Heras and Vieta); and self-employed farmers in Kenya that help to make up the almost 500 million small farm households worldwide (Rapsomanikis

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28  The handbook of diverse economies 2015). These enterprise types also coexist within individual countries. Even in so-called advanced economies such as the US the full range of enterprise types are present. One implication of recognizing enterprise diversity is that it moves away from a stage-based conception of development in which one mode of production is replaced by another, for example, feudalism by capitalism. The recognition of coexisting enterprise diversity helps to challenge ‘capitalocentrism’ (Gibson-Graham 1996, p. 6). As discussed in the introduction, this is the idea that not only is the economy capitalist but that any non-capitalist economic activity is subordinate to capitalism. By identifying the diversity of enterprises – and the ubiquity of this diversity across and within countries – the economic landscape is ‘opened up’ for inquiry into the various ways that new wealth is generated and distributed.

ENTERPRISE DIVERSITY FOR PEOPLE AND PLANET Building on the Marxian analysis of class as a process of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour, diverse economies scholars have further investigated this aspect of how enterprises operate but with a distinctive ‘weak theory’ lens. Weak theory is a way of knowing that starts by assuming as little as possible about the topic at hand, and proceeding with an open and inquisitive stance (Gibson-Graham 2006). By contrast, strong theory starts from a position that presumes to already know what forces are powerfully operating and dictating outcomes. Many empirical studies of the enterprise use strong theory, and especially a strong theory of capitalism. This capitalocentric framing starts by already knowing that ‘capitalism’ is the dominant economic system, and that much that goes on in the world is determined by capitalism’s never-ending quest for expansion. This strong theory approach is evident in the way that scholars have studied the historical development of different types of capitalist enterprises. These studies emphasize how the driving forces of profit maximization and competition result in periods of crisis and restructuring that drive innovation (for example through the development of new labour processes, different forms of competition and new company structures). What results is the story of a shift from competitive to monopoly to global capitalism and the associated evolution from competitive to monopoly to global capitalist firms, each associated with a particular set of capital–labour, capital–capital and capital–state economic relations, as discussed by Gibson-Graham (1988).2 Although these empirical studies document the development of enterprise diversity, the focus is on how diversity operates within what is portrayed as a capitalist system, thereby strengthening and maintaining capitalist class processes (Gibson-Graham 1988). Rather than this strong theory narrative of the unfolding stages of capitalism and the development of matching capitalist enterprise types, diverse economies scholars are interested in the coexistence of multiple enterprise types. A weak theory lens is applied with the specific intention of seeking out hitherto unrecognized economic possibilities, especially those obscured by a capitalocentric framing. The concern is to understand how goods and services can be produced in ways that centre on the well-being of those who are ‘giving’ or expending their surplus labour as well as the ways that the ‘fruits of their labour’ can be distributed to generate broader social and environmental well-being.3 Worker cooperatives are of interest because of how the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus labour in this type of enterprise are premised on the well-being of people

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Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  29 (and increasingly the well-being of the planet). As discussed by Safri in this volume (Chapter 3), worker cooperatives are founded on a series of ethical commitments (including democratic governance and the ownership of surplus by worker-owners) that means there is negotiation over fundamental aspects of the enterprise (such as how wages, profits and decision-making and control are allocated). Diverse economies scholars have researched how these commitments and the associated negotiations ‘play out’ in a variety of cooperatives. For example, Cornwell’s (2012) three-year ethnographic study is of Collective Copies, a printing service formed in 1982, comprising 13 worker-owners that operates in three locations in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts in the US. Cornwell documents how Collective Copies uses consensus-based decision making to negotiate, on an ongoing basis, concerns such as wage levels and benefits (including health and long-term disability insurance), and whether or not to expand operations. Two important points emerge from Cornwell’s research. First, there is a demonstration of how ethical commitments to the well-being of others shape decisions. For example, the decision to open two new locations was not motivated by a desire to increase profits, but rather to be able to ‘invite more workers into the circle of worker ownership’ (Cornwell 2012, p. 726). Indeed, for the worker-owners the expansion of Collective Copies came at a cost, including the time and stress of formulating the proposals and projections, the extra labour of renovations and hiring and training new workers, reductions in profit during the start-up of the new locations and ongoing profit sharing with the new worker-owners. Second, there is a demonstration of how this consideration of the well-being of others involves developing and strengthening democratic and cooperative subjectivity as worker-owners learn to express their views as well as listen to and take into account the views of others with whom they may disagree. With heightened concerns about planetary health, the foundational commitment to the well-being of others is being expanded to include a commitment to the well-being of non-human others. At Collective Copies, for example, there is a commitment to using 100 per cent recycled paper, a commitment which increases the costs of production but is nevertheless a priority for the worker-owners. Scholars working from the strong theory perspective of capitalocentrism, tend to judge cooperatives in relation to capitalism as either lacking capitalism’s cunning capacity to adapt or as being captured and sucked into capitalism’s orbit. The ‘degeneration thesis’ is typical of a strong theory perspective with its claim that over time ‘cooperatives fail . . . either due to internal pressures or because of external market forces that compel cooperatives to resort to a capitalist form where some workers lose the democratic rights which originally applied to all’ (Errasti 2015, p. 495). By contrast a weak theory approach refuses to assume such supposedly self-evident truths and instead seeks to read ‘against the grain’4 and be open to other interpretations. This is particularly evident in how diverse economies scholars (such as Gibson-Graham 2003) have studied the Mondragon Corporation (hereafter Mondragon), a group of over 250 companies (and other bodies) headquartered in the Basque region of Spain, and with operations in other parts of Spain and in other parts of the world. Mondragon is based on a participatory cooperative approach, captured in the logo Mondragon Humanity at Work. The first Mondragon cooperative, Fagor, started in 1956 manufacturing small lamps and heating devices; although, as noted by Azkarraga Etxagibel et al. (2012), this was preceded by 15 years of discussion, planning and education to develop the cooperative approach and ethos. By 2017 Mondragon had over 81 000 workers across four sectors: finance (banking, social welfare and insurance); industry (including automotive, machine tools, appliances and electronics); retail; and knowl-

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30  The handbook of diverse economies edge (including research centres, a university and technical schools) (Mondragon Corporation 2019). As Mondragon has grown, the original cooperative companies have been added to with capitalist companies, especially since the 1990s as Mondragon has expanded overseas in order to remain viable and respond to the pressures of globalization (Azkarraga Etxagibel et al. 2012). As of 2017, there were 98 cooperatives and 168 other companies, including capitalist ones (Mondragon Corporation 2019). The 98 cooperatives employ around 40 per cent of the total workforce. In other words, around 40 per cent of the workforce are worker-owners (or socios, in Mondragon’s terms). Errasti (2015, p. 479) describes Mondragon as now comprising a hybrid ‘coopitalist’ enterprise, a shift that is characterized as diluting the cooperative and weakening the foundational commitments (see also Chapter 3 in this volume by Safri). Others, however, highlight that within Mondragon there has been a robust discussion about participation not just of workers in the offshore capitalist companies but of worker-owners in the original cooperative companies (e.g. Azkarraga Etxagibel et al. 2012). For these researchers, participation ‘involves a complex of economic and social factors’ (Azkarraga Etxagibel et al. 2012, p. 98). The discussion and exploration of how best to enact participation that was core to Mondragon’s establishment continues to be an important and ongoing point of reflection and experimentation as Mondragon responds to economic and social changes. Instead of a single strong theory storyline of inevitable degeneration, weak theory seeks out multiple storylines through nuanced accounts (such as the nuance of recognizing that in Mondragon participation has long been a vital topic of discussion and negotiation, and will continue to be so). This weak theory approach to the empirical study of enterprises seeks to widen economic possibilities, and even to invite researchers to consider how their research might contribute to strengthening (and weakening) the economic diversity that might be commandeered for the well-being of people and the planet (for more on this performative aspect of research see Part VII in this volume on Methodologies). Alongside the study of the long-standing cooperative enterprise form, diverse economies scholars have researched newer types of enterprises that are also prioritizing social and environmental well-being. Social enterprises are of interest because they have been established to serve an explicit social mission. Many social enterprises focus on employing groups who face barriers in finding paid work (such as early school leavers, the long-term unemployed, refugees, ex-prisoners). Since the late 1990s, social enterprises have become a more established feature of the enterprise landscape with governments attracted to the potential for social enterprises to provide employment opportunities for various groups. Sometimes the social mission is combined with an environmental mission (for example, an environmental mission to manufacture products from recycled plastics). Social enterprises can be likened to capitalist enterprises in that they are not owned by the workers (for example, social enterprises may be owned by a social entrepreneur or social entrepreneurial organization, such as a large charity or NGO), and this owner appropriates and distributes the surplus labour that is produced by the workers. There can also be similarities in how the business operates with social enterprises looking for commercial opportunities to enter into new markets or expand their existing markets. But social enterprises are characterized by their strong social mission, and this means that there is a priority on providing quality conditions for workers as they produce surplus labour, and distributing surplus labour (or surplus value) to help secure and advance the social mission of the enterprise. Thus Gibson-Graham and Dombroski in the introduction to this volume identify social enterprises as a form of ‘more-than-capitalist’ firm.

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Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  31 Diverse economies researchers are also interested in the potential of community enterprises. Sometimes the terms social and community enterprise are used interchangeably and there are similarities between these two types. However, community enterprises are usually associated with locally based grassroots activism and tend to have a more radical agenda that challenges familiar ways of doing business (Cameron 2009; Cameron and Hendriks 2014; Pearce 2009). For example, while social enterprises generally focus on providing opportunities for paid work (and some even adopt the descriptor, Work Integration Social Enterprises or WISEs), community enterprises often incorporate a range of labour practices (including paid, paid in-kind or unpaid work).5 In community enterprises the producers of surplus labour also tend to be the appropriators and distributors of surplus labour (or surplus value). Cameron (2015) discusses the example of a community enterprise which takes the legal form of a corporation but with the special condition that only the shareholders can be workers (so this makes it similar to a worker-owner cooperative) (see also Cameron 2010). Other community enterprises take the legal form of an incorporated association, and this means that members are the owners and the workers. Associated with the weak theory approach, diverse economies scholars are also open to the possibility that other types of enterprises, even capitalist ones, might contribute to social and environmental well-being. Certified B Corporations (or B Corps as they are known) are an example of capitalist enterprises in which ethical commitments are present (and are thus an example of a ‘more-than-capitalist’ firm). To be certified, an enterprise has to score a minimum of 80 out of a possible 200 points on an assessment across four main categories of: (1) workers (with questions related to topics such as wages; opportunity for training and further education; and occupational health and safety); (2) community (with questions related to topics such as opportunities for employees to contribute paid or unpaid time-off for community service; and percentage of managers from underrepresented populations, such as women, minority/previously excluded groups, people with disabilities and people living in low-income communities); (3) environment (with questions related to topics such as use of renewable energy; waste monitoring and reduction strategies; and sharing of environmental audits or review); and (4) governance (with questions related to topics such as legal mechanisms to ensure the social and environmental mission will be maintained over time; and sharing of financial information with employees). In earlier work, diverse economies scholars designated such firms as ‘alternative’ capitalist. However, there are limitations to this categorization (Healy 2009). Naming something as alternative presumes that there is a dominant mainstream and risks strengthening this mainstream. In this case, the designation of enterprises as alternative capitalist works against anti-capitalocentric thinking by reinforcing the idea that capitalist enterprises are the mainstream and dominant enterprise form. As well, diverse economies scholars have shown how even the seemingly most archetypal capitalist firms may not operate in ways that conform to the image. For example, O’Neill and Gibson-Graham (1999) investigated the operations in the steel division of BHP, which was at that time an Australian-based multinational capitalist enterprise. They found that contrary to the image of a rational capitalist enterprise that operated according to a logical and profit-seeking dynamic, the enterprise was characterized by multiple and competing logics, desires and ambitions. This weak theory approach to even the most ostensibly capitalist of firms is important as it opens up multiple points for political intervention (as will be discussed in the following section).6

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32  The handbook of diverse economies This brings us more deeply into the politics of the enterprise that diverse economies scholars are interested in. Here there is support for enterprises in which a commitment to workers’ well-being shapes how surplus is being produced; and a commitment to social and environmental well-being shapes how surplus is distributed. When these commitments are present (in whatever type of enterprise) we start to see the contours of a community economy – that is an economy in which an ethical commitment to the well-being of other humans, other species, and the environment shapes economic practices (see Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). The diverse economies framing of the enterprise starts with the recognition of enterprise diversity, but uses a weak theory approach to inquire into the practices of the enterprise in order to more fully understand how surplus labour is being produced, appropriated and distributed, and the role that ethical commitments play. This sheds light on the variety of ways that enterprises might be already contributing to and forging community economies – and the variety of ways that enterprises might be ‘nudged’ in this direction. The next part of the chapter takes up this issue of enterprise dynamics and drivers of enterprise change.

ENTERPRISE DYNAMICS The Marxian class analysis that underpins the diverse economies framing of the enterprise focuses attention on two aspects of the enterprise where change can occur – and where political efforts might be targeted. The first relates to the class dynamics within the enterprise and the second relates to the wider conditions of existence for the enterprise. Class Dynamics within the Enterprise Within the class dynamics of the enterprise there are two crucial moments which have been the basis for political action. The first is the appropriative moment, when the surplus labour produced by workers is taken (either by non-producers of surplus labour, such as capitalists, or by the producers of surplus labour themselves such as the worker-owners in a cooperative). As identified above, in the Marxian class analysis laid out by Resnick and Wolff (1987), exploitation occurs when surplus labour is appropriated by non-producers; this ‘theft’ of what workers produce has been a focus for class political struggle. Since the formation of capitalist firms during the industrial revolution, workers have resisted high rates of exploitation by arguing their wages are insufficient to their reproduction or survival, and that the line between necessary and surplus must be moved to accommodate workers’ needs. Here it is important to note that the Marxian analysis of Resnick and Wolff (1987) is an accounting tool which is open to interpretation, depending on how the distinction between necessary and surplus labour is drawn. For example, necessary labour could be defined as a nationally recognized minimum wage (in countries that offer such standards for workers), or as the average national wage or as the average wage for particular occupations or jobs. Depending on where this line is drawn, wages above the minimum or above the average can be seen as a share of surplus (and therefore as an inessential even dispensable bonus to workers). Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) describe this relationship between necessary and surplus labour as the ‘survival-surplus nexus’ (p. 53), drawing on their reframing of necessary labour as ‘surviving well’ (p. xiii). They identify that how the boundary between survival and surplus is defined has crucial political

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Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  33 implications, captured in their question, ‘[w]hose survival sets the line over which something can be seen as “extra” or surplus?’ (p. 54). A different and less familiar form of class politics that is also centred on exploitation has been to change the form of the enterprise from a capitalist to a cooperative form in which exploitation in the Marxian sense is eradicated. Nevertheless, there is still an internal politics about the appropriative moment with the worker-owners now having to collectively make decisions about the survival–surplus nexus in the form of their wages and wage premiums (as discussed by Safri in Chapter 3 of this volume and by Cameron 2015). The politics associated with the transition to a cooperative can take the form of a gradual change through worker buyouts that use mechanisms such as Employee Stock Ownership Plans (or ESOPs as they are generally known). However, the politics can involve more dramatic struggles as in the case of the Argentinian worker cooperatives formed through expropriation, and discussed in this volume by Heras and Vieta (Chapter 4).7 The second moment that is important for a class politics of the enterprise is the distributive moment when decisions are made about the flows of appropriated surplus. As outlined above with the example of a capitalist enterprise, some surplus will be distributed to maintain and expand operations (for example, by paying managers and advisers), and some surplus will be distributed more broadly (for example, by flowing as profit to individual owners or as dividends to shareholders). All enterprises, capitalist or otherwise, have to make decisions about the distribution of surplus. Diverse economies scholars are interested in a class politics of the enterprise that is focused on this distributive moment for as Gibson-Graham and O’Neill (2001, p. 69) point out, the surplus that is momentarily held by enterprises is a form of ‘social wealth’ that ‘is a massive and potent force’ with potential to spread out ‘to nourish an array of economic and noneconomic activities and institutions’.8 When it comes to capitalist firms, one way that this can occur is through a shift from prioritizing the interests of shareholders to considering the interests of a much broader group of stakeholders that might include shareholders but also customers and clients, suppliers and even competitors, taxpayers and other community members,9 and future generations and the environment. This form of distributional politics is evident in the example of Interface Carpets. As discussed by Gibson-Graham et al. (2019), Interface is a publicly listed capitalist enterprise based in the US, with manufacturing facilities across the globe. It is the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet tiles and one of its priorities is environmentally sustainable manufacturing. Interface has acted on this priority by distributing surplus to invest in technologies to reduce its environmental impact. This has been Interface’s journey ever since 1994 when the founder and Chair of the Board of Directors, Ray Anderson, initiated a radical transformation of the company. Until this point Interface had been a ‘profit-only business with little consideration of [its] effect on the planet beyond that required for legal and regulatory compliance’ (Nelson 2009, p. 22). However, in 1994 Ray Anderson had what has been described as his sustainability epiphany prompted by reading Paul Hawken’s (1993) The Ecology of Commerce. Anderson committed himself and the enterprise to completely revolutionizing the production process. Interface distributed surplus to redesign the production process to shift from a linear take – make – waste approach to a circular economy approach. In 2006, the company formalized Anderson’s vision into a plan called Mission Zero® aiming to ‘eliminate any negative impact Interface has on the environment by 2020’ (Nelson 2009, p. 24). Currently, the company is on track to achieve this aim. For example, its carpets are manufactured from a combination of bio-based materials, recycled materials that have nothing

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34  The handbook of diverse economies to do with carpet, or from carpet material that has been recycled or reused. Interface has now moved on to a second agenda, Climate Take Back™ in which it is taking a leadership role to provoke governments and other enterprises to embark on the serious steps needed to address climate change.10 Through Mission Zero® this capitalist enterprise recognized the environment as a stakeholder, but in the early days of Mission Zero®, Ray Anderson did not inform another stakeholder – the shareholders – that changes were afoot. In a sense he was putting the interest of the environment to not be harmed by humans over the interest of shareholders to know about how flows of some surplus were being used. Once the company could demonstrate that prioritizing the environment was financially viable, it enacted a form of ‘shareholder activism’ to educate shareholders to accept Interface’s environmental mission. This is in contrast with most forms of shareholder activism in which shareholders themselves put pressure on the firm to consider a broader group of stakeholders, including the environment. Hamilton (2013) provides fascinating insights into the strategic role that shareholder activists can play in focusing the attention of corporations on their environmental and social impacts. The interest in shareholder activism is aligned with recent work by legal scholars who critique what is known as the ‘shareholder primacy model’ or the idea that ‘corporate managers are agents of shareholders and should act exclusively in their financial interests’ (Deakin 2012, p. 339; see also Healy 2018). These scholars argue that this model has no legal basis in corporate law but is ‘merely’ a norm that has become entrenched – with detrimental consequences. For example, Stout (2012) highlights how the almost exclusive focus on maximizing shareholders’ wealth led to BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. To save time and money (at least in the short term), standard safety procedures were ignored. While drilling at the Macondo oil well in 2010 the massive rig exploded and sank, killing 12 workers. The oil that spewed from the uncapped well over the next six months impacted a wide group of stakeholders: fishing and tourism operators who struggled to make a living; BP’s competitors who could not operate because of a moratorium on oil drilling; and ecosystems in the Gulf which were damaged and destroyed (and the full extent of the damage is still not known). Of course, stakeholders ‘closer to home’, in the form of BP’s shareholders, were also negatively impacted, with BP’s stock market value plummeting almost US$100 billion. Stout (2012) uses the example of BP to demonstrate how shareholder primacy is an ideology that has been embraced with ‘near-religious fervor’ (p. 2). As a result, the boards of public corporations have lost sight of their capacity to run corporations with other goals in mind, including ‘creating quality products, protecting employees, and serving the public interest’ (p. 2). The discretion to address these goals is legal under corporate law, so long as boards do not ‘enrich themselves’ (p. 2).11 Again, Interface Carpets stands as an example of a public corporation in which such discretion was exercised. The research by legal scholars on shareholder primacy focuses on public corporations (i.e. capitalist enterprises that have shares that are traded on the stock market and can be bought by members of the general public). However, discussions about the interests of shareholders versus stakeholders are also pertinent to private corporations (i.e. capitalist enterprises that have shares that are owned privately by a small number of individuals such as family members).12 Private corporations can operate like BP and prioritize the interests of the owners (such as the family members who own the firm) over the interests of a broader set of stakeholders. But they can also operate like Interface Carpets and prioritize the interests of other stakeholders.

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Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  35 Parallel discussions also take place in other types of enterprises. For example, in cooperatives, worker-owners have to consider their own claims on the surplus generated (say in the form of an annual bonus or dividend) and the claims of a wider group of ‘others’. Most cooperatives follow the principle of committing a portion of their surplus to a fund to support existing and new cooperatives, thereby recognizing the rights of current and future cooperatives and ‘cooperators’. Most also donate a portion of their surplus to community and other groups. Cornwell (2012) describes how Collective Copies invests 5 per cent of its surplus in a fund that supports the development of cooperatives in the region, and a further 10 per cent in donations (and the recipients vary depending on the interests of worker-owners and have included animal shelters, soccer teams, penguin rescue and the Argentina Autonomist movement). The Wider Conditions of Existence for the Enterprise In their Marxian account, Resnick and Wolff (1987) identify overdetermination as a key theoretical and political intervention. Overdetermination is the idea that entities and processes are constituted by multiple conditions of existence and that no one condition of existence necessarily has more determining power than any other. In the period since the 1987 publication of Resnick and Wolff’s Knowledge and Class, the concept of assemblage has come to the fore. Both overdetermination and assemblage are based on a relational ontology which, as Sarmiento describes in this volume (Chapter 53, p. 486), holds ‘that phenomena do not exist as discrete subjects or objects defined by intrinsic, essential qualities, but rather emerge and develop in and through relationships between a wide array of actors and agencies, human and more-than-human’. This relational approach to the enterprise helps to break down the idea of an enterprise as a single bounded unit. Instead the enterprise can be understood as an assemblage comprising a multitude of conditions of existence and therefore having multiple points where change occurs. Diverse economies scholars are interested in how these multiple points can be leveraged to help build the types of community economies discussed above. Jerne (2018) provides an excellent example of this in her research on mafia enterprises and anti-mafia activism in Campania (Italy) (see also Chapter 8 in this volume by Jerne). She highlights how mafia enterprises can be understood as constituted by multiple conditions of existence including corrupt public officials, waste legislation and abandoned agricultural assets. This combination of conditions has enabled mafia enterprises to operate in the waste and construction sectors – with devastating environmental and social consequences for the Campania region. Anti-mafia activists, concerned about these toxic consequences, have concentrated their efforts not by directly confronting mafia enterprises but by targeting some of their conditions of existence and forging ‘alternative associational bonds’ (Jerne 2018, p. 283). This has involved using confiscated mafia assets (confiscated thanks to the executive and judicial powers who do tackle mafia enterprise directly) for the development of other, mostly cooperative, enterprises that seek to provide a viable livelihood option for those who were previously caught up in ‘chains of dependency’ (p. 284) with mafia enterprises. Associational bonds are relevant not just at the local or regional level but more broadly. In the manufacturing sector, it is possible to map out ‘chains of dependency’ that exist globally, and that provide the conditions of existence for certain kinds of practices. For example, until recently China played a crucial role in absorbing nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste (Katz 2019). This relationship essentially enabled manufacturers to produce huge volumes of plastic (and other recyclable materials). With the enactment in January 2018 of China’s

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36  The handbook of diverse economies ‘National Sword’ policy (which banned the importing of most of these materials) countries are now having to confront what to do with the literal mountains of recycled waste that they produce. This challenge involves changing the conditions of existence that previously enabled the overproduction of plastics (and other recyclable materials). In the words of Shove (2010, p. 1278), what is needed is ‘the radical unmaking of unsustainability’ (added emphasis), a shift which necessarily includes changing how many enterprises operate. The idea that there are multiple conditions of existence for how enterprises operate and therefore multiple points for change means that the unmaking of unsustainability is a multi-focused task. One point of intervention is legislative. For example, the introduction of legislation to ban single-use plastics (as is currently occurring in countries across the globe) brings the environment to the fore as a stakeholder in how enterprises operate, and requires that enterprises respond by changing what they produce, and how they produce and package their products. But there are multiple points of intervention that are only limited by our imaginations. A novel point of intervention to change how enterprises operate is occurring in Australia in the effort to manage the approximately one million ‘waste’ mattresses that are thrown out each year. This is a voluntary industry-led initiative that is using the power of cooperation between enterprises (that usually compete in the marketplace) to help make the sustainable management of waste mattresses more prevalent (and to ‘crowd out’ unsustainable practices such as the illegal storing or dumping of waste mattresses). The Soft Landing Mattress Product Stewardship Scheme involves a range of different types of enterprises but two are pivotal to the scheme. The social enterprise Soft Landing plays a crucial role overseeing the scheme and managing the recycling of the mattresses.13 The private and family-owned capitalist firm A.H. Beard plays a crucial role in bringing competing suppliers, manufacturers and retailers ‘to the table’ to cooperate with each other. This ensures that the enterprises along the entire supply chain (from suppliers of mattress inputs to mattress manufacturers to mattress retailers) are helping to make the sustainable management of waste mattresses more feasible. For instance, suppliers are exploring ways of manufacturing the mattress inputs so they can be more easily recycled at end-of-life; the manufacturers are exploring ways of manufacturing the mattress so they can be more easily recycled; the retailers are devising ways that recycling an old mattress can become part of the process of purchasing a new mattress; and Soft Landing is working with materials scientists to ensure that the entire mattress can be recycled.14 Together, all these elements will make the recycling of waste mattresses ‘the norm’ and make unsustainable practices a twentieth-century aberration.

CONCLUSION This chapter started with discussion of the Marxian analysis of class as a process of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour. This analysis provides a basis for how diverse economies scholars study different types of enterprises. As discussed in the second section, the Marxian analysis is combined with a distinctive weak theory approach, which investigates enterprises by seeking out multiple aspects of their operation and not presuming that how they operate is fully captured by existing theories (such as the ‘degeneration thesis’ which predicts that that over time cooperatives will fail). The third section then focuses on enterprise dynamics and the drivers of enterprise change. It starts with the class dynamics of the enterprise showing how the appropriative and distributive moments of the class process can make

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Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  37 a crucial contribution to the achievement of social, economic and environmental justice. This section also considers the broader conditions of existence for the enterprise and how the multiple conditions of existence can provide multiple opportunities for change and intervention. This diverse economies framing of the enterprise has much to offer the questions asked at the outset about the societal role of business as well as the capacity of business to contribute to more equitable and environmentally sustainable futures. This involves a new kind of microeconomics and micro-politics based on a weak theory framing of enterprises that refuses to presume in advance what forces are at work and what outcomes are being generated. Diverse economies scholarship proceeds with an open mind and with the tool of Marxian class analysis to interrogate what is ‘at play’ in individual enterprises, and what potential there is to ‘nudge’ enterprises towards a more socially and environmentally just world via strategies targeting either the class process within the firm or the wider conditions of existence. What diverse economies scholarship shows is that enterprises have the potential to play a pivotal role in building better futures based on an ethical commitment to the well-being of other humans, other species, and the environment.

NOTES 1. 2.

In this chapter, the terms enterprise, business and firm are used interchangeably. As a brief overview, competitive capitalist enterprises are associated with the so-called early period of capitalism, centred on family-based firms rooted in local communities, often incorporating craft skills and paternalistic labour relations. Monopoly capitalist enterprises are associated with the period of monopoly capitalism which is said to start at the end of the nineteenth century and reach maturity after the Second World War (Sweezy 1987). During this period, production became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer but increasingly larger and larger oligopolistic firms, such as US Steel and Standard Oil. Ownership was by shareholders (rather than family members) and the running of the firms was in the hands of managers and other white-collar staff, while blue-collar production workers became increasingly unionized (Edwards 1975). Global capitalist enterprises are associated with the development of a so-called global capitalist economy in which production has shifted from what were once seen as core countries (such as the US) to peripheral countries (such as Mexico and other parts of Latin America, and Bangladesh and other parts of Asia). Global capitalist enterprises are portrayed as highly mobile and able to operate across the globe by shifting or outsourcing production to places where non-unionized workforces can be easily exploited and environmental standards are minimal (Dicken 1986). Global capitalist enterprises include transnational corporations (TNCs) such as Apple, Dow Chemical Company, Nestlé, Royal Dutch Shell and Toyota which operate across all sectors of the economy. 3. As highlighted in the introduction to this volume, this is not to deny the extent of undesirable diversity such as slavery. Studies such as that by Polaris (2018) are crucial for developing strategies to help stamp out this unwanted economic diversity. The diverse economy framework can be used to inform studies such as these that work ‘against certain practices’ (Chapter 1, p. 18, original emphasis); however, the focus in diverse economies scholarship so far has tended to be ‘dedicated to working for others’ (Chapter 1, p. 18, original emphasis). This section reflects this focus. 4. As described by Gibson-Graham in her chapter on methodology in this volume (Chapter 52). 5. There are parallels here between this idea of community enterprises and the eco-social enterprises discussed by Johanisova et al. in Chapter 6 in this volume. See also the discussion by Hicks in Chapter 5 in this volume of community enterprises in the community energy sector. 6. This study is also an example of a ‘queering’ strategy, that involves showing how things that are dominant and presumed to be coherent and stable are characterized by multiple features and held together by only the most tenuous of alignments (for more on this see Chapter 52 in this volume by Gibson-Graham on reading for difference).

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38  The handbook of diverse economies 7. Another example of a dramatic shift from a capitalist to a cooperative enterprise was the formation of the Solidarity Group Cooperative which formed after a factory closure in Thailand (see Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, pp. 76–7). 8. In contrast, established worker-based political struggles have tended to focus on the survival– surplus nexus and associated concerns such as the health and safety conditions under which workers produce necessary and surplus labour. 9. Community members can include First Peoples, and there are now First Peoples’ movements seeking to secure a distribution of surplus, in the form of compensation and royalty payments from mining corporations operating on their lands (Gibson-Graham 2006; Gibson-Graham and O’Neill 2001). 10. For more on Interface’s activities, including its economic and social justice activities, see Gibson-Graham et al. (2019). 11. Stout (2012) reminds readers that shareholder primacy (or as she says it would be more accurately described, ‘shareholder absolutism’ or ‘shareholder dictatorship’ [p. 3]) has taken hold only relatively recently: ‘Fifty years ago, if you had asked the directors or CEO of a large public company what the company’s purpose was, you might have been told the corporation had many purposes: to provide equity investors with solid returns, but also to build great products, to provide decent livelihoods for employees, and to contribute to the community and the nation. Today, you are likely to be told the company has but one purpose, to maximize its shareholders’ wealth’ (p. 2). 12. Here is it worth noting the size of some private corporations. The largest private corporation based in the US is the family-owned firm Cargill, which operates across the globe and has an annual revenue of over $100 billion. The second largest is Koch Industries, owned by two brothers. 13. For more on Soft Landing and the scheme see Gibson-Graham et al. (2019). 14. Currently, 75 per cent of the mattress is recycled (https://​www​recyclemymattress​.com​.au/​the​ -recycling​-process/​[accessed 17 July 2019]).

REFERENCES Azkarraga Etxagibel, J., G. Cheney and A. Udaonda, A. (2012), ‘Workers’ participation in a globalized market: Reflections on and from Mondragon’, in M. Atzeni (ed.), Alternative Work Organizations, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 76–102. Cameron, J. (2009), ‘Experimenting with economic possibilities: Ethical economic decision-making in two Australian community enterprises’, in A. Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity, London: Zed Press, pp. 92–11. Cameron, J. (2010), ‘Business as usual or economic innovation? Work, markets and growth in community and social enterprises’, Third Sector Review, 16 (2), 93–108. Cameron, J. (2015), ‘Enterprise innovation and economic diversity in community supported agriculture: Sustaining the agricultural commons’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 53–71. Cameron, J. and S. Hendriks (2014), ‘Narratives of social enterprise: Insights from Australian social enterprise practitioners’, in H. Douglas and S. Grant (eds), Social Innovation, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise: Context and Theories, Melbourne: Tilde University Press, pp. 342–58. Chandran, R. (2016), ‘Indian model land leasing law promises greater security for tenant farmers’, Reuters World News, 17 August, accessed 17 July 2019 at https://​ www​reuters​ .com/​ article/​ us​ -india​-landrights​-law/​indian​-model​-land​-leasing​-law​-promises​-greater​-security​-for​-tenant​-farmers​ -idUSKCN10S1DT. Cornwell, J. (2012), ‘Worker co-operatives and spaces of possibility: An investigation of subject space at Collective Copies’, Antipode, 44 (3), 725–44. Deakin, S. (2012), ‘The corporation as commons: Rethinking property rights, governance and sustainability in the business enterprise’, Queen's Law Journal, 37 (2), 339–81. Dicken, P. (1986), Global Shift: Industrial Change in a Turbulent World, London: Harper & Row.

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Framing essay: the diversity of enterprise  39 Edwards, R. (1975), ‘The social relations of production in the firm and labor market structure’, Politics and Society, 5 (1), 83–108. Errasti, A. (2015), ‘Mondragon’s Chinese subsidiaries: Coopitalist multinationals in practice’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 36 (3), 479–99. Friedman, M. (1970), ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’, The New York Times Magazine, 13 September, accessed 17 July at http://​umich​.edu/​~thecore/​doc/​Friedman​.pdf. Garibay, C., A. Boni, F. Panico, P. Urquijo and D. Klooster (2011), ‘Unequal partners, unequal exchange: Goldcorp, the Mexican State, and campesino dispossession at the Peñasquito Goldmine’, Journal of Latin American Geography, 10 (2), 153–76. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1988), ‘Restructuring in US manufacturing: The decline of monopoly capitalism’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78 (3), 473–90. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003), ‘Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class’, Critical Sociology, 29 (2), 123–61. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, S. Healy and J. McNeill (2019), ‘Roepke lecture in economic geography: Economic geography, manufacturing, and ethical action in the Anthropocene’, Economic Geography, 95 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and P. O’Neill (2001), ‘Exploring a new class politics of the enterprise’, in J.K Gibson-Graham, S. Resnick and R. Wolff (eds), Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 56–80. Hamilton, T. (2013), ‘Beyond market signals: Negotiating marketplace politics and corporate responsibilities’, Economic Geography, 89 (3), 285–307. Hawken, P. (1993), The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, New York: HarperCollins. Healy, S. (2009), ‘Economies, alternative’, in R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (eds), International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Volume 3, Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 338–43. Healy, S. (2018), ‘Corporate enterprise as commonwealth’, Journal of Law and Society, 45 (1), 46–63. Jerne, C. (2018), ‘The syntax of social movements: Jam, boxes and other anti-mafia assemblages’, Social Movement Studies, 17 (3), 282–98. Katz, C. (2019) ‘Piling up: How China’s ban on importing waste has stalled global recycling’, Yale Environment 360, 7 March, accessed 17 July 2019 at https://​e360​.yale​.edu/​features/​piling​-up​-how​ -chinas​-ban​-on​-importing​-waste​-has​-stalled​-global​-recycling. Mondragon Corporation (2019), ‘Corporate profile’, accessed 25 June 2019 at https://​www​.mondragon​ -corporation​.com/​en/​about​-us/​economic​-and​-financial​-indicators/​corporate​-profile/​. Nelson, E. (2009), ‘How Interface innovates with suppliers to create sustainable solutions’, Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 28 (6), 22–30. O’Neill, P. and J.K. Gibson-Graham (1999), ‘Enterprise discourse and executive talk: Stories that destabilise the company’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24 (1), 11–22. Pearce, J. (2009), ‘Social economy: Engaging as a third system?’, in A. Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity, London: Zed Press, pp. 22–38. Polaris (2018), Human Trafficking in Illicit Massage Businesses, Washington, DC: Polaris. Rapsomanikis, G. (2015), The Economic Lives of Smallholder Farmers, Rome: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, accessed 17 July 2019 at http://​www​fao​.org/​3/​a​-i5251e​.pdf. Resnick, S. and R. Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shove, E. (2010), ‘Beyond the ABC: Climate change policy and theories of social change’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42 (6), 1273–85. Stout, L. (2012), The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations and the Public, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Sweezy, P. (1987), ‘Monopoly capitalism’, in J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds), The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics, London: Macmillan, pp. 297–303.

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3. Worker cooperatives Maliha Safri

INTRODUCTION A worker cooperative is an enterprise that produces and sells goods or services, but is to be contrasted with a conventional capitalist firm in structural and class terms. In capitalist or capital-managed firms, control is allocated by and in proportion to capital. This is what allows for the relations in capitalist firms to be structured by and maintained through the exploitation of workers. Labour-managed firms, and even more specifically worker cooperatives, assign control to labour, and subvert (or at least attempt to) the relation to capital. In worker cooperatives, workers, as members of the cooperative, own the firm, participate in decision making, elect management, and control the surplus or profit produced (Curl 2012; Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). At heart, workers exert a kind of ‘democracy at work’ in which they collectively make decisions about what, how and where to produce (Wolff 2012). Many worker cooperatives explicitly or implicitly look to the International Cooperative Alliance’s (a non-profit organization founded in 1895 as the apex non-governmental organization for global cooperatives of all kinds) principles of cooperation.1 This raises a complex issue related to their specific structure for worker cooperatives: the ICA principles are for many different types of collectives, and worker cooperatives must adapt those principles to fit their own typology as a group of workers that convenes to collectively produce and sell goods and services, rather than say, as a group of consumers who come together to collectively buy goods and services at lower prices. In the case of worker cooperatives specifically, that there should be principles to enterprise relying upon collective ethical commitments to democratic governance and the idea that the surplus belongs to the workers, signal bright differences from capitalist firms. The commitment to placing ethics at the core of the cooperative draws many enthusiastic proponents (Byrne and Healy 2006; Curl 2012; Gibson-Graham 2006; Whyte and Whyte 1991). In the worker cooperative, its advocates lay claim to a kind of ‘prefigurative politics’ in which we construct the economic and social relations of an emancipatory and fairer future here and now (Boggs 1977). For Boggs and many others critical of Stalinism and vanguardist communist politics,2 prefigurative politics is a radical alternative orientation in which the ends do not justify the means, but rather, in which the everyday functioning of the social movement or organizational entity embodies or prefigures those ‘forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs 1977, p. 100). This is a world of worker councils, factory councils, neighbourhood assemblies, participatory budgeting and agricultural peasant collectives; all of which overturn authoritarianism, subvert modes of domination, and enact the power of the collective through their everyday functioning (Ness and Azzelini 2011). Their mere existence, for their proponents, is proof that another world and economy are possible (de Sousa Santos 2006). But the worker cooperative, like any institutional form, is, in the last instance, a form that is subject to infinite empirical variation. Worker cooperatives are marked by geographic 40 Maliha Safri - 9781788119962 07:59:13PM

Worker cooperatives  41 diversity, with global exemplars in the majority and the minority worlds, as well as industrial diversity since they span manufacturing, services and agriculture.3 The modern cooperative movement starts with the industrial revolution itself, with Owen’s New Harmony Village of unity and mutual cooperation in the US (and earlier his social reformism in New Lanark, Scotland), and the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers (in England) in the first half of the nineteenth century.4 Going past the Anglo-Saxon world, W.E.B. Du Bois documented in his 1907 study Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans the various types of life-sustaining cooperation, including the Underground Railroad (Du Bois 1907; Nembhard 2014).5 But the idea and practice of working together cooperatively to produce extends far back into human history, with Indigenous American tribes engaging in collective hunting, agriculture (involving cooperative irrigation construction) and fishing, and then allocating the yield according to an equitable distribution based on need (Curl 2012). The worker cooperative has existed even before it was called such, and it is or has not been always known by that name. Focusing on the contemporary age, numerous rich case studies document the ways worker cooperatives are inhabited and the transformations they are capable of generating, both internally as members expand their own capacities, and externally as the cooperatives affect policy and the industries in which they are located (Conway et al. 2002; Cornwell 2012; Zamagni 2016). My purpose is less to give a sense of this geographic and industrial diversity, but to marshal that empirical diversity into analytical categories: the political, cultural and economic layers that intertwine and intersect to form cooperatives. First, I examine the various forms of governance that worker cooperatives enact, which are marked in part by the legal statutes that determine the possibilities for each local entity. The dramatic variation in the structure of cooperatives leads to a difference in the ways cooperatives are lived in. Second, I examine how worker cooperatives structure their firms economically, in terms of their approach to wages and profits. Before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge the slipperiness of the term worker cooperative itself. For instance, plywood worker cooperatives in the US have been variously examined as labour-managed firms (Berman and Berman 1989), producer cooperatives (Bonin et al. 1993; Craig and Pencavel 1992), worker cooperatives (Craig and Pencavel 1992) and worker-owned firms (Berman 1967). Sometimes the same author uses the different terms interchangeably within the same work (Craig and Pencavel 1992), while other authors sharply delineate why they prefer one term over the others (Bonin et al. 1993) despite the fact that both deal with the same universe of firms. This is more than terminological detail, rather what is at stake is how to delineate the worker cooperative from other kinds of cooperatives such as consumer cooperatives, producer cooperatives, and banking cooperatives or credit unions. I return to this issue later in the chapter, especially because the economic and cultural aspects of worker cooperatives inform this delineation and make it difficult to surgically separate these various types of cooperatives in practice.

GOVERNANCE AND DECISION-MAKING: ‘BUILDING A NEW WORLD IN THE SHELL OF THE OLD’6 Formal worker cooperatives find themselves in a legal world that does not always fit them, since most commercial business legal statutes are designed for capitalist corporations. In some countries there is, however, federal or state/province level legislation specific to cooperatives.

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42  The handbook of diverse economies For instance, in the US, 18 of 50 states have cooperative statutes, although not all distinguish between types of cooperatives. In the remaining states, worker cooperatives can come into legal existence either as limited liability companies, corporations or partnerships, or as non-profits.7 Even in states where incorporation as a cooperative is possible, groups may not elect to do so depending on their own circumstances, financing needs, goals and tax consequences. So the actual formal legal status of the cooperative varies widely. The internal structure of cooperatives is laid out in the formal legal documents: the articles of incorporation and the operating agreement. Each worker cooperative must decide before commencing operations how the company will be controlled, and who will control various kinds of decision making. All corporations are required to have a board of directors and officers (non-profits have a board of trustees), and depending on the scale and complexity of operations, there may be an additional layer of managers. For some, the board of directors is a formality, especially if all workers constitute the board of directors. In the remaining cases, the board of directors is a governing body either partially or totally elected by workers who meet in a general assembly, and it is for this reason that the general assembly is considered the crucible of decision making since it is the final authority granting power to or recalling the board of directors. Worker cooperatives must meet at least once annually as a general assembly, but many meet quarterly or more often. Major developmental plans (such as expansion, wage or benefit increases or decreases, etc.) are approved in general assembly. Each group must work out whether they will vote by consensus, or majority (two-thirds or three-quarters majority), and also what decisions are brought to the assembly, what kinds of decisions are made by the board of directors, and what decisions are made by managers (who may or may not be members themselves entitled to vote). While worker cooperatives generally have the principle of one member worker, one vote, a subset of worker cooperatives hire non-member workers who are ineligible to vote. For instance, Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) in New York City (NYC) has over 2000 workers, but only half are actually members of the cooperative (membership requires a $1000 investment). And in the Mondragon Cooperatives, less than half of its retail division (Eroski) are member-workers, and most of its foreign subsidiaries employ non-member workers; at the aggregate global level, non-members exceed member workers in Mondragon (Lezaun and Barandiaran 2017). Critics point out that the existence of this second class of workers in those cooperatives leads to the deterioration of the cooperative model, since it essentially allows one group of workers rights over the surplus created by non-member workers (Kasmir 2016; Tremlett 2013). It can be argued that having two classes of workers introduces exploitation into the cooperative, in the name of efficiency, profitability and flexibility since non-members can be fired, given different wages and benefits, etc.: they are the expendable workforce that members do not wish to be themselves. Sometimes workers are excluded by design, and in other cases, workers choose not to become members, even when given the opportunity (as in the case of Mondragon’s retail workers, or in the case of CHCA where all workers are eligible to become members but half choose not to do so). Some worker cooperatives may have a flat internal governance structure where all major decisions are made by general assembly and all workers are members. Others (especially large cooperatives with thousands of workers) are characterized by vertical hierarchy in which the general assembly makes some but not all decisions, the board of directors empowers management to make others, and there is a class of non-member workers who are outside the

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Worker cooperatives  43 formal decision-making process altogether. Cooperatives exist on a spectrum between these two poles, and this is why the culture and ways of being can feel so different to workers in contrasting worker cooperative models. As a non-member in a worker cooperative, you can feel like a cog in the machine of a business that is no different than any other capitalist firm. As a member in a small, democratically organized worker cooperative composed entirely of actively participating members, you can feel like you have voice and power in your workplace, which could embolden you to be a spokesperson for this unique model that expands the capacities of workers as they take on new and different roles within and outside the firm. Worker cooperatives can have a top-down, or bottom-up approach, either of which connects (but does not reduce) governance to funding as well. Consider the Evergreen Cooperative Corporation in Ohio, a non-profit holding company for a series of worker cooperatives in Cleveland. The board of directors includes representatives from constituent worker cooperatives, foundations, city government, and major buyers (what they call ‘anchor institutions’ for the cooperatives). The board raised $25 million for cooperative development, and it also maintained and centralized control and oversight of constituent worker cooperatives in stakeholder hands rather than individual worker members. This top-down approach has been criticized by some in cooperative circles who call it an example of ‘white savior complex’ (Davis 2018). Hence the issue of top-down vs. bottom-up approaches can generate strong enough feelings (similar to the question of surplus below) that cooperative scholars and activists start to distinguish and accuse the top-down worker cooperatives as being ‘not really’ cooperative.

ECONOMICS OF, AND IN, WORKER COOPERATIVES Every firm must decide how to set wages, but what distinguishes capitalist firms from worker cooperatives is that workers collectively determine their own wages in the latter. Similar to the spectrum present in decision making and internal governance, there is a spectrum in how wages are set. There are worker cooperatives that have a flat wage per hour or piecework rate, and on the other hand, there are those that differentiate wages by skill, experience and occupation; this is more likely in firms that combine different kinds of labour, such as the newspaper Comercio y Justicia in Argentina, an occupied newspaper factory and worker cooperative (Vieta 2014) (see Chapter 4 by Heras and Vieta in this volume). All worker cooperatives must decide how to set wages, and how much to allocate to a collective surplus account, with all the attendant tax complications. Some worker cooperatives skew towards higher wages, leaving very little for a collective surplus. Domestic care work cooperatives in NYC in the arena of cleaning often work on the following basis: the member worker receives the full value of the service rendered at the point of sale, and the worker contributes 2.5 per cent of the total value to a collective account that is used for advertising and other administrative costs. Since such cooperatives are not designed to earn and distribute profits, they can form as non-profit marketing and referral cooperatives that are taxed, however, as corporations since they are not formed primarily for charitable or educational purposes. Consulting lawyers for NYC cooperatives De Barbieri and Glick (2011) explain that in such cases, ‘the cooperative functions as a means for members to pool their resources for marketing the services that each member provides individually’. Having this structure means that the cooperative does not accumulate internal pools of capital to be used for investment, training or other purposes (such support has to then come from community-based organiza-

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44  The handbook of diverse economies tions). On the other hand, they can boast of offering a living wage in industries infamous for low wages and outright wage theft. Other cooperatives are structured differently, where workers receive a wage perhaps no higher than the average for the industry/occupation, and there is a more substantive surplus account (internal reserves) subject to collective decision making. Workers may decide to disburse a portion of that on an annual basis to worker members, and also use that account (retained earnings in more conventional terms, indivisible reserves in cooperative terms) for investment, improvement, training, etc. This spectrum (how worker cooperatives distribute value between wages and surplus) can be so contentious as to call into question the fundamental designation of the type of cooperative. The worker cooperatives who tend towards higher wages and minimal surplus accounts are seen as ‘less’ or perhaps not at all a worker cooperative by those with larger surplus accounts. The critique is that in this model of individuals contributing to the collective, the individual producers appropriate surplus, and distribute a small share to the collective, bringing them closer to being a producer cooperative that unites individual independent producers, rather than a worker cooperative. In the latter, workers (should) collectively appropriate the surplus, and then collectively engage in negotiations over how to allocate surplus for the well-being of the group as well as individual members. On the other hand, the worker cooperatives with high wages (and low surplus accounts) have also been at the forefront of the worker cooperative movement, particularly within the US and India. It is problematic and harking back to old debates on true vs. false consciousness, to tell a worker cooperative that strongly identifies with and promulgates this organizational form that they are not what they think they are based on a purist distinction of how surplus should be appropriated. While workers make many decisions regarding governance, wages and profit, they cannot make all of these decisions independent of the economic conditions of the markets in which they are located. The industry in which worker cooperatives settle sets the upper limit on the price that a worker cooperative can charge for the good or service they produce. Crucial decisions regarding wages, profits, the length of the working day and working conditions, are not under the control of the worker cooperatives, but rather dictated by market pressures generated by capitalist firms: this is how capitalist firms can wield power over worker cooperatives. We can see this clearly in the case of worker cooperatives in logistics and transportation in the Emilia Romagna region (famous for the world’s highest regional density and number of worker cooperatives) that subcontract from multinational companies such as IKEA, DHL, Amazon and Whirlpool. Sacchetto and Semenzin (2016) write of recent strikes undertaken by worker cooperatives subcontracting from these multinational corporations who dictate wages, shift length and/or working conditions. Striking against IKEA, worker cooperatives (heavily constituted by North African migrants) were met with violent police actions. Eventually, the ones protesting at IKEA shopping centres won better wages and working conditions.8 Sacchetto and Semenzin (2016) note that for those Italian cooperatives working in the health and social care sector, as well as logistics and transportation, new cooperatives are often forced to operate below costs. This leads both to the deterioration of working conditions for worker cooperatives, and also enmeshes them in financial relations that allow them a formal, but not a real capacity to fully appropriate their own surplus labour (Roberts 2011). Even if at the internal level, workers are debating and negotiating structural relations, at the external level, they are subjected to rules of the market sphere to which they did not consent, and over which they have no collective determination.

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Worker cooperatives  45 There is yet another way that worker cooperatives are shaped by larger socio-economic forces that constrain the types of industries and occupations in which worker cooperatives can feasibly form, and this has to do with their access to capital either for starting operations or expansion. In the US, there are few funds available to specifically support worker cooperatives (there are some exceptions such as The Working World and the Cooperative Fund of New England). In general, credit unions, not-for-profit financial cooperatives, are so constrained by financial legislation designed to reduce competition with for-profit finance that most cannot engage in commercial lending. Globally, conventional banks find the multiplicity of owners in a cooperative too unwieldy for lending. In countries where it is difficult to access capital, worker cooperatives tend to concentrate in labour intensive, low capital industries (such as cleaning, home care, etc.). A phrase from Marx fits well the economic conditions that characterize worker cooperatives (he wrote the words in application to a very different topic, but they are nonetheless apropos here): ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’ (2002, p. 19).

CONCLUSION As a body of literature, those working within the diverse economies tradition argue that the economy is composed of different and diverse economic forms and practices, not all of which are capitalist by any means. Diversifying the ontological terrain corrupts economic determinism with contingency, and paves the way for both non-determinist and postcapitalist politics (Gibson-Graham 2006). This does not leave us with a blueprint, but an ethical orientation. Gibson-Graham et al. (2013, p. 11) write: ‘The ethical dimension of postcapitalist politics thus refers to a shift of subjectivity that chooses not to cover over inherent antagonisms by positing ideals of economic harmony. In this sense, the ethics of postcapitalist politics refers to a commitment to a continual process of “becoming in common” through refusing the homogenization of identities and harmonization of community.’ This ethical orientation is particularly appropriate to thinking through the definitions and contours of worker cooperatives. Perhaps it is annoying to some that the worker cooperative cannot be absolutely defined, since there is no universal structural approach to wages, profit, governance, membership, etc. The worker cooperative should be seen instead as an empty container for social relations. In general, worker cooperatives negotiate and decide how to structure internal social relations, and there is a variety of ways that they do so as I describe above in my non-essentialist treatment of the worker cooperative. This does not mean that they reach some ideal radical democratic endpoint, and in fact, they may never get there. But the very fact that fundamental aspects of a firm (how wages, profits, decision making, control, etc. are allocated) are up for negotiation demonstrates that the worker cooperative is a prime example of becoming in common.

NOTES 1. International Cooperative Alliance principles are actually based on the principles produced by the Rochdale Pioneers Equitable Society, a consumer cooperative formed by weavers in England in 1844. Rochdale then went on to create worker cooperative mills and housing cooperatives. The ICA represents all types of cooperatives: worker, consumer, housing, health, agricultural, and as such,

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46  The handbook of diverse economies

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

must mediate their differences as it seeks to advocate for all cooperatives. ICA officially revised the Rochdale principles for cooperatives on three occasions: 1937, 1966 and 1995. I believe that the 1966 principles were perhaps the most appropriate for worker cooperatives: (1) open, voluntary membership, (2) democratic governance, (3) limited return on equity, (4) surplus belongs to members, (5) education of members and public in cooperative principles, (6) cooperation between cooperatives (ICA 1966). MacPherson (1995) describes the seven-year negotiations that went into the most recent revision process, as cooperatives reworked the principles for various reasons including the idea that principles ought to change as history progresses, and the need to represent the full spectrum of cooperatives, amongst other reasons. Vanguardism refers to a general politics in which an advanced small vanguard organizes, leads and draws the rest of the masses towards a revolutionary politics. Objectors to vanguardism assert that if the point of radical politics is a democratic and participatory economy ‘later on’, then the means are just as important as the ends. Objections to Stalinism can stem from very different objections to ‘vanguardism’. Stalinism was a totalitarian regime with fidelity to a particular imperial socialism. If they were in any other camp, generations of Marxists have had to clearly distinguish why and how Marxism was not equivalent to this one regime (in principle no different than a member of a religion like Christianity that has to disavow brutal regimes such as the Spanish Inquisition). Some important contemporary global exemplars: Mondragon Cooperative Complex in Spain, Amul Dairy Cooperative in India, Boing! soft drink cooperative in Mexico, FaSinPat in Argentina, Equal Exchange in the US, Come As You Are in Toronto, and the Emilia Romagna region in Italy. Owen’s ‘experiment’ became important for what became known as utopian socialism, a label retroactively applied to Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon by Marx and Engels (Engels 1999), who distinguished themselves for being ‘scientific socialists’. The Underground Railroad was a secret society of African American and white people working collectively and undercover to transport runaway slaves to freedom. This is a quote from the preamble to the constitution of the International Workers of the World, a remarkably wide-ranging labour union. The ‘Wobblies’ (as they are known) advocated for the Wobbly model of workplace democracy in which workers elect their managers. Each legal form has tax implications: C and B corporations are subject to corporate income tax, while S corporations and non-profits are not. There are other legal implications as well; in some states (such as California), a firm cannot legally call itself a cooperative unless it has incorporated as one, and cooperatives are subject to preferential tax treatment in that dividends are not subject to double taxation. The language used here is revealing: that worker cooperatives ‘went on strike’ and ‘won’ better wages. Are they autonomous worker cooperatives, or more like employees of IKEA?

REFERENCES Berman, K.V. (1967), Worker-Owned Plywood Companies: An Economic Analysis, Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press. Berman, K.V. and M.D. Berman (1989), ‘An empirical test of the theory of the labor-managed firm’, Journal of Comparative Economics, 13 (2), 281­–300. Boggs, C. (1977), ‘Marxism, prefigurative communism, and the problem of workers’ control’, Radical America, 11 (6), 99­–122. Bonin, J.P., D.C. Jones and L. Putterman (1993), ‘Theoretical and empirical studies of producer cooperatives: Will ever the twain meet?’ Journal of Economic Literature, 31 (3), 1290­–1320. Byrne, K. and S. Healy (2006), ‘Cooperative subjects: Toward a post-fantasmatic enjoyment of the economy’, Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2), 241­–58. Conway, M., J. Rodat and A. Inserra (2002), Cooperative Home Care Associates: A Case Study of a Sectoral Employment Development Approach, accessed 27 February 2019 at https://​ www​ .aspeninstitute​.org/​publications/​cooperative​-home​-care​-associates​-case​-study​-sectoral​-employment​ -development​-approach/​.

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Worker cooperatives  47 Cornwell, J. (2012), ‘Worker co-operatives and spaces of possibility: An investigation of subject space at Collective Copies’, Antipode, 44 (3), 725­–44. Craig, B. and J. Pencavel (1992), ‘The behavior of worker cooperatives: The plywood companies of the Pacific Northwest’,  American Economic Review, 82 (5), 1083­–105. Curl, J. (2012), For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Davis, J. (2018) ‘A critical look at the Evergreen Model’, Grassroots Economic Organizing, accessed 15 February 2019 at http://​www​.geo​.coop/​blog/​critical​-look​-evergreen​-model. De Barbieri, E.W. and B. Glick (2011), ‘Legal entity options for worker cooperatives’, Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) Newsletter, 2 (8), accessed 15 February 2019 at http://​geo​.coop/​node/​628. de Sousa Santos, B. (ed.) (2006), Another Production Is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon, London: Verso. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1907), Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans, Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press. Engels, F. (1999), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Sydney: Resistance Books. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., E. Erdem and C. Özselçuk (2013), ‘Thinking with Marx for a feminist postcapitalist politics’, in R. Jaeggi and D. Loick (eds), Marx’ Kritik der Gesellschaft, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp.  275­–84. International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) (1966), ‘Co-operative principles’, accessed 13 May 2019 at https://​web​.archive​.org/​web/​20091029163330/​http://​www​.ica​.coop/​coop/​principles​-revisions​ html. Kasmir, S. (2016), ‘The Mondragon cooperatives and global capitalism: A critical analysis’, New Labor Forum, 25 (1), 52­–9. Lezaun, J. and X. Barandiaran (2017), ‘The Mondragon experience’, in J. Michie, C. Borzaga and J.R. Blasi (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Mutual, Co-Operative, and Co-Owned Business, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 279–94. MacPherson, I. (1995), Co-operative Principles for the 21st Century, Vols 26­–9, Geneva: International Co-operative Alliance. Marx, K. (2002), ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx’, in M. Cowling and J. Martin (eds), Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’: (Post)Modern Interpretations, London: Pluto Press, pp.  19­–110. Nembhard, J.G. (2014), Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ness, I. and D. Azzellini (2011), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Roberts, B. (2011), ‘Exploitation, appropriation, and subsumption’, Rethinking Marxism, 23 (3), 341­–51. Sacchetto, D. and M. Semenzin (2016), ‘Workers’ cooperatives in Italy between solidarity and autocratic centralism’, in N. Pun, B. Hok-bun Ku, H. Yan and A. Koo (eds), Social Economy in China and the World, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 135–55. Tremlett, G. (2013), ‘Mondragon: Spain’s giant co-operative where times are hard but few go bust’, The Guardian, 7 March, accessed 19 October 2019 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2013/​mar/​07/​ mondragon​-spains​-giant​-cooperative. Vieta, M. (2014), ‘Learning in struggle: Argentina’s new worker cooperatives as transformative learning organizations’, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, 69 (1), 186­–218. Whyte, W.F. and K.K. Whyte (1991), Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wolff, R.D. (2012), Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Zamagni, V. (2016), ‘Learning from Emilia Romagna’s cooperative economy’, accessed 4 June 2017 at http://​thenextsystem​.org/​learning​-from​-emilia​-romagna/​.

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4. Self-managed enterprise: worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America Ana Inés Heras and Marcelo Vieta

INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses self-managed enterprises in Latin America with a focus on Argentina, analysing how they emerge, their implications for community economies, and their role in la economía de lxs trabajadorxs1 (the workers’ economy). We home in on Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises) as a specific illustration of the Latin American experience in self-managed enterprises. We particularly address how ERT protagonists transform capitalist and hierarchical firms into cooperative and horizontalized enterprises, become self-managed workers forging associated labour, and produce and share wealth rather than extracting surpluses for private gain. It is in these respects that we have conceptualized their contributions to taking back the economy (Gibson-Graham 2008). Further contextualizing ERTs’ contributions in the last 20 years, we also identify three key forms of praxis threaded through their experiments in self-management: horizontalización (horizontalization), autogestión (self-management), and territorialización (territorialization). These concepts have been revived as bottom-up responses to neoliberal logics in recent decades, both in ERTs and self-managed enterprises more broadly, and in many other anti-systemic social movements in the region, such as Indigenous and campesino (peasant) land occupations, neighbourhood organizations defending community or public property, and popular education schools, amongst others.

CONCEPTUAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Several complex factors provide the socio-historical and political context to la economía de lxs trabajadorxs and the emergence of the ERT movement in Argentina. On the one hand, Argentina has a long tradition of working-class, bottom-up labour organizing and shop-floor democracy (Vieta 2019, 2020). The turn-of-millennium anti-systemic social movements merged with these traditions, manifesting in practices of workplace, road and plaza occupations; popular assemblies; and autogestión. These actions were undertaken in the face of the loss of legitimacy of the neoliberal model, especially after the financial crisis of December 2001, coupled with high rates of unemployment, poverty, capital flight, bankruptcies and firm shutdowns. In addition, in the lead up to this period business owners had ramped up speculative practices which saw rising rates of exploitation facilitated by deregulated markets and asset theft after declaring bankruptcy, and a weakened union movement that had been co-opted by a national government favouring capital over decent work. As these factors combined throughout the first years of the 2000s, workers took matters into their own hands by first 48 Ana Inés Heras and Marcelo Vieta - 9781788119962 07:59:17PM

Worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America  49 occupying, and then converting, the former businesses and factories that had employed them into worker cooperatives. In Latin America, the recuperation and self-management of work and livelihoods has been termed trabajo recuperado (recuperated work) – alluding to a ‘taking back’ of people’s productive abilities and needs – and has placed la economía de lxs trabajadorxs at the centre of the socio-political scene as a conceptual area of debate, study and political praxis. Argentina’s ERTs, the most well-known expressions of trabajo recuperado in the region, emerged over the last 20–25 years during the rise and subsequent crisis of the neoliberal model. They can also be found in other parts of Latin America, such as in Brazil and Uruguay, and in other regions that have experienced acute market failures beyond Latin America, such as in Southern Europe, particularly in France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, as well as in smaller pockets in other countries hard hit by the neoliberal juggernaut, including in the US and Canada. The empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores are, thus, bottom-up initiatives spearheaded by workers themselves for saving jobs, livelihoods and places of work. Most ERTs subsequently convert to worker cooperatives, in which each worker-member has a vote, property is collectively shared, decisions are made in assembly, and the distribution of surpluses is based on more equitable principles when compared to capitalist enterprises (Ruggeri and Vieta 2015). Over the past decades, ERTs have become visible in society at large as a viable solution to informal work, stubborn unemployment and precarity (Vieta 2014), while also proving to be examples of non-capitalist forms of economic activity. However, proposals for economies where workers and communities take responsibility for decision making and stewardship long pre-date today’s concepts of trabajo recuperado, economía social y solidaria (the social and solidarity economy) or economía de lxs trabajadorxs. By the mid-1960s, Latin America’s working and marginalized classes, mediated by strong labour movements, helped forge a version of the developmentalist state that served in many countries in the region to guarantee some sort of redistribution of substantial portions of national wealth (Portes and Hoffman 2003). Iturraspe (1986) has documented several diverse experiences of alternative, worker- and community-led economies during the decades spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Common among these different national experiences throughout the decades were workers’ desires and demands to become full participants in deciding how to organize and carry out work. Overall, workers’ demands for more participation in the economy and a greater say in setting the political agenda, as well as for more self-directed practices on shop-floors, were at the basis of these different experiences. In Argentina, these working-class demands would articulate into bottom-up practices in self-organization and self-activity, including cuerpos de delegados (shop-stewards’ committees) in the 1940s–1950s; early workplace takeovers such as the Frigorífico Lisandro de la Torre events in the late 1950s;2 the wave of clasismo-based3 rank-and-file driven initiatives such as El Cordobazo of 1969; and the myriad social movements emerging during and just after the crisis years at the turn of the millennium (Vieta 2014, 2020). Thus, the voices of working people became more and more visible within varying configurations as organized collectives, and not only and simply within hierarchical and official labour unions. In their actions they clashed with other socio-political forces, such as la patronal (the investor, entrepreneurial and landholding classes) and los intereses del capital (the interests of capital, including the state, foreign imperialist interests, and all of their related forces of power).

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50  The handbook of diverse economies The memory of these and other working-class initiatives lives on in the culture and practices of the ERTs. While the term economía del trabajo was already being used in Latin America by the 1970s, the term la economía de lxs trabajadorxs, the framework taken up more recently by ERTs, means something different in two respects. On the one hand, it names a collective process taken up by embodied subjects – lxs trabajadorxs (the workers) – in plural, as well as referring to the collective of working subjects and not just to the abstract noun trabajo (work). On the other hand, it is a term used by the workers themselves rather than being imposed on them by a vanguard. Thus the concept of la economía de lxs trabajadorxs has similar roots but possesses new discursive power, in as much as it allows for two vital issues to come into perspective: the subjects (plural) performing the action (i.e. the recuperation of the factory and the foundation of a new collectively controlled enterprise such as a cooperative run by the workers), as well as the subjects naming the process (i.e. recuperating work, recuperating enterprises, taking back the economy). These workers’ collectives refer to themselves as empresas recuperadas, trabajadores autogestionados (self-managed workers), cooperativas autogestionadas (self-managed cooperatives) or fábricas/empresas gestionadas por sus trabajadores (workers’ self-managed factories/enterprises). In all of these terms and ways of self-conceptualizing there is an emphasis in the actions and struggles of having won their workplace, of having taken back something that rightfully belongs to all, as well as an allusion of restarting afresh that most basic of human actions and doings – working – but, this time, in cooperation with others for a greater common good.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ERTS: TENSIONS, CHALLENGES, INNOVATIONS As of early 2018 in Argentina, around 16 000 workers were self-managing close to 400 ERTs throughout the urban economy in sectors as diverse as printing and publishing, media, metallurgy, foodstuffs, construction, textiles, tourism, education, health provisioning and shipbuilding (Ruggeri 2017). Because of their broad uptake across a diversity of economic sectors, Argentina’s ERTs offer particularly useful lessons for how to potentially convert myriad forms of capitalist enterprises into worker-run and even community-centred cooperatives. The oldest group of still-operational ERTs in Argentina date back to the 1990s, and most of them have been resilient, with only around 10 per cent having since closed (Ruggeri and Vieta 2015). There are, however, several challenges ERTs continue to face. One set of challenges relates to workers needing to transition from employees to associated workers, which in turn has practical and quotidian impacts on the very processes of self-managing firms. ERT workers must take on, for the first time in their lives in many cases, decision-making responsibilities while needing to recommission and reorganize often troubled firms; they must learn new administrative skills; and must enter personal and collective processes of identity transformation as they refuse to see or talk about themselves as owners, even though strictly speaking they are now collective owners, or co-owners. Another set of challenges relates to production and productivity issues, capitalization of the firm, and meeting client and market needs, not minor issues given the depleted nature of the firms they take over. One way ERT workers have attempted to overcome these challenges is by establishing associated networks between ERTs, local municipalities, sectoral unions,

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Worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America  51 and local university programmes that seek to collectively support and collaborate with production and organizational needs and marketing challenges. Another is to practise solidarity economies by bartering supplies, sharing customer orders, producing as cooperative clusters, or recycling the left-overs of one ERT for the production inputs of another. Most profoundly, however, ERTs’ myriad challenges are addressed – and the economy begins to be taken back by the very communities most affected – in the ways enterprises, labour and transactions are transformed. Transforming Enterprises With ERTs, hierarchical capitalist workplaces become horizontal and cooperative work arrangements. Originally ERT movement leaders decided on the cooperative model for recuperated firms for pragmatic purposes since it was an already available organizational model for collective work in Argentina (Fajn 2003). Yet, the most profound transformations of enterprises happen over time as ERT workers engage in working out their challenges and learning self-management together. Practically, these transformations can be seen in numerous ways: in the regular meeting of workers’ assemblies and in the transparency and rotating membership of workers’ councils chosen democratically; in shop-floor practices where workers collaborate to learn new skills and actively practise on-the-job mentoring and job sharing; in the use of ad hoc work groups specially catered to production needs; in flexible production processes moving beyond alienating capitalist specialization; in more humanized work environments (e.g. regular breaks, shared cultural events, sometimes even slowing down work, and so on); in practices of pay equity, usually not surpassing 3:1 salary differentials; (Heras and Burin 2014); and, perhaps most radically, in opening up firms to the community (Ruggeri et al. 2014; Vieta 2014), which we return to shortly. In sum, as enterprises, the recuperadas set out new and cooperative ways to distribute surplus, rework the organization of production processes, and reconceptualize the relationships between technology and work (Miano et al. 2016). Here, the findings of research into ERTs coincides with heterodox economic theories of the firm underscoring the increase in worker well-being that comes with democratic governance structures and workplace participation (Erdal 2012; Pérotin 2014), and the higher degrees of worker satisfaction, motivation and even productivity at self-managed firms (Becchetti et al. 2010; Oakeshott 2000). Transforming Labour Indeed, that recuperated work is organized cooperatively and in a self-managed fashion is a vital transformation of the enterprise – from a capitalist to a cooperative one. In turn, the experiences and learning workers gain from taking over firms allows them to practise new skills and take a leading role in forging a new form of institution that is novel and distinct from conventional, for-profit capitalist firms. An enterprise and the activity that takes place therein is thus reconceived into one centred on a way of doing labour (associated, collective, cooperative) that challenges the capital–labour relation. Thus, labour itself is also transformed from exploited and managed employees (waged-labour) to collective and self-managed workers (associated labour). By associated labour we follow Marx to mean the voluntary (rather than coerced) coming together ‘of free and equal producers’ (Marx 1967) that begin to disengage from the power of capital as mediator of production

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52  The handbook of diverse economies and work (Henderson 2013). As members of a worker cooperative, each worker’s capacities are now recombined socially (rather than for private ends) for the benefit of the entire collective of workers and the community at large (rather than for the benefit of the capitalist). And this, in effect, begins to take power away from capital and places it back in the hands of the collective of workers associated within a cooperative. Transforming Transactions De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford (2010) have called workers’ collectives and voluntary control of a productive entity and the redistribution of economic surpluses between and by workers themselves a ‘labour commons (pp. 37–9). The notion of a labour commons points to the transformation of transactions spearheaded by ERTs, placing workers and communities at the centre of economic exchange and distribution activity rather than at the periphery. This is most readily manifested in ERT workers’ new-found place in the capital–labour relation. With ERTs – being worker cooperatives (Craig 1993) – it is labour (the direct producers) that hires capital, not the other way around as in capitalist businesses. More than theory, this reality means that ERT worker-members can, in effect, control the planning and organization of production, the distribution of surpluses, and other crucial matters of the firm. Control over the firm and surpluses also permit ERT workers flexibility to deal with challenges and sustain their enterprises by experimenting with new ways of economic, cultural and social transactions between protagonists of la economía de lxs trabajadorxs. One way they have done so is by forming, on their own accord, innovative umbrella organizations based on the community-union model of labour organizing, often in solidarity with non-ERT cooperatives and even traditional unions. These self-managed workers’ federations, such as Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuepradas (MNER, National Movement of Recuperated Enterprises) and Federación Argentina de Cooperativas de Trabajo Autogestionado (FACTA, Argentine Federation of Self-Managed Worker Cooperatives), among others, have gone on to facilitate ERTs in capacity building, to support their protagonists’ educational needs and articulating and transferring best practices between older and newer ERTs, and have even lobbied the state successfully to reform bankruptcy and expropriation legislation in order to make them more amenable for workers seeking to convert failing firms to worker cooperatives (Ranis 2016).4 Another practice of new socio-economic transactions by ERTs is when they embrace community-focused (rather than just client/customer-based) production and exchange, something that two-thirds of them do to some degree (Ruggeri et al. 2014). For instance, many ERTs open up their shops to the broader community in an event that has come to be known as la fábrica abierta (the open factory) (Vieta and Ruggeri 2009). These events are both ways of giving back to the communities that supported them during the takeover of the firm, and practical enactments of the community values worker-protagonists have learnt as they engage in self-managing their firms. ERTs also contribute to the socio-economic needs of surrounding communities by allowing socio-cultural initiatives to operate within the firm, such as neighbourhood cultural centres, free health clinics, and bachilleratos populares (popular and cooperatively organized adult-oriented high schools). Some ERTs have even invested portions of their surpluses in community economic development and revitalization, such as assisting with dignified housing initiatives and repairs of local hospitals; sponsoring local cultural events; and supporting other ERTs or even founding new cooperatives.

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Worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America  53 ERTs engaging in these community initiatives essentially practise new modes of community– enterprise transactions that, rather than using competitive markets to mediate the products or services of a firm with the demands of consumers outside of it, extend productive entities out into the community territorially and bring the community into a productive entity. Indeed, we underscore that this is one of Argentina’s ERTs’ key contributions to thinking about ways of taking back the economy (Vieta 2014, 2019a).

COMMON FEATURES OF LATIN AMERICA’S SELF-MANAGED ENTERPRISES Upon examining the collective and solidarity experiences of self-managed enterprises in Latin America as illustrated by Argentina’s ERTs and within la economía de lxs trabajadorxs and la economía social y solidaria, we find that three main practices are shared: (1) democratic decision making; (2) collective self-organizing; and (3) collaborative and spatial relations between social actors. These can be summarized respectively in three action-oriented concepts: horizontalización, autogestión and territorialización. Horizontalización captures the ways decisions are made in Latin America’s self-managed enterprises. We have highlighted that experiences in self-management reorganize productive activity along directly democratic and participatory practices that begin to eradicate hierarchies of control. In this respect, Latin America’s self-managed enterprises are enacting, and thus pointing towards, a radicalized theory of power sharing. This is a lived and embodied political praxis in which the processes of collectively putting issues to debate, arriving at (partial or in-process) conclusions, and setting these decisions to work become central guiding principles and practices that constantly experiment with collective and direct participation. Autogestión also relates to participatory decision making, but from the perspective of the reorganization of labour (such as the divisions of labour), as well as, more broadly, the reproduction of life and sociality. Autogestión, a word that is used by the actual protagonists of many grassroots socio-economic experiments throughout the region (Cattani 2004), encapsulates how collectives struggling against and moving beyond macro- and microeconomic crises create, from out of the struggle, new spaces for more dignified work and human-centred processes for the production and reproduction of social wealth. In this respect, autogestión is close to other concepts found in the discourse of campesino-indígena and social and solidarity economy practices, namely: autonomía (autonomy), autoafirmación (self-affirmation), independencia (independence), and emancipación (emancipation). These concepts as a whole point to the core issues impelling the collective desire for self-determination and freedom to self-actualize beyond capitalocentric institutions and practices such as wage-labour and private property. Horizontalización and autogestión also embrace active practices of networking between experiments in self-management, building links of solidarity within the broader economía social y solidaria, and forging new social relations between socio-economic and socio-political experiences in order to build close alliances. We call these inter-group and inter-experience alliances that form links across struggles and spaces territorialización. The experiences we name and analyse in this chapter, among many others, hold in common a way of relating to their context by encouraging member and community participation within and across the localities and social networks in which they are embedded and that they help create. In other

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54  The handbook of diverse economies writings, we have conceptualized territorialización, including protagonists’ two-fold desires for self-determination and active networking, as the making and nurturing of alliances with others who may be geographical and/or ideological neighbours (Heras and Miano 2017). That is, these neighbours can either/both inhabit a close space and thus share common perspectives about what then becomes a shared territory, or they are allies who are not close in spatial terms but who may share a vision or a political project. We thus argue that it is in these three specific ways of conceptualizing and enacting self-managed enterprises in Latin America – horizontalización, autogestión, territorialización – that they diverge from capitalistic and capitalocentric notions and practices (Gibson-Graham 2008, 2011; Guattari and Rolnik 2008). They are equally rebellious and creative, emerging in struggles and proposing new ways of organizing socio-economic needs and desires, while also pragmatically motivated to demand (from the state, from other institutional actors) and acting autonomously in their own name. Thus, Latin America’s self-managed enterprises both suggest ways of taking back the diverse aspects of the economy from the perspective of work and workers while prefiguring la otra economía and la otra sociedad (the other economy and the other society) that lies beyond capitalist logics.

NOTES We have chosen to use the x to graphically introduce and problematize the debate over the gendered nature of the Spanish language, in this case representing los/las trabajadores/as in the gender neutral lxs trabajadorxs. 2. These events took place in 1959 as a response of the workers to the government’s initiative to privatize the state-owned meat-packing plant Lisandro de la Torre. What was unique about this circumstance was not only the workers’ response via the organized occupation and takeover of the workplace, but also the support received by families, the neighbourhood and other social actors. 3. Clasismo was a tendency in the Argentine labour movement that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s from the rank-and-file and leadership of Argentina’s more progressive unions that directly challenged both authoritarian-state capitalism and bureaucratic unionism. It can be roughly translated as a ‘working-class perspective’, meaning a perspective informed by workers’ needs and orientations (e.g. direct control over work processes, internal democracy, capacity to negotiate salaries and workers’ rights, etc.). 4. After forming a worker cooperative and securing the temporary control of the plant under usufruct from the presiding bankruptcy judges, Argentina’s ERT worker-protagonists may lobby for the expropriation of the firm by the state on behalf of the cooperative as a ‘common good’. For more on the use of expropriation law in Argentina for securing firms that have been converted to worker cooperatives for its workers, see Ranis (2016) and Ruggeri and Vieta (2015). 1.

REFERENCES Becchetti, L., S. Castriota and S. Depedri (2010), ‘Working in the profit versus non-for-profit sector: What difference does it make? An inquiry of preferences of voluntary and involuntary movers’, Working Papers No. 005-10, Trento, Italy: European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises (EURICSE). Cattani, A.D. (2004), La Otra Economía, Buenos Aires: Altamira. Craig, J. (1993), The Nature of Co-operation, Montreal: Black Rose Books. de Peuter, G. and N. Dyer-Witheford (2010), ‘Commons and cooperatives’, Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action, 4 (1), 30–56.

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Worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America  55 Erdal, D. (2012), ‘Employee ownership is good for your health: People thrive in a social environment characterized by employee ownership’, Journal of Cooperative Thought and Practice, 1 (1), 3–6. Fajn, G. (2003), Fábricas y empresas recuperadas: Protesta social, autogestión, y rupturas en la subjetividad, Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación/Instituto Movilizador de Fondos Cooperativos. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2011), ‘A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene’, Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (1), 1–21. Guattari, F. and S. Rolnik (2008), Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Henderson, G. (2013). Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Heras, A.I. and D. Burin (2014), ‘Para que las diferencias no se transformen en desigualdad’, Revista Idelcoop, 213, 72–112. Heras, A.I. and A. Miano (2017), ‘Educación, auto-organización y territorio’, Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa, 22 (73), 533–64. Iturraspe, F. (1986), Participación, Cogestión y Autogestión en América Latina, Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad. Marx, K. (1967), Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy – A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, New York: International Publishers. Miano, A., D. Burin and A.I. Heras (2016), ‘Tecnología y autogestión en cooperativas de trabajo’, Revista de Prácticas y Discursos, 5 (6), 1–20. Oakeshott, R. (2000), Jobs and Fairness: The Logic and Experience of Employee Ownership, Norwich: Michael Russell. Pérotin, V. (2014), ‘Worker cooperatives: Good, sustainable jobs in the community’, Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 2 (2), 34–47. Portes, A. and K. Hoffman (2003), ‘Latin American class structures: Their composition and change during the neoliberal era’, Latin American Research Review, 38 (1), 41–82. Ranis, P. (2016), Cooperatives Confront Capitalism: Challenging the Neoliberal Economy, London: Zed Books. Ruggeri, A. (2017), ‘Las empresas recuperadas a dos años de gobierno de Mauricio Macri’, Programa www​ Facultad Abierta, Universidad de Buenos Aires, accessed 10 February 2018 at http://​ .recuperadasdoc​.com​.ar/​preliminar2017​.pdf. Ruggeri, A., J. Antivero and N. Polti (2014), Informe del IV relevamiento de empresas recuperadas en la Argentina, 2014: Las empresas recuperadas en el período 2010–2013, Buenos Aires: Programa Facultad Abierta, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, accessed 10 February 2018 at http://​www​.recuperadasdoc​.com​.ar/​Informe​_IV​_relevamiento​_2014​.pdf. Ruggeri, A. and M. Vieta (2015), ‘Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises: A synthesis of recent empirical findings’, Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity (JEOD), 3 (3), 75–103. Vieta, M. (2014), ‘Learning in struggle: Argentina’s new worker cooperatives as transformative learning organizations’, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, 69 (1), 186–218. Vieta, M. (2019), ‘Recuperating and (re)learning the language of autogestión in Argentina’s empresas recuperadas worker cooperatives’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 12 (5), 401–22. Vieta, M. (2020), Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Vieta, M. and A. Ruggeri (2009), ‘Worker-recovered enterprises as workers’ co-operatives: The conjunctures, challenges, and innovations of self-management in Argentina and Latin America’, in D. Reed and J.J. McMurtry (eds), Co-operatives in a Global Economy: The Challenges of Co-operation across Borders, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 178–225.

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5. Community enterprise: diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure Jarra Hicks

INTRODUCTION Community enterprises are businesses in which individuals come together as active communities to create an enterprise around a perceived need, issue or opportunity. Like other forms of ethical enterprise, they are motivated by a dual ambition to participate in economic activity while also contributing to social or environmental goals. Importantly, communities are active in initiating, governing and benefiting from the enterprise. In practice this means community enterprises are grounded in relationships with people that share and are part of an evolving commitment by the enterprise to social and environmental ethics. This chapter explores the structures, processes and outcomes of community enterprise through two examples of community-owned wind farms. Both enterprises discussed in this chapter are community-owned renewable energy projects (CORE) that have emerged from community members collectively reflecting on how renewable energy can be harnessed to survive well. They are motivated by a desire to reduce the impacts of energy generation on the planet by harnessing locally available common-pool resources: the sun, wind, water and biomass. They also seek to enable communities to actively participate in decisions around the kind of energy future we want, and how these choices can reduce negative outcomes and increase positive ones. Hepburn Wind, in Victoria, Australia, is a cooperative with over 2000 members, most of whom are local people. Together they have contributed time, money, expertise and effort to establish a 4.1 MW wind farm. Each year, their two turbines generate the equivalent of the energy needs of the 2000 houses of nearby Daylesford and Hepburn Springs. Shapinsay Development Trust, in Orkney, Scotland, is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee and a registered charity. They established one 900 kW wind turbine to utilize their great wind resource as a way of generating income to fund sustainable development projects for their small island community. Both projects generate income by selling their electricity into the national grid and direct surplus towards social and environmental goals. Through the creation of their enterprises, two communities are participating in and benefiting from the transition to cleaner, more sustainable relationships with energy. They are considering decisions about what energy to consume and where it comes from, whether to generate surplus and, if so, how it is distributed and how to encounter others along this journey (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). All of these considerations influence, and are influenced by, decisions around enterprise structure. To realize community economies we need enterprise structures and processes that are capable of enacting ethics that depart from dominant economic norms. But finding appropriate structures for community enterprises is not an easy task. At the threshold of creating community economies, we confront a conundrum: 56 Jarra Hicks - 9781788119962 07:59:22PM

Diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure  57 We know the next economy will require things like wind turbines, limits on carbon emissions, and sustainably managed forests. The questions that remain largely unanswered are about who will own these, who will control them, and who will flourish in the world they create. (Kelly 2012, p. 15)

If we are interested in engaging differently with economic activity, we must explore the range of opportunities for creating a diversity of enterprise forms that are better able to meet human needs in ways that are aligned with ethics. This is fundamentally important, as Orsi argues: ‘The architecture of organizations will . . . be the architecture of a new economy’ (2012, p. 152). By transforming the parameters of ownership and control within enterprises we can change the functions and impacts of economic activity and the broader economy. This chapter analyses how we can create community enterprises that are capable of enacting and protecting ethics over time, so that ‘their animating intent and their living impact’ holds true to community economy ethics (Kelly in Orsi 2012, p. 157). It looks beneath the veneer of labels such as ‘for-profit’ and ‘not-for-profit’, ‘company’ and ‘cooperative’ and identifies different features of community enterprise design that help to keep ethical commitments alive.

COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE DESIGN As the building blocks of the economy, enterprises provide form and purpose to direct economic activity (Orsi 2012). As such they have the potential to help provide structures and processes that lead to desired outcomes. Community enterprise design, then, is fertile ground for experimentation to find ways of effectively bringing the ethical principles of a community economy to life. One challenge is how to create enterprises that embed and enact community economy ethics within the bounds and constraints of existing legal structures. Recognizing the common difficulties of prioritizing ethics over profit generation in the status quo of business, Kelly claims that enterprise design ‘is a way to keep a generative mission alive in a world often indifferent to the notion of social mission in business’ (2012, p. 182). While some scholars focus on the inadequacies and misalignment of existing legal structures (e.g. company, cooperative, associations) with ethically motivated enterprise (e.g. Capra and Mattei 2015), Kelly posits that ethically driven enterprises are possible (and already exist) using existing legal structures, but that to succeed they must instil the means to uphold the enterprise’s key ethical commitments. Looking in more detail at the structure and practice of community enterprise reveals layers of detail and nuance that are instructive. The balance between structure and process is fundamental. Organizational structure can be imagined as scaffolding that provides the bones for the enterprise: it defines its basic purpose and functions and the rules by which it operates. The structure is built through the legal form, policies and certifications. Inside the scaffolding is a space for communities to participate in the internal life of the enterprise, including decision making and governance processes. The processes through which people participate within this structure are defined by rules around membership and decision making. It is this participation that allows the ongoing ethical negotiations essential to a community economy to take place. These negotiations include consideration of how a community survives well, distributes surplus, encounters others, cares for their commons and consumes and invests in the future. Both the scaffolding (structures) and the space (processes) direct how the enterprise delivers value and care in its community (outcomes).

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Diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure  59 Like other community economy actors, a diversity of social and environmental ethics drive CORE projects. Keeping these ethics at the heart of the enterprise is the purpose of mission-controlled governance. Ethical commitments can be formalized and protected in the structures of the enterprise in two important ways: within the constitution, and through policies and certifications. Constitution The extent to which ethical commitments are translated into an enterprise’s founding legal documents (e.g. constitution) defines the extent to which they become legal obligations. Different legal structures require different constitutions, which codify the differences between a company, cooperative, trust, etc. Shapinsay Development Trust’s mission is ‘to be the vehicle through which the islanders can collectively help to maintain and improve their lives’ (Shapinsay Development Trust n.d.). The objectives in their constitution include specific reference to improving the social welfare and environmental sustainability of Shapinsay and its residents, including provision of housing, education and leisure, alleviation of poverty, and promotion of local industry (Shapinsay Development Trust 2011, pp. 5–6). Hepburn Wind’s mission statement is ‘a shared desire to take constructive action against climate change and in the process directly benefit the community’ (Hepburn Wind 2019). This led them to pursue a cooperative legal structure in which many local people could be involved. Cooperatives are established to benefit their members through ‘active membership provisions’ specified in the constitution. Both the objectives and the active membership provisions included in Hepburn Wind’s constitution require the cooperative to increase member access to sustainable energy generation and education. Policies and certifications Formalized extra-legal instruments (supplementary to the legal structure) are another way that ethical commitments can be protected within an enterprise. This includes options such as internal policies and processes, certifications, audits, agreements and partnerships. While some of these involve legal agreements and certain levels of accountability, they do not carry the same legal weight as those embedded in the constitution. A key reason for pursuing extra-legal instruments is the desire to embody motivations and ethical commitments over time, rather than relying on individual leadership. Shapinsay Development Trust developed a procurement policy to encourage the use of local labour and resources wherever possible (see Chapter 28 by McNeill in this volume). In addition, their Handbook for Directors, Staff and Volunteers encourages all projects to be done in a way that helps to ‘increase the abilities and skills within . . . Shapinsay’ and which ‘increase the connections between Shapinsay and the wider community’ (Shapinsay Development Trust 2012, p. 3). For example, this resulted in getting businesses from the island to do ground and electrical work for the turbine. They also implemented an induction programme for new board members, to ensure continuity of values and ethics, and to rely less on key personalities. Through these instruments, the Shapinsay Trust’s motivations become increasingly embedded in the life of the enterprise. Hepburn Wind chose to additionally secure its commitment to social and environmental impact through becoming a certified ‘B-Corp’. B-corps are enterprises that voluntarily hold themselves to higher levels of accountability across governance and environmental and social impact. Certification requires the enterprise to consider how they encounter others through

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60  The handbook of diverse economies an assessment process and a contract in which they consider the impact of its decisions not only on shareholders, but also on employees, customers, suppliers, the community and the environment (B Lab, 2019). Ongoing, it requires yearly reporting, providing a level of public accountability. These examples demonstrate how mission-controlled governance is facilitated through grounding ethics in the structures of the enterprise. Hence, the focus on values becomes permanent. In Kelly’s view, the patterns of relationship among owners, investors, employees, customers, members and others form the fabric of an enterprise and are ‘held together, most fundamentally, by a set of values and by a purpose based on those values, which is institutionalized in the organization’ (Kelly 2012, p. 152, original emphasis). Through tailoring their constitutions, creating policies and taking on certifications the case studies have codified their collective ethics and motivations into a structural form. Thus they can become the ‘moral compass’ for the enterprise and are more able to be sustained over time, increasing the ability to achieve desired outcomes. Participating in the Space Created: Enterprise Processes for Community Economies The involvement of members is a key part of what keeps the active ethics of community economies alive in community enterprise. The space for participation created within the scaffolding of the enterprise structure influences the ways that members are involved in its governance processes. Through rules around membership, voting and quorum at meetings, people participate in the ongoing negotiations and decisions required to apply ethics in real life scenarios. Membership rules A sustainable and accountable economy requires enterprises that ‘root control in the hands of people who have a natural interest in the health of their communities and local ecosystems’ (Korten in Kelly 2012, p. 11). Within each legal structure, rooted membership is created through rules regarding who can be a member and how decisions are made. Both Hepburn Wind and the Shapinsay Development Trust see local membership as fundamental to being a community enterprise, as it facilitates local participation in and control of the enterprise, leading to feelings of ownership. Ensuring local ownership requires keeping membership and the majority of decision-making power among local people. If voting rights are democratically attributed, then upholding local ownership is a matter of having a majority of local members. If voting rights are attributed by share, then local people must hold a majority of shares. As a cooperative, Hepburn Wind has a one-member-one-vote rule in their constitution. To uphold local ownership, they must ensure that membership is accessible to local people and results in a majority of local members. A cooperative allows for an unlimited number of members, each of whom own shares in the cooperative. Hepburn Wind structured the share offering to ensure it was more accessible to local people, with a minimum investment of 100 shares to locals (costing $100) versus 1000 shares for non-locals (costing $1000). They also have a policy of ensuring that 51 per cent of the cooperative’s membership self-identify as local people. The board upholds this commitment through the application process. As a result, Hepburn has 2002 members, the majority of whom are local. Although having many members increases their administration levels and operating costs (e.g. when processing dividend payments), it has allowed them to protect their commitment to local ownership and benefit.

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Diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure  61 Membership of Shapinsay Development Trust, by contrast, is not attached to shareholding: their constitution stipulates that membership is open to all adult residents of the island for an annual fee of one pound. Each member gets one vote. As such, every adult resident of Shapinsay has the ability to co-own and participate in the Trust. As a result, Shapinsay Development Trust has very open and accessible membership, but also a strict requirement that members must be island residents. Implementing rules and policies to keep membership rooted within a community ensures the enterprise is responsive to and directed by the will of the community it is established to serve. The real impact of rooted membership comes into play when considering how people participate in decision making, as influenced by voting and quorum. Voting and quorum Rules around voting and quorum determine how people participate in enterprise governance. Formal decision-making processes are outlined in an enterprise’s constitution, which includes rules for quorum and voting at annual general meetings (AGMs) and board meetings, as well as outlining board membership requirements. In both Hepburn Wind and Shapinsay Development Trust, the board must be composed mostly of current members, helping to align the interests of the enterprise with the interests of its members. In addition, Hepburn Wind has a policy that 50 per cent of the board should be local people and represent a variety of skill sets. Both enterprises ensure the possibility of board turnover through requiring board members to step down (or stand for re-election) every two or three years, enabling ongoing democratic influence over board membership. This helps to counteract the tendency to entrench power and influence. AGMs are a key moment in the ongoing governance of an enterprise and an opportunity for the membership to influence its direction. Important decisions, such as changes to the constitution and board, must be passed at an AGM. For this reason, the quorum for such meetings is greater than that of board meetings, thereby requiring the involvement of general members. Counter to the norm within companies (and most representative democracies!) both Hepburn Wind and Shapinsay Development Trust require more than a simple majority to pass key decisions, requiring 75 and 66 per cent respectively. The combination of AGM quorum, vote attribution and decision-making thresholds have implications, over time, for the depth of local participation and ownership in the enterprise, and the extent to which they can genuinely be seen to be democratizing decision making. Quorum requirements are a double-edged sword: on one hand, an enterprise can be immobilized, unable to make crucial decisions, if it cannot meet quorum requirements; on the other hand, higher quorum requirements provide a regular impetus to actively encourage member participation in formal decision-making processes. The level of openness and participation in decision making also has implications for transparency and accountability. Rooted membership is a means of keeping members in touch with the enterprise, its mission and the impacts it is having on other people and the planet. Delivering Living Value and Care: Enterprise Outcomes for Community Economies Directing surplus towards social and environmental purposes is what Kelly calls ‘fulfilling a living purpose’ (2012, p. 149). Key determinants of how surplus can be allocated are the

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62  The handbook of diverse economies rules around surplus distribution outlined in the constitution and the ways this is operationalized in practice. In not-for-profit enterprises, such as Shapinsay Development Trust, all surplus must go towards fulfilling their mission as set out in their constitutions. Because the Shapinsay Trust was established to take action on local development agendas, all surplus is channelled into projects identified as priorities by their membership, developed through ongoing co-design processes. Their grant programme, for example, allows local people to apply for funding ‘to make things a wee bit better’ (Shapinsay interviewee), as long as they ‘provide [a] clear benefit to the wider community of Shapinsay’ (Shapinsay Trust 2019). The programme has funded a wide variety of initiatives, such as school and sports equipment, training and education, travel funding and support for the church and local farmers. In addition, Shapinsay Development Trust funds a heavily subsidized out-of-hours (OOH) boat service, which provides extra night and weekend crossings between Shapinsay and the regional centre. Interviewees from Shapinsay feel that the OOH service has ‘opened up’ the island allowing people to access more work, education, recreation and health care opportunities (rather than trying to replicate them, which would be much more expensive and in many cases unviable for a very small population). Taken together, the surplus from the turbine is making a significant contribution to their small regional community and its future viability. Hepburn Wind, on the other hand, is a for-profit enterprise, as they have sought investment from their members and plan to pay this back, plus a small dividend, over time. In this sense they are similar to conventional for-profit organizations, where surplus is returned to shareholders as a dividend paid to individual shareholders. However, this simplistic view of for-profit enterprise is disrupted by reading Hepburn Wind’s activities for difference, as Hepburn Wind has found ways to preference community-wide benefit. Where membership is engaged, committed to the mission and involved in decision making, this provides scope for the enterprise to agree to prioritize things other than dividends. In Hepburn Wind’s case, channelling surplus to the grant fund has been prioritized over returns to members, as directed by a member-wide survey, for the past five years (as of 2016). The community grant fund is part of their B-Corp certification and is something they have negotiated into the Power Purchase Agreement (a commercial contract) with the company that buys the electricity they produce. Thus, their commitment to delivering a living purpose in the community is upheld in the constitution as well as through contracts and member participation in decision making. Their annual grants have funded 36 community initiatives ranging from energy efficiency to school programmes, local choirs and environmental rehabilitation. Hepburn Wind has also used their grant funds to leverage financial and in-kind contributions (from local council, philanthropy, other local organizations and businesses) to run initiatives that contribute to greater local renewable energy uptake and carbon reduction. Initiatives include an electric vehicle charging station on the main street, the refurbishment of a heritage small-scale hydro power plant and investigations to build a solar farm under the wind turbines. These projects act as an opportunity to build new alliances and deepen local relationships, and add another layer to Hepburn Wind’s public presence and their role as a renewable energy advocate and educator. In addition, when returns are distributed to members, having local members means money keeps circulating in the local economy.

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Diverse designs for community-owned energy infrastructure  63

CONCLUSIONS Developing better understandings of how to appropriately design community enterprises is important for increasing our ability to act on issues of concern and begin to create the world we want to live in. This chapter demonstrates how two community enterprises have drawn on and fostered a diversity of enterprise design features to realize their ethical visions for democratized energy systems, sustainability and local regeneration. These enterprises have used different legal structures, modified and supplemented in various ways, in order to manifest community visions. These examples help reveal the opportunities for community participation and for protecting ethics within enterprise structures. They also help us to see beyond the sometimes-stifling boundaries that currently exist in status quo thinking around existing legal structures. Meaningful participation in community enterprises leads to forms of capacity and relationship building that provide fertile ground for learning and redefining our understanding of enterprise and our relationships with others. The larger research project from which this discussion is drawn, found that people’s participation in community enterprises can manifest experiences of individual and collective empowerment that contribute to redefining people’s sense of self, sense of community and consideration of energy issues (Hicks 2018). These transformations represent a significant contribution community enterprise can make to people’s preparedness to engage with other forms of community-led action, both in terms of awareness about the enterprise structures available, and in terms of developing the subjectivities required to participate in community.

NOTE 1.

For an in-depth discussion of the influence of community enterprise design on CORE outcomes and impacts see Hicks (2018).

REFERENCES B Lab (2019), ‘About B Corps’, accessed 21 July 2019 at https://​bcorporation​.com​.au/​about​-b​-corps. Capra, F. and U. Mattei (2015), The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hepburn Wind (2019), ‘Frequently asked questions’, accessed 21 July 2019 at https://​www​hepburnwind​ .com​.au/​wind​-farm/​#!about​-the​-wind​-farm. Hicks, J. (2018), ‘Community power: Understanding the outcomes and impacts from community-owned wind energy projects in small regional communities’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Kelly, M. (2012), Owning our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Orsi, J. (2012), Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies, Chicago, IL: American Bar Association. Ostrom, E. (2015), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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64  The handbook of diverse economies Shapinsay Development Trust (n.d.), ‘Welcome page’, accessed 6 March 2019 at http://​ www​ .orkneycommunities​.co​.uk/​SHAPINSAY/​. Shapinsay Development Trust (2011), ‘Memorandum of Association of Shapinsay Development Trust’, Balfour, Orkney. Shapinsay Trust (2012), Handbook for Directors, Staff and Volunteers, Balfour, Orkney. Shapinsay Trust (2019), ‘The Shapinsay Way Ahead Programme’, accessed 21 July 2019 at http://​www​ .orkneycommunities​.co​.uk/​shapinsay/​index​.asp​?pageid​=​594366.

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6. Eco-social enterprises: ethical business in a post-socialist context Nadia Johanisova, Lucie Sovová and Eva Fraňková

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, we look at the varied strands of alternative capitalist and non-capitalist enterprise in one of the ‘post-socialist’ (or ‘post-Communist’) countries in Europe,1 the Czech Republic. Before we start, let it be said that the ‘post-socialist’ label subsuming these countries under one umbrella is simplified: they had diverse cultural and socio-economic histories prior to their membership in the Eastern Bloc between the 1940s and the end of the 1980s. Furthermore, the regimes themselves differed in degree and form of dominance, and in degree of resistance from below. In the former Czechoslovakia, for example, soon after accession to power in 1948, the regime abolished some cooperatives, deprived the rest of their democratic governance and, perhaps most traumatically, forcibly herded one-and-a-half million small farmers (in a country of 14 million) into eleven thousand new, top-down, and undemocratic ‘unified’ agricultural cooperatives, which swallowed up their land and animals (Kubačák 1995, pp. 45, 181). Such approaches failed in countries like Poland, where small family farms resisted enforced ‘collectivization’ under Communism. However, European post-socialist countries do appear to have some things in common even today. One might be a majority perspective that does not recognize valuable non-capitalist traditions and institutions whose roots lie deeper than the Communist period, since these traditions and institutions were often appropriated or buried in oblivion by the Communist regime (Hausner 2009; Kiss and Mihály 2018). In Czechoslovakia before the Second World War, for example, there were more than sixteen thousand credit, agricultural, housing, energy, consumer, and producer cooperatives. They mitigated social inequalities, supported small farmers, and cultivated solidarity and democratic practice (Feierabend 1952; Johanisova 2005, pp. 27–32). After 1948, the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia terminated not only such authentic cooperatives,2 but also private enterprise and profit appropriation. Only state-owned enterprises or inauthentic cooperatives, such as the ‘unified’ agricultural cooperatives mentioned above, were allowed to engage in production and trade. Non-profit organizations were tightly controlled and had to toe the Communist party line. Tendencies in other Eastern Bloc countries were similar. Unsurprisingly, this has discredited bottom-up left-wing discourses, conflating ‘communal’ and ‘voluntary’ in many people’s minds with ‘Communist’ and ‘state-ordained’. The democratic revolutions at the close of the 1980s also led to a sea change in government policies in these countries, with private enterprise and profit becoming glorified. In the Czech Republic, most state-owned enterprises were privatized, as were many assets whose ownership had been newly shifted from state to local municipalities, including housing. Further, like other post-Communist countries, the Czech Republic was labelled a ‘transition economy’, ‘transition’ here meaning a transition to capitalism and, implicitly, a ‘catching up’ with the West. 65 Nadia Johanisova, Lucie Sovová and Eva Fraňková - 9781788119962 07:59:29PM

66  The handbook of diverse economies As researchers taking a critical view of the current economic system, we are interested in another kind of ‘transition’: a transition beyond capitalism to economies free of built-in growth mechanisms, which would help both human and more-than-human communities to flourish in a long-term perspective (d’Alisa et al. 2015; Gibson et al. 2015; Lang et al. 2018). This chapter looks at some of the seeds of such economies in the Czech Republic today.

ECO-SOCIAL ENTERPRISE To bring to light other-than-capitalist enterprises in the Czech Republic, we undertook a qualitative research project (2014–16) aimed at revealing their diversity and learning more about their structure, functioning, background and values.3 The entities we were interested in were formal or informal group initiatives that regularly engaged in production, service provision, trade and exchange, in a market setting or otherwise. We also included those that were involved in care for the diversity of non-human life. Based on our previous work (Johanisova and Fraňková 2013, 2017), we chose the term ‘eco-social enterprise’ to describe them. Why ‘eco-social enterprise’? Our work has been inspired by the discourse of ‘social enterprise’, which is influential in the EU policy sphere. As a response to pressures from below to legitimize a large swathe of enterprises that do not conform to the mainstream, the EU-supported concept of social enterprise denotes entities that espouse (i) an explicit general interest objective, (ii) limits on profit distribution to owners/members, and (iii) democratic/participatory governance of the enterprise (Borzaga and Defourny 2001; European Commission 2015). A typical social enterprise in this understanding would be a non-profit organization with a trading arm, or a cooperative providing social services in a local community. In some ways, we found this social enterprise framework useful and inspiring. Criteria (i) and (ii) grow out of the historical tradition of the European cooperative, mutual and non-profit sectors (Evers and Laville 2004). At the same time, they align with the community economy concern with connectedness and the distribution of surplus back to communities that made them possible, not to owners/members only. Similarly, criterion (iii) has close ties to the idea of the commons, where the use and care of an asset is negotiated by a community (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, chapters 3, 5). Yet this social enterprise discourse still grows from an essentially mainstream economic ontology. To qualify as a social enterprise under the EU definition, an economic entity needs to have an official legal structure. And it is assumed to operate in a capitalist market, with an emphasis on innovation, economic risk, paid employment and permanent expansion. Such a discourse, which has found its way to countries like the Czech Republic via EU funding packages and exerted a good deal of influence (Fraňková et al. 2018), is necessarily performative, obscuring the existence of ‘other’ enterprises or pushing them into more mainstream positions. What is more, the discourse essentially represents social enterprises as patching up cracks in a ‘business as usual’, growth-oriented world via social inclusion, e.g. by providing employment or social services for disadvantaged groups (Borzaga et al. 2008; European Commission 2015; Hausner 2009, p. 227). We use the concept of ‘eco-social enterprise’ both to acknowledge our debt to the social enterprise discourse and to emphasize our more radical and inclusive approach. In addition, our concept indicates that the environmental dimensions of economic alternatives are as important as the social (Gibson et al. 2015, p. 15). More subtly, it is meant to convey the

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Eco-social enterprises: ethical business in a post-socialist context  67 idea that the very structural and ideological characteristics of many economic alternatives give them an (often unacknowledged) environmental dimension. For example, cooperative members’ shares do not as a rule grow in value along with the assets of the cooperative. This can make growth for growth’s sake less attractive to cooperative members. Assuming that a systemic pressure towards economic growth is at odds with the flourishing of life, cooperatives can thus have a built-in eco-dimension, regardless of any explicit green goals (d’Alisa et al. 2015; Johanisova and Fraňková 2013, pp. 119–24; Johanisova and Wolf 2012, p. 565).4 The following are the five (sliding-scale) criteria of an eco-social enterprise used in our research. While the first three are adapted from the EU definition, the last two make space for the local, the informal, and the non-market (see also Fraňková et al. 2018; Johanisova and Fraňková 2017): 1. Other-than-profit goals: The founding documents of many eco-social enterprises contain explicit social, environmental or cultural aims: they exist to benefit a specific human or more-than-human community, or nature and society more generally. For authentic cooperatives, the case can be made that the basic goal of serving their members rather than maximising profit (ICA 2018) enables them to step out of the market logic when it contradicts members’ wider interests. For example, they may continue to provide a service to their members, even though it may not be as profitable as other options (Johanisova et al. 2014). 2. Using profits to replenish nature and community: This criterion, differently worded (e.g. ‘limits on distribution of profits to members/owners’), is the object of much discussion in social economy literature. Confusingly, ‘non-profit’ entities, whose rules forbid them from distributing any part of their profits, are often distinguished from ‘not-for-profit’ entities, where at least part of the profit can be distributed to members/owners (Evers and Laville 2004, pp. 11–13). Our wording is inspired by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013, chapter 3), who make a case for distribution of profits (or surplus, which need not only be financial) back to communities and ecosystems that made profit creation possible. 3. Democratic and localized ownership and governance patterns: Democratic or participatory governance (e.g. via an elected board of directors) is part of the EU definition of social enterprise. While democratic and locally based ownership of the assets of an eco-social enterprise is not a condition of democratic governance (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, chapter 5), ownership and governance issues tend to be linked. We have therefore included both in the criterion. 4. Rootedness in place and time: Economic localization is not part of the standard EU definition. However, rootedness in place is a desirable trait in social enterprises (Fraňková and Johanisova 2012). Closing local loops, as when farm manure is ploughed back into a field whence the animals were fed, is connected with the idea of returning surplus to the ecosystem that made the surplus possible (see criterion 2). Rootedness in place can be linked to ‘rootedness in time’: a regard for past and future as a basic ontology informing the rules and strategy of an eco-social enterprise. For example, as noted, in many cooperatives their equity shares can only be redeemed at their original price, even though the cooperative assets may have grown in value. Such new wealth is seen as indivisible, common wealth (or commons) handed down from past to future. 5. Non-market production, exchange, or provisioning patterns: While the EU social enterprise definition emphasizes entrepreneurial behaviour and the monetized economy, our fifth criterion concerns the opposite: the non-market and non-monetized transactions and

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68  The handbook of diverse economies behaviour of eco-social enterprises. These can take many forms, e.g. alternative currency systems, volunteer work, positive discrimination in favour of small, local suppliers, or long-term relations of trust and reciprocity replacing pursuit of the lowest price.

THE DIVERSITY OF CZECH ECO-SOCIAL ENTERPRISES Our research revealed a heterogeneous group of eco-social enterprises in terms of scale and length of existence: though most emerged after 1989, some had roots in the socialist period and beyond. The organizational structures of the initiatives varied from informal community groups through non-profits and religious organizations to cooperatives and municipally owned entities, but also a few private businesses and share companies. Areas of activity were also diverse. In the sphere of food and agriculture, the entire chain was covered, from production (organic farms, community gardens) and processing (an apple juice plant, a distillery, a coffee roastery) to distribution via diverse types of market and alternative channels (cafés, a consumer cooperative, a municipally owned shop). Other areas included education and social services (a community school, a social centre), repair and reuse initiatives (a DIY workshop, charity shops), and sharing and exchange (including online platforms but also car sharing and local currency projects). A couple of projects were involved in renewable energy and several initiatives focused on conservation of biodiversity. A number of the eco-social enterprises were active in the arts and media (a local gallery and theatre, a cooperative newspaper, a community radio). But the initiatives were often involved in more than one sphere of activity: The agricultural cooperative Chaloupky started out as an environmental education centre. Its pasture conservation activities inspired its staff to get involved in environmentally friendly agriculture. Today, its educational programmes take place on a fully operational farm, which also processes milk and sheep’s wool. During weekends and holidays, the accommodation facilities of the environmental education centre are rented out to tourists. The centre also provides therapeutic programmes for disabled people. The cooperative has founded a work-integration social enterprise (WISE) focused on landscape and nature conservation, organic landscape gardening, and woodworking.

Chaloupky is also a good illustration of the complex development trajectories of Czech eco-social enterprises. While it has benefited from funding packages linked to the EU discourse, and operates in the market to supplement its income, the roots of this and other eco-social enterprises working in the environmental sphere tap into a tradition of nature conservation and environmental education that grows from a socialist past. The roots of other traditions informing contemporary Czech eco-social enterprises lie even deeper. One of these involves a vibrant tradition of home-grown garden produce, often shared informally among relatives and friends (Jehlička et al. 2018). The shop described below grows from this tradition. Its non-monetized and non-market approaches are a good example of criterion 5 above. We see it as a de facto eco-social enterprise, though it would hardly label itself as such: A small-town branch of the national non-profit Gardeners’ Association runs a shop that sells garden tools and home-grown products brought here by locals. Members, many of them retirees, run the shop on a volunteer basis. Margins from sales are used to finance gardening advice, workshops, and

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Eco-social enterprises: ethical business in a post-socialist context  69 fieldtrips offered to the public free of charge. According to one of the functionaries, the shop has existed for ‘at least 40 years’, predating – and being largely unaware of – the trend of local or organic food. Our question on the non-commercial nature of the initiative left our respondent perplexed: ‘We are concerned with promoting the activity . . . We never considered asking any fees. . . . It’s like with a neighbour, or someone who is on the same wavelength, they just gladly share experiences, but asking money for it, that’s a bit misguided. We see they think alike, they have the same hobby, so we are interested not only in our benefit but also in theirs, we want to support them in the activity. You really caught me by surprise. We never considered asking anything for it’.

Another tradition, harking back to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, is the institution of the Czech municipality. The country has over six thousand independent municipalities, of which 77 per cent have no more than one thousand inhabitants. Even such small municipalities are legal entities able to own assets, employ staff, and run eco-social enterprises: The grocery store in Neslovice is based in a municipal building free of rent, and its staff are municipal employees. Its aim is to enable the 830 inhabitants of the village to buy their groceries locally. It is open to local producers and creates five local jobs. The initiative has no ambition to make a profit, though the shop is expected to cover its own costs.

The EU discourse might not accept the Neslovice shop as an eco-social enterprise, since it is not only unincorporated but it is also controlled by the local municipality rather than by the local community, raising questions about its democratic governance (Fraňková et al. 2018). In our perspective, however, it fulfils all the eco-social enterprise criteria, including criterion 3: on a small scale, municipality and community tend to mesh (Johanisova 2005, p. 90). The last inspiring tradition pre-dating Communism that we wish to mention is the cooperative tradition. Most of the three-thousand-plus cooperatives in the country today appear little different from capitalist enterprises. Yet there are exceptions. One is the consumer cooperative Konzum: Konzum is a regional consumer cooperative with more than 100 shops and 5000 members organized in 54 local groups. It was founded in 1898 and actively promotes cooperative values. On the grounds that Konzum is here for its members and should support their local economy, it sources part of the products it sells (especially meat, bakery, vegetable, and dairy products) from a plethora of local producers, despite higher costs. It puts much of its profits in a reserve fund, often investing in buildings. Its manager commented: ‘The cooperative has existed for 115 years, and our own stewardship period is short-term. We have received the cooperative in a certain condition, we will be handing it over to new generations and we should make sure that its state gets better, and not take undue risks’.

There are many tensions within Konzum, such as the issue of profitability vs. keeping local branches open. However, its readiness to source from local suppliers despite higher costs highlights an important issue: just using profits to replenish nature and community (criterion 2) is not enough. If Konzum declined to support local suppliers, these might go bankrupt. If nature is exploited beyond certain limits, species and ecosystems might go extinct. Even profit redistribution will not bring these ‘stakeholders’ back. Eco-social enterprises thus need to escape from the market logic (i.e. espouse a non-market approach) during their core activities, as indicated in criteria 1 and 5. Sourcing from local suppliers at reasonable prices is one example of this. The use of the word ‘stewardship’ by the manager indicates an affinity with the ‘commons’ discourse. The reserve fund can in fact be reframed as a commons, or common

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70  The handbook of diverse economies wealth, of the cooperative, seen as an asset owned across generations, as discussed under criterion 4. Such a perspective makes non-market approaches easier to legitimate. Interestingly, the cooperative tradition has also been picked up by a new generation of radical young people. Tři ocásci is an example of such a cooperative: The social cooperative Tři ocásci runs a vegan pub and confectionery, supplied from local, sustainable and ethical sources. Employees are partly drawn from vulnerable groups. The cooperative practises non-hierarchical decision making, and its functioning is strongly anchored in a non-capitalist ethos. One of the founders commented: ‘We are a group of left-leaning people and critics of capitalism, so we wanted to get involved with the current system as little as possible. The first way of taking a stand for me was that we didn’t take any bank loans to start the café, we borrowed money from friends, about fifteen of them . . . In our functioning you see the non-commercial nature in many decisions that are unpopular in market terms. For instance, we set the prices in a way to make it accessible for a wide range of people . . . The salaries are set so that we all earn almost the same. The four of us who run the place have agreed that we will take the money we need for a normal life. That means paying rent and some normal things. I think if you count it by the hour, the employees get paid more than us. But this is the way we wanted it’.

The founders of Tři ocásci appear to lean towards anarchism. Other respondents in our study, on the other hand, seemed to draw on a liberal ideology. Basically satisfied with the current system, they emphasized the importance of individual agency and responsibility vs. dependence on the state. Doing things differently was a way of taking care of oneself when institutions failed. Some indicated their belief in the gradual humanization of capitalism via eco-social enterprise – a variant of the ‘catching up with the West’ narrative. Zeměkvítek is a community school founded by 12 families who wanted an alternative to mainstream schools for their children. The school operates four days a week and hires professional teachers, aided by parent volunteers. The initiative uses the clubhouse of the local Scouts group free of charge. Other costs are mostly covered by parents. One of the founders explained her attitude towards subsidies: ‘We got into a situation where what we don’t arrange and don’t pay ourselves . . . we won’t have. That leads us, and I think this is why economic alternatives are good, to foster individual responsibility. Being responsible for your own life. I’m convinced that’s a base for the viability of any system. Once we start delegating responsibility to people above or besides us, that’s the beginning of the end’.

CONCLUSIONS In this chapter, we have attempted to make visible some strands of an alternative economy currently in existence in the Czech Republic. Based on our previous work and on the literature, we used the concept of eco-social enterprise and a five-dimensional, sliding-scale research framework, expanding the narrow EU social enterprise definition that has been imported to post-socialist countries in the last ten years. This enabled an inclusive approach and brought to light a wide diversity of eco-social enterprises building on different traditions. Some of these traditions are specific to the region; for example, the strong tradition of food self-provisioning that the European post-socialist countries have in common when compared with Western Europe, and that has until recently been branded as ‘backward’ (Jehlička et al. 2018). Such specificities of underlying traditions underline the diversity of eco-social enterprises on the ground and the need for a ‘weak theory’ that would enable hidden economies, excluded by more rigid definitions, to come to light (Gibson-Graham 2008). The research framework we

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Eco-social enterprises: ethical business in a post-socialist context  71 suggest in this chapter might be a step towards such a theory with regard to alternative and non-capitalist enterprise. As regards the research results: compared, for example, with Catalonia, where the autonomous economic practices studied by Conill et al. (2012) seem to share a common ideology, and in line with our earlier research on British economic alternatives (Johanisova 2005), Czech eco-social enterprises reveal a broad spectrum of motivations and ideologies, only some of which we have discussed here. What many of our respondents did seem to share was a mistrust of the state. At best, they hoped that it would ‘leave them alone’, although this stance was less pronounced at lower levels of government or in cooperation with specific bodies. In fact, a pronounced distinction emerged in our research between the ‘state’ and the ‘municipal’: small and relatively autonomous municipalities, rooted in place and bound by law to fulfil the needs of their citizens, were strongly supportive of some of the eco-social enterprises we studied. This accords with research on India and Ecuador that indicates the crucial role of small municipalities/villages and local government more generally (Lang et al. 2018) in the transition to equitable and sustainable economies beyond capitalism and Communism (as we knew it). To sum up, our research has brought to light a diverse and hard-to-pigeonhole array of projects, in some ways specific to the region but also sharing some more general qualities common to the new groundswell of alternatives to the mainstream economy in the world today.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The work of Lucie Sovová on this text was carried out at the Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, and supported within the project n. MUNI/A/0957/2017.

NOTES 1.

These countries were characterized by one-party rule and, though formally independent, most were under the ideological, political and economic influence of the Soviet Union. After 1990, the seven original countries split into 13 (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia). 2. By ‘authentic’ cooperatives, we mean cooperatives adhering to the seven cooperative principles (ICA 2018) that include voluntary membership, democratic member control, and various means of regulating internal financial power concentration and profit distribution. Most Czechoslovakian pre-Second World War cooperatives would have fallen under this heading. 3. This was part of a larger research project, entitled ‘Forms and norms of alternative economic practices in the Czech Republic’ and supported by the Czech Grant Agency (Project No. 14 – 33094S). It involved (among others) over 50 face-to-face interviews with Czech eco-social enterprises and three focus groups with practitioners. The case studies described in the extracts are condensed characteristics of selected eco-social enterprises investigated. Quotes are taken from interviews and focus group discussion transcripts. 4. There are many synonyms or near-synonyms to our concept of eco-social enterprise, including ‘economic alternative’, ‘community enterprise’, ‘social solidarity economy’, ‘alternative economic practice’ or ‘third system’ (Douthwaite 1996, p. 34; Johanisova and Vinkelhoferová (2019); Conill et al. 2012; Johanisova and Fraňková 2017, p. 509; Pearce 2009). Similarly, there are the well-known concepts of ‘alternative capitalist enterprise’ and ‘non-capitalist enterprise’ (Gibson-Graham et al.

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72  The handbook of diverse economies 2013, p. 13). However, we find the alternative/non-capitalist dichotomy hard to negotiate (e.g. what is still ‘capitalist’, albeit ‘alternative’, and what is not?), preferring instead one umbrella concept and one sliding-scale set of criteria.

REFERENCES Borzaga, C. and J. Defourny (eds) (2001), The Emergence of Social Enterprise, Abingdon: Routledge. Borzaga, C., G. Galera and R. Nogales (2008), Social Enterprise: A New Model for Poverty Reduction and Employment Generation, Bratislava: UNDP Regional Centre for Europe and the CIS. Conill, J., M. Castells, A. Cardenas and L. Sevron (2012), ‘Beyond the crisis: The emergence of alternative economic practices’, in M. Castells, J. Caraça and G. Cardoso (eds), Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 210–248. d’Alisa, G., F. Demaria and G. Kallis (eds) (2015), Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, Abingdon: Routledge. Douthwaite, R. (1996), Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, Dublin: Lilliput Press. European Commission (2015), A Map of Social Enterprises and their Eco-Systems in Europe, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the EU. Evers, A. and J.-L. Laville (2004), ‘Defining the third sector in Europe’, in A. Evers and J.-L. Laville (eds), The Third Sector in Europe, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 11–42. Feierabend, L. (1952), Agricultural Cooperatives in Czechoslovakia, New York: Mid-European Studies Center. Fraňková, E., P. Francová and N. Johanisova (2018), ‘Social enterprises in the Czech Republic: Context, practice and approaches’, in E. Fekete, N. Zoltán, L. Katalin and J. Kiss (eds), Szociális és Szolidáris Gazdaság a Poszt-szocialista Perifériákon [Social and Solidarity Economy in Post-Socialist Peripheries], Budapest: Bíbor Publishing, pp. 369–87. Fraňková, E. and N. Johanisova (2012), ‘Economic localization revisited’, Environmental Policy and Governance, 22, 307–21. Gibson, K., D.B. Rose and R. Fincher (eds) (2015), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, New York: Punctum Books. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hausner, J. (2009), ‘Social economy and development in Poland’, in A. Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity, London: Zed Books, pp. 208–31. International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) (2018), ‘The cooperative identity’, accessed 18 March 2019 at https://​www​.ica​.coop/​en/​cooperatives/​cooperative​-identity. Jehlička, P., P. Daněk and J. Vávra (2018), ‘Rethinking resilience: Home gardening, food sharing and everyday resistance’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, DOI: 10.1080/02255189.2018.1498325. Johanisova, N. (2005), Living in the Cracks: A Look at Rural Social Enterprises in Britain and the Czech Republic, Dublin: Feasta. Johanisova, N., P. Daněk, E. Fraňková and P. Jehlička (2014), ‘The potential of heterodox economic spaces and of commons regimes in a no-growth economy’, paper presented at the 16th Conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, London, University of Greenwich, 3–5 July. Johanisova, N. and E. Fraňková (2013), ‘Eco-social enterprises in practice and theory’, in M. Anastasiadis (ed.), ECO-WISE Social Enterprises as Sustainable Actors: Concepts, Performances, Impacts, Bremen: Europäischer Hochschulverlag GmbH and Co., pp. 110–129. Johanisova, N. and E. Fraňková (2017), ‘Eco-social enterprises’, in C. Spash (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and Society, London: Routledge, pp. 507–16.

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Eco-social enterprises: ethical business in a post-socialist context  73 Johanisova, N. and M. Vinkelhoferová (2019), ‘Social solidarity economy’, in A. Kothari, A. Salleh, A. Escobar and F. Demaria (eds), Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, Delhi: Authors Up Front and Tulika. Johanisova, N. and S. Wolf (2012), ‘Economic democracy: A path for the future?’ Futures, 44, 562–70. Kiss, J. and M. Mihály (2018), ‘Social enterprises and their ecosystems: A European mapping report’, draft report for EURICSE, Trento, Hungary. Kubačák, A. (1995), Dějiny zemědělství v Českých zemích, II.díl, 1900–89, Prague: Ministry of Agriculture. Lang, M., C.D. König and A.C. Regelmann (eds) (2018), Alternatives in a World of Crisis, Brussels: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Pearce, J. (2009), ‘Social economy: Engaging as a third system?’, in A. Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity, London: Zed Books, pp. 22–33.

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7. Enterprising new worlds: social enterprise and the value of repair Isaac Lyne and Anisah Madden

INTRODUCTION Social enterprises are revenue generating for-purpose (as opposed to for-profit) businesses whose objective is to generate social value. They are businesses in which any net returns are put back into expanding the social value they create, such as employment of long-term unemployed or people with disabilities, or environmental clean-up. Social value includes any benefits to society that might not otherwise be created (Ryan and Lyne 2008). In this chapter we seek to extend the bounds of thinking about the benefit that social enterprises create to show how they might contribute to societal change at the deep level of healing and learning to live well together on this planet (Gibson et al. 2015). We discuss how what we call ‘social enterprising’ plays a role in the work of social and ecological repair in two decolonizing contexts. The conventional literature on social enterprise provides a grounding from which we develop a critical and, we hope, creative new perspective on the possibilities for social enterprise in a damaged world. A key preoccupation of this literature is on defining the distinctive difference between social enterprise and its two ‘others’ – mainstream for-profit business and mainstream not-for-profit enterprise. The explicit social mission distinguishes social enterprise from privately owned for-profit companies. The involvement with commercial activities as a source of revenue generation, distinguishes social enterprise from not-for-profit for-purpose enterprises that rely purely on grants and donations. With respect to the latter, social enterprises are seen to be more autonomous and financially resilient (Dees 1998). Given the concern for social value generation, another focus is on the way social enterprise enacts its change-making agenda. Some social enterprises seek social change by influencing the way that markets work (Dees 1998, pp. 57–63). Some are led by charismatic heroic single-minded entrepreneurs. Some are cooperative organizations that purposefully promote economic democracy and citizen participation (Defourny and Nyssens 2010). Despite the variety of organizational structures and emphases there is a shared dominant narrative that sees ‘innovation and progress’ as the way to tackle ‘intractable social problems’ (Leadbeater 2007, p. 2). This privileging of innovation, albeit social innovation that elicits financial returns, as the pathway to change is accompanied by pressure to pursue organizational prosperity in tandem with replicable, lean approaches to solving social problems (see for instance Mair et al. 2012). From a diverse economies perspective social enterprise is itself a site of difference. When we take an anti-essentialist approach we open up the possibility that there might be many different drivers of social enterprise, not only the quests for social innovation and financial viability. Our interest is in how ‘social enterprising’ enacts the social and has the potential to enact the social in a change making way (Beyes and Steyaert 2011, p. 110; Cameron and Gibson 2005). Specifically, we are concerned to explore how social enterprising can be engaged in repairing a damaged world. In what follows we discuss social enterprises in Eastern Cambodia 74 Isaac Lyne and Anisah Madden - 9781788119962 07:59:33PM

Enterprising new worlds: social enterprise and the value of repair  75 and in the traditional territory of a group of Mississauga Anishinaabe First Nations peoples in Central Canada that are engaged in care, repair and embodied pedagogy.

ENTERPRISING IN A DAMAGED WORLD Over the past two decades, and in the name of national economic development, people in Cambodia have endured intensified violent land grabbing conducted by politically connected speculators and tycoons (Springer 2010). This experience of dispossession via neoliberal accumulation has served to compound earlier traumas visited on the population. Those traumas include: French colonial dispossession in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a series of civil wars in the late twentieth century; a US bombing campaign during the escalation of the Vietnam War; and, during the late 1970s, the communist Khmer Rouge regime during which 20 per cent of the national population perished in four years (Heuveline 1998). In recent decades, and again in the name of national development, Cambodia has seen the rapid growth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) involved in aid and development. Today, Cambodia has the second highest density of NGOs on earth (Domashneva 2013). In the last ten years vast numbers of these NGOs have turned to commercial business in order to diversify or consolidate revenues as international aid flows have declined (Khieng and Dahles 2015).1 Social enterprise advocacy is positioned within a power neutral, progressive discourse. And NGOs establishing social enterprises are urged to enrol the most up to date technical concepts and tools from management disciplines (Dey and Steyaert 2010). But what, we ask, is missed when this uncritical, forward-facing posture is deployed in a society whose fabric is still torn and damaged? At the other end of the economic spectrum in Canada, colonial violence through ongoing development persists today. The historic white settler discourse of the ‘frontier’ that gave rise to the patriarchal family farm and dispossessed Indigenous people of their land and freedom, has since been modified and consolidated by neoliberal agriculture and forms of corporate concentration that raise the political questions around who can access land and grow or harvest food on it (Rotz 2017). Indigenous lifeways nevertheless endure and are continually affirmed. Alongside ongoing struggles over colonial dispossession, Canada’s ‘social economy’, with roots in civic solidarity, has forged more equitable economic relations in some sectors. Social enterprises are part of this social economy. But for some time now practitioners have worried that social enterprise is being imposed by politicians and business in order to give market forces a prominent role within welfare services and welfare-to-work programmes (Browne 2000). Rather than the growth of social enterprise signalling social change and a shift to more sustainable development, our concerns in both Cambodia and Canada are that much social enterprise development is papering over fundamental, deep violences and leaving inequalities and trauma unaddressed. We are interested in exploring whether social enterprise can play a more healing role in a damaged world. To pursue this line of inquiry we propose to conceptualize ‘social enterprising’ as ways of shifting economic registers and subjectivities that enact the social (Beyes and Steyaert 2011, p. 110; Cameron and Gibson 2005). We suggest that social enterprising can embody resourceful ways of caring for the self and others, taking a ‘reparative’ stance that embodies openness and curiosity, allowing one to imagine and see hopeful possibilities (Sedgwick and Frank 2003). This stance allows ‘small narratives’ to be valued rather than approached with exces-

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76  The handbook of diverse economies sive scepticism (Dey and Steyaert 2010). Small narratives include those that show how routine acts of kindness, as well as novel ones, can undo harm and maintain, repair and revitalize the world. In order to develop this approach to social enterprising we mobilize a family of conceptual tools related to acts of love and kindness that might be motivators for social enterprise, namely decolonial love, Buddhist loving kindness and the routine work of care and repair. The concept of ‘decolonial love’ comes from the Dominican-American author Junot Diaz, who has described it as ‘the only kind of love that could liberate . . . from that horrible legacy of colonial violence’ (cited in Benaway n.d.). Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg activist and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2013, 2017) has developed the idea of decolonial love to explore the complexities of contemporary Indigenous struggles in Canada. Her music, poetry and writing invite meaningful reflection on the deep scars of colonialism alongside the beauty, pain, loss and determination of everyday efforts to restore nourishing relationships with land and Earth Others. Social enterprising can be involved in initiating situated enactments of decolonial love in a way that invites true reconciliation and healing. Buddhist Mettā or authentic ‘loving kindness’ is achieved through the cultivation of boundless love and sincere compassion that stands in contrast to self-interested friendliness. It entails an empathetic disposition and mindfulness that can have a restorative impact on well-being (Kristeller and Johnson 2005). While Mettā teachings are traditionally part of secular meditation, in more recent times they have become part of ‘socially engaged Buddhism’ which is built on the notion that one’s journey into the next life is not determined just by meditation but also by meritorious acts (Sreang 2008). As a motivator for social enterprising, the commitment to living kindness is very different from the narrowly economistic drivers proposed by resource dependency theories that see non-profits enacting social enterprise as a substitute for grant funding. A third tool of social enterprising is the routine work of care and repair. As Sharon Mattern (2018) points out, care and repair are practised by a broad demographic of care givers and other outreach agents, not as a matter of altruism, but as a form of what Hall and Smith (2015) term ‘urban kindness’. The everydayness in the work performed by people attending to the physical and social maintenance of societies is also identified in the ‘extraordinarily ordinary’ work of individuals who work in the social economy (Amin 2009). With these tools in hand, we invite you to travel with us to places in which we have both lived and learned about social enterprise in different ways. First, to Kampong Cham Province, in Eastern Cambodia, and then to a small university town in Central Canada, located in the traditional territory of a group of Mississauga Anishinaabe First Nations peoples. Buddhism for Social Development Action: Social Enterprises Teaching Mettā and Practising Repair in Cambodia Kampong Cham Province in Eastern Cambodia lies along the Mekong River and was once an administrative centre for the French colonial rubber trade. People in Kampong Cham suffered terribly during the civil wars and US bombing. Purges during the Khmer Rouge regime left tens of thousands of bodies in mass graves there (Kiernan 1996).2 Studies in Kampong Cham more than 20 years later found that nearly half the people who survived the purges exhibited certain behaviours associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that more than 40 per cent were diagnostically depressed (Dubois et al. 2004). Some might argue that the Cambodian nation has surpassed trauma as it has graduated to a lower middle-income country

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Enterprising new worlds: social enterprise and the value of repair  77 with ‘development prospects’, but researchers have found that PTSD leaves intergenerational imprints on DNA with links to memory problems and immune deficiencies (Uddin et al. 2010). Buddhism for Social Development Action (BSDA) is a grassroots NGO that was established in Kampong Cham Province in 2005 by seven monks using their own resources. BSDA integrates Mettā teachings into its core values – service to the poor, unity, collaboration, integrity and accountability. Through the 1990s and 2000s, socially engaged Buddhism became attractive to international development agencies and NGOs, largely in accordance with the objective of strengthening civil society (Harris 2008). Consequentially, BSDA grew with donor support and is nowadays engaged in various projects targeted at youth training and education, health, reducing harm from drug use and sustainable livelihoods. Some of these initiatives are integrated with social enterprise and we focus on two of them here. The Angkor Language School (ALS) has been operated by BSDA since 2009. It provides affordable English and Chinese classes (fees vary between 1.5 and 3 US dollars per month) to more than 600 children and young adults from local villages each weekday evening, using classrooms in a local primary school. ALS stands in contrast to the prosperous social enterprises that tend to gain the most attention in scholarship focusing on social innovations. In 2016, the profit for the year was under 100 dollars. But while the monetary profit is negligible, the aim of ALS is not to generate high surpluses. Rather, it is simply to provide affordable language classes to as many children and young adults residing in the surrounding villages as possible. Each evening, every classroom that the school has to offer is in use. In the first three years of ALS the local school was made freely available. After three years spent volunteering while the school became established, 18 cooperating teachers were able to finally start drawing part-time salaries as part of the operating cost. These practices of gifting and volunteering build on Buddhist practices of merit making.3 A new BSDA initiative is the Hanchey Bamboo Resort – a meditation and yoga retreat targeting Cambodians and international guests. Hanchey provides employment for graduates of its hospitality vocational training programmes, but the main aim of the enterprise is to diversify BSDA’s revenue in order to help pay for administrative costs and capacity building that donor-funded projects do not fully support. Considering the realities of the aid environment and commercial turn among Cambodian non-profits set out earlier, at first glance Hanchey looks like an enterprising non-profit – it secures its own revenues and avoids excessive dependency on donors, in order to gain monetary sustainability and greater autonomy and entrepreneurial freedom. However, this would be a reductive way to view the social world that has been enacted by this enterprising intervention. Hanchey has mobilized local assets in a way that strengthens collective well-being and community resilience. The construction process became a training programme benefiting more than 20 young adults from local villages who became skilled in landscape design, construction and manufacturing bamboo furniture. These workers have since become a team that can work on eco-tourism projects elsewhere. Hanchey provides ‘alternatively paid’ work, in the form of ongoing training in hospitality, catering and facilities maintenance to children from some of the poorest families in the area. In addition to promoting yoga and meditation in the locality as a part of people’s well-being, Hanchey also helps to instil greater resilience into the livelihood of local market traders who are often selling to survive in the informal economy (Lyne 2017, pp. 120–122), by providing new retail opportunities. In BSDA’s social enterprising initiatives we discern practices that exemplify both authentic loving kindness (Mettā) and routine repair and care. ALS has mobilized resources includ-

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78  The handbook of diverse economies ing labour and access to facilities through means that are inspired by selfless giving, along with a strong orientation towards economic ethics in the everydayness of work. The school has mobilized combinations of community resources in enterprising ways that have, in the manner of bricolage, created something from nothing. It has massively strengthened the local community in the process. The Hanchey resort has helped the local community to recover practices of reciprocity, promoted pride in local capacities and traditional skills and delivered services that are conducive to well-being. It also exemplifies design practices that uphold the use of vernacular materials such as bamboo, keeping alive diverse ecologies of productivity (de Sousa Santos 2016, pp. 180–181) that are otherwise rendered absent by Western-centric monocultural modes of economic progress. Cultivating Decolonial Love in Nogojiwanong, Central Canada Nogojiwanong (also known as Peterborough, Ontario) is an Ojibwe word that means ‘place at the end of the rapids’. This is where Trent University overlooks the waters of the Odonabe (or Otonabee) river, an important historical gathering place for First Peoples who have lived in this region for thousands of years. Nogojiwanong bears the old scars and fresh wounds of colonialism. It is also a place of brave healing and affirmative politics. At Pigeon Lake, just north of Nogojiwanong, James Whetung of Curve Lake First Nation runs a small enterprise selling cleaned and packaged wild rice. His focus is not on profit-making but instead upon ‘Manoominikewin’ – the practice of wild rice cultivation, harvesting and stewardship that he argues maintains ancient skills and knowledge.4 As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains: ‘Manoominikewin is not just about gathering a food staple, it also includes songs, acts of governance, ceremony, families, and philosophies – it is in itself an act of “being Anishinaabeg”’ (Kapyrka 2015). James’ wild rice enterprise is a bold affirmation of Indigenous life and foodways which includes the right to practise self-governance and self-determination, and it invokes responsibilities in doing so. Key to realizing these rights and responsibilities is a loving pedagogical relationship to land (Simpson, 2014). Learning how to relate with land in this way is not something available only to Indigenous communities. It is an invitation to all of us who desire to survive well together on this planet to find ways to connect with the land we are situated in through our own pedagogical process. Student-led food-based social enterprises based at Trent University also enact ethical commitments oriented to social, economic and environmental justice and equity. An early campus project transformed a green roof on Trent’s Environmental Science building into an organic vegetable garden.5 The rooftop garden supported the evolution of a student-run cooperative – the Seasoned Spoon Café, established in 2002. The Spoon, as it is affectionately known, fought for and eventually won the right to contest an exclusivity clause in Trent’s contract with corporate food service provider Aramark. A few years later, in 2006, a one-acre field garden, the Trent Vegetable Garden, was established on campus to increase production capacity to supply the café. The Spoon and the two vegetable gardens are non-profit organizations, supported by a student levy and small membership fees. Most of the work done to maintain their existence is unpaid labour, performed by the collective efforts of multiple species’, as a gift to the community. It is bolstered in the growing season by small government subsidies that support student summer jobs. These financial supports allow food from the garden to flow directly to the café

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Enterprising new worlds: social enterprise and the value of repair  79 without payment, and surpluses are donated to garden staff and volunteers, the local Food not Bombs chapter and other community non-profits. More recently, in 2014, a new garden and social enterprise was initiated on Trent’s campus – the Trent Market Garden. The Trent Market Garden was created specifically as a for-purpose student enterprise to supply Trent’s four college cafeterias with organically grown food, in an uneasy collaboration with Trent’s corporate food service provider. The Market Garden formed an alliance with the Flint Corn Community Project, an Indigenous seed saving and educational initiative that involves Haudenosaunee grower Ieiérhes Karolyn Givogue Grant,6 the Trent Aboriginal Cultural Knowledge and Science youth programme that is run through Trent’s Indigenous Environmental Studies department, and Farms at Work – a project promoting healthy and active farmland in east central Ontario. The Flint Corn Project engages local Indigenous youth in caring for a variety of Kanienkeha:ka (Mohawk) corn seeds, who throughout the growing season learn about the ‘Three Sisters’ (interplanting of corn, beans and squash) and their pollination systems and also participate in traditional celebrations related to the growing and harvesting of corn (Farms at Work 2015). In all these endeavours there is a discernible contribution to collective well-being now and in the future. There is an aspiration to decolonize relationships, that is, to relate in respectful, sustainable and loving ways with other beings in the community. The activities of students on Trent’s campus reflect the desire and effort to learn from the land, from Indigenous knowledge-keepers and one another, even as they navigate institutional disinterest and imperatives towards further commoditization of the campus food system. In this pedagogical process embodying decolonial love, there have been struggles over meanings, ethical issues, space, and accountability. But through the co-production, sharing and distribution of food by enterprising means, these initiatives have also denied corporations and neoliberal governance regimes the right to fully settle questions about who can access the resources to grow and distribute food.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have shied away from essentialist notions of social enterprise and maintained a commitment to diverse motivations. We have proposed decolonial love, Mettā teachings of loving kindness and routine care and maintenance as three interrelated socially enterprising activities that shift affective economic registers and enact the social in transformative ways. We have amplified small narratives of kindness and repair in the broken worlds of Cambodia where a population tries to recover from trauma while past perpetrators continue to assume power, and of Canada where neoliberal concentration of land and resources continues to deny basic social justice. We have suggested that through social enterprising involving the routine maintenance of our collective world and reciprocal acts of decolonial loving kindness, the pain of a suffering and damaged world can be softened a little. Perhaps this pain can be mingled with hopeful dispositions premised on the appreciation of daily collective work, however mundane it may seem. Through allowing ourselves to be affected by others through this work, and by refusing to know too much, we are called to be open to possible enterprising activities that undo harm and maintain, repair and revitalize loving pedagogical relations with our human and non-human kin.

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80  The handbook of diverse economies

NOTES 1.

Cambodia’s active social enterprise sector is now seen by the World Bank as a model that should be replicated wherever possible in other lower income countries (Hutchinson 2007, p. 153). 2. A list of the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia left by the Khmer Rouge period in the second half of the 1970s can be viewed at http://​d​.dccam​.org/​Projects/​Maps/​TableList/​List​_of​_Mass​_Graves​.pdf (accessed 20 May 2019). 3. It is worth noting that communities in Cambodia commonly raise more money for local facilities, including schools and Pagoda buildings, than the Cambodian government provides (Pellini 2005). 4. James Whetung faces ongoing animosity from cottagers who say that his seeding of traditional wild rice in the lake impedes their ability to use watercraft and public enjoyment of the lake. 5. More information about the Trent’s student-run vegetable garden can be viewed at https://​www​ .greenroofs​.com/​projects/​trent​-university​-environmental​-and​-resource​-sciences​-vegetable​-garden/​ (accessed 20 May 2019). 6. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, meaning People of the Long House, is made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas, and was intended as a way to create a peaceful means of decision making. It has been referred to as the oldest participatory democracy on Earth, where law, society and nature are equal partners, and each plays an important role.

REFERENCES Amin, A. (2009), ‘Extraordinarily ordinary: Working in the social economy’, Social Enterprise Journal, 5 (1), 30–49. Benaway, G.M. (n.d.), ‘Decolonial love: A how-to guide’, Working It Out Together, 11 Mimaji – I am Alive, accessed 23 December 2018 at http://​workingitouttogether​.com/​content/​decolonial​-love​-a​-how​ -to​-guide/​. Beyes, T. and C. Steyaert (2011), ‘The ontological politics of artistic interventions: Implications for performing action research’, Action Research, 9 (1), 100–115. Browne, P.L. (2000), ‘The neo-liberal uses of the social economy: Non-profit organizations and workfare in Ontario’, in E. Shragge and J.-M. Fontan (eds), Social Economy: International Debates and Perspectives, Montreal: Black Rose Books, pp. 65–80. Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2005), ‘Participatory action research in a poststructuralist vein’, Geoforum, 36 (3), 315–31. de Sousa Santos, B. (2016), Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Dees, J.G. (1998), ‘Enterprising nonprofits’, Harvard Business Review, 76 (1), 54–67. Defourny, J. and M. Nyssens (2010), ‘Conceptions of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in Europe and the United States: Convergences and divergences’, Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 1 (1), 32–53. Dey, P. and C. Steyaert (2010), ‘The politics of narrating social entrepreneurship’, Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, 4 (1), 85–108. Domashneva, H. (2013), ‘NGOs in Cambodia: It’s complicated’, The Diplomat, 3 December. Dubois, V., R. Tonglet, P. Hoyois, K. Sunbaunat, J.-P. Roussaux and E. Hauff (2004), ‘Household survey of psychiatric morbidity in Cambodia’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 50 (2), 174–85. Farms at Work (2015), ‘Kanienkeha:ka (Mohawk) Flint Corn Seed-Saving and Education Project’, accessed 10 February 2019 at http://​www​ farmsatwork​.ca/​news/​kanienkehaka​-mohawk​-flint​-corn​ -seed​-saving​-education​-project. Gibson, K., D.B. Rose and R. Fincher (2015), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, New York: Punctum Books. Hall, T. and R.J. Smith (2015), ‘Care and repair and the politics of urban kindness’, Sociology, 49 (1), 3–18. Harris, I. (2008), Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Heuveline, P. (1998), ‘“Between one and three million”: Towards the demographic reconstruction of a decade of Cambodian history (1970–79)’, Population Studies, 52 (1), 49–65.

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Enterprising new worlds: social enterprise and the value of repair  81 Hutchinson, K. (2007), ‘Mapping the dynamics of social enterprises and ICTD in Cambodia’, Master’s Thesis, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Kapyrka, J. (2015), ‘For the love of Manoominikewin’, 18 November, accessed 4 February 2019 at http://​anishinabeknews​.ca/​2015/​11/​18/​for​-the​-love​-of​-manoominikewin. Khieng, S. and H. Dahles (2015), ‘Resource dependence and effects of funding diversification strategies among NGOs in Cambodia’, VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 26 (4), 1412–37. Kiernan, B. (1996), The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kristeller, J.L. and T. Johnson (2005), ‘Cultivating loving kindness: A two-stage model of the effects of meditation on empathy, compassion, and altruism’, Zygon Journal of Religion and Science, 40 (2), 391–408. Leadbeater, C. (2007), Social Enterprise and Social Innovation: Strategies for the Next Ten Years, A Social Enterprise Think Piece for the Office of the Third Sector, November, OTS, London. Lyne, I. (2017), ‘Social enterprise and community development: Theory into practice in two Cambodian villages’, Doctoral Dissertation, Western Sydney University, Australia. Mair, J., Battilana, J. and J. Cardenas (2012), ‘Organizing for society: A typology of social entrepreneuring models’, Journal of Business Ethics, 111 (3), 353–73. Mattern, S. (2018), ‘Maintenance and care’, Places Journal, November, accessed 24 December 2018 at https://​placesjournal​.org/​article/​maintenance​-and​-care/​. Pellini, A. (2005), ‘Decentralisation of education in Cambodia: Searching for spaces of participation between traditions and modernity’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 35 (2), 205–16. Rotz, S. (2017), ‘“They took our beads, it was a fair trade, get over it”: Settler colonial logics, racial hierarchies and material dominance in Canadian agriculture’, Geoforum 82, 158–69. Ryan, P.W. and I. Lyne (2008), ‘Social enterprise and the measurement of social value: Methodological issues with the calculation and application of the social return on investment’, Education, Knowledge & Economy, 2 (3), 223–37. Sedgwick, E.K. and A. Frank (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Simpson, L.B. (2013), Islands of Decolonial Love, Winnipeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing. Simpson, L.B. (2014), Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3 (3), 1–25. Simpson, L.B. (2017), As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Springer, S. (2010), Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order: Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space, London: Routledge. Sreang, H. (2008), ‘The scope and limitations of political participation by Buddhist monks’, in A. Kent and D. Chandler (eds), People of Virtue: Reconfiguring Religion, Power and Moral Order in Cambodia Today, Stockholm: Nordic Institute of Asia Studies, pp. 241–56. Uddin, M., A.E. Aiello, D.E. Wildman, K.C. Koenen, G. Pawelec, R. de los Santos, E. Goldmann and S. Galea (2010), ‘Epigenetic and immune function profiles associated with posttraumatic stress disorder’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (20), 9470–9475.

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8. Anti-mafia enterprise: Italian strategies to counter violent economies Christina Jerne

INTRODUCTION Drugs, prostitutes, weapons and human organs are widely exchanged between many regions of the world. Street criminals, white-collar professionals, politicians and complying individuals facilitate these transactions by forming intricate organizations that blur and push the line between the legal and the illegal. Estimates suggest that the total amount of global criminal proceeds summed up to 2.1 trillion US dollars in 2009, which is close to 3.6 per cent of the global GDP (UNODC 2011). Although these numbers are both difficult to collect and interpret, they suggest that criminal markets represent a large and understudied portion of the world’s economic constellation. A central concern of the diverse economy scholarship is to move beyond capitalocentric understandings of economy to make visible (and thus enable) other ways of doing economy (Gibson-Graham 2006; Roelvink et al. 2015). This research ethics implies taking all forms of economy seriously, both the more desirable and the less. A viable politics of possibility is founded on a knowledge that is capable of affirming ethical economic experiments, but also capable of discerningly taking its distance from – and effectively opposing – violent economies. A strategy I have used to understand these ‘unwanted’ types of trade has been to look closely at enterprises that oppose and challenge these economic organizations. Italy has developed a series of enterprise forms that actively counter the devastating effects that organized crime has for the biosphere, for labour relations, and for the overall well-being of different territories. My research has taught me that neither anti-mafia nor mafia enterprises fit into the dominant representation of the ‘Economy’, that is, as including all those ‘productive’ activities that result in waged labour for a capitalist firm (Gibson-Graham 1996). Contrarily, mafia and anti-mafia enterprises use varied currencies, property forms and ways of exerting their influence on markets, and thus represent one of the many ways people organize to survive. This chapter contributes to making these diverse forms of economy visible, by highlighting concrete entrepreneurial practices that are involved in fighting criminal economies. Drawing on three years of qualitative research, I bring to the fore key characteristics of contemporary anti-mafia enterprises and by proxy, highlight certain aspects of mafia enterprise forms. Some authors highlight the need to distinguish between different criminal organizations due to their distinct genealogies and contextual significance. However, for the purpose of this chapter, I shall lean on a definition of mafia that in my view touches upon some central characteristics that most forms of organized crime have in common. In Umberto Santino’s words (2006, p. 246, my translation): ‘. . . mafia is a set of criminal organizations . . . that act within a vast and branching relational context, configuring a system of violence and illegality that is aimed at the accumulation of capital and the acquisition and management of power positions, which makes use of a specific cultural code and enjoys a certain level of social consensus’. This 82 Christina Jerne - 9781788119962 07:59:38PM

Anti-mafia enterprise: Italian strategies to counter violent economies  83 understanding of mafia is coherent with the nuanced set of entrepreneurial practices that characterize contemporary anti-mafia struggles. Before exploring anti-mafia enterprise, I begin the chapter by introducing some of the fundamental characteristics of mafia enterprise. This allows me to subsequently delve into three prime strategies that are being effectively deployed to counter mafia enterprises. The themes I address are property, labour and communication; elements that are essential to any form of enterprise (violent or non-violent). The contribution seeks not to carry out detailed analyses, but rather to map out the core elements of these economies that may be of use to different contexts around the world in countering organized crime. Indeed, while the empirical material I address is the result of a social struggle that has its own contextual peculiarities, these ways of managing property, labour and communication may be of relevance to other criminal ecologies.

MAFIA ENTERPRISE What is the difference between a capitalist enterprise and a mafia enterprise? Surprisingly, they have many common features (Arlacchi 1987; Catanzaro 1992; Dalla Chiesa 2012; Fantó 1999; Gambetta 1993). The main aim of a capitalist enterprise is to maximize profits and distribute them amongst a few private owners or shareholders. The same is valid for the mafia enterprise, albeit with some important differences. Firstly and most obviously, mafia enterprises draw part of or all of their capital from illegal activities. These resources are then often re-invested and transformed in licit markets, but may also remain entirely within illicit markets. Secondly, not unlike certain capitalist enterprises, mafia enterprises often function through private–public partnerships, in terms of both financing, management and development of firms. However, the involvement of illicit capital in these partnerships implies the necessity of corrupting public officials, misusing public funds and infiltrating state institutions. This leads to the last and perhaps most important feature of mafia enterprises, namely that they are explicitly aimed at controlling a territory, and thus not only driven by profit but also by power (Dalla Chiesa 2012). In order to gain and maintain power, mafia enterprises use the force of intimidation to establish relationships of dependency within a community (Jerne 2018). This implies that these transactions are founded on relationships of fear and subjection. Mafias are not merely criminal actors; they are, importantly, entrepreneurs. Their power relies on a certain form of social consensus that grants them territorial control and wealth. Although violent, mafia-type enterprises often provide jobs and protection (Gambetta 1993), their entrepreneurial talent lies, to a large extent, precisely in their ability to create the necessity for these services. Extortion is the most obvious example; using intimidation and blackmail, they create a market for protection money, or better, they capitalize on people’s desire to live undisturbed, creating thereby a web of dependency. Moreover, they make it difficult for other business to compete with them in markets, because of the incomparably high costs of running a business legally. This allows them to grow in size and revenue, which in turn means that they have the possibility of providing jobs. Drug dealing, counterfeiting, smuggling, prostitution, exchange votes, and corrupt tenders generate returns that allow many to earn their monthly living, particularly where unemployment and poverty levels are high. Mafia buys consensus by providing means of survival and wealth.

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84  The handbook of diverse economies In the past two decades, Italian activists have realized that in order to fight the mafias, it is necessary to compete with them. Mafias are no longer seen as strictly criminal phenomena, to which the most effective antidote is investigating and denouncing their illegal activities and seeking justice. This rights-based approach is today being complemented with activities that seek to ensure the welfare of the communities that are most affected by the criminal activities. Indeed, responding to these violent economic relationships requires a comparatively intricate level of organization, as to some extent, mafia enterprises mimic nation-states. Mafias operate both in negation of the rule of law (denying, for instance, the monopoly of force on a given territory) but also affirming it, using its infrastructures (such as the electoral system or public procurement contracts) to enforce their power (Dalla Chiesa 1983). Thereby anti-mafia enterprises are also experimenting with grassroots welfare models that can, on the one hand, counter the dependency on criminal economies, and on the other, cater to the insufficiencies of state welfare initiatives.

COMMONED VS. ENCLOSED: ANTI-MAFIA PROPERTY ‘Nothing stops a bullet like a job’ is the motto of Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles based gang rehabilitation programme that promotes social enterprise as a way out of crime. Italian anti-mafia activists share this goal. Since the early 2000s, social enterprises are increasingly used as tools to compete with mafias for social consensus. One of the distinguishing factors between a social enterprise and a capitalist enterprise is that wealth is ‘commoned’ rather than privatized. In this section, I will describe an important legislative innovation that is facilitating this type of treatment of property. In 1996, the anti-mafia umbrella organization Libera initiated a petition that led to the enforcement of law 109/96, which allows for the social use of mafia-confiscated assets. This law permits citizens to use goods that have been confiscated from organized crime to actualize social projects. The need to requalify these assets comes from the fact that the goods that are confiscated are often thriving businesses; therefore freezing them is not a total victory on the part of the state because in fact, many jobs and capitals are frozen. By allowing these goods to be used collectively, this law aims at circumventing this problem. The 109/96 law thus expresses this double realization: (a) that mafia assets need to be tackled and that (b) the networks that depend on those assets need to be taken care of rather than abandoned. What begins as a punitive and preventive measure of seizure thus develops into broader strategy of social reutilization. Mafia confiscated assets play a central role in contemporary activist projects, where education and commemorative practices coincide with questions of community welfare (Dalla Chiesa 2014). The 109/96 law is in fact aimed at ensuring a community-oriented management of previously enclosed assets. Anti-mafia activists ensure that the care, use, responsibility, access and benefits of the assets are commoned (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, pp. 131–2). In the past 35 years, 27 000 mafia assets (villas, castles, cars, supermarkets, pools, clinics, etc.) have been frozen or confiscated and are now state property. Eleven thousand of these have been re-allocated to the collective (Riprendiamoli 2017). Thousands of associations are taking over these assets and generating all sorts of community economies. However, there are also plenty of commoning examples that do not take place on mafia confiscated assets, but that simply involve caring for areas that are prone to criminal usage. For

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Anti-mafia enterprise: Italian strategies to counter violent economies  85 example, in the past years the region of Campania has witnessed a severe level of pollution due to the criminal mismanagement of urban and industrial waste. This ecological disaster has had severe health implications for the inhabitants of Campania, but has also resulted in the loss of many livelihoods for the farmers of the area. As a response to this, several coalitions between environmental organizations, cooperatives, scientific communities, municipal committees and farmers have emerged. These are providing support for the most vulnerable groups by analysing the chemical composition of their terrains, by purchasing their produce or, when the levels of contamination are too high, helping them find alternatives such as planting non-edible crops. At the same time, several groups are also effectively monitoring the area, preventing its further contamination through illegal dumping (Caggiano and DeRosa 2015), caring for human and non-human others and practising thereby an economic ethics for the Anthropocene (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, pp. 331–6). Overall, in the past two decades many communities in Italy have spontaneously formed diverse networks that are challenging the strict divide between private and public property. Several groups are actively taking the responsibility of their communities’ welfare, with or without direct collaboration with public institutions. Thus, the practice of managing property as commons is a contemporary strategy that is redeeming territories that are mafia-prone.

SLOWNESS VS. SPEED: ANTI-MAFIA LABOUR Mafia enterprises create relations of dependency, through extortion or blackmail, but also through employment. The control of labour relations is central to providing consensus and control over people’s lives. To contrast this territorial control, many anti-mafia enterprises have emerged with the specific aim of ‘competing’ with this labour market. Thus, an important question that anti-mafia enterprises face is one of remuneration. If they need to compete with mafia enterprises, they need to convince people that it is ‘convenient’ to be against the mafia (Jerne 2015). This cannot simply be an ideological matter, because a significant proportion of people who work for organized crime depend on these earnings, and often times they live in poverty, or have difficulty in making ends meet. So far, I have discussed the practice of commoning property, which contributes to redistributing criminal wealth to the communities that are prone to criminal dependency. But how do anti-mafia enterprises remunerate labour and deal with the issue of survival? Many anti-mafia enterprises, particularly the ones that engage with confiscated assets, are organized in the cooperative form.1 Managing a confiscated asset requires a lot of capital investment, particularly when it comes to agricultural land that has been abandoned for years. In fact, several entrepreneurs have pointed out that they only began to think of issues of survival after having been assigned a confiscated asset, as they realized the need to ensure their productivity and sustenance. The cooperative form ensures an initial capital, as well as a shared level of personal investment in the project, as the more everyone works, the more everyone earns. But a frequent problem cooperatives face is the access to credit, as these goods are only made public in their use (not their indefinite property) and therefore banks are not willing to lend out money without a secure return for their investments. Nonetheless some forms of ‘ethical banking’,2 coupled with state and EU subsidies, are helping cooperatives and associations in accessing credit and in alleviating the pressure of the mortgages that weigh on the good from previous (mafia) owners (Forno 2011, p. 106).

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86  The handbook of diverse economies One of the challenges connected to producing food (one of the most common anti-mafia products) the ‘legal way’ is maintaining a level of efficiency and competitiveness in the market. One farmer I worked with told me that when the mafia boss owned the land, everything worked smoothly. For example, a nearby artificial lake was constantly full, because the boss had pierced a hole in the public pipelines that bled directly into his farm. This ensured easy and cheap access to water all year round. Getting access to water legally was instead a long process that failed on several occasions; this made production and labour very inefficient and costly. Instead, the temporality of crime is fast and effective. The cooperatives are also slowed down by their own members. According to Italian legislation, social cooperatives should be oriented towards employing ‘disadvantaged subjects’,3 such as people who suffer from psychiatric or psychological illness, drug and alcohol addicts, and physically disabled individuals; thus people who often operate at a speed that is different than average. During one of my fieldtrips, I volunteered on a vineyard. I had a very mixed array of colleagues. One of them was a migrant who lived far away from the farm and thus had to be picked up at a distant bus stop every morning so that he could take part in the work. Another member was deaf, so we had to find other ways of communicating which took up time. Another one had heart problems, so he had a different rhythm in his work. Furthermore, the farmer confessed that the numerous volunteers that join anti-mafia enterprises are sometimes a burden to the work. Many of them had never been in a field before, were easily frightened by insects, fainted in the sun because of dehydration, were very sensitive to the sting of sulphur in their eyes, or just did not have agricultural knowledge. Anti-mafia cooperatives thereby actively value slower bodies in the prospect of enacting labour relations that are inclusive and solidary towards the less abled. Further, the types of products that these enterprises produce are often organic and designed to respect the temporality of non-human beings. For instance, many cooperatives do not allow the use of industrial pesticides, which means that the yields are far more prone to diseases and more delicate. Meticulous and constant manual work is thereby required to ensure the productivity of the fields. The farmers complained that often times they would be forced to leave many of their vines to rot because they did not live up to the standard of excellence that is necessary for organic certification. Despite this challenge, cooperatives choose to work at a speed that allows other species to survive. Their labour thus also opposes interspecies violence, and represents an effort of learning to be affected by the well-being of others (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009; Latour 2004). In this sense, anti-mafia enterprises resist modes of being that constitute mafia subjects: modes of being that operate fast and disregard the needs of others (human and non-human). Anti-mafia labour works to produce subjects that are slow and patient towards less able bodies, and operate at the speed of legality. This type of labour is a renegotiation of ways of encountering others and producing surplus, ‘a practice of solidarity that takes the shape of commoning relationships’ (Healy et al. 2018, p. 8).

LOUDNESS VS. SECRECY: STRATEGIES OF VISIBILITY Because of their illegal nature, mafia enterprises are characterized by their secrecy, concealment and opacity. By contrast, anti-mafia enterprises operate in regimes of loud, overflowing

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Anti-mafia enterprise: Italian strategies to counter violent economies  87 visibility. An important strategy to contrast silence, compliance and passivity is to communicate an aesthetic regime of openness. In order to compete with mafia influence on the territory, it is not sufficient to oppose their ethics by representing a different position. It is necessary to mimic their skills, the sectors they invest in, and become capable sign entrepreneurs, thus presenting, inviting into, other possible ways of living. Indeed, mafias increase their power by communicating their territorial control through murders, but also by directly libelling anybody who opposes their activities through printed media and rumours. Thus many anti-mafia enterprises also invest directly in their communicative apparatus. One example is the use of brands for anti-mafia products. AddioPizzo, for example, is an association that unites consumers and producers who refuse to pay protection money or buy products from businesses that do. What started as a list of 100 adhering enterprises in 2006 is today a network of 1046 businesses, formally supported by 13 159 consumers (AddioPizzo 2018). An important choice that strengthened the movement was the creation of a brand in 2010. The brand certifies that the underlying product is 100 per cent pizzo-free. Gaining this type of certification implies a greater level of collaboration between the enterprise and the anti-extortion association (AddioPizzo): a willingness of the enterprise to be monitored and a joint effort of rendering the supply-chain transparent. The brand also made it easier to denounce violent acts because it represented a broad consensus around the shift in norm. It also facilitated the connection to entrepreneurs who had experienced standing up to pizzo and therefore could provide knowledge, resources and emotional support. Furthermore, it made extorters afraid of coming into the branded shops because of the ‘noise’ the network makes. Indeed, one of the methods employed by the movement is to place an AddioPizzo sticker in the window of the shops that are part of the network. Essentially, this strategy allowed the reputation of the movement to grow, connecting more consumers to the enterprises. This directed money and networks into the organization thereby strengthening its position in the territory. Thus, brands function as technologies that aggregate affective publics, that is, they are not merely the outcome or the representation of existing publics, but they actually play a part in their formation (Arvidsson 2006; Lury 2004). Another strategy of visibility is represented by the actual interface of confiscated buildings that are managed by anti-mafia associations. Due to the long bureaucratic process that is required to re-allocate an asset, a long time can pass between the moment of confiscation and allocation. Therefore, many apartments or agricultural assets are in dilapidated conditions when assigned to associations, as nobody cares for their maintenance. Once they are re-allocated, they are often refurnished and painted quite vividly, recognizably imprinted with portraits of activists or mafia victims, slogans and song lyrics. Volunteers and local associations carry out much of the labour, and many of these actors are young. Their aesthetic is childish, amateur and joyful – quite the opposite of the fearful, macho affects that usually circulate around mafia objects. Furthermore, associations often adhere to summer programmes (for example Estate Liberi) that invite volunteers to requalify and take care of the assets. Many of the activists I worked with noted that hosting so many volunteers was actually less a matter of receiving support in the form of labour or donations, but was instead more a matter of ‘showing a presence’ in the local territory. Many of the associations and cooperatives that manage confiscated assets witness threats and menaces when they first become responsible for the assets. The local community often disapproves of or fears the consequences of a change of ownership. Thus, the

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88  The handbook of diverse economies volunteers’ bodies, the uniforms they wear, and the playful chattering furnish these sites with a new affective layer, communicating that a different type of relation is possible. A final, characteristic feature of anti-mafia enterprises is their dedication to making the past visible. Activists and entrepreneurs are highly engaged in communicating the history of mafias and anti-mafia struggles in their territories and beyond. The buildings are often named after trade unionists or local activists who were personally engaged against organized crime. Several enterprises organize tourist tours that feature visits to sites where massacres have occurred, or important legislative battles were won. The large community of family members of mafia victims is highly engaged with anti-mafia enterprises. They are often invited to volunteer camps, film screenings, or new product launches and share testimonies of a difficult heritage. Anti-mafia enterprises thus partake in commemorating mafia victims, commoning a historical knowledge, and communicating the importance of its upholding and renewal. If mafias hide their victims in cement, melt their corpses in acid, anti-mafia organizations reframe their role, by making their names and ideas present.

CONCLUSIONS There is much significance in Vito Corleone’s famous quote from The Godfather: ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse’. First, it tells us that mafias are businesses and second, it tells us that their offers speak a language of intimidation and fear. Anti-mafia entrepreneurs have learned these lessons and reframed them to their benefit. The alternative use of property with a difficult heritage has become an important symbolic and material resource that enables labour relations that are not mafia-dependent. Enforcing legislation that stimulates and protects these initiatives has made it easier to sustain workers that were once mafia dependent and thus prevent further crime, or more generally, to sustain vulnerable bodies that have difficulty in surviving. The cooperative form has proven to be particularly fit for this task, as it makes possible wealth generation and surplus sharing between diverse economic subjects who are not necessarily trained as business persons, but who, differently from mafias, are driven by their care for their communities. A significant part of this success is tied to the vivid communicative practices that invite, rather than pressure, individuals into relationships of exchange. The entrepreneurial art of fighting organized crime is about ‘making an offer that can’t be refused’, not because of fear but because of the collective benefits the offer carries.

NOTES 1.

Several instances of anti-mafia cooperativism had emerged already in the nineteenth century (Jerne 2015; Lupo 2004; Renda 1972). 2. These are banks that prioritize the financing of ‘social economies’, that have very low interest rates, and, for instance have lower guarantee requirements for borrowers. 3. Soggetto Svantaggiato Law 381/91 defines social cooperatives as subjects that pursue ‘the general interest of the community to human promotion and social integration of citizens’ either through the management of educational or health and social services (type A cooperative) or (type B) through other activities – agricultural, industrial, commercial, or service-oriented – that are aimed at employing socially disadvantaged subjects (mentally ill, drug/alcohol addicted, physically disabled individuals, etc.). On the basis of this, another law was passed in 2006 (D. Lgs. 155/2006) that

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Anti-mafia enterprise: Italian strategies to counter violent economies  89 regulates the social enterprise, which includes but is not limited to the cooperative form, testifying to an expansion in business models that are aimed at collective rather than private purposes.

REFERENCES AddioPizzo (2018), Chi Siamo, accessed 29 March 2018 at http://​ www​ .addiopizzo​ .org/​ index​ .php/​ addiopizzo/​chi​-siamo/​. Arlacchi, P. (1987), Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. M. Ryle, London and New York: Verso. Arvidsson, A. (2006), Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, London: Routledge. Caggiano, M. and S.P. De Rosa (2015), ‘Social economy as antidote to criminal economy: How social cooperation is reclaiming commons in the context of Campania’s environmental conflicts’, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 8 (2), 530–554. Catanzaro, R. (1992), Il Delitto come Impresa: Storia Sociale della Mafia, Turin: Einaudi. Dalla Chiesa, N. (1983), ‘Gli studenti contro la mafia. Note (di merito) per un movimento’, Quaderni piacentini, 11. Dalla Chiesa, N. (2012), L’impresa Mafiosa, Milan: Cavallotti University Press. Dalla Chiesa, N. (2014), La Scelta Libera: Giovani nel Movimento Antimafia, Turin: Gruppo Abele. Fantó, E. (1999), L’impresa a Partecipazione Mafiosa: Economia Legale ed Economia Criminale, Bari: Edizioni Dedalo. Forno, F. (2011), La Spesa a Pizzo Zero: Consumo Critico ed Agricoltura Libera: Le Nuove Frontiere della Lotta alla Mafia, Milan: Altreconomia. Gambetta, D. (1993), The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healey (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2009), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode 41 (S1), 320–346. Healy, S., C. Borowiak, M. Pavlovskaya and M. Safri (2018), ‘Commoning and the politics of solidarity: Transformational responses to poverty’, Geoforum, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2018​.03​.015. Jerne, C. (2015), ‘From marching for change to producing the change: Reconstructions of the Italian anti-mafia movement’, Interface, 7 (1), 185–213. Jerne, C. (2018), ‘The syntax of social movements: Jam, boxes and other anti-mafia assemblages’, Social Movement Studies, 17 (3), 282–98. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies’, Body and Society, 10, 205–29. Lupo, S. (2004), Storia della Mafia, 3rd edn, Rome: Donzelli. Lury, C. (2004), Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy, London: Routledge. Renda, F. (1972), I Cattolici e i Socialisti in Sicilia, Rome: Caltanissetta. Riprendiamoli (2017), ‘La sfida per i beni confiscati alla mafia’, accessed 28 March 2018 at http://​ speciali​.gelocal​.it/​static/​nazionale/​2016/​beni​-confiscati/​index​ html. Roelvink, G., K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds) (2015), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Santino, U. (2006), Dalla Mafia alle Mafie: Scienze Sociali e Crimine Organizzato, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2011), ‘Estimating illicit financial flows resulting from drug trafficking and other transnational organized crimes’, accessed 29 March 2018 at http://​ www​.unodc​.org/​documents/​data​-and​-analysis/​Studies/​Illicit​_financial​_flows​_2011​_web​.pdf.

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9. State and community enterprise: negotiating water management in rural Ireland Patrick Bresnihan and Arielle Hesse

INTRODUCTION In January 2014, the Irish Government used the Water Services Act to establish a new publicly owned, private company, Irish Water Ltd (Uisce Éireann). This new semi-state water utility assumed responsibility for all public water and wastewater services and sought, for the first time, to introduce domestic water charges and water metering. The Irish Government presented new charges and metering as an environmental measure to incentivize individual and household conservation and as a means of raising much-needed revenue for upgrading a failing water system. The establishment of Irish Water was met with immediate widespread and popular opposition. After five years of harsh austerity policies, a significant portion of the population saw the changes as a cynical attempt to extract more money from citizens (Bresnihan 2016; Hearne 2015). Under sustained pressure from the Irish people and opposition parties, the Government suspended domestic water charges in 2016. The political debate that surrounded these contentious politics was dominated by a focus on the funding of water services, with the opposition rightly perceiving the introduction of domestic water charges as a step towards market-based financing of a public service. These debates hinged on a familiar distinction between public and private, displacing in the process the experiences of approximately 400 community-managed water systems in rural Ireland that provide drinking water for roughly 7 per cent of the population. This absence from the public debate was particularly notable because 15 years earlier these Group Water Schemes (GWS) had tackled challenges similar to those in the public network. When faced with poor water quality and inadequate infrastructures in the late 1990s, GWS had introduced upgrades that were in part funded and supported by domestic water charges and metering and state funding. These initiatives proved effective; many GWS now provide high quality, affordable drinking water to their users. In this chapter we show how these community enterprises, GWS, and their development over the past 20 years, offer a counterpoint to dominant framings of water services and water politics. A careful reading of their relationships to the state, their communities, and their waters, further complicates divisions of public and private, state and non-state. We examine GWS to offer a nuanced reading and interpretation of water politics in Ireland and open up new sites of political intervention and amplification.

IRISH WATER AND AUSTERITY POLITICS In Ireland, piped water is supplied through the public water supply (83 per cent), private wells and private supplies (11 per cent) and group water schemes (6 per cent) (EPA 2017). 90 Patrick Bresnihan and Arielle Hesse - 9781788119962 07:59:43PM

Negotiating water management in rural Ireland  91 When Irish Water took over the public water supply in 2014, it was the latest development of many relating to the deterioration of Ireland’s water system. Problems in Ireland’s public water infrastructure are about both water quantity and water quality, evidenced in ongoing failure to comply with EU water directives and the legacies of chronic underinvestment by the state to upgrade infrastructures inherited from the nineteenth century. Problems with water infrastructures are compounded by economic policies that have consistently degraded the surface and ground waters that supply Ireland’s drinking water through the intensification and expansion of pasture-based, industrial agriculture. Since the late 1990s, Ireland has not met the requirements of European water directives. In 2013, the European Commission issued Ireland a formal notice for failures to meet the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (EPA 2014) and 23 000 people were on Boil Water Notices, meaning their water was not fit to drink due to the risk of microbiological contamination (EPA 2013). As recently as February 2019, the largest wastewater treatment facility in the country (supplying 40 per cent of the population) failed, discharging sewage into Dublin Bay (The Irish Times 2019). Further, supplies are vulnerable to disruption: in 2018, water shortages and outages affecting the Greater Dublin Area, Ireland’s largest city and capital, were accompanied by extreme cold and drought (Fitzgerald 2018; Murtagh 2018; Nelson 2018). The financial crash of 2008 exacerbated these failures to invest in infrastructures to deliver clean, sustainable water and precipitated how water would become a proxy for austerity politics. With the collapse of its economic ‘miracle’ during the crash, Ireland was forced to agree to a financial ‘bailout’ with major European and international financial institutions. Already under pressure from the EU Commission for non-compliance with water directives, the terms of the bailout required that the Government carry out an independent assessment to set up a new, national water utility and introduce domestic water charges (Bresnihan 2016). Ireland is the only EU member state without charges for domestic water consumption, an exemption it secured in the 2000 EU Water Framework Directive in 2000 (The Journal 2016) and which had arisen following popular and successful campaigns against domestic water charges in the mid-1990s. Ireland’s exemption depended on Ireland’s ability to be compliant with EU water directives, a commitment far less tenable following the financial collapse. Consequently, the Government established Irish Water in 2014 as an off-balance sheet semi-state company able to borrow from external lenders and responsible for the public network and implementation of domestic water metering and charges (Bresnihan 2016). These reforms, and water infrastructure more generally, would become a stand-in for a broader debate about neoliberal austerity policies. Despite claims from the Government that domestic water meters and charges were necessary for water conservation, a broad public saw these reforms as a form of regressive taxation that was blatantly unfair, five years into austerity policies. The first national demonstration occurred in autumn 2014, when tens of thousands of people gathered from around the country in the capital, Dublin, with handmade placards, banners and signs (RTÉ 2014). When the first bills were issued in January 2015, over half the population did not pay (The Journal 2015). Under sustained pressure, the Government suspended water charges in late 2016, leading Minister Alan Kelly, who had signed the reforms into law, to assert in the Irish Parliament: ‘I believe we are about to witness the triumph of mediocrity over modernism, of short-termism over common sense and immaturity over innovation’ (Kelly 2016). For Kelly, the reversal of water charges signalled the impossibility of achieving a vision of Ireland as modern and innovative, one which required a specific organization of infrastructure.

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92  The handbook of diverse economies Opposition parties, trade unions and much of the population who resisted water charges argued that a modern, public water system was possible without recourse to domestic water charges. The anti-water charges movement was driven by a rejection of austerity policies and was part of a wider set of grievances (Hearne 2015). Political parties that supported the anti-water charges movement labelled water charges as another ‘austerity tax’ (Collins 2014) while defending the existing model of public investment. On both sides of the political spectrum, there was little disagreement that Ireland’s water system needed upgrading and investment of infrastructure; the dispute was how to pay for it. Any other public service that had suffered from cuts in the wake of the bailout could have taken water’s place as a site of contention regarding austerity policies and the role of the state vis-à-vis the public. Framing oppositional politics in this way casts the present and future state of Ireland’s water system in financial (public/private funding) and engineering terms (upgrades to existing infrastructure). As explored in the next section, however, GWS faced similar challenges to the provision of water services but generated a different way of surfacing the politics of water and water infrastructures that may add to, rather than subtract from, these more spectacular forms of water politics.

GROUP WATER SCHEMES In the late 1950s, when many parts of rural Ireland lacked access to piped water, local community-based enterprises emerged as one solution to this infrastructural deficit. GWS connected and networked rural communities with piped water by building their own physical and social infrastructures. Schemes were built and operated with voluntary labour. The Government provided capital grants to help them establish but did not significantly contribute to them in these early decades. GWS expanded in the 1960s and 1970s across rural Ireland often through local and agricultural cooperatives. Importantly, they grew in the 1970s to meet intense agricultural demands resulting from Ireland’s inclusion in the European Economic Community (B. McDonald 2018, personal communication while on fieldwork in County Monaghan). By the 1990s, GWS accounted for approximately 29 per cent of rural water supplies (Deane 2003), supplying water to as few as two houses and as many as 1000 plus (Brady and Gray 2010). Two developments in the 1990s would reshape GWS’ relationship to the state and their water systems. In 1996, under pressure from the 1990s anti-water charges movement, the Government abolished domestic water charges within the public water network. Those on GWS saw this decision as unfair as it meant general taxation was being used to provide water to those on the public water network, while those on GWS continued to provide their own water services through the collection of water charges and/or voluntary labour. In response, in 1997, GWS organized to form the National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS), an organization that operates as an intermediary body between the state and GWS. Since 1997, the NFGWS has negotiated for increased state funding for rural water supply upgrades, operational subsidies, research on source water protection and source water protection strategies. With these sources of funding, the NFGWS has encouraged GWS to adopt management strategies to meet compliance requirements that have been increasing since the late 1990s.

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Negotiating water management in rural Ireland  93 Managing Water Quality Compliance: Rationalization and Collective Responsibility In the mid-1990s, alarming reports from the national Environmental Protection Agency found that Ireland was consistently failing drinking water standards. In 1998, 42 per cent of GWS failed to meet standards for human consumption (The Irish Times 2000). Many rural supplies did not have adequate treatment facilities in place and faced strains from the growing agricultural sector’s impact on source waters. New pressures mounted from the 1998 European Union Drinking Water Directive which had set new parameters for water quality and drew threats of prosecution and fines from the EU. The EU held the Irish state responsible for these compliance issues within GWS and sought ways of funding their remediation. Since 1998, the resulting Rural Water Programme has funded GWS to reorganize, upgrade and enhance their efficiency in providing clean drinking water. This programme grew out of recognition that responsibility for delivering water supply in rural Ireland was shared ‘between the local authorities and the private group scheme sector’ (NFGWS 1998) and would require a new approach to manage water quality concerns. It identified strategies to address non-compliance and then incentivized them with substantial funding and the endorsement of the NFGWS, particularly with respect to water treatment. The institutional relationships these changes precipitated would provide the context for GWS’ alternative way of materializing water politics. Rather than incorporate all non-compliant GWS into the public water supply, the Government gave them the option to rationalize and upgrade water treatment through a strategy seen quickest to achieve compliance, namely ‘Design Build Operate’ schemes. With the encouragement of the NFGWS, many GWS formalized new relationships with private water service firms that would design, build and operate water treatment facilities under 20-year contracts. GWS continued to maintain source water and networks for water delivery. The NFGWS encouraged some GWS to ‘bundle’, allowing multiple schemes to utilize one water treatment facility, but maintaining their own networks, while others were encouraged to amalgamate and become one larger group water scheme (NFGWS 2004). Both strategies were seen as being a more economical way to approach the future of water services (NFGWS 2004). This move to modernize by teaming up community operated enterprises with private water infrastructure and services firms was backed with rhetoric and financial incentives from the Government and the NFGWS. The NFGWS wrote of such resources in 2003: ‘Money will be provided “for those who wish to progress”’ given that ‘rural water is unsustainable and is dragging us all down’ (NFGWS 2003a, p. 9). In practice, much, but not all, of these changes would be funded by the state. The capital costs of Design Build Operate schemes were covered 100 per cent by the state, along with 85 per cent of the operating costs (Brady and Gray 2010). User charges and meters were used to help cover the remaining costs of these changes. Most projects were negotiated and started in the early 2000s with the last significant bundles agreed to in 2009. By 2009, more than 42 000 householders were supplied by water that had undergone bundling upgrades (NFGWS 2009, p. 1). These efforts to encourage GWS to amalgamate and rationalize have continued to be a key strategy pursued by the NFGWS to meet compliance requirements, and more recently to become more economical. The operation of community water enterprises came to be rethought via a narrative of rationalization framed as the inevitable change necessary for their survival. From one perspective, the way GWS were enrolled by the Irish state to address non-compliance, namely contracting with private companies and professionalizing, could be taken as the advance of

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94  The handbook of diverse economies private enterprise into a previously communitarian sphere. Meters and charges used by GWS are strategies that appear to align with the rationale behind the national metering and water charging policy introduced in 2014. There is, however, an important distinction. The use of metering and charges in the GWS sector served a different purpose. With respect to meters, these technologies were framed as a means of reducing costs for the scheme by making leaks visible and fixable, and were not framed, principally, as a strategy to regulate water use. As the Rural Water News reported: It would be a pointless exercise if vast sums were to be spent on water treatment systems, without looking closely at means whereby we can stop wastage and otherwise conserve supplies. By the same token, we would be failing in our collective responsibilities if we were to rely solely on treatment and did not examine and implement means of protecting our raw water sources. (NFGWS 2003b)

For many GWS, water meters and charges were understood as a means of reducing costs and as a means of making the distribution of costs more equitable. Further, for some schemes, using meters to reduce leakage rates is a source of pride and accomplishment. This was the inverse of how meters and changes were perceived and effectively functioned in the mid-2010s where Irish waters’ meters were seen as a way to police individual domestic water users’ consumption and raise funds. GWS’ collective way of viewing their responsibilities and activities extended into other ways GWS operated and sought to reduce costs. Addressing Source Water Pollution: Drawing on Knowledge of Local Hydro-Social Cycles A distinguishing feature of the GWS has traditionally been their proximity to and intimacy with the hydro-social cycle in which they are embedded. GWS are operated by caretakers with knowledge of not only the pipes and material infrastructure they care for, but also the ecological, topological and social landscapes in which they are embedded. These knowledges can be displaced by some strategies to meet EU and Irish regulations, but in other ways, these knowledges have adapted and endured. While the 20-year service contracts displaced some of the knowledge and practices of GWS by outsourcing expertise to private water treatment companies, they also facilitated new relationships and concerns for the wider hydro-social cycle. Connections between the catchment area, agricultural pollution and drinking water quality were magnified by the new financial arrangements and responsibilities created by the scheme. Under Design Build Operate service contracts, water treatment companies are only responsible for the quality of the treated water when source water enters at an initially agreed upon level of quality. Many service contracts were agreed to on the basis of a few, often insufficient samples (B. McDonald 2018, personal communication while on fieldwork in County Monaghan), with the result that GWS have often found themselves responsible for the quality of the source water, which has raised their own operational costs. In response, the NFGWS has secured funding for and engaged in research to manage the link between intensive forms of animal-based agriculture, source water quality, and the costs of water treatment in an effort to reduce costs for all users. In 2005, in collaboration with the Dundalk Institute for Technology, it entered into a multi-year research project, the National Source Protection Pilot Project to identify and remediate points of source water pollution. Using the catchment as a way of conceptualizing and addressing drinking water quality, the project has worked with specific understandings of the hydrological cycle drawn

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Negotiating water management in rural Ireland  95 from the European Water Framework Directive and reframed drinking water treatment by ‘[m]oving from a treatment philosophy to a protection philosophy’ (Lianne et al. 2011). The Pilot Project has highlighted connections between water systems, agricultural practices, farm policy, communities and landscapes. The agricultural sector’s contribution to water pollution has unequivocally been identified as the source of pollution through slurry spreading and fertilizer use, as well as through soil compaction and nutrient loss. In light of the Project’s findings, the NFGWS has encouraged farmers to install fencing to reduce animals and their faeces from entering waterways and to educate farmers on better practices to protect water supplies from agricultural slurry. It has developed education programmes for schoolchildren to learn about the broader catchment area, the hydrological cycle and its contributions to their drinking water. The Pilot Project also identified new areas of research to protect source water, such as studies on septic tank pollution and the delineation of zones of contribution through catchment mapping in GWS and has resulted in a new phase of research on surface water and groundwater protection. Challenges to the quality of water sources produced by intensive agriculture surface through the different institutional relationships to water infrastructures that GWS embody. These relationships engender a different approach to the same strategies used in the public water supply – meters and charges – and with very different outcomes. At the same time, GWS make up a relatively small proportion of the population, are largely run by volunteers, and have little institutional power to affect national policy (i.e. relating to agricultural expansion). Their efforts to protect source waters are localized and contingent on good relationships with farmers in the areas.

CONCLUSION Since the late 1990s, a form of community operated water enterprise has continued to endure in the face of demanding regulatory requirements and changing environmental conditions. Ireland’s GWS complicate divisions of public and private, state and non-state to the state, in their relationships to their communities, their waters, and the state. They have sought new investments and state resources, while still maintaining their collective ethos. This is particularly interesting in the context of wider transformations in the national water sector which itself has dealt with issues of non-compliance, decaying infrastructure, the need for investment and rationalization and the failure to be modern. We examined GWS to offer a nuanced reading and interpretation of water politics in Ireland and open up new sites of political intervention and amplification. Although the upgrades to GWS and the setting up of Irish Water have utilized similar tools to address similar problems, from these similarities flow their differences. For GWS, charges and metering were supported as a means of reducing costs to schemes, as well as being framed through a collective responsibility to the scheme and its networks. For Irish Water, metering and charges were presented as incentivizing water conservation and also generating a new, financialized revenue stream for an indebted state (Bresnihan 2016). By emphasizing (with very little evidential support) the role of individual water users in conserving (and paying for) water, Irish Water sought to weaken the collective nature and responsibility of public infrastructure.

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96  The handbook of diverse economies GWS are community enterprises that have survived as an alternative to state enterprise in Ireland’s water sector system by continuously refashioning themselves. While reliant on the state, they are self-organized, separate from, but entangled with broader processes within Ireland’s water sector and economic development. As positive as their flexibility sounds, it also reflects their perennial vulnerability. Just as the public water network relies on public funding, GWS also rely on the state-funded Rural Water Programme. As much as GWS engage in source water protection schemes, the Government’s agricultural policies and the strength of the agri-business lobby ensure that any progressive measures to reduce agricultural impacts need to be understood within a context of Irish policies to grow the agricultural sector (Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine 2018). Paying closer attention to differences between how the state enterprise, Irish Water, and community operated enterprises, GWS, have adapted to the challenges of decaying infrastructure and deteriorating water quality reveals potential sites of political intervention and amplification. Significantly, lost in the public debate is an understanding that the costs of water treatment are related to wider dynamics of (over) development and environmental degradation. These relations are often invisible to urban-based populations and activists but are deeply entangled within the everyday experiences of GWS. At the same time, paying attention to the development of the GWS as they have become more closely aligned and accountable to regulatory standards and funding requirements set by the state illustrates the need to be careful about drawing overly neat distinctions between the state and the community sectors, or the private and community sectors.

REFERENCES Brady, J. and N.F. Gray (2010), ‘Group water schemes in Ireland – their role within the Irish water sector’, European Water, 29, 39–58. Bresnihan, P. (2016), ‘The bio-financialization of Irish water: New advances in the neoliberalization of vital services’, Utilities Policy, 40 (June), 115–24. Collins, J. (2014), ‘Water charges are yet another austerity tax’, The Irish Times, 21 May, accessed 4 September 2018 at https://​www​.irishtimes​.com/​news/​politics/​water​-charges​-are​-yet​-another​-austerity​ -tax​-1​.1802847​?mode​=​sample​&​auth​-failed​=​1​&​pw​-origin​=​https​%3A​%2F​%2Fwww​.irishtimes​.com​ %2Fnews​%2Fpolitics​%2Fwater​-charges​-are​-yet​-another​-austerity​-tax​-1​.1802847. Deane, B. (2003), ‘An evaluation of group water schemes in the Republic of Ireland’, Master’s Thesis, University College Dublin. Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (Ireland) (2018), ‘Food Wise 2025’, accessed 4 September 2018 at https://​www​.agriculture​.gov​.ie/​foodwise2025/​. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Ireland) (2013), ‘The provision and quality of drinking water in Ireland: A report for the year 2012’, accessed 1 May 2019 at https://​www​.epa​.ie/​pubs/​reports/​water/​ drinking/​drinkingwaterreport2012​.html. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Ireland) (2014), ‘Focus on urban waste water treatment in 2013’, accessed 1 May 2019 at http://​www​.epa​.ie/​pubs/​reports/​water/​wastewater/​uwwreport2013​ .html. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Ireland) (2017), ‘Focus on private drinking water: 2016’, accessed 1 May 2019 at http://​www​.epa​.ie/​pubs/​reports/​water/​drinking/​focusonpriv​ atewatersupplies2016report​ html. Fitzgerald, C. (2018), ‘Storm aftermath: 10,500 customers without water, 121,000 with restricted supply’, The Journal, 5 March, accessed 4 September 2018 at http://​www​.thejournal​.ie/​water​-supply​ -3885373​-Mar2018/​.

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Negotiating water management in rural Ireland  97 Hearne, R. (2015), ‘The Irish water war, austerity and the “Risen People”’, accessed 8 May 2019 at https://​www​ maynoothuniversity​.ie/​sites/​default/​files/​assets/​document/​TheIrishWaterwar​_0​.pdf. Kelly, A. (2016), ‘Opening statement by Alan Kelly T.D. Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government on Irish Water, Dail Eireann 27th April’, accessed 4 September 2014 at https://​ merrionstreet​.ie/​en/​News​-Room/​Speeches/​Opening​_Statement​_by​_Alan​_Kelly​_T​_D​_Minister​ _for​_the​_Environment​_Community​_Local​_Government​_On​_Irish​_Water​_Dail​_Eireann​_27th​_April​ _2016​ html. Lianne, S., S. Jordan, V. McCarthy, E. Jennings, A. Carson, N. Sweeney, C. Wynne and B. McDonald (2011), ‘National Source Protection Pilot Project at Churchill & Oram Group Water Scheme, County Monaghan: Final Report 2005–2010’, National Rural Water Services Committee and Centre for Freshwater Studies, Department of Applied Sciences, Dundalk Institute of Technology. Murtagh, P. (2018), ‘Fears for autumn and winter water supply if drought continues’, The Irish Times, 3 June, accessed 4 September 2018 at https://​www​.irishtimes​.com/​news/​ireland/​irish​-news/​fears​-for​ -autumn​-and​-winter​-water​-supply​-if​-drought​-continues​-1​.3551563. National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) (Ireland) (1998), ‘Rural Water Programme’, www​nfgws​ .ie/​ kfmgetfull/​ fckeditor/​ File/​ Circular L4/98, accessed 4 September 2018 at http://​ Circulars/​CircularL4​-98​.pdf. National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) (Ireland) (2003a), ‘Rural Water News Spring 2003’, accessed 1 May 2019 at https://​nfgws​.ie/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2018/​10/​Spring​-2003​.pdf. National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) (Ireland) (2003b), ‘Rural Water News Summer 2003’, accessed 1 May 2019 at https://​nfgws​.ie/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2018/​10/​Summer​-2003​.pdf. National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) (Ireland) (2004), ‘Rural Water News Summer 2004’, accessed 1 May 2019 at https://​nfgws​.ie/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2018/​10/​Autumn​-2004​.pdf. National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) (Ireland) (2009), ‘Rural Water News Summer 2009’, accessed 1 May 2019 at https://​nfgws​.ie/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2018/​10/​Summer​-2009​-RWN​ -Magazine​.pdf. Nelson, L. (2018), ‘Running on empty: Ireland’s water crisis’, The Times, accessed 4 September 2018 at https://​www​.thetimes​.co​.uk/​article/​running​-on​-empty​-irelands​-water​-crisis​-59bsplzj0​?t​=​ie. RTÉ (2014), ‘Tens of thousands march through towns and cities in water protests’, accessed 4 September 2018 at https://​www​ rte​.ie/​news/​2014/​1101/​656310​-water​-protest/​. The Irish Times (2000), ‘Dirty drinking water’, 13 December, accessed 4 September 2018 at https://​www​ .irishtimes​.com/​opinion/​dirty​-drinking​-water​-1​.1120913. The Irish Times (2019), ‘Failure of Ringsend tank led to sewage discharge into Dublin Bay’, 26 February, accessed 12 March 2019 at https://​www​.irishtimes​.com/​news/​environment/​failure​-of​-ringsend​-tank​ -led​-to​-sewage​-discharge​-into​-dublin​-bay​-1​.3806086. The Journal (2015), ‘Revealed: Less than half of Irish Water customers have paid their bills’, 14 July, accessed 4 September 2018 at http://​www​.thejournal​.ie/​irish​-water​-payments​-2216990​-Jul2015/​. The Journal (2016), ‘European Commission confirms its view that we are no longer exempt from water charges’, 2 June, accessed 4 September 2018 at http://​www​.thejournal​.ie/​european​-commission​-water​ -charges​-exemption​-established​-practice​-confirmation​-2802121​-Jun2016/​.

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10. Independent and small businesses: diversity amongst the 99 per cent of businesses Peter North

INTRODUCTION From a diverse economies perspective, enterprises are conceptualised as being composed of a range of actors producing, exchanging, sharing and selling goods and services in diverse ways. Given this heterogeneity, what ‘being in business’ or ‘being an entrepreneur’ means can’t be defined from above or in advance, theoretically, but needs to be understood as a set of grounded local practices through which people decide how to make a living and what to do with the profit, or surplus, that they make. This chapter discusses the 99 per cent of enterprises that are independent or small to medium-sized businesses and the ideas of ‘entrepreneurship’ that motivate this kind of enterprise. Small, independent businesses are run by self-employed business people, often with the unpaid support of family members. Larger, but still small, perhaps family businesses with more than one employee are run with the aim of providing a living for family members, sometimes sending some of the surplus generated to support family members elsewhere. Some small businesses enable their owners to pursue their hobbies or lifestyle while making a living. Some directly produce the goods they sell; others retail goods they source from (perhaps local) producers or wholesalers, in which case where the goods come from might be more widely spread. Some reluctant entrepreneurs struggle to get by, while others want (and sometimes get) a yacht and a guitar-shaped pool. Eco-entrepreneurs want to save the planet. People in different parts of the world run businesses in diverse ways, sometimes not seeing what they are doing as being ‘in business’ at all. Making sense of the diversity amongst the 99 per cent of businesses is difficult, if we are to avoid inappropriately making a priori theoretical claims. I am writing this from Liverpool, UK, where in the 1980s being ‘in business’ could label you as variously a ‘scally’ getting by selling stolen gear around the pubs, a ‘capitalist’ exploiting ‘the working class’, or ‘posh’ as in ‘not like us’ – people who get jobs and who can’t be expected to run businesses. Travel to say California and every student or immigrant parking cars or selling gas sees themselves as a potential start-up who will one day make it big. Go to the streets of Latin America and see street hawkers selling sweets and homemade empanadas to tourists. Are they entrepreneurs or poor people getting by, sometimes miserably? Do they even see themselves as ‘poor’? Go to Poland and you will find young people looking forward to getting on a low cost airline to the West and through hard work making a fortune that their parents, brought up under communism, could only dream of. Around the world small business is viewed in many different ways, but in all places, entrepreneurs are lauded as ‘movers and shakers’, the drivers of the economy. In this chapter I develop a broader and more inclusive understanding of entrepreneurism as something performed by a wide range of people who see small, independent, community-based businesses as vehicles for living as they want to. 98 Peter North - 9781788119962 07:59:47PM

Independent and small businesses  99

THE HEROIC ENTREPRENEUR In capitalocentric discourse the capitalist entrepreneur is at the heart of the economic process. Entrepreneurs drive innovation in the economy through the identification and implementation of new combinations of land, labour, machinery and capital in new production processes. Schumpeter (1949) argued that economic development would stall without this process of innovation, as it did in the bureaucratically planned economies of the twentieth century. Entrepreneurs are seen to be the ‘heroic’, charismatic, special people who ‘have what it takes’ (Cunningham and Lischeron 1991). This is the way the heroic entrepreneur discourse goes: they have the instinct and feel for a problem, high levels of vigour, persistence and self-esteem; they have energy, perseverance and vision; they motivate, direct and lead; they are inspirational, adaptable, energetic and willing to take responsibility; some are even thought to have specific personal characteristics such as height, physical attractiveness or a firm handshake; they are popular and persuasive; these ‘special’ people are members of the business elite born into power, success and wealth. The big message from Schumpeter to today is that economies need them, and we should all emulate them by subscribing to an ‘enterprise culture’ that sees our life as an accumulation project. Critics of the ‘heroic entrepreneur’ myth, such as Ogbor (2000), see it as a rational Western white male discourse that occludes the racism, sexism, prejudice and discrimination inherent in the capitalist production process. ‘Heroic’ entrepreneurs have the masculine super normal qualities of intellect and will, and the strength and courage to challenge the accepted way of doing things. These qualities, Ogbor argues, are associated with Western concepts of personal autonomy, individualism and freedom, a strong internal locus of control, aggressiveness, dominance, a low need for support, task orientation, and a high tolerance for risk. He argues that this myth of virility and control is rooted in foundational frontier myths of white settler states, where ‘heroic’ pioneers tamed the wilderness, mastering nature, conquering a virgin land of opportunity. The wilderness is coded as feminine, the mother that ‘real men’ made something out of, and consequently ‘nice guys don’t win’. Thus for Ogbor, contemporary discourses of the assertive, energetic, conquering entrepreneur are a masculinist, science-based rational discourse. He argues that we need to challenge this uncontested common sense and habits of organized routine to see afresh, to uncover alternative discourses that these heroic myths silence. In order to reframe the figure of the entrepreneur and become open to other discourses of being business-minded, it is useful to return to the original meaning of the word ‘entrepreneur’. Entrepreneur is a loan word from the old French, entreprendre, ‘to undertake’. It means no more than that. Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General, written around 1734, conceptualized entrepreneurialism as a form of arbitrage whereby entrepreneurs buy low at currently known prices in the expectation of selling higher for as yet unknown future prices (Murphy 1986). Entrepreneurs, unlike landlords and labourers, look into the future, weigh up the likelihood of certain events occurring or new needs emerging, and act accordingly in order to meet these new needs or handle new events. They reap both the rewards for getting it right and the costs of getting it wrong. They relish uncertainty, and take on the risk of engaging with it on others’ behalf. Cantillon had a democratic view of entrepreneurialism – everyone who produces and sells is in some way acting entrepreneurially, but those who focus on connecting buyers and sellers, and accepting the risk that prices might fall rather than rise,

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100  The handbook of diverse economies are key (Hébert 1985). This suggests that millions of small traders across the global North and South are entrepreneurs – not a few special people. The concept of entrepreneurship thus encompasses traders and producers and this mix reflects the composition of the 99 per cent of independent and small businesses. Ethically, Cantillon argued that the entrepreneur was entitled to the profit gained from accepting the risk that future prices will be higher and getting that judgement right as ‘otherwise he would not do it’. Karl Marx, observing and writing some 100 years after Cantillon, made a distinction between merchant capitalist entrepreneurs who bought low and sold high to make a profit and industrial capitalist entrepreneurs who bought labour power at currently known prices from those who had no other option but to sell it, and extracted profit by paying the worker less than the known value of what the worker has produced. The fact that labour was bought for its capacity to work and produce more value, made it a very different tradable commodity, Marx argued, than other goods. Cantillon’s traders, Marx argued, had become intermediaries in a complex circuit of productive capital – they did not produce value themselves, but took a cut of the industrial capitalists’ profit in return for finding markets for their goods. In the age of competitive industrial capital expansion, the heroic individual ‘capitalist’ employing his or her own capital in the enterprise of making profit was both praised for ‘his’ innovation and ingenuity, and vilified by followers of Marx who saw the exploitation that was involved in ‘heroic’ profit making. During the twentieth century, large-scale Fordist capitalist corporations emerged. They produced dividends for shareholders and were managed by salaried managers (e.g. see Mandel 1976), not by buccaneering, entrepreneurial capitalists. With the growth of what was called ‘monopoly’ capitalist enterprise and later ‘global’ capitalist enterprise it was thought that we would see the demise of the buccaneering entrepreneur and small capitalist business. But announcements of the death of the small enterprise in the minority world were premature, and in the majority world, they have never gone away.

SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES There is no doubt that an individualistic enterprise culture still dominates in economic policy debates, and that the heroic entrepreneur remains a cherished ideal. We have only to think of the way that the Richard Bransons, Steve Jobs and Elon Musks of the world are portrayed as the epitome of business success. Or the way that most economic development interventions promote private business start-ups as the route to regional revival. However, on the ground the reality of independent and small and medium-sized business can be quite grim. Many struggling, barely profitable businesses have few customers, limited cash flows, debt, and an unsympathetic bank manager. Small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners often ‘just about manage’, or have established their business reluctantly as there is no other option – in the global South, this is especially so (Davis 2007). Many fail, and enthusiasts for entrepreneurialism pay too little attention to the costs of this failure in financial terms (leading to debt, poverty, perhaps homelessness) and in terms of mental health issues, internalization of feelings of being a ‘loser’ who made ‘bad choices’ in the enterprise culture, family breakups, and homelessness (Olaison and Sørensen 2014). Many of us are three pay-checks from disaster. If they do manage to get by, SME owners can have limited time, cash and resources. They focus on current performance, on the short, not the long term. They firefight, especially in difficult economic times. They can feel that being socially engaged puts costs onto business

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Independent and small businesses  101 not faced by profit driven ‘cowboys’ and overseas competitors who will then outcompete them. They can feel that their customers are uninterested ‘consumers’, and that the demand for ethical products and services is overstated. They rarely produce reports on corporate ethics as they do not believe that their customers are interested in the issue. Reluctant SME owners may need to be forced to act for the social good through requirements for regulatory compliance, for example, to have good employment practices, respect consumer protection regulations, or health and safety. A diverse economies perspective proposes an ‘ontological reframing’ of economic motivations and performance away from a formal assumption of utility maximization and individualistic economic rationality. Entrepreneurs are conceptualized as people, with human flaws. They are for the most part not heroic (or otherwise) calculating machines identifying optimal economic outcomes through some magic process that the rest of us do not possess. Like other more or less thoughtful human beings, business owners can be very aware of the implications of the ‘bigger picture’, for their and other people’s future prosperity and happiness. Thus entrepreneurs are not just deracinated profit seekers, but may be interested in both ‘profit’ and ‘food, sex and saving souls’ (Cyert and March 1992, p. 9 quoted by Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 187). Capitalist business owners can also be environmentalists, parents, consumers, recyclers, activists, organizers and leaders. There are a range of social, cultural, economic and environmental drivers of economic decisions including passion, sympathy, moral judgement, embodied knowledge and practices, sentiment, trust, mutuality and reciprocity, which change in time and over space (Amin and Thrift 2007). There is much evidence for the need to construct concepts of the enterprise and the entrepreneur that go beyond essentialist conceptions of business as irredeemably capitalist. The next task is to move on from an analysis of ‘enterprise’, broadly conceived, to discuss what the contribution of the more-than-capitalist enterprise might be for building better worlds.

MORE-THAN-CAPITALIST ENTERPRISE? While critical perspectives on SMEs have their legitimacy, a diverse economies perspective offers grounds for a greater range of small business motivations and actions. Entrepreneurs can be strongly influenced by ethics – their world view, belief system and their confidence in their capacity to act. Having decided to create a business, they often see themselves as capable and effective people able to bring their values into being through their business practices. They don’t give up when they encounter problems. Other people protest against, for example, exploitative practices in sweatshops in the global South, but ethical entrepreneurs do something about it by, for example, engaging in fair trade practices. Business people thinking this way feel they can, should and do make a difference, and that it is their responsibility to do so rather than adding to the problems of the world through their business activities (Battisti and Perry 2011, p. 179). Independent business owners can spend their money as they see fit, and don’t have to persuade shareholders or senior management. Ethically Oriented Small Business Working with a diverse economies perspective North and Nurse (2014) identified SME owners driven by morality, curiosity, enthusiasm and a commitment to more than the bottom

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102  The handbook of diverse economies line in running their business. There are too many of these ethical practices to fully document here, but we can point to a 200-year-old chemical company driving through environmental change (often led by the workers themselves); a sign maker choice editing the lighting they offered to the most environmentally friendly options, unbidden; a plastics company only providing recycled products; and a marketing company looking to recruit environmentally aware graduates. Scratch the surface and the evidence is that ordinary SME owners do engage with a rich repertoire of ethical practices. As explanatory vignettes, we offer the example of a printer removing any noxious compounds from the production process as they did not want to expose themselves or their staff to them, and, going further, refusing to stock paper produced with poor environmental standards: I mean, it wasn’t easy by any means, you know, it was a constant sort of, customers were saying ‘oh, you know, I need it cheap and cheerful, just stick it on, on any sort of paper’. We don’t stock ‘any sort of paper’, we only stock FSC-accredited paper. And it’s not more expensive – that’s the common misconception . . . We just don’t like to sell cheap and cheerful stuff. We just don’t advocate it at all.

Or a marketing company that knew that to recruit the best staff it could not act unethically, breaching their social licence to trade: A lot of graduates are coming into good positions and like late 20s and 30s, they’re more aware socially and historically and that from university days. They’ve grown up with Greenpeace and, and we find that a lot of graduates . . . they’re interested in the philosophy of the company and they want to know what their environmental policy is. They’ll only go and join the company that goes in with their beliefs, y’know.

These are studies of ‘normal’ independent businesses that aim to make a profit, but honestly and efficiently, because acting ethically with an eye to the future is necessary. As one SME owner said, ‘something needed to happen’, and these businesses make it happen. Local Embeddedness of Small Business Over the last 30 years a large ‘localist’ literature has emerged that looks to value small, locally-owned businesses. The interest in localism has arisen in opposition to the knee-jerk support often given by development authorities to large inward investor branch plants that demand significant corporate welfare (such as grants, waivers of local taxes, support for training of new workers) as a condition of making their investment in the community, but end up returning very little (Dauncey 1988; Douthwaite 1996; Estill 2008; Shuman 2001, 2007). The deleterious and irresponsible effects of non-local ‘big box’ large retailers responsible to non-local shareholders or equity businesses has been extensively documented, and contrasted with the claimed benefits of locally and community-owned independent stores (Mitchel, 2006; Simms, 2007). These ‘footloose’ businesses can threaten to leave when trading conditions change, or when they can get more profit somewhere else, although they might actually be more ‘locally dependent’ than they would like to admit (Cox 1997). Molly Scott Cato (2004) argues that local independent businesses have the potential to produce more wealth and employment than publicly supported inward investment. Advocates of small local businesses argue that, as they are embedded in their local communities, they will stay through good times and bad. They will pay ‘social licence to trade’ costs if

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Independent and small businesses  103 they act in abusive ways (Lynch-Wood and Williamson 2007), and may see their workers and customers as ‘part of the family’. A SME owner in a small community may have a reputation to maintain. Community businesses and social enterprises use business skills to support an underserved geographical community, or provide much-needed services to specific groups of people (see Chapter 5 by Hicks, and Chapter 7 by Lyne and Madden in this volume). Many people enter into informal business partnerships or register as a limited company, but run their affairs cooperatively without registering as a worker-owned cooperative. A lifestyle business might not be profitable enough to be attractive to a profit maximizer, but might well enable an enthusiast to live where they want, doing things they love, and making a living out of it. Concrete examples of independent and community-owned business are too numerous to fully document here, but we can offer a few pointers. The Transition Network’s Reconomy project1 looks to develop transition-orientated enterprises that aim to develop local self-reliance and low carbon forms of business that help avoid contributing to climate change, working mainly in smaller towns and rural locations. These transition-oriented enterprises include local food production, food sharing, cooperative food markets and community supported agriculture; textile production; community transport, car clubs, bus services and bike sales and repairs; bakeries; bringing empty properties back into use in climate friendly ways; community banking and local money; supporting local pubs and cafés that also act as community hubs; and care for elders. In the United States the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE)2 has supported business owners in neighbourhoods away from growth centres with local loan funds, support networks and co-working spaces. Local food, arts and culture-based businesses have provided opportunities in struggling smaller towns and cities, perhaps availing themselves of underused post-industrial spaces like abandoned railway yards or factories. Taking Liverpool, UK, as an example, we can point to cafés opening space up to people suffering from depression or loneliness; businesses accepting local currencies; a restaurant trying to manage gentrification in ways that provided cooperative work for those struggling to find it; and a café specifically employing people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. These are all examples of local innovation that analyses of the economy as uniformly capitalist would occlude. Diverse economies research looks to document and value these practices, taking a non-essentialist and democratic approach to understanding the progressive potential of independent and community businesses and their owners.

CONCLUSION A diverse economies perspective helps to uncover and document the existing variety of enterprise types and business motivations in the SME world, the 99 per cent of businesses. This approach opens the way to thinking about other ways of organizing economic behaviour, to understanding the ‘not yet’ and the ‘what if’ rather than assuming limits, or the ‘never’. Those of us interested in community economies are exploring how more local and community based businesses might provide dignified livelihoods using local money (see Chapter 25 by North in this volume), the internet, peer-to-peer lending, new forms of platform economy, electronic forms of money and local forms of finance to develop into what might be called a ‘post-capitalist entrepreneurialism for the 99 per cent’ (Cohen 2017). What if we had better business incubation processes – perhaps based on fostering solidarity rather than business competitiveness (da Costa 2017); a less judgemental view of failure and more support for

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104  The handbook of diverse economies creativity and experimentation, long-term patient finance, a basic income, more affordable property prices and ways to share, health care, and decent pensions? Could we combine the dynamism of entrepreneurialism and the diversity of an economy full of creative SMEs and community businesses with a social democratic state that provided for all – the entrepreneurial, those who just want a different job, those who want to work less, or look after their family, or pursue their hobbies in ways that do not cost the earth? Can we have more publicly owned enterprise (Cumbers 2012; Hanna 2018)? A diverse economies analysis of the enterprise, of who is entrepreneurial, and of the role of small independent and community businesses identifies far more hopeful ways of thinking about the economic than allowed by a blanket dismissal of them as irredeemably ‘capitalist’.

NOTES 1. 2.

http://​reconomy​.org/​about​-reconomy/​ (accessed 18 May 2019). https://​bealocalist​.org/​(accessed 18 May 2019).

REFERENCES Amin, A. and N. Thrift (2007), ‘Cultural-economy and cities’, Progress in Human Geography, 31, 143–61. Battisti, M. and M. Perry (2011), ‘Walking the talk? Environmental responsibility from the perspective of small-business owners’, Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 18, 172–85. Cohen, B. (2017), Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship: Startups for the 99%, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Cox, K. (1997), Spaces of Globalisation: Reasserting the Power of the Local, London: Guildford Press. Cumbers, A. (2012), Reclaiming Public Ownership: Making Space for Economic Democracy, London: Zed Books. Cunningham, J.B. and J. Lischeron (1991), ‘Defining entrepreneurship’, Journal of Small Business Management, 29, 45–61. da Costa, R. (2017), ‘Brazil’s social economic incubators’, in P. North and M. S. Cato (eds), Towards Just and Sustainable Economies: The Social and Solidarity Economy North and South, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 117–34. Dauncey, G. (1988), Beyond the Crash: The Emerging Rainbow Economy, London: Greenprint. Davis, M. (2007), Planet of Slums, London: Verso. Douthwaite, R. (1996), Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Uncertain World, Totnes: Green Books. Estill, L. (2008), Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy, Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hanna, T. (2018), Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hébert, R. (1985), ‘Was Richard Cantillon an Austrian economist?’, Journal of Libertarian Studies, 7, 269–79. Lynch-Wood, G. and D. Williamson (2007), ‘The social licence as a form of regulation for small and medium enterprises’, Journal of Law and Society, 34, 321–41. Mandel, E. (1976), ‘Introduction’, in K. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Mitchell, S. (2006), Big Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Murphy, A. (1986), Richard Cantillon: Entrepreneur and Economist, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Independent and small businesses  105 North, P. and A. Nurse (2014), ‘War stories: Morality, curiosity, enthusiasm and commitment as facilitators of SME owners’ engagement in low carbon transitions’, Geoforum, 52, 32–41. Ogbor, J.O. (2000), ‘Mythicizing and reification in entrepreneurial discourse: Ideology-critique of entrepreneurial studies’, Journal of Management Studies, 37, 605–35. Olaison, L. and B.M. Sørensen (2014), ‘The abject of entrepreneurship: Failure, fiasco, fraud’, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 20, 193–211. Schumpeter, J. (1949), The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott Cato, M. (2004), The Pit and the Pendulum: A Co-operative Future for Work in the Welsh Valleys, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Shuman, M. (2001), Going Local: Creating Self Reliant Communities in a Global Age, London: Routledge. Shuman, M. (2007), The Small-Mart Revolution, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Simms, A. (2007), Tescopoly, London: Constable.

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11. Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation: decentring authority and ownership Jayme Walenta

In late 2001, rising star energy giant Enron Corporation, based in Houston, Texas, declared bankruptcy amid accusations of widespread accounting fraud. In the six months prior to this, the company lost more than US$60 billion in stock market valuations as it was forced to make public some suspicious off-balance sheet financial transactions designed to move poorly performing assets off financial statements. As Enron was imploding in a wave of financial scandals, a number of other industry giants in the US and elsewhere were experiencing similar fraud and corruption induced downfalls, including telecom giant Worldcom, cable television firm Adelphia Communications, security firm Tyco International, consulting firm Arthur Andersen, and Italian food giant Parmalat. This era of financial greed and corruption was capped off in 2006 when Enron’s two former Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) were found guilty of lying to employees and investors about the state of Enron’s affairs in late 2001 and sentenced to prison. Explanations for the collapses of these firms by the US Chamber of Commerce (Pearlstein 2002), and in mainstream media like The Wall Street Journal (Sutton 2011) centred on a ‘few bad apples’ who ‘ruin the whole barrel’. As the ‘bad apple’ theory goes, a single individual or handful of managers behaved unethically, outside the bounds of capitalist logics, to enact their plans (Sutton 2011). The capitalist system and capitalist logics, guided by the so-called rational homo economicus or economic man, went unchallenged. Academic research counters these explanations through a variety of perspectives. Critical post-structural economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham, for example, point to the relevance of social context and managerial identities, built from spatially contingent conceptions of gender and power, as legitimizing factors in corporate decision making. The capitalist firm is represented as over-determined and decentred, rather than informed by a unified identity and inherent capitalist logic. Building on this perspective, the diverse economies field of research makes visible the multiplicitous practices and businesses operating outside the strict capitalocentric script (Gibson-Graham 2008). This chapter deploys a method of reading for difference (see Chapter 18 by Gibson in this volume) to reveal the diverse corporate subjectivities at play in Enron’s downfall and its aftermath. My purpose is to decentre the dominant economic identity of the corporation as that of homo economicus, as embodied through the rational, white, and in this case toxic masculine figure and open up the possibility of a diversity of bodies in the corporate sector, which I suggest could lead to new forms of corporate accountability.

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Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation  107

CHALLENGING HOMO ECONOMICUS AS A METAPHOR FOR THE FIRM The notion that corporations are driven solely by capitalist logics to only seek profit and accumulate wealth has roots in classical economics (see Smith 1776 and Mill 1836). More specifically, John Stuart Mill’s metaphor homo economicus, or economic man, has been a particularly potent means to conceptualize free market capitalist behaviour at the scale of the individual (Mill 1836). To Mill, homo economicus personified certain economic behaviours, such as self-interest, as the motivating force in maximizing utility. This behaviour was imagined as the outcome of rational, calculated choices that would always seek the most efficient means of accumulating wealth (Elster 1986). Over time, the spectral figure of homo economicus has taken on a life of its own, serving as a metaphorical stand-in to justify and prioritize certain kinds of economic behaviours over others (Barnes 1996). The scale at which homo economicus operates has extended from the individual (as theorized by Mill) to large institutions, such as corporations (as theorized by Coase (1937) and later Friedman (1970)). Coase famously described the firm as ‘an island in a sea of market relations’ (Coase 1937, p. 392). For Coase, owners of a firm, also the prime decision makers, rationally weigh up all production costs, and on that basis determine the profit maximizing course of action. As a contemporary of Coase, Friedman’s conceptualization of the corporation naturalizes homo economicus as the only acceptable corporate ethic (Friedman 1970). Friedman stated that the rational and uninhibited pursuit of profit is the only responsibility of business. All other logics or ethics are contrary to this goal, making the corporation an institutional embodiment of homo economicus. The idea of homo economicus, as an individual or a firm, has been challenged by heterodox economists who position economic behaviour and capitalist logics as thoroughly socially embedded. Early criticisms target the firm’s competing legal factions as determining corporate behaviour, negotiated through company owners, investors and managers, each serving different interests (Berle and Means 1932). Others situate the corporation as subject to the countervailing powers of government and labour groups (Galbraith 1952). This work was taken up by economic geography’s ‘cultural turn’, which asserted that social and cultural factors impelled managers to act, rather than an inherent capitalist logic (Gibson-Graham 1996; O’Neill and Gibson-Graham 1999; Schoenberger 1997). To O’Neill and Gibson-Graham specifically, the firm is constituted through material and discursive practices such as executives’ language and/or accountancy practices. These multiple cultural agents each possess their own logic, which collectively may be contradictory. Their conception of the corporation contributes to a dismantling of the mainstream fallacy that positions the firm as a profit maximizing machine. They demonstrate that the corporation is not the strong, rational and unified body portrayed in mainstream capitalist narratives, but is instead diverse and contradictory. Placing cultural criticisms of homo economicus more firmly into the realm of feminist theory, Brown (2015) emphasizes the gendered power relations that sustain the metaphor. To Brown, homo economicus is a man, not a woman. The metaphor’s sexing matters, because a gendered order is produced when rationality and self-interest, traits most associated with masculinity, prevail, and the feminine qualities of ‘self-care and self-investment’ are positioned as outside its purview. Because of this, the homo economicus effect is to exacerbate a gendered order whereby masculinity is ‘dependent upon invisible practices and unnamed others’, namely ‘human non-capital entities like women’ (Brown 2015, p. 104). This rela-

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108  The handbook of diverse economies tionship is unbalanced, where a masculine homo economicus supersedes and has authority over feminized behaviours and practices. Brown’s work in the context of this chapter draws attention to which people have the authority to benefit from and author corporate strategy. Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) work reminds us that there are multiple masculinities varying across time and space, all of which work to sustain a hegemonic masculinity. Sitting atop a hierarchy of gender relations, hegemonic masculinity is concerned with idealized notions of what it means to be a man, such as ‘bread winning’. All other masculinities and femininities are positioned in subordination to it. bell hooks adds that we gain an incomplete picture of capitalist power and oppression, when it is positioned only through sexual difference (hooks 1984). To overcome this, she asserts that race is critical to how power emerges and becomes enacted. Thus, I assert that not only is masculinity important in the context of this story, so too is its whiteness. Adding to Brown’s theorizations and keeping in mind Connell and Messerschmidt’s understanding of masculinity and hooks’ assertion of race, I suggest that homo economicus is held up by a white hegemonic masculinity that is toxic in its effects. Denoted as toxic masculinity, this refers to masculinity that is threatened by associations with femininity (Bliss 1995). More specifically, it encompasses sexual aggression, violence, competition, excessively risky behaviour, and a preoccupation with status. Hegemonic toxic masculinity acquires power through social and institutional contexts, by policing male behaviour to conform to certain traits, and through the exclusion and discrediting of those who identify as women (Kupers 2005). To challenge this form of masculinity, its sources of power must be dismantled. This entails exposing its fragility and making a space for identities not rooted in white toxic masculine subjectivities. I work towards this below by underscoring two Enron stories where corporate authorship and ownership depart from the standard homo economicus subjectivity.

ENRON AS ECONOMIC MAN: THE FIRM’S CREATION AND EXPOSURE People perceive the Enron story as a story about numbers, but in reality, it’s a story about people. (Bethany McLean in the film The Smartest Guys in the Room [Gibney 2005])

As McLean suggests in this quote, the Enron story is a story about people, both those who breached their fiduciary responsibilities, leading to the company’s downfall, and those who were impacted by this breach. In this section, I discuss both groups, beginning with the creation of the capitalist narrative perpetrated by the company’s two CEOs, who each viewed themselves as embodiments or physical manifestations of Enron. Then, using testimony from the criminal trial against each CEO, I expose the myth of a particular embodiment of homo economicus to demonstrate the diversity of stakeholders or owners of Enron as a corporate entity. Enron’s longest running chief executive, Ken Lay, wrote in a 1998 article that ‘individual choice and competition are the strongest forces for efficiency, value, and a cleaner earth’ (Lay 1998, p. 33). These values characterized Lay’s vision for Enron, which he enacted through his vast political connections. He lobbied heavily for the deregulation of electricity markets, writing to Texas Governor George W. Bush in 1996 to ‘let the forces of the market work their magic’ (McLean and Elkind 2003, p. 173). As Enron grew, a greedy Lay utilized Enron resources for his own gain, such as a company jet and line of credit (McLean and Elkind 2003).

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Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation  109 Former employees described Lay in varying ways, as ‘entitled’ and ‘aloof’, particularly later in his tenure as CEO when he became preoccupied with preaching the virtues of deregulation (Swartz and Watkins 2003). While Lay was the deregulation zealot of Enron, Skilling was the man who saw a means to profit from it. Skilling’s tenure at Enron could be characterized by the hyper competitive work environment he created, and his enthusiasm for risky financial transactions. On the former, Skilling hired and rewarded what he saw as the smartest ‘guys’ (they were usually men) and pitted them against one another through his Performance Review Committees (PRC). The PRC was a peer review system that rated employees from 1 (best) to 5 (worst) based on teamwork and profit-making attributes. Many former employees confirmed that with the PRC, money mattered most, with one staffer stating that ‘if they were making money . . . we always forgive them for [being jerks]’ (McLean and Elkind 2003, p. 63). The PRC was widely seen as bringing out Enron’s worst; ‘ruthlessness, selfishness and greed’ (McLean and Elkind 2003, p. 64). The types of employees rewarded were people like Lou Pai, who expensed strip clubs as deal-making events (later divorcing his wife and marrying an exotic dancer). Skilling also handsomely rewarded his energy traders, tolerating their market manipulations (causing electricity black-outs in California), and their sexually aggressive language (which famously included lewd comments towards a fictional ‘grandma Millie’ during the California energy crisis) (Roberts 2004). Skilling’s encouragement of risky deal-making created circumstances that endangered Enron’s Wall Street performance expectations. To overcome this, he devised innovative and equally risky financial practices, for example transitioning the company from accrual-based accounting to mark-to-market based accounting. Such a change gave Enron the appearance of tremendous profitability, but posed long-term cash flow challenges. Former CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Andy Fastow’s financial activities helped resolve this. Allegedly sanctioned by Skilling, Fastow constructed highly risky and dubiously legal special purpose entities (SPEs). SPEs are off-balance sheet partnerships that allow a company to transfer a risky venture off its accounting books and put it in an outside partnership. They rely on private pools of capital from ‘arm’s length’ individuals, indicating that proper due diligence underlie the transaction. This did not happen at Enron. Fastow was part owner and complete orchestrator behind Enron’s SPEs. He admitted in court that, ‘the whole purpose of the partnerships was to help Enron make its numbers look the way it wanted them to look’ (US v. Skilling and Lay 2006). Fastow created an illusion that Enron was conforming to capitalist logics by consistently meeting or beating profit expectations. He saw his work as heroic, masking millions of dollars in losses on investments to keep Enron’s stock price high (US v. Skilling and Lay 2006). Through a culture of selfishness, competition, excessive risk and entitlement fostered by key Enron executives, the company’s finances unravelled over the span of a few months in late 2001 as the SPEs were exposed. Lay, Skilling and Fastow’s decisions, aspiring to live up to homo economicus’ ideals, did not originate from disembodied, rational and calculating subjects. Instead, they were authored and authorized by certain bodies in the firm, white men in particular. Their decisions reflect certain economic priorities, rationalized through homo economicus, but enabled through white toxic masculinity. Together, the power of homo economicus and white toxic masculinity foreclosed other ethics, such as responsibility. The toxic effects of these men’s behaviour are clear. At Enron’s high, its stock was valued at $90.75, but by December 2001, Enron shares were trading at $0.26. Over 4000 employees lost their

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110  The handbook of diverse economies jobs and life savings. And billions of dollars were lost by investors and other firm stakeholders (McLean and Elkind 2003). After a lengthy criminal investigation into Enron’s bankruptcy, Skilling and Lay were arrested in 2004. Fastow had already pleaded guilty and was cooperating. Skilling and Lay’s chief indictment centred on lying to and misleading employees and investors and filing false financial statements. The trial against the former CEOs took place from January to May 2006 in a federal court-house in Houston, Texas. I attended this trial daily as part of my doctoral research (Walenta 2009). The approach of the defence team was to position Skilling and Lay as embodiments of Enron, emphasizing their love and passion for the firm. As the logic goes, if the CEOs were Enron, how could they possibly take action to damage it? Skilling went as far as to declare on the witness stand that he ‘bled Enron blue’ in response to whether or not he believed in Enron (US v. Skilling and Lay, 13 April 2006). The image conjured up by Skilling’s words reinforced the notion that Enron was him. The life of Enron coursed through his veins. The prosecution’s approach was to focus on the victims of Enron’s fraud. For example, prosecutor Sean Berkowitz challenged Skilling’s ‘bled Enron blue’ comment during cross-examination, asserting that ‘Although you said that you bled Enron blue, you weren’t Enron . . . It was a corporation . . . and it consisted of its shareholders . . . and you worked for them, didn’t you? . . . they are alleged to be the victims in this case . . . about whether . . . you breached your duties and obligations to those shareholders and employees’ (US v. Skilling and Lay, 17 April 2006). Berkowitz’s line of questioning repositioned Enron as an entity not composed of one man, or two men in this case, but instead as an entity composed of shareholders and run by corporate executives with a fiduciary duty to follow the law. The prosecution’s final witness punctuated the point of Enron’s diverse ownership. Patti Klein was a blue-collar female employee from Enron’s Portland, Oregon office, purchased in 1997 from Pacific Gas and Electric (PG and E). Klein introduced herself as a high school educated ‘line-guy’, one of the few women working a position that climbs poles and runs electricity wires. Later her job transitioned to preparing ‘line-guys’ for their daily work. Klein revealed that her husband also worked for Enron, and their entire retirement savings were composed of Enron stock acquired through the company-sponsored 401k investment programme. This was a programme where Enron matched employee contributions with company stock. She explained that they were forced to convert their PG and E stock to Enron stock following the takeover. Klein spoke of how, based on Lay’s word that the company was ‘sound’, she and her husband retained their stock, rather than sell it when the value began to fall sharply. In 2002, following the bankruptcy, Klein admitted to accepting pennies on the dollar for the stock, a financial loss that prevented her and her husband from retiring (US v. Skilling and Lay 2006). Following Klein’s testimony, the government rested its case. During closing arguments, Kathryn Ruemmler summed up the prosecution’s strategy again delinking Skilling and Lay from Enron. She stated, ‘the common investors and employees of Enron, they were the owners of Enron . . . [who] were cheated. They were stolen from. They were profoundly harmed by what these men did’ (US v. Skilling and Lay, 15 May 2006). The jury reached a decision after six days of deliberation to find Skilling and Lay guilty on most charges. Skilling was released from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in August 2018, and currently lives in a halfway house in Texas, serving out the remainder of his sentence (Swartz 2018). Lay died in the months between the trial’s conclusion and sentencing, forcing the government to vacate their case.

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Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation  111 Through the criminal trial, the unchecked actions of a white toxic masculine corporate culture perpetrated by chief executives Skilling, Lay and Fastow, were called into question and held responsible. The prosecution’s legal tactics and jury decision serve as a sharp reminder of what or who the corporation is, and who has a stake in its daily operations. The trial moved forward two aspects of the corporation as it relates to undoing the white male homo economicus. First, the trial publicly demonstrated the diverse ownership of the corporation, privileging corporate embodiments beyond upper-class white men. This decentres the hold toxic masculinity has on corporate ownership. Second, in part as a result of Enron’s downfall, Congress instituted the Sarbanes Oxley Act, strengthening the fiduciary duty expectations bestowed upon a CEO, and adding criminal penalties for misconduct. This Act holds CEOs, 91 per cent of whom are white men, more accountable for their financial disclosure decisions (Mather 2016).

DETOXING THE MASCULINITY OF ENRON AS ECONOMIC MAN The masculinization of a corporate homo economicus was underscored in a series of theatrical performances about Enron that took place in Austin, Texas in 2018. Known as ENRON, the play was written by British playwright Lucy Prebble. Prebble focused on Lay, Skilling and Fastow, the three men at the centre of the scandal, and the ‘boys club’ atmosphere they perpetuated (Billington 2009). While the play critiques contemporary capitalism, gendered relations within Enron are featured as part of that critique. The original London production in 2009 had 22 cast members. Of those that played Enron employees, only two were explicitly feminized. The first was Claudia Roe, a fictional amalgamation of all Enron women in executive roles. As Roe works to keep Skilling’s ambition in check, she is antagonized for her ‘old’ ideas about how the company should be run. Eventually she is pushed out by Lay who favours Skilling. While Roe is fictional, her experiences align with Rebecca Mark, who famously endured a 10-year feud with Skilling, and was forced out when Skilling was named CEO in 2000 (Swartz and Watkins 2003). The second feminized character was Irene Gant, who represented lower level employees. She confronts Skilling at the end of the play to tell him that after 25 years at Enron, she lost her job and her entire retirement savings of $150 000 and has been forced to move in with her sister (Prebble 2009). The feminized characters are contrasted with displays of masculinity, emphasized by Skilling and his energy traders. Prebble fuses masculinity and homo economicus during a scene depicting energy traders exploiting a newly deregulated electricity market in California. As the traders chest bump each other, they shout sexually charged expletives at one another. At the closing bell, one trader declares that he’s lost $20 million today. Skilling responds by slapping the trader on the back and declaring, ‘only people prepared to lose are ever gonna win’ (Prebble 2009, p. 21). At the conclusion of this scene, another trader states, ‘this is the purest place to work in the world . . . We don’t just play the game, we are the game. There’s you and the guy at the other end of the deal, and who can move faster and who can move smarter . . . There’s something primal . . . Closest thing there is to sex. For a man that is’ (Prebble 2009, p. 23). Prebble acknowledges the unique role that women played in the Enron story as a contrast to men. For example, two women were credited with exposing the company (Sherron Watkins as the chief whistle blower) and Bethany McLean (as a journalist who questioned Enron’s value).

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112  The handbook of diverse economies Prebble adds in an interview, ‘I’m not arguing that women have a stronger moral awareness than men, but from speaking to women in business, I’ve learned that they have a different perspective. Because they are more connected to family life, they tend to see things from the outside and are ready to declare that the emperor has no clothes’ (Billington 2009). Seizing on the gendered aspects of the Enron story and Prebble’s play, the University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance performed ENRON, running shows in early 2018. As part of my research, I attended a performance as well as a workshop connected to the play devoted to discussing Enron, late capitalism, and toxic masculinities. Working alongside cast members and other stakeholders, the director, Hannah Wolf, decided to present Prebble’s original story with a twist; all cast members were female or gender non-binary. She intended to call out the links our society naturalizes between toxic masculinity and corporate strategy or capitalism. Wolf’s vision was to underscore those traits on bodies not normally seen as powerful, stating that ‘when audiences see actors who aren’t men display traits normally attributed to men, the absurdity of common male behaviour is more obvious’ (Thompson 2018). Adding to this, Amissa Miller, a local stakeholder with Violence Against Women, stated ‘we know the fact that white men run companies to be true, but this is often not named. The play asks us to make this maleness and masculinity visible’. The series of eight performances with an all-female/gender-non-binary cast achieved at least three objectives with respect to making toxic masculinity visible and undoing its link to homo economicus. First, quite simply, the play gave white women, women of colour, and non-binary actors the opportunity to benefit professionally. Second, having women and one non-binary actor perform masculine roles threw into question the performativity of gender. On this point, one cast member stated that ‘for me, watching the production highlighted a lot of the language used [in corporate culture and workplace masculinity]. If a man said these things on stage, it would have been like, “okay, that’s just how guys are,” but seeing a woman perform it called attention to language in a way that we don’t usually see’. Annemarie Alaniz portraying Skilling added that ‘it’s about portraying someone who was born with this assumed power that he automatically thinks he has’ (Thompson 2018). The play had us all question that power by disrupting words and gestures reserved for the masculine and subverting them. Finally, the play gave women and non-binary actors the authority to tell the story of Enron, to locate authority and authorship from places outside of where it is typically situated. All three objectives advance a diverse economies agenda by re-enacting the gendered power dynamics in capitalist logics, calling into question male norms, power and authority.

CONCLUSION This chapter delinks the naturalization of the corporation as profit maximizing homo economicus. I do this using the Enron case to demonstrate how homo economicus became embodied as white toxic masculinity located in key executive positions. In this case, corporate power was generated by producing a raced and gendered order privileging historically masculine traits (like rationalism, competitiveness and selfishness) and those who have traditionally been aligned with those traits (especially white men). Ultimately, this embodiment failed to sustain itself at the hand of unethical decisions perpetrated by those in power, forcing the company’s downward spiral.

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Homo economicus and the capitalist corporation  113 The diverse economies approach has been deployed here to note disruptions and reworkings in the dominant social order of the corporation as its mythical homo economicus was undone. I worked to locate corporate ownership and authority from places outside the conventional economic centre of the CEO’s office. In the context of the Enron trial, the state repositioned the corporation as belonging to a constituency far larger than Skilling and Lay. Prosecutors emphasized that Lay and Skilling’s fiduciary responsibility was to all Enron’s owners, not simply themselves. With respect to the performance of ENRON by UT Theatre, female and non-binary actors called into question the reification of corporate power and capitalism with masculinity by making maleness visible and parodying it. Recently, Stephen Healy has written on the topic of accountability and corporate enterprise diversity, suggesting that corporations should be conceived of as a commons, managed to benefit many different parties, and reflective of a wider set of social and ecological values (Healy 2018). While his work emphasizes a diversity of enterprise forms as a means to achieve stronger corporate accountability, I suggest that addressing the diversity of bodies in the corporate sector would add to strengthening its accountability. A less oppressive gendered and raced corporate order has the potential to enact new modes of corporate responsibility.

REFERENCES Barnes, T.J. (1996), Logics of Dislocation: Models, Metaphors, and Meanings of Economic Space, New York: Guilford Press. Berle, A. and G. Means (1932), The Modern Corporation and Private Property, New York: Macmillan. Billington, M. (2009), ‘Making a drama out of the economic crisis’, The Guardian, 14 September, accessed 18 May 2018 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​stage/​2009/​sep/​14/​economic​-crisis​-david​ -hare​-enron. Bliss, S. (1995), ‘Mythopoetic men’s movements’, in M. Kimmel (ed.), The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (and the Mythopoetic Leaders’ Answer), Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 292–307. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. Coase, R.H. (1937), ‘The nature of the firm’, Economica, 4, 386–405. Connell, R. and J. Messerschmidt (2005), ‘Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society, 19 (6), 829–59. Elster, J. (ed.) (1986), Rational Choice: Readings in Social and Political Theory, New York: New York University Press. Friedman, M. (1970), ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’, New York Times Magazine, 13 September, pp. 122–6. Galbraith, J.K. (1952), American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power, London: Penguin. Gibney, A. (Director) (2005), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, documentary film, HDNet Productions. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers . Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Healy, S. (2018), ‘Corporate enterprise as commonwealth’, Journal of Law and Society, 45 (1), 46–63. hooks, b. (1984), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, MA: South End Publishing. Kupers, T. (2005), ‘Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61 (6), 713–24. Lay, K. (1998), ‘Megatrends of energy’, World Energy Magazine, 1 (1), 28–33.

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114  The handbook of diverse economies Mather, L. (2016), ‘Dear white men: Five pieces of advice for 91 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs’, accessed 1 August 2018 at https://​www​ huffingtonpost​.com/​laura​-mather/​dear​-white​-men​-seven​-piec​ _b​_7899084​.html. McLean, B. and P. Elkind (2003), The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, New York: Penguin. Mill, J.S. (1836), ‘On the definition of political economy, and on the method of investigation proper to it’, London and Westminster Review, October. O’Neill, P. and J.K. Gibson-Graham (1999), ‘Enterprise discourse and executive talk: Stories that destabilize the company’, Transactions, 24, 11–22. www​ Pearlstein, S. (2002), ‘Debating the Enron effect’, accessed 1 August 2018 at https://​ .washingtonpost​.com/​archive/​politics/​2002/​02/​17/​debating​-the​-enron​-effect/​8bed9204​-99d0​-47c2​ -ad26​-aeae694596a2/​?utm​_term​=​.549da8614d9b. Prebble, L. (2009), ENRON, Dramatists Play Service Inc. Roberts, J. (2004), ‘Enron traders caught on tape’, accessed 18 May 2018 at https://​www​.cbsnews​.com/​ news/​enron​-traders​-caught​-on​-tape/​. Schoenberger, E. (1997), The Cultural Crisis of the Firm, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Smith, A. (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Sutton, R. (2011), ‘How a few bad apples ruin everything’, accessed 1 August 2018 at https://​www​.wsj​ .com/​articles/​SB10001424​05297020349970​4576622550325233260. Swartz, M. (2018), ‘Seventeen years after the Enron scandal, Jeff Skilling returns’, accessed 14 January 2019 at https://​www​.texasmonthly​.com/​news/​jeff​-skilling​-enron​-return/​. Swartz, M. and S. Watkins (2003), Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, New York: Doubleday. Thompson, T. (2018), ‘UT Theatre and Dance challenges its audience with “Enron” and its all-women www​ .dailytexanonline​ .com/​ 2018/​ 02/​ 19/​ ut​ and non-binary cast’, accessed 18 May 2018 at http://​ -theatre​-and​-dance​-challenges​-its​-audience​-with​-‘enron’​-and​-its​-all​-women​-and​-non. United States v. Jeffery K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay (2006), Cr. No. H-04-CR-025SS, S.D. Texas (copies of transcripts on file with author). Walenta, J. (2009), ‘Corporate performances in space: Situating fraud in the Enron Case’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of British Columbia.

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12. Framing essay: the diversity of labour Katharine McKinnon

There are twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves. I am ready to start tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, but it must be on these terms or none at all. (Samuel Parnell 1840, cited by Atkinson 2017)

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the meanings of work in a diverse economy. Conventional accounts of work tend to focus on paid, or waged labour and explore the conditions under which individuals earn an income. In a diverse economy, however, explicit recognition is given to the many different kinds of labour, in addition to paid labour, that people do to sustain themselves and each other: the work of maintaining a household, of subsistence agriculture, the after-hours volunteering at schools and churches and community, and the work of being with and caring for each other. In the diverse economy it becomes important to attend not only to the tasks that earn a wage, but to all the activities people undertake to sustain life, including those that contribute to material needs (for food, shelter and clothing) and those that contribute to social, cultural, emotional and spiritual needs. In other words, work includes all the things people do to secure the necessities of life and maintain households and communities. The concern to attend not just to how people create an income, but to how they attend to the other necessities of life, has a long history. One important example is the eight hour day movement that originated with Robert Owen’s efforts to create humane conditions of labour for children, women and men in the textile mills of England in the early 1800s, where the brutalities of the industrial revolution were keenly felt. Samuel Parnell, quoted above, was one of the first recorded individuals to succeed in negotiating an eight hour working day.1 On board a ship bound for New Zealand in 1840, he took advantage of the shortage of skilled labour in the new colony to negotiate a building contract that reflected a radical new idea of the time: that humane working conditions should enable a balance between the time spent earning a wage, and the time spent for other things in life: rest, recreation, family, and household chores. Coming from London, where the norm was closer to a 10–12 hour working day Parnell’s suggestion indicates one reason why so many young women and men took the opportunity of emigration to the colonies – to break with many of the entrenched norms of British life (Wright 2016). In the following century the eight hour working day became a global norm, although it took nearly 80 years. It was not till 1919 that the newly formed International Labour Organization put the eight hour working day on the agenda of its first meetings in 1919, establishing the ‘Hours of Work (Industry) Convention’, since ratified by 52 nations (ILO 2019). The idea that the waged working day ought to be structured around an equal share of time for labour, recreation and rest, brought to the fore the idea that a person’s livelihood 116 Katharine McKinnon - 9781788119962 07:59:57PM

Framing essay: the diversity of labour  117 ought not to threaten their quality of life. This concern underpins ongoing battles to ensure that there is a minimum wage that guarantees an income sufficient to live on, that children ought not to be made to work, and that women should receive wages equal to their male counterparts and have the opportunities to undertake the same kind of work (an issue explored further by Clement-Couzner, Chapter 15 in this volume). At the same time, the legacy of the eight–eight–eight formulation in contemporary times has come to represent something of a conundrum. Feminist economists have pointed out that the ‘eight hours recreation’ is often not a time of rest for women as they continue to undertake the lion’s share of unpaid household work: cooking, cleaning, laundry and childcare, drastically diminishing the time available for ‘recreation’. For white collar professionals, new technologies have supported the increasing spillover of work into ‘rest and recreation’ time as smart phones and other devices permit a 24 hour a day flow of emails and financial information. For those with low wages and contractual insecurity, working several jobs is often the norm, and in cities where housing is unaffordable this can mean travelling for hours to reach those jobs. For many, in both majority and minority world worksites, working hours far exceed the eight hour day. Consequently, time available for rest, recreation or ‘what little things they want for themselves’ (Parnell 1840) is severely limited for many people. A healthy balance between the time given to paid work and to other things in life remains a contemporary concern, with Owen’s triple eight now rendered as concern for ‘work–life balance’, or for a healthy ‘work–life blend’. A diverse economies approach offers a systematic way to unravel what working lives consist of by taking into account not only the waged labour that was the crux of the eight hour working day campaign, but also the unpaid labour that sustains us. How the ‘blend’ of paid and unpaid labour, rest and recreation plays out in one’s life takes shape under a range of social, political and material conditions. Along with the many different ways of supporting a livelihood, there are a range of ways to structure working life and to compensate people for the work that they do. In this chapter I offer an introduction to diverse economies thinking about labour. I begin in the second section with a discussion of what constitutes ‘work’ in a diverse economy, highlighting the recognition given to the way that livelihoods are pieced together from a multitude of different interdependent forms of labour.2 In the third section, I discuss how different kinds of work are classified in the diverse economies framework, and draw on the legacy of Marxist thought in drawing attention to the social and political conditions of work and the different ways in which labour is remunerated. In the fourth section, I turn to the role that feminist scholarship has played in prompting critical consideration of how some kinds of work are valued by mainstream discourses, while others are invisible. Attending to the gendered economy exposes the crucial role played by what is sometimes called ‘reproductive labour’. Finally, I turn to the ways that labour takes shape through unequal power relations and introduce the thinking strategies that diverse economies scholarship utilizes to move beyond simply exposing such inequalities. The ultimate concern is not just to account for the myriad stuff that must be done for survival, but to think through what must be done in order to survive well, as individuals, as families, and as communities with human and non-human planetary others.

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DIVERSE AND INTERDEPENDENT FORMS OF LABOUR In contemporary lexicon ‘work’ is commonly understood as something that exists in opposition to something else called ‘leisure’ (or in the eight–eight–eight formulation, time of ‘rest and recreation’). What counts as work in most government policy and mainstream economics is in keeping with the information that is entered into the official System of National Accounts (SNA) that is used to calculate GDP and GNP.3 These accounts largely ignore the significance of non-market or unpaid activities in assuring prosperity and well-being for communities and nations. A considerable body of feminist scholarship has highlighted the enormous importance of the social and informal economy in securing livelihoods, focusing particularly on the role played by the invisible work of women in the household (Federici 2012; Folbre 2006; Waring 1989). A key foundation of the diverse economies literature has also been the recognition of the enormous contribution made to economies by household labour, building on the foundational recognition that most prevalent, over any other kind of work, is ‘the unpaid work that is conducted in the household, the family and the neighbourhood, or the wider community’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 62). While Owen’s eight hour working day began and ended within a discrete time frame, the two stories below elaborate contrasting examples of what a fuller account of an average working day might look like: It’s a normal Tuesday morning. James gets up wearily out of bed. He prepares breakfast and school lunches for three children, cajoles them into their school uniforms and herds them out into the car. He leaves them at the school gate with a hug and kiss each, and continues on to the train station. On the train he catches up with his neighbours, tries to read a document, and conducts an interview with a local radio station that is interested in the outcomes of his recent research on the cooling effects of trees on suburban streets. Arriving in the city he dashes to his office, deals with a swathe of incoming emails, has a meeting with his research team, takes a working lunch with a colleague during which they talk through recent tension in the office around the move to a new building on campus. Back in his office he does some last minute preparation on his lecture, then he heads out to teach class for two hours. After class he runs for the next train home. At home his partner is already there having picked up the kids, and while he helps with final dinner preparations he talks through his day, discussing an aspect of his teaching that didn’t go so well and getting ideas on how to work through it, while listening to his family’s stories from the day, sharing the triumphs and disappointments. Once the children are in bed, he settles next to his partner on the couch, both of them on laptops catching up on tasks left undone during the working day while commiserating with one another about how nice it would be to relax by watching TV and planning a picnic outing for the weekend around the obligation to contribute to a working bee4 at the school. The day begins for Emi before the sun comes up. Everyone else sleeps on while she starts a fire in the hearth and sets the rice to cook. While it cooks she fetches water from one of the two communal taps in the village. As she prepares breakfast, her five children, husband and parents-in-law wake and begin to get ready for the day. She sets her eldest daughter to feed the chickens, her son to water the small plot of vegetables next to the house, while the younger children finish their homework. Once everyone has eaten she sends her older children to walk to school and quickly washes the clothes in the tub by the back door, deposits her youngest child in the care of a neighbour and sets off with her husband to walk half an hour to the fields. Today they will work together to clear the weeds from under the cashew trees, clearing the ground in preparation for the upcoming harvest. When the sun is at its highest the couple return home for lunch, and while her husband rests Emi sets up her loom and continues to work on a weaving she hopes will fetch a good price at market when it is completed. As she works she watches over her youngest who has returned home, and chats with the neighbour who has come over to socialize. Later she will tend the vegetable plot, feed the pigs, and start to prepare the evening meal. After dinner she will take a walk to visit a friend, and together they will go to attend a meeting with others in the sellers’ cooperative to discuss plans for the upcoming harvest

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Framing essay: the diversity of labour  119 and the proposal that families should consider processing a proportion of the crop in order to try to get a better price.

These two stories, one from the minority world, the other from the majority word, tell of the tasks required to piece together daily life and construct a livelihood. They provide a snapshot of how a livelihood is made up of the work done to provide an income (spilling out beyond the official ‘working day’), along with all the accompanying tasks of caring for family, animals, crops and colleagues. These stories are representative of the intermingled working lives that the majority of people lead. In common usage the question ‘what work do you do?’ tends only to refer to paid labour: the time spent in the office working for a wage, the time spent in the fields preparing a crop that will be sold for cash. But in a diverse economy, all of the tasks that we do to provide for ourselves, our families and our communities count as work. Diverse economies scholarship takes an interest in uncovering this diversity in relation to the many forms of work that sustain people in particular places. It also seeks to understand the myriad sorts of labour in which individuals participate in the course of a day, a year or a lifetime. These include: caring for children, preparing food and transport, doing your ‘paid’ work after hours (and beyond the time you are officially paid for), providing emotional support to family members, friends and colleagues, planning ahead for the tasks that need to be achieved, managing the family labour force, maintaining crops for both sale and subsistence, caring for animals, and volunteering for neighbourhood organizations and institutions. James’ and Emi’s working days involve all of these tasks, undertaken as part of a many layered livelihood that meets the combined needs of themselves as individuals, their families and their communities. But if all these things count as work, where does work begin and end? What happens to Owen’s eight hours of recreation, of the ‘life’ part of a work–life balance? Common definitions of work still rely on drawing a distinction between what is work and what is leisure. These are typified in debates around how to achieve ‘work–life balance’ that seem to assume that ‘work’, whether within or beyond the home, is something distinct from ‘life’. This definition owes a debt to Margaret Reid’s 1934 book Economics of Household Production which drew the distinction based on whether a third person could be paid to do the unpaid activity of a household member. Thus cooking, cleaning, and child care all classify as ‘work’ activities. Ironmonger (1996) uses Reid’s definitions of work and leisure as the foundation for redefining non-remunerated household tasks as ‘work’ that should (and can) be taken into account in measures of the value of the household economy. The danger of using Reid’s definition of work is that it fails to recognize the value of types of work that are not, and may never be, given monetary compensation but are crucial contributions to sustaining households and communities. Even more, there is the risk that pleasure or joy itself must be seen as divorced from productive work. If joy or pleasure is all that an activity produces does that mean it in no way counts as work? To parent a child with loving kindness in the midst of tears and tantrums and childish irrationality takes hard work, and while it is work that can be done by someone who is being paid to care for the child there is no remuneration for the depth of emotional investment involved. The care work required in the average office or factory also goes unacknowledged. No one is paid to take their share of the daily lunchroom clean up, or to intuit the well-being of the machinery on the steelwork factory floor, or to ask a colleague ‘Are you OK?’ (as Australians are encouraged to do annually during mental health awareness week) and attend to the response with the empathy that

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120  The handbook of diverse economies can make the difference when someone is suffering. These daily acts of care in the workplace and in the home are, however, crucial to the ongoing functioning of the economy, reliant as it is on working machinery, cordial social relationships in the workplace, and the mental and emotional capacity of individuals to be ‘productive’. The diverse work tasks that individuals undertake in the course of a given day are interdependent. Work is never conducted in isolation. Livelihoods are built in and through relationships with others: the family and community members with whom the benefits of work are shared; the colleagues and companions who work alongside each other; the institutions and systems that structure working lives; and the planetary companions who work to maintain ecologies and other Earth systems upon which humans and other species rely. As fundamentally embedded in social and ecological relations, different forms of work are also given different meanings. Yet it is waged labour (the jobs of the ‘jobs and growth’ mantra) that dominates the discussion of work. Why this is the case is the topic of the next section.

THE CONDITIONS OF REMUNERATION The performance of labour initiates a change of state both in the body that exerts labour and in the object of that labour – a transaction thus occurs that may or may not be met with a payment of some kind. Labour transactions can be differentiated by who has the power to control levels of compensation and decide what happens to the products of labour. When labour is remunerated with a monetary payment from an employer who has set up the conditions under which labour is performed it is usually described as waged labour. While not all paid labour is waged labour and not all labour transactions are remunerated in monetary form, the waged labour transaction has been a huge focus of study and struggle. This is perhaps because the fight for decent working conditions and decent pay in return for labour has, for centuries, shaped what it means to work in humane ways for centuries. Werner and Lim (2016) note that these debates can be traced back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle about the responsibility of the state to enable reasonable incomes to the poor, and subsequently to medieval scholarship on the importance of ensuring a ‘just wage’. Campaigns to secure a living wage for workers have spanned generations since the industrial revolution, with successive movements fighting to guarantee that wage levels be set so as to permit remuneration ‘sufficient to maintain decently the labourer’ (Ryan 1912, p. 82). This vast literature shares a thread of concern for the livelihoods of the poor as a societal responsibility. But it is in the legacy of Marxist thought that a concern for questions of social justice began to expand beyond just the question of fair wages. The focus on how labour transactions are embedded in broader social conditions owes a great deal to Marxist thought. This tradition contrasts with that of neoclassical economics which assumes that work is nothing more than the tasks we perform in order to be paid. The neoclassical approach posits all workers as ‘rational’ utility maximizing individuals whose decision making around whether to work or not is based upon their judgement of whether the wages earned are worth the cost to decreased leisure time (Spencer 2006). Marxist political economy offers a very different view and an important corrective to a neoclassical tendency to empty the cultural, social and political significance of work. Marx provided an important foundation for recognizing the breadth of significance that work has in human lives and communities. He defined labour as:

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Framing essay: the diversity of labour  121 First of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. (Marx 1976, p. 282)

Marx focused on the labour process, which for him included (1) purposeful activity, that is, work itself; (2) the object on which that work is performed; and (3) the instruments of that work (Marx 1976, p. 283). Purposeful activity involved the ‘expenditure’ of the worker’s ‘vital force’ (Marx 1976, p. 296) which soaks through the materials produced. Marx tracked the source of capitalist profit to the surplus labour ‘extracted’ from workers as part of the labour contract in which a worker agrees to work for an employer for a specified time period in return for a wage (see Cameron, Chapter 2 in this volume). In his view, it is the ‘vital force’ of labour that creates new wealth.5 In return for a subsistence wage, workers produce commodities that, when sold, realize the surplus value they have produced over and above the value of their wage payment. Such transactions give rise to the capitalist’s private profit fund and are not automatically an injustice if the worker was able to freely sell his or her labour power and negotiate fair payment. The sale of labour to procure a subsistence wage, however, is predicated upon the separation of workers from any other means of survival – such as access to land or other natural resources. The injustice thus lies in the fact that workers have no choice but to sell their labour power, rather than working for themselves as artisans or farmers, and wider social and political circumstances mean they are blocked from negotiating a fair exchange. With the rise of capitalist industrialization and the destruction of agrarian lifeways, Marx identified this as a systematic alienation of labour. The actions of working and producing became delinked from the products of that work. Rather than having a stake in the things that are produced, and a sense of ownership of them, the worker simply sells their capacity to labour, their labour power, in units of time. Marx recognized, however, that work holds more than just the value of the time spent. The intentionality behind an ‘expenditure of vital force’ encompasses creative vision, passionate investment, and ultimately care – even if these investments of passion or care are provided within the constraints of an unfair exchange (see Dombroski’s discussion of homines curans in Chapter 16 in this volume). Thus the alienation that workers suffer is not just alienation from the materials of labour but from what Marx described as the purposefulness that defines humanity’s ‘species-being’, resulting in a dehumanization of work (Roelvink 2013). Marx’s powerful analysis of the wage labour transaction should not eclipse the fact that the majority of the world’s population are not involved in this kind of exchange. And even if they are, they may also be involved in other transactions associated with, for example, self-employed labour, cooperative, reciprocal, indentured, and bartered labour. In each case the nature of payment is different (see Table 1.2 in Chapter 1 in this volume). Unpaid labour (including housework, family care, neighbourhood work, volunteering, self-provisioning labour and slave labour) is compensated in many different, non-monetized, ways. From a diverse economies perspective it is important to pay attention to the multiple ways in which work is compensated, realizing that labour returns benefits that may take the form of cash exchanges, material commodities, a good meal, love and appreciation, pride or a sense of self-worth. It is the understanding that the ‘necessities of life’ include a great deal more than money, and that a range of diverse forms of work make livelihoods, that is important in a diverse economies framework. This is an insight that feminists have championed in their efforts to see unpaid work in the household recognized and valued.

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GENDER, WORK AND THE LEGACIES OF CAPITALOCENTRISM One key area that has enabled a critical rethinking of the meaning of work and the value that it holds, is in the attention given to household work and the gendering of labour. To differing degrees all economies are gendered, and around the world this means that women take on more of the work of maintaining households, caring for children and the elderly. They are usually paid less than men and overrepresented in lower paid professions such as professional child care, teaching and nursing. Feminist approaches to addressing this imbalance between women and men analyse the dynamics of ‘reproductive labour’ and challenge the limited value that ‘women’s work’ is accorded. Reproductive labour is commonly defined as the work associated with tasks of reproducing human life, building and maintaining the workforce that is needed to ensure a continuity of material production. Some feminists, such as Silvia Federici (2012), have argued that women should be paid for the reproductive work they perform. The International Wages for Housework campaign that began in Italy in the early 1970s and spread to the USA in the 1980s sought payment from the state for the reproductive work done by women in the home: The women of the world are serving notice. We clean your homes and factories. We raise the next generation of workers for you. Whatever else we may do, we are the housewives of the world. In return for our work, you have only asked us to work harder. We are serving notice to you that we intend to be paid for the work we do. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every painful childbirth, every indecent assault, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, then we will simply refuse to work any longer. (New York Wages for Housework Committee n.d.)

Taking a page out of the struggle for better pay and conditions for waged workers, feminist activists positioned women’s work in a ‘capitalist system’. Unpaid reproductive labour in the household was understood to ultimately be a ‘free gift’ to capitalism that was supplying the foundations for productive, profit making work. Demands were made upon the state to make this visible by paying women for their domestic labour. The Wages for Housework campaign articulated a capitalocentric vision of a world in which ‘all the activities necessary for the reproduction of human life – from housework to subsistence agriculture, to the production of culture and care for the environment’ (Federici et al. 2012, p. 55) were seen to be reproducing capitalism. Ultimately, this strategy reinforced the idea that even these important activities are subsumed within a capitalist system, and that the only real measure of value is a financial measure. To an extent, many minority world nations effectively offer payment for domestic work via child endowment payments, child care allowances, carers’ payments and so on. These initiatives are putting a price of sorts on domestic work, as does the contracting out of house cleaning services or food deliveries.6 The focus on monetary values also characterizes efforts to address the undervaluing of women’s work by encouraging women to step outside of the home, join the ‘workforce’ and become entrepreneurs (Chant and Sweetman 2012; Kabeer 2015). From a diverse economies perspective, however, the effort to offer a uniform account of and compensation for reproductive labour (and many other forms of unpaid labour) in purely monetary form is problematic. The focus on monetary compensation can risk reducing or denying the importance of so many types of work that do not accrue direct financial benefit in the form of money, yet are essential to the ability of households and communities to survive, and to thrive. In the case of reciprocal labour, for example, that is mobilized in contemporary ‘time bank’ initiatives, the

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Framing essay: the diversity of labour  123 values of interdependency and mutual exchange are highlighted (see Chapter 26 by Diprose and Chapter 18 by Gibson this volume). The monetary focus also has the potential to distract from an understanding of the interrelatedness that is core to both the overlapping work activities with which we build a livelihood, and the complex social relations through which work is undertaken. These complex relations are especially evident in the case of societies and communities who rely much less on wage labour as the foundation of daily survival. As Carnegie et al. (2019) discovered in their work in the Pacific, the focus on monetary compensation misses the nuances of different place-based economic practices in which the interrelatedness of different kinds of work and the sociality of labour are vital to everyone’s well-being. Their research explored how women and men in Fiji and the Solomon Islands construct their livelihoods, and what vision of gender equity local people might pursue around that. What they found was that this vision of gender equity was quite different from that celebrated by the Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) agenda within international aid. The so-called WEE approach foregrounds the importance of supporting women’s independent economic agency through increasing household earnings. It is predicated upon a narrow definition of development based on expanding the formal sector and increasing GDP, and a limited understanding of economic empowerment as supporting women in their efforts to gain formal employment and establish new enterprises (Carnegie et al. 2019; McKinnon et al. 2016). These aims, while admirable, are not well suited to the many communities in which informal and subsistence labour is the mainstay of local economies, and participation in the social economy is vital to gendered identity and community life. In the Pacific, for example, only a minority of people engaged in waged work. People rely for their livelihoods on the gifts of time, money or material goods that flow within and across to wider family and community networks (including extended family, church and village). A focus on achieving women’s economic empowerment only through the formal or cash economy addresses only a small part of the practices that sustain these communities. By focusing on individual equality and individual income over and above the diversity and interdependencies embedded in local economies, the WEE approach may even damage people’s abilities to continue to contribute to community life. The point is that if we do not attend to the existing diversity of labour and understand how it contributes to people’s livelihoods and their ability not only to survive, but to thrive, then these efforts to improve women’s well-being may actually end up causing harm.

POWER AND THE POSSIBILITY TO RECONFIGURE WORK The ability to shape the conditions of their working lives in order to both survive and thrive differs greatly for people in different places, and in different sectors of society. For many people, the conditions of their working lives are determined by large and powerful conglomerates which create conditions of work that are exploitative, even abusive. Examples of this exist across the global production networks for electronics, white goods and fashion, with big brands making profits on the back of goods produced by workers who are not paid a living wage, in places where labour protection laws are weak and workers have limited means to seek better working conditions. In Myanmar, for example, state labour laws and weak enforcement norms help to create conditions under which employers in the garment industry hire 14-year-old girls, take possession of their ID cards, and make them work 12 hour days

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124  The handbook of diverse economies (Gardener and Burnley 2015). At the same time, the production targets set by the big brands and the profit margins they insist upon create pressure on local manufacturers, contributing to dynamics of exploitation. Examples such as these, where employers are effectively creating conditions of bonded labour, are not uncommon across both the majority and minority worlds. Such exploitative forms of labour are part of the diverse economy that shaped our contemporary world, but these are not forms that help communities either to survive or to thrive. The question then becomes, what can be done about it? Speaking out about contemporary labour exploitation and abuse is an important task that has been taken up by many researchers, international government agencies and non-government organizations. In many cases, this work focuses on revealing the ways that such cases of exploitation are embedded within global capitalist systems of production conjoined with post-colonial power dynamics. It is difficult to identify a path forward beyond critique when the analysis is captured by a ‘strong theory’ approach and based in a capitalocentric understanding of the dynamics of globalization. From these perspectives there is little that can be done to challenge or disrupt the power held by global elites. Diverse economies takes scholarship in a different direction and utilizes a different understanding of power, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault: not as something that is held only by the powerful (‘power over’), but something that is enacted and distributed, formed in and through everyday practices and relations (‘power to’). Thus, diverse economies scholarship complements critical understandings of the plight of workers by directing attention towards the possibilities that emerge when economic diversity and decentred subjects are acknowledged. Highlighting examples of diversity that demonstrate a power to act, this scholarship makes visible the conditions of possibility that already exist. In contrast to more structural Marxist class analyses, the post-structural stance of diverse economies highlights the ways that individuals occupy several, sometimes conflicting, often overlapping economic subject positions in multiple class processes across the different forms of livelihood in which they are engaged (see Healy, Özselçuk and Madra’s discussion of subjectivity in Chapter 43, and Cameron’s discussion of enterprise in Chapter 2 in this volume). Multiple forms of subjectivity allow for different degrees to which individuals have the power to determine the structure of their work. It is possible simultaneously to be a waged labourer in the mines, an investor with a financial portfolio, a landlord, an unpaid worker in the household and a volunteer labourer at the local bowls club, with accompanying social signification and political allegiances that shift accordingly over the course of any given day/week (see Gibson-Graham 2006). And as subjectivities shift and overlap, so too do relations of power. Even enterprises which appear to be thoroughly embedded in capitalist market relations may introduce labour structures very different to the systems of surplus appropriation usually associated with capitalist firms. Worker-owned enterprises may still operate as profit oriented businesses engaged in global markets, while situating workers in a range of different ways within those enterprises. Some have introduced a flat rate of pay, from workers on the factory floor to accountants and managers, with surplus being distributed evenly across the workforce. Others maintain a hierarchical pay scale, with democratic decision making around how remuneration rates should differ for work of different skill levels (see Azzellini and Ness 2011). The recognition that people have multiple coexisting class identities and may be differently empowered to negotiate the conditions of their relations of production with each one of those, also opens up the possibility that these relations need not be fixed, that they themselves may

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Framing essay: the diversity of labour  125 be reimagined and reconfigured (and that this is so even within the confines of a capitalist enterprise). The growing number of worker-owned enterprises are one example of the ways individuals and collectives are able to take advantage of global labour dynamics in unexpected ways, bending the systems to benefit their communities (see Chapter 3 by Safri and Chapter 4 by Heras and Vieta in this volume). To understand that even these small-scale, localized examples have global significance requires that we learn to think differently about the power of global capital and a positioning of workers as small players. Practices that belong to local actors and are situated in place are too easily trivialized by a language of scale which assumes that ‘global’ actors are always more powerful than ‘small-scale’ and ‘local’ actors. The calculations by Safri and Graham (2010) of the economic contributions of the global household demonstrate that something that is often missed: the dispersed, localized practices of ‘small-scale’ actors add up to something much larger. Global household population constitutes 18 per cent of world population, and the value of gross global household product in 2015 is approximately US$11 trillion, a significant quantum of social wealth (Safri 2016). It is acknowledged that not all labourers are able to take action to reconfigure the conditions of their work. While some groups of people are able to negotiate multiple class identities in the construction of a livelihood, others have fewer openings for shaping the circumstances of their working lives. In the interests of creating more openings, diverse economies scholarship includes recognition of slavery, indentured labour, and forms of paid labour that are unprotected and exploitative and researches how economic transformation is possible and has taken or is taking place (see, for example, Gibson et al. 2001; Rio 2000; van der Veen 2000; Pavlovskaya, Chapter 13 in this volume). By providing a fuller account of forms of work and labour, diverse economies researchers lay the foundation for examining which of these diverse forms enact the kind of working lives we might want to have, and which, therefore, we should seek to foster and proliferate.

MOVING FORWARD: WORK AS THE FOUNDATION FOR SURVIVING WELL TOGETHER It was in the examination of the multivalent nature of alienation under capitalist production that the political moment emerges for Marx, and with it the seed of future change and revolution that must come. For diverse economies there is also a political moment, where it is no longer enough to lay out the diversity of economic practices in the world and to turn instead towards outlining what we wish to move towards and how we might do that – but this latter move is the project of community economies scholarship. It is the project then of community economies thinkers to consider how different forms of labour contribute to, or detract from (or are indifferent to) efforts to build and sustain ourselves, as individuals, households and communities together with our human and non-human planetary companions. Diverse economies approaches seek to rethink what an economy is, and within this to rethink what work and labour consist of. This rethinking makes it possible to see and value all the diverse kinds of work that women and men do, and how important the interrelationships of different domains are in creating livelihoods. While a diverse economies take on labour provides an expanded scope of what counts, it does not distinguish between the forms of work that may be desirable and the forms that may be harmful. Slave labour and precarious labour

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126  The handbook of diverse economies are part of a diverse economy, alongside wage labour and unpaid labour. Diverse economies accounts seek to unravel the fullest set of possibilities for how work is constructed. While there is a politics in this project of revealing diversity, its true value lies in the foundations it sets for the next step. Thus understanding the potential for certain labour practices (and by extension certain economic formations) to do harm in a given place, or for a given group of people, provides the impetus to look for which existing practices offer more nurture. At a moment when there is increasing concern for the future of work in an age of rapidly expanding artificial intelligence capability, labour-replacing technologies, increasing precarity, an ageing population, and the dawning realization that vast sections of the population may never be able to find waged work (Ferguson 2015), the future shape of labour remains an open question. Given these emerging concerns about the shape of work into the future, how can a shift to community economies thinking contribute to an understanding of and an engagement with the dynamics of labour? A starting point rests in recognition of the kinds of community that community economies scholarship is focused upon. From a community economies perspective, the communities in which we live comprise not only proximate human others, living nearby or engaged in direct daily relationships. The ‘community’ of the community economies approach also comprises distant others, the much broader reach of those we are connected to through networks of communication, trade and exchange, and parallel and overlapping matters of concern. And, crucially, the community also encompasses the non-human others who are equally at stake in shared lives and livelihoods (see Barron and Hess, Chapter 17 in this volume). An emergent community economy of labour must therefore attend to the interconnected work of all this broad network of community members. This requires a search for a recalibration of labour towards what counts not in terms of monetary remuneration, but in terms of the tasks required to provide for a ‘good life’ together: pointing towards a feminist reconceptualization of work that moves us beyond an oppositional binary of ‘life’ and ‘work’, and thus the preoccupation with trying to achieve work–life balance or providing support for the stuff of life (such as child care) so that more people (i.e. mothers) can enter the realm of ‘productive’ work, narrowly defined as the kind of activity that produces financially legible use-value. When work is defined as the intentional activity that creates our ability to survive well (and to thrive) together (self and others of human and non-human, individual and collective varieties), then the intermingling of life, livelihoods and labour can be seen in a much more holistic way. This places before us the imperative to learn from the mixed-up multiplicity of work that characterizes ‘women’s work’ and from the many Others whose integrative modes of conducting livelihoods are forms of wisdom to be explored.

NOTES 1. Parnell took up the slogan of Robert Owen, a leading campaigner for humane working conditions and the eight hour day in Britain in the early 1800s, and in his successful negotiation of an eight hour working day he anticipated many such similar efforts around the world. However, it would be nearly 70 years before the eight hour day first became enshrined in national law when Uruguay introduced legislation regulating for an eight hour day in 1915. 2. The terms work and labour are used interchangeably in this chapter.

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Framing essay: the diversity of labour  127 3. In official discourse the workforce refers to the number of people actually working (that is, doing paid work in the last week in the formal economy) while the labour force is the number of persons actually working or willing to work. The latter includes unemployed people who want paid work. 4. A ‘working bee’ is a term for when a group gathers to do volunteer work together. This could take place at a community institution (such as the local primary school or community centre) or a private home. 5. Marx identified this capacity with ‘productive’ labour, i.e. labour that expands the store of wealth of a society. He distinguished it from the ‘unproductive’ labour that does not expand value but is expended on realizing this value (via marketing, accountancy, advertising, banking, etc.) or using/ distributing it in social, cultural and household expenditure that produces use-values that support society. This accounting distinction has had a regrettable political history (see Gibson-Graham et al. 2000). 6. It is worth noting that outsourced domestic labour is mostly done by women (child care workers, cleaners and housekeepers) who also maintain responsibility for these duties (unpaid) in their own households, thus doubling their care labour. Domestic workers may also be part of global labour chains of women from majority world nations who accept poor working conditions, usually a form of indentured labour, in return for the possibility to send remittances to support families at home (see Gibson et al. 2001).

REFERENCES Atkinson, N. (2017), ‘Samuel Parnell: Biography’, NZ Ministry for Culture and Heritage, accessed 25 July 2019 at https://​nzhistory​.govt​.nz/​people/​samuel​-parnell. Azzellini, D. and I. Ness (2011), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, New York: Haymarket Books. Carnegie, M., K. McKinnon and K. Gibson (2019), ‘Creating community-based indicators of gender equity: A methodology’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Chant, S. and C. Sweetman (2012), ‘Fixing women or fixing the world? “Smart economics”, efficiency approaches, and gender equality in development’, Gender & Development, 20 (3), 517–29. Federici, S. (2012), Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Federici, S., L. Rudman and M. Rein (2012), ‘The means of reproduction’, Race, Poverty & the Environment, 19 (2), 55–9. Ferguson, J. (2015), Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Folbre, N. (2006), ‘Measuring care: Gender, empowerment, and the care economy’, Journal of Human Development, 7 (2), 183–99. Gardener, D. and J. Burnley (2015), ‘Made in Myanmar: Entrenched poverty or decent jobs for garment workers?’, Oxfam Briefing Papers no. 209, accessed 25 July 2019 at https://​www​.oxfam​.org/​sites/​ www​.oxfam​.org/​files/​file​_attachments/​bp209​-made​-in​-myanmar​-garment​-workers​-091215​-summ​ -en​.pdf. Gibson, K., L. Law and D. McKay (2001), ‘Beyond heroes and victims: Filipina contract migrants, economic activism and class transformations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (3), 365–86. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., S. Resnick and R. Wolff (eds) (2000), Class and Its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ILO (2019), ‘Ratifications of ILO Conventions: Ratifications by Convention’, accessed 26 July 2019 at https://​www​.ilo​.org/​dyn/​normlex/​en/​f​?p​=​1000:​11300:​0:​:​NO:​11300:​P11300​_INSTRUMENT​_ID:​ 312146. Ironmonger, D. (1996), ‘Counting outputs, capital inputs and caring labor: Estimating gross household product’, Feminist Economics, 2 (3), 37–64. Kabeer, N. (2015), ‘Tracking the gender politics of the Millennium Development Goals: Struggles for interpretive power in the international development agenda’, Third World Quarterly, 36 (2), 377–95.

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128  The handbook of diverse economies Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. McKinnon, K., M. Carnegie, K. Gibson and C. Rowland (2016), ‘Gender equality and economic empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: A place-based approach’, Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (10), 1376–91. New York Wages for Housework Committee (n.d.), ‘Wages for housework: Notice to all governments’, accessed 30 July 2019 at http://​bcrw​.barnard​.edu/​archive/​workforce/​Wages​_for​_Housework​.pdf. Reid, M.J. (1934), Economics of Household Production, Madison, WI: John Wiley & Sons. Rio, C.M. (2000), ‘“This job has no end”: African American domestic workers and class becoming’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S.A. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (eds), Class and Its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 23–46. Roelvink, G. (2013), ‘Rethinking species-being in the Anthropocene’, Rethinking Marxism, 25 (1), 52–69. Ryan, J. (1912), A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects, London: Macmillan. Safri, M. (2016), ‘Techniques of the global household: A political economy approach’, in R. Bittner and E. Krasny (eds), In Reserve: The Household! Historic Models and Contemporary Positions from the Bauhaus, Leipzig: Spector Books. Safri, M. and J. Graham (2010), ‘The global household: Toward a feminist postcapitalist international political economy’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 36 (1), 99–125. Spencer, D.A. (2006), ‘Work for all those who want it? Why the neoclassical labour supply curve is an inappropriate foundation for the theory of employment and unemployment’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 30 (3), 459–72. van der Veen, M. (2000), ‘Beyond slavery and capitalism: Producing class difference in the sex industry’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S.A. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (eds), Class and Its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 121–42. Waring, M. (1989), If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, London: Macmillan. Werner, A. and M. Lim (2016), ‘The ethics of the living wage: A review and research agenda’, Journal of Business Ethics, 137 (3), 433–47. Wright, C. (2016), We Are the Rebels: The Women and Men Who Made Eureka, Melbourne: Text Publishing Company.

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13. Precarious labour: Russia’s ‘other’ transition Marianna Pavlovskaya

INTRODUCTION The end of state socialism and the transition to a market economy at the turn of the twenty-first century have powerfully redefined the economic landscapes in Russia and other former socialist states. The transition, informed by neoliberal ideology, was designed to reset Russia on the path of democracy and prosperity that had been interrupted by a ‘deviant’ socialist system (Winiecki 1988). It was advocated by reformers as a somewhat painful but fully worthwhile effort to return to the family of ‘normal’ and ‘civilized’ countries. Neoliberal ideology celebrates individual liberty and prosperity, and presumes that private property, the foundation of capitalist economic relations, is the only means to free the economy from state control (Friedman 1982 [1962]). Under its influence reformers aimed to quickly privatize the enormous assets of the Soviet state in order to reduce state control of the economy and jump start private entrepreneurial development. The assumption was that other social and economic realms such as state welfare, informal livelihoods and domestic economies would successfully adjust to capitalist markets or wither away once made irrelevant by market efficiencies (Sachs 1995). A major outcome of the structural adjustment policy known as ‘shock therapy’ has been widespread and persistent poverty. For three decades now, the capitalist economy has consistently failed to provide stable livelihoods in Russia. Large populations of the post-Soviet poor, as well as the thin middle class, have been forced to support themselves through various forms of precarious work involving short-term, insecure, low-paid, unregulated and often off-the-books employment.1 The case of Russia demonstrates the effects of neoliberal policies with particular clarity. Neither poverty nor precarious labour existed in the Soviet past, but their effect on a society that went from guaranteed full employment to a barely regulated labour market may be indicative of a likely global neoliberal future unless challenged by researchers, activists, politicians, policymakers and, as ever, people themselves. In this chapter I explore the way that temporary labour migration became a livelihood strategy for the many increasingly precarious workers. I speculate on how this strategy might be a means to resist capitalism by offering political possibilities yet to be recognized.

THE ‘OTHER’ TRANSITION: THE PRODUCTION OF POVERTY The economic transition that began in Russia in the early 1990s was conceptualized by the Russian government and its Western consultants as a unidirectional shift from state socialism to capitalism. Given that there simply was no private property in the former Soviet Union, the starting point for transition was clear: the fully nationalized economy controlled by the state. Likewise, the endpoint was similarly clear: a fully privatized and deregulated market 129 Marianna Pavlovskaya - 9781788119962 08:00:03PM

130  The handbook of diverse economies economy. According to the play-book of neoliberalism, the reformers focused all policy efforts on the rapid privatization of state assets in order to eliminate state interference and jump start the operation of free markets and private accumulation (Friedman 1982 [1962]; Sachs 1995). Other economic and social realms were either deregulated (e.g. labour markets, social welfare, health care and prices) or, as in the case of domestic labour and work ‘off-the-books’ for cash, simply ignored. Under the Soviet system the state had guaranteed public goods free of charge. This included major necessities for which working people in ‘free’ market societies have to pay (e.g. housing, health care, child care and education). While there were considerable differences in the levels of material well-being, the experiences of unemployment, homelessness, chronic hunger and feelings of hopelessness associated with poverty under capitalism were largely unknown (Pavlovskaya 2017). Wages and pensions, always set to be higher than scientifically determined minimum subsistence levels, covered the basic necessities for Soviet citizens including food, clothes and consumer durables. The dramatic creation of ‘capitalism by design’ (Offe 1991) in Russia took place in laboratory-like conditions that allow us to see the ways in which the immediate effects of removing almost 75 years of Soviet-era regulation. As soon as guaranteed employment and social protections were eliminated in 1991, income inequality quickly grew from one of the world’s lowest (with a Gini coefficient of 0.260 in 1991, comparable to Scandinavian countries) to one of the world’s highest levels (0.407 by 1993 and 0.423 in 2007), worse than even in the USA (which has a Gini coefficient around 0.411). Unemployment, wage suppression and the collapse of state welfare had profound effects on practices of social reproduction and livelihoods (Smith et al. 2008). With no state to lean on and few employment opportunities within the privatized economy, the new population of the poor and the unemployed had to find their own means to ‘survive capitalism’ after ‘having survived socialism’ (Drakulic 2016 [1992]). Women in particular were aggressively pushed out of the privatized labour market. The blatant patriarchal tropes resurged to ‘encourage’ them to fulfil their natural destiny to be mothers and housewives and leave the waged jobs to men (Pavlovskaya 2004; Pavlovskaya and Hanson 2001). In stark contrast to Soviet era guarantees of child care, employment and pensions, Russian neoliberal policy failed to protect citizens against the ills of the capitalist market and in effect condoned the expansion of precarious livelihoods. As soon as 1992, over one third of the population or almost 50 million people were living in poverty. Even today, three decades later, real wages continue to fall and the official poverty rate is roughly 15 per cent, despite Russia’s fabulous oil wealth (Pavlovskaya 2017). Scholars attribute the sharp and war-like rise in mortality rates in the 1990s, especially among men, to economic hardships, the disintegration of public health care, an inability to cope with poverty, and hopelessness leading to premature deaths of all kinds (Rosefielde 2001). The Russian population has declined in absolute terms for three decades now as death rates continue to exceed birth rates. Metrics concerning poverty compiled by the International Labour Organization portray Russia’s 15 per cent poverty rate as ‘moderate’. But this obscures rather than clarifies its extent. Russia’s poverty level is linked to the so-called minimum monthly wage which, as in the Soviet times, is officially set by the government and should, by the government’s own standards, exceed the minimum subsistence level. However, for most of the post-Soviet period the minimum wage has effectively been below the subsistence level. While in 2018 the

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Precarious labour: Russia’s ‘other’ transition  131 two figures finally came close to each other, for almost three decades working people have received highly suppressed wages causing widespread and deep economic marginalization (Pavlovskaya 2017). The most astonishing thing is that the new poor are not only the jobless, disabled or otherwise vulnerable; an outstanding 63 per cent of the poor in Russia are working poor from all walks of life, age groups and education levels (Ovcharova et al. 2014, p. 20). In other words, the capitalist economy pays wages so low that even the employed cannot rise above the poverty line (Pavlovskaya 2017). Initially reformers rarely mentioned the possibility of poverty, but more recently social scientists and public figures debate the need to tolerate it, as in other ‘civilized’ nations. They discuss the ways in which ‘our poor’ are different from ‘their poor’, and they muse on how to make the poor work harder thereby lessening their burden on the society. ‘The poor’ are now surveyed, monitored, measured, interviewed and researched – which both normalizes and consolidates this new category that makes up a considerable portion of the population. When poverty is an unavoidable but common feature, indeed a norm, the society no longer has to strive to eliminate it; rather it seeks only ways to manage it. The responsibility for escaping poverty shifts to the poor themselves. This approach to poverty contrasts strongly with the Soviet period, when even under the most strained economic circumstances, people would not see themselves, nor would they be seen, as stigmatized ‘poor’ (Pavlovskaya 2017). Measuring poverty against waged income assumes that all work is monetized and the state, as elsewhere, requires the poor to seek (more!) work in the capitalist economy that has so far failed to pay living wages. In reality, the poor cope with poverty by further increasing unpaid work within households and communities while also searching for informal livelihoods. But the fact that these economic practices do not take place within the formal capitalist space conceals the additional strain on social reproduction that the poor endure in addition to being starved for cash. The heralded macroeconomic visions of capitalist transition obfuscate the ‘other transitions’ provoked by the demise of socialism. A diverse economies framework provides a basis for exploring the role that diverse economic practices play in countering the large-scale dispossession of the last decades (Pavlovskaya 2004; Smith et al. 2008; Stenning et al. 2010). Temporary labour migration, then, can be examined as an example of a precarious but vital economic practice that ensures that society continues to reproduce itself.

PRECARIOUS WORKERS AND TEMPORARY LABOUR MIGRATION Households and communities and their relationship to place have been shattered by the ‘shock therapy’ of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Humphrey 1998; Klein 2008; Pavlovskaya 2004; Smith et al. 2008). Local economies were destroyed when major Soviet era restrictions on migration were lifted. The residence registration system – the infamous ‘propiska’ – was a major migration control mechanism that held Soviet populations in place by making residence and employment contingent upon each other. One could not register residence without a job or get a job without registering residence with propiska first. With these restrictions eliminated, millions of migrants from small towns and villages across Russia poured into large cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg in search of cash income.2 These workers did not intend, or could not afford, to relocate their families. As temporary migrants, they formed a large transient

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132  The handbook of diverse economies urban population with no permanent place to live and only temporary work to perform. This kind of temporary work away from home, however, has evolved into a practically permanent solution for the affected social groups. The extent of this phenomena caught the attention of scholars who named it the ‘new otkhod’ (new labour out-migration), a reference to tsarist Russia when circular labour migration to cities for work provided a major source of livelihood to a large number of marginalized peasants. Modern temporary labour migrants comprise as much as 75 per cent of the 38 million working-age adults who do not participate in the formal economy (Plyusnin et al. 2015). My own analysis suggests that about 20 million of such migrants support roughly 50 million people in their households, while another 10 million migrants from other post-Soviet republics earn livelihoods for another 28 million back home (Pavlovskaya 2016). Unregulated labour migration today supports a considerable part of the post-Soviet space. Internal temporary labour migrants often work shifts that last from a few weeks to several months. In contrast to international migrants, they do not establish another residence in Moscow or St Petersburg. Instead, many sleep at their workplace or share rooms in overcrowded hostels. This is especially true for work in construction, the booming private security companies, building maintenance, and some other service jobs that allow workers to ‘live’ in office spaces. Most such labour migrants are men but women also find employment, for example, in hospitals working week-long shifts as nurses. In fact, the range of precarious employment is wide, from low-skilled service to highly skilled working-class and professional jobs (Plyusnin et al. 2015). After several weeks away, migrants return home with their wages and spend another several weeks working in the household economy: tending to the house and the garden, the food from which remains a major part of the diets of millions of Russians. The spatial separation between places of mobile work and home requires profound restructuring of the entire household to accommodate these transitory and migrant jobs (Gerrard 2017). The Soviet era routine of going to work in the morning to a plant or an office and returning home at night gave way to alternating prolonged absences and presences of one adult. The remaining household members shoulder all responsibility for domestic work, gardening and child care during the absences. To do this, they often must quit whatever employment they might still have while the lost income puts pressure on the migrant to earn more cash. Households also renegotiate gender relations and seek more reliance on networks of extended family, friends and community. As an example, the market for private security services has burgeoned with fears of criminal rackets and, more recently, Chechen and Islamic State terrorism. Practically every business or agency in Moscow and other major cities, from schools and pharmacies to restaurants and stores, now has a security guard. This market absorbs a large number of male migrants from small towns and villages, many of whom work either off-the-books or without long-term arrangement. Because they look like any other Muscovite who might be performing the same job, their temporary migrant status is invisible. Office workers, pharmacy customers, or the parents of school children do not know from appearance alone whether the security guards they encounter actually live in Moscow or not. Working shifts that last several weeks without a place to live means that these guards often sleep, eat and clean themselves at their workplace or use public baths and diners. Some rent beds in makeshift hostels. Building maintenance, a major sphere of the urban economy, similarly employs those who commute from other regions, work long shifts, and sleep in those offices where they work. Until the recent tightening of international migration, the majority of street cleaners in Moscow consisted of migrants from Central

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Precarious labour: Russia’s ‘other’ transition  133 Asia who, despite staying months or years at a time, often lived in overcrowded basements or hostels. Female care workers who continue to migrate in significant numbers from Central Asia or the Ukraine, however, often live in the household of the child or elderly person in their care, or they share the hospital room of the patient for whom they are hired to care. Another aspect of precarity is the insecure character of the job itself. Migrants do not know when and where they will find work again. While wages help people to secure livelihoods, these jobs do not provide excess wealth nor do they provide health benefits or pensions. After working like this for years or even decades, workers earn only enough for their family’s basic consumption or the occasional vacation or to fix up and even build the house. Once these labour migrants grow old with no pension or savings, other household members, most likely women, will have to care for them without the possibility of hiring outside help. These new responsibilities will affect again the gender division of labour within such households. In short, securing livelihoods through precarious work is compounded by a spatial separation that literally stretches households over large distances for weeks, months, and often years. This new regime of temporary return migration clearly poses physical health and emotional challenges to workers and their families. While families can and sometimes do break apart under these pressures, most persevere given their mutual dependence under such precarious conditions. In the absence of any rules, migrant workers and those they leave behind successfully maintain complicated arrangements because they rely on and care for each other as families, friends, neighbours, and groups of co-workers. Migrants look for work together and form work teams with friends (e.g. men in construction or women in care work), they develop friendships in the city, including those with employers, and they share meals and accommodation. Meanwhile, back home, the extended families and neighbours care for the young and the old as well as the garden. Solidarity and trust are vital for precarious livelihoods.

POLICY RESPONSES AND SOLIDARITY POSSIBILITIES The extent and depth of economic marginalization and hardship engendered by the transition to ‘capitalism’ almost 30 years ago demands at least some response by the Russian state to the precarity of social production and informal livelihoods. So far, however, the Russian government has neglected to address persistently high rates of exploitation and ubiquitous poverty. Protest movements of all kinds regularly erupt representing a wide spectrum of social groups, from miners and truck drivers to retirees, youth, mothers, and teachers. In response, the state and corporate oligarchs expand repression using police, paramilitary nationalistic groups (e.g. Cossacks), and a special National Guard trained to deal with, specifically, internal street protests. An endless spectacle of bold national and geopolitical projects unfolds on state controlled TV channels (e.g. taking back Crimea and building the bridge to connect it to Russia, hosting the Olympic Games and the World Cup, supporting Russians in Eastern Ukraine, supporting the ‘legitimate’ government in Syria including symphony performances in the ruins of Palmyra, and so on). This spectacle diverts public attention from everyday economic struggles as it generates affect and pride for Russia and its strong leader (Toal 2017). Instead of raising wages, improving worker conditions, and strengthening social protections, the state attempts to extract even more surplus from those enduring precarious livelihoods. For example, in addition to monetizing benefits, the state has drastically increased the

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134  The handbook of diverse economies retirement age. It has also proposed to tax the millions of Russians with no formal employment and, if they do not comply with the tax, to block their access to the remnants of what had been free and universal health care services. In light of widespread tax evasion by corporations and oligarchs, the high costs of a largely monetized and privatized medical system, and the absence of formal employment opportunities that pay a living wage, these new policies clearly constitute a direct attack on livelihoods. Practically half of the Russian population have come to rely on precarious informal livelihoods and unpaid household work in order to survive. As a result, Russian households grow increasingly autonomous from both the state and formal capitalist businesses, both of which have proved unable to provide basic economic security. Although in most situations everyday diverse economic practices do not involve political organizing and anti-capitalist political action, they nevertheless represent a potential for social transformation. This is not to celebrate precarity and unpaid work but to emphasize that in the face of persistent large-scale poverty in Russia and the lack of any viable social welfare policies, people have secured their social reproduction by participating in distinctly non-capitalist practices (Pavlovskaya 2015, 2017). People challenge the new ontologies of poverty by engaging in diverse economic practices that help them collectively resist capitalist exploitation and neoliberalism. Migrants leverage their exploitative situations in solidarity with their families, friends and communities deploying creativity, cooperation, the joining and sharing of resources, and other forms of mutual aid. Return migrants often look for work and work collectively and also share surplus among themselves and within their households. Their purpose is not the creation of wealth but to secure livelihoods and well-being. Moreover, solidarity helps people overcome exhaustion, despair and the everyday violence of ‘surviving capitalism’, as it provides a sense of belonging to community and place. Solidarity economies stand in stark relief to the capitalist logics of profit maximization and competition where workers have no control over the surplus they create or the work they do. Finally, the ability of social reproduction and related livelihoods to cultivate solidarities indicates that they represent already existing sites of non-capitalist community economies and, in this sense, sites of social transformation. Thus, this largely overlooked aspect of post-socialist economies represents an important site and potential for solidarity economy movements as they expand internationally. In short, while neoliberal policies in Russia have placed a heavy burden on social reproduction and livelihoods, new political possibilities also emerge and await their inclusion into social imaginaries of solidarity and post-capitalist social transformation.

CONCLUSION The view of a post-socialist transition leading unidirectionally towards a well-functioning and prosperous ‘capitalism’ still persists among scholars, policymakers and Russian state ideologues. But a diverse economies perspective helps us see this kind of thinking as masking the vast and expanding realms of non-monetized social reproduction and precarious informalized livelihoods. It is these realms that have sustained the Russian society through the economic devastation of the last three decades. The fundamental role of this ‘other transition’ has remained invisible within public discourses and policy and this has enabled capitalists and the

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Precarious labour: Russia’s ‘other’ transition  135 neoliberal state to profit from precarious livelihoods and practices of social reproduction (Katz 1998; Pavlovskaya 2004, 2015). The diverse economies perspective also helps us to foreground the highly significant and also often overlooked fact that an ethic of care and cooperation common within practices of social reproduction, precarious work and informal livelihoods sharply contrasts with capitalist logics of profit maximization and competition. This fact raises important questions about the potential for these practices to resist neoliberalism, act as sites of social transformation, and foster non-capitalist economic futures in post-Soviet Russia and beyond (Pavlovskaya 2015).

NOTES 1. An entire class of people worldwide are already living a precarious existence with no access to meaningful employment at all (Puar 2012; Standing 2011). 2. Both internal and international migration increased dramatically. This discussion focuses only on the comparatively under-researched situation of internal temporary migrants.

REFERENCES Drakulic, S. (2016 [1992]), How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed, New York: Harper Perennial. Friedman, M. (1982 [1962]), Capitalism and Freedom, 2nd edn, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gerrard, S. (2017), ‘Mobility practices and gender contracts: Changes in gender relations in coastal areas of Norway’, Nordic Journal on Law and Society, 1 (1–2), 91–113. Humphrey, C. (1998), ‘The domestic mode of production in Post-Soviet Siberia?’ Anthropology Today, 14 (3), 2–7. Katz, C. (1998), ‘Excavating the hidden city of social reproduction: A commentary’, City & Society, 10 (1), 37–46. Klein, N. (2008), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Picador. Offe, C. (1991), ‘Capitalism by design? Democratic theory facing the triple transition in East Central Europe’, Social Research 58 (4), 865–92. Ovcharova, L.N., S.S. Biryukova, D.O. Popova and E.G. Vardanyan (2014), Level and Profile of Poverty in Russia: From the 1990s until Today, Moscow: VShE. (In Russian: Овчарова Л.Н., Бирюкова С.С., Попова Д.О., Варданян Е.Г. Уровень и профиль бедности в России: от 1990х до наших дней. Москва: ВШЭ, 2014.) Pavlovskaya, M. (2004), ‘Other transitions: Multiple economies of Moscow households in the 1990s’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94 (2), 329–51. Pavlovskaya, M. (2015), ‘Post-Soviet welfare and multiple economies of households in Moscow’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 269–95. Pavlovskaya, M. (2016), ‘Post-Soviet labour market and gendered migration in Russia: From marginality to economies of cooperation’, Keynote lecture presented at the conference Gender and (Im)mobilities in the Context of Work, 15–17 June, Tromsø, Norway. Pavlovskaya, M. (2017), ‘Ontologies of poverty in Russia and duplicities of neoliberalism’, in S.F. Schram and M. Pavlovskaya (eds), Rethinking Neoliberalism: Resisting the Disciplinary Regime, London: Routledge, pp. 84–103. Pavlovskaya, M. and S. Hanson (2001), ‘Privatization of the urban fabric: Gender and local geographies of transition in downtown Moscow’, Urban Geography, 22 (1), 4–28. Plyusnin, Y.M, A.A. Pozanenko and N.N. Zhidkevich (2015), ‘Otkhodnichestvo as a new factor of social life’, Mir Rossii, 1, 35–71, reprinted in Demoskop, 641–2, accessed 25 February 2019 at http://​www​

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136  The handbook of diverse economies .demoscope​ru/​weekly/​2015/​0641/​analit01​.php. (In Russian: Отходничество как новый фактор общественной жизни. Опубликовано в журнале ‘Мир России’, 2015, №1, с. 35–71. Демоскоп, 641–2.) Puar, J. (2012), ‘Precarity talk: A virtual roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović’, TDR, 56 (4), 163–77. Rosefielde, S. (2001), ‘Premature deaths: Russia’s radical economic transition in Soviet perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies, 53 (8), 1159–76. Sachs, J.D. (1995), Rynochnaya Ekonomika i Rossia (Market Economy and Russia), trans. from English, Moscow: Ekonomika. Smith, A., A. Stenning, A. Rochovská and D. Świa̧tek (2008), ‘The emergence of a working poor: Labour markets, neoliberalisation and diverse economies in post-socialist cities’, Antipode, 40 (2), 283–311. Standing, G. (2011), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Stenning, A., A. Smith, A. Rochovská and D. Świątek (2010), ‘Credit, debt, and everyday financial practices: Low-income households in two postsocialist cities’, Economic Geography, 86 (2), 119–45. Toal, G. (2017), Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus. New York: Oxford University Press. Winiecki, J. (1988), The Distorted World of Soviet-Type Economies, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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14. The persistence of informal and unpaid labour: evidence from UK households Colin C. Williams and Richard J. White

The search for an alternative to capitalism is fruitless in a world where capitalism has become utterly dominant . . . (Fulcher 2004, p. 127) The reality is that capitalism has always been contested and that people have created many other ways of providing for themselves. (Parker et al. 2014, p. iii)

INTRODUCTION The dominant market-orientated reading of economic practices assumes that there are no longer alternatives to capitalism. It is the word assumes that is here significant, for the Achilles heel of any apologist for a hegemonic capitalism is the lack of robust empirical evidence that can be drawn on to justify such claims. As Williams (2005, pp. 29–30) has asserted, ‘One of the most disconcerting and worrying findings . . . is that hardly any evidence is ever brought to the fore to provide corroboration that commodification is in fact taking place’. In recent years, various analyses have revealed the persistence of ‘alternative’ economies (e.g. Araujo 2016; Ince and Hall 2018; Krueger et al. 2017; North 2014; White and Williams 2010, 2016a, 2016b; Zanoni et al. 2017). The aim of this chapter is to further advance this burgeoning literature that contests the view that there is no alternative to capitalist forms of work and economy. We use Household Work Practice Surveys (HWPS) to provide an empirical focus on the forms of labour used by UK households to get everyday tasks done. Through analysing these surveys we shed light on the persistence of informal and unpaid labour in UK households and the complex range of transactions animating these forms of labour/work. While not denying the importance of a feminist analysis that positions unpaid household labour as domestic reproductive labour that is harnessed ‘for the support and maintenance of a productive labour force’ (Mills 2016, p. 283), our aim here is to better recognize, and make more visible, the range and persistence of informal and unpaid labour practices in contemporary economies, such as the putatively ‘capitalist’ UK economy. To show this, a ‘total social organization of labour’ (TSOL) approach is used to visualize the diversity of labour practices that prevail in everyday life. This approach recognizes that labour practices range from wholly paid to wholly unpaid practices, and from wholly formal to wholly informal practices. The chapter concludes by revealing how it is entirely mistaken to view formal paid labour as dominant and always the preferred option of citizens. The implications of this analysis point to the potential feasibility of alternative futures for work beyond market-oriented paid formal labour, or what is associated with ‘capitalist’ work. 137 Colin C. Williams and Richard J. White - 9781788119962 08:00:08PM

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MAKING DIVERSE ECONOMIES VISIBLE: A TOTAL SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF LABOUR TAXONOMY A key challenge is how to effectively communicate, represent and make visible the persistence of diverse economies, and how to decentre and de-legitimize capitalism from its assumed hegemony. In the action research applications of the diverse economies approach this has been achieved through reframing and representing the economy as an iceberg (see Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). What is normally regarded as ‘the economy’, namely wage labour, market exchange of commodities and capitalist enterprise, is portrayed as the tip of the iceberg above the water line, whilst beneath the surface are a multiplicity of other activities which are hidden from view. Included in the ‘iceberg’ representation of economy are a diverse range of labour practices, many of which have been documented by sociologists, anthropologists and geographers. In the 1980s, for example, sociologist Ray Pahl (1984) conducted seminal exploratory work on the various forms of work that households undertook to ‘get by’ on the Isle of Sheppey. This research started to unpack work beyond paid employment. Pahl distinguished three forms of work beyond employment, namely self-provisioning (i.e. unpaid work by households for themselves), community exchange (i.e. unpaid work undertaken for members of other households) and paid informal work (i.e. paid work that is not declared to the authorities for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes). More recently, the TSOL approach has been developed to provide a more structured framework of the multiplicity of work practices used in everyday life in contemporary societies (Glucksmann 1995, 2005; Williams, 2014). The TSOL approach interprets the economy as a ‘... “multiplex” combination of modes, rather than as a dualism between market and non-market forms’ (Glucksmann 2005, p. 28). Williams (2014) adapted this TSOL approach and identified ten broad and overlapping work practices as shown in Figure 14.1. This more nuanced taxonomy situates labour practices along a spectrum from relatively market-oriented to more non-market-oriented labour practices but cross-cuts this with a further spectrum (rather than a dualism) from non-monetized, through gift exchange and in-kind reciprocal labour, to monetized labour. Hatched circles are used to show how each labour practice overlaps along both the marketization spectrum of the x-axis as well as along the monetization spectrum of the y-axis. Ten broad overlapping labour practices are thus depicted that merge at their borders into the other practices surrounding them. First, there is formal paid labour in the private sector that is registered by the state for tax, social security and labour law purposes. Conventionally, this was portrayed as the ‘home’ of the market economy, at the centre of economic life, hegemonic and separate from other labour practices. However, given that private sector organizations are increasingly pursuing a triple-bottom line, whilst public and third sector organizations are also pursuing profit (albeit to reinvest so that they achieve wider social and environmental objectives), an ongoing blurring of the boundaries between formal labour across the private, public and third sectors is occurring, reflected in the overlapping of these two zones. Formal paid labour (in all three of these spheres) also merges into the sphere of paid informal labour and the realm of formal non-monetized labour. Paid informal labour is labour not declared to the authorities to not pay tax or social security contributions and/or to violate labour law. Two varieties can be identified: wholly undeclared paid labour that is not declared for tax, social, security and labour law purposes, and under-declared labour where formal

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The persistence of informal and unpaid labour: evidence from UK households  139

Source Williams and Nadin (2010, p. 57).

Figure 14.1

Visualizing a multiplex of modes, difference and diversity of work

employees receive from their formal employers a formal declared salary but also an undeclared ‘envelope’ salary (Williams 2009). This latter labour practice clearly displays how the realms of formal and informal paid labour are not separate from each other. There is also an overlap between formal monetized labour and formal non-monetized labour, with the types of labour at the border of these two realms perhaps expanding in recent years. Formal unpaid labour in the private (and public) sector in the form of unpaid internships or one-week unpaid trials has perhaps become increasingly common. Moreover, when formal non-monetized labour takes place in third sector organizations, it is widely known as ‘formal volunteering’. Sometimes, however, it takes the form of informal or ‘below the radar’ non-monetized labour, such as when a parent coaches a children’s football team but without having undergone the required police checks. There also exists between informal non-monetized and informal monetized labour a realm where labour is provided in-kind or for gifts. Continuing along the market to non-market continuum, there is one-to-one non-monetized labour, which involves the provision of unpaid help to members of households other than one’s own such as friends, neighbours and acquaintances. However, there is again overlap between this labour and monetized labour when there is in-kind reciprocal labour or gifts are given. Examining household members who conduct labour practices within their household for themselves or other members of the household, it is seldom mentioned that sometimes household members are paid by other household members for conducting activities and/or reciprocal in-kind labour or gifts are given in return for the labour provided. Pure monetary payment is in many Western societies nearly always for inter- rather than intra-generational labour provision (e.g. from a parent to a child, not between parents). When gifts and in-kind reciprocal labour are included, the distinction between monetized and non-monetized household labour becomes even more fuzzy. Indeed, couples may conduct everyday domestic tasks for each other on an in-kind reciprocal basis (e.g. one cooks the dinner because the other picks

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140  The handbook of diverse economies up the children). Reflecting on this, it might even be considered infrequent for domestic tasks to be undertaken on a wholly non-monetized basis with absolutely no expectation of some form of reciprocity. Even unpaid housework often is undertaken based on an expectation of reciprocity in the future in couple households. Furthermore, with the increasing incidence of divorce and remarriage and increasing disassembly and reassembly of families, what constitutes family and non-family is no longer clear-cut, since those who are acquaintances, friends and even neighbours might well be past or future family. This results in overlaps between what constitutes self-provisioning and one-to-one non-monetized exchanges. Applying this typology of multifarious labour practices, the chapter will shortly focus on empirical research conducted on work practices in urban and rural areas, and between affluent and deprived households in one minority world context, the UK. Before doing so it is important to draw attention to the fact that the TSOL has great potential in being used effectively across multiple societal contexts. This would certainly include other majority world contexts where, for example, subsistence ‘portfolios’ draw on many similar labour practices, or indeed in workplaces or enterprises in both majority and minority world contexts where this range of practices also occur.

MAPPING DIVERSE LABOUR PRACTICES To map the size and extent of each of these labour practices, Household Work Practice Surveys have been undertaken since the early 2000s in the UK in urban and rural communities and higher- and lower-income households. Households were considered as lower-income where the gross household income was less than £250/week. These surveys start with a list of 44 common everyday tasks covering ‘home maintenance and repair’ (outdoor painting; indoor painting; wallpapering; plastering; mending a broken window and maintenance of appliances), ‘home improvement’ (putting in double glazing; plumbing; electrical work; house insulation; putting in a bathroom suite; building a garage; building an extension; putting in central heating and carpentry), ‘housework’ (routine housework; cleaning windows outdoors; spring cleaning; cleaning windows indoors; doing the shopping; washing clothes and sheets; ironing; cooking meals; washing dishes; hairdressing; household administration), ‘making and repairing goods’ (making clothes; repairing clothes; knitting; making or repairing furniture; making or repairing garden equipment; making curtains), ‘vehicle maintenance’ (washing, repairing and maintaining car/motorbike), ‘gardening’ (care of indoor plants; outdoor borders; outdoor vegetables; lawn mowing) and ‘caring activities’ (daytime baby-sitting; night-time baby-sitting; educational activities; pet care). One-to-one interviews lasted between 30 minutes and one hour. The starting point in generating this task list were the tasks used by Pahl (1984) in his seminal study of household work practices on the Isle of Sheppey. These were slightly modified to suit the contemporary conditions. To examine the sources of labour households used to get tasks completed, the interviewee was asked whether each activity had been undertaken during the previous five years/year/month/week (depending on the activity). If conducted, first, they were asked a series of questions to identify which of the ten sources of labour had been used to conduct the task. Firstly, for example, they were asked who had conducted the task (a household member, a relative living outside the household, a friend, neighbour, firm, landlord, etc.); secondly, whether the person had been unpaid, paid or given a gift; and thirdly, if paid, whether it was

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The persistence of informal and unpaid labour: evidence from UK households  141 ‘cash-in-hand’ or formal employment. For each task completed, moreover, the respondent was asked why they had decided to get the work done using that source of labour and whether it was their first choice, or whether they would have preferred to use another source of labour. Following this, the same task list was used to understand the types of labour that household members had engaged in for other households. Taking each task in turn, they were again asked whether they had conducted the tasks for another household within a particular time frame and if so, for whom, whether it was unpaid, or whether they received money or a gift, and the type of labour involved to classify it as one of the ten forms. They were also asked why they had decided to do that task for the person to understand their motivations (for further details, see Burns et al. 2004; White and Williams 2012; Williams 2005).

THE PERSISTENCE OF INFORMAL AND UNPAID LABOUR IN THE UK Table 14.1 reports the results of the household work practices survey conducted in deprived and affluent urban and rural localities in the UK. This reveals that only 16 per cent of the 44 everyday tasks were conducted by those in a formal job in the private sector (e.g. a formally employed plumber or electrician). Despite assertions of the hegemony of commodification, therefore, just one in six tasks were conducted using private sector formal labour. The consequence is that five in six of these everyday tasks are conducted using other forms of labour. An overwhelming majority (70 per cent) of these 44 tasks are conducted through self-provisioning, i.e. by household members on an unpaid basis for themselves or for other members of the household. For all of the discussion of the advent of a hegemonic capitalism, therefore, the vast majority of everyday tasks conducted by households have not been outsourced to the formal market economy. Paid employment is therefore not extensive. Only 16 per cent of respondents in all the areas studied had sourced employment from the private sector to complete the tasks considered. If public and third sector paid employment is included, this figure increases only by 2 per cent. Contrary to the view that capitalism is pervasive, the evidence is that this is not the case. Neither is it even desired. Examining whether households would prefer to use formal paid labour, but do not do so because they cannot afford to outsource to the market, the finding is that this is not the case. Formal paid labour was commonly used only when the household did not possess the necessary capacities or skills to undertake the task themselves or could not source other sources of help. Indeed, formal paid labour was frequently the last resort and was used only if all other possible options were unavailable. In depictions of capitalist hegemony, self-provisioning (i.e. subsistence labour) is viewed as a mere historical footnote that might persist in a few small margins of the economic landscape. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence from these household work practice surveys refutes this view. Indeed, the outsourcing of these everyday tasks to the formal market economy is very limited, and in most cases, it is seen as a second choice, only used as a last resort, such as when time pressures due to having a formal job and the absence of other options leave no other choice open to households other than to source from formal businesses (e.g. domestic cleaning companies). Even higher-income populations, who outsource a slightly higher proportion of these tasks to the formal market economy, conduct a high level of self-provisioning.

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The persistence of informal and unpaid labour: evidence from UK households  143 the everyday tasks considered. This was more commonly used in deprived than affluent urban localities and in all rural areas. However, its character also varies. While deprived populations rely more on one-to-one unpaid help from kin and this is used as a survival tactic to meet material needs, higher-income populations use one-to-one unpaid work more to maintain and grow their social networks. Monetized community exchanges, meanwhile, were used to complete 3 per cent of all tasks, and involved favours provided by and for closer social relations, often involving token cash payments. Although money changes hands, this is not driven in most cases by economic rationales (to make or to save money). Rather as with non-monetized exchanges, broader redistributive and community-building rationales are cited. For example, when neighbours and friends provide a favour, there was a preference for token cash payments and/or gifts whenever possible, enabling one to avoid owing favours in contexts where reciprocity may be difficult. Paying kin in cash, meanwhile, allows money to be redistributed in a manner that avoids any notion that ‘charity’ is involved. Paying for favours therefore smooths the way for reciprocity in contexts where it might not otherwise occur, such as when one is physically unable to return favours, or too time pressured to be capable of offering in-kind labour in return. Finally, informal employment involves paid activities not declared to the state for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes, and 2 per cent of all the everyday tasks are completed using this source of labour. Such work ranges from work akin to formal employment in terms of the social relations and motives involved to forms closer to unpaid mutual aid, as discussed above. Even those forms akin to employment were not always undertaken primarily for profit. ‘Mates’ rates’ were often charged and paid at rates well below the market price, especially where elderly customers were involved who would not be able to afford market rates.

CONCLUSIONS In depicting formal paid labour as one work practice among many in this TSOL approach, the rejection of capitalocentric framings of the economic is obvious, and the implication striking. Market-oriented formal labour is revealed to be far from hegemonic. This calls into question the dominance of ‘the market’ and suggests that what are often called ‘alternatives’ are already present and commonly used. It also shows that approaches which focus upon the household as the unit of analysis, rather than the enterprise, are a valuable way forward. Not only does such an approach highlight the existence of multifarious labour practices in contemporary society but also does so from a perspective that is easily understood by the population. It is, after all, the household which is the lens through which most people look out onto the world to understand it, rather than the enterprise. By examining whether the labour practices used to undertake tasks are their preferred option, moreover, it is revealed that formal market-oriented labour is not only far from dominant but also seldom the preferred option of citizens. Rather, there is often a preference for using alternative forms of labour other than market-oriented formal labour. The pervasiveness of non-commodified labour practices suggests that the dominance of ‘the market’ is somewhat overplayed. An important contribution of such research is that it potentially reveals that ‘alternative ways of organizing and organization beyond capitalist hegemony’ (Williams 2014, p. 116) are not some utopian desire but exist in the here and now.

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144  The handbook of diverse economies Until now, far too few studies have been conducted on multifarious labour practices. Of those that have, very few have used the TSOL taxonomy of labour practices. If this chapter encourages more grounded studies of these diverse economic practices then it will have achieved one of its intentions. Should this then lead to greater recognition that capitalist economic practices are not hegemonic, and that informal and unpaid economic practices not only persist but are often the preferred option of citizens when selecting how tasks are completed, then it will have achieved its wider objective. If these help collectively to bring forward new visions of work that lie beyond market orientated formal labour then it will have served its purpose.

REFERENCES Araujo, E. (2016), ‘Consensus and activism through collective exchanges: A focus on El Cambalache, Mexico’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36 (11/12), 741–55. Burns, D., C.C. Williams and J. Windebank (2004), Community Self-Help, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fulcher, J. (2004), Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Glucksmann, M.A. (1995), ‘Why work? Gender and the total social organization of labour’, Gender, Work & Organization, 2 (2), 63–75. Glucksmann, M.A. (2005), ‘Shifting boundaries and interconnections: Extending the “total social organization of labour”’,Sociological Review, 53 (2), 19–36. Ince A. and S.M. Hall (eds) (2018), Sharing Economies in Times of Crisis: Practices, Politics and Possibilities, Abingdon: Routledge. Krueger, R., C. Schulz and D.C. Gibbs (2017), ‘Institutionalizing alternative economic spaces? An interpretivist perspective on diverse economies’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (4), 569–89. Mills, M. (2016), ‘Gendered divisions of labour’, in L. Disch and M. Hawksworth (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 283–303. North, P. (2014), ‘Complementary currencies as alternative organizational forms’, in M. Parker, G. Cheney, V. Fournier and C. Land (eds), The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 182–94. Pahl, R.E. (1984), Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Parker, M., G. Cheney, V. Fournier and C. Land (eds) (2014), The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. White R.J. and C.C. Williams (2010), ‘Re-thinking monetary exchange: Some lessons from England’, Review of Social Economy, 68 (3), 317–38. White, R.J. and C.C. Williams (2012) ‘The pervasive nature of heterodox economic spaces at a time of neoliberal crisis: Towards a “postneoliberal” anarchist future’, Antipode, 44 (5), 1625–44. White, R.J. and C.C. Williams (2016a), ‘Beyond capitalocentricism: Are non-capitalist work practices “alternatives”?’ AREA, 48 (3), 325–31. White, R.J. and C.C. Williams (2016b), ‘Valuing and harnessing alternative work practices in a neoliberal society’, in S. Springer, K. Birch and J. MacLeavy (eds), The Handbook of Neoliberalism, London: Routledge, pp. 603–13. Williams, C.C. (2005), A Commodified World? Mapping the Limits of Capitalism, London: Zed Books. Williams, C.C. (2009), ‘Evaluating the prevalence of “envelope wages” in Europe’, Employee Relations, 31 (4), 412–26. Williams, C.C. (2014), ‘Non-commodified labour’, in M. Parker, G. Cheney, V. Fournier and C. Land (eds), The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, pp. 105–19. Williams, C.C. and S. Nadin (2010), ‘Rethinking the commercialization of everyday life: A “whole economy” perspective’, Foresight, 12 (6), 55–68.

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The persistence of informal and unpaid labour: evidence from UK households  145 Zanoni, P., A. Contu, S. Healy and R. Mir (2017), ‘Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies, Organization, 24 (5), 575–88.

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15. Paid and unpaid labour: feminist economic activism in a diverse economy Megan Clement-Couzner

There have always been feminist responses to capitalist practices of work. This chapter looks at the history and contemporary context of feminist activism around paid and unpaid labour, using Australia as a case study. It shows that work and work activism take diverse forms, not solely focused on formal employment in capitalist enterprises, but also on employment in non-capitalist enterprises, and on unpaid domestic and reproductive labour too. This feminist work activism has been particularly concerned with distributions of surplus to those, usually women, engaged in social reproduction. In unpacking feminist activism about paid and unpaid labour, possibilities for further activism and social change on gender and work, towards more ethical economies, emerge. This chapter is based on original research conducted in the Australian feminist and union movements in 2012.

PAID WORK: THE DOMINANT FOCUS OF LABOUR POLICY AND ECONOMIC ACTIVISM Work takes up much of our lives. Much of the human, built and online worlds around us are the collective product of hours of work, both paid and unpaid. Most of us expect to work for our livelihoods. Public and private institutions and welfare programmes focus on producing subjects capable of paid work. Unsurprisingly then, feminism has its own preoccupations with work, paid and unpaid, in particular with gaining equality in and through paid labour, and valuing unpaid domestic and reproductive labour (Weeks 2011, p. 12). Globally, over three billion people do paid work or work for profit, and over 60 per cent of these people are in the informal sector (ILO 2018). This shows that work takes a range of forms, from formal employee–employer relations that are highly regulated, to informal employment, self-employment, volunteer and unpaid work, to domestic work and social reproduction in the home and community. These different forms of work intersect with gender, racial, national and other divides. Despite these many forms of work, the history and definitions of work politics and policy in the Western liberal tradition are centred on industrial models of economic organization, which in turn are centred on the capital–labour or employee–employer relationship. In this model, the basic premise of work or employment is of employers purchasing the potential labour of employees and using this labour in combination with raw materials to create profit. Taking the worker and their labour power and putting them to work in a place of employment is so ingrained in modern understandings of economic organization as to be ubiquitous. There have been activist responses to this organization of labour and production for as long as it has existed, stemming from unionism, socialism, cooperativism, and feminism. Unionist activism in particular has won many gains both legislatively and culturally, helping to develop 146 Megan Clement-Couzner - 9781788119962 08:00:13PM

Paid and unpaid labour: feminist economic activism in a diverse economy  147 a huge industrial policy architecture in many countries around the world, and internationally in the form of the International Labour Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations. The development of unions to represent workers in the capitalist–worker or boss–employee relationship is tied to industrialization and the growth of capitalist production. Union activists organized workers to join craft and later shop or trade-based unions. Many of the conditions that are associated with modern employment (even if eroded by casualization, the gig economy and transnational corporations), such as a two-day weekend, paid holidays, minimum wages, payment for overtime, work health and safety legislation, and the eight-hour day are products of the struggles of organized labour. For several decades now union membership has been on a downswing, with unions arguing the reasons for this are greater casualization, smaller workplaces, global labour market deregulation, and a general political movement towards neoliberalism (ILO 1997). While women have always been involved in labour movements, the popular imaginary tends to be of a male-dominated, blue-collar workforce. For many decades this was also borne out in practice; male-dominated industries were more highly unionized than female-dominated industries. Currently, however, women are a majority of union members in Australia and blue-collar membership is on the decline (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). In the United States, however, men remain more likely to be union members (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018). Activism around labour encompasses a more diverse set of issues and actions than those focused on by unionism alone. They include the establishment of workers’ education institutes, credit unions and cooperatives, unemployed workers’ unions, women’s and mothers’ unions, feminist and community organizations that focus on women’s rights and equality at work, and wages for housework campaigns. While some activists have purely campaigned for what they see as the workers’ rightful share of profits or surplus and decent work conditions, others have demanded workers’ ownership of the means of production and a greater say over surplus distribution, or to alter gender relations and the binary between paid work and domestic work, or for those seeking work to gain greater social security from the state. There is a long and intertwined history of feminist activism on paid labour, from the early presence of a women’s guild in the British cooperative movement (National Co-operative Archive n.d.), the 1912 bread and roses strike by textile workers in the USA (Forrant and Grabski 2013), to 1969 when Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the Commonwealth Building in Melbourne, Australia in protest at unequal pay (D’Aprano 1995, p. 316). As feminist activism on paid labour became more prominent, so did activism that reconsidered the value of unpaid labour and social reproduction. In turn, as women gained greater access to paid work across the industrialized world, their union membership rose. In Australia, feminist unionists also formed and joined separate feminist organizations. The period of industrialization that saw the emergence of a labour movement also brought forth a more distilled distinction between home and work, and therefore, between paid and unpaid labour. Whereas in English feudal and rural society, craft-based work had been performed from the home and women were involved in that labour, the rise of factory work, mining, and the industrialization of agriculture meant that paid work was more frequently performed away from home, at a place of employment, and in the city. Working-class women, as well as men, undertook paid employment, usually at lower rates of pay. This understanding of the workplace and the home as distinct and in opposition became more established, however, and is reflected in the early union slogan, ‘Eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours rest’. A feminist perspective asks what is happening at the home in the eight hours of rest?

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148  The handbook of diverse economies Do washing, cooking, cleaning and preparation of food count as work, and if they do, why are they not valued as part of production, and, perhaps therefore, as worthy of payment? Just as the labour movement is more diverse than the union movement, work is more than paid labour. Feminists Marilyn Waring (1988) and Nancy Folbre (1994, 2000) have addressed this problem by pointing out that an emphasis on markets and production on both sides of the political spectrum ignored the vital contribution of the private sphere – associated with women – to what was typically considered work and therefore counted in formal measures of economy. As Waring states in her book dealing with the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA), If Women Counted: every time I see a mother with an infant, I know that I am seeing a woman at work. I know that work is not leisure and it is not sleep, and it may well be enjoyable. I know that money payment is not necessary for work to be done. (Waring 1988, p. 21)

Waring argued for an inclusion of unpaid work in national accounting measures, most famously through her study of the UNSNA and the value of unpaid work done largely by the world’s women. Folbre, on the other hand, has argued for an understanding of care as a social responsibility and thus a recalibration of the value placed on paid and unpaid (often feminized, caring) work. This chapter will look at examples of work activism around paid and unpaid feminized labour, and where it fits in the diverse economy.

HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST ACTIVISM AROUND PAID LABOUR In keeping with the focus given to employment and labour in economic development, Australian feminism has a history of particular focus on gender equality in paid work. Activism has varied from equal pay campaigns in the 1960s, to feminist bureaucrats working on affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s, to more recent developments such as laws regarding piece work done in the home (known as outwork) and industry-based equal pay campaigns. This section of the chapter will look at a small selection of these activist campaigns, including work to address disadvantage faced by mothers in the teaching profession in the 1970s–1980s, activism to achieve equal pay, and work by migrant women to improve industrial laws. Much of the activism discussed has directed demands to improve alternative and non-market areas of the economy, and this is mapped out in Table 15.1. Feminists in Australia have been adept at taking advantage of industrial relations policies that were part of the established political landscape and extending their logic to women. They initially made claims for equal pay by arguing that women should be paid the same as men for the same job, i.e. equal pay for equal work. In 1969 the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission handed down the first equal pay for equal work decision, which meant that employers employing men and women to do the very same job could not legally pay a different rate to women. Due to the heavy sex-segregation of the workforce in Australia, however, this resulted in pay increases for only around 18 per cent of women nationally. Soon after, a 1972 decision resulted in a new equal pay principle, equal pay for work of equal value. Women doing similar work to men, but perhaps under a different title (for example laundry attendant and laundress), gained access to the same pay rates, and nationally there were overall

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Paid and unpaid labour: feminist economic activism in a diverse economy  149 increases in women’s earnings of around 30 per cent. Then, in the third of three landmark equal pay decisions of the period, in 1974 women achieved the amendment of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act, which was changed to read ‘adult’ rather than ‘male’ minimum wage (Sawer and Radford 2008, p. 195). This meant that the formal gendered categorization of employment was over in Australia. Whilst working in the formal wage labour area of the economy, these rulings affected both market and state-run enterprises, and increased public regulation of private capitalist enterprise. Feminists also made gains on equal employment opportunity (EEO) policy during the 1980s, in particular for public school teachers. In order to address the casualization of female teachers in New South Wales (NSW), feminist activists and bureaucrats worked to remove the pledge of readiness to serve anywhere in the state as a condition of permanent employment. Many women would refuse to sign this pledge due to family commitments, but this meant they could not access superannuation, promotions, and job security. As a result, women made up some 80 per cent of the casual teaching workforce. By removing this clause from the permanency requirements, many casual teachers became permanent (Eisenstein 1990, p. 64). Eisenstein notes how EEO was seen negatively as reformist by parts of the feminist movement in Australia, despite the very real economic gains it presented to many women (Eisenstein 1990, p. 69). This example of EEO in public schools again works in the space of wage labour, but in the area of public rather than privately owned enterprise. During this period, feminists also took other steps to gain greater equality in the labour market. The Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) was established with the intent of representing and forwarding the interests of Australian women. WEL’s work on economic issues in the 1970s and 1980s was prolific, and crucially, they attempted to address the perception that community service jobs were merely make-work designed to keep women busy, pointing to the multiplier effect of women’s spending patterns (Sawer and Radford 2008, p. 192). This move valued work in non-capitalist sectors that have typically been feminized. In addition, WEL’s representations on equal pay helped lead to some of the most important legal decisions on women’s pay rates in Australian history in 1973. WEL made equal pay representations to the then Industrial Relations Commission via Edna Ryan, who had long been a prominent unionist but did not declare herself a feminist until the late 1960s (Ryan 1984; Sawer and Radford 2008). Ryan was responsible for WEL revealing and publicizing the exact numbers of women supporting families, via unpublished data from the Commonwealth statistician. This data helped win the 1973 decision on equal pay for work of equal value (Sawer 2004, p. 5). Ryan’s reason for revealing this data was that it disproved the notion that working women were only supporting themselves, whereas men’s wages needed to be higher so that they could support dependants.1 She showed that women also supported dependants in high numbers. Thus, feminist arguments that the financial costs of reproduction fell to women as well as to men were viewed by the judge as a justification for equal pay, showing that non-capitalist, feminist considerations have influenced the formal labour market. Another area of activism at this juncture, and one that challenges the distinction between paid and unpaid labour, as well as the home and workplace, is that of migrant women’s work activism. Migrant women began to build their own organizations in Australia because their interests were not reflected in the union movement nor well recognized by the ‘Anglo-dominated, largely middle class Australian feminist movement’ (Ho 2008, p. 778). One such organization is Asian Women at Work (AWatW), a community organization in Sydney, Australia that aims to ‘empower Asian migrant women workers who experience . . . exploitation in our Australian

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150  The handbook of diverse economies society’ (AWatW mission statement, accessed 17 May 2019 at https://​www​.awatw​.org​.au/​ images/​pdf/​English​.pdf). They mobilize a huge amount of unpaid (volunteer) labour for the purposes of providing no-cost education, skill-sharing, leisure and community development. They also lobby on industrial relations issues, and run vocational training programmes and activist networking activities. AWatW’s outwork campaign, in coalition with the Textiles Clothing and Footwear Union (TCFU) and other migrant organizations, aimed to improve the regulation of outwork, which is sewing work that is usually paid by piece and performed at home. AWatW and the TCFU used collective organizing models to pressure bosses to change conditions, despite the difficulties of organizing these individual workplaces. This campaign eventually succeeded in the form of legislative change at both the NSW and Federal level (Rawling 2007). The outworkers were working in irregular conditions and were seeking some of the benefits that traditionally male-dominated and unionized industries have gained, such as work health and safety laws, job security, and better pay rates. Outworkers have been successful in their efforts to change outwork laws.2 Their activism is similarly in the area of wage labour, but also breaks down work binaries of home and work, and the private and public spheres as spaces of production and labour. AWatW members have in the past expressed interest in forming a cooperative in order to have more control over their working lives. This form of work and economic activism, even if nascent, falls into the non-capitalist enterprise area of the diverse economy. However, AWatW’s capacity to action their desire has in part been constrained by a lack of economic language and skills in the area of enterprise development. Another barrier has been the absence of available economic identities that could allow them to move from ‘worker’ to ‘cooperator’ or ‘social entrepreneur’ whilst not losing their hard-won ‘worker’ identity and place in the workers’ rights social movement. As part of their focus on community development, AWatW also deliver services such as gardening and dance classes in addition to undertaking advocacy. These forms of provisioning are unpaid and non-capitalist and reflect their goals of developing empowered communities. These activities exist both alongside and as supplementary to capitalist activity, as AWatW also wishes to gain greater surplus from and withstand the pressure of capitalist employers (with varied degrees of success). The social enterprise goals of the organization, however, are about both employment and self-provisioning, in order to control their working patterns and hours and for the reward of working together.

FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND UNPAID LABOUR The Australian women’s movement had been impacting policy in the space of unpaid, reproductive labour for some time prior to WEL and others’ incursions into labour policy. Levi and Singleton note, for example, that the period of 1890–1910 ‘stands out as a beacon of progressive and innovative policies. Consequently, Australia earned the reputation of a “workingman’s paradise”’ (Levi and Singleton 1991, p. 632). In 1912, the state began making lump-sum payments to white mothers on the birth of a child, known as a maternity allowance (Levi and Singleton 1991, p. 633). Yet Asian and Aboriginal women were excluded from the same benefit. The payment had the effect, therefore, of transferring state funds to a group of white women for previously unpaid domestic work, moving their work from the unpaid to alternatively paid area of the diverse economy (see Table 15.1 centre cell).

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152  The handbook of diverse economies

TRANSFORMATIONS TOWARDS SURVIVING WELL All of the examples of feminist activism around work, paid or unpaid, discussed in this chapter, show people concerned with surviving well. In particular, feminist labour activism is concerned with: ●● what is necessary to personal and social survival; ●● how social surplus is appropriated and distributed; ●● whether and how social surplus is to be produced and consumed (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 88, emphasis in original). In the paid work context of EEO or equal pay activism, work is seen as the source of money for necessities and also for social life and enjoyment. Unpaid work is seen as necessary for reproducing life. Women have fought for this traditionally unpaid work to be paid in order for it to be economically valued and to gain access to what the movement considers necessities. Equal pay activists have fought for a greater share of surplus from employers and government, arguing this was both needed by women, to support families and gain some economic freedom from men, and deserved as a measure to increase gender equality. The activists discussed in this chapter saw paid work as work for an employer, rather than work with or for themselves or each other. This shows some of the limitations of the identifications of feminist work activism, but also a potential area for future activism. If economic concerns are reconceptualized as questions of what it means to survive well, then this nascent area could be an avenue to explore other ways to produce and distribute social surplus.

NOTES 1.

In 1907 in Australia, Judge Henry Higgins decided that wages should be based on the cost of living for a worker and his family. For many feminists (for example Pateman 1988), this was the sexist barrier to equal pay, but for Sawer, it was a feature of a liberal tradition of workplace relations with a social conscience, that sought to put humane limits on markets. This system allowed relatively swift progress for equal pay once the gendered discrimination was removed (Sawer 2008, p. 48). 2. In the intervening years since improvements in the legislation, however, sewing work has largely moved offshore.

REFERENCES Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016), ‘Characteristics of employment, Australia, August 2016’, accessed 29 September 2018 at http://​www​.abs​.gov​.au/​ausstats/​abs@​ nsf/​Previousproducts/​6333​ .0Main​%20Features5August​%202016​?opendocument​&​tabname​=​Summary​&​prodno​=​6333​.0​&​issue​ =​August​%202016​&​num​=​&​view​=​. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018), ‘Economics news release: Union members summary’, accessed 29 September 2018 at https://​www​.bls​.gov/​news​ release/​union2​ nr0​ hTm. Cox, E. (2017), ‘It’s time to harness angry feminist energy and inject it into welfare policy’, The Guardian, accessed 28 February 2019 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​commentisfree/​2017/​jan/​25/​ its​-time​-to​-harness​-angry​-feminist​-energy​-and​-inject​-it​-into​-welfare​-policy. D’Aprano, Z. (1995), Zelda, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Eisenstein, H. (1990), ‘Femocrats, official feminism, and the uses of power: A case study of EEO implementation in New South Wales, Australia’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 2 (51), 51–73.

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Paid and unpaid labour: feminist economic activism in a diverse economy  153 Folbre, N. (1994), Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint, London and New York: Routledge. Folbre, N. (2000), The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, New York: New Press. Forrant, R. and F. Grabski (2013), Lawrence and the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike, Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ho, C. (2008), ‘Diversifying feminism: Migrant women’s activism in Australia’, Signs, 33 (4): 777–84. International Labour Organization (1997), World Labour Report 1997–98: Industrial Relations, Democracy and Social Stability, Geneva: International Labour Office. International Labour Organization (2018), World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2018, Geneva: International Labour Office. Levi, M. and S. Singleton (1991), ‘Women in “the working man’s paradise”: Sole parents, the Women’s Movement, and the social policy bargain’, Social Research, 58 (3), 627–51. Muir, K. (2008), Worth Fighting For: Inside the Your Rights at Work Campaign, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. National Co-operative Archive (n.d.), Co-operative Women’s Guild, accessed 28 February 2019 at https://​www​.archive​.coop/​collections/​coop​-womens​-guild. Pateman, C. (1988), The Sexual Contract, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rawling, M. (2007), ‘The regulation of outwork and the federal takeover of labour law’, Australian Journal of Labour Law, 20 (2), 189–206. Ryan, E. (1984), Two-Thirds of a Man: Women & Arbitration in New South Wales, 1902–08, Sydney: Hale & Iremonger. Sawer, M. (2004), ‘The Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act: Aspirations and apprehensions’, The Darlington Centre, University of Sydney, accessed 17 May 2019 at https://​www​.researchgate​ .net/​publication/​265141190​_The​_Commonwealth​_Sex​_Discrimination​_Act​_Aspirations​_and​ _Apprehensions. Sawer, M. (2008), ‘Changing frames: Liberal and feminist perspectives on Harvester’, Dissent, 26, 45–9. Sawer, M. and G. Radford (2008), Making Women Count: A History of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Waring, M. (1988), If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Weeks, K. (2011), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

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16. Caring labour: redistributing care work Kelly Dombroski

INTRODUCTION Feminist writers have long critiqued masculinist visions of the economy and politics that overlook the care labour required for the reproduction of life for all of us – human and non-human. Care is the work that makes all work possible – as Joan Tronto puts it, care is ‘a species activity that includes all we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so we might live in it as well as possible’ (1993, p. 103). Maria Puig de la Bellacasa asks us to expand Tronto’s ‘we’ beyond our own species, and to consider the care work that non-humans perform, some of which is for us (2017; see also Barron and Hess, Chapter 17 in this volume). The point is that ‘we’ all require care at some point in our lives, and ‘we’ all no doubt give care at some point in our lives. There is no denying however, that even if sometimes enjoyable and meaningful, this ‘life’s work’ (Mitchell et al. 2004) is deeply gendered and political. Tronto goes so far to argue that ‘political life is ultimately about the allocation of caring responsibilities’ (2013, p. xiii), and builds on her argument that care requirements for all of us are generally beyond the capacity of the nuclear household, insisting that ‘it is not whether care responsibilities will be more broadly allocated but how’ (2013, p. xiii). Before thinking about how care work is to be reallocated, however, we must get a sense of the care work that is being done, and indeed, how and whether it is compensated. Care work is different from other forms of work in that it can build deep connections and enable different ways of thinking (Ruddick 1989) and being in the world – it touches us (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). A diverse economies approach to examining care work allows us to pay attention to the multiple and complex forms of ‘compensation’ and motivation that compel or invite us to perform this labour. While some of this care work is compensated in wages (for professional care givers, for service providers), much of it is performed in a mixture of complex class processes (Cameron 1996) with a complex range of affective motivations (Healy 2008). Much of it is performed by women, and indeed in some places, even when white women are able to reduce their care labour, it can be passed over to women of colour or immigrant women to perform (Weir 2005). Thus the larger networks of who performs care labour remains as important as why they do so, and with what it is compensated (Dombroski, Healy and McKinnon 2019). Once we are able to recognize what motivates and perhaps compensates this important care work we can then ask how we might redistribute the labour of caring more equitably across gender, class, race and even species boundaries – not because we want to encourage less caring, but because indeed we might want to proliferate the benefits of care work for both those that care and those that receive care.

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Caring labour: redistributing care work  155

DIVERSE ECONOMIES OF CARE LABOUR AND COMPENSATION Diverse economies scholars include consideration of care labour as part of a more general consideration of diverse forms of labour including labour compensated by wages or salary (paid labour), labour only partially compensated for by wages and salary (alternative paid labour), and labour that is compensated completely outside of a system of payments, or not at all (unpaid labour). Labour is categorized here by virtue of how it is compensated, and we can immediately see that care labour can fall into any of these three categories: indeed, Cameron and Gibson-Graham (2003) use the diverse economy of child care to illustrate how an activity (or industry) can be simultaneously capitalist and non-capitalist. The point of identifying diverse labour practices and the diverse economies concept more generally is to bring visibility to the range of economic relations that are more-than-capitalist. Other feminist economists have also tried to bring visibility to the unpaid and non-capitalist labour of people in modern economies. Marilyn Waring famously challenged the UN System of National Accounting because it did not include the contribution of the unpaid labour of New Zealand women to farming (in particular the work of ‘farmers’ wives’), early childhood education and child care (in particular, ‘Playcentre mums’1), volunteer organizations and charities, and in the home – whereas it did recognize as ‘productive’ the cost of cleaning up environmental disasters, trade in weapons and illicit drugs, and health care costs related to smoking (Waring 1988, 1999, 2003). Waring’s work focused on getting this accounting system to better acknowledge the ‘productivity’ of women’s work through adding in hours of care and volunteer labour (this is now used in a number of census systems including Canada and New Zealand although still not officially in the national accounts). She points out that women’s productivity includes both the production of goods and services (how we might traditionally define labour), such as agricultural goods and child care services, but also provides the conditions by which the commodity of labour might be itself reproduced, what minority world Marxist feminists call ‘social reproduction’. The concept of social reproduction tries to get at all of the work that must be done in order to return the factory worker to the factory gates the next day. This can include actual reproduction, as in reproducing the labour force through having and caring for children and thus raising the next generation of workers. It also includes all of the care work needed for the worker to be able to eat, sleep, have shelter and live in a comfortable environment. As Katharine McKinnon discusses in Chapter 12 of this volume, the idea of eight hours labour, eight hours leisure and eight hours sleep overlooks the work that must be done in the home, often carried out by women. Some feminist analyses of (particularly Western) patriarchal societies identify the belief that compensation for this labour is part of the so-called marriage contract, where a (historically) male breadwinner provides for a (historically) female homemaker, who in turn takes up the care work needed for his well-being. While care work can be deeply meaningful and a source of delight, the issue feminists might have with this historical contract is that it has resulted in women being trapped in (sometimes abusive) relationships with no financial means of independent living, or at risk of homelessness and poverty if the relationship ends and the woman has no income to support herself (often with children to provide for). At that point, even if she can find a job (which may be difficult if she has taken time out of the workforce to raise children), her earning power is not comparable even if women and men were to get equal pay (in most countries, they do not: see Neate 2018).

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156  The handbook of diverse economies The ‘marriage contract’, of course, is not just about domestic labour such as cleaning, washing, cooking or child care – it also has a sexual and emotional component, which feminists argue women have been socialized into providing. In recent times scholars have called this part of the work ‘emotional labour’. Emotional labour refers to all of the work to smooth over fraught relationships, to manage households, to make family plans and decisions such as what kind of toilet paper to get, whose birthday is coming up, not to mention whose emotional needs are not being adequately met and what needs to be done about it. This emotional labour can be compensated but can also be exploited (Fraad 2000). Again, in much of the world, more of the burden of this work is taken up by women than by men, and indeed, in some cases we might argue that men have been historically excluded and prevented from taking up this load through concomitant processes of masculine socialization. Some scholars have argued that this emotional labour is also performed by women in the workplace, sometimes to their career detriment, but to the benefit of the employer (Hochschild 2012). It is also performed in activist circles and particularly by women of colour (Ahmed 2004; hooks 1989). Feminists argue that this ‘emotional labour’ has primarily been done by women because they have been socialized into this work and have had their identities based on succeeding in making others feel good, often from a very young age. A recent cartoon by the French cartoonist known only as ‘Emma’, has sparked an international discussion about the importance of redistributing some of this ‘mental load’ if we are serious about equality in both the workplace and the home.2 One emerging perspective in the minority world is that it is not just for women’s well-being that men need to have responsibility for organizing and maintaining domestic matters, but also for their own well-being. Masculinist discourses that shame men for care work also work to produce masculinities where men’s caring sensibilities are denigrated and shut down, and the relationships of care and connection that sustain mental health may also suffer. Redistributing social reproduction labour and emotional labour is therefore an important feminist project not just for women’s well-being, but also for men’s. It is worth mentioning that although potentially meaningful and always important, the work of care, social reproduction, and emotional labour has also been carried out by people who have had little choice but to accept it. Because of class systems, slavery, racism, or other less obvious systems of oppression, the hard, tiring, and not well compensated work of care can be loaded onto some groups of people who have less power to choose not to do it, for people they might not choose to do it for. As we see in the diverse labour framing, not all labour is compensated. For people who are working as slaves or indentured workers, for example, they may only receive food and shelter in return for their labour and have no choice but to labour: for example, domestic workers from the Philippines working in Saudi Arabia or Hong Kong might have wages withheld and end up trapped there (Gibson et al. 2001). Feminists have thus developed theories of ‘intersectionality’ to get at the different forms of discrimination that individuals might face when they belong to or ‘intersect’ with multiple groups that face discrimination or even systemic oppression – for example, working-class women of colour such as the aforementioned Filipina domestic workers who might face direct sexism, racism and classism in everyday life as well as the ongoing economic and social systems that work to inadvertently exclude them. The work of redistributing care work assigned to indentured or oppressed groups is therefore also an important emancipatory, anti-racist and decolonizing project. Redistributing care work is not just about social reproduction and oppressive labour relations however. Firstly, emerging research in diverse economies scholarship points to recog-

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Caring labour: redistributing care work  157 nizing the unpaid care labour of other beings and how care work is already distributed over larger care networks than we might first imagine: as Barron and Hess argue in Chapter 17 in this volume, the work of non-human beings, while not intended for sustaining human life, does actually contribute to sustaining human life or ‘social reproduction’. It also provides uncompensated labour in the form of ‘ecosystem services’ to enterprises in the formal economy. Other diverse economies scholars have paid attention to the care work that inanimate objects as well as microbes and hormones do in the context of humans giving birth (Dombroski et al. 2016; Dombroski, Healy and McKinnon 2019; McKinnon 2016). Thinking about the distribution of care that enables us to maintain, continue and repair our world is therefore also an important posthumanist and environmentalist project. In what follows, I discuss two examples in this emerging research: the first in the area of redistributing the work involved in caring for an infant and what the compensation for this might be, and the second diversifying our understanding of who is doing care labour in a youth well-being focused urban farm in Christchurch, New Zealand.

REDISTRIBUTING INFANT CARE WORK Given that it is in and with the bodies of women that infants are conceived, grown, birthed and subsequently physically nurtured, it is perhaps unsurprising that the majority of the care work required for keeping an infant alive and thriving is carried out by women. However, unlike other forms of intense maintenance care work, it is not a form of labour easily commodified, and it is not a form of labour commonly understood as undesirable. The connection a mother might feel to her infant child may compel her to undertake this work, even as she is exhausted and wishes someone else could take over for just a little while. Indeed, she may even desire this work, feel compensated for it through feelings of love and connection, and have an actual physical bond and connection reinforced through hormones, breastfeeding, and the pheromones and microbes involved in the touch and smell of bodies. Feminists have tended to shy away from examining these forms of ‘compensation’ for the care work of infants, most likely due to the dangers of it being used to further compel women who do not want to care for infants into doing so, ‘essentializing’ the embodied desires of some women and mothers to somehow represent the essence of all women and mothers. Yet still, humans continue to reproduce, people continue to desire children, and when they are born, continue to love and desire to care for them, without monetary compensation. A diverse economies framework might enable us to examine the forms of compensation that are not usually included in our analyses of care work, and thus consider how the care work of infants might be gently and sensitively shared with others, particularly fathers or male co-parents who have historically avoided or missed out on some of this work. Caring for infants is obviously work – it requires us to expend energy, to maintain and continue repetitive tasks that enable the survival of this small being dependent on others for survival. The unfortunate experiments of the Romanian orphanages of the early 1990s (where babies either died or grew up severely mentally stunted; see Simms 2014) show us that loving touch is essential for survival. The work of caring for infants goes beyond merely providing food and shelter, but includes human connection. In economic terms, caring for infants is not so obviously ‘productive labour’. Of course, parts of it are considered economically productive: some aspects of infant care can be commodified into paid child care hours. Yet the calcu-

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158  The handbook of diverse economies lation parents make about who does the work of caring for their infant is something more than economic – it strays into the arena of affect: desire, shame, values, beliefs. Although it is hard, repetitive and exhausting work, it is not necessarily work that we might want to redistribute to others, given our own attachments to our children. It is also not without compensation, as I discuss next. In my own work on infant care in China, Australia and New Zealand, I researched families practising a form of infant hygiene known as ‘elimination communication’. In this practice, caregivers attune themselves to the signs and signals of infants, and hold them out over appropriate receptacles to eliminate their urine or faeces. In my research this was mostly a care and communication task taken up by mothers (and in China, grandmothers), resulting in closer communications and a form of embodied intuition around their infants’ needs. Yet men and co-parents taking up this extra care work of ‘learning to be affected’ by infant communications can also be compensated by the joy of increased embodied intuition and connection with their infant (Dombroski 2018; see also Roelvink, Chapter 47 in this volume). What this means is that an argument for redistributing care work becomes less about redistributing the oppressive and exhausting or exploitative labour of care (although this is still important), but also about redistributing the possibility of connection, intuition, embodied desire and alternative thinking (Ruddick 1989) that might come from certain forms of care work that have historically been performed by women or mothers. Caring for infants in this way, responding to their communications by holding them out to eliminate their waste free of a nappy, also promotes a form of hygiene care that actively benefits the environment and the more-than-human worlds of microbes, compost, sewerage systems and landfill (Dombroski 2016). I argue that these all constitute a kind of hybrid human/more-than-human activist collective of carers. Feminist arguments for the redistribution of care work then, do not have to be just about righting the wrongful essentialization and subjectification of women to care work, but also about righting the wrongful exclusion of men from care work, and indeed expanding the collective of care workers to include more people in the benefits of being a carer. This is important if we are to address that key political question Tronto leaves us with, ‘how do we distribute care fairly?’ As Tronto argues, this kind of care labour might help move all humans away from the masculinist homo economicus and towards the inclusive, perhaps feminist, always collective subject homines curans (Tronto 2017). This collective caring subject is one which includes human collectives but also the more-than-human as discussed next.

DIVERSIFYING CARE LABOUR IN AN URBAN FARM In Christchurch, New Zealand, a series of devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 left the city with large gaps: literal gaps in the landscape where 1240 of the central city’s buildings had to be torn down,3 and other kinds of gaps in the services for city youth, including mental health services which could not cope with the overload of traumatized children becoming youth (Dombroski, Diprose and Boles 2019; Sepie 2015). Stepping into some of these gaps, the social enterprise Cultivate Christchurch developed an urban farm on some cleared land, building up the soil cover of what was once a gravel demolition site with food scraps collected from city restaurants (unserviced by the city council greenwaste collections) and truckloads of tree mulch from arborist services avoiding landfill fees. Started by a social worker and a permaculture ecologist, the organization sought to provide a nurturing space for young people in

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Caring labour: redistributing care work  159 Christchurch – particularly those struggling with mental health issues, in the justice system, or at a loose end after leaving school. With colleagues, I spent a year studying this social enterprise and the care that was provided there.4 We found that the care is provided by trained social workers, working alongside young people in the urban farm, passing on key life skills like how to nurture one’s own physical body and mental health with food, how to stick at a difficult task for the reward it brings, how to care for others – both small and vulnerable plants and one’s human co-workers. But it is not only social workers who provide this care: the farm is managed by staff trained in organic horticulture and includes the labour and care of paid untrained workers, of unpaid volunteers, of alternatively compensated earthworms, microbes, fungi, birds and insects. Some of the youth are provided a living allowance by the Ministry for Social Development for a six-month internship, and are thus cared for by the taxes of the nation of Aotearoa New Zealand. The enterprise began with start-up funding from Vodafone, who added additional layers of care by accepting oral reporting from the founders rather than have them taking time out of farming and caring to write lengthy reports on outcomes. Members of the local community care by choosing to invest in ‘broccoli bonds’: an alternative finance that raises money for expanding composting infrastructure through providing a 15 per cent return on investment for each minimum $1000 bond, to be repaid in vegetables or landscaping services (‘muscle’) to the value of $1150. The land upon which the farm is situated was provided free of rent by private owners who were matched with Cultivate through the charitable trust Life in Vacant Spaces, and who receive a rates exemption from the city council for enabling their land to be used for free until another use is desired. The landowner thus cares for the youth too, and the soil, microbes, insects, vegetables, and of course the urban farmers and social workers employed there. We could also say that the land and plants care for the youth in turn: in our interviews, youth articulated the feelings of peace and calmness that the space provided, or the meditative repetitive work that transplanting seedlings enabled, or even the basic satisfaction of completing a tough job, or holding it together for one’s co-workers who are struggling (see Dombroski et al. 2018). Some of this diverse care work is compensated, and some is not. Some of this compensation is in the form of wages and some not. The point is, the diverse forms of labour and compensation and the diverse forms of care work form a hybrid caring collective that acts to improve not just youth mental health, but environmental health and the well-being of staff, volunteers, restaurants and the general public who purchase the organic vegetables. The work of caring for youth mental health in the city of Christchurch is distributed via a ‘hybrid’ human/ more-than-human caring collective, but in distributing it, youth also learn to care for others and many others are cared for within this collective. Indeed, it seems to be a great example of what Tronto calls ‘caring with’ – care that cares alongside, where the needs of one being are interconnected and interdependent with a whole host of others. The redistribution of care work is not then a simple calculation of shifting care from one type of person (such as women) to other types of people (such as men), but a complex arrangement of interdependent caregiving that shifts us all from one type of person, homo economicus, to another type of being that goes beyond the collective caring subject homines curans to a hybrid caring collective that includes the more-than-human.

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CONCLUSION A diverse economies approach to thinking about care pays attention to the diverse forms of care work humans and non-humans undertake, including the forms of compensation that may or may not be provided for this work. Like any form of work, care labour may become commodified, but in this chapter I have paid attention particularly to those forms of care work that remain situated in affective bonds, complex networks, and distributed collectives. Feminists seeking to redistribute care work may do so as part of anti-oppressive practices, but we also must recognize the complex arrangements of care in which we are all embedded, to not cut back the care that is given to infants, young people, and all, but to rather increase and amplify it through wider arrangements of care that build on the diverse forms of compensation that care might allow. From men and co-parents taking greater shares of both the frustration and joys of nurturing work, to the complex negotiations with the more-than-human that make up the care task of farmers and social workers in a therapeutic urban farm, we must allow that redistributing care is an ongoing process, a shift in complex networks, an opportunity for greater joy and deeper connection with others beyond ourselves and our narrow understandings of labour and care. As we pay attention to shifting oppressive practices of care and redistributing it across hybrid collectives with diverse forms of compensation, we move towards a vision of care labour and work where compensation becomes less about an individual return on investment and more about the environmental and pyscho-social benefits of care for the family and the broader human/non-human community economy of care.

NOTES 1. Playcentre is a cooperative early childhood education centre with over 70 years of history in New Zealand. Parents (until recently almost entirely mothers) do early childhood education training and run the centres by committee. More recently, the association has federated and is government funded, and has thus become less independent. At the time of Waring’s analysis, however, it provided almost the only form of child care and early childhood (and parent!) education in rural New Zealand towns. 2. See ‘The gender wars of household chores: A feminist comic’ accessed 8 March 2019 at https://​ www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2017/​may/​26/​gender​-wars​-household​-chores​-comic. 3. See http://​www​.stuff​.co​ nz/​the​-press/​news/​christchurch​-earthquake​-2011/​66290638/​1240​-central​ -Christchurch​-buildings​-demolished (accessed 8 March 2019). 4. Our research project was funded by National Science Challenge 11: Building Better Homes, Towns, and Cities. Primary investigators were myself and Gradon Diprose, working closely with associate investigators Stephen Healy and David Conradson. See http://​ www​ .cultivatingurbanwellbeing​ .wordpress​.com (accessed 25 March 2019) for more details.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge. Cameron, J. (1996), ‘Throwing a dishcloth into the works: Troubling theories of domestic labor’, Rethinking Marxism, 9 (2), 24–44. Cameron, J. and J.K. Gibson-Graham (2003), ‘Feminising the economy: Metaphors, strategies, politics’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 10 (2), 145–57.

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Caring labour: redistributing care work  161 Dombroski, K. (2016), ‘Hybrid activist collectives: Reframing mothers’ environmental and caring labour’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36 (9/10), 629–46. Dombroski, K. (2018), ‘Learning to be affected: Maternal connection, intuition and “elimination communication”’, Emotion, Space and Society, 26, 72–9. Dombroski, K., G. Diprose and I. Boles (2019), ‘Can the commons be temporary? The role of transitional commoning in post-quake Christchurch’, Local Environment, 24 (4), 313–28. Dombroski, K., G. Diprose, D. Conradson, S. Healy and A. Watkins (2018), ‘When Cultivate thrives: Developing criteria for community economy return on investment’, Christchurch, NZ: National Science Challenge 11 Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities, accessed 25 March 2019 at buildingbetter​.nz/​publications/​contestable​_research​_projects/​Dombroski​_et​_al​_2018​_when​ _cultivate​_thrives​.pdf. Dombroski, K., S. Healy and K. McKinnon (2019), ‘Care-full community economies’, in W. Harcourt and C. Bauhardt (eds), Feminist Political Ecology and Economies of Care, London: Routledge, pp. 99–115. Dombroski, K., K. McKinnon and S. Healy (2016), ‘Beyond the birth wars: Diverse assemblages of care’, New Zealand Geographer, 72 (3), 230–239. Fraad, H. (2000), ‘Exploitation in the labor of love’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S. A. Resnick and R. D. Wolff (eds), Class and its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69–86. Gibson, K., L. Law and D. McKay (2001), ‘Beyond heroes and victims: Filipina contract migrants, economic activism and class transformations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (3), 365–86. Healy, S. (2008), ‘Caring for ethics and the politics of health care reform in the United States’, Gender, Place & Culture, 15 (3), 267–84. Hochschild, A.R. (2012), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. hooks, b. (1989), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Boston, MA: South End Press. McKinnon, K. (2016), ‘The geopolitics of birth’, Area, 48 (3), 285–91. Mitchell, K., S.A. Marston and C. Katz (2004), Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Neate, R. (2018), ‘Global pay gap will take 202 years to close, says World Economic Forum’, accessed 25 March 2019 at https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2018/​dec/​18/​global​-gender​-pay​-gap​-will​-take​ -202​-years​-to​-close​-says​-world​-economic​-forum. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ruddick, S. (1989), Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace, London: The Women’s Press. Sepie, A. (2015), ‘Psychosocial wellbeing: Communities, families, youth and children (0–18 years) – A literature review and qualitative analysis of psychosocial postdisaster adaptation considerations following the Canterbury sequence of earthquakes and aftershocks’, Christchurch, New Zealand: The Collaborative Trust for Research and Training in Youth Health and Development, accessed 25 March 2019 at https://​www​.academia​.edu/​18312154/​Psychosocial​_Wellbeing​_Communities​ _families​_youth​_and​_children​_0​-18yrs​_​-​_A​_literature​_review​_2015​_Christchurch​_New​_Zealand​ _The​_Collaborative​_Trust​_for​_Research​_and​_Training​_in​_Youth​_Health​_and​_Development. Simms, E.-M. (2014), ‘Intimacy and the face of the other: A philosophical study of infant institutionalization and deprivation’, Emotion, Space and Society, 13, 80–86. Tronto, J. (1993), Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Hove: Psychology Press. Tronto, J. (2013), Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice, New York: New York University Press. Tronto, J. (2017), ‘There is an alternative: Homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism’, International Journal of Care and Caring, 1 (1), 27–43. Waring, M. (1988), If Women Counted, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Waring, M. (1999), Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Waring, M. (2003), ‘Counting for something! Recognising women’s contribution to the global economy through alternative accounting systems’, Gender & Development, 11 (1), 35–43.

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162  The handbook of diverse economies Weir, A. (2005), ‘The global universal caregiver: Imagining women’s liberation in the new millennium’, Constellations, 12 (3), 308–30.

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17. Non-human ‘labour’: the work of Earth Others Elizabeth Barron and Jaqueline Hess

INTRODUCTION Environments and ecosystems around the world support human life, culture and basic needs in myriad ways. Indeed, the ‘labour’ of non-humans, or Earth Others, as we refer to them here, is hugely diverse. But ecological descriptions of Earth Other interdependencies demonstrate that rethinking labour to build sustainable futures should not be a purely human-focused project. Much of the work that keeps our planet going has nothing to do with humans. We humans benefit from it but it is not for us. Today a growing dissatisfaction with an exclusive focus on human livelihoods at the expense of planetary livelihood has created a demand to attend to non-human labour and the work it does. In this chapter we explore the work Earth Others do. What does it look like? How is this work exchanged and distributed? How is it accounted for and valued? And what difference does it make to talk of non-human ‘labour’? We begin by describing the work of fungi and the different configurations of exchange and compensation involving fungal labour. We view this fungal work as contributing to complex econo-ecologies (Barron 2015, 2018), a new direction of diverse economies theorizing that explores human and Earth Other interdependence with sustainable underpinnings. Having used fungi to illustrate what the work of Earth Others looks like, we then turn to the ways that non-human labour is currently accounted for. This brings us into critical engagement with the framing known as ‘ecosystem services’. In conclusion we explore what difference it makes to expand the conception of interdependence to include the labour exchanges between Earth Others, as well as between Earth Others and humans, and importantly how this challenges the idea of the non-human servicing of human needs.

FUNGAL WORK, EXCHANGE AND COMPENSATION Fungi are spore-producing organisms such as mould, yeast, mushrooms, morels, truffles and toadstools that feed on living or dead organic matter. Fungi do a lot of work – they cycle nutrients in the environment, provide food for other organisms (including people), and decompose dead matter. There are many interdependencies between humans and fungi. Simply finding specific fungi year after year requires observation and understanding of climate, forest health and fungal life cycles. Many people keep detailed records because they rely on foraging edible fungi as a source of food directly, or as inputs into global supply chains (Tsing 2015). Emery and Barron (2010) have documented the extensive knowledge of gatherers about morel fruiting and life cycle patterns in the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA. They found that many gatherers trained close friends and family members in harvesting techniques that promoted the heath and reproductive capacity of target species with respect to their habitats. In these and many additional cases, harvesters are intentionally aiding in dispersal and protecting the environment for the well-being and productivity of the fungi (Barron 2015). Their work, per163 Elizabeth Barron and Jaqueline Hess - 9781788119962 08:00:22PM

164  The handbook of diverse economies formed variously as unpaid, self-employed or waged human labour, assists the work of fungal Earth Others. But what does this look like from the fungus’s perspective? What work has the fungus done to provide this edible product for humans? Are there insights we can learn from how other organisms labour, expend energy, produce outputs and interact with others via forms of exchange? Using the example of fungus we shift focus from human-centred economic relations to include a broader range of ‘interspecies production activities that provide for diverse needs and foster respectful interdependence’ (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009, p. 153). To follow this line of thinking, we explore Earth Other to Earth Other exchanges to better understand what fungi do as a form of labour. The most fundamental requirements for the survival and propagation of all organic life forms can be broken down into (i) the availability of nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, minerals, vitamins, etc., and (ii) a suitable habitat where access to the required nutrients is assured and biotic factors, such as protection from predators and the presence of symbiosis partners, and abiotic factors, such as temperature, precipitation and shelter, are appropriate for the species in question. Much of the work performed by all organisms pertains to sourcing suitable habitats – finding a place to live through migration or construction, and sourcing nutrients and turning them into tissue. This latter process, whereby complex substrates, for example wood, are broken down into simple nutrients and then reassembled into new substrates, like the tissue of fruit bodies, has been named ‘metabolic labour’ (Beldo 2017). Metabolic labour is essentially a series of chemical reactions performed by an organism, some of which release energy, and some of which require energy. All components of an organism’s metabolic system are made up of proteins, which the organism needs to synthesize from simple building blocks. So even if a set of proteins is involved primarily in producing energy, the organism incurs an initial cost (in energy and building blocks) in manufacturing these proteins. In other words, all organisms have to use some energy to get some energy. In what follows we present three examples of fungal labouring, all of which constitute a form of metabolic labour, and we identify what is exchanged between organisms at different levels of the communities that fungi inhabit. Fungus and Ant Reciprocal Labour Fungus-farming evolved approximately 50 to 60 million years ago and is practised by over 200 species of ants (Mehdiabadi and Schultz 2010). Ants and fungi are dependent on each other in what is called a mutualistic symbiosis. The ants provide foraged materials to the fungus, including plant detritus, seeds, flower parts, insect excretions and dead insect parts. The fungal partner performs metabolic labour – it decays these materials using specialized enzymes, assimilates the nutrients and produces new tissues. The resulting fungal mycelium (the body of the fungus) then serves as a source of nutrients for ant larvae, with some fungi even producing specialized structures, rich in nutrients, for this purpose (Mueller et al. 2005). The fungus clearly provides metabolic labour to the ants, and the ants provide for the fungus, including gathering food and providing shelter inside the ant nest. Additional benefits for the fungi include protection from pathogens through a third symbiosis partner – a bacterium inside the ant pouch that produces antibiotics used to protect the fungus. And once a queen leaves to establish a new nest, she will take fungal propagules with her to establish a new garden and thus help with the dispersal of the fungus.

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Non-human ‘labour’: the work of Earth Others  165 Here we have a reciprocal exchange of non-human labour between two partners who share equal levels of benefits, and care for each other’s habitats. As a set of exchanges and practices that have persisted for over 50 million years, these interconnections certainly are a model for sustainable engagement. Mushroom Reproduction Labour Fruit bodies, the ephemeral fruiting structures of mushroom-forming fungi, are the product of reproductive labour by a fungus to ensure the dispersal of its own offspring. Making fruit bodies involves a tightly coordinated programme of tissue development and production of biomass that uses a lot of a fungus’s resources (Moore et al. 2008). The fruit body also presents a common good to the benefit of the many fungi-eating insects, small mammals and humans (i.e. fungivores) that the fungus shares a common habitat with. In the case of truffles, which are essentially underground mushrooms, animals have turned their digging hobby into a job. By digging up the truffles for humans, they help to distribute the spores of the fungus, which would otherwise be trapped below the surface (Trappe et al. 2009). The nature of the non-human labour exchange taking place depends on when the fruit body is harvested. If harvested before the spores are mature, a sort of unequal ‘theft’ has occurred, as the fungus has gone to a considerable amount of work to attempt reproduction, which will not succeed. If the spores have matured, the animal enjoys a tasty meal and the fungus secures distribution of its genetic material via the animal’s excretions at other locations. In this case, the requirements for survival and propagation of at least two species happen in concert. Fungal Metabolic Division of Labour Fungi are the main decomposers of deadwood in forests and gardens. Their decomposition labour contributes to soil formation and nutrient cycling, joining with the non-human labour of a wealth of organisms that interact in a community of generalists and specialists (Bani et al. 2018). Decomposition proceeds in successive stages, with certain fungal species specializing at different stages of the decay process depending on the prevailing conditions (nutrients, wood structure, moisture) (Hoppe et al. 2016). The metabolic labour performed by one fungus prepares the substrate for growth of another fungus. As decomposition proceeds to later stages, the liberated nutrients become incorporated into fungal tissues and return to the forest soil where they contribute to long-term soil fertility. The non-human labour exchanges that take place during the process of decomposition are analogous to gifted labour and in-kind exchange labour. Different members in the community work to capture their own food, then the by-products of that work produce either food directly for another community member, or create the conditions in which that other member thrives. Both outcomes are a result of a ‘gift’ of nature. At the same time, the original community members benefit from that consumption as well, since it maintains and promotes ongoing nutrient cycling and forest health. In this sense the labour of the fungus is exchanged for an in-kind return – the work of nutrient recycling. In other words, without the exchange of decomposition labour among different species, unsustainable conditions would most likely occur. Furthermore, there would be a high ‘cost’ to be paid if any single form of decomposition dominated or was eliminated from the process. This is the most complex example of the ongoing and multiple negotiations that must be maintained for sustainability.

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166  The handbook of diverse economies As is demonstrated by these three cases, the performance of non-human labour by fungal Earth Others contributes to ecological sustainability. Interdependency is built up through an intricate network of one-to-one Earth Other reciprocity, one-to-many relationships including theft and mutual support, and many-to-many Earth Other gifting and in-kind exchanges. When this fungal work interacts with human labour relationships it can either be sustaining, as in the case of ecologically sensitive human foragers, or destructive as in the case of most modern land management practices. Barron (2015, 2018) has coined the term ‘econo-ecologies’ to focus attention on the interdependence between humans and Earth Others as well as between Earth Others themselves. The concept of econo-ecologies provides a framing within which to analyse what actions form and maintain connections. If the term ‘econo-sociality’ helps us focus on building co-constituted economic and social networks (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009), then ‘econo-ecologies’ extends this focus to encompass the wider more-than-human communities whose interdependence must also be monitored and cared for (see also Chapter 44 by Miller in this volume).

ACCOUNTING FOR THE WORK OF EARTH OTHERS The need for more caring relationships between humans and Earth Others is increasingly recognized as a key component of sustainable and resilient futures (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, 2016; Jarosz 2011; Puig de la Bellacasa 2010; Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009). However, outside the critical social sciences and the environmental humanities this desire to care for Earth Others has been developed primarily through the language of ecosystem services. This framing is based on the idea that we should care for the non-human world because of all the services it provides to humans to maintain the world we need and want. The ecosystem services conceptual framework was first introduced in 2005 by a massive team of interdisciplinary international experts working together to produce the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a global report on the state of nature and biodiversity (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). It was presented as a useful framing within which to categorize all the environment does for humans as provisioning, supporting, cultural, and regulating ‘services’. It helped to disaggregate and value the so-called ‘gifts’ of nature. With increasing realization that resource use was degrading environments at a rapid and unsustainable pace, the ecosystem services framework was rapidly adapted into the idea of pricing the services nature provides. Under the influence of neoliberal thinking it was thought that by valuing the work the environment does for humans, sustainable outcomes would result (Burke and Heynen 2014). The market would regulate use in a beneficial way. Almost immediately the ecosystem services framework was used to create new markets involving monetary exchange: the carbon market and emission reduction programmes, and wetland banking, are just a few examples. The carbon market is based on a ‘cap and trade’ system meant to reduce emissions over time. A total limit is created and placed on all carbon emissions in a given area (state, country, worldwide). Then different businesses or people are allowed a portion of the total credits. If a company produces more than they have credits for, they must pay a fine. Some businesses produce less pollution than their total credit limit, and they are able to sell or trade those credits to companies that are producing more than their share of pollution in order for those companies to escape paying the fines. Over time the total amount of credits in the market is supposed to go down, thereby decreasing pollution. There

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Non-human ‘labour’: the work of Earth Others  167 are several concerns with this system. Notably, it does not take into account the effects on the environment in the places where pollution is being created (Robbins et al. 2014). Further, while the market may be helping to decrease atmospheric carbon, associated planting projects more often focus on reforestation for carbon sequestration rather than biodiversity restoration (Reeson et al. 2015). Wetland banking is a somewhat similar system. In the USA, for example, a cap is set on the total amount of wetlands such that no net loss is allowed. So if a business wants to build a new box store or the state wants to build a new highway in a wetland area that will lead to the destruction of the wetland, they are required to build a wetland elsewhere to prevent net loss of wetlands. Like with reforestation for carbon sequestration, it is ecologically almost impossible to create a fully functioning, environmentally sound wetland (or forest) in an area that was not originally wetland (Robbins et al. 2014). In these cases, the intact environments with well-developed species complexes, soils, disturbance regimes, and ecosystem functions are replaced by simplified, engineered landscapes, which other humans are paid to create. The environment itself, species and their labour, remain uncompensated. Marx’s second contradiction of capitalism states that capitalism has a tendency to undermine the environmental conditions for its own perpetuation, because everything from nature is a ‘gift’, and this perspective leads to the over-exploitation of nature. Both carbon markets and wetland banking are capitalist mechanisms that ironically recognize the truth in this contradiction, while attempting to solve it with more capitalism, leading to simplified environments. No system can communicate the reality of the value the ecosystem provides because of lack of understanding of how the systems actually work and the spatial and temporal scales at which the systems operate. Critics argue that the ecosystems services framework has led to the oversimplification of complex ecological processes in order to bring them into spaces of capitalist exchange (Burke and Heynen 2014). It is a human-centred and hierarchical system based on human choice and human control, rather than one that recognizes Earth Others as independent and humans as interdependent with them. It foregrounds a capitalocentric approach that limits how we think about ‘non-human labour’. In the reforestation efforts related to the carbon market, for example, the structural and species compositions of so called ‘carbon forests’ are determined specifically with the carbon sequestration potential of the trees in mind. Not paying attention to the role of fungi and other microbes in these processes has been shown to decrease the forest’s ability to do this work (Fujita et al. 2014). Rather than simplifying ecological relationships to create markets, another way to interpret ecosystem services is as a way of highlighting the interdependencies humans have with every living and non-living thing on earth. From an econo-ecological perspective, everything from nature is the product of the hard work of Earth Others. Gibson-Graham (1996) emphasized complexity to critique the widespread belief that the economy was dominantly capitalist, and to show it as diverse and always changing. She argued that the economy could not be reduced to a few key determinants. Sustainability, like the economy, also cannot be simplified to a few key determinants or key services which, if properly valued, will be protected and sustained. The catchphrase ‘people, planet, profit’, for example, does not clearly convey that sustainability must be located at the intersection of those ideas, each one of course being an extremely complex system on its own. This brings us back to care. Paying, or paying more for something as a way of demonstrating care is an ethic deeply rooted in capitalist thinking, and since the 1980s, a very American strategy to address environmental problems.

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168  The handbook of diverse economies Even when we pay for the use of natural resources we may be degrading the means of production for Earth Other labour, and creating invisible conditions of unsustainability. For example, when we harvest living or dead trees, we take away biomass for fungi and bacteria to grow on and to initiate nutrient cycling and replenish soils (many-to-many relationships). We disrupt the forest commons and create unsustainable working conditions for the communities that reside there. Ultimately, an ecosystem services perspective closes down possibilities for sustainability.

CONCLUSION Nature cannot be repaid effectively through payments in human currencies to third party actors (e.g. payment schemes for tree replanting) since this often results merely in shifting responsibilities between different human players. In this chapter, we use diverse economies theory to move past the idea that the best way to appreciate and value the environment is through the services it provides to humans. We suggest that instead it is possible to create and understand the value of Earth Others by focusing on their labour, both for humans and for other organisms. This animates fungi (and others) as actors with whom we are interconnected and must relate with for sustainability. Many kinds of labour combine to make a sustainable world. Identifying and recognizing a diversity of labour practices in multiple economies (human, fungal, insect, etc.) in fact exemplifies sustainability because it conceptually represents the interconnected space of environment–economy–equity: recognizing the work Earth Others do in order to honour, care for, and value them and the environments where they live. The interdependencies between humans and Earth Others in a post-capitalist community economy have begun to be articulated by Beldo (2017) and Roelvink and Gibson-Graham (2009) drawing on the ecological humanities. Here we extend diverse economies thinking by drawing on ecology, specifically fungal ecology, to give description and shape to some of these interdependencies. Using scientific findings, we are able to rethink the community economy in terms of labour and exchange amongst Earth Others and Earth Others, not just Earth Others and humans, and bring metabolic labour into the diverse economy as another form of labour. Documenting and valuing the services organisms and earth processes do that benefit humans are actions people do to Earth Others and the environment. Building relationships, working, and surviving/thriving are actions all organisms do for themselves – sometimes with humans but often with others. Econo-ecologies contextualize these labour exchanges in long-term sustainability.

REFERENCES Bani, A., S. Pioli, M. Ventura, P. Panzacchi, L. Borruso, R. Tognetti, G. Tonon and L. Brusetti (2018), ‘The role of microbial community in the decomposition of leaf litter and deadwood’, Applied Soil Ecology, 126, 75–84. Barron, E.S. (2015), ‘Situating wild product gathering in a diverse economy: Negotiating ethical interactions with natural resources’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 173–93.

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Non-human ‘labour’: the work of Earth Others  169 Barron, E.S. (2018), ‘Who values what nature? Constructing conservation values with fungi’, in R. Lave, S. Lane and C. Biermann (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 373–92. Beldo, L. (2017), ‘Metabolic labor: Broiler chickens and the exploitation of vitality’, Environmental Humanities, 9 (1), 108–28. Burke, B.J. and N. Heynen (2014), ‘Transforming participatory science into socioecological praxis: Valuing marginalized environmental knowledges in the face of the neoliberalization of nature and science’, Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 5, 7–27. Emery, M.R. and E.S. Barron (2010), ‘Using local ecological knowledge to assess morel decline in the US mid-Atlantic region’, Economic Botany, 64 (3), 205–16. Fujita, Y., J.-P.M. Witte and P.M. van Bodegom (2014), ‘Incorporating microbial ecology concepts into global soil mineralization models to improve predictions of carbon and nitrogen fluxes’, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 28 (3), 223–38. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers . Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., A. Hill and L. Law (2016), ‘Re-embedding economies in ecologies: Resilience building in more than human communities’, Building Research and Information, 44 (7), 703–16. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2009), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (S1), 320–346. Hoppe, B., W. Purahong, T. Wubet, T. Kahl, J. Bauhus, T. Arnstadt, M. Hofrichter, F. Buscot and D. Krüger (2016), ‘Linking molecular deadwood-inhabiting fungal diversity and community dynamics to ecosystem functions and processes in Central European forests’, Fungal Diversity, 77 (1), 367–79. Jarosz, L. (2011), ‘Nourishing women: Toward a feminist political ecology of community supported agriculture in the United States’, Gender, Place and Culture, 18 (3), 307–26. Mehdiabadi, N.J. and T.R. Schultz (2010), ‘Natural history and phylogeny of the fungus-farming ants (Formicidae: Myrmicinae: Attini)’, Myrmecological News, 13, 37–55. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis, Washington, DC: Island Press. Moore, D., A.C. Gange, E.G. Gange, and L. Boddy (2008), ‘Fruit bodies: Their production and development in relation to environment’, in L. Boddy, J.C. Frankland and P. van West (eds), Ecology of Saprotrophic Basidiomycetes, British Mycological Society Symposia Series 28, London: Academic Press, pp. 79–103. Mueller, U.G., N.M. Gerardo, D.K. Aanen, D.L. Six, and T.R. Schultz (2005), ‘The evolution of agriculture in insects’, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 36 (1), 563–95. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2010), ‘Ethical doings in nature cultures’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 13 (2), 151–69. Reeson, A., A.R. Renwick, C. Hawkins, H.P. Possingham, J. Carwardine, M. Watts, P. Polglase and T.G. Martin (2015), ‘Spatial priorities for restoring biodiverse carbon forests’, BioScience, 65 (4), 372–82. Robbins, P., J. Hintz and S.A. Moore (2014), Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Roelvink, G. and J.K. Gibson-Graham (2009), ‘A postcapitalist politics of dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review, 46, 145–58. Trappe, J.M., R. Molina, D.L. Luoma, E. Cázares, D. Pilz, J.E. Smith, M.A. Castellano, S.L. Miller and M.J. Trappe (2009), ‘Diversity, ecology, and conservation of truffle fungi in forests of the Pacific Northwest’, General Technical Report, PNW-GTR-772, Portland, OR: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Tsing, A. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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18. Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility Katherine Gibson

INTRODUCTION Collectively performed reciprocal labour involves a non-monetized exchange of group work done by community members for the benefit usually of one community member or household. Normally it involves a labour-intensive task that cannot be achieved by a single person or household, such as harvesting or house construction. The expenditure of group manual labour is rewarded by reciprocation, that is, the practice of group work on another member’s task at a later date. Those who benefit at one point in time participate knowing that they will be called upon to benefit another at a later date. The rules of reciprocity vary and are differently enforced according to context. The fact that there are agreed upon rules of exchange distinguish this labour practice from other forms of group voluntary work that is gifted with less formalized expectations of reciprocation.1 Collective reciprocal labour is performed the world over and is known by a range of other analytic terms, such as ‘exchange labour, traditional work groups, communal labour, collective labour, festive labour’ (Moore 1975, p. 271) or reciprocal work bees (Wilson 2001). In this chapter I shed light on the ubiquity of collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange, thereby establishing its legitimacy in a diverse economy. In academic debates about diverse forms of labour and their role in economic development, reciprocal labour exchange is variously positioned as a practice of bare survival, or a practice that is deployed to deal with labour scarcity. Most accounts see the exchange as embedded in relationships of power and obligation (ranging from equal to hierarchical) that are locally negotiated or enforced, but not governed by the ‘more efficient’ and arm’s-length operations of a market that places a price on labour. Reciprocated labour is thus seen to be outmoded and inefficient from a modernization perspective wedded to the beneficial impacts of market growth (that is supposed to bring prosperity and allow people to shift from ‘getting by’ to ‘getting ahead’), modernizing technology (that overcomes labour shortage) and modern democratic governance (that eschews the power dynamics of patron–client relations). Given that at various times this practice has been coercively manipulated by both communist regimes and developmental states as a tool for building state assets, it has gained further negative or non-modern connotations. Yet collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange persists, coexisting with individuated paid, or waged, labour. What is intriguing about reciprocal labour is the way in which it combines relations of collective sharing and individual benefit. In this chapter I read for difference and speculate on how this form of labour exchange might be deployed to a variety of ends, including that of building community economies.

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Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility  171

SPLITTING AND NAMING Reciprocal labour exchange became a practice of great interest to social scientists in the immediate post-Second World War decades when minority world development planners were strategizing how to modernize agriculture in the majority world. A major survey of reciprocal farm labour conducted by the American anthropologist Charles Erasmus in 1956 was initially motivated by the interest that social planners working in Haiti had in seeing the practice of combite (a form of reciprocal labour) as a base from which to build cooperative self-help projects. Some 20 years later, M.P. Moore, a research officer at the UK Institute of Development Studies, revisited the understudied topic of cooperative labour to inquire whether it could be the ‘evolutionary basis for rural “socialism” with a human face’ (1975, p. 270). In order to test the likelihood that reciprocal labour exchange might morph into instruments for cooperative forms of ‘development’, these authors constructed inventories of ‘types’ of reciprocal labour and began to document their local names. Erasmus (1956) draws attention to two forms of collectively performed reciprocal labour: ‘festive’ and ‘exchange’ labour. What differentiates festive from standard reciprocal labour exchange is the degree of obligation to reciprocate labour and the quantity and quality of food and drink (and entertainment) served to the workers on the day that labour is performed. Another distinguishing factor is the number of people involved – with exchange labour groups containing up to ten people, and festive work groups sometimes numbering into the hundreds (Erasmus 1956, p. 446). Mary Hollnsteiner’s fieldwork in the Philippines, conducted in 1959–60, concurs with this division and affords a more explicit parsing of reciprocal labour. She calls exchange labour ‘contractual reciprocity’ and festive labour ‘quasi-contractual reciprocity’ (1961, p. 388).2 Contractual reciprocity refers to the voluntary agreements between people ‘to behave toward one another in a specified way for a specified time in the future’ (1961, p. 388). Her summary account of this form of exchange labour is as follows: . . . in contractual reciprocity, the reciprocal acts are equivalent, their amount and form having been explicitly agreed upon beforehand. The obligation that is felt to return a service is relatively colorless, with a minimum of affective sentiment. Fulfilment of the contract is such that there is no doubt in the mind of either party that payment has been made; repayment is unmistakable. The reciprocation terminates that particular relationship, leaving the participants in a state of equilibrium. (1961, p. 389)

Marshall Sahlins, in Stone Age Economics was later to call this ‘balanced reciprocity’ (1972, pp. 185–204). Linked to the expectation of balance is another of regularity, often linked to the natural rhythms of seasonal labour demand.3 In Hollnsteiner’s categorization quasi-contractual reciprocity is a more intermittent form of labour exchange that is called upon at times of great need, such as when a funeral is to be organized, or when a new fishing raft needs to be constructed or when a house needs repairs or has to be moved. This is more like the cooperative working bee that in the Philippines is known as bayanihan (Placino in Gibson et al. 2018). The terms of balanced reciprocation are implicit, not explicit. Between events, the reciprocal relationship is dormant, but there is an expectation that when a similar event arises for another in the future, labour will be offered. In both cases non-reciprocation is met with social approbation and the accompanying sense of shame or hiya (Hollnsteiner 1961, pp. 395–6). Sahlins terms this indefinite expectation where the return is ‘not stipulated by time, quantity, or quality’ ‘generalized reciprocity’ (1972, p. 194). It is the more infrequent temporality, the one-off nature of the events and the

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172  The handbook of diverse economies requirement often for larger numbers of people, that link this kind of reciprocity with festivities (Erasmus 1956, p. 453). With this clearer conceptual distinction between balanced and generalized reciprocity and a sense of the place-based vocabulary of diversity we can now return to the questions raised by Erasmus and Moore as to how reciprocal labour exchange might play a role in economic transition.

RECIPROCAL LABOUR AND ECONOMIC TRANSITION This discussion of transition will attempt to read for difference in a selection of texts that take reciprocal labour exchange as their focus. First, I will turn to the role that this collective labour practice played in the settler colonial context of Ontario, Canada as documented by Catherine Anne Wilson (2001). Second, I will draw on late twentieth-century analyses of this practice in the context of modernization in rural Asia. Third, I will briefly refer to the harnessing of the idea of reciprocal labour exchange in state development projects. A Tool of Capitalization on Stolen Land Rich insights meticulously extracted from farm family diaries and letters are provided in Wilson’s account of working bees in nineteenth-century Ontario. This historical study is decidedly place-based, but there are many resonances with other settler contexts where country has been stolen or acquired by nefarious means from Indigenous peoples, and where land was thus ‘available’ but labour and capital were in short supply (Wilson 2001, p. 435).4 With colonization came a complete severing of the interconnections between Indigenous peoples and the nourishing ecosystems they were actively involved in through reciprocated working relationships of care and maintenance. Violent economic transition was brought about by the industrious efforts of settler communities who deployed collectively performed reciprocal labour to clear forest, establish broad scale agriculture and build settlements. ‘Development’ in the colonial context became equated with the private appropriation of wealth generated from the built-up fertility of a land that had been managed and nourished for generations by Indigenous peoples. In this context of transition, collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange was in effect a tool of capitalization, squarely implicated in the process of what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’. Settler households, especially those with young children, relied on reciprocal labour exchange to accomplish large jobs like clearing land, building a barn or bringing in the harvest. Wilson notes that ‘frontier’ settlers brought practices of reciprocal exchange from the Old World. ‘Working bees’, as they were known, were a regular affair. A day’s work was exchanged for a day’s work and accounting was informal. If one couldn’t attend the working bee, a family member or material contribution, such as food, would be sent in one’s place. This type of labour arrangement was used not only to clear land, build barns and houses, and harvest crops, but also spin yarn, knit winter clothing and make quilts.5 The rhetoric of neighbourliness hid a subtle form of social accounting: Participation was part of an exchange of labour, skills, equipment, information, hospitality, and good will. Reciprocal work operated much like a bank, in which all made their deposits and were then entitled to make their withdrawals or acquire small loans. One could even attain personal credit for

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Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility  173 the contributions made by ancestors or close relatives. It was possible to borrow and then abscond, but most settled families probably contributed and received in equal quantities. (Wilson 2001, p. 439)

The nature of these labour arrangements fostered, according to Wilson, both mutual reliance and individual prosperity (2001, p. 461). Working bees could be called on in the case of fire or flood, illness or sudden death. In remote settlements, it was important to make connections outside of kin networks to ensure that help would be available when unexpectedly needed. Thus participating in reciprocal labour exchange was a form of insurance – if you helped out neighbours who fell on hard times they would do so in return. Working bees were also a major contributor to community development. They were used to build basic infrastructure such as churches, mills and schools. And in remote places, they were a primary vehicle of social interaction. Wilson notes that: hospitality was an integral part of the exchange and one of the most valued virtues of the social code . . . In the early days of sparse settlement and rough ways, hospitality took the form of simple food, entertainment, and plenty of whiskey. (2001, p. 443)

But despite the collective organizational frame for reciprocal labour exchange, the private and individual nature of ownership was never questioned on the ‘frontier’: Though people agreed to share their labour, tools, and time, it was always clear whose field had been logged, whose cattle would use the newly raised barn, and who could sleep under the quilt. (2001, p. 461)

This collective labour practice resulted in individual gain, creating private capital assets for each settler family, producing the accoutrements of ‘improvement’ that ‘justified’ the claim of private property ownership. For the practice to continue, there needed to be an equal distribution of reciprocity. Social rules and expectations mediated this distribution. Unofficial monitoring of reciprocity extended to the amount and quality of food that was offered during the working bees, the frequency with which the rotation circulated, the acceptance of newcomers into the community and how much front ending they needed to do before they could draw on the neighbourhood labour exchange. Debts of gratitude bound people together and there was fear of the shame associated with breaking the social bond. During the twentieth century, with increasing farm mechanization such as tractors and combine harvesters, the demand for large numbers of farm workers declined and reciprocal labour exchange became less common in the colonial settler agricultural world. With the rise of insurance companies and the welfare state the informal social safety net offered by neighbourhood labour was no longer necessary. And as cash payment for work became more generalized, many saw the benefit of dis-embedding labour transactions from the social ties that governed reciprocity. As Wilson notes: That reciprocal work often resulted in a warm sense of generosity, belonging, and security within a larger community was an important by-product deeply appreciated by people at the time and lamented later when lost. When given the opportunity to be released from the constraints of scarce labour and capital, however, many people chose to leave the obligations and inconvenience of cooperative work behind for other ways over which they had greater control. (2001, p. 462)

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174  The handbook of diverse economies It is timely to reflect on the impact this diverse economy transaction had on the transformation of a commons that had supported Indigenous people for millennia. Collectively performed reciprocal labour was the means by which enclosure took place and by which capitalist family farming and later agribusiness capitalized the landscape and life-worlds of Indigenous people. The question we need to keep open-ended is whether this labour practice can be deployed to other ends? A Disappearing Practice in Modernizing Rural Asia The mid-to-late twentieth-century analyses of contemporary collective reciprocal labour exchange referred to earlier in this chapter unequivocally position this practice in a narrative of inevitable disintegration, decline and disappearance as modernization gathers pace (Erasmus 1956, p. 444; Moore 1975, p. 276). From an anti-capitalocentric diverse economies perspective, the assumed inevitability of the disappearance of reciprocal labour exchange is notable. The factors identified that contribute to this presumed inevitability are numerous. Rural mechanization is one, as Erasmus notes: . . . technological changes which supplement men’s strength and speed modify reciprocal labor patterns and decrease their incidence. (1956, p. 455)

Rural population growth and the increasing inequality of land distribution is another: . . . a member of an exchange group may find he has rights to more labour than he requires [because his land is quite small]: these right[s] he may sell for cash . . . or a larger farmer may begin to fail to turn up for work, sending a cash payment . . . or a paid replacement instead. (Moore 1975, p. 274, inserts added)

The rise of rural landlessness is a further contributor to the breakdown of non-monetized reciprocity. The formation of ‘age-set’ exchange labour groups, for example, of young men who comprise a community labour force, is seen as an inevitable transition towards an agricultural labourers’ cooperative. But once cash begins to stand in for the ‘right’ to claim or offer reciprocity, Moore argues that: . . . the group may increasingly come to resemble a group of labourers hiring themselves out for the benefit of each member in turn. (1975, p. 274)

For many analysts the infiltration of cash into the payment for reciprocal labour signals the move towards proletarianization. Moore, for example, argues that festive labour ‘appears to function as an entrée for capitalist employment relationships . . . it appears to be replaced fairly quickly, as a method of labour mobilisation, by pure wage labour’ (1975, p. 275). Other researchers are not so willing to see the operations of a waged labour market in every appearance of cash in return for collectively performed reciprocal labour. Frank Hirtz (1998) presents a nuanced analysis of the kabesilya, a group of landless labourers, mainly women, who are employed to transplant and harvest rice in a lowland rural area of the Philippines.6 The amount of cash remuneration they receive for transplanting rice seedlings is below that of hired waged agricultural labour in surrounding areas, but this amount is negotiated with the proviso that the farmers are obligated to employ the group again at harvest time. Hirtz resists

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Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility  175 viewing this case as evidence of a capitalist transformation, arguing that employment of these young unmarried women is part of a meshwork of familial obligations that ensure they enjoy a measure of financial independence and maintain a ‘quasi-right to the land’ even though they are not owners of it (1998, p. 260). The cooperative labour group is thus kept within the social safety net of the community and the pressure to migrate to maintain a livelihood is reduced. Hirtz argues that this commitment to interdependence and collective access and control of land explains the resistance to land reform and independent land rights (1998, p. 261). His perceptive analysis is an instructive example of reading for difference against the grain of dominant theories of agrarian transition. In my own field research in the Philippines and that of colleagues in the Community Economies Research Network in India and Asia, we have found that reciprocal labour exchange is a practice that is alive and well, though not widely acknowledged and studied. For example, as part of an action research project that documented community assets in the central Philippines, we encountered still vibrant practices of group reciprocal labour exchange for rice farming (hungus) and individual reciprocal labour exchange (badsanay) (Gibson et al. 2010). Other community economy researchers have also encountered live practices of reciprocal exchange including: caulking and sealing fishing boat hulls in maritime Indonesia (Carnegie 2008, p. 363); the dagyaw system for harvesting rice in Puno rural Philippines (Wright 2010, p. 304); the practice of kamañidungan or reciprocated building labour in the northern region of Batanes in the Philippines where strong stone houses with grass rooves are traditionally constructed and regularly maintained to withstand frequent cyclonic winds (Hill in Gibson et al. 2018); and collective farm labouring in Kondh communities in Odisha, India (Chitranshi 2019, p. 124). The diverse economies perspective encourages us to validate the specificity and potential promise of these practices of economic diversity. Released from the inevitability of capitalist development, we can explore the role that collectively performed reciprocal labour might play in building (and capitalizing) enterprises within community economies. State Co-option and Contestation Before moving on to consider how to productively appropriate reciprocal labour exchange into a politics of community economy building, it is worth noting that, as with any diverse economy practices, it can be and has been co-opted by the powerful and put to work in questionable ways. One transition that has attracted some scholarly attention is the way that in some majority world contexts reciprocal labour arrangements were harnessed by the state to promote development agendas. Bowen discusses the generic Indonesian term gotong royong (mutual and reciprocal assistance in Javanese) and how it became tied to the idea of the Indonesian nation and used as a slogan of national unity and a tool of state intervention into village life under Suharto’s anti-communist Orde Baru (New Order) regime of 1966–98 (1986, pp. 549, 552). This term is rarely used in practice to refer to reciprocal labour exchange as there are already locally specific terms that are in use. However, because gotong royong evokes ‘genuinely indigenous notions of moral obligation and generalized reciprocity . . . it has been reworked by the state to become a cultural-ideological instrument for the mobilization of village labor’ (Bowen 1986, p. 546). Its informal and negotiated village-based meaning has been blended with that of obligatory or corvée labour historically demanded by the politically powerful.

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176  The handbook of diverse economies Under the New Order, rural development programmes were financed by a fixed grant or ‘village subsidy’ for which the village was expected to provide free labour, ‘in gotong royong fashion, that is without pay’ (Bowen 1986, p. 553). Critics of the appropriation of gotong royong into state policy highlight the shift from an exchange between equals that is mutually beneficial, to a demand for labour inputs to infrastructure maintenance and improvement that, in an environment where landlessness is increasing, benefits the landed class and the more powerful (Bowen 1986, p. 555). In a skilful manipulation of meaning, village values are used to endorse local subordination to the state. Bowen is careful, however, to emphasize the variations in the success of this strategy across the nation (1986, p. 559). A somewhat different situation can be seen in the Philippines where the term bayanihan was mobilized as part of the ‘people power’ movement that overthrew the Marcos regime in the late 1980s. The term bayanihan from the root word for ‘hero’ refers to the practice of communal cooperation and collectively performed reciprocal labour (Placino in Gibson et al. 2018). The term is usually associated with the practice of moving a lightweight village house with those who have helped being rewarded with a meal in the vein of the practice of festive labour outlined above. In the post-Marcos era the ‘bayanihan spirit’ was evoked to call up community cooperation around rebuilding democracy (Pascual 1990). In these two different national contexts reciprocal labour exchange has been deployed to different ends – in both cases taking the language of labour reciprocity far beyond its initial quite grounded meaning. However, co-option, or creative appropriation, can work in many ways. In the conclusion of this chapter I turn to speculate on whether practices of collectively performed reciprocal labour might be turned towards the project of building post-capitalist futures.

CONCLUSION Julie Graham once suggested that gifting acts as a form of ‘primitive accumulation’ from which community economies emerge. Perhaps we can also see collectively performed reciprocal labour as another non-monetized accumulative strategy that has the potential to build collective prosperity? In a world where the challenges of the Anthropocene call for new ways of living on this planet, we could start to revalue some of the diverse economic practices that have sustained communities over the longue durée. Despite its dismissal as a last resort practice of bare survival that is on the way out, the benefits of collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange remain pertinent in many contexts. It remains important in near subsistence agricultural economies; it is a good way of mobilizing a large workforce for efficient work; it affords economies of scale and a division of labour, for example, between old and young; it saves time when harvesting; it allows for the rotation of certain kinds of jobs such as protecting crops from predators, or watching water flow in irrigation channels; and there are marked psychological effects with greater jollity and singing that makes the repetitive work pass more quickly (Moore 1975, pp. 278–80). Collectively performed reciprocal labour might be seen as a tool of capitalization for a community economy. For example, in the Municipality of Jagna, Bohol Province in the Philippines, elderly farming women deployed hungus, their traditional practice of reciprocated farming labour exchange, to support the development of a community enterprise value adding to the local ginger grown in the area by making salabat a powdered ginger tea. In order to fit

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Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility  177 this enterprise development into their pre-existing workloads they organized to take turns in production and marketing and sent other family members along to work sessions if they were ill or otherwise engaged. The collective work of the group was channelled not into individual prosperity or capitalization but into building up a shared asset that would benefit the community. Not only did the Laca Ginger Tea community enterprise produce a low priced beverage for the local market with health benefits for target groups such as pregnant women, they also grew the market for ginger producers and offered opportunities for younger women to earn cash and thus resist the pull to leave the community to work overseas as a contract labourer (Community Economies Collective and Gibson 2009). Speculating a bit further, collectively performed reciprocal human and more-than-human exchanges might be one way we can begin to repair our planet and build multi-species community economies. For example, in Australian cities a form of collective reciprocal labour is performed by citizens who are members of Bushcare groups. Local residents of urban areas with remnant native forest volunteer for a few hours once a month to weed and improve the environment for native plants to thrive. The work put into removing invasive species by hand is rewarded over time by the increased growth of species endemic to the locality. This practice establishes new connections between human and non-human members. As residents become more aware of the cooling effects of green spaces and especially of the capacity of native bush to combat rising heat in the city, perhaps they will see their voluntary labour not as a gift but as a form of reciprocation for the ecological work of our resident plant communities. Clearly, collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange is context specific and its benefits and pitfalls have to be approached with an open mind. What is evident is that this practice is by no means dead and that it has the potential to make a major contribution to building different kinds of economies in which equitable exchange, collective care and festivity might be recombined.

NOTES 1. Some readers may be familiar with working bees organized to support a local kindergarten or school, or to help community or family members to move or paint a house. These practices bear some relationship to reciprocal labour exchange but can be seen at one end of a continuum between gifted voluntary labour (with a weak degree of accountability) and collectively performed reciprocal labour exchange (with a stronger set of rules of account that are enforced by community norms). 2. Hollnsteiner also identifies a third type: utang na loob (debt of gratitude) reciprocity which refers to the complex reciprocity that exists between people of different groups or status, which is often referred to as ‘patron–client relationships’ (Scott 1972). 3. Various researchers have compiled collections of terms used to name collectively performed reciprocal labour in parts of South America and Southeast Asia (see, for example, Bankoff 2007; Bowen 1986; Erasmus 1956; Gibson et al. 2010, 2018). To an English speaker, the variety of these terms is remarkable. They exemplify the ecologies of productivity that have been made invisible by mainstream economic discourse (de Sousa Santos 2014). They also attest to the degree to which diverse economic practices have experienced language loss in parts of the Anglocene (see Chapter 51 by Alhojärvi and Hyvärinen in this volume). 4. In some settler colonial states unfree labour, such as slaves or convicts, may well have provided the means to achieve many of the tasks Wilson argues were performed by reciprocal labour exchange in Ontario. 5. The practice of reciprocating group labour to produce quilts is carried on to this day in communities such as that of Gees Bend in the southern USA (Wilson 2018).

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178  The handbook of diverse economies 6. It is interesting to note the similarity of the term, but slightly different meaning as documented by Bankoff (2007, p. 345) who writes that the term kabisilya referred to the headman in a village who was tasked to record the days of labour contributed by each family and their buffalo on another’s behalf and, at the end of the season, to tally up the credits and debts to ensure equality, with any difference being made up in distributions of unhusked rice.

REFERENCES Bankoff, G. (2007), ‘Dangers of going it alone: Social capital and the origins of community resilience in the Philippines’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2), 327–55. Bowen, J.R. (1986), ‘On the political construction of tradition: Gotong Royong in Indonesia’, Journal of Asian Studies, 45 (3), 545–61. Carnegie, M. (2008), ‘Development prospects in Eastern Indonesia: Learning from Oelua’s diverse economy’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49 (3), 354–69. Chitranshi, B. (2019), ‘Beyond development: Postdevelopment and feminist praxis in Adivasi contexts’, in E. Klein and C. E. Morreo (eds), Postdevelopment in Practice: Alternatives, Economies, Ontologies, London: Routledge, pp. 117–32. Community Economies Collective and K. Gibson (2009), ‘Building community-based social enterprises in the Philippines: Diverse development pathways’, in A. Amin (ed.), Plural Economy, Plural Provision: The Social Economy in International Perspective, London: Zed Books, pp. 116–38. de Sousa Santos, B. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers. Erasmus, C. (1956), ‘Culture structure and process: The occurrence and disappearance of reciprocal farm labor’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 12 (4), 444–69. Gibson, K., R. Astuti, M. Carnegie, A. Chalernphon, K. Dombroski, A.A.R. Haryani, A. Hill, B. Kehi, L. Law, I. Lyne, A. McGregor, K. McKinnon, A. McWilliam, F. Miller, C. Ngin, D. Occeña-Gutierrez, L. Palmer, P. Placino, M. Rampengan, W.L.L. Than, N.I. Wianti, S. Wright and the Seeds of Resilience Research Collective (2018), ‘Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59 (1), 3–16. Gibson, K., A. Cahill and D. McKay (2010), ‘Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippines municipality,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (2), 237–55. Hirtz, F. (1998), ‘The discourse that silences: Beneficiaries’ ambivalence towards redistributive land reform in the Philippines’, Development and Change, 29, 247–75. Hollnsteiner, M. (1961), ‘Reciprocity in the lowland Philippines’, Philippine Studies, 9 (3), 387–413. Moore, M.P. (1975), ‘Cooperative labour in peasant agriculture’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2 (3), 270–91. Pascual, D. (1990), ‘Organizing “people power” in the Philippines’, Journal of Democracy, 1 (1), 102–9. Sahlins, M. (1972), Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine. Scott, J.C. (1972), ‘Patron–client politics and political change in Southeast Asia’, American Political Science Review, 66 (1), 91–113. Wilson, C.A. (2001), ‘Reciprocal work bees and the meaning of neighbourhood’, Canadian Historical Review, 82 (3), 431–64. Wilson, L. (2018), ‘Whose quilts? Whose labor? Notes on value in an alternative (community) economy’, in Piece Together: The Quilts of Mary Lee Bendolph, Exhibition Catalogue, Mt Holyoke College Art Museum, pp. 40–47. Wright, S. (2010), ‘Cultivating beyond-capitalist economies’, Economic Geography, 86 (3), 297–318.

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19. Informal mining labour: economic plurality and household survival strategies Pryor Placino

INTRODUCTION The mining sector is usually thought to be quintessentially capitalist. Once highly exploitative and the site of strong unionization, this sector fuelled the industrial revolution and set a precedent for capitalist industrial relations (Bridge 2004). Today 30 million people, or 1 per cent of the global workforce, are employed in the formal mining sector which is highly mechanized and provides regular employment to well-paid workers in many parts of the world (International Labour Organization, n.d.). But this number excludes the estimated 100 million people who gain a livelihood from informal, artisanal and small-scale mining (Communities, Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining [CASM] 2008). From a diverse economies point of view, mining is as much non-capitalist as it is capitalist. The estimated 100 million men, women and children working as informal mining labourers in unregulated mines are largely found in the majority world. These workers are un-unionized, use mainly hand tools and are enrolled in different forms of enterprise or production units including self-employment, family business, small-scale business or cooperative associations. In the academic and policy literature, informality in mining is defined by its illegality, lack of safety and unregulated nature (Hentschel et al. 2002; Hilson et al. 2017; Lahiri-Dutt 2008). In popular media, informal miners are regularly featured digging tunnels prone to landslide and collapse, swimming underwater using only oxygen tubes connected to their mouths, gold panning using mercury, or manually digging and crushing coal or construction stones without protective gear in dusty quarries. Strategies for addressing the hardship and exploitation of informal miners are usually focused on eradication by formalization. This chapter positions informal mining labour as part of the survival portfolio of poor and landless households. I draw on research with informal miners in the Philippines to argue for a more dynamic view that opens up different possibilities for livelihood-making.

FORMALIZATION AND INFORMAL MINING LABOUR How we frame informal mining labour and its livelihood-making dynamics can have the performative effect of either limiting or expanding the possible trajectories of its development. The most prominent narration of informal mining labour places it in the dualist framing of informality and formality. Individuals in the informal sector are seen to be lacking the adequate education, skills and training to be employed in the formal economy (Chen 2012). Informality acts as a form of exclusion for those who have not been absorbed by the formal economy (Chen 2012). Informal labourers are reproduced through a cycle of poverty and are 179 Pryor Placino - 9781788119962 08:00:33PM

180  The handbook of diverse economies viewed as surplus in the labour market (Hilson 2012). Essentially they are seen as victims of capitalist development. In countries where informal mining persists, national governments now acknowledge the huge role of this sector in economic development. They have introduced policies to appropriate the benefits of the informal mining sector through legal and extra-legal instruments (Hilson et al. 2017; Hinton 2005; Siegel and Veiga 2009). Where possible they seek to formalize informal mining labour by absorbing the labour practices of informal miners and the sector of artisanal and small-scale mining into the formal and legal domain (De Soto 2000; Siegel and Veiga 2009). One way that the extra-legality of informal mining has been addressed is through the implementation of ‘designated mining areas’ (Corbett et al. 2017). In the Philippines, where the right of informal miners to mine is recognized in state policies, informal mining zones called Minahang Bayan have been established (Verbrugge and Besmanos 2016). A provincial or city mining regulatory board identifies and designates segregated mining zones for small-scale producers. These designated mining zones are aimed at curbing the proliferation of illegal mining and the detrimental ecological impacts of indiscriminate mining. The board can grant registered small-scale mining cooperatives a renewable two-year contract to mine and process minerals in permitted areas (Verbrugge and Besmanos 2016). Another approach to formalization recommends that financial institutions provide informal miners with capital (Siegel and Vega 2009). Informal miners are encouraged to access loans to purchase better equipment, improve mineral recovery and increase profit (Siegel and Vega 2009). It is through capitalization that informal mining is then deemed to be regulated, monitored and extended support within the legal system (Hilson et al. 2017). In some countries more forceful strategies have been used. But Banchirigah and Hilson (2010) argue that, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa forced mine closures and regulatory management do not work to end informal mining. Mine sweeps, the arrest of people involved, and confiscation of mining equipment, do more economic harm than address the impoverished situation of informal miners. Mine crackdowns are usually intermittent, due to financial and manpower constraints in the government (Banchirigah and Hilson 2010) and the lag between crackdown and follow-up monitoring gives time for miners to re-mobilize and restart their operation. For those at the bottom of the hierarchy who lack formal education the bureaucratic process of formalization can prove daunting (Chen 2012). Not all informal miners have an interest in moving to designated areas or in accessing capital investment since there are those who mine only as a way of diversifying livelihoods for subsistence. Indeed, we cannot assume that limiting informal mining by legal means will necessarily improve the livelihoods of those concerned. Formalization can be quite problematic as it withdraws the sector from its embeddedness in the context of a social economy which allows for ‘local autonomy and action’ (Lahiri-Dutt 2004, p. 126). Through informal mining, local communities get to reclaim their mineral rights that are often appropriated by large corporations and governments (Lahiri-Dutt 2008). Thus informal miners and a range of other actors are to some extent able to directly capture economic benefits from their mineral-rich communities. Interventions to assist informal miners and help them diversify livelihoods are often directed towards lessening the participation of families in mining altogether. However, outright replacement may not be realistic. Hilson and Banchirigah (2009) argue that in the case of Ghana’s informal gold miners alternative livelihoods are not viewed as effective, since mining

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Informal mining labour: economic plurality and household survival strategies  181 can provide more monetary benefits, especially if a miner hits the big time. In Laos large-scale mining investment has transformed the traditional farming landscape. As the local environment becomes more and more unsuitable for agriculture, farmers are turning to small-scale mining as their primary livelihood. Local farmers have diversified into tin mining as a way of taking advantage of the ongoing mineral extractivism in their country; they are not only victims but active economic agents (Lahiri-Dutt et al. 2014). On the ground, households pursue all sorts of activities to constitute a ‘survival portfolio’ (Chambers and Conway 1992). Livelihood-making dynamics include the interactions between different kinds of economic practices within the ‘survival portfolio’ of a particular household. To position informal mining labour as contributing to livelihood-making dynamics is to depart from the binary framing of informality and formality which situates it only as ‘other’ to formal work in the capitalist mining industry. If we situate the informal mining labourer as a subject in a diverse economy with a decentred identity, it is possible to imagine multiple entry points enhancing the diversification strategies of informal miners and their household members.1 I illustrate this point using the case of aggregate mining in the Philippines.

LIVELIHOOD-MAKING DYNAMICS: INFORMAL AGGREGATE MINING LABOUR AROUND METRO MANILA Informal miners are not only involved in the extraction of valuable minerals such as gold, diamonds or coal. They also are involved in the mining of mundane materials including construction aggregates. Aggregates, including sand, gravel and crushed stone, are second to coal as the most mined non-metallic minerals in the world (Bridge 2004). They serve as cheap bulking materials in concrete and make up 60–80 per cent of its mass (Seegebrecht, n.d.). The rapid urbanization happening worldwide continues to be fortified by precast concrete infrastructure and steel-reinforced concrete buildings. This form of construction in the urban setting puts more pressure on workers who are implicated in the production of building materials including informal aggregate miners. Metro Manila is a growing mega-city in Southeast Asia with a population of 12.88 million as of the 2015 Census (Philippine Statistics Authority 2016a). As a ‘concrete jungle’, Metro Manila and its extended region – Southern Tagalog – are at the centre of building construction in the Philippines archipelago (Philippine Statistics Authority 2016b). With increasing demand for building materials, informal mining households continue to produce aggregates amidst the environmental and health consequences of their practice. My research was conducted at two mining sites located at the edges of Metro Manila. One quarry stands at the foot of a mountain which has been prone to landslides and flooding. The mountain is quarried by both mechanized operations using heavy equipment and manual mining activities. Both forms of operation are unregistered. The poorer manual miners live in an informal settlement by the roadside across from the quarry and along a riverbank. In another field site, the quarry is situated below a hill. On top of the hill is a gated residential subdivision. The mining households live in slum housing around the quarry site. Supplier truckers consider these quarries as ideal as they are highly accessible from the main road.

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182  The handbook of diverse economies Diverse Economic Practices and Roles Miners typically begin working at the quarry before sunrise. They will take a rest from quarrying at lunchtime but will go to the quarry in between rest periods whenever there are truckers buying stones. Other miners will resume quarrying when the heat from the sun becomes more bearable and they work until the sky gets dark. Miners who send their children to school sometimes work longer hours to increase the volume of stones they can dig, pile and crush in a day. The informal miners from both sites observe a pwesto system. Pwesto literally means place. This informal system of claiming a portion of the quarry is based on how much space a miner can identify from a point of reference. The ones who have pwesto in the quarry are the informal miners who first got entrenched as informal settlers in the area. In the first quarry site, the miners use their houses as the reference point, and the available space that gets extended from their residence up to the base of the mountain corresponds to their pwesto. A pwesto could be similar to one’s backyard. In the second site, specific segments of the hill correspond to a particular pwesto of an individual miner or a mining household. A miner can only manually dig stones from his own pwesto. But in some instances, a miner who has a pwesto and is not using it on a particular day can share his mining space with other miners who do not have their own pwesto. In return for access, they share with the pwesto owner a small percentage of the revenue generated when they sell their stones. There are certain circumstances when miners sell their pwesto to other miners for financial reasons. Informal mining households rely on a range of labour practices and transactions to augment finances and minimize economic uncertainty. Some miners work in their family’s mini-store, or as part-time construction workers, cooks or house-helpers. Miners who have families do unpaid household labour and care work for their children and ageing parents. Other miners and their family members grow food in their own backyard garden, breed and raise cows and hogs, and glean leafy vegetables from the neighbourhood and sell them in the market. There are also instances when individuals give up informal mining (or limit their work hours at the quarry in a day) when they see that other economic practices become more financially rewarding than digging and crushing stones. For example, some miners are also tricycle drivers, and they devote most of their working hours to driving. As registered tricycle drivers, they become members of a tricycle operators and drivers’ association in town. The organization serves as a conduit between individual members, commuters and the public transport authorities. It also helps them in collectively negotiating with authorities about disputes related to their trade. As social actors, many miners are also parents. They seek jobs that allow for work and life balance. Having a flexible work schedule of self-employed aggregate mining means that their activities can be spread across the whole day. Female miners who have children will bring their kids to school in the morning, crush stones for a few hours before lunchtime, do household chores in the middle of the day, and fetch the kids from school in the late afternoon. In between household and mining work, they can attend meetings in their kids’ school or in the village, take a nap or socialize with neighbours without a boss noticing their every move. However, miners who are also mothers do most household-related tasks. For both male and female miners, they do not have to travel far to go to work since the mountain where they quarry is just a few metres away from their backyard. For them, time lost commuting is also an important consideration as well as money for transport.

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Informal mining labour: economic plurality and household survival strategies  183 Informal miners obtain loan money from private lenders and microcredit institutions. Some miners use it to set up their mini-store, to pay the cost of celebrating a family member’s baptismal, to purchase livestock, or to augment hospital expenses when a family member gets sick. However, while some individuals find getting loans beneficial, others feel that they also suffer from becoming trapped in a cycle of debt. There were instances in the past when a member of a mining household would get a loan and use a portion of the money only to repay another lender. A few miners now ensure that they seek financial assistance from lending companies that offer loans in a more sustainable way. For example, some miners prefer applying for loans from a microcredit institution that gives them an option to allocate a small percentage of their monthly repayments to cover the cost of their life insurance policy and to add a pre-agreed amount to their savings account. The miners find this setup beneficial in the long run. Collective Practices and Actions One way of reading informal mining labour differently is to reveal the ways miners work together to attempt to minimize risk and extract materials in a responsible and caring way. In one site quarrying has transformed the mountain and affected its stream and tributaries. Informal mechanized quarrying, as well as manual mining, have operated in the site and co-transformed the topography. The quarry site has become more prone to landslides and flash floods especially during the monsoon and typhoon months. Different actors have come together in an attempt to remedy, albeit temporarily, the environmental problems in the quarry. During one monsoon season, the slum dwellings of informal miners and their non-mining neighbours were flooded. The affected residents sought the help of the village chair and complained about the alleged negligence of the mechanized quarry operator regarding preventing the flooding incident. The village chair had to intervene by requiring the mechanized quarry operator to build improvised dikes by piling boulders, gravel and soil against the path of the previous flood to prevent future flooding from reaching the slum dwelling. On the eve of a passing typhoon, the village chair organized the residents across the quarry to do a clean-up of the canals along their houses to de-clog them of household waste and sediments from the quarry. Both mining and non-mining household members volunteered a few hours of their time that day. The miners not only volunteered their labour but also shared their shovels during the clean-up. A few of the informal miners encountered in my research are members of a progressive party list organization. With the help of the organization, they have learned different strategies of resistance against threats of ecological destruction, co-optation of mining practices and displacement from their mining site and place of residence. They have been supported to document flooding events with photographs and videos, communicate their documentation with government authorities, attend demonstrations, meet, consult and negotiate with government officials, verify the authenticity of any legal instruments presented before them, and prevent themselves from affixing their signature to any document without consulting their allies about its content and veracity, among others. Creating allies and becoming proud of organizational identity is part of the livelihood-making dynamics of these informal miners. In one research site, informal miners have safeguarded a portion of the mountain where a natural spring is located and restricted quarrying activity around this area. They get their water from this source and have developed a practice of sharing and distributing water supply to other households in the village. At another field site, informal miners devote one day of their

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184  The handbook of diverse economies week to quarry stones and pool together their revenue for that day. They donate their earnings to fellow miners or their family members who have been sick and need financial support for their hospital bills. Informal miners are embedded in economic and ecological relations that constitute the materials they create. In the case of informal aggregate miners, they can be considered as producers of building materials. They also enrol these materials when building their own houses. The houses of informal miners are made from a mix of light materials (e.g. wood, wood scraps, bamboo, galvanized iron sheets, etc.) and reinforced concrete. Adult family members build these structures themselves. A few informal mining households have rebuilt or renovated their houses with concrete after saving some of their income and getting additional loans from local lending companies. Concrete houses are also self-built. Households often enrol the help of extended family members who have previously worked as casual labourers in construction projects. I would like to suggest that it is at the intersections of these diverse economic practices and collective actions where the prefiguring of alternatives can be made. For example, when informal aggregate miners are conceptually decentred from mining per se they can be re-signified as environmental repairers or perhaps co-makers of building materials. With this re-presentation, we can begin to imagine other future roles for informal mining labour.2

CONCLUSION Informal mining livelihoods will always be in question as mining continues to pose environmental and health threats to workers and the planet in the age of the Anthropocene. Moreover, as our societies continue to struggle with the challenges brought by automation, accumulation by dispossession and resource conflict, informal miners and their families face many barriers to their mining practices. A diversification strategy that relies on the formalization of manual mineral extraction, for example, can be easily made redundant by mechanized mining operations. In some contexts, decision-makers continue to circumvent mining policies to satisfy their personal stakes including the interest of businesses and corporations. The ironies presented by informal mining compel us to think of developmental interventions that are participatory and sensitive to local contexts. By looking at informal mining labour as a process of livelihood-making, we can trace the economic and ecological relations it facilitates between and among different practices within and outside the context of extraction. By splintering the identity of the informal mining labour subject and situating informal mining in a diverse economy, we can begin to imagine a broader range of trajectories of transformation that highlight interdependency, complexity, uncertainty and possibility.

NOTES 1. While I will still use the adjective ‘informal’ to describe mining labour, I strategically marshal the concept only to signify ontological difference from other kinds of mining labour (Lahiri-Dutt 2016). 2. In my action research with informal miners we attended an urban gardening seminar in which speakers demonstrated how mushrooms can be cultivated. I briefly mentioned to my participants that mushroom is now used as a potential alternative building material and I showed them a photo of wall boards/panels that were made from mushrooms.

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REFERENCES Banchirigah, S.M. and G. Hilson (2010), ‘De-agrarianization, re-agrarianization and local economic development: Re-orientating livelihoods in African artisanal mining communities’, Policy Sciences, 43 (2), 157–80. Bridge, G. (2004), ‘Contested terrain: Mining and the environment’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 29, 205–59. Chambers, R. and G. Conway (1992), ‘Sustainable rural livelihoods: Practical concepts for the 21st century’, Discussion Paper, Institute of Development Studies, Brighton. Chen, M.A. (2012), ‘The informal economy: Definitions, theories and policies’, WIEGO Working Paper No. 1, accessed 11 May 2019 at http://​www​.wiego​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​files/​ Chen​_WIEGO​_WP1​.pdf. Communities, Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (2008), Issue Brief, accessed 12 May 2019 at http://​ siteresources​.worldbank​.org/​INTOGMC/​Resources/​CASMFACTSHEET​.pdf. Corbett, T., C. O’Faircheallaigh and A. Regan (2017), ‘“Designated areas” and the regulation of artisanal and small-scale mining’, Land Use Policy, 68, 393–401. De Soto, H. (2000), The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, London: Black Swan. Hentschel, T., F. Hruschka and M. Priester (2002), ‘Global report on artisanal and small-scale mining’, accessed 11 May 2019 at http://​www​.ddiglobal​.org/​login/​resources/​g00723​.pdf. Hilson, G. (2012), ‘Poverty traps in small-scale mining communities: The case of sub-Saharan Africa’, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Études du Développement, 33 (2), 180–97. Hilson, G. and S.M. Banchirigah (2009), ‘Are alternative livelihood projects alleviating poverty in mining communities? Experiences from Ghana’, Journal of Development Studies, 45 (2), 172–96. Hilson, G., A. Hilson, R. Maconachie, J. McQuilken and H. Goumandakoye (2017), ‘Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa: Re-conceptualizing formalization and “illegal” activity’, Geoforum, 83, 80–90. Hinton, J. (2005), ‘Communities and small-scale mining: An integrated review for development planning’, accessed 12 May 2019 at http://​www​.asmhub​ mn/​en/​files/​view/​507. International Labour Organization (n.d.), ‘Mining: A hazardous work’, accessed 12 May 2019 at http://​ www​.ilo​.org/​safework/​areasofwork/​hazardous​-work/​WCMS​_124598/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2004), ‘Informality in mineral resource management in Asia: Raising questions relating to community economies and sustainable development’, Natural Resources Forum, 28, 123–32. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2008), ‘Digging to survive: Women’s livelihoods in South Asia’s small mines and quarries’, South Asian Survey, 15 (2), 217–44. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2016), ‘The diverse worlds of coal in India: Energising the nation, energising livelihoods’, Energy Policy, 99, 203–13. Lahiri-Dutt, K., K. Alexander and C. Insouvanh (2014), ‘Informal mining in livelihood diversification: Mineral dependence and rural communities in Lao PDR’, South East Asia Research, 22 (1), 103–22. Philippine Statistics Authority (2016a), ‘Highlights of the Philippine population 2015 Census of Population’, accessed 12 May 2019 at https://​psa​.gov​.ph/​content/​highlights​-philippine​-population​ -2015​-census​-population. Philippine Statistics Authority (2016b), ‘Construction statistics from approved building permits for year 2015 (final results)’, accessed 12 May 2019 at https://​psa​.gov​.ph/​content/​construction​-statistics​ -approved​-building​-permits​-year​-2015​-final​-results. Seegebrecht, G. (n.d.), ‘The role of aggregate in concrete’, accessed 12 May 2019 at https://​www​ .concretenetwork​.com/​aggregate/​. Siegel, S. and M.M. Veiga (2009), ‘Artisanal and small-scale mining as an extralegal economy: De Soto and the redefinition of “formalization”’, Resources Policy, 34 (1), 51–6. Verbrugge, B. and B. Besmanos (2016), ‘Formalizing artisanal and small-scale mining: Whither the workforce?’ Resources Policy, 47, 134–41.

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20. Migrant women’s labour: sustaining livelihoods through diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana Chizu Sato and Theresa Tufuor

INTRODUCTION Men and women have long participated in migration for work and to generate a better livelihood in a place that is not their own. Earlier, women and girls accompanied their male family members as dependants, but today, they often migrate alone. Women and girls currently constitute nearly half of international migrants (United Nations 2017); they also constitute more than half of the rural–urban migrants in many parts of the majority world (Chant 2013). International migrant women’s labour from the majority world, to work as nurses, domestic servants, and entertainers, in the minority world, has been well studied (see for example, Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Gibson et al. 2001). This chapter will focus on the labour performed by unskilled women and girls who voluntarily migrate from rural areas to cities in Ghana. As with their international counterparts they migrate to secure better livelihoods and find employment but are more likely to do so in the informal sector. In Ghana, labour migration by women and girls from the rural north to southern urban centres, like Accra, has become increasingly common (Kwankye 2012; Pickbourn 2011; Tufuor and Sato 2017; Ungruhe 2010). Migrant women’s economic contribution to the survival of rural households is widely recognized. Men now say ‘Now if you have only sons you are dead’ (Abdul-Korah 2011). Work is usually undertaken in the informal sector which requires low skills and has low living and overhead costs (e.g. travel, rent). In Ghana, where there is a large informal economy and where women have been long recognized as traders (Robertson 1984), migrant women and girls often work in business in the informal sector and, once they secure enough capital, some even start their own business. Empowering women via business is now recognized as ‘smart economics’ (World Bank 2011). Aid interventions invest in women’s human capital to encourage them to engage in business and enterprising women are expected to multiply investments through their contributions to their own, familial, communal and national well-being. The research presented in this chapter challenges the stark individualism of this narrative of development and the assumption of a capitalist trajectory of growth. It is informed by feminist critiques of the ‘rational’ woman as development subject (Chant and Sweetman 2012; Roberts and Soederberg 2012) and it draws on the diverse economies framing to situate migrant women in a complex network of economic relationships and trajectories. Existing studies on paid migrant labour in Ghana’s informal economy, working for example in portering, petty trading, petty commodity production, and domestic work, rarely examines the collective dimensions of this work (Awumbila and Ardayfio-Schandorf 2008; Awumbila et al. 2017; Oberhauser 2010; Oberhauser and Yeboah 2011; Tufuor et al. 2015). The aim of 186 Chizu Sato and Theresa Tufuor - 9781788119962 08:00:37PM

Migrant women’s labour: diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana  187 this chapter is to make visible some of the complex interdependencies between the different forms of labour that migrant women perform, including wage labour, alternative paid labour (such as indentured, self-employed and reciprocal labour) and unpaid labour (such as household provisioning labour and care work). We highlight the intersectional parameters at play, such as ethnicity, place of origin and proximity of domestic settings (Tufuor et al. 2015). This analysis will help us better understand the mechanisms through which migrant women generate livelihoods and, with that understanding, identify strategies that are far better fitted to their efforts than those formed subsequent to the dominant narrative of individual enterprising women securing empowerment through business.

PERFORMING DIVERSE ECONOMIC PRACTICES IN ACCRA Our discussion is based on field research conducted in Old Fadama, a squatter community in Accra located next to the Old Fadama market, the main depot for fresh produce coming from northern Ghana. The women migrants we interviewed, observed and conducted focus group discussions with were largely members of the Dagomba tribe from northern Ghana.1 Most had been involved in subsistence farming and other household provisioning labour and care work before they moved to Accra, while a minority also reported taking part in other economic activities such as collecting and selling groundnuts or producing shea butter. In Accra, the women we interviewed reported securing their livelihoods through a diversity of practices both in and outside of the Old Fadama market. The following sections discuss the practices of newcomers, the practices of those who are becoming more established, and economic practices in the migrants’ domestic setting. Newcomers Migrant women most often arrive in Old Fadama without the means to start their own business. They find waged work in small capitalist enterprises and indentured work in feudal enterprises. Small privately owned businesses in the Old Fadama market attract newly arrived migrant women, especially those with no prior connections in Accra. One form of wage labour is performed in small service enterprises such as a chop bar (local restaurant). For example, Ikma (not her real name), is a single mother of two small children in her twenties. She has been exchanging her labour for a wage in a small chop bar run by a ‘madam’ (owner-worker) from Accra for four years. The madam works along with her employees. Ikma starts the cooking fire around dawn, does the time-consuming preparatory cooking, cleans and sets tables and chairs before her madam and other employees join her a little later in the morning. Her work continues until late evening, involving cooking, serving, and washing cooking utensils. New arrivals also often work in small stores that sell everyday provisions. Abibata, another single mother in her twenties, has been working as a shop attendant for her madam from Accra for three years. Since she is the only attendant beside her madam, she does almost everything around the store except management. Her work starts with cleaning outside the store before 6.30 a m. After that, she opens the store, starts selling, intermittently stocking and fetching items from the inside storage room until as late as 11.30 p m. Newcomers also engage in portering (transporting goods within the market). Azumi, unmarried and in her late teens, carries

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188  The handbook of diverse economies items purchased by customers from the point of sale to a designated destination, such as their own means of transportation. Within these small capitalist enterprises, madams and their employees occupy different positions. The terms of contract are set by the madams. All three of the migrant women just mentioned expressed dissatisfaction with the wage they were paid and their working conditions but did not dare to complain about them. The unsatisfying hierarchical relationship with their madams is tolerated in part due to idiosyncratic conditions. As single mothers, both Ikma and Abibata identify themselves as the main financial providers for their children, whether care is provided through remittances to caregiving grandmothers in the north or directly to children living with them in Accra. These mothers are morally obliged to pay for their children’s education and food and also their parents’ farming costs. They know that it would be near impossible for them to generate sufficient income in their village and that they cannot return without having first secured substantial savings. Linked to this, they both think that, as migrants from the north who initially did not speak the majority language Twi, they must maintain a good relationship with their employer in Accra in order to keep their jobs. Indeed, they must work extra hard to retain their paid jobs as they know that southerners, including their madams, perceive migrants from the north as not trustworthy and there are many migrant women and girls who could easily replace them. Ikma knows that her madam is part of the food vendors’ association and that almost all food vendors in the Old Fadama market are part of the same association. She fears being blacklisted if she complains. She also sleeps on the premises which means that she receives a part of her wage in kind and her lodging is tied to her employment. Ikma is grateful that she does not need to pay rent and that she may eat leftovers from the restaurant, as that allows her to save two Ghanaian cedis (less than 50 euro cents) every day. On the other hand, the wage given to Abibata and Azumi is tied to the weekly profit made by their madams (although it is never higher than promised). Abibata recognizes that the agreement she has with her madam is informal. She does not even discuss the situation with Azumi. Even if she is bitter that the wage she gets is not what was promised and that she needs to buy the snacks the store sells, for Abibata, it is important that her madam trusts her not to be a thief and she can keep her job. Recognition that in their current jobs they learn how to run the sorts of food-vending businesses they want to start once they get sufficient capital also provides a condition of existence for the hierarchical relationships reported by both Ikma and Abibata. New arrivals also perform indentured labour within quasi-feudal enterprises when they accept advances, in the form of commodities to be sold, from more established migrant women from their native villages. Rukia, a single woman in her mid-twenties, has been hawking sachet water for four years. When she first arrived in Old Fadama, two young women from her native village arranged for Rukia to receive ten sachets of water from their aunt. Agnes, a recently arrived divorcee in her early thirties, was also helped by better established migrant women who are onion traders from her native village. She was loaned a trayful of onions. Advances such as these are debts. Upon accepting advances, Rukia and Agnes became indentured. They were obliged to repay the loan without either interest or a strict time limit. Compared to indentured labour performed by migrant women in the international context, the size of debt is much smaller, which enables these indentured migrant women to repay their advances much faster. This form of work gradually allows them to start saving and sending remittances to their families in the north.

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Migrant women’s labour: diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana  189 While paid labour is commonly seen in both feudal and capitalist enterprises, the nature of the social bonds is different. Capitalist relationships tend to be more contractual while feudal relationships tend to be understood by both parties as moral: they are reciprocal and they generate social harmony (Charusheela 2010). This moral layer is woven into perceived solidarity arising from common identity: junior and senior migrant women recognize their shared place of origin, their shared ethnicity and their somewhat similar trajectories of experience in the north and in Accra. A supra-familial feudal relationship is created through context-specific social articulations: a junior, a newly arrived or short-term migrant woman and a better established longer-term migrant woman from the same home village meet in Old Fadama, a context where northern migrants are not perceived by southerners as trustworthy; the senior migrant woman is morally obliged to give advances and offer some protection by taking on some risks. The newly arrived migrant woman is obliged to reciprocate by honouring the trust given by repaying the advances given within these supra-familial relationships of unequal mutual interdependence. In some cases, newly arrived migrant women gain access through these feudal relations to inexpensive group lodging and limited protection. Parties to these arrangements use the familial terms ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, ‘sister’ to refer to their counter-parties while these are only very rarely used when describing relationships between capitalist employers from Accra and migrant women employees from the north. Getting Established It takes a long time for newly arrived migrant women to accumulate capital. Most of them struggle to make ends meet for years. The fraction of their income they must use to provide for necessary consumption such as rent, food, clothes, toiletries, showers, and garbage, is quite high and they are morally obliged to assist their children, if they have any, and to send remittances to family in the north. To reduce their necessary consumption, women who are not provided accommodation via their employers often share a room with seven to ten other women by group renting.2 Women secure their livelihoods by paying membership fees for gendered market and cultural associations, which are often commodity and place of origin specific respectively, to secure access to networks and support such as bookkeeping, dispute settlement and health education. Women also often participate in informal savings and credit groups, susu, through which they are able, and strongly encouraged, to save small amounts of money every day (see Chapter 39 by Hossein in this volume). Even though women may sell their labour within feudal or capitalist enterprises, the associations and susu in which these women participate are collectively organized as a community of labourers across individual enterprises.3 Once relative newcomers save enough through susu, which could take several years, women often start their own small-scale business. These businesses are usually self-employed sole proprietorships. In contrast to the wage and indentured labour offered by women like Rukia and Fatima, women continue to sell the same commodity but as self-employed merchants once they acquire enough capital to buy their own inputs from a wholesaler and sell products at a profit from which they pay themselves a wage. Similarly, women like Abibata and Ikma who wish to continue work in food commodity production, once they amass some capital, might cook and sell prepared foods as food vendors. Migrant women also perform portering as self-employed labour rather than wage labour by directly selling their labour. In each of

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190  The handbook of diverse economies these non-merchant examples, self-employed women may determine and appropriate their own surplus. Self-employed labour may be seen as empowering if the shift from ‘taking a wage from others’ or ‘being in debt’ to ‘paying themselves a wage’ is recognized as desirable. This transition should not, however, be universally lauded. For example, self-employed commodity producers may not be self-appropriating. While they might not be exploited by others, there is ‘no clear boundary between necessary and surplus labor’ (Hotch, 2000, p. 146) and they may practise self-exploitation (Gabriel 1990). Indeed, self-employed merchants may pay themselves a wage lower than the value of their labour power. These self-employed women might work longer by, for example, not taking days off, lowering their necessary consumption fund through, for example, group renting and through reducing the quality or quantity of their food intake. Also, while a woman may be self-employed, she usually does not have control over prices (van der Veen 2000). They may be subject to power dynamics that force them to pay more or lower prices in order to compete with others in the market. When selling sachet water as a self-employed merchant, Rukia found, for example, that the number of competing hawkers increased so she had to work longer hours and Fatima was forced to sell other vegetables when the profit from onions dwindled. Instead of thinking in categories of ‘income’, ‘independence’ and ‘empowerment’ we must also ask if self-employed migrant women are better able to secure the funds necessary to sustain themselves (and their families) and, if not, explore ways to support transitions for the self-employed that enable them to move from deficit to security. Some women use accumulated capital to become owner-workers or feudal ‘mothers’ in small capitalist enterprises. Rabi, who is in her mid-thirties and a single mother of one pre-teen child, runs a ‘Check-Check’ (a local fast food restaurant). She moved to Accra 17 years ago and worked as a porter and store attendant initially (like Abibata). Once she accumulated capital, she moved into food vending, first as a stall vendor and finally as a restaurant owner. She now hires young women to work at her restaurant. Azara, who is in her late forties and is a single mother of one teenage child, runs a provisions store. When she came to Accra, nearly two decades ago, she was helped by older migrant women from her native village. She started by selling tea. Once she acquired enough capital, she invested in selling canned foods and wax printed cloth through which she was eventually able to set up her own provision store. Besides performing independent merchant labour to run her store, she takes on junior migrant women from her village as ‘daughters’. She provides them with sachet water and confectionery. Azara reports doing this not to maximize profits but because of her gratitude to her own ‘mother’ and ‘sisters’ and recognition of the hardships experienced by newly arrived migrant women. There are diverse trajectories crossing non-capitalist and capitalist forms of labour and embedded social relations that overdetermine the labour practices of migrant women. Most migrant women start with some sort of wage labour, hawking, food vending or portering which involves less capital (e.g. hawking bags of porridge prepared in their own private hearth) for the first years. Using savings made through susu, they then progress to more capital-intensive forms of merchanting or food vending (e.g. itinerant merchanting, selling cooked meals at a movable stall, a fixed shop). While migrant women’s duration of stay in the Old Fadama community seems to correspond to their success in accumulating capital, there are a number of factors that disrupt this linear trajectory. Women may find themselves in intolerable situations (housing, work, social); susu collectors may run away with the money; their savings may be depleted by familial/parental obligations; they may be robbed; they may become pregnant; and

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Migrant women’s labour: diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana  191 power dynamics in the market may shift prejudicially. None of the labour practices or trajectories described are stable nor linear. Through social relations developed with other sisters, aunts and mothers, in participating in group renting, susu and associations, migrant women, while occasionally falling back, keep generating livelihoods. Continuing to generate livelihoods in the Old Fadama market is an achievement every day. Economic Practices within Domestic Settings Given the interdependence of production and reproduction, we must also pay attention to the unpaid labour migrant women perform in their domestic settings. As mentioned earlier, struggling migrant women rent rooms as a group to reduce their necessary consumption fund. Even if domestic space is shared, each migrant woman runs her own ‘hearth-hold’, a domestic unit of consumption and production centred around a hearth, comprised of a woman (or a person) and her dependants (Ekejiuba 1995). She performs independent labour through, for example, cooking, cleaning and caring for her own necessary consumption. In this hearth-hold, provisioning labour and care work, even unpaid, produces concrete use-values. Contrary to the widely accepted conceptualization of the household as solely a site for reproduction, the domestic unit can be a site where surplus is produced (Fraad et al. 1994). In-kind reciprocal labour is performed in the household. For example, Amina, in her early thirties, a self-employed food vender with a small child, cooks and cleans more than she requires for her and her child. She distributes this extra labour (food, care and cleaning) to sister migrant women and their children who live nearby while these sisters work during the day. These sisters, in turn, provide child care while Amina goes out to vend food in the evening. Amina adjusts her necessary labour: the labour (food, care and cleaning) allocated to sisters and their children becomes part of her necessary labour. Appropriating the fruits of one’s labour does not mean that one keeps it all. A self-appropriating independent migrant woman may distribute surplus to others in many ways. Migrant women, although they cook independently, often share food with sisters who live nearby as a gift. Also, a portion of their savings is often given as remittances to family members in the north. The gift giving of migrant women should not be taken lightly. Migrant women who struggle to secure their own necessary conditions will ruthlessly reduce their own necessary consumption fund to gift others, recognizing that they have been and will be assisted in times of need. Moral commitment to mutual support is enacted in labour practices that are shaped not only by gender, age, ethnicity or place of origin, but also by the proximity of domestic settings and compatible work shifts. While each migrant woman runs her own hearth-hold, perhaps under a shared roof, family-like relations produced through these gifting and reciprocal labour practices in both the domestic and market settings are reflected in how sisters among migrant women say ‘we are each other’s keepers’. Such reciprocal relationships arise from mutual consent similar to that found in feudal intra-generational relationships between ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’ but these intergenerational relationships in domestic settings are non-hierarchical.

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192  The handbook of diverse economies

CONCLUSION This chapter illuminates some dimensions of migrant women’s economic practices that are not visible through the lens provided by the smart economics’ empowerment via business narrative. Women migrate to work as an individual strategy for moving out of poverty. By attending to economic difference, we are able to see interdependencies among diverse economic practices in a range of enterprise types in the alternative informal market, as well as in the non-market domestic spaces that support migrant women’s livelihoods. In the Old Fadama market and community, migrant women, old and new, connect via ethnic, place-based ties and shared experiences in the north and Accra. They collectively support one another in and outside of the market through diverse practices, including susu, associations, and the sharing of food and care. These collective practices can be found across and within generations, labour and enterprise types. Furthermore, while transitioning from less to more capital intensive businesses is commonly observed, it generally takes several intensive years to start one’s own business and there are countless factors that destroy this presumed simple linear trajectory. Women do engage in moral economies instead of simply pursuing their own individual profit. Gender, ethnicity, power dynamics in the market, and other factors constantly condition migrant women’s livelihood practices. When the economic practices of these women are understood as more diverse, we are better equipped to identify context-appropriate strategies that support their movement towards more desired forms of economic practices and social relations.

NOTES 1.

Of the 230 respondents interviewed, 95 per cent came from Ghana’s Northern Region. The majority had Dagbani as their native language. About two-thirds (67 per cent) were younger than 30 years old with 46 per cent in the age range of 15–25 years. They were economically active, mostly unmarried, and frequently school dropouts. 2. Ninety-three (41 per cent) of our respondents lived in jointly rented group accommodation. 3. One hundred and seventy-seven (77 per cent) of our respondents indicated that they had membership in a susu (informal rotating saving and credit) group and/or market associations (e.g. the onion sellers’ association).

REFERENCES Abdul-Korah, G.B. (2011), ‘“Now if you have only sons you are dead”: Migration, gender, and family economy in twentieth century northwestern Ghana’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 46 (4), 390–403. Awumbila, M. and E. Ardayfio-Schandorf (2008), ‘Gendered poverty, migration and livelihood strategies of female porters in Accra, Ghana’, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift/Norwegian Journal of Geography, 62 (3), 171–9. Awumbila, M., J.K. Teye and J.A. Yaro (2017), ‘Social networks, migration trajectories and livelihood strategies of migrant domestic and construction workers in Accra, Ghana’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 52 (7), 982–96. Chant, S. (2013), ‘The long shadow of “smart economics”: The making, methodologies and messages of the World Development Report 2012’, in L. Oso and N. Ribas-Mateos (eds), The International

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Migrant women’s labour: diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana  193 Handbook on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 97–126. Chant, S. and C. Sweetman (2012), ‘Fixing women or fixing the world? “Smart economics”, efficiency approaches, and gender equality in development’, Gender and Development, 20 (3), 517–29. Charusheela, S. (2010), ‘Engendering feudalism: Modes of production revisited’, Rethinking Marxism, 22 (3), 438–45. Ehrenreich, B. and A.R. Hochschild (2003), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Henry Holt. Ekejiuba, F. (1995), ‘Down to fundamentals: Women-centred hearth-holds in rural West Africa’, in D. Bryceson (ed.), Women Wielding the Hoe: Lessons from Rural Africa for Feminist Theory and Development Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 47–61. Fraad, H., S.A. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (1994), Bringing It All Back Home: Class, Gender and Power in the Modern Household, London: Pluto Press. Gabriel, S. (1990), ‘Ancients: A Marxian theory of self-exploitation’, Rethinking Marxism, 3 (1), 85–106. Gibson, K., L. Law and D. McKay (2001), ‘Beyond heroes and victims: Filipina contract migrants, economic activism and class transformations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (3), 365–86. Hotch, J. (2000). ‘Classing the self-employed: New possibilities of power and collectivity’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S.A. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (eds), Class and its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 143–62. Kwankye, S.O. (2012), ‘Transition into adulthood’, OMNES: The Journal of Multicultural Society, 3 (1), 1–24. Oberhauser, A.M. (2010), ‘(Re)Scaling gender and globalization: Livelihood strategies in Accra, Ghana’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 9 (2), 221–44. Oberhauser, A.M. and M.A. Yeboah (2011), ‘Heavy burdens: Gendered livelihood strategies of porters in Accra, Ghana’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32 (1), 22–37. Pickbourn, L.J. (2011), ‘Migration, remittances and intra-household allocation in northern Ghana: Does gender matter?’ Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Roberts, A. and S. Soederberg (2012), ‘Gender equality as smart economics? A critique of the 2012 World Development Report’, Third World Quarterly, 33 (5), 949–68. Robertson, C. (1984), Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Tufuor, T., A. Niehof, C. Sato and H. van der Horst (2015), ‘Extending the moral economy beyond households: Gendered livelihood strategies of single migrant women in Accra, Ghana’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 50, 20–29. Tufuor, T. and C. Sato (2017), ‘What motivates single women to migrate from northern Ghana to Accra?’, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift/Norwegian Journal of Geography, 71 (1), 46–59. Ungruhe, C. (2010), ‘Symbols of success: Youth, peer pressure and the role of adulthood among juvenile male return migrants in Ghana’, Childhood, 17 (2), 259–71. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017), International Migration Report 2017: Highlights (ST/ESA/SER.A/404), New York: United Nations. van der Veen, M. (2000), ‘Beyond slavery and capitalism: Producing class difference in the sex industry’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S.A. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (eds), Class and its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 121–41. World Bank (2011), World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, Washington, DC: World Bank Publications.

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21. Framing essay: the diversity of transactions Gradon Diprose

INTRODUCTION This chapter introduces some of the ways that economic transactions are broached using a diverse economies lens. In the English-speaking world, a transaction is probably most commonly understood as the ‘transfer of goods, services, or funds’ (Merriam-Webster 2019). While this understanding focuses on what gets exchanged, there are other ways of thinking about how, and why, people engage in transactions. In this framing chapter I draw on a more open understanding of transaction as ‘a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other’ (Merriam-Webster 2019). This understanding allows for many different kinds of transactions to be included as economic transactions, in addition to the exchange of commodities in markets. It directs attention to the ways transactions affect people’s lives, relationships with other people, and relationships with the non-human world. To illustrate the range of transactions that come into view using a diverse economies lens, I start with five fictitious examples. 1. Jonathan and Suzanne are both sole parents who met each other through their children becoming friends at school in Cape Town, South Africa. Jonathan looks after Suzanne’s son at his home most days after school until she finishes work. In exchange, Suzanne then looks after Jonathon’s son at her home for a few hours on most Saturdays while he coaches a hockey team. 2. Sarah lives in Australia and orders five T-shirts on sale from the online fashion company ASOS.com for AU$3.99 each. Sarah pays for the T-shirts using her VISA and ASOS posts the T-shirts using a well-known international shipping company. The tag on the T-shirts states that they were made in China, but ASOS do not provide any information on where the cotton was sourced or the labour conditions of the workers who grew the cotton or made the T-shirts. Sarah usually buys clothing based on price and trend though, so tends not to worry about these other factors. 3. William lives in Nova Scotia, Canada and needs surgery to remove a cancerous tumour. He gets a referral from his doctor who puts him on a waiting list with the public hospital. The costs of the surgery and hospital stay (including any post-surgery recovery, check-ups and medication) will be paid for by the government of the province of Nova Scotia who provide free public health care to citizens and permanent residents. 4. Kisi lives in Accra, Ghana, and decides to invest some of her monetary savings in the cryptocurrency Etherium to reduce the risk of her savings being lost by large fluctuations in the value of the Ghanaian cedi. She chooses to invest in Etherium because the transaction costs are lower than Bitcoin, and Etherium also includes the feature of ‘smart-contracts’ that provide greater reassurance for buying certain goods and services in the future. 5. Miram hires a bike for two hours to transport some crafts for sale in a market in Kanpur using the OlaPedal! app. Miram likes to rent rather than own a bike because you can get access whenever you want through the app, and you don’t have to pay for upkeep or worry about the bike getting stolen.

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196  The handbook of diverse economies Each of these examples involve different types of relationships and negotiations around value. They highlight how transactions intersect with owning property, state or government resources, goods, services, human bodies and labour, and the non-human world across different geographic scales. It is the variety of transactions that is of interest to diverse economies scholars, in particular, how transactions interact with other forms of encountering others through ethics, relationships, and negotiations of value and trust. I deal with each of these in turn in the remainder of this chapter. These themes are also picked up and applied in various ways in each of the chapters that follow.

ETHICS Ethics is a word that gets used a lot and applied in different ways. People often talk about ‘ethical behaviour’ or ‘acting ethically’. However, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes ethical behaviour across different contexts or cultures. In the social sciences over the last few years there has been a shift away from universalizing and individualist understandings of ethics, to a more relational and collective approach that foregrounds caring for, and responsibility towards, others (see for instance: Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010; Hill 2011; McEwan and Goodman 2010; Miller 2013; Popke 2007, 2010; Pratt 2009). Popke suggests understanding ethics as the: nature of our interactions with, and responsibilities toward, both human and non-human others. To speak of ethic[s] . . . then, is to consider the nature and extent of these responsibilities, both empirically and theoretically, as well as the ways in which our actions and dispositions toward others tend to fulfill or abrogate them within particular contexts or institutional arrangements. (2010, p. 437)

Diverse economies thinking has contributed to this relational shift, drawing on anti-essentialist and post-structuralist theories that frame human subjectivity as always in a process of becoming (see Chapter 43 by Healy, Özselçuk and Madra in this volume). This process of becoming is constructed and understood through relationships, what Nancy (1991) calls ‘being-with’. Popke’s description of ethics points to the importance of context, of institutions, and the different power relations that characterize certain relationships and transactions. The history of the West and in particular colonization is full of transactions that were incredibly unethical – that is, they did not consider the nature and extent of responsibilities to human and Earth Others. These included transactions that enslaved and stole from Indigenous peoples, and looted the non-human world for profit. The history of industrialization in Europe is also full of transactions involving working-class people’s labour being exploited for profit by those who controlled the means of production. Today, examples of exploitative transactions are still numerous and at times overwhelming in their scale, with workers and producers in the majority world being exploited so that consumers like Sarah from Australia can buy cheap goods. For consumers like Sarah, buying cheap fast fashion may not necessarily express a conscious ethic of deliberately wishing to exploit underpaid garment makers in the majority world. Rather, fast fashion reflects the expression of social norms and unquestioned institutional arrangements. While fast fashion is becoming increasingly contested, in many parts of the minority world it is still seen as acceptable to ‘buy a bargain’. The scaled network of transactions involved in fast fashion (and many other industries) completely distances the clothing buyer from the maker, so that the nature of the exploitation is hard to trace and not

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Framing essay: the diversity of transactions  197 immediately apparent. Transactions, then, both express and are underpinned by ethical beliefs about our responsibilities to other people, and the non-human world. For those interested in fostering more ethical transactions a key question becomes how can people move towards more ethical and empowering transactions? Feminist theorists have drawn on care ethics to theorize how people can move towards more ethical and empowering transactions. For example, Lawson (2007, p. 3) argues that ‘care ethics begins with a social ontology of connection, foregrounding social relationships of mutuality and trust’. For Lawson, care can articulate a particular form of social ethics premised on the collective concern for the well-being of others. Popke (2010) suggests that one way to approach and better understand ethics is to focus on the everyday actions and labour that people undertake to care for each other and the more-than-human. He goes on to argue that ‘it is important not only to theorize the existence of ethics and cooperation, but to try to cultivate them, through representational strategies aimed at making visible the social relations and connections through which ethical responsibility might flow’ (Popke 2010, p. 451; see also the work of Massey 2005). He suggests that within human geography, the work of Gibson-Graham (2006) is exemplary in illustrating the various ‘ways in which our collective labors create the economic as a field of ethical interdependence and decision’ (Popke 2010, p. 451). Through their action research, Popke argues that Gibson-Graham (2006) and others have sought to bring into being what they call the ‘Community Economy’ where ethical questions around care and the nature of our interdependence with others are central. This feminist framing of ethics points to the fundamental importance of relationships – between humans and also with the non-human world. The work of Gibson-Graham (2006) therefore provides a useful starting point for exploring how people can move towards more ethical transactions.

RELATIONSHIPS Entering into a transaction (which involves a certain relationality) with another person is inherently uncertain. As Butler (2005) notes in relation to social life more broadly, people are constantly negotiating the tension between exposing their own vulnerability and maintaining a sense of self-preservation. This negotiation often involves living with others ‘precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging’ (Butler 2005, p. 28). Butler argues that not knowing what another person will do – whether they will hurt, steal, love, help or surprise – is more than a state of interdependency or attachment, it is a state of ‘being given to the other’ (2005, p. 28). While Butler was writing about social life generally, these concerns also relate to those people we undertake transactions with. For instance, how do we trust strangers, how do we manage our own sense of vulnerability when encountering others through transactions, and how do we try and preserve a sense of self in any transaction? Transactions could be thought of as forms of encounter that become ritualized so that they create a kind of certainty around the nature of self–other relationships. By focusing on the relationship that a certain transaction facilitates, the sociality and norms of exchange are better able to be understood. This focus represents a shift away from thinking about transactions as only providing for material needs (like clothing, food or other material goods), to thinking about the kinds of social norms and communities different transactions actually foster. For example, the case of Jonathan and Suzanne looking after each other’s children illustrates

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198  The handbook of diverse economies a transaction that involves high levels of trust and certainty. This level of trust and certainty may take significant amounts of time and familiarity to develop. Theorists from different disciplines have explored the sociality of transactions in various ways. For many, the early twentieth-century work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss has been influential in thinking about how the exchange of objects between people builds relationships (see Mauss 2000). Mauss analysed literature on the social practices of Indigenous and non-European cultures (including Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Pacific Northwest peoples in North America) showing how exchange systems in these cultures centre around the obligations to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. Interestingly, some of Mauss’ key insights were derived from an exchange of letters between Tamati Ranapiri and Elsdon Best, a mutual exchange of curiosity built on and building a somewhat reciprocal relationship where Ranapiri wrote as an early literate Māori scholar describing his own community and cosmology, among other things (Hēnare 2018; Stewart 2017). In Ranapiri’s discussion of gifts, we can see that gifts serve to build alliances and relationships between people and foster a sense of collective obligation and responsibility (Stewart 2017). Gifts invite the giver and receiver into a relationship in both material and spiritual ways. This is because the gift giver is not only giving an object, but also part of themselves, creating a social bond and obligation for the recipient to reciprocate. Mauss drew on Ranapiri and Best’s exchange to propose that three obligations are associated with gifts: giving, which is the first step that creates and maintains social relationships; receiving, because if you refuse a gift you are rejecting the social bond; and reciprocating in order to demonstrate one’s generosity, honour and wealth. Gifts are transactions that are at once economic yet certainly not capitalist, and can contribute to building other kinds of economies; in the case of Ranapiri’s analysis, an economy of mana, elsewhere, an economy of affection (Hēnare 2018). In other places, practices of gift giving are intricately bound up with the giving of favours (and subsequent calling in of favours). Mayfair Mei-Ling Yang’s work in China has explored economies of guanxi, a Chinese word which can be literally translated as relationships (Yang 2000). The cultivation of reciprocity in gifts and favours is a deliberate livelihood strategy also explored in Pavlovskaya’s work in Russia (2004). The economies of exchange that cohere around gift giving and favours compel us to consider an important difference between gift transactions and the practices of exchange in capitalist commodity transactions. A commodity is generally understood as a good or service that is bought and sold with ownership of the commodity transferred in the process of exchange from seller to buyer.1 As Mauss suggests, in these transactions, private property rights tend to be applied to objects, land and resources (and sometimes people), so that if these are sold, ownership rights are transferred to the new owner (see Chapter 30 on property by St. Martin in this volume). In a gift transaction though, the objects (or favours) that are given remain connected to their givers in some way so that it is more like being loaned or shared. Because the identity of the giver is bound up with the gift, this helps to compel the receiver to reciprocate, fostering the sense of an ongoing relationship between people. In other words, through gift giving, a social bond evolves that is assumed to continue through space and time until the future moment of exchange. Of course, all transactions imply relationships, and even in a capitalist commodity exchange where the transfer of rights is seen as complete, relationships of ethics and responsibility remain – although perhaps hidden and distanced (Allen 2008). Post-colonial readings of Mauss’ work have shown how he primarily used Māori and Indigenous understandings of reciprocity as a way of speaking back to the commodification of exchange, holding up his

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Framing essay: the diversity of transactions  199 work as a ‘mirror’ to the West rather than accurately representing Māori understandings of gifts and reciprocity (Stewart 2017). Nevertheless, as Hēnare (2018) points out, we might also read this as the Māori scholar Ranapiri influencing the sociology of transactions and indeed Western academic understandings of reciprocity more generally. The fact that transactions are relational, that trust and uncertainty and vulnerability must be acknowledged and lived with, might seem obvious to kaupapa Māori scholars reading Mauss and Ranapiri. But for many mired in anti-capitalist critique, this point serves as a reminder that we already have here present in the diversity of economic transactions all around the world the basis of different forms of relational economy. Because of this, diverse economies researchers are interested in theorizing different kinds of transactions, interrogating how unequal or disempowering transactional relationships might be transformed, and describing modes of encounter that support ethical relationality.

VALUE There is no consensus amongst scholars about what value is, or where it is derived from. What people and societies are willing to put their energy and trust in, and the rules governing transactions through which resources are allocated and exchanged, varies amongst cultures, within and between societies, and over time (Bauwens and Niaros 2017). In other words, forms of value come into being through the diverse networks that create economies. According to Graeber (2001), people need value regimes to allow them to direct attention and energy to what they commonly value. Markets are a common mechanism to structure value regimes and help organize transactions. While markets are understood by some to be solely a means of commodity exchange linked to capitalist development, there is an increasing body of work that demonstrates how markets ‘are networks which enable various transactions to occur, bringing together actors and things and thereby constantly reconstituting relationships’ (Roelvink 2007, p. 131). In most parts of the contemporary minority world, and increasingly in the majority world, many people see money as the primary measure of exchange that determines value and structures markets. While money is often seen as valuable, credit theorists point out that money is not a commodity (like coffee or a mobile phone), but rather, a powerful accounting tool or a unit of measure that enables transactions (Graeber 2011). Value regimes are socially constructed and a key factor for the ongoing influence of money is the extent to which people collectively agree it will continue to have value in the future. Recently theorists like Bauwens and Niaros (2017) have argued that we are currently experiencing a ‘value crisis’ in relation to money, with increasing distrust in money and associated economic systems following the 2008 global financial crisis and other national economic collapses. The example of Kisi deciding to shift some of her money to the cyptocurrency Etherium rather than keep it in the Ghanaian cedi illustrates how the value of money can shift depending on political and economic circumstances. Graeber (2011) argues that a key contradiction with contemporary value regimes is that what most people truly value (meaningful work, time with family and friends, security of tenure and access to life sustaining food, shelter, water and spirituality) is often either undervalued in capitalist markets, or people with economic and political power charge others too much for these things to maximize their own profit. While this highlights the significance of uneven power relations in structuring markets, it also suggests a kind of imaginative limitation to collectively valuing and organizing transactions.

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200  The handbook of diverse economies To understand this ‘value crisis’ two heterodox economic traditions – social economics and traditional (sometimes called ‘old’) institutional economics – are helpful (see for instance Dugger 1989; Lutz 1999; Tae-Hee et al. 2017). These bodies of theory focus on the social construction of markets and how people determine value and come to trust the practices that determine value. One key theme of heterodox economics is a rejection of the homo economicus model that understands humans as ‘rational economic agents’. Heterodox economists argue that this is a gross oversimplification of how people actually make transaction decisions. Instead, heterodox economics tends to focus on the ‘institutions–history–social structure nexus’ that explores how people actually make transaction decisions in specific contexts, rather than assuming they act in normative ways (Tae-Hee et al. 2017). Gibson-Graham (2006) argue that there is often a conflation between capitalism and markets – whereby market transactions of commodities are automatically assumed to indicate the appearance, if not dominance, of capitalist relations. Roelvink’s (2007) review of Julia Elyachar’s (2005) account of the rise of cash-based market transactions in Egypt demonstrates how to work against such a conflation of markets and capitalism. Roelvink’s reading for difference highlights how even within what may initially look like cash-based commodity transactions, the reputation and skill of the maker can still be important, much like in the gift transactions Mauss described. Elyachar’s account of how the reputation of the master craftsman is vital to the value attributed to the product or commodity is, for Roelvink, evidence of a non-capitalist transaction, one more clearly associated with independent producers and class processes in which the knowledge and mastery of the craftsman is imbued in the transactional relationship. Heterodox economists and diverse economies scholars suggest that we should empty both commodities and markets of any assumed value and focus on the diverse ways markets get constructed, bounded and policed. To help move beyond the capitalist market as the only way to ascribe value and govern transactions, the diverse economy framing includes a vast range of transactions that people use to meet their needs, some involving organized markets, while others don’t (see Table 1.3 in Chapter 1 in this volume). As indicated in Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1, there are many different ways in which relations of commensurability or incommensurability are negotiated in a diverse economy. A number of questions arise as to how transactions are resolved, especially when determining value without resort to pricing mechanisms. For example, if you are involved in a bartering transaction, how do you decide whether your five apples are worth swapping for a soft toy? Who has the ability to set the value or price in a given transaction, and what happens when you are moving between different types of markets, across geographic scales and national boundaries, and between different value regimes? These questions raise even further questions about the complex and ever-changing insurance and financial regulations and laws, international treaties, and certification schemes that shape how value is understood and negotiated in different contexts. The ongoing debate and development around such insurance, financial regulations, treaties and certification schemes highlight the socially constructed nature of value regimes, markets, and the ways people attempt to foster certainty and trust around transactions. Even within what might often be termed ‘capitalist markets’, there are still a diverse range of transactions that can involve complex negotiations around value (or in/commensurability).

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Framing essay: the diversity of transactions  201

TRUST AND CERTAINTY A key aspect associated with completing a transaction is trust in the nature of the relationship, the value regime, and the mode of transaction itself. For instance, can you trust the seller or buyer of a product or service to actually deliver what was promised? Can you trust the transaction mode itself, and can you trust the individuals, institutions, organizations and states that regulate and govern the transaction to protect you throughout the process? What guarantee would you have about the product, relationship or service, and what could you do if it doesn’t meet your expectations? The example of Miram hiring a bike for two hours to transport some crafts for sale in a market in Kanpur using the OlaPedal! app illustrates at a small scale the level of trust and certainty needed to complete a transaction. Miram must trust that the OlaPedal! app is legitimate and will actually allow the bike to be used, and that the bike actually works and isn’t damaged. These questions about trust and certainty have become even more significant as transactions have scaled up and people are undertaking transactions when they don’t necessarily know or physically meet the other party. While human communities may have once been able to develop and rely on more intimate trusting relationships (for instance in small towns or villages where most people personally knew those they were transacting with), globalization and international trade have made things much more uncertain. There is also a temporal element to trust and certainty in transactions. For example, if you invest in a certain good that has a relatively long lifespan, you may well consider whether this good will hold its value over the longer term. These questions surrounding value regimes, trust and certainty connect back to the ‘value crisis’ mentioned earlier. If enough people collectively lose trust in a dominant value regime, investments may be lost and entire markets might lose their stability and collapse. The sheer number of national and international laws, treaties and regulations surrounding transactions point to the desire humans have to minimize uncertainty and develop shared norms to enforce certain expectations. We could see these laws, treaties and regulations as investments in certain kinds of value regimes that attempt to foster a sense of trust and certainty. For example, in many countries medical professionals are accredited and have to undergo a certain amount of specialized and expensive training. The example of William getting surgery to remove a tumour through the Nova Scotia public health system illustrates aspects of trust and certainty. William will assume that the surgeon and other medical staff will all have the appropriate training and knowledge to perform medical procedures. This training and accreditation may be enforced through state rules and professional bodies to protect patients, ensure certain standards of public health and engender trust in the wider medical profession. However, maintaining trust and certainty in value regimes is difficult and requires significant work, regulation and maintenance. For instance, money organizes exchange via prices, and national governments print numbers on bills and coins, but they can’t necessarily determine what those numbers refer to. The actual value of those numbers is determined by countless price-setting decisions by producers, businesses and individuals, reacting to the structure of costs and demand they face and government regulations. So rather than understanding value regimes and accounting tools (like money) as either naturally occurring or an outcome of general agreement or political imposition, Beggs (2012) argues that we should see them as the outcomes of countless interlocking transactions in a vast, decentralized (and often competitive) and dynamic system.

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202  The handbook of diverse economies The French sociologist Michel Callon argues that disciplines like economics (as well as the natural and life sciences more generally) contribute towards creating the realities that they describe (see Law and Urry 2004 for more on this). Callon (2006) uses the concept of performativity to explain how certain discourses partially construct the reality they describe. He argues that for any system (like a market) to work, infrastructure is needed to establish relationships between objects and actors, which then act on one another in order to control the others. He uses the example of a pickle farmer to describe how this ‘infrastructure’ functions: Initially the farmer and his pickles could hardly be dissociated. This close entanglement made the pickles invisible at a distance and precluded their circulation. Gradually the pickle became autonomous; its ability to circulate increased. Its standardization and the comparisons and aggregations that it allowed paved the way to its economization and to that of the agents who produced, packaged, traded and consumed it (the farmers who filled in questionnaires on their production, the cooperatives who commercialized the pickles, the federal agencies that centralized the data and decreed regulations, etc.). The stage had to be prepared for categories such as supply and demand to be enacted, for the market to be unified and for prices to be set in relation to the (aggregated) demand and the (aggregated) supply. The basic categories of economics are present in this reconfiguration. What is striking here . . . is the cooperative aspect of these mutually complementary interventions. (2006, p. 36)

Callon uses this example to highlight the ways people, goods, services and economic practices are utterly entangled. He calls these entanglements ‘performations’ and makes two broad distinctions between performations that manage to produce regularities and repetition, and performations that are constantly faced with unexpected events, which they sometimes absorb, but only sometimes, for a while. Callon and his colleagues (see Mackenzie et al. 2007) highlight how trust and certainty in a certain kind of economic system is fostered and maintains currency through the development of infrastructure. His work has informed a range of thinking and action research that seeks to foster what Callon might call different performations. One example of different performations are theorists and practitioners interested in post-monetary currencies. These theorists and practitioners argue that people need transaction management systems that enable communities to see flows of value and react to them, and importantly, that reward ‘generation’ and ‘regeneration’ rather than the current system which primarily rewards ‘extraction’ (Bauwens and Niaros 2017). Recent work in this area has applied these ideas to social media and other online transactions which are often associated with the ‘sharing economy’. For example, Bauwens and Niaros (2017) argue that the current format of ‘netarchical capital’ (exemplified by Facebook and Instagram), where capital no longer produces commodities for sale through commodified labour, but enables peer to peer ‘exchanges’ that extract rent from monetary transactions, is also socially unsustainable. The rise in social media ‘influencers’ and younger people in particular seeking fame and income on Instagram and YouTube highlight a contemporary form of often exploitative and highly personal ‘labour’. This includes both the labour involved in producing images, videos and content, and the unpaid but commodified labour of the thousands of viewers clicking ‘like’ and engaging with the content. To reclaim what Bauwens and Niaros (2017) call ‘value sovereignty’ over common resources (which include digital commons), communities need to develop transactions that safeguard their networks from capitalist forces that co-opt and do not reward or return value to people’s lives. Bauwens and Niaros (2017) draw on examples like Enspiral (a New Zealand based entrepreneurial coalition of mission-driven entities that uses participatory and collaborative tools), Sensorica (a commons based ‘Open Value Network’ with partial market interfaces) and Backfeed (a blockchain based prospective infrastructure for

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Framing essay: the diversity of transactions  203 encouraging and rewarding peer production) to illustrate what progressive digital commons could look like. These examples use open-source digital networks to facilitate decentralized transactions where value is created and transparently distributed to benefit all contributors, and not just a small group of shareholders or ‘owners’.

CONCLUSION A diverse economies perspective helps to highlight the diverse forms of transactions people engage in to sustain their lives. This can help shift the focus away from just capitalist forms of transaction, to other kinds of transactions that highlight the ethical questions and relationships that connect people and the non-human world. A key question is how do we go about collectively building more equitable transactions that foster liveable lives for more people? Future research in the area of transactions could explore the following questions: ●● What could ‘fairer’ markets look like, where there is a diversity of enterprises and the ability to set price isn’t determined by one powerful actor? ●● What could ‘fairer’ international trade look like, and how might we move towards ethically transformational sharing transactions? ●● How might we foster transactions that do not force people into distanced, individualized and alienated working conditions (exemplified by Uber and some other ‘sharing economy’ initiatives)? ●● What could transformational state transactions look like, and how could these be fostered? ●● How might we shift from valuing extractive transactions that enrich some at the expense of others, to generative value models that enrich people, communities and the non-human world? The authors of the following chapters in this section all engage with these questions in different ways – from considering alternative currencies and value regimes, to social procurement processes, fair trade and ‘sharing economy’ practices. Throughout the chapters that follow, the authors draw on diverse economies thinking to show how communities and organizations are attempting to collectively enact different kinds of transactions. Some of these attempts at fostering different value regimes and transactions appear to be more successful than others. And some of the attempts perpetuate uneven power relations and according to the authors, don’t necessarily result in greater economic freedom for all people involved. The chapters all offer nuanced, contextualized accounts of attempts to enact different kinds of transactions, and therefore contribute to building our collective understanding of how to continue imagining other economic possibilities.

NOTE 1. Marx denoted the merchant capitalist commodity transaction as M–C–M–C where money (M) is used to buy commodities (C) which are then resold and it is only if the commodities are sold at a higher price (M′) that the merchant’s profit is made. He distinguished this transaction, or circuit of capital, from the industrial capitalist commodity transaction in which labour power is bought as a commodity and is the source of capitalist profit (see Chapter 37 on finance by Safri and Madra for more discussion of Marx’s circuits of capital).

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REFERENCES Allen, A. (2008), ‘Power and the politics of difference: Oppression, empowerment, and transnational justice’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 23 (3), 156–72. Bauwens, M. and V. Niaros (2017), Value in the Commons Economy, Heinrich Böll Foundation and the P2P Foundation, accessed 23 July 2019 at http://​commonstransition​.org/​value​-commons​-economy/​. Beggs, M. (2012), ‘Debt: The first 500 pages’, Jacobin, accessed 23 July 2019 at https://​jacobinmag​ .com/​2012/​08/​debt​-the​-first​-500​-pages/​. Butler, J. (2005), Giving an Account of Oneself, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callon, M. (2006), ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative?’, CSI Working Papers Series 005, accessed 23 July 2019 at https://​halshs​.archives​-ouvertes​ fr/​halshs​-00091596/​document. Dugger, W.M. (1989), Radical Institutionalism: Contemporary Voices, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Elyachar, J. (2005), Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2010), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (1), 320–346. Graeber, D. (2001), Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Graeber, D. (2011), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York: Melling House. Hēnare, M. (2018), ‘“Ko te hau tēnā o tō taonga . . .”: The words of Ranapiri on the spirit of gift exchange and economy’, Journal of Polynesian Society, 127, 451–63. Hill, A. (2011), ‘A helping hand and many green thumbs: Local government, citizens and the growth of a community-based food economy’, Local Environment, 16 (6), 539–53. Law, J. and J. Urry (2004), ‘Enacting the social’, Economy and Society, 33 (3), 390–410. Lawson, V. (2007), ‘Geographies of care and responsibility’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97 (1), 1–11. Lutz, M. (1999), Economics for the Common Good, London and New York: Routledge. Mackenzie, D., F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds) (2007), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Massey, D. (2005), For Space, London: Sage. Mauss, M. (2000), The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, New York: W.W. Norton. McEwan, C. and M. Goodman (2010), ‘Place geography and the ethics of care: Introductory remarks on the geographies of ethics, responsibility and care’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 13 (2), 103–12. Merriam-Webster (2019), ‘Transaction’, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, accessed 23 July 2019 at https://​ www​ merriam​-webster​.com/​dictionary/​transaction. Miller, E. (2013), ‘Community economy: Ontology, ethics and politics for radically-democratic economic organizing’, Rethinking Marxism, 25 (4), 518–33. Nancy, J.-L. (1991), The In-Operative Community, P. Connor and L. Grabus (trans.), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pavlovskaya, M. (2004), ‘Other transitions: Multiple economies of Moscow households in the 1990s’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94, 329–51. Popke, J. (2007), ‘Geography and ethics: Spaces of cosmopolitan responsibility’, Progress in Human Geography, 31 (4), 509–18. Popke, J. (2010), ‘Ethical spaces of being in-common’, in S.J. Smith, R. Pain, S.A. Marston, and J.P. Jones III (eds), The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies, London: Sage, pp. 435–55. Pratt, G. (2009), ‘Subject/subjectivity’, in D. Gregory, R. Johnston and G. Pratt (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Roelvink, G. (2007), ‘Review article: Performing the market’, Social Identities, 3 (1), 125–33. Stewart, G. (2017), ‘The “Hau” of research: Mauss meets Kaupapa Māori’,  Journal of World Philosophies, 2 (1), 1–11. Tae-Hee, J., L. Chester and C. D’Ippoliti (eds) (2017), The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics, London and New York: Routledge.

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Framing essay: the diversity of transactions  205 Yang, M.M.-L. (2000), ‘Putting global capitalism in its place: Economic hybridity, Bataille and ritual expenditure’, Current Anthropology, 41 (4), 477–509.

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22. Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste Oona Morrow

INTRODUCTION Gleaning is the practice of collecting surplus or unharvested food at its source. It is a non-market transaction that encompasses the power of the gift and the freedom of foraging from nature’s ‘free gifts’. The practice of gleaning has taken place in agrarian societies for hundreds of years and has persisted alongside an increasingly market oriented food system. It has continued in the cracks of capitalist, feudal, communal and state supported agriculture, despite the gradual enclosure of the agricultural commons that allowed for gleaning to occur. Gleaning encompasses a whole bundle of economic practices, property regimes, food laws, materialities, and power relations that shape our broader food system – as well as our attitudes towards food as a right/entitlement, a commodity, and something to be shared rather than wasted. It thus makes for an interesting entry point into diverse food economies (Cameron and Wright 2014). Increased awareness of the global scandals of food waste and hunger has generated renewed interest in gleaning among food security and sustainability advocates (see for example, Feedback Global at https://​ feedbackglobal​ .org/​[accessed 18 July 2019]). Gleaning has become one among many mechanisms for redistributing the surplus of capitalist food enterprises to people in need often through the intermediaries of non-profit gleaning networks and food banks. Gleaning thus remains one of the most widely practised ways of sharing food with those in need (Davies et al. 2017). In this chapter I briefly introduce the history of gleaning, unpack the economic geographies that contemporary gleaning is embedded in, and through the case of the League of Urban Canners I reflect on the importance of re-embedding gleaning practices in the commons.

GLEANING IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:9–10)

As described by Leviticus in Mosaic law, gleaning has historically occurred because of the obligation of landowners and harvesters to leave behind ‘gleanings’ for the poor to nourish themselves from. Gleaning became a well-known ‘customary right’ of the poor to access land and harvest its fallen fruits to provide sustenance. As such, gleaning has always been embedded in negotiations around the meaning and governance of property.

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Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste  207 In Western Europe, gleaning took on a particularly feudal flavour – as a result of feudal property arrangements and class processes between peasants and feudal lords. By class process, I refer to the processes through which surplus is appropriated and distributed in the creation of value (Gibson-Graham 2006). In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the customary right to glean was quite regulated. Gleaners, the majority of whom were women, conducted unpaid gleaning work according to the ringing of the gleaner’s bell and the seasonal rhythms of the harvest. In some districts, wives were permitted to glean between three and six bushels of wheat a year, making a significant contribution to the income of labouring households (King 1991). Women undertook gleaning in combination with other child care activities, after taking part in a full day of harvesting (Humphries 1990). The number of legal cases brought against gleaners suggests, however, that gleaning was not always an activity welcomed by land owners. Over time they sought to narrow the definition of the ‘deserving poor’ who could access their fields, excluding those who were able to work, were not officially registered as poor, or not local enough. The regulation of the poor took place in tandem with practices that strengthened the ideal of private property (King 1991). Urbanization and the enclosure of the commons brought forth numerous successful legal cases by property owners against gleaners. For property to become truly private, gleaning had to be abolished. As Tabachnick (2016) chronicles, the loss of gleaning rights in combination with the loss of (common) pasture and trans-human rights of way made it impossible for the labouring households and peasants to maintain diversified rural livelihoods, eventually pushing them off the land and into wage labour. A Eurocentric review of the history of gleaning and capitalism might lead us to conclude that with the rise of private property, wage labour and capitalist food production, gleaning has all but disappeared and social welfare has largely been formalized and assumed by the state. This of course, is not the case. Traditional gleaning practices have continued in other parts of the world. For example, in their inventory of diverse economic practices in the Philippines, Gibson-Graham (2005) include pamukak – the tradition of collecting surplus fruits and vegetables after the harvest. In rural Indonesia, Stoler (1977) documents the practice of women and mothers gleaning in close proximity to rice harvesters, where their activities are closely surveilled by property owners. Elsewhere in the Philippines, Cabanban et al. (2014) describe the significance of shellfish, invertebrate, and small fish gleaning practised in tidal waters. Seafood gleaning reveals the fluidity of categories such as gleaning and foraging. In post-socialist Serbia gleaning is carried out by Roma people, whose practices are largely interpreted as theft by local (non-Roma) property owners. In Dikovic’s (2016) analysis, gleaning becomes theft when it fails to reproduce relations of trust and reciprocity between owners and non-owners. These diverse examples highlight the critical role that (formal and informal) regulation and property regimes play in facilitating gleaning in different contexts – where feudalism and capitalism are not the main historical points of reference.

MODERN-DAY GLEANING Historical gleaning emerged in the total absence of social welfare, with customary rights and moral obligations as a stand in for any form of collective care and responsibility. Today, at least in the minority world, modern-day gleaning takes place in the context of a formalized social welfare system. It is no longer the customary right of the poor, but practised by diverse

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208  The handbook of diverse economies actors with motivations that span food waste, food security, social welfare and environmentalism. Gleaning is largely done by non-profits and voluntary organizations on behalf of the poor.1 For example, in Greater Boston, there are a number of long established non-profit organizations that glean fresh food on behalf of the hungry, and redistribute this food through local food pantries and food banks. One of the most notable examples is the Boston Area Gleaners (BAG 2016), whose volunteers visit farms in the Greater Boston area to harvest produce for food redistribution programmes. In 2016, they gleaned 421 167 pounds of fresh food, from 51 farms, with the labour of 310 volunteers. In addition to BAG, there are also mutual aid organizations that seek to embed gleaning in practices of self-provisioning. Gleanings are, however, less likely to come straight from the field and more likely to be commodities whose market value and perhaps ‘freshness’ has expired because of date label, appearance, price speculation, or an obscure sales algorithm (Gille 2012; Midgley 2014, 2019). Just as historic gleaning was supported by regulations such as Mosaic law and the customary rights of the poor, much modern-day gleaning depends on the existence of food safety and liability laws that make it possible to share access to land and share the harvest. In the USA these include the Good Samaritan’s Law, which protects food donors who give food to non-profits from liability. There are also policies that incentivize food donation, allowing donors to claim a general tax deduction of up to 30 per cent of their declared income, or an enhanced tax deduction of up to 15 per cent (REFED n.d.). And in 2018, New York State passed the ‘Farm donation to food pantries credit’ which allows farmers to claim up to 25 per cent of the fair market value of the food they donate, up to US$5000 annually (New York State 2018). These processes of institutionalization and regulation have had the effect of scaling up and formalizing gleaning, with large regional food banks coordinating gleaning alongside other forms of food donation, recovery and redistribution (Lohnes and Wilson 2017). While extremely beneficial to food recovery agencies and the businesses that donate to them, such laws do not support gleaning in its historic form, namely allowing individuals direct access to the surplus of their neighbours. Gleaning and food sharing transactions between businesses and individuals and peers are not shielded from liability. As a result, informal gleaning and food sharing activities can be highly criminalized (Gonzalez 2016; SELC 2011). Gleaning as a form of self-provisioning has been marginalized as a criminal act that borders on trespassing and theft, as evidenced by conflicts between dumpster divers, freegans, and business owners who padlock their dumpsters and destroy their food to prevent gleaning (Carolsfeld and Erikson 2013; Edwards and Mercer 2007; Spataro 2016). Gleaning is no longer framed around self-provisioning or alleviating poverty, but preventing food waste. And gleaning in the traditional sense, by and for the poor, is increasingly rare as the liability of food donors is protected over the rights of gleaners, the hungry and the poor.

DIVERSE ECONOMIES OF SURPLUS FOOD Food waste stands as a symbol of the perverse contradictions of capitalist food economies that rely on enormous public subsidies and the free gifts of nature to both overproduce and undervalue food, at enormous human and environmental costs (Gille 2012). Capitalist food production has cheapened food and generated such slim profit margins that a sudden market fluctuation can cause the exchange value of food to expire far faster than its use-value. Such

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Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste  209 disruptions reveal the woefully inadequate metric of monetary value used to valorize the environmental and human inputs and benefits of agriculture. This sudden devaluation means that fresh vegetables are often not worth the (already very low) wages paid to harvesters. As a result, crops are left on the field, which creates (but does not guarantee) opportunities for gleaning. Gleaned food, is food that has for a variety of reasons that may be aesthetic, financial or logistical, lost its full commodity value. Through gleaning, and the investment of multiple kinds of labour – in harvesting, logistics, redistribution, cooking and preserving – food waste becomes food again, and its use-value is preserved or restored. But the transformation of waste into food rarely occurs through the market alone, although circular economy initiatives are currently doing a great deal to make food waste more attractive to for-profit entrepreneurial activities. For example, selling ‘wonky veg’ online has become such big business that it is eating into the profits of local food justice-oriented CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture schemes) (Phatbeets 2018). But in general, the revalorization of food waste in gleaning is made possible by mobilizing people, food and markets around social and environmental values that are rooted in concern for human and non-human others (Hawkins and Potter 2006). In the diverse economies framework, gleaning is categorized as a non-market transaction. However, as should be clear by now, this is less clear cut in practice. Depending on the regulatory context, gleaning can be defined as foraging, theft or charity. The work of gleaning depends on diverse forms of labour (mostly unpaid) and enterprise (non-profit, mutual aid, capitalist), and is enabled by diverse property arrangements (public, private and common). In many cases, the existence of food for gleaning is a direct result of capitalist relations of food production. Thus, gleaning cannot be understood as a transaction alone; it is embedded in, enabled by, and productive of diverse property regimes, financial relationships, labour practices, enterprises and further transactions – such as selling, bartering and gifting. Gleaned food can be generative of other economic circuits – with flows of surplus value and food invested in a multiplicity of non-capitalist transactions and enterprises. For example, numerous researchers studying the ‘freegan’ and ‘dumpster diving’ movements across the world have documented how free food and food waste supports a variety of non-capitalist economic practices and new forms of conviviality that stem from the reduced demand to earn income to purchase food (Edwards and Mercer 2007; Morrow 2019; Wilson 2013). Agnes Varda’s 2000 documentary film, The Gleaners and I, challenges the categorization of waste itself and, as Roelvink (2009, p. 339) argues, opens up ‘the possibilities of what can be achieved through gleaning, including art where waste becomes material for sculpture or painting and, somewhat more obscurely, free French language classes for refugees, their teacher’s voluntary labour physically sustained by the edible leftovers he collects’. These are just a few examples of the multiple circuits of value that are created through gleaning and food sharing. These activities have little to do with the causes of food waste, and show the multitude of economies and ethical practices that can grow out of the surplus of our flawed food system.

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RECONNECTING GLEANING TO THE COMMONS IN GREATER BOSTON In the remainder of this chapter I turn to my own research on the diverse economies of urban food provisioning in Greater Boston to examine the economic practices that gleaning is embedded in, enabled by, and productive of. As such I seek to go beyond capitalocentric understandings of food waste to more deeply examine the postcapitalist afterlives of gleaned food. The League of Urban Canners is a self-described community food provisioning cooperative that harvests surplus backyard fruit for community consumption (LURC 2018). This completely volunteer-run enterprise is composed of local food and sustainability advocates, urban homesteaders, hipster foodies, bicycling enthusiasts, families with young children, retirees, students, people who are unemployed, and people who are receiving public benefits.2 Together these volunteers have developed partnerships with private property owners – and their fruit trees – to coordinate the decentralized logistics of gleaning, preserving and redistributing surplus fruit for household and community consumption. The League started when one neighbour invited another to cross the driveway fence and harvest from her bountiful grape arbour. Many jars of jam later, the harvesters were left wondering what else was growing in their neighbourhood orchard and activated a large volunteer network to find out. Through participatory mapping, canvassing, crowdsourcing, fliers, and word of mouth the League developed a database and online map of some 300 trees and arbours, locating exotic fruits like mulberry and quince, as well as apples, crab apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, apricots and grapes that could be accessed. From the trees in this database they harvest about 4000 pounds of fruit each year (Morrow 2017). Over time, they have developed a stewardship food sharing model in which they approach neighbours with the offer to harvest fruit, preserve it, and return 10 per cent of the preserved harvest as a thank you. The gleaners also practise property and tree care – taking care to clean up the yard, and return throughout the year to care for the trees and arbours they glean from, providing free pruning and organic pest management. Through such practices of property care and stewardship the gleaners actively challenge the status of property as strictly private, and assert their collective property rights as commoners (Morrow and Martin 2019). Unpaid labour is tremendously important to all kinds of gleaning, especially when we consider the fact that food becomes ‘gleanable’ only after its exchange value has diminished to the extent that it is no longer worth paying harvesters. Historically gleaning was embedded in feudal relationships between land owners and the poor. In this aspect, modern gleaning is not that different. The feudal aspect of gleaning is something that several League members grew to resent. The property owners were, after all, appropriating the labour of the gleaners – in the form of clean lawns, healthy trees and jars of preserved fruit, even if these were the terms of access that the gleaners themselves had proposed. But in their view, if property owners had contributed almost no labour to the care and harvest of their trees, were they really entitled to the fruits? Despite being embedded in feudal relations, gleaning is also productive of communal and cooperative economic relations in the League of Urban Canners. By organizing as a collective, the gleaners gain access to a much larger pool of resources than they would alone. But perhaps most importantly, they learn to find joy in sharing their labours (harvesting, canning) and the surplus it creates (fruit, jam) collectively. Through sharing knowledge, skills, trees, meals,

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Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste  211 food and labour, the League of Urban Canners take an active role in co-creating the urban food commons that they glean from, securing access for, hopefully, the long term. The history of gleaning in England can serve as an important reminder of the significance of gleaning, and other practices of shared property use, for maintaining and defending the commons. Historically gleaning has been a means for redistributing food, but also for contesting the meaning of property. In the present, gleaning by the League of Urban Canners is enabled by feudal relations with property owners, who allow access to the ‘gleanings’ of their private backyards. But it also transforms those relations; opening up the possibility of sharing and caring for backyards, food, knowledge and trees as a commons. Organizing as a collective to create and cultivate a database of gleaning opportunities has helped the gleaners to reframe these private resources as commons that can be shared and collectively cared for. As Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) remind us in their commons-identikit, ownership is just one dimension of property. And indeed, through various stewardship practices, the gleaners seek to manage, care for and govern the resources they benefit from as commons.

CONCLUSION Gleaning shows great potential for social innovation and experimentation in developing alternative modes of valuing and distributing food and indeed investing food surplus into other circuits of value. However, food policies persistently fail to recognize the diverse ways that people provision food. As a result, today gleaning as a form of self-provisioning, by individuals and informal initiatives, remains largely criminalized. This can be seen even more starkly in Europe, where food safety is governed through the legal tools of private property. Here, liability protections for food donation do not exist, and informal food sharing organizations who seek to manage surplus food as a commons face constant harassment from local food safety regulators (Morrow 2019). The ability of the League of Urban Canners to flourish in the legal grey area is a result of the trust that this community of harvesters and tree-owning households have built up together, through mundane practices of tree care, reciprocity and food sharing. Their practices have gained further legitimacy by growing public outrage about food waste. But this moral outcry against food waste is not always accompanied by an equally loud cry for food justice. Would these same tree-owning households welcome the passing stranger, the traveller, or the poor to pick from their trees, I wonder? What new norms, customs and (formal and informal) laws can we realize to re-common food and protect the right to food? Mobilizing gleaning to tackle the twin problems of food waste and food insecurity in a way that is also socially just, will require shifts in food governance and ethical self-governance. If we can accept that there really is enough for everybody, and begin to recognize food as a commons rather than only a commodity, then we might begin to normalize the sharing of food, with whoever wants it or needs it. In terms of food policy, this could mean demanding that food businesses donate whatever they cannot sell and even set aside a certain percentage of their food to share before it is at risk of expiring or spoiling. Putting the ‘right to glean’ back in the hands of the poor will require a broader mobilization around the right to food. It will also require a redrawing of the legal, liability and food safety regulations that have developed around the assumption that food is first and foremost a capitalist commodity (Morrow 2019).

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NOTES 1. In the SHARECITY100 database – an inventory and typology of food sharing enterprises in 100 cities (the majority in North America and Europe) – we found that the vast majority of gleaning organizations are non-profits, with far fewer informal organizations (Davies et al. 2017). 2. On the whole, this group would be difficult to compare to the ‘deserving poor’ granted gleaning rights under customary laws of yesteryear.

REFERENCES Boston Area Gleaners (BAG) (2016) , ‘Annual report’, accessed 12 April 2018 at https://​ www​ .bostonareagleaners​.org/​uploads/​1/​6/​4/​6/​16465104/​boston​_area​_gleaners​_2016​_annual​_report​_web​ _version​.pdf. Cabanban, A.S., I.J. Tajonera and M.L.D. Palomares (2014), ‘A short history of gleaning in Negros and Panay Islands, Visayas, Philippines’, in M.L.D. Palomares and D. Pauly (eds), Philippine Marine Fisheries Catches: A Bottom-up Reconstruction, 1950 to 2010, Fisheries Centre Research Report 22 (1), Vancouver, Canada: Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, pp. 105–17. Cameron, J. and S. Wright (2014), ‘Researching diverse food initiatives: From backyard and community gardens to international markets’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 1–9. Carolsfeld, A.L. and S.L. Erikson (2013), ‘Beyond desperation: Motivations for dumpster diving for food in Vancouver’, Food and Foodways, 21 (4), 245–66. Davies, A.R., F. Edwards, B. Marovelli, O. Morrow, M. Rut and M. Weymes (2017), ‘Making visible: Interrogating the performance of food sharing across 100 urban areas’, Geoforum, 86 (March), 136–49. Dikovic, J. (2016), ‘Gleaning: Old name, new practice’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 48 (2), 302–21. Edwards, F. and D. Mercer (2007), ‘Gleaning from gluttony: An Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste’, Australian Geographer, 38 (3), 279–96. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2005), ‘Surplus possibilities: Postdevelopment and community economies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26 (1), 4–26. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gille, Z. (2012), ‘From risk to waste: Global food waste regimes’, Sociological Review, 60 (Suppl. 2), 27–46. Gonzalez, M.-T. (2016), ‘Hunger, poverty, and the criminalization of food sharing in the new guilded age’, Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law, 23 (2), 231–83. Hawkins, G. and E. Potter (2006), ‘Waste matter: Potatoes, thing-power and biosociality’, Cultural Studies Review, 12 (1), 104–15. Humphries, J. (1990), ‘Enclosures, common rights, and women: The proletarianization of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1), 17–42. King, P. (1991), ‘Customary rights and women’s earnings: The importance of gleaning to the rural labouring poor , 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, 44 (3), 461–76. Lohnes, J. and B. Wilson (2017), ‘Bailing out the food banks? Hunger relief, food waste, and crisis in Central Appalachia’, Environment and Planning A, 50 (2), 350–369. LURC (2018), ‘League of Urban Canners’, accessed 8 March 2019 at http://​www​.leagueofurbancanners​ .org/​. Midgley, J.L. (2014), ‘The logics of surplus food redistribution’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 57 (12), 1872–92. Midgley, J.L. (2019), ‘Anticipatory practice and the making of surplus food’, Geoforum, 99 (February), 181–9.

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Gleaning: transactions at the nexus of food, commons and waste  213 Morrow, O. (2017), ‘League of urban canners: Stewarding urban orchards’, in Shareable, Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, p. 88, accessed 8 March 2019 at https://​www​.shareable​.net/​sites/​ default/​files/​Sharing​%20Cities​.pdf. Morrow, O. (2019), ‘Sharing food and risk in Berlin’s urban food commons’, Geoforum, 99 (February), 202–12. Morrow, O., and Martin, D. G. (2019), ‘Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons’, Urban Geography, 1–21. New York State (2018), ‘Farm donations to food pantries credit – FAQs’, accessed 8 March 2019 at https://​www​.tax​ ny​.gov/​bus/​farm​-donations​-credit​ htm. Phatbeets (2018), ‘The ugly truth of ugly produce’, accessed 10 March 2019 at https://​ www​ .phatbeetsproduce​.org/​uglyproduce/​. REFED (n.d.), ‘Food waste policy finder’, accessed 12 April 2018 at https://​www​refed​.com/​tools/​food​ -waste​-policy​-finder/​federal​-policy/​federal​-tax​-incentives. Roelvink, G. (2009), ‘Broadening the horizons of economy’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2 (3), 325–44. SELC (2011), ‘The shareable food movement meets the law’, accessed 8 March 2019 at http://​www​ .shareable​ net/​blog/​the​-shareable​-food​-movement​-meets​-the​-law. Spataro, D. (2016), ‘Against a de-politicized DIY urbanism: Food not bombs and the struggle over public space’, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 9 (2), 185–201. Stoler, A.L. (1977), ‘Rice harvesting in Kali Loro: A study of class and labor relations in rural Java’, American Ethnologist, 4 (4), 678–98. Tabachnick, D. (2016), ‘Two models of ownership: How commons has co-existed with private property’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 75 (2), 488–563. Wilson, A. D. (2013), ‘Beyond alternative: Exploring the potential for autonomous food spaces’, Antipode, 45 (3), 719–37.

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23. Direct producer–consumer transactions: Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots Ted White

INTRODUCTION Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one form of direct producer–consumer transaction. The CSA movement arose from long-term public concern over the increasing industrialization of agriculture and its many negative side effects: both ecological and emotional. The food being produced via industrialized farms felt unsafe, face-less and place-less to the pioneers of CSA who were disturbed by the use of toxic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the long-distance trucking of produce from farm to supermarket, the poor wages and economic insecurity of farmers, and the loss of family farms which had provided trusted personal and cultural connections to food and landscape. Prior to CSA, interest in creating consumer networks to support the production of chemical-free foods can be traced back to biodynamic agriculture that had been practised in Europe since the 1920s (Biodynamic Association 2019) and Japanese Teikei farms that developed in the 1960s and 1970s; (Henderson and Van En 1999 [2007]; JOAA 2019). Over decades a wide range of citizens and agricultural activists expressed alarm and scepticism about large-scale industrialized agriculture and actively advocated for alternatives based on natural principles. They also saw cooperative economic structures as the best way to support this endeavour. From this, CSA emerged. The history of CSA is one of multiple, autonomous and nearly simultaneous pioneering farm projects that soon became influential models. In the USA, three CSA farms sprung up circa 1986 – two in Massachusetts and one in New Hampshire. It was at Indian Line Farm in Massachusetts that the term ‘Community Supported Agriculture’ was first used.1 There has never been a standardized definition of Community Supported Agriculture. Much of the vibrancy of CSA has been its many creative interpretations, grassroots diffusion and independence from governing agencies (White 2016). However, there is wide agreement that the essence of the CSA model is that it is based on a set of ethically motivated transactions. In a typical CSA, a farmer gathers a group of local consumers prior to the planting season and asks them to make an advance payment directly to the farmer for a share of the season’s harvest. In this system, farmers and consumers share the risks and mutual benefits of ethical, ecological food production. When drought or disease or other adverse situations have a negative impact on crop yields both producer and consumer share the risks. When the harvest is bountiful, both parties enjoy the rewards. This represents a stark contrast to industrialized agriculture where a farmer’s failed crop could mean bankruptcy, and even a good crop can mean a drop in their selling price. In CSA, consumers make an ongoing financial and social commitment 214 Ted White - 9781788119962 08:00:52PM

Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots  215 to support their local farmers. With a prepayment in hand, the farmer is much less vulnerable economically. In return, farmers can provide a more direct link to consumers for understanding the challenges and goals of sustainable farming and bring a greater sense of transparency to the process. A central point to many CSAs is to try and build new relationships – a new set of transactions between producers and consumers, independent of the fluctuations of market pricing. In many CSAs, farmers and members meet face to face, and discuss and learn from each other – sharing both their hopes and concerns. In other CSAs the relationships are mostly online. Ideally, as the relationships continue, both parties examine the process together, citing both successes and struggles and collaborating on changes that aim for mutual benefit. This constitutes a radical re-personalization of the transaction. In this chapter, I draw on my own hands-on participatory research to explore the diverse transactions that are an inherent part of CSA and the additional creative transactions that often ripple out from them. Going beyond agriculture, this chapter also looks at CSA’s offshoots, a wide range of other Community Supported Enterprises (CSEs) inspired by CSA and observes the diverse transactions occurring within them as well. The empirical research that informs this chapter was conducted in the USA (primarily in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) between 2010 and 2013. Additional research took place in California and Massachusetts and via conversations with CSE participants throughout the USA between 2014 and 2018.

ESTABLISHING CONNECTIONS With the deeper connections fostered by CSA and the ethically motivated transaction at its centre, CSA participants are given an opportunity to rethink, reframe and remake daily economic choices. As one CSA farmer told me: ‘My favourite thing about CSA is that it stretches people’s imagination about what the economy is’ (interview 2010). As a result, many CSA participants become inspired to engage in a variety of additional non-capitalist economic practices such as barter, foraging, gifting, gleaning, sharing and volunteering. While these diverse economic practices have always existed – long before capitalism – CSA has proven to be a particularly rich and fertile site in which such economic diversity flourishes. Here’s an example: one CSA member I interviewed said that she split her CSA share with a neighbour. Instead of the neighbour paying his portion with money, however, they had agreed that he would mow her lawn. He was short on cash, and her big yard was too much work for her. So, they initiated this creative and adaptive exchange strategy themselves. ‘I’m not growing the food in my yard and giving it to him’, she explained, ‘but it seems almost more akin to that. It wouldn’t be like going and buying him the vegetables (at a supermarket) and having him mow my yard or something. It seems more an extension of these other kind of neighbourly arrangements we have . . . and we’re both happy with it’ (interview 2010). In a typical capitalist transaction, there is often an inherent element of mistrust. One CSA member described her discomfort with typical capitalist buyer/seller relationships, referring disdainfully to ‘all of these tricks’ that sellers would use to ‘get’ her money: ‘. . . there’s a lot of suspicion there’, she admitted. In contrast, she observed that ‘with the CSA model you can get away from some of that’, it offers ‘a totally different mindset . . . a different setup for the whole transaction part’. She compared her farm share transaction to an ‘investment’ saying

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216  The handbook of diverse economies ‘I think with the CSA it’s like I’m buying into your farm, and your whole harvest. . . . I’m trusting you . . .’ (interview 2010). Many CSAs offer sliding scale prices for shares, further challenging notions of a market price. This draws CSA members into a more active role of deciding for themselves how much they could/should pay. The perishable nature of food also inspires members to view their share as a collection of goods uniquely suited to trading or giving away. CSA members have realized that while on vacation they could pass their weekly share to a friend, neighbour, or soup kitchen. These situational experiments with transactions have provided revelations for farmers as well. One farmer admitted to me that despite his wish that his CSA was more profitable, the freedom to be creative with transactions did have some rewarding possibilities. One example was that he bartered with a local chiropractor a season’s worth of fresh produce for unlimited chiropractic treatments for him and his wife: ‘. . . in that particular situation’, he observed, ‘what I do is valued at the same rate as a doctor’. By using food as a locally based, alternative currency, he realized that in some instances his produce could take on a significantly higher exchange value. This farmer and many others I communicated with also accepted food vouchers – supplied by the government to people with low incomes in return for farm produce – another form of alternative currency. Unfortunately, paying for a CSA share in advance can be financially difficult for people who want to eat local ecologically grown food but can’t afford it. One CSA member I met decided to address this issue at her own workplace, a cooperatively-run credit union. She and other staff had already been asking themselves ‘why aren’t we doing business with more co-ops in the area? That’s one of our principles, that’s who we want to be’ (interview 2012). They saw CSA as fostering a cooperative venture between farmers and consumers and wanted to improve the potential for more members to participate, so they created a zero-interest CSA ‘farm share loan’ to help aspiring CSA members to pay up front.

CULTIVATING WILD TRANSACTIONS Many CSAs offer a variety of public events as a way of adding meaning and context to the transactions which form the basis of farmer–consumer relationships. Several of the CSAs in my study offered some form of public education. These workshops, tours and other activities might focus on local farming history, how to pickle vegetables or keep backyard chickens. At these events there were often informal discussions on topics such as ‘reducing food miles’, increasing biodiversity or conserving energy. Many discussions also centred around economics – in particular, an appreciation for resourcefulness and a self-provisioning ethic. One popular workshop offered at several CSAs was an ‘Edible Plant Walk’. The gathering of wild food constitutes a cultural practice older than agriculture itself. Gathering represents a form of ‘non-market’ transaction (Gibson-Graham 2006) and these workshops had attendees realizing there might be such a thing as a ‘free lunch’ after all. At one such event, attendees introduced themselves, stating who they were and what their interests were. ‘Hi, I’m Lisa and I want free food!’ announced one woman. Her sentiment got quite a few laughs but also sincere approval from the crowd. The workshop was free and open to the public, and it was clear that learning new ways to save money was one element that had drawn this group of strangers together. The workshop provided tips on how to identify and use wild edible plants and the workshop leader, a charismatic middle-aged man, engaged the group with questions, provided a wealth of

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Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots  217 information and also made room for several other ‘experts’ amongst the audience. The crowd followed him around to ditches and other uncultivated areas of the farm, closely examining leaf shapes and seed heads. Out popped their phones and spiral notebooks to photograph, document and share images and information. By the end, many people had accumulated large bags full of edible ‘weeds’. No money had changed hands in these wild transactions. No one had even consciously grown this food; it had been an invisible resource, now newly discovered.

BEYOND AGRICULTURE, OTHER COMMUNITY SUPPORTED ENTERPRISES EMERGE As the first few CSAs were established in the 1980s and more and more sprouted up, CSA founders hinted at the possibility that the model could be applied in other, non-agricultural contexts. Since then, a diverse range of Community Supported Enterprises – the offshoots of CSA – have sprung up and offered additional examples of diverse economic activity, highlighted by closer relationships and creative transactions amongst producers and consumers. Like CSAs, CSEs are usually based on producers being supported by local memberships of consumers who pay in advance. As an outgrowth of CSA, many CSEs also make a connection to food and/or agriculture. Community Supported Fisheries, Community Supported Bakeries, Community Supported Breweries and Community Supported Restaurants are some examples. Other examples beyond agriculture include: Community Supported Art, Community Supported Yoga and Community Supported Medical Care. The emergence of CSEs marks a new category within diverse economic discourse and helps us better understand the basic concepts of CSA that have inspired CSE.2 Similar to CSA, most CSEs also engage consumers as committed advocates who pay in advance directly to the producer. This, in turn, provides producers some level of security to invest in their enterprises. In Community Supported Agriculture this has meant a farmer could buy seed, repair farm equipment, or build new greenhouses early in the season, assured that at least some of the necessary income would be guaranteed. CSEs often leverage this same advantage. For example, in a Community Supported Bakery, this advance support allows bakers to buy in bulk, and receive discounts via economies of scale. In Community Supported Yoga, this means a teacher can rent a studio space to hold classes with minimal financial risk. In Community Supported Art programmes artists can purchase materials and begin production, knowing their work has already been sold. Some element of ethical, and/or ecological production and consumption is also often practised and promoted within CSEs. The most common manifestation of this is that many CSEs prioritize providing higher/fairer wages to what are often undervalued professions. Sustainability is also a common goal for CSEs, with many CSEs creating structures that attempt to reduce waste and damage to ecosystems. For Community Supported Bakeries (CSBs), knowing who is buying, how many to bake for, and having advance financing, helps reduce waste and discards occurring from overproduction. CSBs have the advantage of being able to develop out of an existing retail or wholesale bakery – or convert to one if the CSB is not successful. Like Community Supported Agriculture, some CSBs also ‘mix systems’, combining membership income with wholesale accounts, direct sales at farmers markets or catering jobs.

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218  The handbook of diverse economies In addition to financial cost savings, there are other more qualitative aspects as well – that can be both challenging and empowering. One CSBaker described her biggest challenge as ‘customer outreach and support’, but claimed that 60 per cent of members sign up again after their initial membership period (interview 2013). At the five-year mark, her CSB had a demonstrated longevity. Despite ongoing challenges to attract and keep members, and balance work and leisure time, she expressed pride in the enterprise, saying ‘I never guessed how connected I would get in the community’ (interview 2018). She said she had become known as someone who took a leap of faith to found her Community Supported Enterprise: ‘people feel inspired because I quit the job I didn’t like to do this’. Five years after my first interview with her (11 years into the enterprise), her CSB had grown significantly in size and staff. In contrast, another CSBaker I talked to had ended his CSBakery just nine months after starting it. He blamed his own overly narrow focus (producing only gluten-free products) as the main reason, but he retained enthusiasm about the overall experience, saying ‘What I really enjoyed about it was that we knew how much money was coming in, and knew exactly what we needed to make each week and I really enjoyed all the aspects of it. There were a lot more things that made sense about it’ (interview 2013). If all CSEs were short-lived or unprofitable, of course this would cast doubt on CSE as being any kind of larger movement or viable alternative to capitalist enterprise. But this demise of a nine-month-old CSBakery is to some extent merely a failure in capitalocentric terms. That this particular CSE couldn’t grow and reap profits like a successful capitalist business, does not erase the newly acquired knowledge that there were ‘a lot more things that made sense about it’. CSEs are sites of economic creativity and transformational experiences that generate and test new economic ideas and identities.

EDUCATING THE CONSUMER Another vital element amongst CSEs has been the fostering of dynamic educational interactions between producers and consumers. For CSA farmers, this has meant having members come as volunteers to help harvest crops, assist with distribution tasks or just take an educational tour of the farm. In CSEs, similar opportunities have emerged that enrich and inform the ethical transactions which are the foundation of the enterprise. In Community Supported Art programmes this has meant that members (aka patrons) could meet artists and learn more about their methods, materials and creative processes, and also more about their personal lives and cultural histories. In some Community Supported Fisheries, this has meant that members could become more acquainted with the fishing livelihood by getting links to specialized coastal weather reports, access to fish filleting/cooking demonstrations or learning more about species decline, catch limitations, and different fishing methods and equipment. The depth and diversity of these relationship-building activities is arguably the single most important aspect of successful Community Supported Enterprises. Some of the transactions and relationship-building activities of Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs) are even changing industrial practices: for example, the promotion of less popular species, which has created new value for species whose populations are less vulnerable. Within the traditional markets (fish auctions), a limited range of species are highly valued and as a result overfished, so CSFs have alleviated some of this pressure by making members aware of species they were previously unfamiliar with (McClenachan et al. 2014; Snyder and

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Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots  219 St. Martin 2015). As one CSF operator told me, ‘we are creating demand for species that are relatively undiscovered or obscure’. However, CSF fishers also sometimes fish for species considered endangered. This has triggered some push back as one set of fishing ethics, that of consumers and environmentalists, is sometimes challenged by the small boat fishers themselves. Their overall sense of a principled and sustainable livelihood derived from fishing is a complex lived experience, and less dogmatic. Therefore, CSFs can provide for their members a revealing opportunity to figuratively ‘step into the boots’ of fishermen and become more aware of and perhaps empathetic towards their challenges, methods and motivations. In a simple and direct way, some CSFs also provide for their members a more visceral, experiential connection to their industry by offering shares of whole fish which members must clean and fillet themselves. Looking into a flounder’s two eyes staring up at them, CSF members with knives poised can confront their own curiosities and anxieties about marine life, the fate of our oceans, and traditional vs. industrialized fishing practices (White 2013).

CLASS AND RACE CONCERNS The populations that make up a typical CSA or CSE membership often lack diversity. The socio-economic factors of class, race and ethnicity that have impacted a wider range of sustainable food projects, policies and perspectives are also often reproduced in CSA where farmers and members are more often white, upper middle class and college-educated (Schnell 2007; Slocum 2007). Julie Guthman (2008), a frequent critic of the organic agriculture industry, has called on whites ‘to open up the space’ to others for creating a more just and ecological way of providing food. While Guthman and other white scholars have voiced important critiques of these exclusionary dynamics, it is the work of activists and academics of colour engaged in documenting their own agricultural histories and training their own new leaders that suggests real transformations are occurring. A positive example of this effort is articulated by an organization called the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive which describes its goal as ‘. . . building the leadership of young people of colour to practice cooperative values, economics, and strategies for collective liberation’.3 Some CSEs have been able to move the needle on this issue and foster more diversity into their producer groups. One CSArt programme I looked at was started expressly to offer ethnic folk arts drawing on the work of immigrant artists, and to foster the rediscovery of heritage arts being produced by familial descendants from a broad range of cultures and geographies. This and other CSArt programmes I studied included the work of artists from Hong Kong, Laos, the Philippines, Morocco, Panama, as well as artists with Palestinian American, African American, and Asian American backgrounds. The fact that CSArt organizers are making some progress in this area is encouraging. In addition to opening up the space for more diversity amongst artists, CSArt programmes have also opened up the potential for artists to gain guaranteed exposure to their work by new audiences.

LIVELIHOOD SUSTAINABILITY Despite the many valuable connections, innovations and successes that CSA and CSE have indisputably brought forth, there remain challenges. CSAs and CSEs have fallen short of pro-

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220  The handbook of diverse economies viding adequate and stable incomes for many producers – whether they are farmers, fishermen or artists, community support has not fully elevated these professions into secure, high earning careers. In many cases, the personal desires and romantic notions of CSA and CSE consumers obscure the reality that producers just aren’t earning enough for what is often a tremendous amount of work. Outside of the Community Supported bubble, consumers are used to having myriad choices, money-back guarantees, the ability to ‘opt out’, or ‘take their business elsewhere’. But CSAs and CSEs require greater commitment, and a deep concern for the personal and financial lives of their producers and consumers. Rural sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram’s (2011) research article titled ‘The only thing that isn’t sustainable . . . is the farmer’ symbolizes this dilemma. The title was taken from a comment made by an organic farmer she interviewed, who’d come to realize that despite all the talk of ethics and sustainability, this farmer’s own economic well-being had not been adequately prioritized. Community Supported Yoga (CSY) represents a small niche amongst CSEs. Capitalist gyms or yoga studios either offer a set wage per class and thus no financial incentive to grow or improve the class, or payment on a per student basis – and thus no financial security. In the pay-per-student model, if only a few students show up to class, the teacher is still obliged to teach, but might make little or no profit. The founder of the CSY which I studied had come upon the idea when the gym that she worked at fell into debt and closed suddenly. Out of a job and wanting to try something new, she and one of her students, who had become a friend and advocate, ‘started to talk about this idea of Community Supported Yoga that would be modelled after a CSA’. The CSY they wanted to create needed members who would commit to strengthening the relationships to their teacher, their fellow students, and to their own practice. The founders of this CSY adopted ‘a strategy of generosity’, and cultivated an environment of flexibility. Members could lend their membership to spouses, relatives, roommates, and a ‘bring-a-friend-for-free’ policy was created to allow each existing member to invite friends or family to try the programme. This kept the official membership intact, but helped attract new members and mitigated the potential for the membership becoming too insular or exclusive. The programme was a success and within the first year something unexpected and extraordinary happened to the teacher: members in the programme decided to donate their August monthly payment so the teacher could take a paid vacation. The generosity had come back around.

CONCLUSION The creative transactions rippling out of Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots represent an exciting space for diverse economic possibility. Examining Community Supported Enterprise from a diverse economies perspective is particularly valuable in that it foregrounds a wide range of creative collaboration and interaction between producers and consumers in an effort to enact and inhabit more sustainable worlds. Motivated by a set of ethics that works both to protect natural resources and support human communities, CSA and CSE undeniably ‘stretch people’s imagination about what the economy is’ and create a space where transactions based on trust and mutual well-being are the foundation. Upon that foundation often emerges a wide range of additional innovative and personal transactions including barters, work trades, volunteering and self-provisioning.

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Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots  221 It is important to note that despite the sometimes utopian visions of both their founders and their participants, CSA and CSE haven’t solved the problem of farmers, fishing crews or artists being overworked and underpaid. Or fully addressed the issues of how class, race and other factors inhibit some consumers from affording or feeling welcome to participate in these membership-based transactions. However, when considering the proven success and rich possibilities for fostering new relationships between producers and consumers, for stimulating economic creativity, resourcefulness, consciousness and compassion, Community Supported Agriculture and its offshoots have borne a tremendous harvest.

NOTES 1. These three earliest CSAs circa 1986 were: Indian Line Farm, Temple-Wilton Community Farm and Brookfield Farm. They all continue to operate as CSAs today. All of these were also influenced and supported by Anthroposophic communities, interested in the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, founder of biodynamic agriculture and Waldorf education. 2. For clarification, in this chapter I have only included enterprises which consciously refer to themselves as ‘community supported’ and explicitly mention CSA as an inspiration in their promotional communications. 3. The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive is one of several organizations that are foregrounding the need for young people of colour to become leaders in farming and food justice initiatives. Statements were accessed from their website: https://​www​.cofed​.coop/​about (accessed 21 March 2019).

REFERENCES Biodynamic Association (2019), ‘What is biodynamics?’, accessed 21 March 2019 at https://​www​ .biodynamics​.com/​what​-is​-biodynamics. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Guthman, J. (2008), ‘“If they only knew”: Color blindness and universalism in California alternative food institutions’, The Professional Geographer, 60 (3), 387–97. Henderson, E. and R. Van En (1999) (updated in 2007), Sharing the Harvest: A Citizens Guide to Community Supported Agriculture, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. Japan Organic Agriculture Association (JOAA) (2019), ‘“TEIKEI” system, the producer-consumer co-partnership and the Movement of the Japan Organic Agriculture Association, Country Report for the First IFOAM Asian Conference, 19–22 August 1993 in Hanno, Saitama, Japan’, accessed 21 March 2019 at http://​www​.joaa​.net/​english/​teikei​ htm. McClenachan, L., B. Neil, D. Al-Abdulrazzak, T. Witkin, K. Fisher and J. Kittinger (2014), ‘Do community supported fisheries (CSFs) improve sustainability?’, Fisheries Research, 157, 62–9. Pilgeram, R. (2011), ‘“The only thing that isn’t sustainable . . . is the farmer”: Social sustainability and the politics of class among Pacific Northwest sustainable farmers’, Rural Sociology, 76, 375–93. Schnell, S. (2007), ‘Food with a farmer’s face: Community Supported Agriculture in the United States’, Geographical Review, 97 (4) 550–564. Slocum, R. (2007), ‘Whiteness, space and alternative food practice’, Geoforum, 38 (3), 520–533. Snyder, R. and K. St. Martin (2015), ‘A fishery for the future: The Midcoast Fishermen’s Association and the work of economic being-in-common’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin, and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 26–52. White, T. (2013), ‘Seeds of a new economy? A qualitative investigation of diverse economic practices within Community Supported Agriculture and Community Supported Enterprise’, accessed 20 March 2019 at https://​scholarworks​.umass​.edu/​open​_access​_dissertations/​824.

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222  The handbook of diverse economies White, T. (2016), ‘The branding of Community Supported Agriculture: Collective myths and opportunities’, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 5 (3), 45–62.

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24. Direct food provisioning: collective food procurement Cristina Grasseni

INTRODUCTION Direct food provisioning is a term I use here to indicate any way of procuring food that does not conform to the ‘Western’ norm of individuals shopping in supermarkets. According to this form of food procurement, consumers sit at the receiving end of a long, complex, often global food chain. In fact, this ‘norm’ is not at all ‘normal’, namely it is neither long-established nor sustainable. Indeed, there are so many ways of practising direct food provisioning, including traditional subsistence farming all over the world, that we can consider direct food provisioning as the norm. In short, procuring food is a multifaceted social phenomenon that has accompanied the history of the human species and the differentiation of its cultures. It should be natural then to expect comparison between different types of direct food provisioning in diverse locations and at different scales. This chapter challenges the idea that direct food provisioning should be considered per se ‘alternative’ or ‘radical’. In particular, I will show how collective food procurement allows reflection on the consequences of globalized food systems vis-à-vis direct food provisioning.

SUPERMARKETS VS. DIRECT FOOD PROVISIONING The separation of food provisioning from food production and exchange has become the norm with the establishment of supermarket chains as worldwide models for food logistics. The disconnect between consumers and producers is the topic of widespread scholarship about and against ‘big food’ (Sage 2012). More traditional ways of producers meeting consumers have become increasingly seen as ‘alternative’ fringes in a global food system. These new ‘reinventions’ include farmers’ markets, small independent retailers, and community gardens. In effect, they are ‘transgressions’ in the face of the ever-increasingly consolidated worldwide food capital of seed-to-table agribusiness. According to this latter model, a few companies concentrate resources and centralize purchasing; they also maximize profit, thus guaranteeing cheaper prices to the consumer than it might cost the smallholder to produce food. This race to the bottom is unsustainable for independent food producers, who then have to specialize in niche markets. The reason is that niche customers are prepared to pay a premium for their products, such as heritage foods, geographic denominations, or community supported agriculture schemes – and this ‘premium’ price is necessary to independent food producers for survival. Access to markets for small producers is very difficult. Large distributors often impose precise quotas and dates of delivery, with fines for failing to deliver. Small and seasonal productions with their variations are unwelcome and unrewarded. On the other hand, where 223 Cristina Grasseni - 9781788119962 08:00:57PM

224  The handbook of diverse economies smallholders and local farming have disappeared, we find rural areas where accessing fresh and seasonal food from local farms has become impossible. Even when people want to buy local and organic food, if the economy of scale is too small and the cost of production is too high, farmers cannot sustain business in the long term. The economy of scale of monocultures, centralized purchasing, large distribution, and especially the price wars of the one-stop shop, are unbeatable for the individual producer. This is why a number of solutions have cropped up all over the world (and not only recently) to provide a protected market for small and local producers: food consumer cooperatives and community supported agriculture for example. In consumer co-ops, members purchase food produce from farmers within the region. Where it works very well, it is a sustainable solution.1 However, the ‘supermarketization’ of the global food chain is well under way, not only in the northern and western hemisphere but in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Where they encroach, American-model malls shape the peri-urban environment with car-only accessible outlets comprising food chains, clothes outlets, toy outlets, fast foods and drive-in, in an all-too-familiar scenery which, to someone born 40 to 50 years ago, is perceivably different than how it looked just a couple of decades earlier. Supermarkets can have real power over local governments, influencing land-zoning policy, or lobbying against farmers’ markets in city centres, or vice versa lobbying for farmers’ markets outside their doorstep as a way of improving the decorum of the urban space surrounding them – and attracting clients anyhow. Certain supermarkets may well participate in Food Policy Councils, recruit local producers with franchise operations, make space on their shelves for local and organic produce, and actively participate in urban planning action to relieve the problem of food desertification in urban centres (Yung 2014). Even though on the whole large organized food distributors act callously in the market in a race to the bottom, driving competitors out of business, not every supermarket chain has the same policy or size, or strategy. Ultimately a diversification of the ways in which people can get access to food is a question of resilience of both urban and rural livelihoods – which is why putting food provisioning on the agenda of local and regional governments is key. We can broadly distinguish two types of direct food provisioning practices, themselves highly diverse within each type: (1) foraging and self-growing, and (2) direct supply via short food chains. Foraging includes the practices of gathering fruit and vegetables, mushrooms and herbs, berries and nuts from open access grounds such as woods, fallow fields, or trees located on public grounds such as parks, avenues, reserves, etc. (see Chapter 22 by Morrow in this volume). Self-growing includes hands-on production for self-consumption in back gardens or allotments, community gardens and communal allotments. In both cases production and collection lead to the need to share, barter, can, pickle or preserve large quantities of the same crop when they become available all at the same time. This can be done within an extended family, neighbourhood or group. The novelty of the last decade or so is that groups increasingly organize themselves through Facebook or other apps and social networks. For example, the German network ‘Mundraub’ uses Facebook and Google Maps to locate and signal to others the availability of crops in specific locations, and calls for harvesting days all over the country. This is quite common also among so called ‘gleaners’ or ‘freegans’ or ‘dumpster divers’. These, instead of harvesting crops, recuperate discarded foods after food markets or from shops’ backyards. Far from being necessarily a lonely and forlorn condition, dumpster-diving can be planned quite efficiently in teams – for example knowing in advance which days certain types of foods are put out by supermarkets because they are out of date.

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Direct food provisioning: collective food procurement  225 This too usually leads to redistribution through a network, festive cooking or gifting (Edwards and Mercier 2012). Direct supply from producers via short food chains tends to be monetary-based (though barter cannot be excluded in principle). Direct supply can be informal (namely based on personal connections with specific producers, such as the habit of paying a visit on-farm, which may then lead to provisioning for eggs, cheese, milk, vegetable crops, fruit, etc.). In any case one speaks about the ‘informal economy’ when provisioning is paid for in cash and goes unregistered for tax purposes. It may or may not be illegal depending on circumstances and regulations. For example procuring raw milk from dairy farmers can be a thoroughly illegal or a thoroughly legal practice depending on the national legislation (Myncite 2014). Short food chains can also be organized in formalized transactions, either in person at farmers’ markets or through ‘food hubs’ facilitating direct supply from farmers (whether online or not). The model of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in particular developed independently in the USA (White 2013), Japan (Kondoh 2015) and France (in the form of Associations pour le Maintien d’une Agriculture Paysanne: Lamine 2005). These are mostly farmer-driven business models that target pools of consumers by selling crops in advance through a system of seasonal or yearly ‘shares’ (see Chapter 23 by White in this volume). This commits consumers to buying from local smallholders and provides the producers with the necessary guarantee (and advance payment) that their crops will be sold, regardless of quality, quantity and day of ripening. From a consumer’s point of view, the limitation of CSA models is that they tend to be pricier than supermarket chains and thus tend to target discerning, educated and relatively affluent consumers – thus having relatively little impact on widespread issues such as food deserts in inner cities, or the malnourishment and undernourishment of the poor. The solutions carried out so far to take CSA out of this niche include accepting food stamps on CSA schemes (and also at some farmers’ markets), and introducing ‘sliding shares’ and ‘sponsored shares’ in some CSA schemes at the farmers’ initiative. From a producer’s point of view the limitation of CSA is that it cannot address the gaping hiatus between ‘million-dollar farms’ and smallholders barely breaking even – the latter need to be innovative, competitive and creative, and rely on marketing niches to maintain access to the market and thus a sustainable business. This brief introduction to direct food provisioning covers what have been described in the literature as ‘alternative food networks’ (Goodman et al. 2012), ‘food activism’ (Counihan and Siniscalchi 2014) or ‘ethical consumption’ (Carrier and Luetchford 2012). They are all variously considered as subtly subversive economic practices, in the name of ‘civil economies’, ‘human economy’ or ‘diverse economies’ by economists (Bruni and Zamagni 2007), anthropologists (Hart et al. 2010) and geographers (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). In the remainder of this chapter I turn to a less examined form of direct food provisioning, which I define as ‘collective food procurement’ namely the collective effort of groups of people in the production or distribution of the food they consume. To give an example of the latter, in the following section I describe in-depth the practice of Solidarity Purchase Groups in Italy.

COLLECTIVE FOOD PROCUREMENT: THE EXAMPLE OF ITALY’S SOLIDARITY PURCHASE GROUPS Italy’s Solidarity Economy Networks consist of Solidarity Purchase Groups (or GAS, the acronym of the Italian Gruppo di Acquisto Solidale: Grasseni 2013). The GAS members

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226  The handbook of diverse economies I studied in Lombardy can organize direct food provisioning from as far as Sicilian orange growers about 1300 kilometres away. In this case, the orange producers are organized in small cooperatives and may cultivate lands that the state has confiscated and reallocated from convicted mafia criminals (see Chapter 8 by Jerne in this volume). This is part of a widespread consumer’s mobilization against mafia trade circuits in Sicily (see Forno and Gunnarson 2010). GAS members welcome the trucks driving their orange provisions from Sicily to Lombardy and help unload them. Each group of about 20 to 40 families will send a representative to pick up and redistribute the oranges. Practicalities and logistics are worked out at fortnightly meetings, in local parish churches, community libraries, sports clubs or each other’s homes. GAS members’ own conceptualization of what they are doing is that they want to practise ‘solidarity’ with each other, with the producers and with nature, through the manner in which they choose to buy, for example, oranges. These are not just orange consumers. They do not just ‘directly provision’ oranges either. There is a complex, self-conscious and collective practice of direct food provisioning: namely collective food procurement. The logic of these groups is to act as networks. So, for example, more than one GAS group has joined together to organize this orange trip. On other occasions, GAS groups networked in the middle of the credit crunch crisis in 2009, when banks stopped giving credit to small entrepreneurs. One particular dairy that was providing cheese for several GAS groups reached out for help to its GAS customers lest they had to close for lack of a cash float. As a response, around 200 GAS groups volunteered enough money to keep the dairy afloat, on the basis of a very ad hoc kind of system: there were donations as small as 50 euros per GAS group, but also GAS that facilitated negotiations with a local credit union for a zero per cent loan. The dairy – Tomasoni – is well known in the solidarity economy movement. As a result of their popularity after the event, they completely switched to organic cheese making and only supply Solidarity Purchase Groups (Signori and Forno 2016). Another example of how these groups network and facilitate access of small producers to the market has been to set up their own types of farmers’ market, called ‘citizenship markets’, where the sellers’ stands are reserved only for producers that supply GAS groups. In other words it is a market by invitation only. This challenges the common sense idea that the market is a neutral space where demand meets supply or the other way around. The point is that the food market is a very competitive (global and virtual) space, and even the marketplace is a very competitive (local and concrete) space. Farmers need to find the right spot, go to the right event, and especially need to have enough staff to send to run the stands – often at weekends. For family and small producers this is very difficult to leverage. GAS members are aware of the fact that their own purchasing power is not enough to change this. From a collaborative survey carried out with GAS groups, it emerged that GAS in Lombardy spent 13 per cent of their family food budget through a Solidarity Purchase Group, but they would still go to the supermarket for a relatively large portion of their food provisioning (Forno et al. 2013; Grasseni et al. 2015). However, GAS try to exploit the critical mass of their own network to attract new customers by providing a protected space in the market square for their own providers. To attract more people they organize events such as book presentations and ‘street dinners’, convivial events where GAS members can order and consume a full cooked meal on tables set out in the market square. These are usually very successful events that attract the curiosity of more people and re-socialize them around the idea of local food. There are also other ways in which solidarity has been interpreted, appropriated and applied by Solidarity Purchase Groups, for example in response to the series of earthquakes that have

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Direct food provisioning: collective food procurement  227 hit Italy in the last 10 years (beginning with L’Aquila followed by one in the region of Emilia Romagna and then again in central Italy). In the cheese-making region of Modena and Reggio many damaged wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano had to be sold off instead of matured to full age (and price). In solidarity with a buying campaign spearheaded by the farmers’ unions, GAS groups set up mailing lists and offered to buy the cheese at a favourable price for the producers. In 2011, two years from the L’Aquila earthquake that destroyed the town, the GAS network held their national assembly there, under tents and in accommodation scattered around the area, to bring their presence and solidarity to local farmers and to the local economy. For example, the delegates came back with local providers’ contacts and set up forms of collective food procurement from those farms. All of these interventions took the market as their start and end point, but tried to manage it with humane principles and through personal contacts and face-to-face connections. Without having enough financial impact to take on ‘big food’ then, this type of collective food procurement is nevertheless a type of economic practice that has some consequences in terms of lifestyle changes. From the CORES research on GAS groups in Lombardy (Forno et al. 2013) it emerges that about 80 per cent of GAS members reported that they had increased their consumption of organic food and local food and about 70 per cent had increased their conception of seasonal food, while 68 per cent had decreased their shopping in supermarkets. Ethnographic experience also shows that in some cases, becoming part of a GAS did not mean a decrease in patronizing a supermarket, simply because this was already limited to supply that could not be procured elsewhere. In sum, an in-depth thick description of Solidarity Purchase Groups combined with a survey of GAS practice in Lombardy showed how while GAS do not achieve independence from large food distribution, it is a collective experience of self-education, getting to know about the reality of food production, and learning skills that are not necessarily just about food (Forno et al. 2015). For example, the most interesting result regarded the GAS members’ self-perception about the difference it made to meet fortnightly with other people to deliberate about how to procure their oranges or cheese, rather than shopping individually. About 40 per cent felt they were more able to cooperate with people in general, namely to discuss, decide and act collectively rather than to act on an individual basis.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have proposed collective food procurement as a specific type of direct provisioning which, in addition to direct food provisioning, through collective action, carries out practices of self-determination through food procurement. Diverse forms of collective food procurement have not yet been analysed comparatively, nor have they been conceptualized in their implications for our understanding of food transitions. Collective food procurement is a timely topic of investigation because through it, specific groups and networks may articulate and practise specific cultural styles of civic participation and social mobilization. To grasp the variety and multiplicity of such networks and styles is important for our capacity to envision and transform the economy. In other words, investigating collective food procurement shows how economies are always embedded in sociality, despite the fact that in policymaking literature and institutions, sustainable energy and food transitions are being envisaged as largely a question of finding a technology fix, namely a creative adaptation of existing food systems to the challenges of climate change, soil

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228  The handbook of diverse economies desertification, and the stark coexistence of malnourishment and obesity, surplus production and waste. Policy imaginaries of global food systems are also peculiarly homogeneous: they posit a seed-to-table consolidated and integrated chain ‘serving’ individual ‘consumers’. Once again these are imagined as solipsistic unities, more or less responsibly deliberating and ‘choosing’ among commodities, with little notice of the relevance of culture to provisioning, and of the diversity of cultures of procurement. Transitions do not work for everyone everywhere indifferently. Relevant cultures of participation enable certain ways of innovating food procurement – and not others – in specific socio-cultural arrangements. Examples such as that of Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups show how food procurement mediates relations and creates a space of experimentation within relevant social networks. In other words, eaters are not just consumers but social actors who are engaged in meaning making. This does not only mean that some groups eat ‘traditionally’, for example due to religious prescriptions as is the case of kosher or halal. Food cultures and practices of food provisioning impact lives in dramatic ways, and this becomes particularly visible when they are subject to change. Food procurement is not only a question of macro-political analysis and policy (regarding how institutions and corporations should work or how they could be lobbied or educated), nor of individual deliberations alone (such as the habituated ‘choice’ reflexes attributed to consumers by ‘nudging’ marketers, public advertising or supermarket shelf displays). An ethnographic understanding of direct food provisioning adds a ‘middle’ level of socio-cultural analysis to the previous two, analysing social practice in its dynamic and collective aspects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The project ‘Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities: Solidarity and diversity, skills and scale (2017–22)’ has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 724151).

NOTE 1. See for example the documentary film on the history of consumers’ food cooperatives in the United States: http://​foodforchange​.coop/​category/​film/​sinterviews/​(accessed 20 March 2019). Cooperatives are a chapter in and of themselves. There are producers’ cooperatives, large-scale and small-scale cooperatives, worker-owned cooperatives and cooperatives that operate like industrial businesses. See Gibson-Graham (2003). See also Kasmir (1996) for an anthropological critique of the ‘Myth of Mondragón’ by an ethnographer who carried out long-term, first-hand observation of it.

REFERENCES Bruni, L. and S. Zamagni (2007), Civil Economy: Efficiency, Equity, Public Happiness, Bern: Peter Lang. Carrier, J. and P. Luetchford (eds) (2012), Ethical Consumption: Social Value and Economic Practice, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Counihan, C. and V. Siniscalchi (eds) (2014), Food Activism: Agency, Democracy, Economy, London: Bloomsbury.

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Direct food provisioning: collective food procurement  229 Edwards, F. and E. Mercier (2012), ‘Gleaning from gluttony: An Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste’, in P. Williams-Forson and C. Counihan (eds), Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, New York: Routledge, pp. 195–210. Forno, F., C. Grasseni and S. Signori (2013), ‘Dentro il capitale delle relazioni. La ricerca “nazionale” sui Gas in Lombardia’, in Tavolo per la Rete Italiana di Economia Solidale (ed.), Un’ Economia Nuova, dai Gas alla Zeta, Milan: Altra Economia, pp. 13–47. Forno, F., C. Grasseni and S. Signori (2015), ‘Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups as “Citizenship Labs”’, in E. Huddart-Kennedy, M. Cohen and N. Krogman (eds), Putting Sustainability into Practice: Applications and Advances in Research on Sustainable Consumption, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 67–90. Forno, F. and C. Gunnarson (2010), ‘Everyday shopping to fight the mafia in Italy’, in M. Micheletti and A. McFarland (eds), Creative Participation: Responsibility-Taking in the Political World, London: Paradigm Publishers, pp. 101–24. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003), ‘Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class’, Critical Sociology, 29 (2), 123–61. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Goodman, D., M. DuPuis and M. Goodman (2012), Alternative Food Networks: Knowledge, Practice, and Politics, New York: Routledge. Grasseni, C. (2013), Beyond Alternative Food Networks. Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups, London and New York: Bloomsbury. Grasseni, C., F. Forno and S. Signori (2015), ‘Beyond alternative food networks: Italy’s Solidarity Purchase Groups and the United States’ community economies’, in P. Utting (ed.), Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe?, London: UNRISD and Zed Books, pp. 185–201. Hart, K., J.L. Laville and A.D. Cattani (2010), The Human Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kasmir, S. (1996), The Myth of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town, Albany: State University of New York Press. Kondoh, K. (2015), ‘The alternative food movement in Japan: Challenges, limits, and resilience of the teikei system’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32 (1), 143–53. Lamine, C. (2005), ‘Settling the shared uncertainties: Local partnerships between producers and consumers’, Sociologia Ruralis, 45 (4), 324–45. Myncite, D. (2014), ‘Raw milk, raw power: States of (mis)trust’, Gastronomica, 14 (4), 44–51. Sage, C. (2012), Environment and Food, London: Routledge. Signori, S. and F. Forno (2016), ‘Closing the attitude–behaviour gap: The case of Solidarity Purchase Groups’, Agriculture and Agricultural Science Procedia, 8, 475–81. White, T. (2013), ‘Growing diverse economies through community supported agriculture’, Northeastern Geographer, 5, 1–24. Yung, J. (2014), ‘(Re)establishing the normal’, Gastronomica, 14 (4), 52–9.

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25. Alternative currencies: diverse experiments Peter North

Recent years have seen a mushrooming of diverse forms of money created by communities as an alternative to the ‘fiat’, or ‘make it so’, money we use mainly because governments and banks tell us to. If governments can make paper, metal discs or electronic entries valuable by telling us that they are valuable, can others recognize that money is a social construct, not a thing ‘out there’? The answer is yes – there is a rich history of alternatives to the money created by governments that goes back to Robert Owen’s Labour Notes at the dawn of capitalism or the scrip issued by local authorities in the Great Depression (North 2007). More recently, people have experimented with LETS schemes, time banks, local paper currencies, electronic forms of payment, and cryptocurrencies. These different models of grassroots currency suggest, support and enable very different futures: libertarian, communitarian, hyper capitalist, ecological, inclusive. For diverse economies advocates, they provide inspiring alternatives to ‘money-as-usual’ that enable people to live ethically, sustainably, prosperously, and with dignity and justice in the Anthropocene. This chapter explores how. LETS or Local Exchange Trading Schemes emerged in the late 1980s as networks through which members exchanged goods and services with each other, paying for them with a virtual local currency called a green dollar (in Canada, Australia and New Zealand), talente (in Germany and Hungary), or grains of salt (France). UK LETS adopted an amusing or locally resonant name, for example ‘tales’ in Canterbury, ‘brights’ in Brighton, ‘bobbins’ in Manchester (North 2006). LETS members do not have to first possess currency in order to trade; rather they make a commitment to pay back what they spend later. They write a cheque denominated in the local money units to pay for goods and services, which they send to an ‘accountant’ who keeps scores on a PC. The person buying goods or services has their account debited, while the buyer or person doing the work is credited the same amount. Scaled up to the network, the totality of transactions in and out of all accounts balances. LETS and green dollar networks now have some 25 years’ trading experience under their belt. They have a resolutely ‘alternative feel’, with aromatherapy and counselling services outnumbering plumbers and electricians. People joined these networks to meet new people and build community, to obtain things they could not afford, but also to explore new economic values and ethics, ways of caring for and with each other, and of living sustainably (Seyfang and Longhurst 2013). Other alternative currencies are denominated in units of time. As Gradon Diprose discusses in more detail in this volume (Chapter 26), time banks connect people who exchange services rewarded with credits denominated in time, with no relationship to national money. Ithaca ‘Hours’, emerged in the late 1980s as the first of a wave of paper currencies denominated in hours and decorated with local images and slogans extolling the virtues of a place (Maurer 2003; North 2014). In the 1990s, the EF Schumacher Society created BerkShares, a local currency for the Berkshires, Massachusetts, aligned with the US dollar. In time, Ithaca Hours and BerkShares crossed the Atlantic and inspired the UK’s Transition Initiatives to develop local paper currencies as part of their programme of developing grassroots-led localized economies in response to dangerous climate change.1 Other paper currencies included Germany’s 230 Peter North - 9781788119962 08:01:02PM

Alternative currencies: diverse experiments  231 regional currencies or regiogeld, and the creditos used by millions after the economic crisis of 2001 that devastated Argentina’s economy (Gómez 2008; North 2007). The advent of the Eurozone crisis meant alternative exchange networks later emerged in Greece (Sotiropoulou 2011; Thanou et al. 2013). Cryptocurrencies store and lock together chains (blockchains) of online electronic bookkeeping entries to log and validate transactions, without using banks. Their libertarian supporters have no confidence in the ability of states to maintain the value of fiat currency over time, arguing that cryptocurrencies are an exhilarating, disruptive and potentially liberating financial innovation that provides a decentralized, non-state alternative to capitalist banks that could be a solution to poverty, financial crisis, debt and hyperinflation (Dierksmeier and Seele 2018). Yanis Varoufakis developed early proposals for a blockchain drachma should Greece leave the Eurozone (North 2016), while contemporary Venezuela is developing the Petro to avoid US sanctions. The widespread use of contactless and mobile phone-based payment systems and a concomitant fall in the use of cash, and the popularity of phone-based exchange systems such as MPESA have led to the development of smartphone-based local electronic currencies such as COLU2 or Hull Coin.3 Taking the necessary risk of oversimplifying what is a very diverse range of global phenomena, this chapter will examine the implications of these different alternative currencies for diverse economies perspectives around three themes: 1. Valuation and convertibility 2. Regulating emission, managing exchange 3. Geographies of circulation.

VALUATION AND CONVERTIBILITY Alternative currencies can be denominated in a number of ways: (1) in time (time banks, Ithaca Hours); (2) directly aligned to and convertible with conventional currency (transition currencies, BerkShares); (3) a hybrid, like but not exactly aligned to a pound or dollar (LETS and green dollars); or (4) unconnected to any form of valuation – people are expected to believe in and support each other (Argentine creditos). Cryptocurrencies are mined, and their value rises and falls in relation to mainstream money. The arguments for and against various rates have implications for how the alternative currency works, what sort of ethics are promoted in economic relations, whose work is or is not valued and valuable, and what sort of economy is being performed into existence in prefigurative or concrete ways. Aligning an alternative currency with state money can make counting, price setting and exchanging easy; but it can also reproduce unequal ways of valuing people and things. Consequently, advocates of money denominated in time agree with Robert Owen’s – and Marx’s – argument that labour is the basis of all wealth, everyone has equal worth, and therefore everyone’s work should be of equivalent value. They support feminist analyses that want to properly recognize, value and reward work often attributed to and carried out by women (Waring 1990). Consequently, time-based money appeals to those who want to develop alternatives to patriarchal capitalist calculations that value, for example, the work of lawyers above that of cleaners.

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232  The handbook of diverse economies Denominating the currency in time demands that users accept this premise. Of course, it is contested. Elites argue that the work performed by a well-qualified, experienced and efficient person with technical knowledge is more valuable than unskilled labour: an hour of a lawyer’s or hypnotherapist’s time is actually twenty years’ experience and training concentrated into an hour. What if one person works harder or more competently than another: should they both be paid the same? Denominating alternative currencies in units of time frames them as radical, countercultural experiments aiming to revalue people, work and time in non-capitalist ways, which is why diverse economies advocates are attracted to them. But this potentially restricts their appeal to like-minded people and can lead to a small network with lots of agreement on values, but without what Granovetter (1973) called ‘the strength of weak ties’ through which you can meet people who are not like you, and can do things you can’t (Aldridge and Patterson 2002). The absence of any national currency referent in time-based money led to confusion in pricing goods: How many hours for a slice of pizza? How do you give out change (Maurer 2003)? Would a wider, more useful network include people who wanted to value themselves and others in conventional, money-related ways, and people who valued each other’s time equally? Could this be the best of both worlds? It was UK LETS where the most debate over value occurred, perhaps unsurprisingly given its role in the 1990s as a space for early innovation. Many UK LETS schemes argued that a LETS unit is ‘like’ a pound, and that an hourly rate should be paid that reflects a ‘fair’ rate for the work done and time spent. The Bright Exchange in Brighton set a rate of 12 units to the hour which, it was felt, was specifically non-decimal and therefore discouraged valuations aligned to pounds. Belfast experimented with pints.4 Ideal LETS, in Bristol, set a rate of 20 ideals an hour, reflecting the earning expectations of its bohemian professional members who were used to being well remunerated. For Manchester LETS, the dilemma was solved with a (perhaps very British) fudge whereby individuals were allowed to develop a range of diverse values for their local currency, the bobbin. Mancunians say ‘that’s bobbins’ or ‘I would not pay bobbins for that’ to mean ‘that’s rubbish, or ‘that has no value’. What matters is not having something worthless-in-itself – a bobbin – but the exchanges of the things and skills people have which will be lubricated with this essentially worthless (in itself) bobbin (for an extended discussion, see North 2006). So for some, a bobbin would be thought of as being aligned exactly with a pound to make calculation easy. For others, it was roughly like a pound in a moral market (Lee 1996). For the ‘bob-a-jobbers’ it was a gesture – one bobbin would be paid, irrespective of the time taken to provide a service. Some used the network to share, refusing to use bobbins which they rejected as another form of commodification. Many people would use a mix of the above in diverse ways. This diversity was refreshing and facilitated much experimentation and play with value which worked well when people entered into the spirit of things with good humour. Things could be more challenging when people with different value systems and expectations of how much to charge or pay struggled to make a deal (North 2006). Others argued strongly against denominating LETS units in categories aligned with state money as they felt the unequal exchange relations in the money economy would thereby be transmitted to the new economy they wanted to create. For example, cleaners could feel that an accepted rate of 10 bobbins an hour, if a bobbin is worth a pound, compared favourably with the going rates in the pre-minimum wage UK, while a homoeopathist could feel that her hourly rate should include recompense for her hours of training. Some felt that this meant that the inequality of the main-

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Alternative currencies: diverse experiments  233 stream economy was being recreated if, for example, our homoeopathist earning 20 bobbins an hour could then buy two hours cleaning at 10 bobbins an hour. Others felt that the benefits of experimenting with an economy based on community feeling and a cooperative ethics outweighed what they thought were teething problems. They felt that an internalized lack of self-worth or a lack of experience in negotiating on the part of those who had not done well in capitalist markets would be rectified in time. What really mattered was that members could meet their needs with a means of payment that was limited only by people’s willingness and ability to pay it back, if only they recognized that; in other words in time the network would help repair the damage done to the people that capitalist economies did not value, or threw away. In that context, they argued, one person charging more bobbins, ‘nothings’, than another seemed irrelevant. Rejecting the economics of austerity, they argued for problems to be solved and needs to be met irrespective of the need for money to be in existence in advance. They argued for money to be just the lubrication or energy needed to facilitate work: and it is work, meeting people’s needs, not money, that matters. They argued that someone charging above the odds would encounter community disapproval, which would mean they would lower their prices. Alternatively, our cleaner would either raise his prices or refuse to be exploited by our homoeopathist who would struggle to procure cleaning services and end up with a store of unspendable bobbins: lots of ‘nothings’, essentially worthless credits.

REGULATING EMISSION, MANAGING EXCHANGE Other debates emerged about the extent to which the supply of the currency and how it circulates should be actively, consciously and collectively managed. LETS and time credits are ‘personal credit’ forms of money, tools for people to use as they see fit. LETS users decide to emit the currency, which has no physical form, by spending it into existence much as banks emit money by agreeing to make a loan. This is an unmanaged process: individuals decide to emit money. With Ithaca Hours scrip was emitted as a reward to businesses who advertised in a local skills exchange newspaper, and spent on from then. BerkShares and the transition currencies were bought for cash and then spent into circulation. These are all market mechanisms. No currency ‘exists’ until it is used to procure concrete goods and services, and thus a market decides how much currency is needed to meet people’s needs and lubricate market transactions. Inflation is avoided. In contrast, in Argentina creditos were freely issued to individuals chasing too few trading opportunities in a crashed economy. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, in time they catastrophically lost value in an inflationary cycle (Gómez 2008) and when the state pointed this out, suggesting it was all a scam, the networks collapsed in acrimony. This leads to a debate: Is it good enough to leave individuals completely free to create and spend this community-created money, seeing it as a neutral tool to be used as people see fit; or should there be an ethical component to this? For example, are members expected to earn as much as they spend over time, periodically returning their account to a zero balance (or, as it is called ‘go through zero’) as in LETS; or should needs be met irrespective of ability to pay in the future (the case with time banks)? Should they worry about charging or paying ‘over the odds’, or think that they deserve a ‘good’ living and charge (and pay) accordingly? What if your needs are greater than your ability to earn? Should account balances, levels of indebt-

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234  The handbook of diverse economies edness and transactions be private or public? What are the cultural mores and community concerns about what many regard as private, personal information? Things then get complicated. Are moral expectations good enough to manage this complexity, or should someone actively set and enforce rules? Should there be credit or debit limits? Can an account with a growing debit but no obvious way to repay be tolerated? Should balances be made public? Can someone be excluded from the network? Some LETS schemes set and actively enforced rules which were regarded as necessary to maintain the integrity of the currency and confidence in it. This was an issue neglected by some of the transition currencies with the result that in time users lost confidence that the currency was being professionally managed. In reality, however, the extent to which individual LETS members did check up on others and regulate their trading accordingly was limited. Some members regularly spent more than they earned with no penalty, which could also be destructive of trust and the networks could atrophy. Well managed networks, especially green dollars in New Zealand/Aotearoa, did seem to maintain trust, prevent free riding, and last longer (North 2007, pp. 126–48).

THE GEOGRAPHICAL EXTENT OF TRADING Peer-to-peer personal credit money worked well enough when the emphasis was on play and creativity, and people exchanged services or things they had produced at home or, for example, in a community garden. The stakes were low if things did not work out as expected, and no one was hurt. But these bohemian, experimental and playful currencies were generally not considered to be ‘serious’ forms of money, accepted by mainstream businesses and therefore of use in the ‘real’ economy where jobs, businesses and livelihoods were at stake. Busy businesses were often not prepared to take cheques and send them to the accountant. LETS, green dollar and time bank networks stayed small, homogeneous alternative milieus and the range of goods and services was limited. Members in high demand struggled to spend as much as they earned, and often left. Opportunities to meet everyday needs for social and economic reproduction were limited. Of course, diverse economies perspectives would not make the distinction between a ‘serious’ or ‘real’ and an ‘alternative’ currency, seeing these as diverse forms of transaction and exchange, each as valid as each other. But would an alternative currency that enabled people to make a living be more useful? Did that require the involvement of businesses which provide the things we can’t produce ourselves? Those who wanted to scale local currency networks up developed BerkShares and the UK transition currencies: paper currencies (or scrip) with high design and production values that ‘look and feel’ like money, denominated in alignment with and backed with conventional money held on deposit in a bank account. Businesses that could not spend all the local scrip they earned could change it back into state currency. Given that paper money goes in and out of tills with ease, the assumption was that businesses would be more likely to accept local paper money that looked and felt more like money. People would be more likely to use them, and the networks would grow. In the UK, which pioneered these transition currencies, Transition town Totnes launched the Totnes Pound, and Transition Lewes, Brixton, Bristol and (more briefly) Stroud and Exeter followed. BerkShares, transition currencies and regiogeld involved local businesses to a significant level, thus enabling their users to access more of the everyday goods and services they needed. But this led to four new problems: first, and as discussed above, aligning a local currency with

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Alternative currencies: diverse experiments  235 national currency was seen by more radical members as potentially replicating the inequalities of capitalist valuations of work. Second, given that these currencies can only be obtained in exchange for national currency, it was unclear why anyone would change universal money accepted everywhere into a more limited form of money, unless they had a political or affective commitment to the project, or to their place, or to supporting their local economy. Third, those who spend all their money on essential purchases not available for local money are excluded. This was not ‘new’ or ‘extra’ money boosting spending power for those who don’t have much of it. Finally, what is the benefit of a currency that is just banked after one exchange? Many busy small local businesses bought into the ethos of a local currency but struggled to spend as much as they could earn. They found it more convenient to convert the local money they had accepted back into national money given that they could do this relatively easily as it was backed by conventional money on deposit. For their advocates, this was a problem as they had hoped that a local scrip would incentivize people to support ethical local and community businesses. They had hoped that it would penalize exploitative businesses that do not contribute to their community, inappropriately minimize the tax they pay, or remit their profits to a head office elsewhere spending little locally. The currency would help local businesses to trade with each other and/or to pass the local currency down their supply chains by finding local suppliers, thereby deepening the network through local import substitution. In time, local scrip would catalyse the development of new forms of local production to fill the holes through which money flows out of the community, acting as a tool for localization. But if these notes are spent once and then banked, the hoped-for ‘structuring’ or localizing elements of a local currency are missing (North 2005). BerkShares attempted to address this by incentivizing recirculation rather than banking the local currency by establishing a differential exchange rate. Nine US dollars bought ten BerkShares, while businesses exchanging ten BerkShares back into US dollars would only receive nine dollars in return. Businesses that spent their BerkShares or gave them out in change were not so penalized. This seemed sensible: many businesses routinely offer discounts. Further, the local currency boosted footfall when it featured prominently in the media and provided favourable publicity for the town. But high volume, low profitability businesses that could not spend the currency in the volumes they accepted struggled with what was effectively a 10 per cent penalty that could represent the difference between profit and loss. They not unreasonably complained about what they saw as the ‘cost of doing business’ that hurt the very businesses BerkShares aimed to help (North 2014). They were often reliant or dependent on long-standing but geographically extensive supply chains, and did not have the time or inclination to go to the trouble of proactively identifying local suppliers (Marshall and O’Neill 2018). They often did not see it as their job. These were teething problems for BerkShares. In time the discount was reduced to 5 per cent which seemed more sustainable and was replicated elsewhere. Nevertheless, in time it became increasingly clear that the towns and their economic hinterlands in which transition currencies circulated were perhaps too small to work well as ‘optimal currency areas’ (Mundell 1961) in which the geographical spaces that money circulates in maps on to the circulation of physical goods and services in the economy beyond those produced by network members. Might a more geographically extensive but still ‘local’ currency work better? In Germany, Chiemgauer regiogeld circulates in an area 100 km around a lake, the Chiemsee, which is seen as an area small enough to have some coherence, regional identity and be considered ‘local’; but big enough to include a wide enough variety of businesses such that users

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236  The handbook of diverse economies can spend Chiemgauer in some volume for day-to-day purchases. If enough businesses participated, it was thought that business-to-business exchange would be catalysed, and in time, local production stimulated. By June 2018, 629 000 Cheimgauer circulated. The other solution was to experiment with electronic forms of payment, which were promoted as a cheaper alternative to both banking cash and the charges made by credit card companies while keeping a local feel by stressing support for local businesses. Payment by smartphone using electronic currencies is becoming routine, and cash less widely used, with the result that by 2019 the pioneering Totnes Pound was withdrawn from circulation. It is too soon to tell, but a secular move away from cash to electronic payments suggests this is the new frontier for innovation in alternative currencies which may include blockchain currencies as electronic forms of money that can bypass the banks.

CONCLUSION There were early hopes that alternative currencies might quickly bring into being less commodified and regulated forms of work and livelihoods that operate by alternative rhythms than that of capitalist disciplining. Change the form of money and you change the economy. The lessons are mixed. Many LETS schemes enabled their members to experiment with alternative forms of value in playful ways, while time banks provide concrete support to people in need. They help us visualize forms of exchange and cooperation beyond paid work for an employer, and provide a valuable tool for local businesses to exchange with and support each other. That said, alternative currencies have not (yet) facilitated a move out of alternative circuits of consumption into alternative forms of production. People cannot, yet, make a living using alternative currencies (Fickey 2011). No local currencies have significantly contributed to the localization of an economy to the extent that emissions and resource throughputs have been significantly reduced at levels necessary to avoid dangerous climate change (Dittmer 2013). That said, diverse forms of currency and transactions are now a well-established part of the community economy armoury, enabling those who use them to experiment with alternative visions of convivial localized economies, and, within the limits of their productive capacity, experiment with alternative visions and assemblages of work, livelihood and economy. Some have been going for 25–30 years. Their full potential will need to be uncovered and nurtured through future research and innovation. This would go beyond a focus on alternative visions to an examination of the concreteness of alternative practices, circuits of exchange and production and the assemblages of people, money and things that are generated or made visible by alternative currencies.

NOTES 1. See http://​www​.transitionnetwork​.org (accessed 7 March 2019). 2. See https://​www​.colu​.com/​(accessed 7 March 2019). 3. See http://​www​ hull​-coin​.org/​ (accessed 7 March 2019). 4. ‘I’ll buy you a pint if you . . .’.

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Alternative currencies: diverse experiments  237

REFERENCES Aldridge, T. and A. Patterson (2002), ‘LETS get real: Constraints on the development of Local Exchange Trading Schemes’, Area, 34 (4), 370–381. Dierksmeier, C. and P. Seele (2018), ‘Cryptocurrencies and business ethics’, Journal of Business Ethics, 152 (1), 1–14. Dittmer, K. (2013), ‘Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 5 (1), 3–13. Fickey, A. (2011), ‘The focus has to be on helping people make a living’: Exploring diverse economies and alternative economic spaces’, Geography Compass, 5 (5), 237–48. Gómez, G.M. (2008), Making Markets: The Institutional Rise and Decline of the Argentine Red de Trueque, The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. Granovetter, M. (1973), ‘The strength of weak ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78 (6), 1360–1380. Lee, R. (1996), ‘Moral money? LETS and the social construction of local economic geographies in Southeast England’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 28 (8), 1377–94. Marshall, A.P. and D.W. O’Neill (2018), ‘The Bristol pound: A tool for localisation?’ Ecological Economics, 146 (C), 273–81. Maurer, B. (2003), ‘Uncanny exchange: The possibilities and failures of “making change” with alternative money forms’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21 (3), 317–40. Mundell, R. (1961), ‘A theory of optimum currency areas’, American Economic Review, 51 (4), 657–65. North, P. (2005), ‘Scaling alternative economic practices? Some lessons from alternative currencies’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2), 221–33. North, P. (2006), Alternative Currencies as a Challenge to Globalisation? A Case Study of Manchester’s Local Money Networks, Aldershot: Ashgate. North, P. (2007), Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. North, P. (2014), ‘Ten square miles surrounded by reality? Materialising alternative economies using local currencies’, Antipode, 46 (1), 246–65. North, P. (2016), ‘Money reform and the Eurozone crisis: Panacea, utopia or grassroots alternative?’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 40 (5), 1439–53. Seyfang, G. and N. Longhurst (2013), ‘Growing green money? Mapping community currencies for sustainable development’, Ecological Economics, 86, 65–77. Sotiropoulou, I. (2011), ‘Alternative exchange systems in contemporary Greece’, International Journal of Community Currency Research, 15, 27–31. Thanou, E., G. Theodossiou and D. Kallivokas (2013), Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) as a Response to Economic Crisis: The Case of Greece, Geneva: United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service. Waring, M. (1990), If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, London: HarperCollins.

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26. Transacting services through time banking: renegotiating equality and reshaping work Gradon Diprose

INTRODUCTION Since the Global Financial Crisis the social and moral imperative to be in waged work has only increased in many countries. Today ‘work society’, as it has been named by Weeks (2011), frames waged work as morally necessary, as the primary right to citizenship, and as the main way to participate in the wider capitalist economy, and by consequence live a life deemed to be legitimate. This has created a real tension because there are fewer secure waged jobs for people that pay a living wage. Given the significant inequalities and uncertainty surrounding waged work, there is a pressing need to explore practices that might help enrich both anti-work and post-work imaginaries. There is a need, in other words, to explore transactions that enable people to labour and meet their needs in more equitable and meaningful ways. Time banks are one such transaction. In this chapter I review recent research, and draw on my own involvement with the Wellington Timebank, to explore how people go about collectively exchanging their labour through time banking to meet material and psycho-social needs. The chapter begins by outlining the concept and practice of time banking, before reviewing four themes emerging from research on this kind of transaction. It concludes with some thoughts about the limitations and potential for time banking as an emerging form of more equitable transaction.

TIME BANKING Time banking is one way of exchanging human labour, skills and resources in some kind of reciprocally beneficial arrangement. Contemporary forms of time banking are most often associated with Edgar Cahn (2004) who popularized the practice in the United States. While battling poor health he felt useless and invisible because he could no longer contribute in the waged economy. He was inspired by the work of Waring (1988) which looked at how feminized labour has been, and continues to be, undervalued in the waged labour market. Cahn developed the structure of a time bank which is basically a collective of members who share offers to labour or provide a service, and requests for labour or services, through a networked system. The model Cahn popularized is underpinned by an asset-based understanding of human subjectivities where all human labour is valued, and where reciprocity and trust develop as people share their skills and resources to create improved community connections. In Cahn’s model every member’s labour is valued equally using time, and individual members keep track of the number of hours they work and the number of hours for which they receive something. So for example, in Cahn’s model someone may clean your house for an hour and this has the exact same value as someone offering legal services or a back massage. While 238 Gradon Diprose - 9781788119962 08:01:06PM

Transacting services through time banking: renegotiating equality and reshaping work  239 many time banks operate slightly differently, Cahn’s model enabled people to trade with anyone else in the collective. So for instance, after Sid earns time credits by babysitting for Kim, Kim can then earn time credits by cleaning Xon’s house and so on. The model seeks to create interdependence across the collective, rather than Kim, Sid and Xon only trading with each other. Cahn (2004) suggests that the practice is significantly different from charity because of the reciprocal nature of the exchange in that all people have both needs in their lives, and skills and attributes which they can offer to others. He calls this reciprocal relation ‘co-production’ and argues that the practice avoids designating one person as the ‘object’ or beneficiary of ‘charity’. A key value underlying Cahn’s framing of time banking is the belief that humans’ material needs are best met through an ethic of collective interdependence, rather than neoliberal discourses of the independent, self-sufficient subject who is competing with others to sell their labour. Cahn argued that it is through valuing everyone’s labour equally that dignity is restored to the lives of people whose labour has been coerced, undervalued or ignored in the waged economy. He suggests that non-capitalist transactions are the place to leverage change because this is where surplus exists. Cahn paints a very optimistic view of the potential for time banking to foster social change and revalue care work, and there has been emerging discussion in the literature about the effects and success of time banks and how they connect to other alternative currencies (see Gregory 2015; Seyfang 2001). To date, the literature on time banking indicates that more ‘everyday’ practices like cleaning, cooking, gardening, massage, and language lessons, are most commonly exchanged rather than more professionalized services like law, medicine or engineering. While there is the potential to trade consumable goods like food and other products using time credits, some time banks apply a time credit to the good and also a dollar or money charge. For example, a cooked meal may cost a time credit of an hour (for the human labour) and three dollars to pay for the ingredients. In what follows I explore four themes that have emerged from recent literature on time banking that illustrate the potential and limitations of time banking transactions.

NEGOTIATING CONNECTION AND ANXIETY WHEN TIME BANKING Time banking can play a role in fostering connections between people to build community and belonging across socio-economic difference (see Cooper 2013; Seyfang 2004b). My own research with the Wellington Timebank (Diprose 2016) reflects trends in literature from New Zealand and the United Kingdom where many participants join time banks because they want to meet new people and connect with their local community (see Collom 2007; Gregory 2012; Ozanne 2010). While meeting material needs is important for some participants, for most time bankers it is the reciprocal nature of economic interdependence that is valued. Cooper (2013, p. 38) points out that time banking can accelerate ‘what is often experienced as the slow temporal process of identification with, and attachment to, community’. North (2006) calls this ‘relationship trading’, while Cooper (2013, p. 46) refers to it as ‘caring-sharing’. Although the desire for connection with other people is important for many time bankers, concerns around safety and anxiety when encountering strangers in what can often be quite personal exchanges, can interrupt this desire. For example, in my research with the Wellington

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240  The handbook of diverse economies Timebank, members have expressed concerns around letting strangers into their homes, having strangers look after their children, or driving their older relatives around. To manage these concerns, time banks operate in different ways. Some time banks (like the Wellington Timebank) have paid coordinators who manage membership and enforce joining criteria that include: paying a monetary joining fee, reference checks, police history checks, and depending on the outcome of these, limitations around what members can do. These kinds of approaches are sometimes called person-to-person time banks (see Glynos and Speed 2012). Other time banks (particularly in the United Kingdom) operate person-to-agency approaches that require paid staff to attend all trades to mitigate any health and safety risks (Gregory 2012; Seyfang 2004a). These kinds of arrangements often require substantial investments of both time and funding and tend to reflect state or local government led projects run by social and community workers (see Gregory 2012), as opposed to the more grassroots initiated approaches like person-to-person time banks (see McGuirk 2012). In contrast to these more facilitated approaches, some time banks operate more like open source databases where there are no membership fees or reference checks and no paid coordinators (see the national Australian Timebanking website1). Running alongside these desires for community connection, and concerns around safety, are also wider context specific factors. The different forms time banks take are often context specific and influenced by funding availability, and legislation around risk and personal liability. For example, in New Zealand, the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC)2 plays an important role in influencing the day-to-day operation of practices like time banking in relation to health, safety and personal liability. ACC would cover (most) of the costs associated with an injury that occurred during a time bank trade and also remove the risk of personal liability, such as being held responsible for someone’s medical care. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, state provided health services (like the National Health Service) provide cover for injuries and accidents. These kinds of context specific factors highlight that although many time banks may draw on a similar ethos, their operational processes like membership criteria, resourcing and behavioural norms can reflect different political and geographic understandings of community, agency and risk and lead to different forms of interdependence between people and institutions.

COMMENSURABILITY AND QUALITY One of the key values underpinning Cahn’s (2004) model of the time banking transaction is that everyone’s labour is valued equally. However, there are inevitably moments of confusion or re-negotiation that shape how this actually plays out. Some people for instance are incredulous about this equality. For example, the previous Wellington Timebank coordinator described to me how she regularly got asked questions like: ‘How could a lawyer’s time be valued as much as someone who is just digging a hole?’ And then I had another time when someone said to me ‘How can a lawyer’s time be valued as much as someone’s time who is putting all the work into digging a hole?’ (Personal communication)

Such reactions reflect discourses which value forms of labour quite differently depending on the perceived amount of training, specialization, and physical or intellectual effort required.

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Transacting services through time banking: renegotiating equality and reshaping work  241 Some prospective time bankers really struggle with the underlying ethos of all labour being commensurable and ask sceptically ‘How could that possibly work?’ In my research with the Wellington Timebank I’ve observed that people who go on to become active members have tended to already support this ethos of equality and adopt a pragmatic approach to moving beyond doubt about it working. For instance, one member described how she ‘just totally embraced the fact that if somebody else needs what I have to offer then that’s valuable and that’s the thing’ (personal communication). Similarly, another member noted that it is the matching up of a need and skill which creates the value. These examples show how a market is still at play in the negotiation around valuing skills and labour, in that demand and the willingness to offer something generally determines whether an exchange occurs (see Diprose 2017). Some time banks have also modified Cahn’s approach to valuing labour equally. For instance, the Japanese exchange scheme called Fureai Kippu (which translated means ‘ticket for a caring relationship’) uses a mixed approach (Community Currency n.d.). Members can earn time credits by providing care to older or disabled people and they can then transfer these credits to relatives or friends who need care, or save them for the future. Some of the individual Fureai Kippu collectives distinguish between different types of labour and allocate credits accordingly. For instance, shopping or reading for someone are valued at one time credit, while more intimate bodily care acts (such as bathing someone) are valued at two time credits. This differential valuing gives special recognition to those intimate and life-sustaining care acts over others (see Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). Some Fureai Kippu schemes also provide members with the option of obtaining money (yen), time credits, or a combination of both, for providing their services (Nakagawa et al. 2011). Such examples of mixed exchanges are not uncommon in time banks, especially if a trade requires resources such as food or petrol. Time banking in practice therefore tends to function as complementary to the waged/money economy (rather than a completely separate substitute) and depends on what the people trading negotiate and agree to. While this flexibility can accommodate a wider range of possibilities, it can also create confusion for members and others when local time banks attempt to scale up or work across organizations (see Glynos and Speed 2012; Nakagawa et al. 2011). Just like incredulity around the equal valuing of all labour, concerns can also arise around the quality of other time bankers’ labour and skills and their behaviour during a trade (Cooper 2013). For example, what if someone gives you a haircut you don’t like, or provides a counselling session that actually makes you feel worse, or breaks something and you have to pay someone else to fix it? These kinds of important practical concerns often shape how willing people are in trying time banking. Individual time banks respond in different ways to such issues. For instance, the Wellington Timebank developed ‘safe trading tips’ for members that include: being on time, not trading while intoxicated, contacting your trading partner if running late, agreeing on the nature of the trade and how much time is being traded, and confirming who will track this through the online accounting system. The tips also emphasize the importance of being flexible when trading by encouraging members to remember that they may not be trading with an ‘expert’, but that the time bank is an experiment in alternative economy (see Diprose 2017). Within the waged economy there are often various laws, legislation and professional or peak bodies who manage industry and service providers’ behaviour and conduct. These kinds of mechanisms that shape and enforce conduct and provide redress where transactions do not occur in mutually agreed ways attempt to provide those buying and selling labour and products with increased certainty. In the absence of such mechanisms for time banking though, research

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242  The handbook of diverse economies suggests that individual time bank coordinators can help alleviate members’ anxieties around these kinds of issues and create a sense of psychological safety for members (see Glynos and Speed 2012; Ozanne 2010).

CO-OPTION AND NEOLIBERAL RESPONSIBILIZATION Within the literature on time banking there has been some discussion around the politics and representational aspects surrounding the practice. Writing in 1992, Cahn and Rowe suggested that an advantage of time banking is that it can appear ideologically neutral. They write: The Time Dollar . . . does not fit the standard groove. It has elements that appeal to the Right, elements that appeal to the Left, and overall, it’s an idea that lies in the frontal zone that is unclaimed by either side. (Cahn and Rowe 1992, p. 162)

Gregory (2013, p. 4) is somewhat critical of this, suggesting that ‘[o]n the one hand it is a means of promoting alternative, core economy values; on the other it seeks not to promote anything too radical as to upset the political landscape’. Writing from the UK in 2015, he describes how recent government ‘Big Society’ discourses have promoted personal responsibility and a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ to legitimize the shift in responsibility for solving social welfare problems to local communities who need to engage in ‘self-help’. Because time banking can operate relatively independently of state welfare, the Conservative UK government at that time promoted time banking as a local self-help tool to get people ‘job ready’ over the last few years. In other words, time banking was seen as a cheap and decentralized way to produce more worker-citizens and to justify further austerity and reduced welfare. Gregory (2015) argues that time bankers need to articulate more clearly what is actually radical about the practice to avoid this kind of co-option. While Gregory (2015) raises important points about the risks of co-option, this risk appears to be most relevant to the UK context and few other governments appear to be so interested in time banking at a national scale. Focusing purely on government or policy level debates around co-option and representation can also obscure the complex reality of everyday practices. For instance, in my work with the Wellington Timebank the focus is on the embodied exchange of labour, rather than explaining what this means through existing political terms. Some members of the Wellington Timebank participate precisely because the practice is framed as ‘apolitical’. It’s about building relationships and a sense of community, rather than some radical or capital ‘P’ political act (see Diprose 2017). What I am suggesting is similar to what Day (2004) argues in his distinction between a ‘politics of demand’ and a ‘politics of action’. Refusing to translate practices in relation to existing political categories or government discourses can sometimes build a sense of common purpose because the focus is on the embodied practices that people actually do (a ‘politics of action’), rather than describing what these mean in relation to an institution or government policy. This resonates with Huron’s (2016) research with people involved in housing cooperatives in Washington, DC who refused to label their involvement in conventional political terms. Huron (2016, p. 4) describes how for many of her research participants, getting involved in housing cooperatives was a pragmatic choice, pursued ‘out of necessity, not out of a preconceived politics’. This doesn’t necessarily mean practices like cooperatives or time banking are co-opted or drained of their radical potential. Rather, it means

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Transacting services through time banking: renegotiating equality and reshaping work  243 that analysis needs to focus on the actual practices, as much as on how they are named and represented.

THE NATURE OF TIME Gregory (2015) argues that the clock and capitalist understandings of time (epitomized by the phrase ‘time is money’) are fundamental to structuring contemporary Western societal relations and subjectivities. However, he points out that in most discussions of social policy and welfare (including time banking), an understanding of time is barely considered. One of the slightly ironic things I’ve noticed about the Wellington Timebank is that when members are asked why they don’t use it more, many claim a lack of time (see also Cooper 2013; Ozanne 2010). While many Wellington Timebank members appear to support the practice, they are still primarily dependent on waged work to meet most of their material needs and see time banking as a ‘nice’ supplement. So why does time banking become one more thing to fit into people’s busy lives, rather than freeing them up? Some members of the Wellington Timebank have suggested that the way time banking is divided into 15 minute units is stressful. For instance, they’ve queried whether the first five minutes they spend chatting to their trading partner should be counted? And how should they deal with trading partners who take a lot longer to complete a task than they would have, or think is reasonable? While these kinds of questions are also relevant to money exchanges, they highlight the fact that time banking is still premised on a Western understanding of the clock that divides time into discrete chunks and allocates this against individualized labour. In other words ‘time is money’ becomes ‘time is credit’. Gregory (2015) and Cooper (2013) both suggest, although in different ways, that one way to challenge capitalist clock time is to focus on how ‘relative time’ (understood to be a subjective or internal sense of time) is actually experienced through time banking exchanges. By this they mean how time banking challenges the ‘time is money’ understanding of what it means to work, to care, and to relate to others through embodied exchanges in community.

CONCLUSION Time banking is founded on the radical notion of all human labour being valued equally. Research has shown that time banking can meet material needs while fostering a greater sense of belonging as people expand their sense of community, by giving and receiving care from others. The practice can also foster a greater sense of personal agency for people who are subjected to the de-humanizing processes of undervalued waged labour or state welfare and charity systems because it is foregrounded on the understanding that all people have valued skills. However, research has also shown that time banking can be confusing or uncertain in terms of commensuration and the quality of exchanges, limited in scale, and open to co-option by government discourses that see it as a cheap alternative to welfare. Significantly, time banking as conceived by Cahn (2004) does not really challenge modern notions of labour being measured and accounted for in units of individualized clock time. Looking to the future it will be interesting to see how time banking resonates with changes around waged work more generally, including robotic automation and calls for universal

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244  The handbook of diverse economies citizen allowances distributed through re-imagined welfare states (see Healy 2018). What has struck me throughout my research is how the lived diverse practices of time banking exceed any singular motivation or agreed upon direction for the future. In this way I’m continually drawn towards Gibson-Graham’s (2006) call for reading for difference and diversity in any analysis of socio-economic practices by focusing on the ethical decisions people and communities negotiate as they seek to survive well collectively.

NOTES 1. https://​www​.timebanking​.com​.au (accessed 28 April 2019). 2. The Accident Compensation Corporation is the Crown entity responsible for providing New Zealand’s compulsory and universal no-fault accidental injury scheme. The insurance scheme covers injuries from accidents both at work and outside of work and is administered on a no-fault basis, so people cannot sue for damages (except for exemplary damages). The scheme provides cover for injury treatment and lost earnings following an accident.

REFERENCES Cahn, E. (2004), No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative, Washington, DC: Essential Books. Cahn, E. and J. Rowe (1992), Time Dollars: The New Currency that Enables Americans to Turn their Hidden Resource – Time – into Personal Security and Community Renewal, Chicago, IL: Family Resource Coalition of America. Collom, E. (2007), ‘The motivations, engagement, satisfaction, outcomes, and demographics of time bank participants: Survey findings from a US system’, International Journal of Community Currency Research, 11, 36–83. Community Currency (n.d.), ‘Fureai Kippu’, accessed 27 March 2018 at http://​community​-currency​ .info/​en/​currencies/​asia/​fureai​-kippu/​. Cooper, D. (2013), ‘Time against time: Normative temporalities and the failure of community labour in Local Exchange Trading Schemes’, Time & Society, 22 (1), 31–54. Day, R. (2004), ‘From hegemony to affinity’, Cultural Studies, 18 (5), 716–48. Diprose, G. (2016), ‘Negotiating interdependence and anxiety in community economies’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48 (7), 1411–27. Diprose, G. (2017), ‘Radical equality, care and labour in a community economy’, Gender, Place & Culture, 24 (6), 834–50. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Glynos, J. and E. Speed (2012), ‘Varieties of co-production in public services: Time banks in a UK policy context’, Critical Policy Studies, 6 (4), 402–33. Gregory, L. (2012), ‘Local people rebuilding their communities: An exploration of Welsh time banking’, Contemporary Wales, 25 (1), 40–57. Gregory, L. (2013), ‘Time banking and the dangers of ideological elasticity’, paper presented at the Social Policy Association Conference, Sheffield University, UK. Gregory, L. (2015), Trading Time: Can Exchange Lead to Social Change?, Bristol: Policy Press. Healy, S. (2018), ‘Basic income and postcapitalist imaginaries: From surplus humanity to humanity’s surplus’, Arena, 51/52, 130–152. Huron, A. (2016), ‘Commoning in the city: The politics of pragmatic practice’, paper presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco.

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Transacting services through time banking: renegotiating equality and reshaping work  245 McGuirk, E. (2012), ‘Studying time banking: Exploring participatory action research in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Sites: New Series, 9 (2), 142–71. Nakagawa S., R. Larratta and T. Bovaird (2011), ‘Hureai Kippu – Lessons for Japan for the “Big Society”’, accessed 26 March 2018 at http://​www​.jlgc​.org​.uk/​en/​pdfs/​Hureai​%20Kippu​%20​-​ %20Lessons​%20from​%20Japan​%20for​%20the​%20Big​%20SocietyCESedit17March2011​.pdf. North, P. (2006), Alternative Currencies as a Challenge to Globalisation? A Case Study of Manchester’s Local Money Networks, Aldershot: Ashgate. Ozanne, L. (2010), ‘Learning to exchange time: Benefits and obstacles to time banking’, International Journal of Community Currency Research, 14 (20), 1–16. Seyfang, G. (2001), ‘Community currencies: Small change for a green economy’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 33 (6), 975–96. Seyfang, G. (2004a), ‘Time banks: Rewarding community self-help in the inner city?’, Community Development Journal, 39 (1), 62–71. Seyfang, G. (2004b), ‘Working outside the box: Community currencies, time banks and social inclusion’, Journal of Social Policy, 33 (1), 49–71. Waring, M. (1988), If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, London: Macmillan. Weeks, K. (2011), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

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27. Fair trade: market-based ethical encounters and the messy entanglements of living well Lindsay Naylor

INTRODUCTION Fair trade is consistently described as a movement and a market for more socially and economically just exchanges of commodities. The idea of fair trade arose from solidarity organizing that took place in the latter part of the twentieth century, where groups in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe organized to purchase coffee and handmade crafts in solidarity with groups that suffered persecution and had little access to global markets. In 1988 the first fair trade certification label was established between a group of coffee farmers in Latin America and a Dutch development organization, Max Havelaar (Renard 2015). The introduction of the label signalled that the trading and production conditions for certified products stood apart from conventional practices and commodity trade. Certified products were sustainably produced, travelled through a shorter commodity chain, with fewer actors, and were priced higher than their conventional counterparts thus redistributing more of the commodity dollar at the site of production. In many cases third-party certifiers portray fair trade as an example of an alternative to neoliberal capitalist free trade and a path to producer empowerment and community development. Certifiers claim that consumers can empower producers, reduce poverty, and improve entire communities through their purchase of certified products (see Fair Trade USA 2012). Proponents argue that they can connect producer and consumer and provide a platform for sustainable development (Raynolds and Greenfield 2015). In this chapter, I question these simple representations and explore the messy entanglements of fair trade exchanges. I argue that despite attempts to cast fair trade as different from conventional forms of capitalism, these claims remain mired in a conventional business-oriented world view that puts profit ahead of people. However, through a diverse economies reading, this capitalocentric viewpoint is reframed and the messy entanglements and power relations around economic transactions opened up so spaces are made for the redistribution of power.

THE TRAJECTORY OF FAIR TRADE Since the late 1980s, fair trade certification has expanded enormously. What began as a site of mutually beneficial, more direct people-to-people trade became a fully-fledged competitive market. According to third-party certifier Fair Trade USA, in 2016 alone fair trade certified goods were sourced from 1.6 million producers and labourers in 46 different countries (2017, p. 22). Coffee was the first fair trade certified product in 1988; however, there are now more than 4500 certified products on the market today, from seafood and chocolate, to composite products, such as soap and ice cream, as well as home goods and apparel. Coffee continues to 246 Lindsay Naylor - 9781788119962 08:01:11PM

Fair trade: market-based ethical encounters and living well  247 be the most traded certified product and it is now sold under multiple certification schemes, from Fairtrade International and Fair for Life to UTZ and Rainforest Alliance (among others). From an initiative that attempted to very clearly distinguish certified coffee from conventional coffee, the proliferation of certifications adorning bags of coffee are now indistinguishable and may certify any number of practices, including, since 2012, plantation-grown coffee. Fair Trade USA, upon its split from the Fairtrade Labelling Organization in 2011, began this practice, despite the history of opposition to plantations that had originally fuelled the organization of small-scale producers into fair trade networks. For small-scale coffee producers, producing under the fair trade label means a commitment to small-scale, sustainable production performed by an adult-aged labour force as a means of community development. These commitments are codified by standards for fair trade production that are levied and governed by third-party certification organizations (such as Fairtrade International) and subject to annual audit by independent auditing bodies (such as FLO-CERT). These systems, however, are predicated on an economic development paradigm that foregrounds commodity production for the market. Standards for fair trade, which started as sustainably managed coffee production, now cover a range of activities, from small-scale organic agriculture, to labour organizing on tea and banana plantations, and conditions of work in textile manufacturing. This dramatic rise in so-called ethical markets has fundamentally changed the face of fair trade exchanges. The original ethos of solidarity and social justice organizing to make trade fairer was directed towards creating economic, environmental and social change. Fair trade certification meant a guaranteed price, access to credit, the payment of a premium for community development, and a consistent buyer for small producers. Nevertheless, what began as a producer-consumer movement to change the structure of the market and create a viable alternative to free trade (see Renard 2015) has become a market that merely attempts to operate in a less unfair way. Certification is now tied to rigorous standards for production and development that are decided in boardrooms far removed from the fields, homes and communities of producers. For their part consumers of fair trade certified products are told to simply look for the label. The mainstreaming and asymmetrical character of contemporary fair trade transactions have rendered it, as Lyon describes: ‘a kinder, gentler form of business as usual’ (2015, p. 162). Certainly research shows that participating in certified trade does make some difference for participants vis-à-vis their non-fair trade contemporaries, but it does not allow them to significantly improve their lives and livelihoods (see for example Jaffee, 2014; Lyon, 2011). Farmers struggle to remain compliant with certification requirements and the bigger aims of community development and sustainable livelihoods are put on the back burner. There is a universalizing tendency in narratives about production for the fair trade marketplace that tends to value only the labour and market transaction that happens as part of fair trade certification, eliding the multiple and potentially competing practices undertaken by people as part of everyday social and economic relations. A diverse economies framing assists with moving beyond what I argue is the homogenizing character of much fair trade research. To illustrate this problematic here, I discuss the practices of campesinos/as in Chiapas, Mexico, who – among a range of other activities – produce coffee for the fair trade marketplace.

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REFRAMING FAIR TRADE AND LIVELIHOODS IN CHIAPAS People producing for the fair trade market have multiple and diverse economic identities that cannot be reduced to the title of fair trade producer. The coffee producers who I worked with in Chiapas, Mexico undertake coffee production as just one strategy for building secure and dignified livelihoods. Not unlike their peasant counterparts in other places in the world, campesinos/as in Chiapas undertake multiple economic activities as part of their everyday lives. These Chiapaneco producers struggle to live well in a neoliberal context that attempts to strip them of their identities as indigenous subsistence producers. From 2010–13 over multiple visits, I worked with two coffee cooperatives in the highlands of Chiapas. Both cooperatives are connected to the fair trade certified market and were established by indigenous social movement actors fighting for autonomy, the right to self-determination, and for the possibilities of maintaining agrarian and subsistence-based livelihoods. Additionally, production for the fair trade marketplace facilitates network-building, where coffee producer cooperatives link to other actors such as importing groups and coffee roasters. A core aim of efforts by members of these coffee cooperatives is to build autonomy through self-determination and ensure the continued ability to produce food for subsistence (the centuries-old practice of growing the milpa: corn, beans and squash), while cultivating dignified livelihoods (Naylor 2017b). These struggles are not aimed at achieving a high mass-consumption lifestyle where subsistence producers would shed their agrarian lives and shift to wage-work, purchasing consumer goods with their earned income. Rather, they are struggles to live well, based on indigenous ways of knowing and being, rather than imperial, white, and Western ways. To illuminate this aim is, however, not to blindly celebrate it. Instead, I point to this disconnect as a form of resistance and struggle that is undertaken by campesinos/as as part of their everyday lives. Thus, participating in fair trade certified networks presents a challenge to these struggles. The standards for production and development are framed by third-party certifiers who position producer participants as ‘rational economic actors’ who work to improve their ‘entire communities’. The audit of one of the cooperatives in Chiapas revealed that third-party certifiers frame producer cooperatives as businesses, the producers as workers, and the fair trade premium payment as a way to improve the product and bring more commodities to market (Naylor 2017a). In their Annual Report, Fair Trade USA emphasized this message, stating ‘Fair Trade USA is building an innovative model of responsible business and conscious consumption that enables sustainable livelihoods for farmers, workers and their families around the world’ (2017, p. 8). Fair trade organizations thus tend to homogenize producers and communities, treating a diverse set of people, places, politics and practices as the same across space. Producing fair trade coffee fits into the strategy of diversifying economic activities for growers. It is a site for earning cash income to support purchasing items such as medicines and consumer durables that cannot be produced at home. Yet it also competes with a resilient strategy of diversification as fair trade production takes up time and space that could be dedicated to other production activities. Furthermore, third-party certifiers, through the production and development standards and the annual audit attempt to surveil and control livelihood practices and economic development efforts in the communities they trade with, demonstrate an uneven power differential in the certified commodity chain (Naylor 2017a).

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Fair trade: market-based ethical encounters and living well  249 This somewhat messy entanglement of producing in the fair trade certified marketplace was continuously demonstrated during my discussions with campesinos/as. In the vast majority of my interviews with members of the coffee-producing cooperatives, participants discussed fair trade as not being very fair. When asked what they thought of fair trade they consistently described it as comercio mas justo (more fair trade), saying that they often measured their certified sales as being better than selling to the coyote (an intermediary who pays very low prices), but not as significantly different otherwise. Many took note of the still fluctuating price of coffee. Although fair trade provides a price floor to assure that farmers are not in crisis alongside a major dip in the commodity market price, the fair trade price moves up and down above that floor with the New York price. Many participants also spoke about the hard work of producing under the fair trade standards. Producing under fair trade (and organic) certification requires more labour in the coffee growing plots and many were concerned that they could not spend as much time in their subsistence plots growing food. The key reason articulated by growers as to why they participated in fair trade if significant benefits were not reaped was the consistent buyer, that is, their cooperatives. For the cooperatives, the connections made through fair trade networks are an increasingly important site for solidarity relations as they continue to struggle for dignified livelihoods. Coffee importers and coffee roasters have created long-lasting relationships built on trust. In many cases the shortened commodity chain within fair trade certified exchange brings these actors closer together, as coffee roasters visit the coffee producers and opportunities for dialogue and information sharing are established. What makes fair trade a reclaimable site for supporting economic diversity, solidarity and social justice is that it embeds ethical social relations in the economic exchange of commodities. But, as I go on to show, the ethical social relations built into fair trade networks are not between people purchasing fair trade certified products at retail establishments and those who produce them, as some certifiers suggest.

MESSY ENTANGLEMENTS ALONG THE FAIR TRADE COMMODITY CHAIN While fair trade is extolled as an example of using economic exchange for good, it is abundantly clear, as many sustainability proponents note, that we cannot consume our way to a better world. Building sites of economic exchange predicated on trust and interdependence is a critical component of diverse transactions. However, participating in fair trade has uneven benefits and consequences. The mundane and banal work of contributing to such exchanges asks much of commodity producers and very little of commodity consumers. The work of growing coffee sustainably is a burden placed on growers by consumers, while very little is expected of consumers to change their consumption behaviour, beyond looking for the label. In fair trade marketing the simplified commodity chain connects five different exchange nodes in the certification network: producer, cooperative, importer, roaster/retailer, consumer. This linear and oversimplified chain misses the entanglements within and between the nodes. Admittedly, there are fewer actors in the fair trade commodity chain – compared to the non-certified trade of coffee. However, the attempt to advertise a producer connected to a consumer via three nodes does not capture the asymmetrical exchanges of power that take place as part of these certified transactions, nor how these connections are facilitated (or not) via fair

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250  The handbook of diverse economies trade. Moreover, the economic subjectivities assumed at each node in the network mask the identities of the actors in the network more broadly. At either end of the fair trade commodity chain are people performing different economic activities and identities. For coffee consumers, purchasing the final product of a coffee producer’s labour is part of a regular habituated economic act. The coffee purchaser is not tied to any one coffee producer in order to enact their ethical consumption and there is very little change in consumption practices (Naylor 2018). The relation of exchange, mediated through a third-party certifier, simplifies the consumer’s decision-making processes. They buy their way to a better world through regular purchasing habits, inadvertently participating in an asymmetrical power relation that arguably re-centres capitalist forms of exchange. If we consider the different exchange nodes in the fair trade network, the messy and entangled social relations of fair trade are evident. This re-reading is imperative, as third-party certifiers seek to bring more groups, such as coffee plantations, into the fair trade fold. A close reading for difference along the commodity chain brings to light relations that are not necessarily visible at the consumer end of the commodity chain. Additionally, the simplified fair trade commodity chain begins at the site of production, missing the critical foundation for small-scale producers to benefit from fair trade certification, which is, belonging to a cooperative. Disrupting this linear network is a key part of re-reading fair trade as a potential vehicle for ethical community development. Producer Cooperatives In the case of small-scale certified coffee, the initial site of exchange starts not with the labourers in coffee plots, but with the democratically run producer cooperatives. Producer cooperatives comprise small-scale producers who form a community of people who are selling coffee for income, but who also elect their peers into leadership roles and make decisions about how to distribute surplus. In the case of fair trade exchanges, this surplus is not profit, but the fair trade premium that is paid to the cooperative as part of maintaining their certification. The cooperative is also the site of knowledge exchange – from best practices in coffee growing and organic production to regional and international news events. The cooperative is a point of sale for coffee seedlings and burlap sacks for coffee storage. The cooperative is also a gatekeeper, determining who can claim membership and produce under their label, and policing the production practices of their members. Small-scale producers cannot receive the fair trade price without their connection to a cooperative. The policing and gatekeeping character of the cooperatives means that in some cases it is difficult to attain or prolong membership in certified production (see Dolan 2008; 2010; on organic coffee see Mutersbaugh 2004, 2005). Participating or attempting to participate in certified production brings new relations of power to coffee growing communities. Nevertheless, the producer cooperative fosters horizontal power relations, which are very different from those governing growers employed in plantation production. Coffee Producers In successfully becoming a member of a cooperative, small-scale producers of coffee create a connection to a consistent buyer, access to inputs (including a modest pre-payment ahead of harvest) and education, and a contract-based seasonal price. It was, as already noted, this

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Fair trade: market-based ethical encounters and living well  251 consistency that farmers valued most. They also agree to uphold the rigorous standards for production and delivery of their minimally-processed coffee. The coffee harvest is during the winter months (generally November–March); however, coffee plots are maintained (weeding, composting, pruning) throughout the year. The activities of producing for the coffee market are underscored by subsistence food production and other social and economic activities that are undertaken on a daily basis. As they relate to coffee, exchanges take a number of forms, including the labour relations of production, where gendered divisions of labour still play a role. In the case of Chiapas, men often take responsibility for maintaining the coffee plots, while men and women both participate in the harvest and processing of harvested coffee cherries, women are often responsible for the daily activities of drying the parchment coffee, and in male–female partnered households, men deliver the coffee to the cooperative. The delivered coffee is exchanged between the producers and the cooperative for cash. Because it is often men who deliver and receive the payment for coffee it may be distributed differently at the household level than when payment is distributed to women (see Lyon 2015). However, some producers may have excess coffee that they sell for a lower price to an intermediary (in Mexico, the coyote). The income earned through these sales provides opportunities for households to purchase goods such as soap, salt, medicine and clothing. Crucially this income provides opportunities to purchase additional food in the ‘lean months’ prior to the first harvest of corn (see Bacon et al. 2014). While many families strive to produce enough food to last between harvests, choices made about labour and land as well as low production rates often make this goal unattainable. Thus, coffee production must be integrated with other activities and choices made about where to emphasize labour time for production – for food or for income. Importers Once the coffee is sold to the producer cooperative the next site of exchange is between the cooperative and the importer. Importers are based in the global core (the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) and maintain relations with producer cooperatives (or other intermediaries). The US importer for the coffee producing cooperatives in Chiapas is actually a cooperative as well, their membership populated by coffee roasters. As the exchange of coffee happens seasonally, other economic exchanges beyond the sale of coffee in the international marketplace take shape. These are based in taxes, fees, insurance, banking, shipping, and so on. Far from the simplified commodity chain represented by fair trade groups, the exchange of coffee connects through a number of different nodes (see Mutersbaugh 2016). The linear network touted by certifiers is entangled within a much broader network of transactions that remains invisible. Coffee Roasters Coffee roasters purchase from the importer. In the case of the cooperatives in Chiapas, the coffee roasters maintain relations with the coffee producer cooperatives, not just through purchasing their coffee from the importer, but through frequent visits to Chiapas, and through discussions with the leadership of the cooperatives. The relations between these groups are based in the exchange of coffee but are not limited to it. Indeed, in the example of the coffee roasters who purchase from the cooperatives I worked with in Chiapas, both were started with solidarity at their foundation and neither has retained their fair trade certification since the

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252  The handbook of diverse economies 2000s. The solidarity relations were built between US-based actors, who wanted to support the Indigenous social movements that the coffee producers are a part of. These actors started buying and roasting coffee that was produced by the cooperatives where coffee producers continue to struggle for self-determination, autonomy and Indigenous rights. Importantly, while both roasters were initially fair trade certified, they both gave up their certification as fair trade became more mainstream. They still pay fair trade prices, and often set their prices higher and in direct communication with the cooperatives. However, coffee roasters who purchase certified coffee are not reliant on, or limited to purchasing from any one cooperative. The power over the coffee exchange is in their hands. While certification may facilitate connections between roasters and producer cooperatives (as in the case of the cooperatives in Chiapas), it does not require the roaster to purchase from the same cooperatives each season or develop long-term relationships in their pursuit of quality coffee beans. Coffee Consumers The coffee roasters retail the coffee and there it is made available to the end-users, coffee drinkers. Those people purchasing coffee from the roasters may be doing so for any number of reasons; from a desire for caffeine or the proximity of the coffee roaster to their workplace to a commitment to ethical purchasing or the social justice efforts of the coffee roaster. As already noted, there is not a prerequisite, a contract, a knowledge base, or a binding commitment to purchase the coffee that moved its way through the various nodes in the certified network on the part of the coffee buyer. Indeed, certified exchanges reify already existing power dynamics between a ‘consuming North’ and ‘producing South’ (Naylor 2014).

CONCLUSION A diverse economies reading of the fair trade coffee commodity chain signals opportunities for ethical encounters by demonstrating where the power sits. Reading fair trade exchanges as diverse transactions opens up possibilities for considering how to distribute and redistribute economic power more equitably and how we build knowledge about how to live well. Fair trade in some ways is another form of farming under contract, where producers are bound to particular rules, and contracted prices. The question remains as to how fair trade might build knowledge and connections that help people to live well. As scholars we need to stop asking if fair trade is working for farmers and start thinking about how fair trade is mobilized by different actors across space towards a number of different aims (Naylor 2019). To focus on whether fair trade is assisting producers’ market transactions misses the diversity of economic activity and economic identities of producers and renders fair trade less meaningful. However, if we are concerned with creating systems where people can live well and participate in mutually beneficial transactions embedded in social relations of care, we must re-read fair trade and consider it beyond the label. As economic actors, we must go further than fair trade to shift the uneven power relations in economic transactions. A diverse economies reading of fair trade exposes the messy entanglements, while creating a space for thinking about new and better ways to encounter others and break down asymmetrical power relations at the site of economic transactions.

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REFERENCES Bacon, C.M., W.A. Sundstrom, M.E. Flores Gómez, V. Ernesto Méndez, R. Santos, B. Goldoftas and I. Dougherty (2014), ‘Explaining the “hungry farmer paradox”: Smallholders and fair trade cooperatives navigate seasonality and change in Nicaragua’s corn and coffee markets’, Global Environmental Change, 25, 133–49. Dolan, C.S. (2008), ‘In the mists of development: Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields’, Globalizations, 5 (2), 305–18. Dolan, C.S. (2010), ‘Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields’, Geoforum, 41 (1), 33–43. Fair Trade USA (2012), ‘Fair trade for all’, accessed 10 May 2019 at https://​www​ fairtradecertified​.org/​ who​-we​-are. Fair Trade USA (2017), ‘2016 Almanac’, accessed 23 March 2019 at https://​www​fairtradecertified​.org/​ news/​2016​-fair​-trade​-usa​-almanac. Jaffee, D. (2014), Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival (updated edn.), Berkeley: University of California Press. Lyon, S. (2011), Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Lyon, S. (2015), ‘The hidden labor of fair trade’, Labor, 12 (1–2), 159–76. Mutersbaugh, T. (2004), ‘Serve and certify: Paradoxes of service work in organic-coffee certification’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (4), 533–52. Mutersbaugh, T. (2005), ‘Certifying rural spaces: Quality-certified products and rural governance’, Journal of Rural Studies, 21 (4), 381–8. Mutersbaugh, T. (2016), ‘Environmental certification and eco-labeling’, in International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, accessed 23 March 2019 at https://​ onlinelibrary​.wiley​.com/​doi/​10​.1002/​9781118786352​.wbieg0943. Naylor, L. (2014), ‘“Some are more fair than others”: Fair trade certification, development, and North– South subjects’, Agriculture and Human Values, 31 (2), 273–84. Naylor, L. (2017a), ‘Auditing the subjects of fair trade: Coffee, development, and surveillance in highland Chiapas’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35 (5), 816–35. Naylor, L. (2017b), ‘Reframing autonomy in political geography: A feminist geopolitics of autonomous resistance’, Political Geography, 58, 24–35. Naylor, L. (2018), ‘Fair trade coffee exchanges and community economies’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50 (5), 1027–46. Naylor, L. (2019), ‘Fair trade rebels: coffee production and struggles for autonomy in Chiapas’, Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds Series, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Raynolds, L.T. and N. Greenfield (2015), ‘Fair trade: Movement and markets’, in L.T. Raynolds and E. Bennett (eds), Handbook of Research on Fair Trade, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 24–41. Renard, M.-C. (2015), ‘Fair trade for small farmer cooperatives in Latin America’, in L.T. Raynolds and E. Bennett (eds), Handbook of Research on Fair Trade, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 475–90.

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28. Social procurement: generating social good through market transactions, directly and indirectly Joanne McNeill

INTRODUCTION Markets function using a wide variety of transactions involving a multitude of actors and relationships. In conventional policy discourse, the market is portrayed as an efficient system for organizing economic interactions and market dynamics are seen to involve a free flow of transactions governed by consumer choice. However, as this is far from reality, even ardent proponents of the ‘free market’ recognize some intervention is required to ensure markets ‘work’. Consequently, governments around the world apply various forms of power to influence the activity of market actors and the conditions in which they operate. The most obvious of these powers is direct regulation to, for example, prevent monopolies, establish and enforce environmental standards, and protect workers (McCrudden 2007, p. 2). Another is the power to address ‘market failures’ through investing in and supporting the development or maintenance of goods or services deemed to generate significant public benefit, but considered unattractive to the commercial sector (Mazzucato 2013, 2015). Addressing market failures often relies on the procurement of ‘public interest’ goods and services by different types of government entities. This chapter addresses a form of state procurement that intervenes in markets to generate ‘social good’, also sometimes referred to as ‘public benefit’. Procurement goes by different names, many of which are used interchangeably. At its most basic, procurement can be understood as the buying of goods and services. Within the procurement profession the broad spectrum of activity involved is usually broken down into three broad dimensions. These are: planning – when business needs are analysed using historical data and through engaging internal stakeholders, supply capacity is researched, and a strategy is developed; sourcing – when suppliers are approached and selected, and contracts are negotiated and awarded; and managing – which focuses on implementation, contract performance management, and renewal. Over time and in different jurisdictions, procurement designed to deliver ‘social good’ has attracted a range of labels. Historical terms include ‘secondary policies’ and ‘collateral policies’. However, this type of positioning can imply these approaches are somehow illegitimate or subservient to commercial considerations. Consequently, Arrowsmith suggests ‘horizontal policies’ are a better option, as this is generic enough to incorporate a broad range of economic, social, political and environmental issues (2010, pp. 149–50) without attaching any implied hierarchical positioning. Horizontal policies in procurement are evident where issues that are ‘distinct from those achieved through the products, works or services themselves’ are taken into account in decision making (Arrowsmith 2010, p. 168) – that is, consideration is 254 Joanne McNeill - 9781788119962 08:01:16PM

Social procurement: generating social good through market transactions  255 given to issues above and beyond purely commercial matters. These often take the form of ‘public interest’ objectives. Recognizing that in many instances environmental, social and economic issues are inextricably intertwined, in recent times ‘sustainable procurement’ has gathered traction, offering a practical example of a contemporary horizontal procurement strategy. This shift to an integrated consideration of objectives from across public policy domains marks the beginning of a more nuanced positioning for procurement as a policy implementation tool (Barraket et al. 2016, p. 5). The remainder of this chapter explores one strand of this emerging policy trajectory, that of social procurement, with a focus on government roles and relationships in and around social procurement. Note, however, that the growing interest is not limited to the public sector, as social procurement strategies can and are being adopted by a wide range of entities.1

SOCIAL PROCUREMENT Social procurement is a kind of short-hand label for a suite of activities that are essentially concerned with generating various types of socio-economic outcomes. Acknowledging this language nuance is important for understanding the growth of interest in social procurement. Social procurement strategies largely work within existing (mostly dwindling) public sector budgets, by harnessing the spending associated with the ongoing and extensive procurement schedules of public sector entities. But there is also increasing recognition that complex issues do not sit neatly within traditional silos, and social procurement is increasingly identified as a powerful horizontal policy tool that can generate outcomes across policy domains. This strand of interest and activity also stems from more fundamental shifts in thinking about what constitutes best value and ‘value for money’ in a public sector context. As evidenced by recent developments in procurement regulation and practice around the world, more holistic interpretations that go beyond ‘lowest price’ – incorporating social, economic and/or environmental dimensions – are being adopted.2 The definition of social procurement distilled by Furneaux and Barraket using cross-case analysis points to the ‘acquisition of a range of assets and services, with the aim of intentionally creating social outcomes (both directly and indirectly)’ (2014, p. 269). Instances of government intentionally promoting proactive acquisition measures – guided by, for example, affirmative action agendas such as removing barriers for veterans, disability enterprises, minority-owned businesses and so on – were enacted in the 1960s in the USA, when there was a shift away from simply seeking to prohibit discrimination through contractual requirements (McCrudden 2004, p. 260). Locating social procurement within this historical continuum helps to normalize the practice, by connecting it to a long-ranging and broad suite of policy initiatives. The differentiation between direct and indirect forms of social procurement promotes a more textured engagement with the agents and processes involved in this transactional practice. These two ‘unpackings’ of social procurement as a practice are particularly helpful when engaging with policymakers and other procurers. It is also useful to differentiate between direct and indirect social procurement. For example, by its very nature, the public sector is engaged in a wide range of procurement activity that is inherently concerned with implementing policies designed to generate public

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256  The handbook of diverse economies benefit in various forms. Examples include procuring goods and services to provide health facilities, deliver education programmes, or construct a recycling plant. This is not considered social procurement as it does not intentionally seek to generate any additional socio-economic outcomes beyond the delivery of the products, services or works being purchased. However, if the procurement strategy for the hospital, education programme, or recycling plant includes objectives designed to create, for example, employment or training opportunities for people facing barriers to entering the labour market – then it would be an example of indirect social procurement. Typical approaches to indirect social procurement use contract award conditions to require certain behaviours of suppliers. These are sometimes called ‘social clauses’ or Community Benefit Clauses.3 The most commonly cited approaches to indirect social procurement include screening supply chains for ethical considerations, and inserting employment targets for particular target groups into capital works contracts awarded via competitive tender (Furneaux and Barraket 2014, p. 270). Indirect approaches focus on how a procurement activity is designed and delivered, by incorporating specially designed clauses into ‘regular’ contracts. Direct approaches to social procurement involve purchasing from various types of for-social-purpose entities (Furneaux and Barraket 2014, p. 270). For-social-purpose (also termed for-social-benefit, or for-public-benefit) suppliers are organizations and enterprises driven by a primary purpose that revolves around delivering social, environmental and/or cultural outcomes – including entities that are owned by groups or people who are considered marginalized or socially excluded. In the Australian context, for-social-purpose suppliers include, for example: not-for-profits; social enterprises; Australian Disability Enterprises; Aboriginal-owned businesses; other minority-owned businesses; social businesses; community owned cooperatives (McNeill 2015, p. 3); some worker-owned cooperatives; the emerging Fair Shares ‘solidarity cooperatives’ (see Ridley-Duff 2015); and some B-Corp certified organizations.4 Direct approaches to social procurement often take the form of ‘set-asides’ and other corralling techniques designed to build capacity amongst particular types of suppliers. Many historical examples of what we would now call social procurement fit into this category. In the remainder of this chapter I explore the ways that social procurement is generating ‘social good’ through a close reading of the relationship between the UK-based social enterprise Fusion21 and its public sector customers.

SOCIAL PROCUREMENT GENERATING ‘SOCIAL GOOD’: THE CASE OF FUSION21 Fusion21 is a social enterprise based in the Liverpool region of north-west England. Established in 2004 by seven local Housing Authorities, it now procures goods and services for public sector agencies around the UK. In England, beginning in the 1980s, Local Authorities transferred ownership of much social housing stock to not-for-profit social housing providers, like Fusion21’s Founding Members. Social housing providers are hybrid organizations. They are responsible for the expenditure of public funds, through their tenants’ housing benefit payments, and so are subject to the ‘best value’ and accountability requirements placed on public sector procurement in the UK. At the same time, social housing providers also behave like social economy organizations in their broader operations – including their reinvestment of surplus – as they are driven by a core social purpose that is their raison d’être.

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Social procurement: generating social good through market transactions  257 Fusion21 was established as a specialist stand-alone enterprise. In a climate of escalating maintenance costs, due to an ‘over-heated’ construction market, the initial explicit objective was to improve procurement efficiencies and save money. The Founding Members recognized that as social housing providers, their procurement needs were very similar, and they also had common and integral social objectives that related to improving quality of life for their tenants. As a result, they agreed to each contribute to a (modest) loan pool, which was used to establish Fusion21. The initial loan was repaid in full within 12 months, and Fusion21 has been fully self-sustaining since that time and has generated a profit every year. Through the bespoke procurement model it developed, Fusion21 has reconfigured the existing market transactions of its Founding Members and now generates significant ‘social good’, across multiple dimensions: by 2015, it had managed over £500 million worth of joint procurement contracts for 130 Members; generated £125 million in efficiency savings for its Members and created over 2000 employment opportunities for local communities in the process (Fusion21 2015); it had delivered thousands of training opportunities to local people; and generated an estimated additional economic contribution of over £30 million, in the form of regular paid work and reductions to welfare benefits (Fusion21 2013). Today Fusion21 has over 350 Members, and continues to extend its impact across all these dimensions (Fusion21 2016, 2017). Membership is open to any public sector entity across the UK; there are no fees; and there is no minimum expenditure or potential spend requirement. The efficiencies and cost savings it achieves on behalf of its Members are generated through a system of Frameworks available across service packages such as: installation of heating systems, kitchens, bathrooms, windows and doors; void security and works; installation and maintenance of roofing; maintenance and servicing of heating systems; lift installation, repair and servicing; retrofitting properties; external painting and repair works; a wide range of facilities management services; ground works; building whole houses; refurbishment of high rise apartments; and a project management and consultancy service. In essence, each Framework is a series of pre-approved supplier pools and procurement templates for sourcing and managing suppliers in key service delivery areas. The team identified early on that fairly routine services offered the greatest opportunities for improving efficiencies and facilitating bulk purchasing agreements. Each Framework ‘package’ includes template documentation for all aspects of the procurement process, as well as specification of a complete supply chain for the type of product or service – from manufacturers, to distributors and services providers. The cost savings achieved for Members flow primarily from the central coordination of the complete package. This reduces duplication of procedures and eliminates the administration cost loadings that are often added at each step of the supply chain. It also delivers substantial workflow advantages, as the critical path for the complete project is handled centrally. Fusion21 presents aggregated demand to the market, which means it has significant purchasing power. Harnessing this, a sophisticated two-tiered approach to social procurement that successfully combines direct and indirect forms has been developed. Members are directly purchasing from a social enterprise (Fusion21), whilst the Frameworks incorporate community benefit clauses and other indirect mechanisms into what would otherwise be fairly regular public works contracts.

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258  The handbook of diverse economies Reframing ‘Efficiencies’ – For Social Good One of the things we’ve been saying to the public sector is ‘why are you letting all those massive contracts with the private sector’. It’s about the best outcomes and the best return on your investment overall . . . The question we’re raising is ‘could social enterprise do that for you, in a different way’. The private sector equation means that there must be some profit – whatever you’re doing you’ve got to have a slice of that for your shareholders. We’re not arguing about that, profit is not a dirty word. Profit is a good word. It’s just that we choose to do something different with our profit. We have this motto – profits into people and not pockets. That’s the difference really. (Fusion21 Board interview)

Fusion21’s model is unequivocally designed to achieve the lowest possible price at the highest possible quality. The innovation this single-minded focus has facilitated is the requirement that one per cent of the cost savings generated be allocated to a ‘social value levy’. The levy is built into the contract price agreed with suppliers, ensuring complete transparency in where and how it is collected. Membership includes agreeing to the Procurement Policy, which requires that the social value levy be spent on the development and delivery of programmes designed to meet social value objectives that are negotiated between the Fusion21 team and the Member. Both sides of this equation are non-negotiable. For many Members, primary amongst the social value objectives is the creation of employment and training opportunities for their constituents. Therefore, a standard social clause in Fusion21’s supplier agreements is that for each £500 000 of contract value an employment opportunity must be created by the supplier. Many of Fusion21’s Members also apply their social value levy to local regeneration projects, including upgrading community facilities and supporting community capacity-building initiatives. Being aligned in purpose, Fusion21 also ensures Members’ requirements around tenant involvement and amenity are integrated into how projects are delivered. This includes engaging residents early in the process around works that may impact them: communication groups are established, people are involved in the design phase and in finance groups for the projects; schedules are arranged to ensure the minimum disruption to households, and issues are tightly managed. Members also consistently access higher quality goods and services than they would be able to on their own, and these benefits flow on to their tenants and other constituents. The green credentials of materials and processes are also prioritized and integrated into Frameworks. This improves the performance of assets over time, ensures the Members’ compliance with increasingly rigorous environmental regulations, and also delivers household-level cost savings to tenants.5 Fusion21 also has a clear purpose around building capacity and stability into its supply chain. In its core operating area of north-west England, 95 per cent of people working in the construction industry are employed by a small or medium-sized enterprise. It is therefore these businesses that, arguably, are best positioned to provide the kind of longer-term employment opportunities needed to support programme participants to successfully transition into open market employment. However, the suppliers can’t guarantee these positions will be available when contracts are piecemeal, and therefore a lot of effort goes into stabilizing workflow for the supply network. A steady stream of work has flow-on effects for local residents and households in the region as a whole, beyond the social housing tenant participants. Whilst no specific assessment has been undertaken to validate the local economic multiplier effect6 of Fusion21’s model, it is also likely that a significant portion of the income generated across all these groups is spent on local purchasing, generating further economic benefits beyond the immediate supply chain.

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Social procurement: generating social good through market transactions  259 Establishing Fusion21 as a social enterprise was a clear and intentional decision by the Founding Members, as it ensures the social purpose is embedded into all aspects of the model. This includes ensuring that the substantial cost savings and efficiencies generated for all the public sector Members are retained in the public purse, and not extracted to benefit private interests. The surplus (or profit) Fusion21 generates for itself, over and above its operating costs, is reinvested. Since 2014, this has been through the Fusion21 Foundation. Fusion21 Foundation is now the parent company, through which governance decisions must flow. It was established as a charitable body to further embed the social purpose and to ensure a long-term legacy. The Foundation uses the funds to deliver its own social-purpose projects and to support those of other social enterprises that have complementary socio-economic objectives. The Fusion21 Assemblage – Diverse Actors and Processes The engine-house of Fusion21’s model is the fully integrated nature of the two key elements – the efficiencies delivered by the Frameworks, and the social value levy the resulting cost savings facilitate. These two forms of value are referred to as the ‘cashable’ and the ‘non-cashable’ savings. To achieve these mixed-value outcomes, the model draws on a diverse assemblage of economic actors and processes. Working with and through this assemblage, Fusion21 is driving social value outcomes throughout a diverse supply chain – one which includes commercial businesses, government entities, and other for-purpose enterprises. This diverse economy assemblage is knitted together through the relationships and socio-technical processes created, and through these delivers a sophisticated social procurement model that innovatively combines direct and indirect strategies. Now, with almost 15 years’ track record, Fusion21 has the data needed to substantiate the social procurement ‘value proposition’. Its story also provides practical insights into how the ‘rules of the game’ can be negotiated and reframed through ‘processes of social construction’ (Bovaird 2006, p. 99), so that public sector policymakers are ‘sharing the driver’s seat’ in peer-to-peer style relationships. It is in these rules of the game that intentions to make different decisions and/or to make decisions differently can be agreed and codified. Successful cases, like that of Fusion21, offer opportunities for improving our understanding of how these rules are negotiated, and between whom. This greater visibility and clarity is key, if social procurement is to become more normalized within policymaking contexts (Barraket et al. 2016, pp. 50–52).

CONCLUSION Social procurement allows us to ‘start where we are’; to configure and reconfigure resources in different ways and to identify and amplify existing tools and resources (Manzini 2015). Rather than waiting for an event of ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter 2010) to recalibrate relationships with the state, social procurement is a pragmatic approach that has potential to act as one of the many hinges needed to bridge ‘between an old world and a new’ (Murray 2009, p. 5). Rather than designating state actors as ‘other’, finding ways to work with current systems and cultures will be central to increasing the ‘number, extent, and reach of associations’ (St. Martin et al. 2015, p. 21) that can be enrolled in addressing complex public issues and in generating social good.

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260  The handbook of diverse economies In the case of Fusion21, a broad range of diverse economic actors and processes are working in a bespoke assemblage. Alternative market transactions are generating sustainable revenue streams for themselves, and for other for-social-purpose and local-level enterprises. New forms of social value are being created through reconfiguring markets; new norms and frames of reference are being established; and the model is being diffused into the broader policy contexts in which they operate. Significant improvements in social relations are also being realized, through reconfiguring governance relationships at various levels. In particular, there is sustained collaborative interaction between the agents involved, including in the establishment of objectives, policy trajectories and roles. In a demonstration of shifting subjectivities, the parties involved have been both created and transformed through the shared pursuit of addressing a complex issue (Sorensen and Torfing 2015, p. 154). An important feature of the Fusion21 model is its gradual and iterative development. The approach is based on a clear vision and sustained commitment – one which both facilitates and relies on the ‘gathering of friends’ around its goals along the way, and through this the broad diffusion of its for-purpose influence (Akrich et al. 2002). As Fusion21 continues to evolve within an increasingly constrained budgetary context, understanding the relationships involved as contingent and in a constant state of negotiation will be central to keeping broader political questions in focus, and thus continuing to respond to the political nature of social change. Existing and already-committed public sector budgets are a significant resource pool, particularly in the prevailing climate of shrinking discretional funding. There are obviously significant issues related to the rise of austerity budget policies. The representation offered here, of how one ‘efficiency agenda’ has been responded to, is not intended to trivialize these in any way, but rather – in the community economies tradition – to offer a hopeful stance that opens up possibilities for action from within the existing paradigm.

NOTES 1. For example, see Social Traders (2014) and https://​supplynation​.org​.au/​(accessed 27 February 2019). 2. For a more extended discussion on this, see McNeill (2017). 3. The Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 defines Community Benefit requirements as ‘. . . a contractual requirement imposed by a contracting authority: (a) relating to i) training and recruitment or ii) the availability of sub-contracting opportunities, or (b) which is otherwise intended to improve the economic, social or environmental wellbeing of the authority’s area in a way additional to the main purpose of the contract in which the requirement is included’ (Scottish Government n.d.). 4. See https://​bcorporation​net/​(accessed 27 February 2019). 5. In addition to these ‘social value outcomes’, a range of benefits to suppliers and the local economy are also made possible through the model. For a discussion of these dimensions, see McNeill (2017). 6. The additional economic benefit accrued to a geographically defined area, from money spent in the local economy (Moretti 2010).

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Social procurement: generating social good through market transactions  261

REFERENCES Akrich, M., M. Callon and B. Latour (2002), ‘The key to success in innovation Part I: The art of interessement’, International Journal of Innovation Management, 6 (2), 187–206. Arrowsmith, S. (2010), ‘Horizontal policies in public procurement: A taxonomy’, Journal of Public Procurement, 10 (2), 149–86. Barraket, J., R. Keast and C. Furneaux (2016), Social Procurement and New Public Governance, London: Routledge. Bovaird, T. (2006), ‘Developing new forms of partnership with the “market” in the procurement of public services’, Public Administration, 84 (1), 81–102. Furneaux, C. and J. Barraket (2014), ‘Purchasing social good(s): A definition and typology of social procurement’, Public Money & Management, 34 (4), 265–327. Fusion21 (2013), ‘We are 10’, accessed 12 May 2019 at https://​www​.fusion21​.co​.uk/​media/​2232/​ smallfusion21interactive​.pdf. Fusion21 (2015), ‘Annual Report 2015’, accessed 27 February 2019 at https://​www​.fusion21​.co​.uk/​ news/​2015/​fusion21​-annual​-report​-2015/​. Fusion21 (2016), ‘Annual Report Summary 15/16’, accessed 11 May 2019 at https://​www​fusion21​.co​ .uk/​news/​2016/​check​-out​-our​-2015​-2016​-annual​-report​-summary/​. Fusion21 (2017), ‘Annual Report Summary 2016–17’, accessed 11 May 2019 at https://​www​fusion21​ .co​.uk/​media/​2229/​fusion21​-annual​-report​-summary​-2016​-17​.pdf. Manzini, E. (2015), Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, London: MIT Press. Mazzucato, M. (2013), The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, London: Anthem Press. Mazzucato, M. (2015), ‘From market fixing to market-creating: A new framework for economic policy’, Working Paper Series, 2015–25, accessed 27 February 2019 at http://​www​.isigrowth​.eu/​wp​-content/​ uploads/​2015/​11/​working​_paper​_2015​_2​.pdf. McCrudden, C. (2004), ‘Using public procurement to achieve social outcomes’, Natural Resources Forum, 28, 257–67. McCrudden, C. (2007), Buying Social Justice: Equality, Government Procurement, and Legal Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNeill, J. (2015), ‘Insights into social procurement: From policy to practice’, accessed 27 February 2019 at http:// socialprocurementaustralasia​.com/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2015/​07/​SPA​-Insights​-From​ -Policy​-to​-Practice​-2015​_FINAL​.pdf. McNeill, J. (2017), ‘Enabling social innovation assemblages: Strengthening public sector involvement’, Doctoral Dissertation, Western Sydney University, Australia. Moretti, E. (2010), ‘Local multipliers’, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 100, 373–7. Murray, R. (2009), Danger and Opportunity: Crisis and the New Social Economy (Provocation 09), London: NESTA. Ridley-Duff, R. (2015), The Case for Fair Shares, Sheffield: The Fair Shares Association. Schumpeter, J. (2010 [1943]), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London: Routledge. Scottish Government (n.d.), Community Benefit Clauses, accessed 11 May 2019 at https://​ www​ .legislation​.gov​.uk/​asp/​2014/​12/​section/​24. Social Traders (2014), Corporate Social Procurement in Australia: Business Creating Social Value, accessed 11 May 2019 at https://​www​.socialtraders​.com​.au/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2016/​04/​WEBSTC​ orporateSocialP​rocurementinAustralia2013​.pdf. Sorensen, E. and J. Torfing (2015), ‘Enhancing public innovation through collaboration, leadership and New Public Governance’, in A. Nicholls, J. Simon and M. Gabriel (eds), New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 145–69. St. Martin, K., G. Roelvink and J.K. Gibson-Graham (2015), ‘Introduction’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–25.

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29. Sharing cities: new urban imaginaries for diverse economies Darren Sharp

INTRODUCTION The sharing economy is an emerging socio-economic movement comprising commercial, community and public sector actors that enable the peer-to-peer sharing of goods and services via digital platforms and social networks. This movement is increasing access over ownership and unlocking the idling capacity of assets where people rent, share and exchange a variety of stuff, space and skills (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Gansky 2010). Commercial sharing economy businesses have developed digital platforms to monetize various transactions via two-sided marketplaces that connect service providers like drivers, accommodation hosts and couriers with customers. This has led to the rapid take-up of new transportation and food delivery services (Uber and Deliveroo), short-stay holiday rental platforms (Airbnb), task-based service exchanges (Airtasker and TaskRabbit) and online marketplaces for buying and selling goods (eBay). Commercial sharing for-profit belies a diversity of other sharing economy interactions that include alternative market and non-market transactions, reciprocal modes of exchange and commoning practices. Community sharing pre-dates much of the commercial platforms and is driven by grassroots innovations that match needs with haves at the local level and the cultivation of mutual aid networks (Schor 2015). Examples of community sharing include community gardening, food sharing, time banking, carpooling, toy libraries and clothing swaps. These sharing practices are often initiated and run by volunteers with support from auspicing organizations that include community associations, neighbourhood groups and local government. Community sharing appreciates the strengths of local residents, involves the commoning of shared resources to create systems of self-provisioning, and builds solidarity through place-based connections between peers. In addition to this, a variety of ethical sharing economy actors are experimenting with various forms of postcapitalist entrepreneurship (Cohen 2017). These actors utilize different types of paid and unpaid labour to create common pool resources and greater economic plurality. For example, peer production communities generate shared knowledge commons via open source software and Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. Open Design and Distributed Manufacturing uses circular economy principles to revive local production through makerspaces and 3D printing. Platform cooperatives combine digital platforms with democratic ownership to redistribute surplus back to value creators in the form of good livelihoods. They build economic interdependence and offer ethical digital marketplaces for service providers and customers alike. These alternative transactions and exchanges create a community economy through worker empowerment, respect for different forms of labour and mechanisms to support local economic development. 262 Darren Sharp - 9781788119962 08:01:22PM

Sharing cities: new urban imaginaries for diverse economies  263 The agglomeration benefits of proximity, density and amenity of shared assets in cities have made the sharing economy a distinctly ‘urban phenomenon’ (Davidson and Infranca 2016). Cities are also a canvass on which to dream about the future and project our hopes, fears, politics and preferred modes of economic development. Urban imaginaries are the embodied images, visions and narratives of the city which structure action and reveal certain pathways while at the same time obscuring other possibilities. Urban imaginaries provide an important context for enacting community economies by organizing the scope of possible city futures, the range of actors who get to play a role, and the choice of actions to drive transformative change. New urban imaginaries have emerged in recent years which present alternative visions of city futures outside of the dominant capitalocentric economic narrative. Sharing cities are a new urban imaginary of the sharing economy grounded in grassroots innovation, municipal provisioning of sharing infrastructure and diverse forms of sharing that generate social justice, economic democracy and ecological sustainability (Shareable 2018). Sharing cities encourage urban experimentation that brings civil society, local government and market actors together to co-produce and co-govern the city as a commons. Local governments play an enabling role in bringing sharing cities to life through policies and programmes to support more diverse forms of sharing to solve urban challenges. Sharing cities like Seoul and Amsterdam have made their assets and infrastructure more amenable to sharing. Other municipalities like Bologna in Italy have reimagined the city as a commons and introduced institutional innovations through regulations to enable the co-governance of shared resources between the city and citizens (Gorenflo 2015). This includes everything from public buildings and open data, to vacant land, empty shopfronts and underutilized space. This chapter looks at the commercial sharing economy as a mode of ‘transactional sharing’ geared towards the monetization of public and private assets and discusses some of the impacts this is having on cities, workers and urban governance. It then introduces a range of cases that demonstrate how diverse forms of ‘transformational sharing’ initiated by community actors, postcapitalist entrepreneurs and local governments can empower grassroots agency through the co-production and co-governance of shared urban resources. I show how new urban imaginaries like sharing cities develop an alternative narrative of the sharing economy to reframe the context of urban economic development and utilize transformational sharing to create other economies.

TRANSACTIONAL SHARING The sharing economy developed rapidly in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Silicon Valley is home to many of the largest commercial platforms including Airbnb, Uber and TaskRabbit. Neal Gorenflo, co-founder of the non-profit news and action hub Shareable, makes a distinction between ‘transactional sharing’ which is primarily motivated by profit and resource efficiency, and ‘transformational sharing’ which involves a shift in power relations that builds social capital and community resilience through cooperation and strengthening of the urban commons (Ede 2014). Commercial sharing economy businesses facilitate transactional sharing through digital platforms that monetize formally out-of-reach areas of private and communal life. For instance, a shared lift to work, a helping hand, or a spare room for an out-of-town guest have all become commodities to be bought and sold through a range of commercial sharing economy platforms.

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264  The handbook of diverse economies The commercial sharing economy’s most high-profile protagonists – Uber and Airbnb – have scaled rapidly under the mantra of ‘disruptive innovation’ while pursuing a hyper-capitalist growth model fuelled by billions of dollars in venture capital funding and a disdain of government regulation. These commercial sharing actors have ignited controversy and led to court battles with city governments, regulators, workers and incumbents in the taxi and hotel industries. Commercial sharing platforms pursue exponential growth to extract maximum value for a small group of founders, investors and shareholders. This has created a zero-sum game of speculative venture capital investment into a handful of commercial platforms which must become ‘platform monopolies’ to cement their market dominance, attract additional capital and maintain multi-billion-dollar valuations in the hope of being acquired by a bigger tech giant or a public launch on the New York Stock Exchange (Rushkoff 2016). In addition to the commercial platforms’ extractive business models and monetization of everyday interactions, a range of negative externalities have been unleashed through competitive market dynamics. Uber cars actually increase road congestion in some major cities (LeBlanc 2018), while its drivers face arbitrary deactivation with little recourse to appeal (Marin-Guzman 2017). Australian Uber drivers earn less than half the minimum wage once fees paid to the platform, income tax, GST (goods and services tax) and car running costs are taken into account (Stanford 2018). While many on-demand platforms like Uber and Deliveroo function as labour hire firms they do not classify workers as employees which has led to ongoing court battles and a race to the bottom for lower pay and conditions (Hill 2015). Rental platform Airbnb exacerbates the housing affordability crisis and intensifies gentrification in cities the world over as long-term rental stock is removed from the housing market and converted into short-stay accommodation (Wachsmuth et al. 2018). Commercial sharing platforms provide convenient services to customers and have increased the wealth of start-up founders and venture capital investors. But this has come at the expense of workers who are mostly independent contractors that struggle to make a living. Revelations about the poor treatment and conditions of rideshare drivers and food delivery couriers has led to much criticism including the suggestion that the commercial sharing economy relies on a depressed labour market and is just a guise for ‘monetizing stuff and labor in creative ways’ (Roose 2014). Digital labour scholar Trebor Scholz has described the commercial sharing economy’s use of casual labour and zero-hour contracts as a “platform capitalism that is built on socialized risks and privatized profits” (Lietaert 2016). The market exchanges and business models utilized by commercial sharing economy platforms increase inequality by eroding labour standards and entitlements like annual leave. Commercial sharing platforms are also having an impact on urban governance and public sector spending. For example, the town of Innisfil, Ontario redirected investment in public transit towards a partnership with Uber to transport people through a subsidized fares pilot (Pelley 2017). But what happens when fares go up, drivers can’t earn a living wage or Uber leaves town? In San Francisco commercial platforms have used venture capital funding to successfully lobby for policy changes that favour deregulation and have been offered tax incentives from ‘tech-friendly city governments’ (McNeill 2016). While transactional sharing embodies the dominant capitalocentric logic of economic growth, privatization and enclosure of the commons, it represents only one aspect of the sharing economy.

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Sharing cities: new urban imaginaries for diverse economies  265

TRANSFORMATIONAL SHARING In contrast to transactional sharing’s playbook of disruptive innovation, rapid scale and growth, transformational sharing is concerned with connection, replication and place-based economies that appreciate the strengths of local communities. Examples in Melbourne, Australia include the Clothing Exchange, a social enterprise that runs regular clothing swaps to encourage sustainable fashion; the organization 3000acres which partners with public and private asset owners to unlock vacant land to grow food through urban agriculture; and the Brunswick Tool Library, a volunteer-run organization that pools a range of machinery and equipment for hire by local residents to promote sustainable consumption. These examples of transformational sharing engender a range of alternative market and non-market transactions that include sharing, swapping, commoning and gifting of tangible and intangible assets to create ‘diverse encounters with others’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). These encounters take place through myriad community sharing initiatives that include community gardens, Men’s Sheds, tool libraries, Repair Cafés, skillshares, seed banks and food swaps. Such diverse forms of sharing build resilience at the local level through mutuality, solidarity and the co-production of shared resources which enables citizens to create stronger trust-based relationships with peers to overcome material and social deprivation. Transformational sharing helps people live more fulfilling lives by reframing idle stuff, space and skills as opportunities to share, learn and connect strengths, person to person in local communities. Transformational sharing also supports different types of paid and unpaid labour in the co-production of shared resources. Yochai Benkler (2006) coined the term ‘commons-based peer production’ to describe non-hierarchical forms of value created outside of the market and state via shared knowledge and participatory cultural production in the open source software and Wikipedia communities. In peer production communities, value is distributed back to the commons in the form of open software, knowledge and design and participants have access to these shared resources for mutual benefit. Commons-based systems function on principles of abundance because all actors can share labour and knowledge between peers “to generate common value outside of the market logic” (Bauwens and Iacomella 2014). Open Design and Distributed Manufacturing is a form of peer production that pools shared knowledge and labour to create physical goods sourced from local supply chains to revive local manufacturing and reduce carbon emissions (Kostakis et al. 2016). AbilityMate is a social enterprise in Sydney that uses open design and 3D printing to peer-produce assistive devices with people who have disabilities. Technology is developed through collaboration between designers, carers, therapists and people with disabilities, working together to co-design solutions matched to individual needs. AbilityMate maintains a commons of open source designs and has set up local makerspaces to produce devices including orthotics and other mobility equipment for children. Community actors have developed other forms of transformational sharing through grassroots innovations that utilize unpaid labour as a response to the profligacy of planned obsolescence and a throwaway culture fuelled by the fallacy of endless economic growth. Repair Cafés started in Amsterdam to connect people with broken items too good to throw away, with peers in the community willing to offer repair skills. There are now over 1000 Repair Cafés in operation around the world keeping usable clothing, footwear, toys, furniture and household appliances out of landfill (Sharp 2018a). These public gatherings not only bring goods back

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266  The handbook of diverse economies to life and teach people valuable repair skills, they also reduce waste and foster stronger community connections. Other forms of transformational sharing include postcapitalist entrepreneurship which uses cooperative ownership to redistribute surplus back to the drivers, couriers and workers in the sharing economy. Trebor Scholz (2016) developed the term ‘platform cooperative’ to describe a new category of enterprise that is concerned with protecting the financial interests of people who create value in the sharing economy through collective ownership and democratic governance. The emerging platform cooperatives sector is giving workers the ability to become part-owners of the platforms they rely on for their livelihoods. Stocksy United is an artist-owned stock photography platform cooperative which shares 50 per cent of standard licence fees with its owner-photographers (Cortese 2016). Green Taxi Cooperative is a rideshare service which distributes profits back to its 800 driver-owners and will leverage the procurement of local anchor institutions in Denver, Colorado to support community wealth building (Stearn 2016). These ethical marketplaces address concerns for social equity and workers’ rights by combining digital platforms with democratic governance to engender solidarity through worker-owned structures.

SHARING CITIES New urban imaginaries create alternative visions and narratives of economic development that “opens up a wider set of possibilities” for more diverse forms of organization and distributive mechanisms that challenge the dominant capitalocentric economic narrative (Longhurst et al. 2016, p. 69). The sharing city is a new imaginary of urban transformation that valorizes peer-to-peer collaboration and democratic citizen participation to create greater social and economic inclusion (McLaren and Agyeman 2015). Sharing cities amplify the role of citizen as city maker and foster co-governance of the city as a commons through greater collaboration between the community and local government in the stewardship of shared resources (Foster and Iaione 2015). Shareable developed the vision of sharing cities as a new urban imaginary and social movement that reframes the city as a platform for transformational sharing (Sharp 2018b). Shareable’s vision of sharing cities tells a new story of the sharing economy grounded in a diverse range of grassroots innovations, urban commoning, non-market transactions and systems of self-provisioning which enrich the lives of people and communities. To achieve this vision Shareable published Policies for Shareable Cities (Orsi et al. 2013) and the follow-up Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons (Shareable 2018) which contains case studies and model policies to support commons-based forms of urban sharing. Shareable also launched the Sharing Cities Network to mobilize community advocacy and provide the digital infrastructure to support its transformative vision of the sharing economy. One of the network’s first actions was a series of MapJams which inspired the creation of community sharing maps in over 50 cities around the world using asset mapping to appreciate local strengths (Johnson 2013). Asset mapping is a powerful way to enact sharing cities and make diverse transactions more visible; it helps convene local actors for community building and creates new opportunities for people to access a range of shared resources. Local governments can play a key role in sharing cities by enabling diverse stakeholders to co-govern the city as a commons through policy innovations that set out the rules for the

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Sharing cities: new urban imaginaries for diverse economies  267 stewardship of shared resources. The City of Bologna’s ‘Regulation on Collaboration Between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons’ enables residents to collaborate with local government and establish civic partnership agreements to co-govern public space, parks and vacant buildings or land (City of Bologna 2014). These agreements, signed by both citizens and local government, require the city to provide assistance to meet agreed tasks, and are a “critical tool of legal experimentation in shared governance” (Iaione, 2016 p. 424). City governments are also instrumental partners in designing services, subsidies and regulations to distribute the benefits of the sharing economy to the wider community. Actors from the public and private sectors declared Amsterdam Europe’s first sharing city and convened an ambassador group with local stakeholders to develop a programme of activities that support local sharing projects (Miller 2015). In South Korea, the Mayor of Seoul, Won-soon Park initiated Sharing City Seoul, a world-leading programme that encompasses public awareness, start-up incubation, new regulations and access to the city’s 800 public buildings during idle hours (Johnson 2014). The Seoul Metropolitan Government (2014) through its Sharing City Seoul programme provides subsidies from taxes paid by citizens to support sharing enterprises and organizations that commit to solving urban challenges in the social welfare, culture, environment or transportation sectors. In Malmö, Sweden, the city government supports local sharing, making and repair through municipally funded sharing infrastructure like STPLN, ‘a multipurpose maker space’ incorporating a bike kitchen, tools for digital fabrication, a free co-working space and a textile workshop (Hult and Bradley 2017). Kirklees Council in the United Kingdom created Comoodle, a stuff, space and skills matching platform that provides asset sharing targeted to local community groups in need of resources (https://​www​.comoodle​.com [accessed 28 April 2019]). Participatory City’s ‘Every One Every Day’ project is developing a network of communal infrastructure across Barking and Dagenham in London with shared kitchens, storage space, a workshop and warehouse to enable local residents to share assets “for bulk cooking, food growing, tree planting, for trading, making and repairing, and for growing community businesses” (http://​www​.participatorycity​.org/​every​-one​-every​-day/​ [accessed 28 April 2019]). Together these cases demonstrate how sharing cities drive transformational sharing through alternative market and non-market transactions, reciprocal modes of exchange and the commoning of shared resources.

CONCLUSION This chapter has shown how the sharing economy is an emerging socio-economic movement comprising commercial, community and public sector actors who engage in different forms of market, peer-to-peer and non-market exchanges. Profit-led commercial platforms use transactional sharing to sell or rent ‘idle assets’ to primarily maximize owner, investor and shareholder returns. This has enabled people to perform and utilize flexible task-based work via rideshare apps (Uber) and errand marketplaces (Airtasker and Deliveroo) but also shifted risk onto independent contractors and has drawn criticism from labour advocates for increasing casualization, worker precarity and inequality. The growth of commercial platforms and transactional sharing has also led to the removal of long-term rental stock from the housing market, diverted municipal investment in public transit and impacted urban governance through deregulation and tax minimization in the pursuit of shareholder returns.

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268  The handbook of diverse economies Transformational sharing, in contrast, brings diverse others together to build resilience at the local level through commoning and the self-provisioning of assets including knowledge, time and skills that play to the strengths of communities and create relationships grounded in cooperation, mutual support and solidarity. Sharing cities offer a new urban imaginary that brings cities and citizens together through new forms of co-production and co-governance to strengthen the city as a commons and reframe the context of urban economic development. Case studies have demonstrated how transformational sharing creates a community economy through alternative market and non-market transactions, different forms of labour and postcapitalist entrepreneurship that redistributes surplus back to workers in support of good livelihoods. Finally, transformational sharing and sharing cities reframe the sharing economy to reveal other worlds of possibility and enact different social realities that engender socio-economic interdependence, economic plurality, and care for others through the stewardship of shared resources.

REFERENCES Bauwens, M. and F. Iacomella (2014), ‘Peer-to-peer economy and new civilization centered around the sustenance of the commons’, in D. Bollier and S. Helfrich (eds), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, Amherst, MA: Levellers Press, pp. 323–30. Benkler, Y. (2006), The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Botsman, R. and R. Rogers (2010), What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, New York: HarperCollins. City of Bologna (2014), ‘Regulation on collaboration between citizens and the city for the care and regeneration of urban commons’, accessed 4 March 2018 at http://​www​.comune​.bologna​.it/​media/​ files/​bolognaregulation​.pdf . Cohen, B. (2017), Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship: Startups for the 99%, Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. Cortese, A. (2016), ‘A new wrinkle in the gig economy: Workers get most of the money’, accessed 30 March 2018 at https://​www​ nytimes​.com/​2016/​07/​21/​business/​smallbusiness/​a​-new​-wrinkle​-in​-the​ -gig​-economy​-workers​-get​-most​-of​-the​-money​.html. Davidson, N.M. and J.J. Infranca (2016), ‘The sharing economy as an urban phenomenon’, Yale Law & Policy Review, 34 (215), 215–79. Ede, S. (2014), ‘Transactional sharing, transformational sharing’, accessed 19 March 2018 at http://​ postgrowth​.org/​transactional​-sharing​-transformational​-sharing​-2/​. Foster, S.R. and C. Iaione (2015), ‘The city as a commons’, Yale Law & Policy Review, 34 (2), 281. Gansky, L. (2010), The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, New York: Penguin Books. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gorenflo, N. (2015), ‘Bologna celebrates one year of a bold experiment in urban communing’, accessed 18 March 2018 at https://​www​.shareable​ net/​blog/​bologna​-celebrates​-one​-year​-of​-a​-bold​-experiment​ -in​-urban​-commoning. Hill, S. (2015), Raw Deal: How the ‘Uber Economy’ and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hult, A. and K. Bradley (2017), ‘Planning for sharing: Providing infrastructure for citizens to be makers and sharers’, Planning Theory & Practice, 18 (4), 597–615. Iaione, C. (2016), ‘The co-city: Sharing, collaborating, cooperating, and commoning in the city’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 75 (2), 415–55. Johnson, C. (2013), ‘We gathered, we mapped, we shared: A #MapJam follow-up’, accessed 14 March 2018 at http://​www​.shareable​ net/​blog/​we​-gathered​-we​-mapped​-we​-shared​-a​-mapjam​-follow​-up. Johnson, C. (2014), ‘Sharing city Seoul: A model for the world’, accessed 19 March 2018 at http://​www​ .shareable​ net/​blog/​sharing​-city​-seoul​-a​-model​-for​-the​-world.

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Sharing cities: new urban imaginaries for diverse economies  269 Kostakis, V., K. Latoufis, M. Liarokapis and M. Bauwens (2016), ‘The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (2), 1684–93. LeBlanc, S. (2018), ‘Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities’, accessed 29 March 2018 at https://​www​.apnews​.com/​e47ebfaa1b184​130984e2f3501bd125d/​Studies​-are​-increasingly​-clear:​ -Uber​,​-Lyft​-congest​-cities. Lietaert, M. (2016), ‘Bringing the platform co-op “Rebel Cities” together’, accessed 22 March 2018 at https://​www​.shareable​ net/​blog/​bringing​-the​-platform​-co​-op​-rebel​-cities​-together​-an​-interview​-with​ -trebor​-scholz. Longhurst, N., F. Avelino, J. Wittmayer, P. Weaver, A. Dumitru, S. Hielscher and M. Elle (2016), ‘Experimenting with alternative economies: Four emergent counter-narratives of urban economic development’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 22, 69–74. Marin-Guzman, D. (2017), ‘Uber settling unfair dismissal claims for deactivated drivers’, accessed 28 March 2018 at http://​www​.afr​.com/​news/​policy/​industrial​-relations/​uber​-settling​-unfair​-dismissal​ -claims​-for​-deactivated​-drivers​-20170629​-gx0z2e​#ixzz5B8ClUUlW. McLaren, D. and J. Agyeman (2015), Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. McNeill, D. (2016), ‘Governing a city of unicorns: Technology capital and the urban politics of San Francisco’, Urban Geography, 37 (4), 494–513. Miller, A. (2015), ‘Amsterdam is now Europe’s first named sharing city’, accessed 20 March 2018 at http://​www​.shareable​ net/​blog/​amsterdam​-is​-now​-europes​-first​-named​-sharing​-city. Orsi, J. and the Sustainable Economies Law Centre Team (2013), Policies for Shareable Cities: A Sharing Economy Policy Primer for Urban Leaders, San Francisco, CA: Shareable and the Sustainable Economies Law Centre. Pelley, L. (2017), ‘Innisfil, Ont., partners with Uber to create substitute for public transit’, accessed 26 July 2018 at https://​www​.cbc​.ca/​news/​canada/​toronto/​innisfil​-uber​-partnership​-launching​-1​.4114816. Roose, K. (2014), ‘The sharing economy isn’t about trust, it’s about desperation’, accessed 22 March 2018 at http://​nymag​.com/​daily/​intelligencer/​2014/​04/​sharing​-economy​-is​-about​-desperation​ html. Rushkoff, D. (2016), Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, New York: Penguin Books. Scholz, T. (2016), ‘Platform cooperativism: Challenging the corporate sharing economy’, accessed 20 March 2018 at http://​www​ rosalux​-nyc​.org/​wp​-content/​files​_mf/​scholz​_platformcoop​_5​.9​.2016​.pdf. Schor, J.B. (2015), ‘Getting sharing right’, Contexts, 14 (1), 14–15. Seoul Metropolitan Government (2014), ‘Sharing city’, accessed 12 March 2018 at https://​ www​ .slideshare​ net/​cckslide/​sharing​-cityseoulenglish. Shareable (2018), Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, San Francisco, CA: Shareable. Sharp, D. (2018a), ‘The Repair Café Foundation builds community by fixing things’, accessed 21 March 2018 at https://​www​.shareable​ net/​blog/​the​-repair​-caf​%C3​%A9​-foundation​-builds​-community​-by​ -fixing​-things. Sharp, D. (2018b), ‘Sharing cities for urban transformation: Narrative, policy and practice’, Urban Policy and Research, 36 (4), 513–26. Stanford, J. (2018), ‘Subsidising billionaires: Simulating the net incomes of UberX drivers in Australia’, Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute. Stearn, M. (2016), ‘Green Taxi Cooperative: Building an alternative to the corporate “sharing economy”’, Democracy Collaborative, accessed 30 March 2018 at https://​community​-wealth​.org/​content/​green​ -taxi​-cooperative​-building​-alternative​-corporate​-sharing​-economy. Wachsmuth, D., D. Chaney, D. Kerrigan, A. Shillolo and R. Basalaev-Binder (2018), ‘The high cost of short-term rentals in New York City’, A report from the Urban Politics and Governance Research Group, School of Urban Planning, McGill University, Montreal.

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30. Framing essay: the diversity of property Kevin St. Martin

Property relations can be configured as exclusionary, violent, and marginalizing. Yet they can also be the means by which individuals find meaning in the world, anchor themselves in communities, and contest extant power relations. (Blomley 2002, p. 577)

INTRODUCTION Property can be defined in many ways. Generally it includes some understanding about exclusive rights to access and use of a resource or place, possession of an object or territory with a right to exclude others, or the ability to dispose of, or exchange an owned object. We might experience these different aspects of property across a wide range of contexts such as owning a share in a cooperative enterprise, feeling possessive and caring for a park bench or stretch of beach, sharing space and household goods with family members, inheriting legal title to a house or plot of land, harvesting wood or grazing goats on a commons, being sole owner of a farm or factory, or buying one’s own motor scooter. Importantly, while property might be specified and codified in law, tradition, religious practice or international agreement, it is clear that in all cases it is a relationship between people with respect to things. It is this relationship (and not the thing in itself) that defines how such things might be accessed, utilized, accumulated, shared or leveraged for some future benefit. This relationship between people and things can be private, open access or commoned in various ways. Seeing the diversity of property helps us understand that property is an assemblage of social, legal, technical, economic and embodied relationships. Property is enacted, or bundled together, legitimated and maintained over time by different ‘property regimes’ that are enforced and administered variously by the state, tradition, religious practice, common law, international agreement or interpersonal negotiation. Being attentive to property, then, means being attentive to a range of practices that include and overflow legal title, and which actually enact property, fix it, and make it durable. All these enactments are the sites of diverse economy intervention and practice. This chapter foregrounds what we miss when property is reduced to a single legal ruling or the existence of a title granting sole ownership and rights to possess and exclude. It elaborates the many practices of property that shape its contours and format its capacities relative to economy. The following section sketches hegemonic understandings of property, particularly those that position private property as inseparable from capitalist forms of economy. Using the case of property in land and the advent of enclosure, which signalled the institutionalization of a particular and now hegemonic form of ‘private’ property, I explore property’s dynamics and powers as well as its relationship to economy. In the next section I illustrate how property can be overtaken and ‘occupied’ by collective action to initiate different engagements with property such that it serves community ends in beneficial and ethical ways. Here I use the 271 Kevin St. Martin - 9781788119962 08:01:26PM

272  The handbook of diverse economies example of Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises (ERT, empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores). What follows is a discussion of the limits of conceiving property as only established via the law and the implications of the latter for (re)entangling property with an ethical concern for local livelihoods, community well-being and cooperative futures. The goal throughout is to demonstrate how property, despite the primacy of private property and its association with individual accumulation, might be leveraged in the practice of ‘commoning’.1

PROPERTY COMMON SENSE: PRIVATE PROPERTY While many common understandings of possession and rights to access and use exist, the dominant property regime in most parts of the world is that of ‘private’ property – a legal encoding inherited from Roman law that over the last four centuries has been institutionalized globally. We might usefully think of this particular bundle of rights as hegemonic and, as such, rarely interrogated relative to its origins, infrastructure or perceived immutability. Yet with an interest in economic diversity (and thus property diversity) and an orientation to reading for difference, it is useful to briefly trace how this ‘common sense’ came into existence and became normalized. The private property regime that many are familiar with today emerged only in the seventeenth century and signalled a broad movement from rights (e.g. to land, fisheries, buildings, storehouses of goods, etc.) based in tradition, proximate negotiation or inhabitation, to rights legally inscribed, technically institutionalized, administered and enforced by an extra-local state.2 This shift in relationships between people was also a shift in the relationship between people and things. While resources were often accessed by many for a range of purposes (e.g. common lands were often used for agriculture, grazing, hunting or foraging), the property regime that emerged in the seventeenth century treated resources as discrete objects with definite boundaries, as alienable and exchangeable, and as belonging to a single and unambiguous owner. The movement that most clearly enabled a shift towards this new understanding and enactment of property was land enclosure. Beginning in the sixteenth century and reaching its peak in England and Scotland in the eighteenth century, enclosure was a political and economic movement that transformed the common lands of Western Europe, which until then had been accessed and utilized according to traditional and feudal rights. Common lands were divided into discrete and real properties that, for the first time, could be legally possessed by an individual (Mingay 2014). Land became separated from its wide range of local commitments, reciprocities and relationships of mutual dependence. It was now alienable, that is, its ownership could be transferred. At the same time, the understanding that some one person (or institution or corporation) might be a ‘sole owner’ bearing title to the land became established as a new norm. Title conferred the right to exclusive use unencumbered by any obligation to those others who may have depended upon the land for sustenance. While this new relationship between people and things served to intensify resource use and increase production for commercial circulation, critics pointed to the high price paid by those who were dispossessed by privatization (e.g. Marx 1990). As land ownership became legally codified in Europe, it legitimized the violent clearance of peasants and whole communities from the land; it fostered the consolidation of ownership and wealth as it disenfranchised former landed peasants; it prompted mass migration to cities creating an urban population with

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Framing essay: the diversity of property  273 nothing but their labour to exchange for livelihood; and it transformed land use from a diversity of practices by local inhabitants to new forms of intensified agriculture and grazing.3 The private property regime that emerged at this time became a mode and form of property that applied to more than just land; goods, buildings and a range of other newly inscribed commodities would also be subject to this different understanding of property (Blomley 2007; Jones 2019). Yet it was land and the practices of enclosure that provided the impetus for novel theorizations, legitimizations, and ultimately institutionalized enactments of property. Indeed, it was enclosure that, despite all its negative on-the-ground effects, became a template for a new common sense understanding of property aligned with assertions concerning human nature and ‘rational’ behaviour, propensities for ‘improvement’ of the land and the self, and a transformation of society towards higher levels of ‘civilization’. These assertions diagrammed what would come to be new relationships between people and things that would format not only an understanding of property but also and importantly an understanding of economy that remains hegemonic to this day. The form of private property that enclosure signalled was understood then, and is understood now, to be an essential determinant of economic efficiency, rationality and growth; a property/economy dynamic that has become inseparable from hegemonic understandings of capitalism.

PROPERTY’S POWERS These new understandings of property/economy worked through semiotic-material practices evident in the discourses of property theorists, the actions of the state, and the practices of property’s administration that emerged in England and other Western European countries, as well as elsewhere given European imperial expansion. Prominent European theorists such as Jeremy Bentham (1887) were thinking, at the very height of the enclosure movement in the eighteenth century, about property, its legitimation, and the work it does relative to economy. Individual possession of land was associated with rational improvement and improvement was seen as a civilizing force. The dynamic reshaping of property was understood to be inseparable from the dynamic of a newly emerging capitalism, which was likewise represented and thus legitimated as ‘progressive’, despite the horrors of industrialization and the wretched conditions of wage labour at the time. Property, according to Bentham, revolves around an individualized notion of the possession of some ‘thing’, an externalized mechanism that secures one’s right to possess and exclude, and an expectation of return that forges subjects motivated to individually invest and accumulate: The idea of property consists in an established expectation; in the persuasion of being able to draw such or such an advantage from the thing possessed, according to the nature of the case. Now this expectation, this persuasion, can only be the work of laws. I cannot count upon the enjoyment of that which I regard as mine, except through the promise of the law which guarantees it to me. It is law alone which permits me to forget my natural weakness. It is only through the protection of law that I am able to inclose [sic] a field, and to give myself up to its cultivation with the sure though distant hope of harvest. (Bentham 1887, p. 112)

To Bentham, the security provided by law and enforced by the state is essential to the formation of property as it permits individuals to risk investment and improvement. While the ancient institution of the commons, especially in England, represented a diverse set of prac-

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274  The handbook of diverse economies tices and institutions governing access and management of common resources (Cox 1985), Bentham dismisses such arrangements as ‘natural sentiments’ (Bentham 1887, p. 110) and ‘feudal absurdities’ (p. 197) unable to secure expectation and thereby spur any improvement. For Bentham, only the extra-local authority of state-sponsored administration and title would provide a fixed and durable expectation that, presumably, was not available via local institutions, negotiations, or traditions. Law alone has done that which all the natural sentiments united have not the power to do. Law alone is able to create a fixed and durable possession which merits the name of property. (Bentham 1887, p. 110)

The commons, stripped of its ancient institutional arrangements that had worked to sustain communities and environments over centuries, and furthermore equated by Bentham with a necessary inefficiency, even savagery (especially see pp. 109–20), could then be most clearly understood as a problem to be solved. Indeed, the commons would become an archetype for the problem of the individual desirous of maximizing utility but unable to gain exclusive and fixed access to the means by which ‘peaceful industry’ (p. 195) could be unleashed and individual accumulation activated.4 With the discredited commons banished to history, the only other collective to consider is the larger ‘public’, whose best interest is best served by protecting individual desires, rights and properties. Individual interests are the only interests. Take care of the individuals; never molest them, never suffer any one to molest them, and you will have done enough for the public. (p. 144)

This formulation that prioritizes the interests of ‘the individual’ over that of the public is key insofar as the very logic of private property, as articulated by Bentham, does not necessitate that the owner of property be an individual human. The capacities generated by exclusion and celebrated by Bentham, capacities extra-locally legitimated and enforced by the state, might, for example, accrue to any owner be they a collective or an individual. Yet, Bentham entangles into his diagram of property an insistence that the public good is best and always served by prioritizing the individual whose self-possessed incentive to improve and accumulate wealth has been unleashed by the advent of property itself. While other forms of ‘owner’ have evolved beyond that of an individual (e.g. corporations are now not only owners of property but are increasingly seen as ‘individuals’ relative to law in the USA; see for example Walenta, Chapter 11 in this volume), the dynamic of property as diagrammed by Bentham imagines an individualized expectation, incentive and accumulation of wealth that aligns with and gives legal foundation to the emerging capitalist economy. For Bentham and other property theorists of the time, instituting property to solve the problem of the commons was inseparable from, and indeed instrumental to, the transformation of land and resources under a new form of production and appropriation now possible given property’s capacity to guarantee expectation, to guarantee that the benefits of ‘improvement’ would accrue only to the individual owner rather than, for example, to those whose labour transforms the land, those who inhabit the land, those who subsist off the land, or the land itself. We, of course, recognize the particular economic logic that Bentham entangles with property as capitalism. This entanglement of individual ownership with entrepreneurial spirit was not just restricted to the diagram sketched by Bentham in his writings but was materially, and often violently, enacted across English as well as Scottish, Irish, and other colonial land-

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Framing essay: the diversity of property  275 scapes. The common sensibility captured in Bentham’s writings echoed that of many theorists, politicians, and an emerging capitalist class of the period and since. Even critics such as Karl Marx (1990) clearly saw property and capitalism as essentially related, a relationship, again, clearly diagrammed by enclosure. The property diagrammed by Bentham overwrites other social relations and institutions governing access and use, as it powerfully reshapes economy as well as those commoners now divided into the owning few and the disenfranchised many. As private and individualized, it becomes over time an ahistorical principle and practice that ‘takes hold’ as it interpolates us as self-interested property owners. I shall conclude by a general observation of great importance. The more the principle of property is respected the stronger hold it takes on the popular mind. (Bentham 1887, p. 145)5

Property, as institutionalized in law and title, has become a common sense embodied and enacted in the everyday boundaries we have all come to observe, the exclusions from access that we have normalized, and the unquestioned right to possess that we have granted profit-seeking ‘owners’ of not only land, water, forests, fisheries and other natural resources but also and increasingly housing, cultural products, medical services, pharmaceuticals, genetic sequences, and knowledge of all kinds.6

OCCUPYING PROPERTY The dominant form of property that was instituted in Europe in the sixteenth century (and is being newly instituted in parts of the world today),7 derives its power from an extra-local enforcement of title guaranteeing an individual’s right to exclude and profit from what had often been common. Then as now, unenclosed land is never completely open to all (i.e. access and use is often circumscribed to a limited number of ‘commoners’8 based on tradition, genealogy, proximity, inhabitation, or any of a large number of historical arrangements). But the new dynamic converted land from overlapping and integrated resources (and bundles of common rights) to a commodified object open to appropriation and exchange by an individual. In the sixteenth century this shift represented a radical departure from prior sensibilities and generalized systems of production and sustenance. It was this aspect of property and its gradual normalization that became the target of resistance and, in some cases, (re)occupation. In the classic stories of enclosure, it can seem as if the institutionalization of a new ‘principle of property’ and its effective taking hold of the ‘popular mind’ (see the Bentham quote above) is almost instantaneous. Yet it was rather a centuries-long process which unfolded in Europe, and which we might usefully think of as never complete (see Blomley 2002). Conceiving property as a contested and decidedly more contingent space, McDonagh and Griffin (2016) document examples of the considerable resistance and active occupations that emerged in response to enclosure in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in Europe. Historic actions of hedge-breaking, animal occupations, anti-enclosure riots, community trespasses and semi-permanent squatting were ‘bottom-up’ responses to enclosure and dispossession that did not have as their target the extra-local recognition of rights or even the right to exclusive use.

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276  The handbook of diverse economies This was not a rejection of law or capitalism, but rather an adjustment, a creative remaking of the commons which, for brief moments at least, had the potential to challenge the emerging logic of absolute property in land. (McDonagh and Griffin 2016, p. 9)

Rather than a call to end the imposition of ‘property’, each occupation might be better understood as a struggle over distribution insofar as occupiers were insisting that the benefits of the land, and of property, be distributed to those who have long claimed some right to access and/or use, that is, collectives and commoners rather than individual owners. In this sense, even those occupations occurring at the dawn of capitalism in Western Europe were not necessarily a call to revert to some prior configuration of production nor did they wish to forgo the capacities that emerge with limited access. They were, however, an insistence that access and use, and by extension the economy, should remain beholden to the needs and interests of communities rather than only individual owners; they were an effort to ‘take’ property and repurpose its capacities. The 2004 film The Take, by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, documents the story of Forja, a factory abandoned by its individual capitalist owner during the Argentine economic crisis of 2001 and subsequently occupied by its workers. Inspired by the ERT movement to recover factories (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores), the Forja workers made plans to form a producer cooperative and revive the factory’s operations; their goal and the slogan of the movement was to ‘occupy, resist, and produce’ (see also Vieta 2019). The film presents the many struggles of the Forja workers and the obstacles they faced as they did the hard work of, personally and organizationally, moving beyond a capitalist model of production and towards cooperative production and appropriation of their own labour, towards a solidarity economy aligned not only with the ERT movement but also echoing occupations of the past and aligning with a range of movements and communities who are rethinking economy today. Much of the film centres on the legalization of Forja’s ‘recovery’ and, in particular, on the question of property – just who has the right to occupy, run and profit from Forja? The film’s climax and turning point is a hard-won legal ruling in favour of the workers, a ruling that affords the right of the workers to retain possession of Forja, its machines, its products and its profits. Prior to the ruling, occupation and resistance were clearly possible albeit challenging across a range of registers. Yet, it was production itself that was seemingly impossible, or at least highly unadvisable, insofar as there were no sanctioned guarantees of continuation, no right to remain that would encourage investments, secure contracts, protect outputs from other claims, or guarantee access to and control over surplus. After the ruling, which suspended the formal property claims of the previous owner thereby creating a de facto property right for the workers of Forja, occupation and resistance quickly turned towards the resumption of production as well as a cascade of attendant business connections and associations that had been anticipated but were on hold. The story of Forja foregrounds the powerful role played by property as it, initially, represented an almost impossible barrier to the initial recovery of Forja. Yet, eventually, it was property that afforded the cooperative the capacity to produce and possess a collective surplus. The resolution of the question of property, and subsequent alignment of the apparatus of property with the movement’s desires to produce, worked to make Forja decidedly more durable beyond the initial moments of occupation and resistance; property, in this case, is what declared ‘another production is possible’ (de Sousa Santos 2006). Furthermore, the precedent of Forja’s legislative victory, and that of other related cases, suggests an increased capacity to

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Framing essay: the diversity of property  277 not only produce but to transpose and thereby multiply the cooperative recovery of enterprises. The case of Forja suggests that property, even where private property is clearly hegemonic (i.e. contemporary Argentina) rather than just emerging (i.e. sixteenth-century England), is surprisingly mutable and much less sacrosanct than we often believe. It might be the case that property, under certain circumstances, can be an ally to the formation of economic difference rather than only a barrier. The particular property claim at issue at Forja was the exclusive right to the factory claimed by the factory’s original owner despite his having abandoned the factory and all responsibility for its debts and maintenance. This is a version of the now common sense understanding of property as an essentially inviolable and state-sanctioned right to not just land but also buildings, machines and bank accounts, as well as the products produced by manufacturing and the profits generated from their sale. The occupiers at Forja, however, were clearly not invested in eliminating or even nationalizing property even as they recognized how powerfully property works against worker, community and economic well-being. They were not calling for a revolutionary end to property per se but, like the occupiers noted by McDonagh and Griffin, ‘rather an adjustment, a creative remaking of the commons’ (2016, p. 9) that affords an improvement to individual livelihoods and community well-being ‘here and now’ (cf. Gibson-Graham 2008). Their project, like that of occupiers past, was to shift the benefits produced by a right to exclusive use from some distant and detached individual owner to Forja’s workers. Occupying, in this case, does not diminish what property does in terms of the productive capacities it generates but instead works to alter the distribution of benefits that emerge from those enhanced productive capacities. So, along with Forja we might see that one goal of occupying property is to resist its conflation with only individual accumulation, and repurpose it to produce on behalf of a common well-being. In this case, occupying property (then and now) is not about any ‘strong theory’ where property has an essential role in capitalist development as asserted by Bentham; nor is it about property’s dissolution as an eventual and necessary ingredient in the revolution needed in order to move beyond capitalism, as asserted by Marx. Rather, Forja and occupy movements of the past are ‘bottom-up’ affairs concerned with proximate practices of repurposing property, redirecting its capacities and powers, and reworking its economic alignments such that it fosters community well-being (see also Chapter 32 by Crabtree in this volume).

THE LIMITS OF PROPERTY The history of resistance to enclosure and even the ERT movement that inspired the recovery of Forja are clearly attempts to redress the power of property to enable an individualized investment and accumulation at the expense of a common or community well-being. Yet, such stories also prioritize the taking possession of those enclosures and factories as a first step towards another and presumably more just production. To some degree they mimic enclosure itself (McDonagh and Griffin 2016) as they seek to establish exclusive, albeit collective, rights to access and use. Such stories, when read only as instances of occupation, perhaps reinforce Bentham’s assertion that property’s powers and its capacity to make or remake economies are achieved through ‘law alone’. Property’s powers, however, clearly derive from more than just ‘the law’. They are supported by a range of processes and practices not the least of which, as seen above, is an instru-

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278  The handbook of diverse economies mental denigration or forgetting of those local commitments, reciprocities and relationships of mutual dependence that worked to ensure a common(s) survival prior to enclosure. The many and diverse configurations of relations between people and things that existed (and continue to exist around the world) represent a reservoir of property difference that is rendered invisible when property defaults to an individualized right (see also Chapter 33 by Colin Marx in this volume). In this sense, the workers at Forja were up against not just a legal system favouring individual property rights but a shared sensibility that made it difficult to imagine and locally enact another form of property. Property Practices Beyond the ‘Law Alone’ Acknowledging that property’s powers are constituted by more than ‘law alone’, that they are enhanced and supported by the absence of other property possibilities and by denying the range of actions and practices required to maintain a single form of property as common sense, opens property to myriad interventions beyond title and legal ruling. For example, in the case of Forja, we might document and amplify how its performance of property differs from that of the prior owner, and how it entails much more than legal access and exclusive right to use. The property practised by the workers of Forja may have been technically mimetic of enclosure but its purpose and its effects were radically different. The actions of Forja entangled an ethical consideration for others with property insofar as ‘the take’ supported not only workers’ livelihoods but also their families and proximate neighbourhoods, the network of cooperatives in which they were enrolled, and the solidarity economy writ large. The property they performed, to be effective and to continue, could not reduce to an individualized (or closed collective) interest insofar as it reasserted property as a site of local commitments, reciprocities and relationships of mutual dependence. Indeed, the film makes clear that the property enacted by Forja encompassed an ethical commitment to the well-being of those beyond the workers who initially occupied the factory. While The Take tempts us to see the legal moment when the workers of Forja are granted the right to the factory as the foundation for the alternative economy that emerged, such a limited reading of the film would belie much of what the workers did to repurpose property as a site of ethical concern and as a common good. Indeed, the seemingly pivotal legal moment might more usefully be read as an outcome of a wide range of practices across many registers including but not limited to a personal reworking of worker identity, ongoing resistance to police action, development of new technical and managerial skills, group enrolment in the network of cooperative and recovered enterprises, and implementation of cooperative forms of governance within the factory. From this perspective, the reworked and ethically infused property relations surrounding the Forja initiative are composed of and enacted by multiple practices, knowledges, dispositions, and socio-technical devices, not simply conferred by a single legislative ruling. Property, certainly in the case of Forja, is a set of practices that overflow the legal moment. This does not make that moment any less important or challenging but it does expand where and how we, along with the workers of Forja, might occupy property and repurpose it as a site of ethical commitment to a common well-being.

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Framing essay: the diversity of property  279 From Occupy to Commoning The workers at Forja did not overthrow or eliminate property, yet it is clear that property can be reworked and effectively re-entangled with ethical-material practices of livelihood maintenance, community well-being and mutual support (cf. Mackenzie 2013). This re-entanglement of property with a common well-being and common future, despite the pull of property’s propensities to exclude, recasts ‘the take’ as also a ‘commoning’ (see also Chapter 31 by Kruzynski, Chapter 34 by Kennedy, and Chapter 35 by Erdem in this volume). Instead of accumulation for its own sake, the workers of Forja are appropriating and redirecting surplus to enhance a community and common well-being (see also Bargh’s Chapter 40 on Indigenous finance in this volume). Along with a host of alternative economic initiatives worldwide (Bollier 2016; Esteva 2014), Forja’s success works to release property from its common sense alignments with capitalism and private accumulation, and provides a compelling example of how property might be leveraged to (re)make the world as a common responsibility and a wellspring of a common well-being. Once the relationship between property and capitalist economic practice has been loosened and the common sense of property undermined, a range of diverse property practices ‘here and now’ becomes visible, vital, and a foundation for a common well-being (Gibson-Graham et al. 2016; Harcourt 2019). In much of the majority world, for example, individual and private property has considerably less of a history and less of a hold on the ‘popular mind’. On the Tibetan plateau, the bush blocs of Zambia, the Indonesian jungle and the urban slums of Bangladesh – to name just some contexts where scholars interested in community economies are working – traditional and contemporary relationalities, reciprocities and mutual dependencies are foundational to a wide range of productive activities that sustain communities and environments, despite being subject to ongoing land grabbing and legal reconfiguring that privileges privatization (see also Lejano et al. 2014; Singh 2017).9 Property is also surprisingly diverse across the countries of the former Soviet bloc despite a mass privatization campaign after the fall of the Soviet Union. For example, Komsomol offices in downtown Moscow have ironically become ground zero for capitalist financial services, while former collective farms in the far North have been privatized only to be reconfigured by Indigenous reindeer herders as a collective property (Pavlovskaya 2013). While breaking the common sense conflation of private property with capitalism reveals the potentials of, for example, Communist Youth League offices to become incubator hubs for capitalism (giving a somewhat different twist to ‘occupy, resist, produce’), it also and importantly, allows us to see and amplify commoning across a range of properties (including private property) ‘here and now’ rather than only in the distant past or the High Alps.10 To do so, we are interested here to again bring focus to the two phenomena that have given the common sense of private property its power and enhanced its capacities since at least the time of Bentham. We are not, however, interested to reinforce private property as hegemonic but to rework and repurpose property such that commoning is possible and commonplace. In particular, we are interested to see how those ‘forgotten’ relationalities, reciprocities and mutual dependencies of commons past are being revived, reworked and re-entangled across a variety of properties now subject to deliberate and politically active commoning practices (Mackenzie 2013; Morrow and Martin 2019); and to trace how commoning, like property itself, might be associated, inscribed and made durable through socio-technical devices beyond the ‘face-to-face’.

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280  The handbook of diverse economies It is clear that the limits of property, its maintenance and its durability as private and individual, may not be found in title and law alone. Even Bentham seems to imply this when he admits that property takes time to be established and when he fears for its dissolution not by some wholesale reversal or overthrow but by ‘slight attacks’ that pave the way for transformation: Slight attacks upon this principle prepare the way for heavier ones. A long time has been necessary to carry property to the point where we now see it in civilized societies; but a fatal experience has shown with what facility it can be shaken,11 and how easily the savage instinct of plunder gets the better of the laws. (1887, p. 145)

Establishing and maintaining property is not in title and ‘law alone’; its power is in the many contingent constituent elements that allow property to ‘take hold’ over time and in the way that popular understandings of private property continually forget there are viable and ethical other ways of relating to things. Seeing property’s power this way suggests both the limits of private property as common sense, and it makes clear the possibility for property to be otherwise. Like the workers of Forja we can now imagine property repurposed not just to create a collective private wealth but as a key contribution to the continual struggle to make common that which has been enclosed and appropriated for individual benefit alone.

CONCLUSION The everyday sense of property as individual and private and its attendant and equally powerful conflation with capitalism, have made imagining and enacting other property/economy alignments very difficult. When property is normalized as individual and private, capitalism prevails; and to conjure other economies will, therefore, require property’s transformation to the public sphere (as in socialism) or its complete overthrow (as in the revolution yet to come). When understood as codified in law, and enacted via repeated and ongoing enclosure, property appears as an absolute barrier to the establishment of economic difference ‘here and now’. Furthermore, given a strong theorization of property relative to economy, there is little or no incentive to explicate property as a practice and as a decidedly more contingent and mutable institution, itself open to difference. When the central dynamic of property/economy (i.e. only private individual accumulation will create economic incentives) is accepted as the default normal, we are blind to the many modes of property that have existed or might exist, to property’s capacities relative to other economic practices, and to the range of things beyond law that keep property in place and secure its powers. The possibility of Forja’s recovery emerged by addressing and rethinking property across a range of registers from the affective and embodied to the extra-local technical, administrative and socially networked. The Forja workers, allied with a host of human and non-human others, creatively occupied, rethought and repurposed property despite a hegemonic understanding of private property that was supported by neoliberal policies. They showed that property is mutable and open to ethical consideration, not only equivalent to legal title, but an outcome of complex social relations. Working to repurpose property for collective benefit is not to deny that enclosures and a range of other privatizations that work to privilege the few are not happening. Nor is it to deny the need to keep struggling against such initiatives. Rather, it is a call to focus activism and scholarship around all that makes enclosure and individual legal title possible, and all that might make it otherwise.

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Framing essay: the diversity of property  281

NOTES 1. Commoning generally refers to the act of making common and more specifically to the ethical practice of collectively caring for some thing, some resource, or environment. This is in contrast to commons as an existent set of rules, practices or institutions governing the common use of some resource or environment. See Kirwan et al. (2016) for an excellent review and relevant chapters. 2. Such rights were a form of what Latour (1986) refers to as ‘extrasomatic’ powers, that is, powers constituted and extended over space (beyond proximate bodily performances) by technologies, materialities and physical practices. 3. The process of enclosure in Western Europe was soon paralleled by the invasion and acquisition of land in the so called ‘New World’ by European nations throughout the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Here the discourses of ‘civilizing’ and making ‘productive use’ of land legitimated the violent clearing of Indigenous people off their country and destruction of lifeways in which relationships between people, land and other species were governed by very different ‘law’ (see Chapter 40 by Bargh in this volume). 4. It is not difficult to see this diagram of property and power re-performed from the time of Bentham to the present. Resource economists, for example, repeatedly reference Garret Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis (1968) that begins by asking us to ‘picture a pasture open to all’ and concludes ‘freedom in commons brings ruin to all’ (p. 1244). As with Bentham, Hardin’s thesis works to legitimate privatization by presuming virtually all non-privatized resource regimes (e.g. rangelands, fisheries) to be ‘open access’ and therefore offering no incentive for ‘improvement’ or, in Hardin’s case, even maintenance. 5. We can perhaps here see echoes of Bentham’s other famous ‘diagram of power’, the Panopticon (Foucault 1995). Property and the Panopticon are, in a sense, both apparatus and architectures that format subjects, spaces and economy (see Chapter 43 by Healy, Özselçuk and Madra and Chapter 45 by Gabriel and Sarmiento in this volume). 6. On the power of law to fix and stabilize relations, and the challenges to economic transformation that it presents, see also Chapter 36 by Morgan and Kuch in this volume. 7. This idea of property has been much later in coming to other parts of the world, e.g. nomads in China are now settling and getting forms of property rights over previously open land, and in New Zealand treaty claims seek ownership over lands, with tangata whenua now more forcefully being translated as traditional owners rather than the land’s people/people of the land. 8. Although see Cox (1985, p. 56) concerning evidence of mechanisms for accepting strangers and granting them access to commons resources as commoners despite the lack of legal obligation. 9. The work of commons theorist and Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom (e.g. 1990) must be mentioned for its unwavering valuation of common livelihoods and institutions. While much of this work posits an essentially rational actor thereby limiting where and how commons might emerge, it nevertheless amplifies the possibility of a great many common worlds. 10. Bentham includes a footnote (1887, p. 196) suggesting that there are sometimes exceptions to rules. Indeed, he notes how in the High Alps there are common grazing lands that should remain common because of their seasonal nature. Curiously, these are the same commons institutions that would later become one of Elinor Ostrom’s more celebrated case studies (1990). 11. It seems likely that Bentham is here referring to the French Revolution.

REFERENCES Bentham, J. (1887), Theory of Legislation, London: Trübner & Company. Blomley, N. (2002), ‘Mud for the land’, Public Culture, 14 (3), 557–82. Blomley, N. (2007), ‘Making private property: Enclosure, common right and the work of hedges’, Rural History, 18 (1), 1–21. Bollier, D. (2016), ‘Commoning as a transformative social paradigm’, The Next System Project, accessed 23 July 2019 at https://​thenextsystem​.org/​commoning​-as​-a​-transformative​-social​-paradigm. Cox, S.J.B. (1985), ‘No tragedy of the commons’, Environmental Ethics, 7 (1), 49–61.

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282  The handbook of diverse economies de Sousa Santos, B. (ed.) (2006), Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon, Volume 2, London: Verso. Esteva, G. (2014), ‘Commoning in the new society’, Community Development Journal, 49, 144–59. Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Remarx – “Place-based globalism”: A new imaginary of revolution’, Rethinking Marxism, 20 (4), 659–64. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2016), ‘Commoning as a postcapitalist politics’, in A. Amin and P. Howell (eds), Releasing the Commons, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 192–212. Harcourt, W. (2019), ‘Feminist political ecology practices of worlding’, International Journal of the Commons, 13 (1), 153–74. Hardin, G. (1968), ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, 162 (3859), 1243–8. Jones, H. (2019), ‘Property, territory, and colonialism: An international legal history of enclosure’, Legal Studies, 39 (2), 187–203. Kirwan, S., L. Dawney and J. Brigstocke (eds) (2016), Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures, London: Routledge. Klein, N. (writer) and A. Lewis (director) (2004), The Take, DVD distributed by Celluloid Dreams, 87 minutes, colour. Latour, B. (1986), ‘Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together’, Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies, 3 (T), 207–60. Lejano, R., E. Araral and A. Agrawal (2014), ‘Interrogating the commons’, Environmental Science & Policy, 36, 1–92. Mackenzie, A.F.D. (2013), Places of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land Ownership, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, New York: Penguin Books. McDonagh, B. and C.J. Griffin (2016), ‘Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500–1850’, Journal of Historical Geography, 53 (July), 1–10. Mingay, G.E. (2014), Parliamentary Enclosure in England, London and New York: Routledge. Morrow, O. and D.G. Martin (2019), ‘Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons’, Urban Geography, May, 1–21. Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlovskaya, M. (2013), ‘Between neoliberalism and difference: Multiple practices of property in post-Soviet Russia’, Europe Asia Studies, 65 (7), 1295–323. Singh, N. (2017), ‘Becoming a commoner: The commons as sites for affective socio-nature encounters and co-becomings’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 17 (4), 751–76. Vieta, M. (2019), ‘Recuperating and (re)learning the language of Autogestión in Argentina’s Empresas Recuperadas worker cooperatives’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 12 (5), 401–22.

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31. Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking Anna Kruzynski

INTRODUCTION Gentrification is a global force affecting urban communities across the world (Simet 2017). Point St. Charles, an urban area located in close proximity to downtown Montreal in Quebec, Canada, is no exception. Originally hunting and fishing grounds of the Kanien’kehá:ka and other Indigenous peoples, the area’s marshlands were enclosed by colonizers for agricultural and residential purposes (Greer 2012). Later redeveloped for industrial purposes, this ‘urban village’ of 13 000 souls has been the terrain of struggle against gentrification for the past three decades. In the wake of policy adopted by Montreal City officials and supported by capitalist real estate developers, the vacant factories along the Lachine Canal were converted into luxury condominiums. More recently, with the expansion of the downtown, ‘affordable’ condominium developments have multiplied, as has the conversion of multiplex buildings into single-family homes by middle-class professionals wanting to settle close to Montreal’s urban centre. Property values have skyrocketed as properties are bought up to be renovated and ‘flipped’ onto the capitalist market for profit. In just a decade, average rent has increased by 42 per cent and the percentage of social housing units has decreased from 40 per cent in 1996 to 33 per cent in 2016 (Action-Gardien and RIL 2019). These policies and practices, as is the case in most metropolitan cities (Lees et al. 2016), are causing the displacement of less privileged populations. Notwithstanding these forces, Point St. Charles is renowned as a bastion of solidarity and resistance and has managed to slow down the forces of gentrification in ways that adjacent neighbourhoods have not. One explanation for this is a strong tradition of commoning from the 1960s onward (Collectif Courtepointe 2006; Sévigny 2009). The people’s health and legal aid clinics that were set up in the late 1960s, and that were the precursors of state-run local community service centres and legal aid services, are still thriving today, fully funded by the state, but self-managed by neighbourhood residents. Other long-standing community organizations offer alternative mental health, education and family services, and still others manage a people’s grocery store, collective gardens and kitchens, as well as a public fruit and vegetable market. The housing organization, via its development wing, has built cooperative and non-profit housing units, while its advocacy wing works to protect tenant rights. All these organizations and more not only share access to several buildings and meeting spaces, they are also regrouped into a concerted-action round table called Action-Watchdog. This autonomous political institution has been at the forefront of many successful battles against forces of gentrification, austerity measures and regular attempts by the state to absorb its autonomous health and legal aid services (Triollet 2013). These historical commons have no doubt contributed to a durable collective imaginary of what a commons is in this neighbourhood, one that commoners today can build upon (Stephen Healy 2017, personal communication). This imaginary 283 Anna Kruzynski - 9781788119962 08:01:31PM

284  The handbook of diverse economies inspired La Pointe Libertaire (the Anarchist Point), a Bookchin-inspired local affinity group born in the wake of the Global Justice Movements that erupted at the turn of the century. As of the mid-2000s, La Pointe Libertaire organized several direct actions (Kruzynski and Silvestro, 2013), pushing back against legal boundaries in the name of legitimacy, and, at the same time, creating, expanding and protecting urban commons. This chapter contributes to the emergent literature on urban commoning (Foster and Iaione 2017; Gorenflo 2017; Huron 2018). In it I draw on my personal experience as co-founder and active member of La Pointe Libertaire to analyse three urban sites that I was directly involved in commoning.

LE JARDIN DE LA LIBERTÉ It had been a long-standing demand of community organizations that an unmanaged piece of public property located near the Lachine Canal be zoned as a park in order to protect it from enclosure by private real estate developers. Although in theory this property was accessible to all, in reality, people stayed clear of it because it was overgrown with ragweed, a potent allergen that is a public health nuisance. It is in a prime location; cyclists pass by it regularly on the city bike path, as do tourists and locals accessing the banks of the Lachine Canal. The site was nested between a vacant but fenced-in lot on the one side, and, on the other, a building that housed state employment services and a social enterprise that trained people without employment to do metalwork. It was only a matter of time before these waterfront properties were purchased by real estate developers, thus completing the cycle of transformation of abandoned factories into luxury condominiums that had begun in the 1990s. Commoning the Site In 2007, La Pointe Libertaire took matters into their own hands, taking responsibility for the care of this plot of land. We organized a festive family-oriented guerrilla gardening activity and created a beautiful urban garden that we named le Jardin de la liberté (the Garden of Liberty). In doing so, we were both initiating the process of commoning, by enlarging access to green space in this cement-laden neighbourhood prone to the heat island effect and defending the common public entry-ways to the banks of the Lachine Canal from enclosure by private condominium owners. Today, the long-standing demand has been won – the garden is now a park that remains publicly owned. It is also a biophysical commons: it is accessible to, and benefits, neighbourhood residents who like to exercise their green thumb, cyclists taking a break from their ride along the Lachine Canal, homeless people who have set up temporary living quarters nearby, birds, insects and many forms of plant life. Use is not explicitly negotiated, but the Jardin’s commoning-community, in its continued role of caretaker, remains vigilant and acts to ensure that those who use it do so by respecting its integrity.1 Challenge to the Commons by Public Authorities Although La Pointe Libertaire generally lacks faith in public authorities, we nevertheless decided to ask the Borough Council to take on official responsibility for the garden by changing its zoning to the status of a park. This was a strategic move in order to strengthen the commoning-community by bringing in protective legislation and in doing so, make it

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Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking  285 more difficult for real estate developers to enclose the garden for the sole use of owners of condominiums. The public authorities, however, were not interested. An article in a major newspaper on the subject refers directly to this request; the journalist writes that: although the council generally appreciates it when citizens take action to beautify the city and even helps them out sometimes, this act is frowned upon: ‘There is a lot of provocation going on here’ says Claudette Lalonde, spokesperson for the municipal council. ‘Under no circumstances will the City take on the care of this garden’, she says. ‘We are ignoring them. We are letting them do their own thing and that’s it’ she adds, noting that the borough does not ‘get involved in political controversy’. (Elkouri 2008)

Not only did the public authorities ignore us, but they also interfered with the commoning process. A civil servant wrote us an email asking us to remove the bushes and plants because the municipal workers were scheduled to cut everything down, as they do every year. We refused, publicly, and they did not actually do it. Interestingly, on several occasions, municipal workers actually decided, of their own volition, to help us with commoning. They transported a picnic table from a nearby park using their pickup truck. They left a pile of compost by the plot as they did their rounds of the borough-sanctioned community gardens. Once in a while, they even made a detour to come and water the plant life while on their watering round. La Pointe Libertaire continued, year after year, to organize gardening bees, until, at one point, the garden took on a life of its own. Birds, insects, worms and plant life no longer needed human intervention to flourish in this urban landscape – the bushes burgeoned and the plants flowered, drawing strength from the nutrients in the soil that had multiplied from years of compost. A couple of years later, however, an extremely powerful actor literally trampled the commons like the proverbial bull in a china shop. The publicly owned Commission des Services Électriques de Montréal (Electrical Commission of Montreal, CSEM) dumped their heavy equipment and materials directly on the garden, squashing most of the plant life. Outraged, members of La Pointe Libertaire wrote a letter to the Mayor and then posted images of the garden on social media, along with a call to the borough authorities to take action. The Mayor replied to the post with the following: The refurbishing of the garden will be taken on by the CSEM as they are responsible for the destruction of the garden [. . .] [I’d like to know] what types of plants [have] been planted over the years by the citizens, so that the garden [can] be redone at best. It will be my pleasure to get back to you to confirm the date.2

As of this writing, the CSEM has fenced off the garden to prevent it from being used as a parking lot by construction workers building the new condominium complex on the site that, just a few years prior, was home to a metalwork shop. The garden has yet to be refurbished, but incredibly, the plants have begun sprouting green and orange through the rubble and someone has raked and disposed of the garbage. Lessons Learned Several lessons emerge out of this experience. First, direct action gets results or, as the slogan has it, ‘direct action gets the goods’ (at least in this case). We took action, and in doing so, we jump started the political process of struggle-negotiation. Second, we learnt that public

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286  The handbook of diverse economies institutions are not monolithic entities; they are a coming-together of a diversity of actors, with different interests, connections and access to power. In this case, some civil servants and the CSEM interfered, while municipal workers and politicians assisted commoning of the site. The garden’s commoning-community made strategic choices to bring certain municipal actors in, while pushing others out. Third, even after the site was zoned green, the garden was trampled, unmade, un-commoned. The garden has and will be refurbished, but in the years to come will it remain accessible to all? Will the homeless people who have set up camp on the site be pushed out by folks living in the newly built adjacent condos? Will local folks no longer feel at home, as the landscaping is uplifted to reflect the tastes of those living nearby? The lesson here is that commoning is never finished; the commoning-community must always remain vigilant and take action when needed to defend and expand the commons.

‘THE POINT ALL DRESS’3 – A COMMUNITY MURAL This was another long-standing demand of community organizations: to transform the 80-metre railway viaduct wall that forms a physical and psychological barrier between the North and South parts of Point St. Charles – by painting a mural. Although every passer-by has access to the site, in the sense that they can contemplate its drab concrete greyness covered with mould and toxic drippings from the trains passing above, they do not benefit from it as they would if it was a beautiful vibrant piece of community art. Commoning the Site As with the Jardin, La Pointe Libertaire initiated the commoning of the viaduct by taking responsibility for the care of the eyesore. We began painting, others continued; some of us were arrested and charged with mischief for defacing the property of the once state-owned, now privately owned Canadian National Railway Company (CN). We then negotiated a first-ever in Canada agreement with the CN to create a community mural, seeing to it that our charges were dropped. Shortly thereafter, the commoning-community was expanded, formalized and made more visible with the creation of Le Collectif au Pied du Mur (At the Foot of the Wall Collective). The Collectif regrouped 10 artists ranging from 26 to 72 years in age from the neighbourhood who had never done a mural before. The commoning-community also included 120 volunteers who helped paint (neighbours, kids, local artists), as well as the Borough Council and staff, as they provided scaffolding, permits and funding. By the autumn of 2013, the thus constituted commoning-community had produced one of the longest murals in Montreal, an incredibly vibrant depiction of the people’s history of Point St. Charles, from colonization to today. Although the property remains privately owned, the mural is a cultural commons. The benefits are distributed far and wide. Immediate neighbours are able to access beauty as they look out their windows or hang out on their stoop. Passers-by stop to contemplate or discuss one part of the fresco or another. Tourists partake in the audio-tour on the history of the neighbourhood that the mural is part of. Cyclists on the adjacent bike path catch their breath as they cycle by this surprising flash of urban landscape.

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Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking  287 Challenge to the Commons by White Supremacists The commoning-community has had to engage in struggle-negotiation with respect to use in order to push back against attempts by white supremacists to undo the inclusive, social justice message that is at the heart of the project. The most poignant example occurred on 3 December 2013: An explicitly racist act was committed during the night in Point St. Charles. A painting of a black woman’s face on the wall of a CN viaduct was vandalized. The act is clearly targeting the Black community because the vandal(s) did not touch any other part of the 400 square metre mural. (Le Collectif au Pied du Mur 2013)

In fact, the vandals had carefully repainted both the woman’s face and hand, with white paint, making sure to stay within the contours. The effect was spectacular as the painting is huge, over 20 feet high. The commoning-community reacted immediately. The next day they held a press conference at the site. Three days later, the Collectif repainted the face and organized a well-attended anti-racist rally in front of the mural. In parallel, and without any kind of official coordination, other members of the amorphous commoning-community took action: emplacing an anti-fascist banner on the viaduct, anti-racist graffiti on the walls of surrounding buildings and sidewalks, solidarity messages on poster-boards attached to telephone poles, and putting out radio broadcasts and articles in both mainstream and alternative media. At the time of writing, no other racist incursion into the mural has occurred. Lessons Learned In the garden example the unmaking of the commons was caused by the actions of a public institution. In this example, racist individual(s) did the unmaking. The lesson here is that although this type of commons can easily be unmade, a strong and durable commoning-community that is always alert is able to remake and, through that process, contribute to a culture shift. In this case, the remaking created the conditions for the naming of white supremacy and for the emergence of a process of ethical deliberation around the use of the commons and who benefits from it. When faced with this racist act, the commoning-community ‘decided’ that racists were not welcome; or, in other words, the commoners chose to exclude racists from the community they had created in which a social justice message guided action.

BÂTIMENT 7: A FACTORY OF COLLECTIVE AUTONOMY Bâtiment 7 (Building 7) is a 100 000 square foot building located on the CN railyards in Point St. Charles that now belongs to a non-profit organization, 7 à nous (It Belongs to Us).4 The conversion of the abandoned train repair shop is happening in several phases. The ‘local services and collaborative practices hub’ opened in the spring of 2018. It includes five collective enterprises – a youth-led arcade and upcycling programme, a worker-run brew-pub, a member-run grocery store, a cooperative artistic foundry and an art school. It also includes several collaborative membership-based workshops: bike, auto, wood, silk-screening, ceramics, digital printing, dark room and common infrastructure such as a multi-function venue and a co-working space. Next is the family and health services hub (day-care, birthing centre, affordable alternative health services) and the urban agriculture and food production hub

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288  The handbook of diverse economies (greenhouse, chickens, horses, industrial kitchen, vegetable garden, green and blue alleyway, etc.). Commoning the Site As is the case with other post-industrial neighbourhoods in the minority world, Point St. Charles is home to many vacant buildings. Bâtiment 7 was one of these and is located on the CN railyards. Neighbourhood outcry was loud when this land, which represents one third of the territory of the neighbourhood, was sold for $1 to the capitalist developer Vincent Chiara. After having decontaminated the land, Chiara would then be free to resell lots to build condominiums and tourist venues for profit. Thanks to nine years of struggle, however, Chiara was forced to reserve 25 per cent of housing units for social purposes, to cancel his plans to replace a park with an access road and to donate Bâtiment 7 to the community along with $1 million for renovations. This incredible outcome, the collectivization of a private property of this size and value, could not have happened without the coming together of a diverse and durable commoning-community (Kruzynski 2017; La Pointe Libertaire 2013). The 7 à nous collective, set up in 2009 to spearhead the campaign to expropriate Bâtiment 7, was composed of a dozen politically experienced organizations. Action-Watchdog, the round table of 30 local organizations, led the political negotiations with the borough, while the Autonomous Social Centre, a loose grouping of local anti-authoritarian activists and their allies built power by organizing festive family-oriented mini-squats in an unpredictable manner on the Bâtiment 7 site. The CEO of the Darling Foundry, who happens to live next door to Bâtiment 7, used the power of her elite board of directors to engage in direct negotiations with Chiara, while the local Community Economic Development Corporation representative did work behind the scenes to help us secure funding and to incubate the collective enterprises that would house the space. The coming together of all of this into a commoning-community that took responsibility for Bâtiment 7 made this historic moment possible. On 28 April 2017 the official transfer of property was signed. Now that the building belongs to a non-profit organization, the relationships at play shift away from confrontational ones with the capitalist owner to other, much more complex dynamics that break away from the a simple ‘us and them’ dynamic. The 80 active members of the ecosystem (that will grow to 200 over the next decade) form the current commoning-community; many of us were involved in the groups that were in the trenches during the battle to secure the building. This reconstituted commoning-community is now responsible for the building and its common infrastructure. We have intentionally created horizontal management structures to enable ethical deliberation regarding viability and development, use of infrastructure and space, and mission/vivre ensemble. The latter is particularly innovative, in that it institutionalizes the spaces for action-reflection on diversity/accessibility, integration/onboarding and tensions/conflicts.

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Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking  289 Challenges to Commoning by Forces of Gentrification One of the tensions that we are currently struggling with is related to the fact that Bâtiment 7 is a potential gentrifying force. Although we do not use the word (anti-)gentrification, we carefully designed the mission to include most of its elements (see italics): 1. To self-manage a collective property rooted in the area’s popular history; 2. To create a hub of artistic, cultural, social and political services and activities to respond to the needs and desires of the local population; 3. To safeguard the accessibility of the site to all, with a strong and affirmed bias in favour of marginalized and impoverished populations; 4. To establish an ecosystem based on experimentation and learning, in order to promote self-reliance, interdependence, complementarity and resource-sharing; 5. To practice a horizontal and inclusive democratic mode of management; 6. To demonstrate solidarity towards other social justice efforts and to engage in the collective reappropriation of our neighbourhoods, our cities and our sense of togetherness. Fundamentally, we want to create a space of innovation that does not contribute to the displacement of the working-class and impoverished local population by another, with more cultural or material capital. This is easier said than done. This brings us back to the composition of the commoning-community and to the observation that although it is quite diverse in terms of gender, sexuality, age, income and political stripes (on the left), it does not mirror some of the key demographics of the neighbourhood. While 25.1 per cent of the population of Point St. Charles identifies as a visible minority (Ville de Montréal 2015), the members of Bâtiment 7 are overwhelmingly white. While 26.4 per cent of people aged 15 and over in the locality have not finished high school, most members of the commoning-community are university-educated and benefit from the symbolic capital that is thus conferred to them/us. The fact that Bâtiment 7 is managed by a mostly white coordinating class of activists is problematic given that our mission is rooted in autogestion (self-management). If the most marginalized and impoverished folks from the neighbourhood are not part of the commoning-community, are we not, inadvertently, contributing to gentrification? Each of us attracts our friends, who oftentimes resemble us, who then get involved in the member-run initiatives. Some decide to move into the neighbourhood, to be closer to the building and in doing so reduce the number of affordable housing units available to local folks. Many prefer to buy organic, local produce and to spend time in hip cafés. Developers know this, and open speciality shops and businesses, which attract young, middle-class families who transform multiplexes into single-family homes and successfully pressure public authorities into investing in beautification projects. Property values go up. Investors buy real estate, and then flip it. Rental housing owners transfer tax increases onto their tenants. All this has the potential to lead to displacement of those who can no longer afford to live there or who no longer ‘feel at home’. Lessons Learned This example sheds light on the messiness and the complexities of the relationships at play in the process of commoning. The ‘adversary’ in this case are the ubiquitous forces of gentrification which are oftentimes not external to ‘us’. Following the idea that a diverse ecosystem

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290  The handbook of diverse economies is more resilient and durable, the ability of Bâtiment 7 to stave off and slow down forces of gentrification in the years to come will be a direct result of our current efforts to enrol a diversity of actors into the commoning-community. It will also depend on our ability to make those who are different from us feel at home within the building and its ecosystem, even if that means navigating discomfort and cultural shifts. It will also mean joining forces with other commons-communities in their campaigns to reclaim other vacant lots and buildings for collective use. Fundamentally, it will be about our willingness to participate actively in the intentional process we have set up to engage in those difficult ethical negotiations that require time, energy, conflict, compromise . . . but also love and rage.

CONCLUSION In each of the three examples, different types of property have been commoned. A commoning-community has used direct action to create a commons and has taken on responsibility for its care. A space of ethical deliberation has been opened up in which commoners and other potential un-commoners negotiate use, access and benefit (Gibson-Graham et al. 2016). Because of the diversity of actors involved, these ethical discussions always take the form of struggle-negotiation. Some actors – such as the borough authorities, the Electrical Commission of Montreal, the capitalist owner of the CN railyards – are clearly powerful, easy to identify and thus to target. The power of others – such as the white supremacist neighbour or the gentrifier-inside-many-of-us – is less obvious, and therefore not as easy to identify. In the examples I have presented in this chapter, the commoning-community was able to make strategic choices about which actors to enrol in order to harness and expand power, but also about who to exclude, in order to protect the integrity of the commons. What has been learnt is that commoning is never neutral and never finished; it involves an ongoing process of making and remaking, struggling with and celebrating the messiness of surviving well together.

NOTES 1. This discussion of commoning draws on the set of criteria summarized in the Commons Identikit in Gibson-Graham et al. (2013, p. 135), namely access, use, benefit, care, responsibility and ownership. 2. B. Dorais (2017), comment on Anna Kruzynski’s Facebook thread, author’s translation. 3. This is a play on words, a point of pizza, all dressed. 4. This is a play on words, 7 is the number of the building, but also sounds like ‘c’est’, meaning ‘it’.

REFERENCES Action-Gardien and RIL (2019), ‘Étude sur l’habitation à Pointe-Saint-Charles’, accessed 27 March 2019 at https://​www​.espacesendisparition​.org/​documentation/​. Collectif Courtepointe (written by I. Drolet and A. Kruzynski) (2006), The Point Is . . . Grassroots Organising Works! Women from Point St. Charles Sharing Stories of Solidarity, Montreal: Éditions du Remue-Ménage.

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Commoning property in the city: the ongoing work of making and remaking  291 Elkouri, R. (2008), ‘L’anarchie fleurie de Pointe-Saint-Charles’, La Presse, accessed 5 June 2017 at http://​www​.lapresse​.ca/​debats/​chroniques/​200809/​08/​01​-656308​-lanarchie​-fleurie​-de​-pointe​-saint​ -charles​.php, author’s translation. Foster, S.R. and C. Iaione (2017), ‘The city as a commons’, Yale Law & Policy Review, 34 (2), 281–349. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2016), ‘Commoning as a postcapitalist politics’, in A. Amin and P. Howell (eds), Releasing the Commons: Rethinking the Futures of the Commons, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 193–212. Gorenflo, N. (2017), ‘Introduction’, in Shareable (ed.), Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, Creative Commons, pp. 20–35. Greer, A. (2012), ‘Commons and enclosure in the colonization of North America’, American Historical Review, 117 (2), 365–86. Huron, A. (2018), Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, DC, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kruzynski, A. (2017), ‘L’autonomie collective en action: du Centre Social Autogéré de Pointe-Saint-Charles au Bâtiment 7’, Nouvelles Pratiques Sociales, L’Action Communautaire: Quelle Autonomie? Pour Qui?, 29 (1), 139–58. Kruzynski, A. and M. Silvestro (2013), ‘Proximité physique, vie de quartier et luttes anarchistes’, in R. Bellemare-Caron, É. Breton, M.-A. Cyr, F. Dupuis-Déri and A. Kruzynski (eds), Nous Sommes Ingouvernables: Les Anarchistes au Québec, Montréal: Lux Éditeur, pp. 137–51. La Pointe Libertaire (2013), Bâtiment 7: Victoire Populaire à Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montréal: Les Éditions Écosociété. Le Collectif au Pied du Mur (2013), ‘Vandalisme raciste sur la mural: Au pied du mur riposte rapidement’, accessed 8 June 2017 at http://​lecollectifaupieddumur​.tumblr​.com/​post/​69298499680/​ vandalisme​-raciste​-sur​-la​-murale​-au​-pied​-du​-mur (author’s translation). Lees, L., H. Bang Shin and E. López-Morales (2016), Planetary Gentrification, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sévigny, M. (2009), Et Nous Serions Paresseux? Résistance Populaire et Autogestion Libertaire, Montréal: Écosociété. Simet, L. (2017), ‘Planetary gentrification’, Housing Studies, 32 (4), 543–5. Triollet, K. (2013), ‘Une décennie de luttes urbaines à Pointe-Saint-Charles: Vers une réappropriation citoyenne’, Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme: Occupons la Ville!, 10, 129–43. Ville de Montréal (2015), ‘Profil sociodémographique de Pointe-Saint-Charles’, Direction Culture, Sports, Loisirs et Développement Social, accessed 15 June 2018 at https://​ccpsc​.qc​.ca/​sites/​ccpsc​.qc​ .ca/​files/​PORTRAIT​_CSSS​_SudOuestVerdun​_2014​_v1​.1​_0​.pdf.

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32. Community land trusts: embracing the relationality of property Louise Crabtree

INTRODUCTION For many, it is currently hard to imagine a world in which land is not seen as a commodity to be bought and sold. However, history tells us the commodification of land is both recent and unusual. Even more encouragingly, ongoing and renewed interest in various forms of land and built property tenure shows us that the commodification of and speculation on housing are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Alongside the practical development of alternatives to privatized, commodified, speculative property, a growing body of theoretical work highlights the inherently relational nature of property and the opportunities this presents for imagining and enacting alternatives (see Blomley 2013; Crabtree 2013). This chapter is concerned with community land trusts (CLTs) as a contemporary manifestation of a long-standing interpretation of land as a common legacy to be stewarded rather than a privatized, speculative commodity. Specifically, it is concerned with how property is perceived and enacted by CLTs and the potential CLTs hold for articulating community economies. While the vision of land and property as a privatized, speculative commodity has served certain interests and aspects of late capitalism well, the intensification of property’s role as a vehicle for wealth accumulation is starting to run up hard against the fundamental role of housing in providing shelter. In Australia, this is generating ongoing and deepening issues that are also becoming increasingly widespread, most noticeably as a loss of affordable and decent housing stock in many cities and regional centres. Moreover, these issues are spreading beyond major economic centres to include their historically more affordable hinterlands. This is the direct result of the promotion of enclosure and privatization, with the assertion of property as a speculative commodity being enabled and supported through public policy that favours ‘free market’ forces rather than ongoing government provision of affordable housing. As with other such markets, the ‘free market’ in housing is constructed and maintained by public policies and, often, public subsidies that belie the ostensibly ‘private’ nature of property or the ‘free’ nature of the market. These policy settings can extend beyond housing policy to include the reduction or dismantling of public retirement pension schemes on the assumption that retirees will own property free and clear of debt. Further, it is assumed that the home will either be lived in – hence annulling the argument for pensions to be substantial enough to cover housing costs – or downsized for a smaller home, with the sale generating a lump sum to then be used as income. In addition, as was made visible by the global economic turmoil of the 2000s, housing lending products are now deeply entwined in global financial markets and recent literature has discussed the implications of the home as a financialized asset (e.g. Smith 2015). The commodification of property is not a universal narrative, however, and efforts to establish other forms of property are varied and widespread. These often rest on a base of 292 Louise Crabtree - 9781788119962 08:01:36PM

Community land trusts: embracing the relationality of property  293 substantial community input and/or control that seeks to identify and uphold core objectives, so can be described by umbrella terms such as community-led housing, collaborative housing, or self-organized housing (see the themed issue of the International Journal of Housing Policy 18 (1) (2018) and Lang et al.’s 2018 review paper). Within that broad drive for community control, various tools are used to implement specific community concerns. These can include legal forms such as cooperatives, or design and lifestyle models such as co-housing. However, these can also provide housing that is still commodified and not community led, so in defining community-led, collaborative, collective, or self-organized, the focus tends to be on function rather than form, or principles rather than types. That is, the focus is on what objectives are being upheld, rather than the form through which they are upheld. Within that broad category, CLTs rest on a principle of removing at least some of the imputed value of property from capitalist relations of exchange and holding it out of the speculative market in perpetuity. To achieve this, CLTs combine a community-based ownership and governance structure with a variety of legal agreements that index housing costs to appropriate measures such as local wages. In both the USA and the UK, CLTs are defined in national law to include both community benefit and housing affordability, with each CLT then free – or more accurately, obliged – to define and uphold those locally. Given that diversity, this chapter will review the philosophical and practical inheritance of CLTs, illustrate some of the variety that lies within the sector, and discuss the establishment of a sector in Australia to unpack some of the issues raised by resisting speculation and embracing relationality.

THE COMMONS LINEAGE OF CLTS As collectively owned and stewarded property, CLTs draw on the historical lineage of commons. Specifically, the creators of the first CLT in the USA drew their core principles from a combination of Henry George’s land rent model, Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model, and the Indian Gramdan Village movement (Davis 2010). From those models, CLTs developed a core assertion that land is a common legacy to be stewarded, while householders are entitled to a return on any efforts they put into the home. Consequently, the ‘classic’ CLT in the USA involves a non-profit entity holding title to land in perpetuity while granting the resident ownership of the home upon that land. A long-term, renewable ground lease between the resident and the CLT spells out the ongoing rights and responsibilities of both parties. As leases are renewable and inheritable, the relationship is intended to remain in perpetuity, so heirs or subsequent buyers inherit the relationship with the CLT and by inference, the broader community. On the basis of ongoing community organizing, CLTs unpack the rights and responsibilities bundled up in the idea and enactment of property. Consequently, CLTs aim to balance the rights and responsibilities of the resident with those of the broader community, including future residents. That balancing act resonates with the utilization of commons by a clearly defined group of users and their management through clearly defined rules. To perform the balancing act, many CLTs write the balancing of interests into their ownership and governance form as well as the agreements with their residents. The ‘classic’ CLT involves a Board comprising one-third CLT housing residents, one-third voting members who live in the CLT’s service area, and one-third representatives of the ‘public at large’ and other professionals. This last third is appointed by the other two-thirds.

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294  The handbook of diverse economies That Board structure combines the interests and skills of the people the CLT houses with members of the broader community who support its mission and professionals who can lend particular expertise or connections to that mission. Many CLTs require all Board nominees and members to undergo training to both build rapport and make sure all Board members have a shared understanding of their roles and responsibilities. In the USA, CLTs grew from an origin in the Civil Rights movement, through urban communities of colour as an anti-displacement measure, to become a more widespread model of affordable and price-restricted housing (DeFilippis et al. 2017). Some argue that while the dual focus of community benefit and perpetual affordability remains, the growing focus on affordability has come at the expense of community control and empowerment (Davis 2010; DeFilippis et al. 2017). The examples below highlight how this balancing act or increasing tension is playing out in different contexts.

CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative, Boston, Massachusetts, USA The history of Dudley Street is long and fascinating and the subject of at least one book (Medoff and Sklar 1994) and two documentaries (Lipman and Mahan 1996, 2012). The Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative (DSNI) is a community-based planning and organizing entity which created a subsidiary CLT, Dudley Neighbours, Inc. (DNI), to implement the community’s vision for Boston’s blighted and marginalized Dudley/Roxbury area. DNI was formed in 1988 when the City of Boston utilized the power of eminent domain to hand over title to vacant and disused properties in a 62 acre area of property known as the ‘Dudley Triangle’ after a long community campaign against historical absentee landlordism, illegal dumping, property destruction and looming gentrification. Since its inception, DNI has overseen the development of 225 perpetually affordable housing units and DSNI has overseen more than 1300 development applications in the area, often with several hundred community members at development application meetings. The City has adopted DNI’s redevelopment plan as its planning strategy for Roxbury and the former CEO of DSNI is now head of economic development for the City. The 34-seat DSNI Board includes 16 residents from each of the four local major ethnic groups, two additional Board-appointed residents, three youth, seven non-profit agencies, two churches, two businesses, and two community development corporations. As DSNI’s subsidiary, DNI is driven by and exists to fulfil the desires of DSNI; as such, DNI does not have the classic three-part board structure as it is already steered by DSNI’s multi-stakeholder Board. Rather, DNI has 11 Board members, of which eight are voting positions. The three non-voting positions are appointed by the City to ensure the power of eminent domain is not misused. Of the eight voting positions, six are from DSNI, one represents the Roxbury Neighbourhood Council and one the Mayor’s office. Currently three of these DNI Board members are CLT leaseholders. Consequently, DNI is perhaps unique in its powers, constitution and governance. On that basis, DNI has commissioned for-profit developers to build affordable housing according to criteria established by residents regarding room size and housing types, materials, and rate of infill. DNI houses households on up to 120 per cent of area median income and

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Community land trusts: embracing the relationality of property  295 places a restricted value on homes, with the resident owning the entire value of any improvements that they make to their home. In addition, DNI has successfully secured lower land tax rates for its properties, in line with their lower resale values. The Trust has also expanded into affordable rentals through the purchase and the construction of Dudley Village. Dudley Village combines 50 permanently affordable rental apartments with ground floor commercial spaces on the main street of Roxbury. The development application was overseen by 350 community members, with the development process supervised by a sustainable development committee covering land use, civic building, density, and building material and design. This relatively dense development was driven by local residents and social service agencies that recognized that density gain was necessary for social services’ viability. Other DNI projects have included parks, community gardens, and a 900 square metre commercial greenhouse on 2000 square metres of land in partnership with the Food Project, to address local food security and youth employment concerns. DSNI creates an ongoing and visible point of difference in the local housing system as alongside its perpetual affordability, the physical form of DSNI’s homes contrasts with that which a for-profit market would create. Eigg Isle, Scotland Research on Scotland’s expanding community land ownership movement demonstrates that a strong focus on land reform (with an integral housing component) and community development can be transformational with regard to a range of outcomes (Mackenzie 2006). The movement was fundamentally enabled by the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, a national law that ‘gives crofting communities the right to acquire and control the croft land where they live and work’ (Scottish Government n.d.a),1 and other communities the first offer to buy identified parcels of land as they come to market (Scottish Government n.d.b). The sector is underpinned by the Scottish Land Fund. The scope and power of community ownership as enabled by policy support shows the potential of hybrid and collective approaches to the de-commodification of property for both residential and non-residential uses. The Isle of Eigg is a small island off the west coast of Scotland that was bought in 1997 through a fundraising effort that raised £1.5 million amongst residents and from further afield. Prior to the community buyout, an absentee landlord owned the island; now the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust owns it and has established three subsidiary companies with different functions. Eigg Electric Ltd runs the renewable energy system, which was set up with grant funds and generates solar, wind and water power. Eigg Trading Ltd owns and manages the island shop, post office, tearoom and craft shop. Eigg Construction Ltd has renovated several homes on the island and does repairs and small infrastructure projects. A shared equity scheme, Eigg Roll, was also established with grant money to enable residents to build homes on the island with no land cost, on the condition that if they sell, the land value in the sale price would be passed on to the Trust. While not retaining control of the land in community hands, that resale mechanism does allow the value of land sale to be held and used by the community. Since the 1997 buyout, the community has grown from 64 people to roughly 100, including young children and people who had previously left the island. Other nearby island communities are following the experience of Eigg with interest.

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ESTABLISHING CLTS IN AUSTRALIA Currently there is interest in CLTs in Australia from at least two angles that can be roughly defined as care for the land and/or community on the one hand, and a need for affordable housing on the other. Sometimes both concerns are in play. Where CLTs are being explored as an avenue for care for land and community, they share conceptual and ideological terrain with intentional communities and as a result, often align with the discourses and practices of ecovillages. Affordability may or may not be part of the core concerns of these, although as housing affordability worsens generally, interest in this role of CLTs is spreading within intentional community discussions. Currently there are very few CLTs in existence in Australia and the diverse range of CLT objectives can be seen in descriptions and mission statements from self-identifying CLTs: . . . a fully self-sustainable village, created, owned and operated by its community. It offers a place of belonging, social connection, spiritual development, and economic independency in a pristine environment. (Cohousing Australia n.d.) Provide perpetually affordable housing for people on low incomes who live or work in the Mount Alexander Shire who cannot access either long term affordable home ownership or a secure rented property through channels that currently exist. To promote equal access to high quality and well designed housing that is both environmentally sound and in keeping with community expectations. (Mount Alexander Community Land Ltd 2010)

Broadly speaking, grassroots CLT initiatives are driven by multiple objectives including community control over development, affordable housing, and a range of non-housing objectives such as local food production, greater community interaction, and decentralized energy and water services. In contrast, CLT proposals from existing registered community housing providers are primarily concerned with the diversification of the providers’ housing activities beyond income-limited affordable rentals into resale-restricted home ownership. This is based on the community housing providers’ experience as providers of affordable rental housing with their residents not having options if and when they want to (or based on their increasing income, have to) leave. The majority of Australia’s community housing providers operate at a scale beyond a local ‘community’; many are city- or state-wide, and some are national or international. Very few have dedicated Board positions for tenants, and none are member-based.2 How they might enable substantial community control over development in their expansion to CLT activities or achieve community economy objectives remains unclear. However, there is an avenue that is worth exploring in the existing cooperative housing sector. In the eastern states of New South Wales and Victoria, some community housing providers support localized cooperatives. The state-based peak body often holds title to the housing and holds long-term agreements with the individual cooperatives. Residents lease their homes from the cooperative, with rents indexed to household incomes. Income limits apply, so the sector is currently investigating if and how it can expand into a variant on the USA model of limited equity cooperatives so that residents can transition into an equity model as their incomes rise. This would mean that cooperative housing would be available to households who may not be eligible under the current income restrictions, but who do not want to, or cannot, participate in the open market. There is also interest in the principles and strategies of CLTs amongst some Aboriginal organizations that are looking into appropriate models of housing tenure on Aboriginal lands.

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Community land trusts: embracing the relationality of property  297 The focus on community control as well as affordability resonates with the objectives and aspirations of such organizations and their communities (Crabtree et al. 2015). This provides a mechanism for creating more appropriate housing options than either current policy or market forces are able to deliver. While there is growing interest in CLTs amongst diverse areas of Australia’s housing system, Australia’s CLT sector is in its very early stages. Its growth and development have been assisted by an ongoing body of scholar activism that has worked extensively with government, community and industry partners to conduct workshops, meetings, public talks and fieldwork, and to create a suite of freely available reports and resources including a substantial legal manual and subsequent book (e.g. Crabtree et al. 2013 and Crabtree et al. 2019). As housing affordability intensifies as a topic of public and, to an extent, policy discussion, there is growing awareness of and interest in diverse forms of housing design, procurement and tenure. Many of these span the spectrum of rights and responsibilities that lies between Australia’s dominant models of private rental and ownership and so tend to be shaped by dominant market logics, albeit in a modified or ameliorated form. Efforts to establish CLTs occupy this space and as such can stir up a lot of the assumptions and expectations that are upheld (yet hidden) by dominant enactments of property. In Australia, the conflation of private home ownership with individual identity and socio-economic success has become ossified. CLTs challenge these associations and consequently can create fracture lines. As with broader advocacy and activism regarding housing affordability, CLT discussions and efforts can trigger the assertion of a claim to space by propertied and working individuals, alongside the de-legitimization of others not manifesting the same citizen ideal. It is apparent that the ongoing financialization of housing has translated into moralistic assertions of who deserves to live where, why, and on what terms, in line with their actual or perceived contribution to the economy rather than society. Relational understandings of property can offer ways to rebalance the consideration of the social and financial values and infrastructures of housing. In this, it is vital that agencies involved in creating policy, building homes, and providing finance to residents are also key parties in the discussion, as the re-articulation of such infrastructures will both need champions and create new opportunities for innovative entities.

CONCLUSION I sometimes hear CLTs referred to as de-commodifying housing or property, but that has sat uneasily for a while. Commodities are neatly delineated goods or services that can be readily exchanged. De-commodification implies either removing the exchange value of property or removing its neatly delineated nature; CLTs do neither of these. I think CLTs do something far more interesting and interstitial. Due to the flexibility of their definition, which immediately demands local contextualization, CLTs do whatever makes the most sense to uphold their core principles. Hence in CLTs, property is still delineated and exchanged, but the need to define affordability and community benefit means that the parameters of ownership and exchange are made very clear. Moreover, they are made accountable and open to considered refinement, while resistant to rapid or flippant revisions. As a result, increasingly, when asked what ‘the CLT model’ is, I respond ‘persistence and opportunism’, despite knowing that often the asker is seeking a singular legal or financial form

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298  The handbook of diverse economies as the response. I think that refusing to answer the question in a technical sense is a core part of the work that CLTs do, as they ultimately have no ‘model’ other than a relentless drive to find appropriate ways to uphold affordability and community benefit in perpetuity. The requirement for local definition and accountability immediately makes CLTs political animals that have to engage with and articulate the relational nature of property. In doing so, they uphold the social relations of commoning and offer creative and promising channels for the ongoing embedding of these relations in place.

NOTES 1. Crofting is a form of tenancy in which residents live and work on the croft estate, titles to which have historically been held by landlords. Crofters have their own parcel of land in addition to common land. Many crofts are small towns. Historically the dominant form of crofting work was agriculture but most contemporary crofters have other sources of income and crofting communities are involved in energy production, tourism and other land-based activities (see Shelter Scotland 2018). 2. Two of the cooperative housing peak bodies have a focus on tenant roles in governance. Each operates as the peak body of discrete cooperatives located throughout their state.

REFERENCES Blomley, N. (2013), ‘Performing property: Making the world’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 26 (1), 23–48. Cohousing Australia (n.d.), ‘Mannawood Community Land Trust (Former Bunjil Community Village)’, accessed 4 June 2018 at https://​www​.ic​.org/​directory/​mannawood​-community​-land​-trust/​. Crabtree, L. (2013), ‘Decolonising property: Exploring ethics, land, and time, through housing interventions in contemporary Australia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (1), 99–115. Crabtree, L., H. Blunden, P. Phibbs, C. Sappideen, D. Mortimer, A. Shahib-Smith and L. Chung (2013), The Australian Community Land Trust Manual, Sydney: University of Western Sydney. Crabtree, L., N. Moore, P. Phibbs, H. Blunden and C. Sappideen (2015), Community Land Trusts and Indigenous Communities: From Strategies to Outcomes. Final Report No. 239, Melbourne: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. Crabtree, L., C. Sappideen, S. Lawler, R. Conroy and J. McNeill (2019), Enabling Community Land TRusts in Australia, Melbourne: ARENA Publications. Davis, J. E. (2010), ‘Origins and evolution of the community land trust in the United States’, in J.E. Davis (ed.), The Community Land Trust Reader, Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, pp. 3–47. DeFilippis, J., B. Stromberg and O. Williams (2017), ‘W(h)ither the community in community land trusts?’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 40 (6), 755–69. Lang, R., C. Carriou and D. Czischke (2018), ‘Collaborative housing research (1990–2017): A systematic review and thematic analysis of the field’, Housing, Theory and Society, 35 (4), 1–30. Lipman, M. and L. Mahan (1996), Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street, Newburgh: New Day Films. Lipman, M. and L. Mahan (2012), Gaining Ground: Building Community on Dudley Street, Newburgh: New Day Films. Mackenzie, A. (2006), ‘A working land: Crofting communities, place and the politics of the possible in post-Land Reform Scotland’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31 (3), 383–98. Medoff, P. and H. Sklar (1994), Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood, Boston, MA: South End Press.

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Community land trusts: embracing the relationality of property  299 Mount Alexander Community Land Ltd (2010), ‘Our vision’, accessed 4 June 2018 at http://​www​.macll​ .org​.au/​vision​ htm. Scottish Government (n.d.a), ‘Crofting community right to buy’, accessed 4 June 2018 at https://​beta​.gov​ .scot/​policies/​land​-reform/​crofting​-community​-right​-to​-buy/​. Scottish Government (n.d.b), ‘Part 2 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003: Community right to buy – information for communities’, accessed 4 June 2018 at https://​beta​.gov​.scot/​publications/​community​ -right​-buy​-information​-communities/​. Shelter Scotland (2018), ‘About crofts and crofting’, accessed 5 June 2018 at https://​scotland​.shelter​ .org​.uk/​get​_advice/​advice​_topics/​finding​_a​_place​_to​_live/​crofts​_and​_crofting/​about​_crofts​_and​ _crofting. Smith, S. (2015), ‘Owner occupation: At home in a spatial, financial paradox’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 15 (1), 61–83.

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33. Urban land markets in Africa: multiplying possibilities via a diverse economy reading Colin Marx

INTRODUCTION For many, there is really only one way to understand the land markets of African cities. This is that they are fundamentally in evolution towards capitalist land markets underpinned by statutory law, in a context characterized by a prevalence of informal and customary land markets. That is, when acknowledged by policymakers as significant in any way other than their prevalence, other possible kinds of land markets are considered to be deficient versions of capitalist land markets. Land markets and their effective functioning emerge as a precondition for economic growth in many countries. In this formulation, economic growth is taken for granted as capitalist economic growth and markets are taken for granted as the aggregation of transactions characterized by the interaction of demand and supply based on neoclassical economic models (Giddings 2009). In such contexts, the interests in land markets is neither in questioning what they are nor how they contribute to (capitalist) economic growth; rather, the focus falls on the technical preconditions for land markets to function – effectively displacing the focus onto land administration and management systems. This type of understanding has clear implications for the ideological role of the state and public policies in facilitating but not impeding land markets, for which property rights are considered most valuable (especially those that are recognized by statutory legal systems), and for where the most wealth can be generated (where land is leveraged in complex financial deals) (Napier et al. 2013). In this view, complexity in urban land markets arises from the sophistication of the financial arrangements in which land is configured (Wallace and Williamson 2006). But there is another kind of complexity that characterizes these land markets and which is arguably more important for the majority of residents of African cities. Despite the analytical precision of the underlying neoclassical economic model and robustness of consequent land administration knowledge, scholars and policymakers inherit a series of restrictions. As I will demonstrate by comparing the dominant view with a view that affords more diversity, these restrictions are built on an automatic hierarchy of land markets and make it difficult to challenge the direction of social change as well as understand how different types of economic practices articulate with each other. In addition, it is difficult to see how different types of transactions emerge and interact with each other. Moreover, we lose a sense in which the outcomes of land markets can be ambiguous – they can simultaneously be both positive and negative for the same party. All of this is important in considering a wider set of politics and understanding better how cities grow physically. I turn to a diverse economies perspective to start to address them. There are two significant ways in which urban land could figure in a diverse economies perspective of land markets. The first is as a ‘factor of production’ in a diverse economy – 300 Colin Marx - 9781788119962 08:01:43PM

Urban land markets in Africa: a diverse economy reading  301 with all the differentiated ways in which economic activity occurs. The second is through the diversity of ways in which urban land itself is exchanged. Engaging with the latter view, this chapter puts forward an understanding of urban land markets that is enabled by a diverse economies challenge to capitalocentricism. In doing this, I argue that the complexity of urban land markets is related to the diversity of their interactions and show how this provides more analytical purchase on the actual dynamics of cities and possibilities for change when each land market can be simultaneously a platform and threat to progressive change. The chapter is structured as follows. First I identify some of the most important implications of capitalocentric understandings of urban land markets which provide a basis upon which to demonstrate the utility of alternative views of land markets. Second I present five elements of markets that, together, afford a view of the diversity of urban land markets. Finally, I show how this presents opportunities to multiply the possibilities for understanding urban land markets that are more supportive of poor women and men’s livelihoods.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF CAPITALOCENTRIC UNDERSTANDINGS OF LAND MARKETS For the most part, urban land markets are understood within a neoclassical economic understanding of markets. In such a view, markets bring buyers and sellers together, they set the prices for land, allocate land by setting prices so that the market ‘clears’ and play an important role in ensuring that land is efficiently used (Antwi 2002; Deininger 2003). For this to happen, six conditions need to be in place. These are: well-defined property rights, the voluntary participation of parties, many buyers and sellers, free entry and exit, perfect information, and enough similarity of product (Dowall 1993). While many of these characteristics need to be relaxed in order to inform the real world, they provide a performative ideal of bid rent curves and market dynamics (Dipasquale and Wheaton 1992; Genesis Analytics 2008) and predetermine the main actors and source of agency, how land markets relate to economic growth, and the directions of change. Notwithstanding the prevalence of such neoclassical economic understandings, there are more focused approaches. One such – commonly referred to as ‘making markets work for the poor (M4P)’ – rejects the assumption that poor people are outside of markets and that the primary means through which they can be included is by subsidizing the cost of land, lowering the standard of land services and/or lowering the size of the land provided. Instead, drawing from new institutional economics, this approach highlights the economic roles of institutions in reducing production costs and transaction costs (Elliot et al. 2008; Gibson et al. 2004). Transaction costs are the expenses incurred in doing business. Where systems of coordination and cooperation are clear, it is less expensive to transact because these activities can be taken for granted. In this light, the efficiency and effectiveness of markets can be measured in transaction costs. And, in relation to land markets, the perceived disconnection between formal and informal land markets creates a high transaction cost for the poor. This approach seeks to reduce poverty through functioning markets – where functioning markets do not impose unnecessary and high transaction costs. Taking the view that where markets function, there has been economic growth, proponents argue that markets are a key organizing principle of everyday life. Markets matter to everyone but particularly the poor because if poorer people are not in the markets they can only benefit through the redistribution

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302  The handbook of diverse economies of tax or through charity, neither of which are sufficient or sustainable. Therefore, the most effective way forward is to have inclusive markets that work for the poor. Despite a belief in a diversity of markets, this approach ultimately fails to escape its neoclassical economic foundations and the fundamental belief that the only market that matters is a capitalist market. Thus, the model of an accessible and appropriate market is one comprising three dimensions and a number of elements which I will build on later. First, there is the core market where buyers and sellers interact based on the (capitalist) dynamics of supply and demand. Second, surrounding the core, are the institutions which provide the (capitalist) rules of the game. And third, surrounding the institutions are the (capitalist) services and infrastructure that lubricate the markets (Mooya and Cloete 2010). In this account, the task is to reduce the institutional disconnects between (capitalist) markets and any other markets. What analysts are left with are, first, clear distinctions between who the main actors are and who play the supporting roles. Second, that the ability of (certain) land markets to relate to economic growth is predetermined with those that are formal and supportive of capitalist processes. And third, that the dynamics of change in such a reading are also unilinear with movement towards greater clarity achieved through formalization and capitalist logics being the ultimate solution. What is lost is an ability to account for diversity, and subsequently the multiple possibilities that can arise, and I turn to this now.

AFFORDING DIVERSITY A fundamental aspect of acknowledging different perspectives is acknowledging the importance of the subjectivities and positionalities both of researcher/scholars and amongst those being researched as they engage in their everyday lives. Bound up with the ways of knowing and abilities to construct different worlds is the need to accept the inevitable opportunities and constraints afforded by different subjectivities and positionalities (Gibson 2001; Gibson-Graham 1996). Similarly, the subjectivities and positionalities of people are just as important in creating possibilities, experiments, relations and interjections in various processes in people’s everyday lives (Simone 2012). Affording opportunities for these to be consequential is important in being able to analyse how urban land markets – now understood to encompass a more diverse set of practices – operate. This section builds upon an attentiveness to subjectivity and positionality to build on five elements of African urban land markets identified within institutional economics. The five elements are aspects of transactions that are needed in order to afford a glimpse of the diversity. However, in contrast to institutional economic accounts (such as M4P discussed above), these elements do not have a predetermined, default position and relation to other elements although some are stabilized into more or less commonly accepted configurations. Instead, they need to be continually configured by those operating within, and through, them. These five elements are important in analysing the nature of transactions within multiple urban land markets as well as the relationships between transactions – understood as the building blocks of markets (Ramstad 1996) – and markets.

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Urban land markets in Africa: a diverse economy reading  303 Element 1: Mediated Demand and Supply I begin analytically from the point that a ‘land market’ is characterized by an allocation system of demand and supply for a geographically located space that affords room and opportunities to engage in activities. However, from work on diverse economies, it is clear that people transact within many different registers of meaning. For example, in research on the operation of informal land markets in the South African cities of Cape Town, Durban and Ekurhuleni, it was evident that amongst the registers of meaning there are: transactions that are based on the simple need for survival (people ask for and are granted price reductions) adjusting the transaction so that money still changes hands and reference may be made to a ‘full’ market price but based on a different logic or rationale. For example, recently arrived rural migrants could transact on their basic human need for somewhere to stay. Landowners recognize this basic human need and lower their requested level of payment for the right to reside on, or use, land (Isandla Institute and SBC 2007). Similarly, people transact on the basis of a personal or socio-political right (that identifies them as members of a clan, kin group, nation or region) and, where again, the market price is mediated by socially agreed interpretations of these rights. For example, in many post-colonial contexts, citizens of newly liberated countries claimed a right to land as following on from the country’s independence. For example, the ‘rights’ register may have been forged out of complex post-colonial histories where, in Hargeysa, Somalia, for example, people engage in transactions in relation to the suffering they endured during, and because of, a war of independence. In this scenario, other registers of meaning include treating land as a commodity, as an asset (in terms of a financial and/or family investment) and in reference to capitalist land markets as a ‘complex commodity’ comprising financialized processes of securitization and corporatization (Wallace and Williamson 2006). Importantly, each one of these registers has an interwoven history with other social processes and emerges as much from the process as the specific location. Element 2: Plural Legal Systems From work on legal pluralism, these transactions occur within many different legal ‘systems’ (Rakodi 2005) (see also Morgan and Kuch, Chapter 36 in this volume). For example, in Kampala, Uganda, transactions are located within and constitute legal systems as diverse as statutory law, customary law, informal norms and conventions, religious law, and international project law (such as that imposed by agencies like the World Bank when it supports infrastructure projects) (Nkurunziza 2008). In Tanzania, the country’s Constitution itself recognizes statutory, informal and customary legal systems (Kombe 2010). However, while there are different legal systems operating, it is clear that people have different abilities to work between these and that for some, their scope of action is more limited in the sense that they do not have the possibilities of working in more than one system (Von Benda-Beckmann and Von Benda-Beckmann 2006) and that there are strong incentives to favour a statutory system (McAuslan 2005).

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304  The handbook of diverse economies Element 3: Recognition and Recognizing It is clear that people do not come into markets as pre-formed buyers and sellers. Instead, there are a range of social processes that are needed to make buyers and sellers recognizable to each other and to have ways of recognizing other parties involved in transactions. These processes of recognition are important in determining whether the other party is actually able to hold exchangeable land rights, or will be able to make/accept payments, and so on (Lwasa 2010). In many places, buyers and sellers rely on neighbouring land holders and community leaders to make themselves recognizable as either buyers or sellers. For example, as the value of land rapidly changes in peri-urban Blantyre, Malawi, buyers and sellers must renegotiate the conventional and intentional relations, and everyday symbolic and material practices of transacting (Jimu 2012). Key to these processes are the subjectivities that people adopt and the social networks through which they engage in transactions. For example, in Durban, South Africa, people enter transactions as ‘workers’, ‘unemployed’, ‘migrants’, ‘slum-dwellers’ and so on (Posel and Marx 2013). Each of these subjectivities, already forged in relation to particular legal systems, enables certain social relations to be constructed as buyer/seller pairings as people find others to transact with. Element 4: Defining Property Rights Working with a definition of property rights that sees property as a social relation between people with regard to something of value rather than an objective relation between people and a thing (Macpherson 1992; Singer 2000), we can see that the social agreements about what counts as a right (or ‘property’) are important and speak to people’s willingness to transact over something where they know the extent of the security of the rights they are purchasing (Shipton 2009). In this process, what counts as ‘property’, ‘land rights’ and ‘claims’ to land are locally determined, and far from universal (Blomley 2004; Braverman et al. 2014). Eschewing a view that ‘property’ is essentially statutorily defined ‘rights’, there are a multitude of ways in which people can hold land, as property, that range from ownership and renting, to borrowing and ‘taking care of’ (Isandla Institute and SBC PRD 2007). In such cases, ownership can be in/formal, customary or religious, for example. Renting can be formal or informal. Borrowing refers to instances where people have property, but realizes that this is temporary because a more enduring claim belongs to someone else. ‘Taking care of’ is similar in that it has an important temporal dimension, but this time, the holder of the property is invited to ‘own’ the land at the bequest of the ‘real’ owner and has some sense of the circumstances under which they may need to leave. For example, an owner may assume a responsibility for a relative and allow the relative to use the land and enable them to overcome hardship. From the owner’s perspective, this offers security where physical occupation of land is a strong sense of tenure security. Element 5: Framing Markets in Time and Space Closely related to the subjectivities and positionalities of actors in land markets are the abilities to ‘frame’ market transactions in terms of time and space. That is, for transactions to be rendered commensurable and aggregable there must be agreement on which transactions can be included in the calculations. Time and space are fundamental in delimiting what counts as

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Urban land markets in Africa: a diverse economy reading  305 the market. For example, in Durban, people talked about their great-grandfather purchasing land more than 100 years previously and how this transaction was pertinent to their current considerations of market activity. In this case, a historical transaction has provided proof and identity for people and is material to the way that they choose to act in the contemporary period. Similarly, people in northern Ghana draw on long histories – mostly with rural origins – in order to contextualize and legitimize their urban land ownerships (Sikor and Lund 2009). Each one of these different framings creates different possibilities for what counts as a transaction in ‘the market’. Transactions and Markets Lastly, there is the relationship of ‘individual’ transactions to markets to consider. Conventional analyses suggest that markets are the sum of transactions. Perhaps they are if only one type of transaction is aggregated. However, from the foregoing it is evident that there are many urban land markets in African cities. The picture is complicated still further when transactions are considered to be a process rather than represented by a point of intersecting demand and supply curves. If we consider transactions to cohere with the five elements in the different sequential, but not unilinear steps, then, there are a multitude of ways in which they could come together as parties, find others to transact with, recognize other parties are legitimate actors, value the right to be exchanged, calculate the amount to exchange, contract with other parties, and hold the land under different tenure regimes. In each one of these steps the five elements may play a role in shaping how people exchange land or seek to alter the behaviour of others to act in accordance with particular norms and understandings. With these myriad ways of configuring transactions it is evident that any claims that individual transactions can be summed to form a (single) market are a stretch of the imagination. Since the idea of a single land market is not beyond a capitalist imagination, it is more pertinent to ask: What are the effects of claiming that a land market is the sum of (particular) transactions and how are these effects secured? This is not to say that there are not stabilizations and norms that emerge in different land markets. Clearly, there are interests that emerge in different contexts that structure the exchange of land in particular ways that buyers and sellers can work through. However, without admitting the differences that are possible, it is very difficult to justify looking for ways, other than (proto-) capitalist, of exchanging urban land.

CONCLUSION Working from a diverse economies perspective, researchers are afforded a view of African urban land markets that operate as multiple idealized spaces for exchanging rights to space to engage in activities, location and identity. There are therefore different logics, working for different reasons, to realize diverse values working through urban land markets as people seek to engage in activities in (locational) relation to others and in terms of social values of belonging and identity. In these diverse processes, there is the potential for multiple directions of change. As a result of using diverse economies as an inspiration, researchers gain an ability to challenge the direction of change. By opening up to a plurality of land markets that are not automatically cast in a hierarchy, we gain a sense of how different types of economic practices articulate with each other or how transactions conducted in one place are differentiated

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306  The handbook of diverse economies from others. We gain a sense in which the land markets in a particular city are not simply the aggregation of transactions across a particular part of the city or even worse, assumed for the entire city. We gain a sense in which the outcomes of land markets are ambiguous – they can simultaneously be both positive and negative for the same party. All of this is important in considering a wider set of politics and in understanding better how cities grow physically and what other logics can be built upon to produce more equitable African cities.

REFERENCES Antwi, A.Y. (2002), ‘A study of informal land transactions in Accra, Ghana’, in Our Common Estate, London: RICS Foundation. Blomley, N. (2004), Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property, New York: Routledge. Braverman, I., N. Blomley, D. Delaney and A. Kedar (2014), The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deininger, K. (2003), Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction, Washington, DC: World Bank. Dipasquale, D. and W.C. Wheaton (1992), ‘The markets for real-estate assets and space: A conceptual-framework’, Journal of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, 20 (2), 181–97. Dowall, D.E. (1993), ‘The role and function of urban land markets in market economies’, paper presented at the Workshop on Privatization of Land in Ukraine, sponsored by the Ministry of Construction and Architecture, State Committee on Land Resources, and United States Agency for International Development, Kiev, 12–14 May. Elliot, D., A. Gibson and R. Hitchins (2008), ‘Making markets work for the poor: Rationale and practice’, Enterprise Development and Microfinance, 19 (2), 101–19. Genesis Analytics (2008), ‘The dynamics of the formal urban land market in South Africa’, a report prepared for Urban LandMark, Pretoria. Gibson, A., H. Scott and D. Ferrand (2004), ‘Making markets work for the poor: An objective and an approach for governments and development agencies’, report prepared for the ComMark Trust, Woodmead, South Africa. Gibson, K. (2001), ‘Regional subjection and becoming’, Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, 19 (6), 639–67. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Giddings, S.W. (2009), The Land Market in Kampala, Uganda and its Effect on Settlement Patterns, Washington, DC: International Housing Coalition. Isandla Institute and SBC (2007), ‘Do informal land markets work for poor people? An assessment of three metropolitan cities in South Africa’, a synthesis report prepared for Urban LandMark, Pretoria. Jimu, I.M. (2012), Peri-Urban Land Transactions: Everyday Practices and Relations in Peri-Urban Blantyre, Malawi, Bamenda: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group. Kombe, W.J. (2010), ‘Land conflicts in Dar es Salaam: Who gains? Who loses?’ in Cities and Fragile States, London: Crisis States Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science. Lwasa, S. (2010), Urban Land Markets, Housing Development and Spatial Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Uganda, New York: Nova Science Publishers. Macpherson, C.B. (1992), Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McAuslan, P. (2005), ‘Legal pluralism as a policy option: Is it desirable, is it doable?’, paper presented at UNDP–International Land Coalition Workshop on Land Rights for African Development: From Knowledge to Action, Nairobi, 31 October–3 November. Mooya, M.M. and C.E. Cloete ( 2010), ‘Property rights, real estate markets and poverty alleviation in Namibia’s urban low income settlements’, Habitat International, 34 (4), 436–45. Napier, M., S. Berrisford, C. Wanjiku Kihato, R. McGaffin and L. Royston (2013), Trading Places: Accessing Land in African Cities, Somerset West: African Minds for Urban LandMark.

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Urban land markets in Africa: a diverse economy reading  307 Nkurunziza, E. (2008), ‘Understanding informal urban land access processes from a legal pluralist perspective: The case of Kampala, Uganda’, Habitat International, 32 (1), 109–20. Posel, D. and C. Marx (2013), ‘Circular migration: A view from destination households in two urban informal settlements in South Africa’, Journal of Development Studies, 49 (6), 819–31. Rakodi, C. (2005), ‘The urban challenge in Africa’, in M. Keiner, M. Koll-Schretzenmayr and W. A. Schmid (eds), Managing Urban Futures: Sustainability and Urban Growth in Developing Countries, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 47–70. Ramstad, Y. (1996), ‘Is a transaction a transaction?’, Journal of Economic Issues, 30 (2), 413–25. Shipton, P. (2009), Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sikor, T. and C. Lund (2009), ‘Access and property: A question of power and authority’, Development and Change, 40 (1), 1–22. Simone, A. (2012), ‘Screen’, in C. Lury and N. Wakeford (eds), Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, London: Routledge, pp. 202–18. Singer, J.W. (2000), Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Von Benda-Beckmann, F. and K. Von Benda-Beckmann (2006), ‘The dynamics of change and continuity in plural legal orders’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 38, 1–44. Wallace, J. and I. Williamson (2006), ‘Building land markets’, Land Use Policy, 23 (2), 123–35.

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34. A Slow Food commons: cultivating conviviality across a range of property forms Melissa Kennedy

INTRODUCTION The concept of a commons, or property that is shared, is becoming increasingly prevalent in rethinking how we use our resources. Conceptions of the commons are typically evoked through the image of the shared village pastures of medieval Britain or Indigenous forms of collective land management. More recently, the term ‘urban commons’ is gaining attention through initiatives such as community gardens that are reclaiming communal property in cities. My own introduction to thinking of a commons was blackberry picking, an annual ritual in Ireland undertaken by my father and I, where we foraged from brambles along public roads and into private pastures, hoping not to be reproached by a farmer for trespassing (or even worse, a bull!). What underpins these examples is the relationship between property and food, which provides the focus for this chapter. Definitions of commons embrace both material and immaterial property. Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy explain the commons as: ‘a property, a practice or a knowledge shared by a community’ (2013, p. 130). A food commons can involve the sharing of the food itself and the property where it is cultivated, but can also extend to a ‘culinary commons’ of knowledge and practices that inform how food is traditionally cultivated, prepared and consumed across cultural contexts (Barrère et al. 2012). Under industrialized food systems however, food is largely separated from its cultural context and has come to be considered a ‘commodity’ constituted by ‘mostly private goods (land, agro-chemicals, patented seeds) although not always (local landraces, rainfall, agricultural knowledge)’ (Vivero-Pol 2017, p. 185). While commodified food on supermarket shelves represents increasingly private forms of property, as food commons scholar Vivero-Pol points out here, its inputs may also derive from a commons drawn from other species, the atmosphere and knowledge. New potential to amplify the food commons is offered from a diverse economies perspective. As Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy point out, ‘all forms of property can be potential commons’ (2013, p. 131). To locate a food commons in a diverse economy involves attuning to a variety of property forms, ranging from private land, to state-owned land, to open-access resources such as the atmosphere and water (2013, p. 147). Furthermore, a community economies perspective brings to our attention the community of commoners (both human and non-human) that bring the commons into being. To make this point, Gibson-Graham quote anthropologist Stephen Gudeman in emphasizing ‘Without a commons there is no community, without a community, there is no commons’ (cited in Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 95). This raises the important consideration that commons are not just material but also social. What underpins any commons is a set of rules around how: access is shared, use of property is negotiated, benefit is distributed, care is performed and responsibility assumed by community members (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, pp. 131–2). Taking the example of 308 Melissa Kennedy - 9781788119962 08:01:48PM

A Slow Food commons: cultivating conviviality across property forms  309 blackberries referred to in the opening, a diversity of property forms are identified alongside rules that address an ethic of interdependence between species. Blackberries are recognized as an open-access food resource or ‘natural food commons’ which have been shaped by human and non-human use and interaction (Vivero-Pol 2017, p. 185). Historian Gunther Peck (2014) describes how migrating workers and animals perpetuated the spread of blackberries along the edges of roads, railway lines, fences and forests in northern Europe. While my own blackberry picking encounters were fraught with fear of trespassing, in other countries such as Sweden and parts of the UK, use of private land for wild food harvesting is enshrined in law (Lee and Garikipati 2011; Sténs and Sandström 2013). Blackberry picking involves more than sharing access to property, but often the distribution of benefits with families sharing the fruit to make jam and tarts. The continuance of this practice in Ireland also benefits cultural customs by passing down folklore (such as the superstitious warning not to pick berries after Michaelmas Day for fear of blighted fruit), as well as maintaining a practice so integral to many childhoods as celebrated in national literature (Heaney 1966). Care and responsibility for this wild food commons are also performed through rules passed amongst pickers to not only leave fruit for other pickers, but also to care for the non-human community through the rule to ‘leave some for the birds’. What this example of a blackberry commons shows is that a food commons can be drawn together through access to multiple properties, involves use by human and non-human members, and while such members might be unknown to each other, this commons is underpinned by mutual care and responsibility. The practice of blackberry picking, if only for a brief season, activates a food commons.

SLOW FOOD AND COMMONS The Slow Food Movement provides a key example of how cultural practices can create or sustain a food commons in the face of food system threats. The concept of Slow Food arose in response to the proliferation of ‘fast’ or industrialized food systems and is defined according to the interconnected principles of ‘good, clean and fair food’ (Slow Food International 2015). The descriptor of ‘good’ emphasizes ‘quality, flavoursome and healthy food’; ‘clean’ signifies ‘production that does not harm the environment’; and ‘fair’ means ‘accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers (Slow Food International 2015). A major concern for food commons is the prevalence of agri-food monopolies locking food systems into a corporate structure typically involving monocultures and giant retail corporations (Holt-Giménez 2011). As a result, risks are presented to the diversity of food systems, heterogeneity of taste and appropriate economic returns for producers. The Slow Food Movement developed in response to these threats. Central to the Slow Food Movement’s grassroots activism, is its focus on culture to celebrate difference through food traditions (Tencati and Zsolnai 2012, p. 348). Through its network of around 1500 convivia or food communities, the Slow Food Movement works to amplify an alternative to agri-food and create or enlarge the food commons at the local level through taste education. In a challenge to industrialized and globalized ‘fast food’, the emphasis on slow works to ‘decelerate the food consumption experience so that alternative forms of taste can be (re)acquired’ (Murdoch and Miele 2004, p. 241). While such activities have been critiqued as the preserve of the privileged (Gaytán 2004), these objectives draw upon and help to support

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310  The handbook of diverse economies local food sources, as well as maintain the aforementioned ‘culinary commons’ recognized as an immaterial stock of knowledge, recipes, norms and practices shared by a cultural group and passed on over time (Barrère et al. 2012). The Slow Food Movement’s emphasis on ‘conviviality’, derived from the Latin word to ‘live with’ or ‘together’, foregrounds the social and pleasurable aspects of local food that are heightened through sharing (Tencati and Zsolnai 2009). The Slow Food Movement therefore works to draw attention back to a local food commons through the sharing of knowledge and food as part of food system change. As Holt-Giménez (2011) puts it, a food commons is not just a physical space but ‘a social space where decisions are made in the interest of the common good. Whenever food activists take back a part of the food system in the interest of the common good, they are constructing a food commons’. In the following section I look to practices of food commons cultivation in place through drawing upon my research with the Slow Food Movement in Mildura, northern Victoria, Australia. Through interviewing members and participating and observing at Slow Food events, I provide key insights into how commons are brought into being through the building of relations around property, food, culture and community.1

CULTIVATING A SLOW FOOD COMMONS IN MILDURA, AUSTRALIA Many of the international Slow Food Movement’s concerns around access to good, clean and fair food resonate in Mildura. Regarded as a ‘food bowl’ at the edge of a desert, its status as a global commodity producing area was shaped by its establishment as an irrigation colony. In the 1890s, the enterprising Chaffey brothers brought irrigation technology from California to Mildura in order to overcome natural barriers to production and turn ‘water into gold’ (Hill 1951). Mildura provides a key example of how outside capital has been pivotal to the development of agriculture in Australia (Moir 2011, p. 12). Food is perceived predominantly as a commodity in Mildura with the region generating large proportions of the country’s dried grapes (98 per cent), table grapes (75 per cent), almonds (68 per cent), citrus (24 per cent) and wine (20 per cent) (Mildura Regional Development 2016). Mildura is part of a ‘global countryside’ embedded in flows of capital, commodities and labour (Argent and Tonts 2015). Ties to global agribusiness put the region in a privileged but precarious situation. The combined effects of an unstable commodity and water market and the legacy of the ‘millennium drought’ have forced many farmers to diversify their operations, or in the face of mounting debt, partake in the federal government’s ‘small block’ irrigator exit package (Kiem et al. 2011). The volatile water market and a drying climate present serious concerns for the health and sustainability of its lifeblood, the Murray River, with doubts surrounding the future viability of many crops (Askew et al. 2014; Head et al., 2018). Despite the predominance of a capitalist food system in Mildura, diverse food economies have existed across a range of cultures prior to Slow Food activities. Historian Richard Broome (2017) documents how Indigenous groups like the Jari Jari fostered a shared food commons around fish such as Murray Cod and riverine plants. Post-war Italian communities collectively gather to practise traditions such as salami making, where many families gather in sheds over a long weekend in winter to share the preparation and provisioning of prosciutto and capicola,

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A Slow Food commons: cultivating conviviality across property forms  311 while feasting and dancing to traditional music. As observed by Brad, a chef and co-leader of Slow Food Mildura, these practices are hidden to many in the community: Within communities, traditions exist and until you are invited into them, or discover them or take interest, it doesn’t affect you personally. So if I wasn’t interested in food, if I wasn’t a chef, you know I would look at all the picker sheds in Mildura around the long weekend in June and see there is activity everywhere but I wouldn’t know what was going on – I had friends through the football club and their family invited me up to have a look. (Brad, Slow Food Mildura)

The arrival of the Slow Food Movement in Mildura around 2003 coincided with the millennium drought. As a conduit in bringing Slow Food to Mildura, local celebrity chef Stefano de Pieri explains how the drought was a key matter of concern driving action. Through marrying Slow Food’s principles with the local environmental concerns, de Pieri and his partner Donata Carrazza describe how action was shaped around the aspiration for a ‘Slow River’: taking a leaf out of the Italian-born international Slow Food movement, we have sought to imagine ourselves immersed in a Slow River . . . to live and work by a set of principles which strive to uphold good things – respect for the environment, love of family and friends, conviviality, community engagement and so on. (Carrazza and de Pieri 2006, p. 145)

This vision for Slow Food put the river at the centre of human–environment conviviality. Alongside interdependence with the environment, conviviality with different food cultures has been pivotal to the work of Slow Food Mildura. It has grown to incorporate a diverse gathering of producers, consumers and chefs who promote and experiment with local food through various activities such as cooking demonstrations, cultural celebrations and taste education events. The convivium is made up of a range of cultural backgrounds and class positions including culinary students from Italy and Malaysia, southern European migrant growers, and a range of self-employed and professional workers and retirees from Mildura (both long-standing residents and newcomers). In order to locate the spaces of Slow Food Mildura activities and understand their role in commons cultivation, I undertook a diverse economy mapping exercise with members of the group. This technique offered a methodological intervention in ‘reading for difference’ (see Chapter 52 by Gibson-Graham in this volume) against the corporate agribusiness backdrop. During this activity, the convivium’s co-leader Deb noted the significant contribution of private property, particularly the sharing of local farming properties for Slow Food workshops: ‘I think there are quite a lot of private places that we consider common like the Garreffas’ Sultana Avenue shed, the Garreffas’ Belar avenue vineyard, the Bawdens’ olive grove . . .’ (Deb, Slow Food Mildura). To expand on these observations of how multiple forms of property are activated to create a food commons, I draw upon the example of the ‘Slow’ workshops (Slow Pig and Slow Tomato), which involve sauce and salami making demonstrations using traditional methods and local produce. The Garreffa family who run the workshops are Italian migrants and long-standing members of Slow Food Mildura. Their involvement has been pivotal in generating local interest in Slow Food through connections to the Italian origins of the Movement. The Slow Pig salami making workshops for instance take place on private property at the Garreffas’ packing shed over the June long weekend. The Garreffas not only share their physical property but also their intellectual property through sharing recipes from their Calabrian

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312  The handbook of diverse economies cultural heritage. Ingredients include produce from open-access sources such as fennel seeds and asparagus from the floodplain, highlighting the diversity of food sources outside of capitalist enterprises. Furthermore, the use of alternative or state-owned property through the local TAFE college has been facilitated by the membership of chefs and hospitality students. This has provided access to a commercial kitchen to allow goods produced during Slow Pig to be prepared and safely stored for sharing at Slow Food events such as the ‘Festa della Vendemmia’, a harvest dinner that takes place under the vines at the Garreffas’ vineyard and showcases local food and producers. Access and use of the commons created through the workshops differs from various stages of production to consumption. During the workshops, access and use is open to Slow Food members who buy a ticket to participate. The benefits, however, extend beyond the conviviality of shared meals during the weekend and the knowledge that is exchanged, to the cured goods being later distributed as gifts (myself a recipient in return for exchange of labour), used in community cooking demonstrations at the Farmers’ Market stall and events such as the Festa, where profits are distributed to local school kitchen garden programmes. The different forms of property upon which commoning takes place include private homes, state educational facilities and sites around the river and highlight the diverse material resources (food/land/ water) and immaterial resources (knowledge/culture) that underpin Slow Food activities. The commons created through the workshops provides an opportunity to leverage different forms of property for a shared benefit and creates an opening for a commoning-community that amplifies people and planetary well-being. A key way that this commoning-community is activated is through Slow Food’s pedagogical tool of taste education. In the Slow workshops, participants are taught about locally grown food and traditional recipes, resembling what Bruno Latour describes as ‘learning to be affected’ through evoking sensory awareness to difference (Latour 2004). In the workshops, participants are guided by Elina Garreffa who teaches the group: All the things that could go wrong and the things that are right, and the things that are good about the sauce. There’s a good sauce and a bad sauce like there is a good salami and a bad salami, so once the group recognizes that they can see it . . . And they go out and they know the difference. (Elina, Slow Food Mildura)

Distinguishing difference is also linked to the well-being of other species. For the Slow Pig workshop, they source ‘happy pigs’ outside of the conventional intensive farming system. Brad notes how difference and well-being are registered through taste: Every year is different and that’s the beauty of it and you know it should be because it’s a different pig every year. You know it’s not the same pig and it’s not treating meat like it’s meat . . . you are what you are eating and that is influenced by the breed and who is looking after it. (Brad, Slow Food Mildura)

Through these workshops, the concept of ‘good’ food therefore extends beyond gustatory pleasure to an ethics of consumption. For Deb, workshop activities resemble a politics of ‘disguised activism’ where people are learning about food system issues by getting involved in the production process in a fun and non-threatening environment. Such activities form part of the group’s broader activism objectives:

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A Slow Food commons: cultivating conviviality across property forms  313 I like to think that as people are becoming more aware of who we are, that they are becoming more aware of what our message is and what we stand for. And that will modify how people choose to eat and that’s what has the potential to change the world. (Deb, Slow Food Mildura)

These small-scale grassroots activities are therefore perceived as offering potential for local practices to have global food system reach, counter to the local being subjugated by international corporate regimes. Alongside the sharing of material resources, the family’s sharing of their culinary commons of traditional techniques and recipes is appreciated by other members of the group, particularly in a culture where recipes are typically sacred. Brad observes: ‘We are so lucky to be aligned with them, so lucky that they share it. I think they have Italian friends who go, “you are telling all your secrets . . .!”’ However, when questioned as to what they got out of their involvement, Elina highlighted the convivial benefits of the workshops through sharing her knowledge rather than making a profit: ‘Well we don’t do it as a profiting from it at all . . . it’s just an enjoyment of passing food on to others and enjoying the food culture of people’. Gio, a student chef from Sicily, also acknowledged the importance of these activities in ‘keeping the food culture alive’. Gio’s initial perception of Slow Food was as an ‘elite group’. But through his involvement as a student chef his perception shifted and he came to see how Slow Food activities were more than promoting Italian culture: I didn’t have any idea that it was about normal people trying to enjoy good food and trying to keep the culture, every culture, because like we do Italian things like the salami and the tomato but we also promote Indigenous food. (Gio, Slow Food Mildura)

Slow Food Mildura’s promotion of Indigenous food is particularly evoked through Terra Madre Day (Mother Earth), an annual celebration of traditional food and small-scale producers led by Slow Food International. Such examples work to share rather than enclose knowledge for private gain. In Mildura, the celebration is themed as a ‘River Soiree’ and is situated around the Murray River as its lifeblood. For Slow Food Mildura, the event offers an opportunity to connect young chefs and consumers with Indigenous culture and ingredients such as Murray Cod. The event thus plays a key role in building awareness of the region’s ancient food commons and highlighting the need for its ongoing care and protection.

CONCLUSION This chapter set out to explore how a food commons may be constituted through the drawing together of multiple property forms. Counter to Mildura’s conventional image as a capitalist agro-industrial food bowl, a diverse economies approach brings into focus a wide range of non-capitalist spaces and practices that are underpinned by the sharing of food. While the focus of the Slow workshops is on the sharing of an immaterial or knowledge commons, at the same time physical spaces of commoning are also opened up; ranging from private homes such as the Garreffas’ shed, to public land such as the floodplain where the fennel seeds are foraged. Through these convivial practices, new socialities are being created which help to break down binaries around production and consumption and highlight heterogeneity in the local food economy.

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314  The handbook of diverse economies The coming together of a community around a food commons not only offers an understanding of the diversity of food sources, but also the diversity of potential commoners responding to economic and environmental concerns. As a multicultural settler community, Mildura provides important insights into how Slow Food is drawing together a community of commoners through difference, as opposed to the perceived pre-existing commonality of rural settings (Huron 2015, p. 969). For Slow Food Mildura, commoning practices have centred on building relations with other cultures amongst a range of different backgrounds and class positions. While stemming from the traditional or nostalgic elements of Slow Food’s Italian roots, the food commons being created through Slow Food activities is continuing to be enlarged. Recently, Slow Food Mildura has supported a team of researchers, private enterprises, non-profits and community groups to facilitate land access for Burundi migrants, who are in turn contributing their knowledge commons to experimenting with maize crops in adapting to climate change (Klocker et al. 2018). These activities continue to enable a collective mosaic of difference against corporate agriculture’s dominant backdrop. Taken together, Mildura’s Slow Food activities demonstrate the relational underpinning of food commons as constituted through diverse property forms and cultural practices.

NOTE 1.

Following ethics procedures, participants in this research were given the option to be referred to by either their real names or a pseudonym. These preferences are followed here.

REFERENCES Argent, N. and M. Tonts (2015), ‘A multicultural and multifunctional countryside? International labour migration and Australia’s productivist heartlands’, Population, Space and Place, 21 (2), 140–156. Askew, L.E., M. Sherval and P. McGuirk (2014), ‘“Not just drought”. Drought, rural change and more: Perspectives from rural farming communities’, in R. Dufty-Jones and J. Connell (eds), Rural Change in Australia: Population, Economy, Environment, London: Ashgate, pp. 235–50. Barrère, C., Q. Bonnard and V. Chossat (2012), ‘Food, gastronomy and cultural commons’, in E. Bertacchini (ed.), Cultural Commons: A New Perspective on the Production and Evolution of Cultures, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 129–50. Broome, R. (2017), ‘Murray Mallee: A riverine geography of aboriginal labor’, Agricultural History, 91 (2), 150–170. Carrazza, D. and S. de Pieri (2006), ‘Beyond the great divide’, in P. Beilharz and R. Manne (eds), Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays, Melbourne: Black Inc, pp. 139–46. Gaytán, M.S. (2004), ‘Globalizing resistance: Slow Food and new local imaginaries’, Food, Culture & Society, 7 (2), 97–116. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Head, L., N. Klocker, O. Dun and T. Spaven (2018), ‘Irrigator relations with water in the Sunraysia region, northwestern Victoria’, Geographical Research, 56 (1), 92–106. Heaney, S. (1966), ‘Blackberry picking’, in S. Heaney, Death of a Naturalist, London: Faber, p. 8. Hill, E. (1951), Water into Gold, Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens. Holt-Giménez, E. (2011), ‘From food monopolies to food commons’, accessed 31 August 2018 at https://​ www​.slowfood​.com/​from​-food​-monopolies​-to​-food​-commons/​.

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A Slow Food commons: cultivating conviviality across property forms  315 Huron, A. (2015), ‘Working with strangers in saturated space: Reclaiming and maintaining the urban commons’, Antipode, 47 (4), 963–79. Kiem, A.S., L.E. Askew, M. Sherval, D.C. Verdon-Kidd, C. Clifton, E. Austin, P.M. McGuirk and H. Berry (2011), ‘Drought and the future of rural communities: Drought impacts and adaptation in regional Victoria, Australia’, technical report prepared for the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast. Klocker, N., L. Head, O. Dun and T. Spaven (2018), ‘Experimenting with agricultural diversity: Migrant knowledge as a resource for climate change adaptation’, Journal of Rural Studies, 57, 13–24. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies’, Body & Society, 10 (2–3), 205–29. Lee, J. and S. Garikipati (2011), ‘Negotiating the non-negotiable: British foraging law in theory and practice’, Journal of Environmental Law, 23 (3), 415–39. Mildura Regional Development (2016), ‘About Mildura’, accessed 24 February 2019 at https://​ milduraregion​.com​.au/​about​-mildura/​. Moir, B. (2011), Foreign Investment and Australian Agriculture, Canberra: RIRDC. Murdoch, J. and M. Miele (2004), ‘Culinary networks and cultural connections: A conventions perspective’, in A. Amin and N. Thrift (eds), The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 231–48. Peck, G. (2014), ‘Migrant labor and global commons: Transnational subjects, visions, and methods’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 85, 118–37. Slow Food International (2015), ‘Our philosophy’, accessed 27 August 2018 at https://​www​.slowfood​ .com/​about​-us/​our​-philosophy/​. Sténs, A. and C. Sandström (2013), ‘Divergent interests and ideas around property rights: The case of berry harvesting in Sweden’, Forest Policy and Economics, 33, 56–62. Tencati, A. and L. Zsolnai (2009), ‘The collaborative enterprise’, Journal of Business Ethics,  85 (3), 367–76. Tencati, A. and L. Zsolnai (2012), ‘Collaborative enterprise and sustainability: The case of Slow Food’, Journal of Business Ethics, 110 (3), 345–54. Vivero-Pol, J.L. (2017), ‘The idea of food as commons or commodity in academia: A systematic review of English scholarly texts’, Journal of Rural Studies, 53, 182–201.

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35. Free universities as academic commons Esra Erdem

INTRODUCTION In recent years, growing discontent with the ‘neoliberal turn’ in higher education and controversies over rights to academic freedom have not only sparked protests across university campuses, but also inspired off-campus organizing to build emancipatory spaces of learning and sharing knowledge. This chapter focuses on free universities as a distinct response to the crisis and shows how the praxis of grassroots initiatives contributes to the development of postcapitalist imaginaries in academia. According to the Melbourne Free University Guide, a ‘free university is a space created by a community for the sharing of knowledge . . . [It is] a space in which knowledge and ideas can be freely shared among equals. This space is not given: it has to be established and occupied’ (Westendorf et al. n.d., pp. 4–5). Free universities build on a rich tradition of feminist, anti-racist, and working-class struggles to create spaces of autonomous learning and empowerment. The name ‘free university’ was coined during the 1960s student protests in Berkeley, California with inspiration coming from the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights movement (Draves 1980, pp. 75–85). Challenging the status quo in higher education, activists developed distinct practices of emancipatory learning which were ‘low-cost or cost-free, non-credentialed and voluntarily run, oriented towards radical education for social change, responsive to community needs and organized in accordance with principles of participatory democracy’ (Amsler 2017, p. 10). Recent years have seen a resurgence of free university initiatives around the world, providing invaluable experiential knowledge (see also Means et al. 2017). In Mexico, for example, Universidad de la Tierra (Unitierra) was started in 1999 ‘to support autonomous ways of living’ for Indigenous and poor urban communities in the Oaxaca region (Esteva 2006, p. 12). In Canada, the perceived failure of the University of Saskatchewan to live up to its mission as ‘a university of the people’ led to the founding of the People’s Free University in 2002 (Collins and Woodhouse 2015). The popular education network Universidad Trashumante (2009) in Argentina grew out of a desire for diverse encounters with people and forms of knowledge marginalized by political and economic repression. The Social Science Centre in Lincoln, UK, emerged in 2011 out of a concern that the British ‘system of higher education . . . is increasingly oriented towards satisfying the perceived needs of business and industry, and . . . embraces the short-termist, highly competitive, profit-driven motives of the capitalist market’.1 Since 2016, politically persecuted ‘Academics for Peace’ in Turkey have collectively organized in Solidarity Academies in an effort to safeguard public access to critical research and learning (Erdem and Akın 2019). As the examples show, free university initiatives differ widely in terms of their conditions of existence and they do not necessarily carry the title of free university in their name. As of January 2019, the ‘Alternative Education Map’ includes 123 entries (primarily from the minority world) of ‘groups that are thinking critically about higher education provision and are attempting to offer alternative models’.2 Such diversity 316 Esra Erdem - 9781788119962 08:01:52PM

Free universities as academic commons  317 not only allows for a deeper understanding of knowledge as a complex site of struggles over class relations, property rights and social reproduction, but also opens up space for imagining different trajectories for the ‘university of the common’ (Edu-Factory Collective 2009). The significance of free universities is thus twofold: They articulate a profound critique of the ways in which capitalism has marked academia through the commodification of education, the reorganization of the academic labour process, the enclosure of knowledge, and the financialization of student debt.3 At the same time, they demonstrate how learning can be organized beyond the institutional confines of the public and private university and grounded in the principles of commons, with resources being ‘shared by a community of users/producers, who also define the modes of use and production, distribution and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance’ (De Angelis and Harvie 2014, p. 280). In what follows, the chapter elaborates on different aspects of the postcapitalist politics of free universities, focusing particularly on their contributions to making knowledge accessible, their practices of ‘doing in common’, their structures of collective organization, and the emergent communities that sustain the academic commons.

ACCESS One of the critical issues pertaining to commons is the question of how to regulate the access to and use of commons resources (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013; Hess and Ostrom 2007; Stavrides 2010). Free universities share a belief that higher education should be socially inclusive and foster the sharing of knowledge. As such, they embody a threefold critique of the mechanisms through which universities typically regulate access, namely admission criteria, tuition fees and intellectual property rights. First, free universities have largely abandoned restrictive admission criteria to create spaces of learning that are ‘open to all regardless of experience, background, age or qualification’.4 Furthermore, the relocation of classes to community-based spaces such as parks, libraries, churches, trade union halls, community centres, cafés, bookstores, galleries, and even a car-park supports the outreach to diverse communities beyond white middle-class students. The second important contribution of free universities is to reduce economic barriers to higher education through decommodification. Not surprisingly, numerous free universities were sparked by student protests against skyrocketing tuition fees and the undermining of the right to education through market forces. Echoing Marx’s critique of ‘teaching factories’ (1990 [1867], p. 644), Curtis (2001, p. 83) explicates how the non-profit liberal arts college in the United States is a capitalist enterprise that: produces and sells a specific educational commodity, the academic course . . . The exchange-value of this commodity is tuition. The use-value of the course may include the specific knowledge gained, entertainment, credits toward fulfilling major or general graduation requirements and hence the bachelor’s degree, and any usefulness the course might have in obtaining employment and future success in self- or paid employment.

The commodification of education thus turns students into customers who purchase academic credentials and knowledge, albeit at the risk of incurring high levels of debt (Federici 2009). For free universities, in contrast, lecturers and students ‘are not merchants and buyers of education but partners in a common project’ (Fatsis et al. 2018). Courses are offered either free

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318  The handbook of diverse economies of charge or at a very moderate fee, with a focus on the intrinsic motivation of participants to acquire and share knowledge. Hence, exams, grades and the awarding of degrees are anathema for most initiatives. Exceptions include Free University Brighton’s ‘freegree’ or the alternative diploma awarded by Unitierra, which sends a strong political message about poor and indigenous communities’ struggles for the right to education in Mexico (Esteva 2006, p. 15). The third point of critique aims at the role of universities in restricting access to knowledge. Notwithstanding efforts to promote cultures of sharing through open-access publications, online courses, research networks and collegial traditions in university departments (Harvie 2004), increased reliance on corporate partnerships to conduct academic research is turning knowledge into private property, protected through intellectual property rights. In a sense, Marx’s (1993 [1953]) critique of the appropriation of societal knowledge – which he referred to as the ‘general intellect’ – through capital can be seen as a precursor to the contemporary debate on the ‘enclosure of academic commons’. As Bollier (2002, p. 19) points out, there are serious concerns over whether core academic values such as serving the public good, independence and integrity can ‘be adequately protected as more scholarly arenas are reconceptualized as market resources, to be treated as holdings in an investment portfolio whose primary goal is return on investment’. Enclosure also occurs at the point of publication, as the ‘dependence on the private sector for scholarly journals essentially compels universities to finance research, give it away to for-profit publishers for free, and then buy it back at astronomical prices’ for university libraries (Kranich 2007, p. 88). Free universities, on the other hand, enact their commitment to the free circulation of knowledge by the nurturing of intentional communities of sharing, for instance, through the creative use of social media, the compilation of online resources, the use of collaborative learning formats and community outreach.

COMMONING PRACTICES Commoning, or ‘doing in common’, refers to processes of social labour undertaken by a community to produce and sustain its shared resources. The verb form ‘commoning’ highlights the processual character of this effort alongside its collaborative nature (De Angelis 2017, p. 121). Critical pedagogy, understood as a peer-based social relation of labour (Neary and Winn 2017), lies at the heart of commoning in free universities. Inspired by the work of educational theorists such as Paulo Freire and committed to education as a socially transformative praxis, free university activists critically scrutinize the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and circulated, explore different epistemological perspectives and work together to develop participatory methods of learning. Put differently, ‘knowledge is a common good ... because it is produced and reproduced by living labour and social cooperation’ (Edu-Factory Collective 2007). One activist reflects on the experience of critical pedagogy as follows: I was drawn to the Melbourne Free University because it offers a generative, transformative space: informed, challenging conversations are held, drawing on a variety of ‘ways of knowing’, bringing together rigorous intellectual thinking with a diversity of lived experiences, deeply held ethical positions and intuitive reflections. Spaces such as this are transformative as they destabilise hegemonic, disempowering ideas about ‘expertise’, and open up, deepen and challenge our thinking. (Westendorf et al. n.d., p. 11)

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Free universities as academic commons  319 The quote goes to show that ‘the common is always organized in translation’ (Roggero 2010, p. 368). In other words, commoning extends to the labour of developing a shared language that acknowledges the diversity of experiences and knowledge that participants bring to the commoned space. In effect, this is akin to the emphasis put on recognizing the multiplicity of people’s (often informal, autodidactic) skills in the context of community economies (Cameron and Gibson 2001). Commoning practices also include the administrative and logistical work of scheduling and advertising academic events, coordinating lecturers, finding adequate venues and technical equipment, custodial duties, community outreach, the documentation and evaluation of events, and management of websites and social media accounts. While the existence of free universities critically depends on this kind of collective (and mostly unpaid) labour, it may turn out to be less than straightforward to establish a fair division of labour that does not replicate the hierarchies based on gender and academic status, commonly found in mainstream academia (Erdem and Akın 2019).

COLLECTIVE SELF-MANAGEMENT Commoning also includes processes of collective decision-making such as the establishing of ‘rules or protocols for access and use . . . caring of and accepting responsibility for a resource, and distributing the benefits in ways that take into account the well-being of others’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2016, p. 195). While free universities share a critique of hierarchical university structures and consensus-based forms of decision-making are a common feature, their concrete modes of organization vary widely depending on the political context as well as the theories informing their vision, such as Marxism, Anarchism, Workerism or the Cooperative movement. The institutional set-up can thus range from formally incorporated cooperatives to informal networks (Saunders 2017, p. 162; Thompsett 2017, p. 27). The Social Science Centre in Lincoln, for instance, exemplifies the not-for-profit cooperative model, operating ‘on the basis of democratic, non-hierarchical principles’ and consensus-based decision making. Until its closure in early 2019,5 members owned and controlled the cooperative, serving on committees, supporting the everyday running of the Centre, and contributing to research and curriculum development (Neary and Winn 2017). However, as activists with Kocaeli Solidarity Academy in Turkey (organized as a non-profit association) report, unlearning the academic habitus of status-based hierarchical interaction continues to pose a challenge even after peer-based structures of deliberation have formally been put in place (Erdem and Akın 2019, p. 154). Many free universities choose to operate in an informal way to retain their autonomy, with a core team of activists taking responsibility for the academic commons and sharing decision-making power with a larger group of participants. The platform cooperativist model of Antiuniversity Now is unique insofar as it connects people interested in organizing local activities of knowledge sharing across Britain. It remains to be seen whether the decentred network managed by a small team of facilitators with ‘no permanent base, no regular staff or a list of students and no desire to start a new institution’ will turn into a distinctly new trend in commoning knowledge (Antiuniversity Now and Shalmy, 2016).

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320  The handbook of diverse economies

COMMUNITY From the 1960s onwards, ‘many free universities became alternative knowledge communities in which relations between the self and others, knowledge, learning institutions and society were fundamentally reimagined. . . . Free universities also served to regenerate “a sense of community” where communities had been destroyed’ (Amsler 2017, p. 12). Indeed, the significance of community-building for the resilience of academic commons cannot be overestimated. As Gudeman (2001, p. 27) has famously stated, ‘without a commons, there is no community; without a community, there is no commons’. Nurturing a community of learning that shares a sense of belonging and commitment to the free university project requires enormous amounts of affective labour expended towards ‘being-in-common’ (Gibson-Graham 2006). This includes the time and effort spent on developing a consensus that reflects the ‘set of interrelated meanings and values that are shared, understandable, performable or evocative – in short, some common ground’ (De Angelis 2017, p. 126). Case studies suggest that values and ethical principles such as equality, reciprocity, trust, localness, conviviality and social justice inform free universities (Esteva 2006; Thompsett 2017). For the Solidarity Academies, the collective experiences of state repression and the willingness to serve as anchors of peace-building and democracy in Turkey have also been crucial factors in community-building (Erdem and Akın 2019, pp. 154–6). Without implying a hierarchy of values, let us conclude with a focus on freedom, as the value enshrined in the name ‘free university’, and explore how it succeeds in serving as common ground despite the different connotations it has, or perhaps exactly because of the multiplicity of meanings it allows for. First of all, freedom implies the right to partake in education. As elaborated above, open admission policies and decommodification allow people to freely pursue their learning interests. Contra Hardin (1968), however, free access has not resulted in a ‘tragedy of the commons’. Melbourne Free University, for example, has been operating according to the principle ‘no money in, no money out’ since 2010, relying exclusively on volunteer work and donated resources (Westendorf et al. n.d., p. 28). Here, freedom signifies a shift from market exchange to gift economies in the field of education. An equally profound meaning of freedom is the struggle for institutional autonomy from the state and the higher education system. In the United States, the old free university motto ‘anyone can teach and anyone can learn’ has been variously associated with free enterprise as well as the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression (Draves 1980, pp. 18, 55). The desire of free universities is to be ‘free in spirit’,6 that is, to engage in critical thinking, to experiment with emancipatory formats of pedagogy and collective organization without hindrance from bureaucratic mechanisms of control. This should not be mistaken for arbitrariness though. Antiuniversity Now, for example, combines a radical openness with a firm commitment and ‘collective desire to create and sustain safe autonomous spaces for radical learning that follow, nurture and enact anti-capitalist, anarchist, feminist, anti-racist, de-colonial, anti-fascist, queer, trans and sex worker inclusive values through conversation and direct action’.7 Academic commons, and hence the right to knowledge, are thus always enshrined in a broader set of collective freedom rights. This multifaceted nature of the signifier freedom has perhaps been described most succinctly in the definition provided by the Free University of Berkeley as early as 1970 (quoted in Draves 1980, p. 82):

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Free universities as academic commons  321 FREE U IS FREE form

YOU can teach

FREE space

YOU can attend

FREE thought

YOU can participate

FREE forum

YOU can initiate

FREE the people YOU

NOTES 1. 2.

https://​socialsciencecentre​.wordpress​.com/​about/​ (accessed 18 May 2019). https://​socialsciencecentre​.wordpress​.com/​alternative​-education/​(accessed 18 May 2019). For a list of free universities that existed in North America in the 1970s, see the appendix in Draves (1980). 3. While a detailed analysis of universities from a diverse economies perspective remains beyond the scope of this chapter, a cautionary note on the problematic nature of capitalocentric critiques of higher education seems warranted (Aoki 2018). 4. http://​www​.antiuniversity​.org/​About (accessed 18 May 2019). 5. https://​socialsciencecentre​.wordpress​.com/​about/​(accessed 18 May 2019). Note that the SSC was discontinued in early 2019, as activists felt that they had exhausted the possibilities to be explored in this organizational form. Another prominent example of the cooperative model is Mondragon University (Spain), which is run as a private, fee-charging university (Wright et al. 2011). 6. Quoted from the 1967 manifesto of the now defunct Sydney Free University; see Thompsett (2016, p. 61). 7. http://​www​.antiuniversity​.org/​About (accessed 18 May 2019).

REFERENCES Amsler, S. (2017), ‘“Insane with courage”: Free university experiments and the struggle for higher education in historical perspective’, Learning and Teaching, 10 (1), 5–23. Antiuniversity Now and S. Shalmy (2016), ‘Education as direct action’, accessed 27 May 2019 at http://​ strikemag​.org/​antiuniversity​-now/​. Aoki, M. (2018), ‘A long shadow and undiscovered country: Notes on the class analysis of education’, in T. Burczak, R. Garnett and R. McIntyre (eds), Knowledge, Class, and Economics, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 466–84. Bollier, D. (2002), ‘The enclosure of academic commons’, Academe, Sept.–Oct., 18–22. Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2001), Shifting Focus: Alternative Pathways for Communities and Economies, Traralgon and Melbourne: Latrobe City and Monash University. Collins, M. and H. Woodhouse (2015), ‘The people’s free university: Alternative to the corporate campus and model for emancipatory learning’, Journal of Educational Thought, 48 (3), 117–44. Curtis, F. (2001), ‘Ivy-covered exploitation: Class, education, and the liberal arts college’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (eds), Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 81–104. De Angelis, M. (2017), Omnia Sunt Communia, London: Zed Books. De Angelis, M. and D. Harvie (2014), ‘The commons’, in M. Parker, G. Cheney, V. Fournier and C. Land (eds), The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 280–294. Draves, B. (1980), The Free University: A Model for Lifelong Learning, Chicago: Association Press. Edu-Factory Collective (2007), ‘Edu-Factory Manifesto’, accessed 27 May 2019 at http://​ dev​ .autonomedia​.org/​node/​5481. Edu-Factory Collective (2009), Towards a Global Autonomous University, New York: Autonomedia.

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322  The handbook of diverse economies Erdem, E. and K. Akın (2019), ‘Emergent repertoires of resistance and commoning in higher education: The Solidarity Academies Movement in Turkey’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 118 (1), 154–64. Esteva, G. (2006), ‘Universidad de la Tierra (Unitierra), the freedom to learn’, in S. Pimparé and C. Salzano (eds), Emerging and Re-Emerging Learning Communities: Old Wisdoms and New Initiatives from around the World, Paris: UNESCO, pp. 12–16. Fatsis, L., H. Freeman, J. O’Gorman, D. Parish and A. Sauerteig (2018), ‘Free university Brighton: Education for love, not money’, The Sociological Review, accessed 27 May 2019 at https://​www​ .thesociologicalreview​.com/​free​-university​-brighton​-education​-for​-love​-not​-money/​. Federici, S. (2009), ‘Education and the enclosure of knowledge in the global university’, ACME, 8 (3), 454–61. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy (2016), ‘Commoning as a postcapitalist politics’, in A. Amin and P. Howell (eds), Releasing the Commons: Rethinking the Futures of the Commons, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 192–212. Gudeman, S. (2001), The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market, and Culture, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Hardin, G. (1968), ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, 162 (3859), 1243–8. Harvie, D. (2004), ‘Commons and communities in the university: Some notes and some examples’, The Commoner, Autumn/Winter, 1–10. Hess, C. and E. Ostrom (eds) (2007), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Kranich, N. (2007), ‘Countering enclosure: Reclaiming the knowledge commons’, in C. Hess and E. Ostrom (eds), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, pp. 85–122. Marx, K. (1990 [1867]), Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl (1993 [1953]), Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, London: Penguin Books. Means, A.J., D.R. Ford, and G.B. Slater (eds) (2017), Educational Commons in Theory and Practice: Global Pedagogy and Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Neary, M. and J. Winn (2017), ‘Beyond public and private: A framework for co-operative higher education’, Open Library of Humanities, 3 (2), 1–36. Roggero, G. (2010), ‘Five theses on the common’, Rethinking Marxism, 22 (3), 357–73. Saunders, G. (2017), ‘Somewhere between reform and revolution: Alternative higher education and “the unfinished”’, in R. Hall and J. Winn (eds), Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 157–70. Stavrides, S. (2010), Towards the City of Thresholds, Trento: Professional Dreamers. Thompsett, F. (2016), ‘Learning by doing by learning: Reflections on scholar-activism with the Brisbane Free University’, Australian Universities Review, 58 (2), 59–66. Thompsett, F. (2017), ‘Pedagogies of resistance: Free universities and the radical re-imagination of study’, Learning and Teaching, 10 (1), 24–41. Universidad Trashumante (2009), ‘Walking the other country: Reflections on trashumancia and popular education’, Polygraph, 21, 157–68. Westendorf, J., A. Mondon and G. Hofstaedter (n.d.), ‘How to start a free university: A guide by the Melbourne Free University’, accessed 27 May 2019 at http://​freeuniversitybrighton​.org/​wp​-content/​ uploads/​2014/​05/​How​_to​_Start​_a​_Free​_University​.pdf. Wright, S., D. Greenwood and R. Boden (2011), ‘Report on a field visit to Mondragón University: A cooperative experience/experiment’, Learning and Teaching, 4 (3), 38–56.

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36. Diverse legalities: pluralism and instrumentalism Bronwen Morgan and Declan Kuch

INTRODUCTION Law is important to economic thinking and practice. Why? Because practices of legality, both formal and informal, help to define understandings of property and ownership, to enforce transactions between parties, to reallocate economic resources from one group to another and to compensate for harms suffered in economic interactions. Law, to some extent, allocates the rights, duties and resources that constitute the range of diverse economic practices explored in this field of scholarship, and tends to both legitimate and facilitate these practices. Law is important proactively and not simply as a reaction to ‘trouble cases’ (Sarat et al. 1998): it can constitute economic activity as much as proscribe or regulate it. As this chapter will show, across all five domains of diverse economies, law arranges or rearranges obligations into new patterns that can be repeated or modified until they crystallize into new social relations. As such, law has a cross-cutting salience for the analytical structure of diverse economies. And particularly once encoded by the state, law tends towards ‘frozen politics’ (Morgan 1999), accruing a stickiness to the social relations it governs that is relatively hard to roll back. To what extent then does law play a role in ‘producing a discourse of economic difference as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation’ (Gibson-Graham 2008)? This question as such has not been articulated to date in diverse economies scholarship. There is thus fertile potential for productive dialogue. We start with the observation that diverse economies scholarship and socio-legal scholarship share a common commitment to two key assumptions about the role of law in the economy. The first is that legalities are not separate from social practices but are rather embedded in them, whether in state-centred form or beyond the state. The second is that legality can be equally constitutive of non-capitalist and alternative capitalist economic practices, even though many formal practices of state-centred legality may tend to consolidate capital’s hold on the economy. Just as diverse economies scholarship unsettles ‘familiar representations of capitalism as an obdurate structure or system, co-extensive with the social space’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, p. 615), so too legality is by no means obdurate or necessarily implicated in blocking and prohibiting, but instead can reveal malleable openings for economic difference, and perform alternatives to the familiar nexus between capital, private property and waged labour. This chapter explores two pathways opened up by the question of law’s role in producing a discourse of economic difference: legal pluralism and legal instrumentalism. Legal pluralism, most simply, refers to the recognition of the coexistence of multiple authoritative legal processes that operate within a specific jurisdictional or territorial area. Legal instrumentalism refers to a mode of legality which has roots in late nineteenth-century philosophical pragmatism where legal institutions are seen as a means to an end. While legal pluralism diversifies understandings of sources of law, legal instrumentalism is more outcome-focused: legality 323 Bronwen Morgan and Declan Kuch - 9781788119962 08:01:58PM

324  The handbook of diverse economies is viewed as providing resources for retooling the economy, using legal instruments to help bring community economies, for example, into being. This retooling can create openings in the status quo that we have described elsewhere as ‘radical transactionalism’, where legal building blocks of property and capital can be creatively deployed to provide a foundation for new social and democratic possibilities (Morgan and Kuch 2015, p. 559; see also Morgan and Thorpe 2018). However, alliances between legal forms and centralized state political power often significantly constrain the possibilities and openings available in legal settings and institutions, including in courts, in the writing of legislation and the operation of regulatory bodies. Appreciating these limits can strengthen diverse economies scholarship. This chapter emphasizes that legal instrumentalism should not assume the central or monopolistic salience of legality, but is rather one part of a complex assemblage of social and political relations that create, perform and constitute diverse economies.

LEGAL PLURALISM AND ECONOMIC DIFFERENCE Legal pluralism is open-minded as to the source of binding norms, viewing them as embedded in customs or social practices as much as official state-sanctioned institutions. Contemporary understandings of legal pluralism tend to assume pluralization against a benchmark of modern, secular legal norms generated by state institutions, but of course a longer history and broader geographical view on legal systems reveals a rich mixture of relationships between state, civil society, religious and citizen institutions. Modern secular formal legalities were closely linked by Weber and others (Rheinstein 1967) to practices that support capitalist activity. This has led to the perceived interdependence between formal-legal rationality and capitalistic practices around profit, accounting and commercial dispute resolution. Certainly, along with the rise of Westphalian conceptions of national sovereignty understood hierarchically, there has been a tendency for formal-rational legalities in the modern era to compress the breathing space for diverse and plural understandings of legality. Hence a common thread through legal pluralism is the recognition that a multiplicity of institutional and cultural sites for the generation of legal norms can coexist without the necessity for a hierarchical relationship of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ authority (see Chapter 33 by Marx and Chapter 40 by Bargh in this volume). Assuming some degree of legal pluralism is thus naturally congruent with a stance on diverse economies that positions legality not as an external skeleton for a constrained subset of economic activity, but rather as always performing shifting boundaries between capitalist, alternative and non-capitalist practices. This is illustrated particularly well by reference to the range of exchange and labour practices foregrounded by diverse economies scholarship. Along these two dimensions, many practices flourish that illustrate legalities strongly decentred from state law. The labour practices discussed in chapters on unpaid labour (Williams and White, Chapter 14; Dombroski, Chapter 16), informal labour (Placino, Chapter 19) and non-human labour (Barron and Hess, Chapter 17) all tend to take place without reference to the purview of waged market labour as defined by formal employment law. Chapters on precarious labour (Pavlovskaya, Chapter 13), reciprocal labour exchange (Gibson, Chapter 18) and affective labour (Dombroski, Chapter 16) explore forms of labour which might well be part of formal labour practices defined and shaped by state law, but whose ethos or contours are distorted by the operations of such state law. In these instances, legal pluralism in many instances will

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Diverse legalities: pluralism and instrumentalism  325 capture a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between binding norms and non-legal dimensions of reciprocity or care. These relationships may be mutually productive, or they may be sites of tension and friction. For example, Lahiri-Dutt (2016) explores mining on the fringes of the Indian nation-state as a site where informal economic activity and cultural practice intersects with formal law in ways that produce friction across a variety of judicial and executive sites, such as tax collection. Existing labour practices embedded in the informal economy conflict with state regulations about mining in ways that are indeterminate. Implicit in Lahiri-Dutt’s discussion is that the existing practices of the community tend to be defined as illegal by their relationship to competing sources of state rules. But the norm-generating nature of informal activities and cultural practices is entirely visible to both legal pluralism and diverse economies scholarship. Despite the hospitability of legal pluralism and diverse economies, the tendency towards formalization over time noted above is endemic to labour practices, whose status as a contractual relation under capital has always been especially vexed in the context of law. A century of labour law in most Western jurisdictions has been built upon policing the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate labour contracts. To give a recent example, the sharing economy has blurred the employment status of those who work through digital platforms. A similar perspective can be applied to the range of exchange activities explored in diverse economies literature. Direct provisioning (see Chapter 24 by Grasseni) and share systems are relatively clearly non-market transactions. Although law may still monitor fraud or abuse of power, it does not clearly frame or constitute the actual exchange. However, if we explore alternative currencies (see Chapter 25 by North), fair trade goods (see Chapter 27 by Naylor), direct producer–consumer supply chains (see Chapter 23 by White), gleaning (see Chapter 22 by Morrow), or especially social procurement (see Chapter 28 by McNeill), the constitutive and possibly constraining presence of legality is much more apparent. These modes of exchange are partially constituted by modes of legality which impose their own conceptions of legitimacy (legal vs. illegal) onto them. Legalities matter, but in much the same way as economies matter in diverse economies: that is, in terms of framing a wide range of disparate possibilities that shift continuously. Take for example the long history of shared hospitality provided as a gift. Since the development of the ‘sharing economy’ (see Chapter 29 by Sharp), Couchsurfing is one example of modern technology (digital platforms) facilitating and expanding this gift-based form of sharing. The mutuality of such gifts can be extended through non-monetary exchange practices such as time banking (see Chapter 26 by Diprose), or entirely commodified through commercial digital platforms such as Airbnb. The shadow of formal-rational law shapes not only the market transactions but also those practices involving offering space as a gift, or in exchange for other time-based services. Formal state law in the areas of tax, liability and contract might potentially apply to these activities, often in a bid to make them ‘visible’ such that income flows can be taxed, damages may be sought, and commercial agreements may be enforced (Morgan and Kuch 2015). The trajectory of formalization over time is a legacy of legality. However, it is just as possible to focus on the social norms that animate the non-market dimensions of these transactions and explore how macro-legal frameworks can support these. This is no easy task. As Davina Cooper (2013) has explored in researching time banking, for instance, wider capitalist framings often pressure transactions performed in the time bank to mirror capitalist valuations. And over time, this constrains those patterns of exchange and

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326  The handbook of diverse economies labour that we identify here as beyond the purview of formal state law. In short, the iceberg familiar to diverse economies scholars becomes increasingly top-heavy. Law can be a site of remedying this imbalance in two ways: firstly, by critically addressing the increasingly instrumental approach to considering the role of law in producing economies of difference; and, secondly, through greater focus on systemic change and organizational frameworks for practices of work and exchange, particularly enterprise and finance. To extend the Couchsurfing example: in instrumental terms, there is a reasonable likelihood that diverse legalities may induce pressure on entities like Couchsurfing to adopt more capitalistic practices, including the evolution of Couchsurfing from non-profit to a ‘for-benefit’ legal form of enterprise. A diverse economies reading can help draw attention to what is lost and gained in such a move.

LEGAL INSTRUMENTALISM AND BUILDING OTHER ECONOMIES Legality manifests as malleable, performed and situated. This resonates with the way that diverse economies scholarship implies an anthropological sensibility about how order is made. Such a sensibility means, in part, shifting away from thinking of law as necessarily defined as a set of particular rules that generate specific outcomes. To some extent this puts legal instrumentalism in tension with diverse economies – but sometimes there are instrumental possibilities present in existing formal state law that embody transformative possibilities. At other times, those possibilities are currently inchoate, embedded in social practices, customs or patterned behaviour that could be characterized as legal pluralism. It might be possible to say that in general ‘non-capitalist’ practices are less likely to be captured by the dynamics of legal instrumentalism – but the general picture of how and when law matters is often much more fluid and nuanced. Law relates to the five dimensions of diverse economies (see Tables 1.1–1.5 in Chapter 1) indirectly, rather than creating an additional dimension. This is the case for both legal pluralist and legal instrumentalist perspectives. From the perspective of legal pluralism, the pluralism relates to sources of authority (state or non-state) rather than to economic practices. Modern economies are in many ways defined by the institutions that enforce the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate actions in all domains of economic practice. Enforcement involves a spectrum of activities from criminal sanctions to the ‘softer’ cultivation of appropriate conduct of citizens, consumers and workers by means of the incentive frameworks laid down by legal rules. The boundary between formal and informal emanations of law is a variation of the point made above that legal pluralism is an important dimension of diverse economies. As noted earlier, transactional practices such as gifts or financial practices such as household income flows are typically invisible to formal law. Yet formal law can also shift this situation by defining precisely when these practices become visible to the state, as for example when governments redefine the sharing of private housing through digital platforms as a taxable transaction. This outcome-focused perspective on law is much more instrumental. From the perspective of legal instrumentalism, though – and similarly to legal pluralist approaches – legality is not an additional distinctive dimension of economic practices. Rather, legality constitutes (on occasion) those practices: law allocates the rights, duties and resources that constitute prac-

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Diverse legalities: pluralism and instrumentalism  327 tices of labour, finance, enterprise etc., legitimating them (from the perspective of the state) to varying degrees. The instrumental salience of law for diverse economies of difference is its capacity to arrange or rearrange obligations into new patterns that can be repeated or modified until they crystallize into new social relations. The joint stock corporation is perhaps the purest creature of law in a typical economic landscape, possessing as it does the quality of legal ‘personhood’ and the admitted fiction of the ‘corporate veil’ that limits shareholder liability without capping profits (see Chapter 11 by Walenta in this volume). But legal engineering can fashion distinct kinds of organizational economic actors, making the legal form of an enterprise a crucial site of political potential. Legal form dictates the flow of money, including profit; responsibilities when things go right or wrong; equity, voting rights, debtor relations, and shares. The centrality of law in the creation of these various incidents of organizational personhood means that legal instrumentalism can be constitutive of quite different entities, rearranging equity, debt, audit and shares in novel company law formats. As William Davies argues, doing this helps ‘start to imagine a wholly different economy, simply through considering how freedoms, powers and responsibilities might be combined differently, via subtly redesigned legal instruments’ (Davies 2013). In the sharing economy context, the emerging ‘platform cooperative’ movement (Schneider 2018) and peer-to-peer commons-based organizations (Bauwens and Pantazis 2018) are powerful examples, with diverse forms of company and intellectual property law at their heart, some of which are finding their way into propositions for concrete organizational alternatives to Airbnb such as FairBnB (https://​fairbnb​.coop/​[accessed 08 May 2019]). This is not inconsistent with legal pluralism: for example, a legal pluralist understanding of ownership shows the ways companies can be rethought as commons (Healy 2018), in dialogue with formalist-focused instrumentalist approaches that are sympathetic to this vision (Deakin 2012). Also illustrative of the co-presence of legal pluralism and legal instrumentalism, jurisdictions like the UK and USA have legislated distinctive company forms for social enterprise, whilst in Australia, certification schemes and a creative approach to the customization of ordinary company law (Morgan 2018) have arguably filled the role of formalizing social missions into diverse economic organizations. While the legalities of diverse enterprise illustrate how formal law can be constructively instrumental, the legalities of finance might be seen as constraining the breathing space for community economies to flourish (but see chapters in Part V of this volume). The finance sector is often viewed instrumentally through the lens of capitalocentric political economy, highlighting the dubious ways the sector has grown parasitically upon useful economic output without contributing to it (Jessop 2012; Quiggin 2009). Large multinational financial corporations dominate infrastructure capacity, leading to situations where finance entangled with state law tends to steam-roll community interest concerns. For example, Airbnb’s venture capital funding took it from major US cities to a global presence with little regard for local regulation or its impact on rents. Between 2008 and 2018, Airbnb reportedly took on more than US$3 billion of venture capital funding (Benner 2017). Following highly public backlashes from neighbourhoods being hollowed out by property investors through the platform in cities such as Paris, Barcelona, Berlin and New York, local taxes and ordinances are now often collected alongside Airbnb’s site fees as an instrumental mechanism to resolve its intrusion into neighbourhoods across Europe and the United States.

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328  The handbook of diverse economies The financial disentanglement of Airbnb’s responsibilities to city residents can be contrasted with FairBnB, the cooperatively owned enterprise structure mentioned above that provides an alternative to Airbnb. Enterprise diversity brings in its train diversity in financing and the use of surplus: rather than profits to offshore shareholders and taxation directed to municipal coffers, FairBnB provides ‘a platform to be owned and managed by a cooperative of users and neighbours who will collectively decide how to reinvest part of the profits in local projects that would help to ease the impact of tourism, protect residency and fight gentrification’.

PROPERTY AS A SUBSTRATUM: LAW AS A COMMONS If labour and transactions give breathing space for non-capitalist activities while enterprise and money struggle more but constitute foundational shifts when successful, property law is the most entrenched of all (Capra and Mattei 2015). Airbnb’s operations obviously depend crucially on individual property rights over individual dwellings, but could law create a different kind of substratum for a different kind of sharing economy? In many ways, the cumulative effect of using law to retool enterprise, labour and finance in the ways described above is to construct a kind of commons despite the individualized property rights of its substratum. This is consistent with the point often made by diverse economies scholars that neither property ownership nor the type of legal rights that pertain in relation to property are determinative of a commons (Davies 2017; Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). This point is echoed within legal doctrine, in relation to both private property and the commons. In relation to the first, the ‘social function of property’, an established doctrine in certain jurisdictions, in Latin America and France especially, embraces: the idea that an owner cannot always do what she wants with her property; rather she is obligated to make it productive, which may include putting it at the service of the community. In other words, sometimes the state is obligated to require individuals to sacrifice some property rights in order to put property to its productive and socially functional use, or to do so itself. (Foster and Iaione 2015, p. 308)

In relation to the commons, this concept is often interpreted in two divergent ways by courts: one ‘based on the inevitable rivalry or subtractability of an open access resource, and the other based on the inherent public value of an open access resource (even if privately held)’ (Foster and Iaione 2015, p. 294). The substantive ambiguity, then, of legal resources, is a common thread here. And indeed, some socio-legal scholars use this to argue that law is itself a kind of commons. Roger Cotterrell elaborates on law’s capacity to function as a communal resource by ‘approving and protecting the empirical conditions that facilitate mutual interpersonal trust’ (Cotterrell 2002, p. 643), and Amanda Perry-Kessaris (2009, p. 21) identifies three pathways for doing this: ‘expressing the values and interests that hold people together, coordinating the values and interests that hold people apart, and provoking and facilitating participation in social life’. If legal rules express consensus where possible and coordinate dissent in a socially responsive and participatory fashion, they become themselves a communal resource. And the intellectual resources of diverse economies scholarship add a rich substantive dimension to the idea of law itself as a commons. In illuminating the diverse ways that existing social practices embed property, markets, transactions, money and exchange, it becomes more imaginable that legal

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Diverse legalities: pluralism and instrumentalism  329 rules and legal institutions can and should reflect, express and facilitate that diversity; diversity that is in fact long-embedded in the tradition of law (Capra and Mattei 2015). The tradition of legal pluralism already embodies such commitments, and if legal instrumentalism can work with the grain of legal pluralism, then legality itself will become more open-textured. Diverse legalities will increase capacity to temper law’s tendency to consolidate capitalist practices, instead opening up economic difference and helping to institutionalize its diverse possibilities.

CONCLUSION We would like to close by stressing that we are by no means claiming that law is all that matters. It may be a highly salient aspect of ‘producing a discourse of economic difference’ but it is also deeply insufficient. Formal state laws are just words on pages: irrelevant until embedded in social practices and power dynamics. Informally, and beyond even legal pluralism, social norms often do similar work; even formally, financial architectures and their conditional force frequently do similar work, securing the force of law without taking the form of general rules. This injunction to attend to both legal form and infrastructure should not be mistaken for a methodological prescription for diverse economies research. Formal law is often not the obligatory point of passage for resolving disputes in community enterprises, nor does it necessarily dictate monetary flows through an enterprise, for example. The operations and forms of legality are radically insufficient for the creation of enduring institutions and practices. Nonetheless we close by urging explicit engagement with the dynamics of legality, in particular via more extended conversations between diverse economies and socio-legal scholars. Whether law is viewed in instrumental terms as a resource for retooling economies or in legal pluralist terms as a fresh language for enacting discourses of economic difference, it is far more than a rigid external framework. Rather, legality is a rich interpretive site, with more plasticity and open texture than many might assume; perhaps even the capacity to act as a commons itself.

REFERENCES Bauwens, M. and A. Pantazis (2018), ‘The ecosystem of commons-based peer production and its transformative dynamics’, The Sociological Review, 66 (2), 302–19. Benner, K. (2017), ‘Airbnb raises $1 million more in a funding round’, The New York Times, 9 March, accessed 11 May 2019 at https://​www​ nytimes​.com/​2017/​03/​09/​technology/​airbnb​-1​-billion​-funding​ .html. Capra, F. and U. Mattei (2015), The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Cooper, D. (2013), ‘Time against time: Normative temporalities and the failure of community labour in Local Exchange Trading Schemes’, Time & Society, 22 (1), 31–54. Cotterrell, R. (2002), ‘Subverting orthodoxy, making law central: A view of sociolegal studies, Journal of Law and Society, 29 (4), 632–44. Davies, W. (2013), ‘20 public spirited lawyers could change the world’, Potlatch Blog, accessed 19 March 2019 at https://​potlatch​.typepad​.com/​weblog/​ownership/​. Davies, W. (2017), ‘A review of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016, New York: New Press)’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 30 (4), 213–20.

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330  The handbook of diverse economies Deakin, S. (2012), ‘The corporation as commons: Rethinking property rights, governance and sustainability in the business enterprise’, Queen’s Law Journal, 37 (2), 339–66. Foster, S. and C. Iaione (2015), ‘The city as a commons’, Yale Law & Policy Review, 34, 281–349. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Healy, S. (2018), ‘Corporate enterprise as commonwealth’. Journal of Law and Society, 45 (1), 46–63. Jessop, B. (2012), ‘Economic and ecological crises: Green new deals and no-growth economies’, Development, 55 (1), 17–24. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2016), ‘The diverse worlds of coal in India: Energising the nation, energising livelihoods’, Energy Policy, 99, 203–13. Morgan, B. (1999), ‘Regulating the regulators: Meta-regulation as a strategy for reinventing government in Australia’, Public Management: An International Journal of Research and Theory, 1 (1), 49–66. Morgan, B. (2018), ‘The sharing economy’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 14 (1), 351–66. Morgan, B. and D. Kuch (2015), ‘Radical transactionalism: Legal consciousness, diverse economies, and the sharing economy’, Journal of Law and Society, 42 (4), 556–87. Morgan, B. and A. Thorpe (2018), ‘Law for a new economy: Enterprise, sharing, regulation’, Journal of Law and Society, 45 (1), 1–9. Perry-Kessaris, A. (2009), ‘Introduction’, in A. Perry-Kessaris (ed.), Law in the Pursuit of Development, London: Routledge-Cavendish, pp. 21–9. Quiggin, J. (2009), ‘The irrelevance of the finance sector’, johnquiggin.com, accessed 5 June 2018 at https://​johnquiggin​.com/​2009/​09/​25/​the​-irrelevance​-of​-the​-financial​-sector/​. Rheinstein, M. (ed.) (1967), Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, New York: Simon & Schuster. Sarat, A., M. Constable, D. Engel, V. Hans and S. Lawrence (eds) (1998), Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schneider, N. (2018), ‘An internet of ownership: Democratic design for the online economy’, The Sociological Review, 66 (2), 320–340.

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37. Framing essay: the diversity of finance Maliha Safri and Yahya M. Madra

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS FINANCE? Finance encompasses the processes by which people save and invest, borrow and lend. People have saved, even before the invention of money, as when farmers saved part of the harvest in case the following year’s output was lower than anticipated. Savings allows for inter-temporal allocation of resources, producing a kind of stability and security in the face of emergencies and unforeseen events. Alternatively, when saving is oriented towards growth, the function of investment is introduced. The farmer can use some savings to expand production at a larger scale in the future to accommodate the growth in family or community. Written treatises on borrowing and lending go back to Aristotle, as well as the scriptures of all major religions. For Aristotle, all interest, or profit for lending, was ‘unnatural’, as it makes a gain out of money itself and not the uses to which it is put (Kozel 2009). Religious scriptures allowed for interest, but decried what is known as usury, or interest rates that are ‘too high’. The Qur’an, for instance, mandates that an impartial scribe should record the terms of a loan: ‘He shall write, while the debtor dictates the terms . . . refrain from all kinds of usury . . . if the debtor is unable to pay, wait for a better time’ (Qur’an chapter 2, p. 282; pp. 276–80). In fact, the lender who was unable to be patient would be visited with retribution. Both castigation of the lender, and that the borrower dictates the terms, are ideas that seem altogether foreign today. The first pairing of savings and investment is a non-monetary example. Whereas the second coupling of borrowing and lending, to the extent that it involves interest rates, is premised on a monetary system of equivalence measuring disparate things in the common medium of money. Lending at an interest rate requires an equivalence between money and time – the length of time of the loan translates into an amount of money in addition to the loan that must be repaid. The processes of borrowing and lending through the credit system brings into existence money as a generalized system of equivalence (see also Graeber 2012). Finance can assume both monetary and non-monetary forms. One can invest one’s own labour and sweat, what people commonly call ‘sweat equity’, although labour is often made invisible in finance. One can invest capital, or one can invest some combination. Investment is linked to expectations of growth and claims on surplus (profit being the most commonly used term), with swirling and competing ideas for how surplus should ‘rightly’ be claimed or distributed, and who should bear the risk if there is a problem in realizing the anticipated surplus value. The relations above are direct: the farmer saves for herself, by herself; the borrower strikes a deal with the lender who wants to lend precisely the same amount; the entrepreneur self-finances. Money is itself a form of intermediation, however, the signifier ‘finance’ refers to an entire family of institutions that carry out the function of intermediation. The institution of the bank, as one of the most prominent actors of intermediation, pools and redistributes 332 Maliha Safri and Yahya M. Madra - 9781788119962 08:02:03PM

Framing essay: the diversity of finance  333 money for different purposes and facilitates relations between savers, borrowers, investors and lenders. The role of finance assumes its most polarized terms in contrasting Marxist and neoclassical economic approaches. From a traditional neoclassical economic perspective, finance performs a number of beneficial roles: (1) it provides capital for a variety of types of investment so that investment is not constrained by the ability of the capitalist entrepreneur to self-finance, (2) it smooths consumption by allowing people to save today to consume later, (3) it diffuses risk since gains and losses are spread across many rather than one, and (4) it turns illiquid stores of value into more liquid forms of value, by using assets like homes and firms as collateral for further borrowing. Banks are one way to connect anonymous savers and borrowers, but they are not the only actors to perform these roles; equity markets (i.e. stocks and bonds) constitute another channel. In stock markets, ownership claims (or shares) of capitalist corporations meeting minimum criteria of credit worthiness are sold off to raise capital. Those shares of stock are tradable assets and hold the promise of profit distributions in the form of dividends. Bonds are simply loans promising interest payments, issued by the public and private sector alike.1 From a traditional Marxist perspective, finance capital is a variation of capitalism that is essentially parasitic. The capitalist producing commodities obtains surplus value, or profit, by engaging in exploitation of labour. The productive circuit begins with a sum of money capital, the capitalist purchases commodities (labour power and the means of production including raw materials), labourers produce commodities with greater value embodied in them, and the capitalist appropriates and realizes that greater value as profit upon sale of the final commodity. The shorthand for the circuit of capital is M–C . . . P . . . C′–M′ where M denotes money capital, C denotes input commodities (labour power and means of production) and P denotes the production process in which new value is created. C′ denotes the final commodities produced inside the production process with the prime mark indicating the expansion in value that labour has added, and M′ is the expanded monetary value of these commodities – the prime here indicating surplus value. On the other hand, the circuit of financial capital M–M′ is much shortened. There is an initial sum of money capital, lent out to productive capitalists and workers alike, and in exchange more value is received (in the form of interest). Unlike industrial capitalists, financial capitalists are not involved in the production of surplus value. Rather they receive returns from lending (interest income), returns from holding equity (dividends) and returns from trading financial assets (capital gains). Financial capitalists may lend to industrial capitalists, or to workers and communities. When they lend to industrial capitalists, that returning flow is a cut from the surplus value extracted by industrial capitalists from direct labourers. When financial capitalists lend to workers and communities, the returning flow is a direct transfer of value from the income of workers to lenders. This is what Marx called ‘secondary exploitation’ or ‘profit upon expropriation’ in order to distinguish it from the class exploitation that occurs inside the production process as a result of the appropriation of unpaid labour (Lapavitsas 2013, pp. 141–7). From a Marxist perspective, therefore, finance involves a form of profit that is distinct from, yet complexly related to, the profit from production. In between these two radically opposed positions, there is a third position that simultaneously affirms and criticizes finance. The British economist John Maynard Keynes (1936, 1937), writing in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and during the Great Depression when the pro-market laissez faire programme of neoclassical economics had lost all its legitimacy, argued forcefully that financial markets have an in-built tendency to produce business

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334  The handbook of diverse economies cycles (booms and crises). Given ‘fundamental uncertainty’ regarding the future states of the economy, Keynes argued, the economic actors, and in particular, investors, have no secure ground to anchor their expectations regarding prices, and therefore base their decisions not on the so-called fundamentals but on other economic actors’ behaviour. While this herd behaviour may be the right thing to do for each investor, it leads to speculative bubbles and sudden bursts, thereby increasing the systemic risk of failure. Liquidity, considered to be a virtue from the neoclassical perspective, turns out to be an attribute of the financial system that can also be a source of trouble if there’s too much of it. In response to this inherently irrational dimension of finance, Keynes’ advice is not to eliminate finance altogether but to govern it through a coordinated mix of monetary and fiscal policy interventions and regulate it to harness its intermediary functions for the growth of the private, capitalist sector. For Keynes and his followers, like Marxists, interest-bearing capital and the rentiers are parasitic, as they ‘exploit the scarcity-value of capital’ (Keynes 1936, p. 376). Yet, unlike Marxists, they do not connect this ‘profit upon expropriation’ with the injustice of class exploitation that structures capitalist relations of production and instead embrace ‘the advantages of decentralisation and of the play of self-interest’ (Keynes 1936, p. 380) albeit within bounds regulated by the public sector. One pole in this normative debate holds finance to be beneficial, while the other holds it to be parasitic. In this chapter, we approach finance from a class-based, diverse economies perspective to demonstrate that there is nothing inherently ethical or unethical about finance. This is a difficult proposition, since it is uniformly seen as one or the other: we seek instead to show that it can be either, or both. We explore why a diverse approach to finance is important, moving from the idea of diversity to the ethico-political choices that are at stake in different forms of finance. Finance in the capitalist realm is perhaps always extractive, but if finance is being deployed to further collectively desired processes, actors and organizations, and assuming both monetary and non-monetary forms, then it can be deeply ethical in terms of sharing the surplus to facilitate communities and replenish the commons.

DIVERSE FORMS OF DARK FINANCE Let us begin with a type of finance that rarely reaches our attention, but one that can have devastating impacts in the majority world: debt bondage. Recent research in Uttar Pradesh, India has identified debt bondage as the dominant form of finance in entire villages around the city of Shahjahanpur (Kara 2014). The process of debt bondage began about 15 years ago, when carpet contractors began recruiting male heads of family by providing money advances almost entirely to meet basic consumption needs. The average loan size for the 2 010 bonded labourers interviewed by the researchers was $85 (Kara 2014). Contractor/lenders then required men, women and children of the family to work 12 or more hours a day, six or seven days a week to meet a production quota of hand-made carpets as repayment for the debt. Families (split between poor minority Muslims and those in the lowest castes) became ensnared for years, unable to leave the villages or pursue other employment. This form of finance (debt bondage) had dramatic effects on labour relations, and was intentionally designed to do so. All people interviewed said they were forced to work in difficult and dangerous conditions, that they ate only two meals a day, and were forced to live and sleep in the same place they work (with some being locked in or chained to the loom). Common ailments reported were eye disease, spinal deformation due to hunching over the loom, malnutrition, cuts, sores, infections, and

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Framing essay: the diversity of finance  335 pulmonary ailments. Extrapolating from their sample, Kara estimates 28 per cent of India’s two million carpet sector workers are in a form of debt bondage. Tracing the supply chain of the carpets, investigators found they ended up in Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, and other major retail stores in the USA. What this immediately brings into focus is the relation between debt bondage and modern-day slavery. Essentially, debt bondage profoundly changes the labour relations of carpet weavers and turns them into slaves. Most people interviewed had little idea of how much debt was left, and it was up to the judgement of the contractor to determine when the debt had been repaid. Slavery, a regime of labour, is actually produced by a regime of finance. This joint regime occurs in many industries and countries including agriculture (e.g. shrimp, rice, cacao), manufacturing (including beedi cigarettes, bricks, construction) and services (prominent examples being sex work and domestic labour) (Bales 2004; Belser et al. 2005; Human Rights Watch 2018; Iqbal 2006; Kara 2009, 2014). These commodities are often sold far away from their place of production, with goods like hand-woven carpets ending up being purchased by the richest consumers in the richest countries. Deeply extractive forms of finance occur in the richest countries as well, albeit amongst the poorest communities in those countries: pawn shops and payday lenders. Payday loans are small short-term loans, in which a person provides a post-dated cheque for the loan plus a fee dependent on the amount borrowed. The standard time frame for loan maturity is two to four weeks, corresponding with the borrower’s next ‘payday’.2 In the USA, the majority of loans range from $100 to $500 with an average loan amount of $375 (Burtzlaff and Groce 2011). The financing charge is usually $15 per $100 borrowed, which translates to an annual percentage rate (APR) of 400 per cent (Bhutta et al. 2016). While they are marketed as very short-term loans, the average borrower holds a payday loan for five months, rolling it over because they do not have enough money to repay the loan when it is due (Pew 2012). Pawn shops also issue loans (on average $100) but on the basis of physical collateral like jewellery and electronics. The size of the pawn loan is a fraction of the pawnbroker’s assessed value of the collateral, ensuring that the loan is more than fully secured in the case of default. Pawn shops usually charge an annual interest rate of 250 per cent (Bhutta et al. 2016). For the sake of comparison, in recent years credit cards have charged an annual percentage rate of around 14 per cent, going up to 30 per cent for those with poor credit histories. Users of ‘grey market’ lenders like pawn shops tend to be young, black, and economically disadvantaged in terms of income, education and employment (Baradaran 2015; Bhutta et al. 2016). Both pawn shops and payday lenders have dramatically increased in prevalence in the USA inside communities of colour in the last decades, with ‘how to start a pawnshop!’ books proliferating on Amazon. From the Marxist perspective, these are stark instances of ‘secondary exploitation’ hitting working families and poor communities, regardless of the way they earn their livelihoods: as wage-earners or worker-owners, self-employed or precariously employed, they are all subordinated to the unequal terms of the relationship, each with different levels of vulnerability. Neoclassical economic perspectives also consider these as problems. Yet, the problem is, ironically, defined as not enough finance. According to institutions like the US central bank (the Federal Reserve), the diagnosis is that these borrowers are excluded from formal financial markets, which is why they are subject to these usurious interest rates (Bhutta et al. 2016). If only they could gain access to formal financial markets, were able to access credit cards, have checking accounts, home mortgages, student loans or small commercial business loans, then the outcomes would be entirely different. The new pro-poor mantra in emerging market and

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336  The handbook of diverse economies developing economies is ‘financial inclusion’, an idea that holds that these segments of the population must be included in the shared benefits of formal finance. How, then, has the panacea, formal capitalist finance, worked out in the last 40 years? In the neoliberal era, finance has been liberalized (or ‘freed’) in most economies. This move toward liberalization reflects the power of the global financial community and the power of ideas about the need to unleash finance. In this context there has been a process of financialization that has had dramatic implications for households and communities. On the household front, two important developments mark this period: the decline in the share of income going to labour, and the transformation of the welfare regime across advanced capitalist countries. Government spending as a share of gross domestic product has declined, and inside that shrinking pie there has been a reallocation of state spending away from public goods (Rudra 2002). This was a shift away from the priorities of the so-called ‘golden age’ of the post-Second World War years that privileged social services including education and housing. At the same time, there has been a marked increase in public debt, with the USA leading the pack because of the unique advantages it enjoys in the global system due to the domination of the dollar. With the bottom 90 per cent of households experiencing either a decline or stagnation in wages (also because of a universal decline in the power of collective labour), and a decline in the social services they received from the state, they turned to credit, or debt, to address the gap. Household debt rose in many ways: using credit cards to finance consumption, using mortgages to finance shelter, using student loans to finance education. As a result, finance replaced the Keynesian welfare state as the agency managing ‘effective demand’ (Marazzi 2008). Debt has become the new basis for social life leading some observers to argue that everyday life has been financialized (Lazzarato 2012). Individuals must self-manage a set of financial calculations no longer undertaken by the state or other institutions (such as labour unions), privately managing investments in education, housing and an asset portfolio for retirement (Bryan et al. 2009). A new subjectivity of risk pervades the social fabric, and generates a growing inequality between at-risk households and those few capable of managing these new techniques and ways of being (Martin et al. 2008). This is what is meant by the financialization of daily life as a new form of governmentality, or logic, that leads to a finance-based assessment of value and measure of life (Joseph 2014; Martin 2002). In this view there is a mythic assumption that we have all become entrepreneurs of the self, calculating risk and reward across a range of life’s daily basic functions of school, housing, health, retirement, etc. and moving resources capably between the most lucrative outcomes across those functions.3 Financialization signals a competitive calculus that goes beyond finance capital, and also generates more crisis-prone dynamics that culminate in events such as the 2008 recession. US households (particularly within communities of colour) had increasingly turned to the subprime market for home mortgages; being excluded from the prime market meant that they were subject to predatory lending and adjustable rate mortgages (Dymski et al. 2013). After the housing price peak in 2006, those adjustable interest rates reset at much higher levels, and homeowners found themselves unable to sell at purchase prices or refinance their debt, and foreclosures soared. Assets (securities) backed by mortgages began to lose their value, and investors around the world were affected, leading both to the spectacular demise of large financial institutions, and the global tightening of credit, which had recessionary effects globally. Jobs were lost, homes were lost, home prices declined, construction and other firms shrank, and yet bailouts helped the very financial institutions at fault because we were told that

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Framing essay: the diversity of finance  337 their collapse would be apocalyptic. High financial institutions were able to offload the risk that they themselves created onto poor households who bore all the consequences. All these processes designate finance as an apparatus of dispossession, a speculation driven casino economy prone to crisis, a cluster of mechanisms and dispositifs that facilitate the transfer, rather than the production of value. Yet, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017) argue, finance, or better yet, the processes of financialization (securitization and marketization through derivatives) do not only transfer value but actually design and implement mechanisms of the extraction of the common, whether this entails ‘the control of social cooperation and the extraction of value produced in the innumerable circuits of social life’ or ‘the extraction of value from the earth and the various forms of natural wealth we share in common’ (Hardt and Negri 2017, p. 162). Financialization, they argue, by creating mechanisms of measurement and commensuration that safeguard the investors against risk and uncertainty, captures the immeasurable and the incommensurable, whether it is pollution, indigenous knowledge or social networks. The cases of debt bondage discussed above, or even some cases of microloans, to the extent that borrowers are subjected to the ‘secondary exploitation’ of finance, can also be seen as ways in which finance takes its cut from the social value produced by the deep and diverse hinterland of economies beyond the capitalist mainstream, whether it be value produced through household labour or through non-capitalist relations of production.

FORMS OF FINANCE THAT WORK AGAINST THE GRAIN Finance, under financialization, has outgrown its subservient role as an intermediary between lenders and borrowers or savers and investors and become a constellation of mechanisms and dispositifs that salvages and creates ‘capitalist value’ out of ‘non-capitalist value regimes’, out of the circuits of social life and cooperation, and out of the earth and its ecosystems. Viewed from this perspective, it is indeed Finance (with a capital F) against the commons in its most expansive sense, in all the glorious diversity of the forms of living and being. Yet, there is a sense in which finance itself is a commons. To begin with, banks themselves do not own most of the money capital that they lend out, even though they control how and to whom that capital is allocated (Biewener 2001). As Marx writes about the banking and credit system: neither the lender nor the user are its owner or producer. It thereby abolishes the private character of capital and inherently bears within it, though only inherently, the abolition of capital itself. Through the banking system, the distribution of capital is removed from the hands of private capitalists and usurers and becomes a special business, a social function. (Marx 1981, p. 742)

What this means is that although the bank is inherently a commons, offering the opportunity for intentionally and collectively deliberating the allocation of capital and for what purposes, this does not mean that in practice, this collective control is enacted or enabled. Instead, formal Finance has, for the most part, been characterized by a very different evolutionary path in which the socialized character of the bank has been displaced and usurped. A few get to decide what to do with the collective deposits of the many. In this section, we would like to turn our attention from how Finance controls and captures the common to how finance-as-commons can be put to the use of the common. Or, what would

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338  The handbook of diverse economies it mean to mobilize finance as a commons, to support postcapitalist politics? In other words, what are the forms of finance that work against the grain? In a manner, finance, as an aggregated common of capital distilled into an abstraction and emancipated from the proprietorship of its owners, by making capital mobile and deployable, creates the possibility of social cooperation at an increased scale. Usually, for its champions and detractors alike, Finance is associated with a global scale. Yet, finance, with a small f, can refer to a multiplicity of scales, local, regional, national, and, of course, translocal and transnational. By distinguishing Finance from finance, we do not seek to create another sterile binary, rather, we seek to pluralize and diversify approaches to finance. Here we cannot promise a uniform calculus in opposition to financialization. We don’t have one ‘Other’, we have many ‘others’ to offer that have their own ways of negotiating what it means to perform finance. This is what a diverse economies approach to finance is: to not presume one type, but to actually investigate the diversity of financial forms and intermediation that currently exist. Our section’s contributors deal with various forms of finance – Islamic banking, rotating savings and credit associations, hacking finance through cryptocurrencies, community finance, indigenous finance and allocation – all guided by very different norms, constituted by different communities, and assuming different forms of functioning. Their commonality lies in their alterity to conventional finance, but also in terms of how they each approach an ethical grid of coordinates. We are particularly influenced by Gibson-Graham’s (2006) examination of how diverse economic practices deploy ethical criteria in their decision making around necessity, consumption, the commons, and surplus. In Take Back the Economy, Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) expand this list to include encounter and investment. Decisions around these nodal points require the broad participation of all those affected, solidarity with humans and non-humans, and fostering of class justice. In what follows we make use of the growing literature on ethical coordinates in the diverse economies tradition, as well as the proposals by critical finance and economic researchers that advocate for changes that lessen inequality and further social equity and fairness (Chang and Grabel 2014; DeMartino 2002). The diversity of principles that may orient and ground forms of finance working against the grain, or that would be supportive of community and solidarity economies, include the following: ●● Heterogeneity. A commitment to heterogeneity has implications for how finance is organized, how organizational forms of surplus labour receive credit, and how debts are repaid. There would be a diversity of institutional forms and practices that provide finance at the right price to the full range of enterprises including cooperative ones; to borrow from ecology, a pluriculture of finance would be richer than a monoculture serving capitalist priorities. A pluriculture would be abundant in experimentation (Grabel 2018). Debt need not extract a pound of flesh, instead, it can be paid in-kind, or labour, or in outcomes such as biodiversity conservation (Biewener 2001). ●● Justice. An ethic of care would ask the question of what fair finance ought to look like. When it comes to international trade, a rich field of critical inquiry and practice has built up around ‘fair trade’ (DeMartino 2002), whereas an accompanying emergent agenda of ‘fair finance’ is not as legible as a distinct social movement. Fair or ethical finance would be organized around solidarity, seeking to protect from risk especially vulnerable social groups rather than exposing them to the harshest and most extractive terms.

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Framing essay: the diversity of finance  339 ●● Transparency. There would be a commitment to transparency to the maximum extent possible. To the degree that people cannot understand the instruments they use and the contracts they enter, they can be subject to risk they did not know was even possible (the 2008 financial crisis is a case in point). If the instruments of finance, e.g. the operations of derivatives, are not transparent, then it also becomes exceedingly difficult to regulate them. But also, transparency leads to the democratic possibilities of participation, something that current forms of finance which uphold it as the domain of ‘experts’ cannot accommodate. Taking this conceptual grid, of justice, heterogeneity and transparency, we now think through some concrete examples to show what we mean. First, we think through a whole range of ‘other banks’ including zero-interest rate and below market interest rate institutions such as credit unions, rotating savings and credit associations and public banks, as well as ‘time’ banks. Second, we consider a whole domain of finance beyond debt, including debt cancellation, contracts that don’t use money for repayment, grants, and gifting. Third, we think through a range of finance designed to support or incubate worker ownership and control as versions of postcapitalist politics of investment. We also readily admit that finance may be the most under-researched area in diverse economies scholarship, and infuse this section with questions that may guide future research. All three forms reveal heterogeneity – of how they organize finance, of what kind of economies are sustained, and of how debt is repaid. They are all ways in which both class and other concerns of justice are foregrounded. And their mechanisms of operation are reached through broad participation and public debate, thereby providing transparency in finance. Nonetheless these clusters are neither exclusive nor complete; they reflect our interests. ‘Other’ Banks In conventional banks, the few guide the decisions regarding the collective deposits of the many; in contrast, here we describe different types of banks that self-organize in order for the collective to occupy the seat of power. Consider credit unions and public banks, both being alternative banks designed to offer lower credit costs. Organized around the common bond of association, credit unions emphasize mutual aid and collective well-being, serving as financial solidarity spaces for groups of the same occupation, the poor, and those excluded from mainstream banks or by institutional racism. Credit unions are owned by members who each have one vote regardless of the size of their deposit and have the means (through the board of directors they elect and are elected to) to control any surplus which is distributed back to the membership community and invested in its interests. Public banks, in contrast, are state owned and controlled banks (e.g. Sparkassen in Germany, or the Bank of North Dakota in the USA), disbursing credit for the social good and financing a variety of private sector and public sector projects. Public banks are like credit unions in the sense of having a specific mission or purpose which mark them as different. They both also disburse loans at lower than market interest rates. But public banks are different than credit unions in the types of loans they may originate, effectively expanding allowable categories of debt to include ‘community lending’ and emergency loans (Simpson 2018). And they can play a stabilizing role by facilitating counter-cyclical credit expansion. Rotating savings and credit associations are another kind of credit arrangement much more popular in the majority world, and certainly active in immigrant communities around the

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340  The handbook of diverse economies world. These zero-interest funds are constituted by members who each contribute a saved amount which is pooled and then allocated to members of some community sharing a religious, ethnic or racial social bond (see Chapter 39 by Hossein in this volume). Borrowers repay but with zero interest, which actually amounts to a negative return for the lender if the locale experiences any inflation whatsoever. Zero-interest lending is fundamentally organized as the opposite of conventional banks since it involves a redistribution of value from the lender to the borrower, precisely because that is where social need lies as determined by communities. Profit-sharing finance as opposed to fixed or adjustable interest rates in the conventional sector, is yet another kind of banking arrangement that fundamentally addresses the share of surplus going to the financier (analysed by Dodds and Pollard as they examine different Islamic financial instruments in Chapter 38). It requires relational lending rather than ‘arm’s length’ distance preferred by conventional capitalist lenders who prefer the ‘objectivity’ of unrelated borrowers and lenders. In principle, profit-sharing finance redistributes risk; risk is to be shared by borrower and lender, not placed entirely on the borrower’s shoulders under conventional banking arrangements. If the profits are lower than anticipated, the lender receives less since the overall pie shrinks; if profits are higher, so is the amount earned by the financier. In practice, profit-sharing arrangements, to remain competitive, tend to offer rates of return on investment to lenders that are comparable with interest-bearing banking and the fees, commissions and penalties levied by these banks may tend to function effectively as interest (Kuran 1995, p. 161). Nevertheless, at least in principle, to the extent that profit-sharing finance has the potential to turn the lender into a stakeholder, there is room for rethinking it through a framework of ‘class justice’ that takes a stakeholder approach towards surplus (DeMartino 2003; Özselçuk and Madra 2005). What would it look like for a lender to receive a stake in the surplus, and what is a fair share? Right now, interest rates are set by markets, which makes this stake non-negotiable, but what would it mean to fairly negotiate that which is fixed, taking into account the needs and abilities of both lenders and borrowers? And, more importantly, what would be the legal, economic and social conditions of sustainability of such arrangements under the competitive pressures of mainstream finance? Finance beyond Debt Diverse banks and banking arrangements encircle a justice-based negotiation between the needs and abilities of borrowers and lenders, which becomes perhaps most startlingly obvious when we turn to arrangements which either do not involve money at all, or engage in complex equivalencies between money loans and non-monetary repayment (Biewener 2001). ‘Debt for nature swaps’ (when countries put land aside into land conservation trusts) are only one example of loan repayment taking place through environmental conservation, which arose in the 1980s as environmental conservationists’ response to the debt crisis in Latin America. Costa Rica is often cited as a successful case, whereas Ecuador is a failed one (Isla 2015; Muradian et al. 2013). Despite the thorough critiques of these swaps – that they have dropped in occurrence per year, that effects were not concentrated in countries experiencing rapid deforestation like Brazil, that debt relief did not necessarily free up more resources for conservation expenses, etc. – there is a kernel here that must be retained: debt need not be repaid with money. Many possibilities immediately arise, accompanied by interesting questions on equivalency: how might debt be repaid with labour? with environmental measures? with

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Framing essay: the diversity of finance  341 improvement of commons infrastructures such as irrigation systems, anti-erosion measures, and schools?4 If we valorize these as socially important measures and actions, then why would a socially constructed banking system not accept these as repayment for loans? The basic understanding of debt is loosened further in considering debt cancellation or debt forgiveness in either historical or contemporary jubilee movement campaigns. Michael Hudson (2018a) writes that debt jubilees routinely occurred in all major Bronze Age Mesopotamian civilizations. ‘Clean Slate Proclamations’ were made by dynastic rulers both upon ascension to the throne, or after crop disasters or wars, wiping out entire categories of debt (Hudson 2018a). The point of reference was not what would happen in case debt was forgiven (i.e. the unavoidable anger of nobility as assets of wealthy creditors were reduced), but what potentially catastrophic and destabilizing conditions might have arisen if debt was not wiped out. ‘This was not a utopian act, but quite practical, especially on ascending the throne. What the king lost in immediate payment, he got back in encouraging a land holding peasantry, who could pay future taxes and provide the backbone of the army’ (Hudson 2018b). Clean slate proclamations were part of the community’s self-preservation, and Hudson argues a similar process needs to be reinstated today when it comes to the onerous debt obligations of students, homeowners, and entire countries. In the contemporary era, the Jubilee 2000 Campaign resulted in approximately US$100 billion in debt cancellation for countries in the majority world. Catholic and Protestant groups from 40 countries united to press countries in the minority world to take action based on biblical reference to a jubilee year in which ‘slaves are freed and debts are eliminated’. They successfully lobbied the G8 to engage in this debt cancellation, combining grassroots organization (e.g. resulting in the world record for a hand-signed petition of 21 million people) and the outreach of prominent international ambassadors such as Muhammad Ali and Bono. On a localized basis in the USA, a ‘Rolling Jubilee’ was initiated as a project of Strike Debt, an offshoot movement/campaign of Occupy Wall Street in 2012. Declaring itself a movement of debt resisters fighting for economic justice and democratic freedom, they have purchased $32 million of medical and student debt, and then ‘abolished’ or retired it permanently. Both movements did not reach their goals (Jubilee 2000 aimed at abolishing all ‘third world’ debt, and retired a portion; Strike Debt aimed to abolish all predatory debt, and affected about 3700 medical debtors and 12 000 student debtors to date). However, through their functioning they seek to draw attention to the possibility for a politics of debt resistance and debt forgiveness. Debt forgiveness or cancellation is one thing, but disbursing funds without the idea of debt ever even entering the picture is obviously beyond debt altogether. Even though that seems too fantastic, we argue finance as a gift is ubiquitous. Gifting is mobilized through aid, donations and grants given out by states, organizations, communities, households and individuals. Gifting is done by the poor and the rich, and in fact evidence shows that the poor give a larger proportion of their incomes than the wealthy do, even though the latter make splashy headlines (Daniels and Narayanswamy, 2014). Gifting is both deeply relational and anonymous: it is what we do for loved ones, and for people we don’t know and will never know, as when people donate money for social or political causes or disaster relief. Mauss (1990) famously described the trio of obligations that make up the gift: to give, to receive, and to return. In some communities, gifting can mean the difference between life and death: millions of migrant households send money to families in countries of origin (remittances), some of whom could not survive without those infusions. Official remittances actually exceed all overseas development aid, and rival other international financial flows such as foreign direct investment (Safri

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342  The handbook of diverse economies and Graham 2010). Gifting is everywhere, done by everyone, and yet the ‘iceberg effect’ sets in and veils this (Community Economics Collective 2001). Financing Postcapitalist Politics The debates around the regional Democratic Economy project of the Kurdish municipality-based democratic autonomy movement in Southeastern Turkey can be instructive about the necessity of non-capitalist forms of finance for practising postcapitalist politics at multiple scales (Madra 2016). During the short-lived ‘peace negotiations’ window of 2013–14, the Kurdish movement, to defend its autonomy in the face of the colonization of Kurdistan under the ‘capitalist modernity’ of the Turkish state, wanted to construct, using municipalities, a regional democratic economy around the leadership of a solidarity economy comprising consumer and producer cooperatives (both in urban and rural sectors). The strategy was to articulate a democratic community economy bloc around the vanguard solidarity economy by organizing an extensive and diverse sector comprising peasants, independent producers, shopkeepers, artisanal producers, small-scale family businesses and even ‘patriot’ Kurdish capitalist classes. The diverse and complex class composition of the Kurdish autonomy movement necessitated the adoption of sufficiently flexible economic politics that could accommodate the heterogeneity of institutional forms and factional interests. The project had many endogenous impediments but what ultimately prevented it from realizing its objectives was the collapse of the peace negotiations. One endogenous impediment important for our purposes here became clear quite early: the construction of a democratic economy, especially at a regional scale, and with the objective of rationalizing and socializing production and consumption required funds for various purposes: it was necessary to create distribution networks for small farmers and cooperative farms alike; similarly for farmers involved in husbandry, municipalities required resources to create hubs for refrigeration; and municipalities needed credit to undertake the various social service and public goods projects they needed to implement to improve the living conditions of their electorate. This necessity, when combined with a strong ethical concern about and a political distaste for being subordinated to capitalist forms of finance, made the absence of a non-capitalist finance a real problem. The problem of non-capitalist finance emerges for social movements and actors not only in Kurdistan, but all around the world – in Jackson MI, Paris, Kerala, and so on. Then what does non-capitalist finance look like? There is a long history of using finance to facilitate alternative economies. An important yet ultimately failed model was the wage earner funds (Löntagarfonderna) that were established in Sweden in 1980s (Pontusson and Kuruvilla 1992). The importance of this model emanated from the fact that it was seen as a logical extension of the Keynesian drive for socialization of investment towards economic democracy. A wage earner fund, financed through taxes on excess profit, was used to purchase the stocks of companies above a certain size with the objective of gradually transferring their ownership to workers. The failure of the initiative could be read as an indication of the limits of a Keynesian programme – the moment it reached the thorny issue of the transfer of the ownership of the means of production, the social democratic ‘deal’ between capital and labour breaks down. Yet, it could also be seen as a vindication and crystallization of Marx’s point which we discussed earlier, on the inherently collective (yet privatized and monopolized) nature of capital. The historical conjuncture of the early 1990s (global neoliberal revolution at its peak) and the balance of social forces in Swedish society at the time may have made the

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Framing essay: the diversity of finance  343 wage earner fund a non-starter. But this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to revisit the model today (Gowan and Viktorsson 2017). Sweden’s wage earner fund was a component of a Keynesian macroeconomic vision. Yet, finance-as-commons can be used to promote postcapitalist politics at meso- and microeconomic levels as well. Consider the case of the Mondragón Cooperative Complex in Spain, where a group of cooperatives and companies are organized around a bank, Caja Laboral Popular. The latter provides the cooperatives in the Complex access to capital as well as monitoring, guidance and support through the ups and downs of the life cycle of each enterprise (Gibson-Graham 2006). Given its scale and institutional sprawl (financing a university, schools, social security system, research and development lab), Mondragón presents itself as a regional economy that puts patient capital in the service of incubating the growth of non-capitalist practices. Italy’s Marcora Law (1985) combined a variation on the Swedish wage earner fund model with the Caja Laboral model of the Mondragón experience. The law provides an opportunity for redundant workers to use up to a maximum limit of three years’ worth of unemployment benefits to start up a cooperative firm. In this regard, it is more timid compared to the Swedish model where the fund was financed directly from surplus value through a tax on excess profit tax. But on the other hand, this scheme was supported by a rigorous institutional framework where two different funds provide not only matching funding but also monitoring, training and support for the fledgling cooperatives. Even though the programme was suspended in the 1990s, it was revitalized during the 2000s and today it functions as an important exemplar for other social movements of economic justice around the world (e.g. the Labour Party in the UK).

CONCLUSION It is easy to relate to and make sense of finance as an extraction of the common. It resonates with what we hear in the news with regards to the economic and political power of financial corporations; it corresponds in a twisted manner to the image that finance tries to project about itself: global, instantaneous, powerful, universal; it echoes in the scale and the size of financial wealth that has been created by financialization since the 1970s. In contrast, it is very difficult to imagine finance as a commons, as a form of accumulated and redeployable (alienable) assets that doesn’t have to belong to any particular person or entity and that can be used by anyone regardless of their relationship to it. Yet finance is both a constellation of mechanisms of extraction and concentration of alienated value and a process of resistance in which people mobilize their alienated and abstracted wealth against the financialization of life and for experimentation and building up a new way of life.

NOTES 1.

One relevant distinction between banks and bonds is that banks work on a fractional reserve system, bonds do not. 2. One relevant issue is that because workers are paid after working for two or four weeks, their employer can actually use that value (rightfully belonging to the worker) as a form of credit for the business in the meanwhile. But this also means that the worker must somehow survive, and in the

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344  The handbook of diverse economies case of payday loans, we can see that the worker is paying a very high price for extending credit to his employer. 3. Michel Foucault’s 1978/79 lectures at the Collège de France (Foucault 2008) constitute a foundational document for the subsequent readings of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality. See also Lemke (2002). 4. See report by Dombroski et al. (2018) for a description of ‘broccoli bond’ loans that are repaid with muscle and vegetables.

REFERENCES Bales, K. (2004), New Slavery: A Reference Handbook, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Baradaran, M. (2015), How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Belser, P., M.D. Cock and F. Mehra (2005), ‘ILO minimum estimate of forced labour in the world’, Geneva: International Labour Office, accessed 14 February 2019 at https://​digitalcommons​.ilr​.cornell​ .edu/​cgi/​viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=​1006​&​context​=​nondiscrim. Bhutta, N., J. Goldin, and T. Homonoff (2016), ‘Consumer borrowing after payday loan bans’, Journal of Law and Economics, 59 (1), 225–59. Biewener, C. (2001), ‘The promise of finance: Banks and community development’, in J.K. Gibson-Graham, S. Resnick and R. Wolff (eds.), Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 131–57. Bryan, D., R. Martin and M. Rafferty (2009), ‘Financialization and Marx: Giving labor and capital a financial makeover’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 41 (4), 458–72. Burtzlaff, D. and B. Groce (2011), ‘Payday loan industry’, Stephens Inc. Industry Report 6. Chang, H.-J. and I. Grabel (2014), Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual, London: Zed Books. Community Economics Collective (2001), ‘Imagining and enacting non-capitalist futures’, Socialist Review, 28 (3), 93–135. Daniels, A. and A. Narayanswamy (2014), ‘The income-inequality divide hits generosity’, Chronicle of Philanthropy, 26, 19. DeMartino, G. (2002), Global Economy, Global Justice: Theoretical and Policy Alternatives to Neoliberalism, London and New York: Routledge. DeMartino, G. (2003), ‘Realizing class justice’, Rethinking Marxism, 15 (1), 1–31. Dombroski, K., G. Diprose, D. Conradson, S. Healy and A. Watkins (2018), ‘When cultivate thrives: Developing criteria for community economy return on investment’, Milestone Report 1 from Delivering Urban Wellbeing through Transformative Community Enterprise, Christchurch: BBHTC, accessed 10 July 2019 at https://​www​.buildingbetter​.nz/​publications/​contestable​_research​_projects/​ Dombroski​_et​_al​_2018​_when​_cultivate​_thrives​.pdf. Dymski, G., J. Hernandez and L. Mohanty (2013), ‘Race, gender, power, and the US subprime mortgage and foreclosure crisis: A meso analysis’, Feminist Economics, 19 (3), 124–51. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978/1979, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gowan, P. and M. Viktorsson (2017), ‘Revisiting the Meidner Plan’, Jacobin, accessed 10 July 2019 at https://​jacobinmag​.com/​2017/​08/​sweden​-social​-democracy​-meidner​-plan​-capital. Grabel, I. (2018), When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graeber, D. (2012), Debt: The First 5000 Years, London: Penguin. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2017), Assembly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hudson, M. (2018a), . . . and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (Tyranny of Debt), Dresden: ISLET-Verlag.

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Framing essay: the diversity of finance  345 Hudson, M. (2018b), ‘How Bronze Age rulers simply canceled debts’, Evonomics, 3 December, accessed 14 July 2019 at http://​evonomics​.com/​how​-bronze​-age​-rulers​-simply​-canceled​-debts/​. Human Rights Watch (2018), ‘Hidden chains: Human rights abuses and forced labor in Thailand’s fishing industry’, accessed 14 July 2019 at https://​www​ hrw​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​report​_pdf/​thailand0118​ _report​_web​.pdf. Iqbal, M.J. (2006), ‘Bonded labor in the brick kiln industry of Pakistan’, Lahore Journal of Economics, 11 (1), 99 –119. Isla, A. (2015), The ‘Greening’ of Costa Rica: Women, Peasants, Indigenous Peoples, and the Remaking of Nature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Joseph, M. (2014), Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kara, S. (2009), Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, New York: Columbia University Press. Kara, S. (2014), ‘Tainted carpets: Slavery and child labor in India’s hand-made carpet sector’, Report for FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA. Keynes, J.M. (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan. Keynes, J.M. (1937), ‘The general theory of employment’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 51 (2), 209–23. Kozel, P. (2009), ‘Communities and local exchange networks: An Aristotelian view’, in R.F. Garnett Jr, E. Olsen and M. Starr (eds), Economic Pluralism, London: Routledge, pp. 205–17. Kuran, T. (1995), ‘Islamic economics and the Islamic subeconomy’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9 (4), 155–73. Lapavitsas, C. (2013), Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, London and New York: Verso. Lazzarato, M. (2012), The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Lemke, T. (2002), ‘Foucault, governmentality, and critique’, Rethinking Marxism, 14 (3), 49–64. Madra, Y.M. (2016), ‘Democratic Economy Conference: An introductory note’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 115 (1), 211–22. Marazzi, C. (2008), Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Martin, R. (2002), Financialization of Daily Life, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Martin, R., M. Rafferty and D. Bryan (2008), ‘Financialization, risk and labour’, Competition & Change, 12 (2), 120–132. Marx, K. (1981), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, trans. D. Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mauss, M. (1990), The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London and New York: Routledge. Muradian, R., M. Arsel, L. Pellegrini, F. Adaman, B. Aguilar, B. Agarwal, E. Corbera et al. (2013), ‘Payments for ecosystem services and the fatal attraction of “win-win” solutions’, Conservation Letters, 6 (4), 274–9. Özselçuk, C. and Y.M. Madra (2005), ‘Psychoanalysis and Marxism: From capitalist-all to communist non-all’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 10 (1), 79–97. Pew (2012), ‘Payday lending in America: Who borrows, where they borrow, and why’, Pew Charitable Trust Report. Pontusson, J. and S. Kuruvilla (1992), ‘Swedish wage-earner funds: An experiment in economic democracy’, ILR Review, 45 (4), 779–91. Rudra, N. (2002), ‘Globalization and the decline of the welfare state in less-developed countries’, International Organization, 56 (2), 411–45. Safri, M. and J. Graham (2010), ‘The global household: Toward a feminist postcapitalist international political economy’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 36 (1), 99–125. Simpson, A. (2018), ‘Public banks’, The Next System Project, Series on Elements of a Democratic Economy, accessed 14 February 2019 at https://​thenextsystem​.org/​learn/​stories/​public​-banks.

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38. Islamic finance: diversity within difference Gemma Bone Dodds and Jane Pollard

INTRODUCTION The 2007–8 financial crisis, centred in the USA and then spreading internationally, has had devastating ongoing consequences for many regions and communities. Austerity policies, stagnant real wages, rising household debt and employment precarity have led to a widespread erosion of living standards in many parts of the globe. Relatedly, there are concerns about the possibilities and timing of the next crisis in a financial system that has been supported through the last decade by central bank policies, ultra-low interest rates and cheap money that has enabled high levels of indebtedness (Jenkins 2017). In this context, with a lack of trust in ‘finance as usual’, questions of monetary reform and, relatedly, appetites for thinking about alternative ways of organizing finance have become more prevalent in popular and political circles. Whilst the majority of diverse economies research to date has concentrated on engaging with specifically alternative capitalist/market and non-capitalist/market sectors of the economy, the diversity of the mainstream is also important. De-homogenizing ‘finance’ by reading for difference is an important strategy in the search for forms of finance that may support and help to constitute paths to alternative, less socially and environmentally destructive economies. In this chapter, we expand the reading for difference approach (see Chapter 52 by Gibson-Graham on this) and use Islamic finance as a conduit to explore a small part of such difference and to delineate some of the diverse economies of contemporary global finance. The first part of the chapter explores the capacity for reading for difference in finance. The chapter then considers some of the key features of Islamic finance and considers some of the complexities in how Islamic principles are being translated into contemporary financial practices in different parts of the world.

READING FOR DIFFERENCE If a central concern of a diverse economies of finance is about discursively loosening the grip that mainstream finance holds over our imaginaries, then we can extend a diverse economies approach to try to overcome the perception of a finance system that dominates social and political life through the power it wields. This perception affects the willingness of people to challenge this power and makes it difficult to see how change could be achieved. If we start by breaking apart what we mean by ‘finance’, then a diverse economies approach can help us reveal the cracks (or potential for cracks) in this dominance. One technique that we can use is a simple one – to look at other spaces, times and places where finance is done differently. For example, the UK has a commercial banking sector dominated by a small number of relatively large commercial institutions; this could be read as a strong commercial banking sector. Yet when we look at Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, 346 Gemma Bone Dodds and Jane Pollard - 9781788119962 08:02:08PM

Islamic finance: diversity within difference  347 Korea, Austria and France, we see countries with more diverse banking systems that house more public and cooperative institutions alongside their commercial bank counterparts (see Greenham and Prieg 2015). Through that comparison, we can read the UK structure as relatively homogeneous and, perhaps in comparison to Germany, more prone to shocks and contagion. Looking at alternatives can lessen the power and dominance of finance, or at least reveal the contingent relations upon which different forms of finance are built. When we see that alternative paths are possible, because they exist in other places or times, we can also find space and power in the recognition that finance is always in the process of being (re)made. If the UK banking system’s homogeneity becomes seen as a source of weakness rather than strength, then we can see opportunities that did not previously seem possible. For example, if the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority view the banking sector as too centralized (perhaps following another crash, crisis or scandal) they face a decision either to increase competition slightly, by encouraging new market entrants, or taking a more radical step to break up large banks into a network of small, locally controlled banks, similar to the Sparkassen in Germany (Greenham and Prieg, 2015). Whilst the outcome may be contingent on timing, luck and political opportunity, if the underlying alternative ideas are not there, then they cannot be taken up in times of crisis/opportunity. The power of a diverse economies approach lies in the potential it has in providing a method through which we can start to deconstruct dominant and dominating discourses. Nowhere is this more needed than in global finance. Far from being constrained and tamed in the 10 years since the financial crisis, ‘finance as usual’ has appeared to grow stronger and more concentrated in financialized economies like the USA and UK. Whilst mainstream finance may not have radically changed, we know that there has been a resurgence of interest in ways of doing finance differently, from crowdfunding (Gray and Zhang 2017) to Islamic finance. In what follows, we explore some of the characteristics and possibilities of Islamic finance.

THE DIVERSE ECONOMIES OF ISLAMIC FINANCE Islamic finance is a small, but increasingly significant and rapidly growing presence in international financial markets. Islamic banking emanated from the Middle East in the 1970s; the sector now – conservatively – accounts for 1 per cent of global financial assets and had over US$1.9 trillion in Shari’a compliant assets at the end of 2017 (Anon. 2018). The Middle East and Southeast Asia dominate banking assets – Iran, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia are particularly influential centres (see World Bank and Islamic Development Group 2016) – but Islamic finance has also made inroads in Muslim and non-Muslim majority countries. While Islamic banking accounts for almost 80 per cent of Islamic financial assets, there are also markets in sukuk (Islamic bonds, accounting for 17 per cent of assets) and other mutual funds and takaful (Islamic insurance) products (Anon. 2018), operated by banking and non-bank financial institutions. For readers in North America and large parts of Europe, perhaps the first questions to ask of Islamic finance are ‘what is it?’ and ‘how does it differ from the finance I am familiar with?’ Islamic finance is by no means simple to define because it embraces a heterogeneous, shifting and contested set of practices in different parts of the world (Pollard and Samers 2007). For Ibrahmin Warde (2000, p. 5), ‘Islamic financial institutions are those that are based, in their objectives and operations, on Koranic principles’. Islamic finance is rooted in the rules and

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348  The handbook of diverse economies norms of Islam, and in particular Shari’a law, which emerges out of the Qur’an. In Shari’a law there are three broad suites of concern that inform the principles and practices of Islamic banking (and other finance) and provide some points of contrast with conventional finance. The first element of difference is Islam’s prohibition of riba, typically translated as ‘interest’ or ‘usury’ (Maurer 2005). In essence, Islamic financial institutions do not pay interest on any financial products, contracts or services because interest is deemed exploitative, unfair and a form of unearned profit. But the lending of money is not prohibited under Islamic law. Islamic scholars have determined that money can earn a price for its time, but this cannot take the form of fixed, predetermined rates of interest where numerous risks are borne by the borrower, while the lender faces only the risk of the borrower’s default. As such, money is not considered a commodity in Islamic economics, but rather a bearer of risk. The second element of difference between Islamic and other forms of finance is the prohibition of excessive risk, uncertainty and hazard that may lead to loss or destruction (gharar). Gharar refers to a broad-ranging suite of concerns to protect contractual parties from exploitation or injustice that may occur through a lack of certainty, transparency or deceit. The ideal is that all Islamic financial transactions should be based on transparency, accuracy and disclosure of all necessary information. With such transparency and consent, no party to a contract is disadvantaged and unexpected losses or disagreements over contracts are avoided. In practice, this leads Islamic institutions to avoid investing in various kinds of businesses and other activities deemed haram (including the consumption of alcohol, pork and prostitution). Third, and related, Islamic law frowns on speculation and prohibits all forms of gambling (maysir) and qimar (betting and wagering to seek gains from others). Again, this does not mean that Islamic finance is averse to taking commercial risks and, in essence, speculating on the successful outcomes of economic endeavour. Many commercial transactions – for example, starting a new business or investing in someone else’s business – involve elements of ‘risk’. Yet deciding to invest in a project after a careful sifting of economic and financial data is a very different proposition as compared with purely speculative motives that seek to make effortless gain or to dishonestly appropriate others’ assets. Taken together, these prohibitions manifest in a number of ways. Most critically, Islam emphasizes the asset-based – as opposed to speculative – qualities of financial contracts and practices. A key aspiration is a close coupling of the financial and the ‘real’ economy. As Muhammad Taqi Usmani (2002, p. 19) – a globally significant Shari’a scholar – put it: Islam . . . does not recognize money as a subject-matter of trade, except in some special cases. Money has no intrinsic utility: it is only a medium of exchange . . . The profit earned through dealing in money . . . or the papers representing them is interest, hence prohibited. Therefore, unlike conventional financial institutions, financing in Islam is always based on illiquid assets which creates real assets and inventories.

This asset-based orientation thus privileges risk sharing, rather than the risk transfer that is the norm in conventional financial intermediation. Islamic financiers are thus encouraged to invest in promising projects through a variety of forms of contract (see Table 38.1). Ideally, the aspiration is that these should take the form of Musharakah or Mudarabah contracts and forms of Profit and Loss Sharing (PLS) with entrepreneurs. PLS contracts are valued because they give banks a long-term stake in the success of different ventures, while allowing entrepreneurs to focus on their businesses rather than servicing their debt (Warde 2000). In practice, however, many Islamic banks shy away from PLS contracts because their returns are hard(er)

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350  The handbook of diverse economies A first suite of issues relate directly to the heterogeneity of Islamic financial thought, which is expressed in regional differences in legal, accounting and regulatory standards (Warde 2000). The key centres of Islamic finance are found in the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia and these centres are vying for position in leading the harmonization of Islamic financial standards internationally, which is important for facilitating the expansion of Islamic finance. Malaysia, and specifically Kuala Lumpur, is a global leader in Islamic finance (Bassens et al. 2012). Under the leadership of Mahathir Mohamad (hereafter Mahathir), who became Prime Minister in 1981 and has since returned for a second term in 2018, Islamic finance was promoted as part of the (secular) state’s mission to develop and model an industrialized, modern and cosmopolitan Malaysia (Lai and Samers 2017). En route, Kuala Lumpur became home to the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), opened in 2003, which sets international standards for agencies concerned to oversee the soundness and stability of Islamic financial services and institutions, including banking, capital markets and insurance. The IFSB issues Shari’a pronouncements and rulings and provides guidance on Shari’a compliance procedures for banks and other institutions. Malaysia’s version of Islamic finance has consciously straddled different financial spheres, one interest-based and Western facing and one more closely connected to Islamic practices in the Middle East (Poon et al. 2016). As such, Islamic finance in Malaysia has simultaneously been deployed as a site for critique of the perceived greed and instability of Western interest-based finance and also a site of experimentation and innovation in Islamic financial products. Malaysian financial innovations like sukuk (Islamic bonds), however, have not always been acceptable to more conservative regimes in the Middle East (see Pollard and Samers 2013; Poon et al. 2018). Bahrain is another powerful centre for Islamic finance and, since 1991, has been the base for another key international governance organization, the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), which sets international standards on accounting, auditing and governance protocols for Islamic financial institutions. In 2007, Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, head of AAOIFI’s 18 member Shari’a Board, sent shock waves through global Islamic finance markets when he ruled that about 85 per cent of Islamic sukuk (bonds) violated Islamic principles, arguing that their structures too closely mirrored those of conventional interest-based bonds (see Pollard and Samers 2013). The ruling was quickly transmitted around the globe and, beyond its immediate economic impact, was read as another demonstration of Shari’a authority designed to ensure that Islamic finance did not become indistinguishable from conventional finance. The Usmani ruling speaks to a second – and hotly debated – consideration in translating Islamic principles into financial practice in different parts of the globe, namely the identity of Islamic finance: what is it and, relatedly, what is its mission? These questions are by no means settled. Shari’a scholars occupy a crucial position in debating and policing the boundaries of what is, and what is not, deemed to be Islamic, and therefore permissible, in Islamic financial products and practices (Pollard and Samers 2013). Although Shari’a scholars have a legal framework that sets out broad principles – the avoidance of riba, gharar and maysir – how such normative ends are to be achieved is not specified and is open to interpretation. Shari’a scholars are uniquely qualified to invoke ijtihad (effort), to read, consider and interpret Islamic texts, in order to communally arrive at ijma (consensus) and then issue a fatwa (opinion) (see Pollard and Samers 2007). Beyond all the legal and other difficulties in reaching decisions about the ‘Islamicness’ of different financial products, key arguments remain about the purposes of such deliberations.

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Islamic finance: diversity within difference  351 Lena Rethel (2017, p. 565) argues that there are three prevailing images of Islamic finance. The first, ‘business as usual’, emphasizes a narrow definition of Islamic finance as ‘financial practice constrained by what is not permissible according to the Shariah’. This view of Islamic finance stresses its similarities with conventional finance, its use of familiar market metrics, indices and products, albeit with a series of restrictions governed by Shari’a. This view has been promulgated in various ways, including the entrance of Western banks like Citibank, Lloyds TSB and HSBC into Islamic finance and the development of numerous Islamic finance degrees and training programmes designed to ‘professionalize’ the sector. A second view (Rethel 2017, p. 566) posits Islamic finance as ‘Other’, as a radical, post-colonial suite of practices that challenge ‘business as usual’. This view embraces a much wider conception of the differences that can be read into Islamic finance, focusing on its potential to offer access to finance for marginalized and excluded groups. Thus for established and migrant communities experiencing financial exclusion – either through their religious beliefs or marginal status – Islamic finance can be viewed as a way of providing them with access to, say, mortgage finance or remittance networks to enable them to more fully participate in economic and social life. A third view of Islamic finance (Rethel 2017) is a hybrid of the first two, specifying Islamic finance as a socio-economic project dedicated to generating a more responsible, sustainable financial system marked by greater concern for social justice and fairness in financial products, practices and markets. Even as we discuss Islamic finance as part of a ‘reading for difference’ in global finance, then, it is important to appreciate that Islamic finance is itself heterogeneous, comprising a diverse, and sometimes contested set of practices. Whatever the model of Islamic finance being promoted, the design, codification, transmission and implementation of standards, products and legalities remains an ongoing project that testifies to the fluidity and social construction of financial (and other) markets (see Riles 2016) and the crucial role of legal norms. A third, again related, suite of concerns about Islamic finance concern its target population. Writing at the start of the new millennium, Ibrahim Warde (2000, p. 240) argued that Islamic finance is both a success and a failure. Its success, he argued, lay in its shift from being a small experiment to becoming a significant and growing presence in many parts of the globe; its failure lay in its relative lack of risk sharing and its failure to bring significant social and economic benefits to the Islamic world. The charges of being too close to interest-based finance and doing little to help the poorest of the poor (see Dar 2004) are serious. While Warde (2000) is right to argue that the relative youth of the industry should be acknowledged in judging its accomplishments, it is also true that some of the most visible examples of Islamic finance, particularly in the West, mirror elite elements of Western finance. In these circumstances, however, it is important, again, to shift our focus from what is most visible, namely elite institutional networks, to consider some other, harder to research, Islamic networks, typically organized through voluntary organizations that manage very significant flows of Islamic assets (see Pollard et al. 2016). As Ariff (1991, p. 3) puts it, ‘The significance of the voluntary sector in the Islamic order can hardly be overemphasized’. In Islam, obligatory forms of giving like zakat are complemented by other discretionary alms in the form of sadaqah (which can be money or services) and these can be given to individuals or through voluntary organizations, for example, awqaf (singular, waqf). Awqaf are in essence endowment institutions that manage buildings, land and money (Sait and Lim 2006). In the Middle East, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, awqaf control considerable physical assets in the form of land, property, madrasahs (schools), burial grounds,

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352  The handbook of diverse economies orphanages and mosques (see Ariff 1991; Brown 2008). There is also evidence of Islamic institutional forms (awqaf) and also considerable financial flows through registered Muslim charities in global cities like London that have significant Muslim populations (Pollard et al. 2016). The economic significance of awqaf in Southeast Asia, in Islamic charitable networks more generally and growing policy interest in Islamic microfinance initiatives demonstrate some of the possibilities of Islamic financial initiatives that do draw upon principles of risk sharing and participation of the poor.

CONCLUSIONS The recent financial crisis demonstrates – again – the pressing need for imaginative and progressive ways of reimagining economies; financial governance, markets, institutions and practices must necessarily be central to the sustainability of any such endeavours. This chapter has argued that there is scope for diverse economies readings of finance that can discursively loosen the grip that mainstream, interest-based finance holds over popular, policy and academic imaginaries. In terms of the reading for difference that is encouraged by diverse economies literatures, Islamic finance is a growing, plural and increasingly visible set of principles and practices now in operation in many parts of the globe. In terms of its diversity, Islamic finance houses practices that range from doing little if anything to challenge ‘finance as usual’, through to principles and institutions that are explicit about some normative elements of the relationship(s) between finance and the ‘real’ economy of making things, while also privileging concerns of social justice, philanthropy and redistribution. As such, we can view the experimentation with variants of Islamic finance as evidence of what Ilene Grabel (2017, p. 5) terms the ‘productive incoherence’ of finance, a sign that in parts of the globe, an ‘unruly pragmatism’ is breaking out that is slowly producing a more pluripolar, heterogeneous financial landscape. As a part of this landscape, Islamic finance: falls short of providing a comprehensive template for an alternative financial system, [but] it nevertheless shows that finance is a creature of the social world – an economy of our making – and therefore amenable to change. (Rethel 2017, p. 577)

REFERENCES Anonymous (2018), ‘Regulations are hindering growth of Islamic finance’, 31 May, accessed 28 February 2019 at https://​www​.businessdailyafrica​.com/​analysis/​columnists/​Regulations​-are​-hindering​-growth​ -of​-Islamic​-finance/​4259356​-4589318​-3ukqjo/​index​ html. Ariff, M. (ed.) (1991), The Islamic Voluntary Sector in South East Asia, Singapore: Institute of South East Asia Studies. Bassens, D., D. Derruder and F. Witlox (2012), ‘Gatekeepers of Islamic financial circuits: Analyzing urban geographies of the global Shari’a elites’, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, 4 (5), 337–55. Brown, R. (2008), ‘Islamic endowments and the land economy in Singapore: The genesis of an ethical capitalism 1830–2007’, Journal of South East Asia Research, 16 (3), 401–53. Dar, H. (2004), Demand for Islamic Financial Services in the United Kingdom: Much Ado about Nothing? London: Institute of Islamic Banking and Insurance. Grabel, I. (2017), When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Islamic finance: diversity within difference  353 Gray, M. and B. Zhang (2017), ‘Crowdfunding: Understanding diversity’, in R. Martin and J. Pollard (eds), Handbook on the Geographies of Money and Finance, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 580–609. Greenham, T. and L. Prieg (2015), ‘Reforming RBS: Local banking for the public good’, accessed 28 February 2019 at https://​neweconomics​.org/​2015/​02/​reforming​-rbs/​. Hasan, M. and J. Dridi (2010), ‘The effects of the global crisis on Islamic and conventional banks: A comparative study’, IMF Working Paper 10/201, Washington, DC: IMF. Jenkins, P. (2017), ‘A decade on from the financial crisis what have we learnt?’, The Financial Times, 31 August. Lai, K.P.Y. and M. Samers (2017), ‘Conceptualizing Islamic banking and finance’, The Pacific Review, 30 (3), 405–24. Maurer, B. (2005), Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pappas, V., S. Ongena, M. Izzeldin and A. Fuertes (2017), ‘A survival analysis of Islamic and conventional banks’, Journal of Financial Services Research, 51, 221–56. Pollard, J., K. Datta, A. James and Q. Akli (2016), ‘Islamic charitable infrastructure and giving in East London: Everyday economic development geographies’, Journal of Economic Geography, 16 (4), 871–96. Pollard, J.S. and M. Samers (2007), ‘Islamic banking and finance and postcolonial political economy: Decentring economic geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32 (3), 313–30. Pollard, J.S. and M. Samers (2013), ‘Governing Islamic finance: Territory, agency, and the making of cosmopolitan geographies’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (3), 710–726. Poon, J., J. Pollard and Y. Chow (2018), ‘Resetting neoliberal values: Lawmaking in Malaysia’s Islamic finance’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 108 (5), 1442–56. Poon, J., J. Pollard, Y. Chow and M. Ewers (2016), ‘The rise of Kuala Lumpur as an Islamic financial frontier’, Regional Studies, 51 (10), 1443–53. Rethel, L. (2017), ‘The imaginary landscapes of Islamic finance and the global financial crisis’, in R. Martin and J. Pollard (eds), Handbook on the Geographies of Money and Finance, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 562–79. Riles, A. (2016), Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sait, S. and H. Lim (2006), Land, Law and Islam: Property and Human Rights in the Muslim World, London: Zed Books. Usmani, M. (2002), An Introduction to Islamic Finance, Karachi: Maktaba Ma’Ariful Qur’an. Warde, I. (2000), Islamic Finance in the Global Economy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. World Bank and Islamic Development Bank Group (2016), Global Report on Islamic Finance: Islamic Finance: A Catalyst for World Prosperity, Washington, DC: World Bank.

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39. Rotating savings and credit associations: mutual aid financing Caroline Shenaz Hossein

INTRODUCTION Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) are mutual aid financing groups in which members pool and share money according to an agreed upon protocol. They are a global phenomenon – no matter where you go there are ROSCAs both in minority and majority world countries. People, but mainly women, continue to belong to ROSCAs because these groups are founded on the human spirit of helping one another. Long before the idea of microfinance came into being, people around the globe pooled money and engaged in financial collectives using very different methods from those of commercial microfinance (Hossein 2016). ROSCAs are unregulated financial institutions that provide quick access to savings and credit for people, mostly women, who are excluded from formal banks (Ardener 1964; Ardener and Burman 1996; Hossein 2013, 2014, 2018; Rutherford 2000). The widespread and sustained use of ROSCAs confirms that diverse financial institutions do matter. This chapter is focused on the mutual aid of women who use ROSCAs. I argue that it is important to take issue with the corporate environment that downplays the contributions of ordinary racialized women who are super active in informal financial collectives. It is these financial mutual aid institutions that should be defining what we mean by (micro)banking because they build up the human spirit, they support communities and make many dreams come true, especially for excluded groups. Sadly ROSCAs do not come to mind when we think of business or (micro)banking, even though they provide a concrete example of a home-grown model that civilizes market fundamentalism. In what follows, I examine the black experience of mostly women in the Americas, specifically in Canada and the Caribbean region, who run financial collectives and are called the Banker Ladies.1

WHAT ARE ROSCAS? HOW DO THEY WORK? ROSCAs have many modes of operation. The structure, rules and policies they follow depend on the membership of the group. While there are examples of mixed-gender and men-only ROSCAs (usually migrant newcomers to an economy) such as among taxi cab drivers or shop owners, the majority of ROSCAs are run by women for women. In their seminal book Money-Go-Rounds: The Importance of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations for Women, Ardener and Burman (1996), document women’s involvement in ROSCAs around the world. In my own research experience over the past 15 years I have found that the most numerous ROSCAs are women-only associations. 354 Caroline Shenaz Hossein - 9781788119962 08:02:13PM

Rotating savings and credit associations: mutual aid financing  355 Most groups are pragmatic in orientation. They err on the side of ensuring democracy and voice in much the same way as cooperatives do. It would be wrong, however, to imagine ROSCAs as ‘primitive cooperatives’ because they are not. They are mutual aid groups or self-help groups that are created on purpose to operate relatively informally. ROSCAs have an elected executive (e.g. President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary) who make the decisions for the larger membership, and if there are any controversial matters, the executive brings the issues to the full membership to vote on. The commitment to voice and democracy is aimed at building cohesion among members. At the point of formation, the group members are the ones to decide the mechanics of running the ROSCA and the rules for sharing the money. People participate as individuals with each member making a regular fixed contribution to a collective fund for a specific time period (e.g. each month for a six- or ten-month cycle). This collective fund is allocated each month to members in turn depending on the decided rules for allocation. For example, in a group of ten women in Canada, each member might contribute a weekly contribution of $250 per week (or $1000 monthly) which means at the end of the month there is a massive pool of $10 000 to be shared at the monthly meeting. One member of the group may receive the full $10 000 (called a ‘pot’ or ‘hand’) at the discretion of the executive, and this amount can allow for a substantial downpayment on a car or home in Canada. Of course, in other national and regional settings the amount regularly contributed can be as little as 50 cents to one dollar. The executive and the members determine the needs of individual members and distribute the ‘hand’ to members accordingly. This system is not profit-oriented. Most groups do not take any fees or interest charges from the members, though some might – again, this is up to the specific group. Meetings are often held in someone’s home, and members can bring food to share with each other. Sometimes big ROSCAs organize a meeting at a community recreation centre and the group will bear the cost, and thus exact a small service fee. One thing that is apparent in these groups is that members value self-regulation. They take the time to make sure the rules are clear to everyone who joins, and joining a group does require a careful vetting process. In the African diaspora the black women who run these economic collectives – Banker Ladies – operate in a business-like fashion and make sure that members repay their borrowed funds in a timely manner (Hossein 2016). Most people do not refer to ROSCAs as ‘ROSCAs’. This is an academic term used to refer to the worldwide concept of group banking. Most citizens around the world call these groups by their local indigenous names. A quick scan of the different names for ROSCAs illustrates their ubiquity. Starting with Ethiopia, the world’s most ancient civilization, people for thousands of years and to this day organize equb and idir. ROSCAs are known as susu in Ghana (see Chapter 20 by Sato and Tufuor in this volume), hagbad or ayuto in Somalia, restourne in the Democratic Republic of Congo, jangui in Cameroon, esusu or ajo in Nigeria, itega in Kenya or tontines in francophone West Africa such as Benin, Senegal and Togo. In Sudan people call them sandooq and its neighbour Egypt refers to them as gama’yia. As one moves to South Asia, Sri Lankans have cheetu, and Indians refer to ROSCAs as chits or kitties, and there is legislation recognizing the role of these groups. In Pakistan they are called community. In Southeast Asia, Vietnamese refer to them as hui, Indonesians arisan, Japanese jou, Korean as kye (Ardener and Burman 1996; Gibson et al. 2018a, 2018b). Moving to the the Americas, Mexicans have tanda, Jamaicans partner, Peruvians pandero, Bahamians asousou, Haitians sol, Trinidadians susu and Bajans lodge. ROSCAs move to the USA, Canada, Australia,

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356  The handbook of diverse economies France and the UK and take on a number of names to reflect the diaspora groups who live there. In a study on ROSCAs in Indonesia, Clifford Geertz (1962) referred to arisans as ‘middle-rung institutions’ and he argued that they would fade away once formal banks became prevalent and reached remote areas. This kind of capitalocentirc reading of economic dynamics is a common one we encounter when reading for economic difference (Gibson-Graham 2014 and see Chapter 52 by Gibson-Graham in this volume). Interestingly, the reverse has happened. One can now argue that ROSCAs have grown within countries and have moved to developed countries and are quite transnational (see for example Ardener and Burman, 1996). As Rutherford (2000) argues in The Poor and their Money, it is evident that ROSCAs are in high demand among the poor because these group banks function efficiently, offering both low defaults and transaction costs. The informality of ROSCAs is what makes them distinctive in their own right. Guyanese historian Maurice St. Pierre (1999) explains that these economic collectives were in existence in Guyana since at least the 1600s when African slaves rotated funds among each other, as they did in the susu or box-hand groups. Faye V. Harrison’s work (1988) shows that since the times of slavery, Jamaican higglers have struggled to make a livelihood in precarious economic and political environments and used partner to meet their financial needs. ROSCAs are quiet forms of protest against unwelcoming banking systems. In my interviews with hundreds of women in Canada and the Caribbean, black women were usually the ones to organize savings from the community. These funds were used to support their own business projects such as a small shop, sewing business, handicrafts, or market selling (Hossein 2013, 2014). In the documentary, Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (Becker et al. 2009), women in Cité Soleil (one of the largest slums in the Americas) reject low-paid factory work and turn to sol to help them develop their own businesses. Joining the sol also helped the women to carve out a sense of freedom and to engage in community awareness about violence affecting women’s lives in the country. For generations, people everywhere have perfected ROSCAs, and in doing so have demonstrated that marginalized people do not sit idly by and let commercial banks alienate them. They are taking charge and using pooled resources where outsiders believe none exist, counteracting their exclusion from mainstream business. In doing so, ROSCAs fly in the face of commercialized banking norms. Because the women who organize ROSCAs are local residents in the community, they are highly vested in bringing social change drawing on the indigenous systems they know and trust. They refuse to leave it to the control of a corporation to dictate how they run their own lives, homes and communities.

ROSCAS AND THE BUSINESS OF MICROFINANCE The story of banking for the poor is often told from a Eurocentric perspective. Yet ROSCAs were born first, drawing on indigenous mutal aid practices, and microfinance came later. Indeed, early microfinance was a ‘reinvention’, focused on solidarity circles that were created to uplift marginalized people. The founder of the Grameen Bank, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Muhammed Yunus, is a member of the majority world who witnessed first-hand poverty and social exclusion. He also knew about chits or kitties in his native land of Bangladesh. The billion-dollar success of the Grameen Bank was built upon the realization

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Rotating savings and credit associations: mutual aid financing  357 that low-income racialized women are committed to (at least the ideal of) business and to repaying their loans. The microfinance revolution initiated by Yunus has now become a mainstay of development interventions (Yunus 2007). For at least four decades, getting the poor ‘banked’ has become a priority in the fight against world poverty.2 In 2016, microfinance had developed into a commercialized business and had emerged as one of the world’s most celebrated institutions, with around $70 billion in investments and at least 205 million people accessing loans through approximately 10 000 microfinance institutions (Reed 2012; Roodman 2012).3 When, at the first Microcredit Campaign Summit in 1997, it was declared that microfinance would reach 100 million poor families, the UN immediately endorsed it as a tool to help meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty in poor countries by 2015; and since that time, the world has been taken up with microfinance. Microfinance was novel in financial circles in that it emphasized a different system to ensure more inclusionary financing – a peer-based one founded on social relationships and people’s willingness to repay. Thus came the term ‘social financing’. As has been noted, this idea of group economics is hardly new: it has a long history among excluded people (Du Bois 2007; Gordon-Nembhard 2014; Mintz 2010). Through this microfinance ‘revolution’, civil society organizations turned conventional banking norms upside-down and decolonized the business structures to fit with the needs of the poor (Ashley 2000; Baruah 2010; Bateman and Chang 2012; Rahman 1999; Sengupta and Aubuchon 2008; Wahid 1994; Yunus 2010). This kind of (micro) banking clashed with the Western model as it was promoting a form of solidarity economics. At the same time it commercialized and formalized community based financing. The universal endorsement of microfinance as a tool to create ‘access to finance’ requires further scrutiny (Morduch 1999). The truth is that while access to finance is useful to marginalized groups, many people are still being excluded – and sometimes by the very bankers who aim to serve them. The largely white male investors and bankers seem to be the ones investing into micro-banking (Hossein 2016). Another moral dilemma arises when microfinance institutions access subsidies and concessional loans, claiming they support inclusive finance when they clearly ignore certain groups of people. Malcolm Harper (1998) was one of the first critics to see the shift in micro-banking from a development model focused on poverty alleviation to a commercial model he called the ‘new wave’ of microfinance – a trend that has pushed microcredit towards the goal of profitability. Canadian professor Katherine Rankin’s (2001) early work in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal was a pioneer study that critically examined and linked the new neoliberal economic order to microfinance, finding it was turning Nepali women into ‘rational economic women’ conforming to commercialization. Other early critics of microfinance (e.g. Dichter 1996; Dichter and Harper 2007; Rogaly 1996) claimed that its advocates (e.g. Klobuchar and Wilkes 2003) were blindly committed to ‘money with a mission’, overlooking the pressure from within financial institutions to be profitable in their hopes for a cure to poverty. The common perception is, however, that microfinance can do no wrong. But in Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic (2012), industry insider Hugh Sinclair questions the integrity of the professionals within the microfinance industry. Hossein (2016) has shown that local elites can misuse economic resources and exert their power over the powerless, with the consequence that these microcredit programmes are run in an exclusionary way. Roy’s Poverty Capital (2010) questions whether white/ened and educated elites in microfinance are preoccupied

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358  The handbook of diverse economies with their own personal biases. For these critics, commercialized banking has become a hiding place where the privileged elites can join in the process of replicating unequal systems that further harm those already at the bottom. ROSCAs, by contrast, are not trying to aid the economic elite; their preoccupation is with informal collective action that makes sense to the group members’ cultural values system. Millions of people, mostly women, are unrelenting in their efforts to make banking inclusive. They contribute to the framing of diverse financial economies in quiet ways as they zero in on what matters, the collective. The ‘social economy’ in which microfinance is positioned is designed as a place to ‘help’. But too often it becomes a neutral site that fails to react against oppression. ROSCAs show that racially excluded groups come together through their own self-determination to not only contest their systemic economic and social exclusion from conventional formal finance, but define the concept of diverse financial economies. And no proper dose of modernity can formalize these groups, as it is the informality of the micro-banking that makes them core to the concept of diverse financial economies.

WHY THEY MATTER: ROSCAS OUTSIDE OF A CAPITALOCENTRIC FRAMING In The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi (1944) argued that the economy is embedded in social relationships, and that how people make a living is not solely focused on business. In a similar vein Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) have long articulated that community economic practices continue to take place in spite of market fundamentalism. Understanding the various ways people live collectively is vital to unravelling the dominant view that there is only one way to organize business and society. The social economy, and the focus on mainstream commercialized microfinance, has, however, ignored the important work economic collectives do in both developed and developing countries. Gordon-Nembhard’s (2014) work on African-Americans traces self-help banking groups by enslaved African-Americans back to the sixteenth century, finding evidence that people were always creating intentional communities for themselves. Gordon-Nembhard and Pang (2003) show that in marginalized ethnic communities in the USA, excluded groups will create inspiring and caring collaboratives. My own research together with a number of scholars (Hossein 2018) attests to the diverse community economies in the Americas. It is worth noting that many of the businesses black people initiate are part of an activist tradition and are cooperative by nature. Wherever they are, ROSCAs are locally driven to help people to meet their livelihood needs, when even formal and targeted ‘pro-poor finance’ projects fail them (Hossein 2013). The Banker Ladies have similar social origins as the people they work with – they are low-income and uneducated women who know full well that they need activism to counteract the everyday pain of their comrades. Black people in the diaspora have devised diverse banking in part because of their political and economic contexts as well as the fact that it makes plain sense to their own cultural values system. So in times of adversity African people and the diaspora have relied on collective systems they know and trust. Women who form these groups organize themselves to support a host of life events such as education costs for their children, marriages and funerals. And the bulk of the women I interviewed use the money for their businesses or sideline business activities whether it is catering, retailing goods or a cleaning business. The women believe

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Rotating savings and credit associations: mutual aid financing  359 that together, by pooling and sharing monies, they could achieve financial independence one day. People who choose collective banking, where dividends are shared by members, practise a quiet form of resistance because they are ultimately rejecting commercialized banking. People on their own terms are thus devising more humane money systems that work for communities.

CONCLUSION Coming together to help one another during times of adversity is a certain sign of black people’s commitment to the social economy (Hossein 2014, 2018). People, and particularly those who cannot fit into mainstream business, have turned to home-grown community economies (Gibson-Graham 2006). In spite of the push towards a shareholder model, collective enterprises persist. To ignore this experience of people’s conscientious decision to do business differently is to undermine the resistance in an era of corporations. ROSCAs show no signs of becoming redundant anytime soon, and part of the staying power has to do with people who have conscientiously chosen to interact in cooperative ways not focused on the individual. Group economics are important to most people and especially to historically oppressed people. The Banker Ladies of this world, the women who organize money with a purpose, are here to stay because they quietly do their business while rejecting commercialized institutions. The very concept of ROSCAs is sacred in that it confirms without question that diverse financial institutions matter – ones that are people-owned and rooted in cooperation.

NOTES 1. This chapter concentrates on only one region of the world, but ROSCAs are practised around the globe. See, for example, the Kudumbashree cooperatives in Kerala (http://​www​kudumbashree​.org [accessed 12 May 2019]) or the Mata Masu Dubara movement of Niger in the Sahel (Grant and Allen 2002). 2. While the terms ‘microcredit’, ‘micro-banking’ and ‘microfinance’ are used interchangeably in the literature, this study deals with ‘microcredit’, very small loans made to the entrepreneurial poor (Midgley 2008, p. 468). The more modern term ‘microfinance’ includes loans, savings, remittances, insurance and business consultation services. 3. Many conferences have recognized microfinance as an important intervention: Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development (1975); Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995); Programme of Action for the Least Developed Countries for the Decade 2001–2010; and International Conference on Financing for Development in 2002.

REFERENCES Ardener, S. (1964), ‘The comparative study of rotating credit associations’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 94 (2), 201–29. Ardener, S. and S. Burman (eds) (1996), Money-Go-Rounds: The Importance of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations for Women, Oxford: Berg.

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360  The handbook of diverse economies Ashley, B. (Producer and Director) (2000), Credit Where Credit Is Due, Film, Bullfrog/Television Trust for Environment, BBC Worldwide. Baruah, B. (2010), ‘NGOs in microfinance: Learning from the past, accepting limitations, and moving forward’, Geography Compass, 2 (6), 1–14. Bateman, M. and H. Chang (2012), ‘Microfinance and the illusion of development: From hubris to nemesis in thirty years’, World Economic Review, 1, 13–36. Becker, M., R. Bergan and M. Schuller (2009), Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy, Film, 60 minutes, Tet Ansanm Productions, accessed 12 May 2019 at http://​ www​ .potomitan​ net/​. Dichter, T.W. (1996), ‘Questioning the future of NGOs in microfinance’, Journal of International Development, 8 (2), 259–69. Dichter, T.W. and M. Harper (2007), What’s Wrong with Microfinance? Rugby, UK: Intermediate Technology. Du Bois, W.E.B. (2007 [1903]), The Souls of Black Folk, Minneapolis, MN: Filiquarian Publishing. Geertz, C. (1962), ‘The Rotating Credit Association: A middle rung in development’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 10 (3), 241–63. Gibson, K., R. Astuti, M. Carnegie, et al. (2018a), ‘Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59 (1), 3–16. Gibson, K., A. Hill and L. Law (2018b), ‘Community economies in Southeast Asia: A hidden economic geography’, in A. McGregor, L. Law and F. Miller (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Development, London: Routledge, pp. 131–42. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnestota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2014), ‘Rethinking the economy with thick description and weak theory’, Current Anthropology, 55 (S9), S147–S153. Gordon-Nembhard, J. (2014), Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gordon-Nembhard, J. and V. Ooka Pang (2003), ‘Ethnic youth programs: Teaching about caring economic communities and self-empowered leadership’, in G. Ladson-Billings (ed.), Critical Race Theory Perspectives on the Social Studies, Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, pp. 171–97. Grant, W. and H. Allen (2002), ‘CARE’s Mata Masu Dubara (Women on the Move) Program in Niger: Successful financial intermediation in the rural Sahel’, Journal of Microfinance, 4 (2), 189–216. Harper, M. (1998), Profit for the Poor: Cases in Microfinance, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Harrison, F.V. (1988), ‘Women in Jamaica’s informal economy: Insights from a Kingston slum’, New West Indian Guide, 3 (4), 103–28. Hossein, C.S. (2013), ‘The black social economy: Perseverance of banker ladies in the slums’, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 84 (4), 423–42. Hossein, C.S. (2014), ‘Haiti’s Caisses Populaires: Home-grown solutions to bring economic democracy’, International Journal of Social Economics, 41 (1), 42–59. Hossein, C.S. (2016), Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power and Violence in the Black Americas, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hossein, C.S. (ed.) (2018), The Black Social Economy: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Markets, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Klobuchar, J. and S. Cornell Wilkes (2003), The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism: A Compelling Case for Microcredit, London: Kirk House. Midgley, J. (2008), ‘Microenterprise, global poverty and social development’, International Social Work, 51 (4), 467–79. Mintz, S. (2010), Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morduch, J. (1999), ‘The microfinance promise’, Journal of Economic Literature, 37, 1569–614. Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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Rotating savings and credit associations: mutual aid financing  361 Rahman, A. (1999), ‘Microcredit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development: Who pays?’, World Development, 27 (1), 67–82. Rankin, K. (2001), ‘Governing development: Neoliberalism, microcredit and rational economic women’, Economy and Society, 30 (1), 18–37. Reed, L. (2012), ‘A too generalized look at microfinance’, Opinion section, Washington Post, accessed 21 February 2019 at https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​opinions/​a​-too​-generalized​-look​-at​ -microfinance/​2012/​03/​13/​gIQANqjcCS​_story​.html​?utm​_term​=​.18aeeabbde3f. Rogaly, B. (1996), ‘Microfinance evangelism, destitute women and the hard selling of a new anti-poverty formula’, Development in Practice, 6 (2), 100–112. Roodman, D. (2012), Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance, Washington, DC: Center for Global Development. Roy, A. (2010), Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, New York: Routledge. Rutherford, S. (2000), The Poor and their Money, New Delhi: DFID/Oxford University Press. Sengupta, R. and C.P. Aubuchon (2008), ‘The microfinance revolution: An overview’, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 90 (1), 9–30. Sinclair, H. (2012), Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. St. Pierre, M. (1999), Anatomy of Resistance: Anticolonialism in Guyana 1823–1966, London: Macmillan Education. Wahid, A.N.M. (1994), ‘The Grameen Bank and poverty alleviation in Bangladesh: Theory, evidence and limitations’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 53 (1), 1–15. Yunus, M. (2007), Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle against World Poverty, New York: Public Affairs. Yunus, M. (2010), Building Social Businesses: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs, New York: Public Affairs.

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40. Indigenous finance: treaty settlement finance in Aotearoa New Zealand Maria Bargh

INTRODUCTION Internationally, Indigenous peoples have experienced colonization in different ways. In some countries Indigenous peoples have extensive control over the governance of land and resources often as a result of treaties or political recognition, while in other countries their very fight for recognition as ‘peoples’ remains a priority. These histories have shaped the financial positions that Indigenous peoples find themselves in. Having rights to utilize your own resources or receiving royalties from the extraction of, say, petroleum and minerals, has translated into financial flows to Indigenous communities (such as in the United States) (Helin 2008). Such situations tend to also continue to be complicated by ongoing socio-economic and well-being disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and strategies to alleviate disparities to improve indicators for Indigenous communities. This chapter will look at Indigenous finance as one element of this broader picture. Specifically I examine the experiences of an Indigenous Māori community of Aotearoa New Zealand. I do so from my position as an academic of Māori descent who belongs to the Te Arawa iwi (tribe) and aligns my research to Māori research methodologies (Smith 1999). Te Arawa is one of the Indigenous Māori iwi of Aotearoa New Zealand. Before the arrival of non-Māori, Te Arawa resided and held political authority in the Bay of Plenty area of the North Island. In the 1830s and 1840s Te Arawa was a prosperous iwi with flour and flax mills, ships to transport and trade products, and tourism businesses in the area surrounding the town of Rotorua (O’Malley and Armstrong 2008). In the 1840s many Māori tribes were concerned about the encroachment of non-Māori on their land and they signed the Treaty of Waitangi with their colonizers. The Treaty of Waitangi permitted the British to establish a government and guaranteed to Māori their sovereignty (tino rangatiratanga) and authority including over property and other resources (Waitangi Tribunal 2014). However, contrary to the Māori language version of the Treaty, the settler government that was created after the Treaty assumed that Māori ceded sovereignty and sought to acquire more Māori land by multiple means. In the land wars of the 1850s and 1860s Te Arawa sided with the British Crown against other Māori, in part as a strategy to protect and retain authority over their lands. But after the establishment of the Native Land Court in the 1860s and through other means Te Arawa also had the authority and control of their lands, lakes and businesses taken by the Crown (O’Malley and Armstrong 2008). In 1975 the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act indicated the beginning of a long change in Crown attitudes towards their obligations under the Treaty. Importantly it validated processes to rectify breaches of the Treaty. The Waitangi Tribunal was established to hear cases brought by Māori about breaches of the Treaty and the Crown created a ‘Treaty Settlement 362 Maria Bargh - 9781788119962 08:02:18PM

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manaakitanga/kaitiakitanga (nurturing/guardianship) mana (authority) tapu (spiritual quality) utu (balance).

These Māori values (or tikanga Māori), and Māori identity itself, are never a ‘completed project’ but are always in a state of change and ‘becoming’ (Barcham 2001, p. 148). The relationships (whanaungatanga) amongst people and between people, landscape features and flora and fauna are crucially important in Māori society because of the role close relationships can play in maintaining peace and balance (Jones 2016). Relationships extend across generations and therefore contemporary decisions must consider an intergenerational investment and impact. Having an understanding and knowledge of the genealogical connections between people and the environment (manaakitanga) is a key part of ensuring that positive relationships are maintained (Mead 2016). Having guardianship (kaitiakitanga) and caring for people and the environment is another key concept and encourages particular kinds of behaviours that promote environmental sustainability. The concept of mana relates to the individual authority of people and leaders but also relates to the authority that particular groups have over specific resources and areas. Tapu indicates that there is a spiritual element to all things and this concept also regulates behaviours in Māori society. The concept of utu or balance is a key mechanism for ensuring the maintenance of relationships. If something is taken away, or if rules are breached then there must be an action (utu) to restore the balance (Mead 2016, pp. 34–5). These values set up particular kinds of expectations about behaviours, and processes of accountability in Te Arawa entities. Each of the Acts and governance entities (see Table 40.1) pertaining to Te Arawa assets have been established as a result of a Treaty of Waitangi settlement process. Each of the Treaty settlements contains commercial and cultural redress and generally an apology. The amount of redress varies across tribes and depends on a number of factors, including the type of Treaty breach, the population size of the tribe, as well as more political elements such as the strength of negotiators (Bargh 2012). The amount returned in commercial redress is never enough to compensate for what was lost and is usually only a very minor percentage. In many ways it is more of a symbolic gesture on the part of the Crown (Fisher 2017). Values are apparent in Te Arawa entities but these are always in a state of change and ‘becoming’ (Barcham 2001, p. 148). This position of ‘becoming’ is manifest in two ways. Firstly, Te Arawa entities might be celebrated by some as ‘Māori’ because of the dominant narratives they articulate in Annual Reports and so on. Yet at the same time, they might face criticism for being ‘non-Māori’ because the way governance and financial decisions are sometimes made might be according to other cultural practices such as individualism. The second way that these entities are in a state of becoming is by re-inscribing the logics of capital through some of their practices (such as having shareholders and following corporate governance models) as well as forging new practices which blend different organizational practices (particularly through their selection of investment priorities). In what follows I highlight tensions involved in these becoming community economies by detailing the cultural-financial practices of two Te Arawa entities.

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Indigenous finance: treaty settlement finance in Aotearoa New Zealand  365 Te Arawa Fisheries: Distributing Finances to Benefit the Iwi Te Arawa Fisheries is a charitable trust whose mission is ‘Kia whakakotahi tatou o Te Arawa Waka ki raro i te maru o nga taonga o Tangaroa mo nga whakatipuranga o Te Arawa’, which means, for Te Arawa to unite all of those who descend from the Te Arawa waka (canoe) under the mantle of the treasures of the ocean to support the people of Te Arawa. Their vision is: ‘Effective Te Arawa Iwi, Prosperous Te Arawa Whanau, Healthy Te Arawa Moana’. This entity emerged out of the Fisheries settlement which was the first pan-Māori (rather than iwi-based) national settlement. The Fisheries settlement came about after the New Zealand Māori Council took the Crown to court when the Crown created the fisheries Quota Management System in the 1990s but failed to provide for Māori ownership rights in fisheries. Te Arawa Fisheries was established in 1995 and amended its Trust Deed in 2006, when it also established companies to hold and manage the assets from the Māori Fisheries Act 2004. The assets of the Trust consist of ‘fishing quota, shares in Aotearoa Fisheries Limited and cash which were valued at $23.7m in total at September 2006’ (Te Arawa Fisheries 2017, p. 25). The ‘quota, shares and cash produce an annual income’ which is then used to further the Trust’s mission and vision (Te Arawa Fisheries 2017, p. 23). As a charitable trust its strategic objectives fall into three areas of social support and environmental care. The first is ‘Our Te Arawa iwi are supported for success’ (Te Arawa Fisheries 2016, p. 4). This objective involves providing support, in different forms including delivering seafood to bereaved families and marae (meeting houses) hosting tangi (Māori funeral rituals) or providing funding for Matariki (the Māori new year) celebrations for elders. The second area of focus is ‘Our Te Arawa Whanau are Prosperous’ for which Te Arawa Fisheries provides education and employment support such as tertiary scholarships and jobs in a fish factory and in the Te Arawa Fisheries fish shops. The third area of focus is protecting and preserving the marine environment and involves participation in policy discussion with local agencies and other stakeholders. These areas of social and environmental support also have financial elements in terms of investing in the people based on values of nurturing relationships. The financial strategies of this entity are focused on Te Arawa people receiving financial distributions. The distribution to the iwi is regularly reported in Annual Reports. In the 2016 report, for example, it is noted that $120 000 was distributed ‘to our iwi to support our community initiatives’ (Te Arawa Fisheries 2016, p. 5). Cultural values provide the rationale for these financial distributions. Recipients of tertiary scholarships, for example, participate in a marae stay ‘to help them maintain their connection with Te Arawa’ (Te Arawa Fisheries 2016, p. 5). These are direct investments in maintaining relationships and spiritual connections to place. Te Arawa Fisheries notes that it makes a modest surplus in order to maintain the support it provides but otherwise has very little financial accumulation. The 2016 Annual Report emphasizes the ‘prudent investment of assets to provide revenue which has been reinvested or utilised in the provision of initiatives that deliver benefit to our beneficiaries’ (Te Arawa Fisheries 2016, p. 7). These are financial practices guided by cultural values. Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa: Reinvesting for Ongoing and Future Benefit Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa was established to receive assets from the Central North Island Forests Iwi Collective Settlement 2008 on behalf of its affiliates and to govern and redistribute these. Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa Group received NZ$38.6 million in financial redress and

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366  The handbook of diverse economies now has NZ$110 million of equity (Te Pumautanga 2017). Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa established Te Arawa Group Holdings Limited as a commercial subsidiary company to manage and grow the forestry, agribusiness, tourism, geothermal and property settlement assets. All of the investments are physically located in the Bay of Plenty area, roughly coinciding with the traditional Te Arawa tribal area of authority and providing an indication of the role that the relationships, including to the land, play in finance and investment decisions. The vision of Te Arawa Group Holdings Limited is to ‘create wealth and opportunity for the inter-generational benefit of our shareholders’ (Te Pumautanga 2017, p. 21). Te Arawa Group Holdings Limited is mindful of ‘inter-generational benefits’ and emphasizes its own reinvesting of revenue rather than distribution (Te Pumautanga 2017, p. 21). This has led to some challenges from Te Arawa affiliates who seek to control and manage their proportion of assets separately (Te Pumautanga 2017, p. 15). To date NZ$1million has been paid out to each sub-tribe within Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa and these amounts have been used in a variety of ways, including being reinvested in banks. Distributions in revenue from the broader Central North Island Collective Holdings Limited go directly to and are managed by Te Arawa Group Holdings Limited (Te Pumautanga 2017, p. 15). Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa has strong financial aspirations set out in its Strategic Objectives, such as, ‘advancing the integrity of the settlement’, ‘ensuring the best and effective use of our taonga (treasure)’ but on the whole their function is to ‘hold and administer’ rather than directly maximize profit (Te Pumautanga 2017, p. 10). The priority given to preserving the financial investment is evident from the ‘2017 Highlights and Events’ on page 1 of the 2017 Annual Report including ‘Total revenue’, ‘Operating expenses’ and ‘TPT and TPTCT Operating expenses’. Page 2 of the Annual Report, however, attends to cultural values with obituaries of people who have passed away in the previous year. Cultural values inform the political role that Te Pumautanga holds by virtue of the Central North Island Settlement. This role involves leading complex negotiations about which tribes have mana (authority) over particular tracts of land and forests. Before the distribution of forest assets can occur, the tribes involved need to agree about who has authority over which tracts of land and forests and where boundaries lie (Bargh 2012). Those discussions invoke the concepts around mana over the land and relationships amongst the different tribes and the human relationships to the land and waterways (Durie 1999). The concept of utu (balance) comes into play with the negotiations assessing which tribes lost the most land through the Crown’s actions. As the land returned from the Crown is not equally spread across all tribal areas, more intricate discussions have taken place about the value that should be placed on cash versus shares or title to land. Te Pumautanga originally included a subsidiary charitable trust which sought to ‘improve the wellbeing of our people’ (Te Pumautanga 2017). In the 2015/2016 financial year the development arm was wound up. Part of the rationale for its closure was to reduce operating costs (Te Pumautanga 2017). It had been designed to operate on external revenue but struggled to achieve enough to cover costs and provide the educational, planning and engagement services it aspired to deliver. The implication for the future here is that the task of improving the well-being of the people may be left for members to promote using the financial resources devolved to them. Cultural values also inform the national political role that Te Pumautanga plays representing Te Arawa through the Iwi Chairs’ Forum which engages with government on a range of issues such as water allocation, climate change and land use diversification. Participation in this

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Indigenous finance: treaty settlement finance in Aotearoa New Zealand  367 Forum enables the building and sustaining of relationships across various iwi and provides Te Pumautanga a political avenue to try to promote political and cultural aspirations as well as financial aspirations and investments in sectors such as agriculture.

ENTANGLED NARRATIVES AND STRATEGIES The negotiations about how to invest finances is entangled for many Te Arawa and other Māori organizations with questions about which cultural values take precedence. Some scholars have argued that those managing assets in post-settlement governance entities ‘often appear to act in a manner contrary to tikanga (Māori values)’ (Te Aho quoted in Jones 2016, p. 99). Legal scholar Carwyn Jones argues that these entities ‘are not tikanga-based structures’ so can be constituted in forms that lead ‘decision-makers to act in a way that is at odds with the principles of tikanga’ (Jones 2016, p. 99). Jones goes on to explain that this does not need to be the case, however, and that by including Māori legal concepts in Treaty settlements, before many of these entities are established or while they are being designed, Māori have more opportunities for placing tikanga Māori values at the forefront of decisions, including financial decisions. As already shown, Te Arawa entities are articulating and negotiating these constraints and opportunities in different ways. Cultural and ethical values sit in tension in decision-making processes with financial imperatives to maximize profits to increase the asset base. Many of the entities feel pressures to conform to market imperatives and maximize their assets. This tends to simultaneously be part of the manaakitanga responsibility and strategy to provide intergenerational benefits and to alleviate the negative socio-economic realities of members. The ‘becoming’ Māori community economy is evolving through the negotiations around these issues. Arguably these Te Arawa entities are articulating and performing Māori community economies. They are selectively and consciously promoting ‘surviving well together’ (Roelvink et al. 2015, p. 10), via redistribution and sustenance for the human and non-human world. A useful way to assess the tensions within Te Arawa entities is to distinguish between a traditional financial services narrative, that is, one which revolves around the ‘objective, prudent, and sober behaviour, the careful balancing of books, and, above all, the analysis of financial numbers with an aim to maximising profit’ (Buttle 2008, p. 2103) and the charity narrative, which focuses on ‘providing care, passion, a belief in a cause, and sustainability’ (Buttle 2008, p. 2103). In Te Arawa Fisheries and Te Pumautanga we see a Māori cultural narrative built upon the five values around relationships (whanaungatanga), nurturing/guardianship (manaakitanga/kaitiakitanga), authority (mana), spiritual quality (tapu) and balance (utu). But we also see a narrative that is similar to the financial narrative that Buttle describes and is fundamentally about increasing or maximizing profitable revenue from the assets returned by the Crown in the settlement process. It differs in that it also involves a financial distribution aspect rather than simply accumulation. While these two narratives sit in tension as a ‘cultural-financial narrative’ and are articulated slightly differently in each Te Arawa organization they are both strategies which form part of a becoming Māori community economy.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter I have examined entities from one particular Māori tribe in New Zealand and the manner in which they articulate financial practices guided by values of relationships, nurturing/guardianship, authority, spiritual quality and balance at the core. These entities are distinct but also have similarities to many other Māori political and economic entities where specific Māori economic identities are evident and where financial activities are prioritized unique to a Māori community economy. There are many similarities between the values evident in a Māori community economy and the ethical concerns of community economies more abstractly put (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). For example, the ‘material interdependence with human and earth others’ (Roelvink et al. 2015, p. 9) that is acknowledged in the concern for surviving well, encountering others ethically and commoning have long been a consideration for Māori and continue to be reflected in tribal entity activities. Māori values around guardianship of the environment are fairly standard for most Indigenous peoples and are articulated as a care for the non-human world (Todd 2014). Inherent in many of the decisions around ethical coordinates is a sense of balance and an understanding of consequences from particular decisions (Gibson-Graham and CEC, 2017). The element of spiritual quality is more developed and more clearly articulated in Māori values than in the community economies literature, and yet is an area of current interest (see Chapter 7 by Lyne and Madden, and Chapter 38 by Dodds and Pollard in this volume). The spiritual quality of ‘things’ could be further analysed to provide an even richer lens on the reasons why some peoples invest in places and non-humans as part of their community economies.

REFERENCES Barcham, M. (2001), ‘(De)constructing the politics of indigeneity’, in D. Ivison, P. Patton and W. Sanders (eds), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 137–51. Bargh, M. (2012), ‘Impacts on Māori: Post settlement’, in N. Wheen and J. Hayward (eds), Treaty of Waitangi Settlements, Auckland: Bridget Williams Press, pp. 166–81. Buttle, M. (2008), ‘Diverse economies and the negotiations and practices of ethical finance: The case of Charity Bank’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 40 (9), 2097–113. Durie, M. (1999), Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga, Auckland: Oxford University Press. Fisher, M. (2017), ‘Binding remedies: The Ngāi Tahu Treaty settlement negotiations’, New Zealand Universities Law Review, 27 (3), 505–27. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and the Community Economies Collective (2017), Cultivating Community Economies: Tools for Building a Liveable World, accessed 6 March 2019 at https://​thenextsystem​.org/​ cultivating​-community​-economies. Helin, C. (2008), Dances with Dependency, Woodland Hills, CA: Ravencrest Publishing. Jones, C. (2016), New Treaty, New Tradition: Reconciling New Zealand and Maori Law, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Mead, H. (2016), Tikanga Māori (revised edn), Wellington: Huia. NZ Government (2008), ‘Central North Island Forests Iwi Collective Settlement’, accessed 6 March 2019 at https://​www​.govt​ nz/​treaty​-settlement​-documents/​central​-north​-island​-forests/​.

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Indigenous finance: treaty settlement finance in Aotearoa New Zealand  369 NZ Government (2010), Ngāti Tuwharetoa, Raukawa and Te Arawa River Iwi Waikato River Act 2010, accessed 10 March 2019 at http://​www​.legislation​.govt​.nz/​act/​public/​2010/​0119/​latest/​DLM2921831​ .html. O’Malley, V. and D. Armstrong (2008), The Beating Heart: A Political and Socio-Economic History of Te Arawa, Wellington: Huia. Roelvink, G., K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds) (2015), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, L. (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies, Otago: Otago University Press. Te Arawa Fisheries (2016), Annual Report, Rotorua: Te Arawa Fisheries. Te Arawa Fisheries (2017), Annual Report, Rotorua: Te Arawa Fisheries. Te Arawa Lakes Trust (2016–17), Annual Report/AGM Report, Rotorua: Te Arawa Lakes Trust. Te Arawa River Iwi Trust (2014–15), Annual Report, Rotorua: Te Arawa River Iwi Trust. Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa (2015), Annual Report, Rotorua: Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa. Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa (2016), Annual Report, Rotorua: Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa. Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa (2017), Annual Report, Rotorua: Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa. Todd, Z. (2014), ‘An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn’, accessed 6 March 2019 at https://​umaincertaantropologia​.org/​2014/​10/​26/​an​-indigenous​-feminists​-take​-on​-the​-ontological​-turn​ -ontology​-is​-just​-another​-word​-for​-colonialism​-urbane​-adventurer​-amiskwaci/​. Waitangi Tribunal (2002), The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi as expressed by the Courts and the Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, accessed 6 March 2019 at http://​ www​ .waitangitribunal​.govt​ nz/​assets/​Documents/​Publications/​WT​-Principles​-of​-the​-Treaty​-of​-Waitangi​ -as​-expressed​-by​-the​-Courts​-and​-the​-Waitangi​-Tribunal​.pdf. Waitangi Tribunal (2014), He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti – The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o te Raki Inquiry, Wellington: Legislation Direct. Wheen, N. and J. Hayward (eds) (2012), Treaty of Waitangi Settlements, Auckland: Bridget Williams Press.

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41. Community finance: marshalling investments for community-owned renewable energy enterprises Jarra Hicks

INTRODUCTION Finance is the one of the means through which enterprises access the resources needed to perform their activities and fulfil their mission. To build community run enterprises, we need sources of finance that are aligned with more-than-economic goals. Community finance is one such source. It involves sourcing investment, donations, loans and other contributions from a defined geographic or interest community built around an enterprise. Concepts of community finance extend to include investments of time and other non-monetary resources, which contribute to the economic viability of an enterprise through non-cash means (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). In line with Orsi’s guidelines for enterprises in the new economy, community finance means enterprises are ‘driven and “financed” less by money and more by people and their needs, passions, concerns, time and energy’ (2012, p. 153). Importantly, by virtue of sourcing finance from a mission-aligned community, community finance creates opportunities for finance to be more accountable to ethics, more patient and more grounded in community. Thus, finance becomes a central tool that both enables and directly impacts on the realization of our visions for ethical community economies. This chapter reviews different forms of community finance being crafted to realize community-owned renewable energy (CORE) enterprises. CORE enterprises bring people together to own and operate a renewable energy system, united by a common vision for decentralized, democratized and decarbonized electricity options (Hicks et al. 2014; and see Hicks, Chapter 5 in this volume). These enterprises are making inroads into what has become a highly centralized nexus of political, economic and electrical power (MacArthur 2016). All over the world, countries with established electricity systems are founded on burning fossil fuels in large, centralized power plants that connect households to one-way flows of electricity via an enormous network of cables. In exchange, millions of dollars a year flow out of communities into large state-owned or private electricity retailers, generators and grid companies. Over time, the electricity market has become increasingly disconnected from the people it services, seeming inaccessible and monolithic in its monstrosities. As the devastating climate impacts of our energy choices become clear and as electricity costs rise beyond people’s means to pay, people have become increasingly concerned with how our electricity system operates. Renewable energy revolutionizes the possibilities at the very foundations of this system: by harnessing the common powers of nature available everywhere, renewable energy technologies enable smaller-scale electricity generation distributed across the landscape, owned by individuals and communities. Distributed renewable energy generation involves people with

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Community finance: community-owned renewable energy enterprises  371 a living, daily interest in decisions about where their electricity comes from and what impact this has on others and our planet. Marshalling the financial resources needed by a CORE enterprise is no small feat, often requiring millions of dollars and the orchestration of a confluence of finance arrangements, including investment, grants, loans, donations, in-kind subsidies and more, as well as efforts to reduce costs in creative ways. Not all CORE enterprises mobilize community finance. In some instances, enterprises are funded entirely by large government grants and bank loans, wherein the community that owns the enterprise has very little involvement in its finance arrangements. Other CORE enterprises exist only through a range of community financial contributions: volunteer labour, donations, in-kind contributions, local share offerings and debt from local credit unions. This chapter uses three case studies to present different forms of community finance being crafted to realize CORE and to explore the implications of decisions to use community finance over mainstream finance options.

WHAT IS COMMUNITY FINANCE? Anyone who has been involved in community organizations would likely attest that it can be difficult to access the money needed to fulfil the organization’s mission. Setting up a multi-million dollar, multi-megawatt wind or solar farm when you have never done anything like it before, in a context that is highly regulated and dominated by large, established corporations, is daunting. CORE enterprises must navigate difficult and complex interactions with mainstream actors in the energy system (retailers, grid operators, regulators, mainstream financiers). Gaining access to finance can be a hurdle (Coalition for Community Energy 2015, p. 52) especially as the level of capital required presents an overwhelming challenge to communities unfamiliar with capital raising. If they turn to mainstream finance solutions, the advice they get and the options open to them might not be suited to the ethically driven nature of their enterprises (Hall et al. 2016). Nor are these options well suited to utilizing local assets and opportunities. And yet, the energy system must be transformed to meet the challenges of climate change, and communities are motivated to participate in the transition to renewable energy. Community finance encapsulates a diversity of investments made by people who are aligned with the mission of the enterprise (e.g. for a safe climate or local economic development) and who remain connected to the enterprise and its purpose. Table 41.1 shows an inventory of different forms of community and mainstream finance drawn upon by community enterprises. Note that non-monetary contributions are considered forms of community finance in that they enable the enterprise by reducing costs through harnessing contributions from supporters in their community. By sourcing money and other contributions from a consciously created, mission-aligned community of people, community finance increases the scope for keeping decision making in mission-oriented hands and keeping financial benefits circulating in the community. Rather than finance being something tacked on at the end of a business planning process and out of necessity, community finance options allow us to think about finance as an integral part of how we design and deliver the central mission of the enterprise.

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Community finance: community-owned renewable energy enterprises  373 income to fund other initiatives to support the sustainability, viability and vibrancy of their 300-person community. All island residents can be members of the Trust (and thereby co-owners of the turbine) for a nominal annual membership fee of one pound. In contrast to the other two cases, Shapinsay Trust drew far less on community finance. Their capital costs were funded entirely through grants and bank debt from external institutions. Commitment to the mission of the CORE enterprises, and their ability to open up opportunities for people to participate, facilitates a diversity of finance contributions. These include: ●● Volunteer labour: Local people’s contributions of volunteer effort over years is what enabled both Hepburn Wind and Shapinsay Trust to move forward, and eventually realize their visions for a community-owned wind farm. CORENA was established and continues to run on entirely voluntary efforts. ●● Rotating loan fund: CORENA stewards community donations, so they can be used time and time again to support community organizations (not-for-profits providing a community service) to install solar PV and energy efficiency devices. Donations are pooled and loaned out at no cost. As the community organization saves money on electricity bills, the loan is repaid. The money is then loaned to the next applicant. CORENA aim to grow their funding pool to $630 000, which would fund one new solar PV project every month, forever. ●● Deferred payment and sweat equity: Hepburn Wind developed a strong partnership with a local business that performed the wind resource studies and technical planning for the wind farm. This business was deeply committed to Hepburn Wind’s mission and agreed to be paid when the project proceeded to construction. Deferred payment allowed Hepburn Wind to move forward with project planning, despite not having the cash available at the time to pay for the required studies. Instead, this cost was paid when the enterprise was able to raise funds through a community share offer. In addition, some of the deferred payment was taken as shares in the cooperative and will be paid out over years, as a return on investment. ●● Community investment: $9 million of community investment raised through a community share offering provided a significant amount of the finance required to build Hepburn Wind’s turbines. This contribution determined the viability of the enterprise: without it, they could not proceed. Members will receive a modest return on their investment, when agreed to by members alongside the cooperative’s other goals. ●● In-kind contributions: Hepburn Wind runs events at their turbines as part of their mission to increase local community involvement in, knowledge of and support for renewable energy. In-kind contributions make these events viable. For example, the Sleep Under the Stars festival was made possible through in-kind contributions of over $70 000 (AUD) worth of staff time, equipment and talent from over 130 individuals, artists, groups and businesses in the community. This one event (a small component of the cooperative’s overall activities and relationships) demonstrates the number and quality of active community connections that contribute to creating and upholding the enterprise. ●● Sharing: In the early stages of planning their turbine, Shapinsay Trust joined with other local trusts from neighbouring islands to share the process of establishing a wind turbine with others on the same journey. Through Community Power Orkney, the trusts shared their experiences and learning, including commercial information. At times, they also

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374  The handbook of diverse economies shared staff and covered for each other if someone was away or sick. When it came time to purchase the turbines, they put in a joint order to reduce cost and logistics. These examples demonstrate the financial value of building an active community of people committed to the enterprise mission, who are able and willing to help it thrive. Rather than seeing finance as requiring a predetermined set of economic arrangements dictated by commercial norms, we can recognize the multitude of possible economic arrangements that can be drawn on through community finance. Crucially, an awareness of community finance creates three key openings in our finance options: firstly, it values contributions that reduce the amount of cash required to proceed; secondly, it helps to address cash flow challenges through deferred payment and sweat equity; and thirdly, it increases the possible avenues for sourcing mission-aligned money required to deliver the enterprise. It should also be noted that community finance options are often used alongside other finance options including grants, loans and subsidies from external organizations or governments.

THE VALUE OF COMMUNITY FINANCE Community finance can have important ramifications for creating community economies, particularly in relation to accessing accountable, ethical, patient and grounded finance. Accountable and Ethical Finance Sourcing finance from members who are committed to the mission of the enterprise enables the enterprise to bring finance in as an ally and enabler – ‘not as a master’ (Kelly 2012, p. 193). When an enterprise uses community finance options, these align the enterprise’s finance needs with their mission by drawing on financiers who support their mission. Kelly (2012, p. 190) explains that, in contrast, when finance is sourced via absentee ownership, ‘with boards representing shareholders who never set foot in the place – that design allows costs and consequences to be put onto others’. When people contribute to the finance of a project, they contribute time, effort, knowledge and money to an enterprise in which they have an active, engaged and ongoing interest. This develops informal and formal accountability processes that protect the enterprise mission and ethics over time. Informally, it increases people’s connection and contact with the enterprise and other members, thereby enhancing informal feedback loops. As a board member from Hepburn Wind explained: ‘There is an onus on us to make sure [decisions are] well-received. We have to live here too, so we have that extra level of accountability as we walk down the street!’1 Formally, community finance is generally sourced from members of the enterprise, who have an ownership stake in it. Share ownership comes with the rights and responsibilities of being involved in enterprise governance and decision making. Keeping decision making in the hands of mission-oriented members helps to steer the enterprise towards its ethical purpose over time.2 For Hepburn Wind, having member finance is fundamental to their mission to be locally owned and to create empowering ways for local people to take action on climate change. Their share offering gave preference to local people, with a minimum shareholding of $100 for locals and $1000 for non-locals. Because Hepburn Wind is a cooperative, each member has

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Community finance: community-owned renewable energy enterprises  375 one vote at general meetings, regardless of their level of shareholding. These arrangements help them to achieve their desire to be majority locally owned and controlled. Community investment builds a strong sense of member ownership over the enterprise, including a sense of pride, positive association with the turbines and sense of responsibility towards the enterprise. For Hepburn Wind, this has led to ongoing member interest and involvement in the cooperative and its mission. To demonstrate the value of community finance, strong contrast is provided by Shapinsay Trust’s experience of a very different source of finance. They relied on debt finance from a large external bank for 90 per cent of the wind farm costs. The key factors informing Shapinsay Trust’s governance and finance model were to be able to generate income for community initiatives and do this with very little money available to establish the venture. The strength here is that ‘the community could wholly own the project without spending every penny they had in their pocket’. It also enabled them to channel 100 per cent of the surplus from the wind turbine into community initiatives, without the need to repay shareholders or pay dividends. They do, however, pay commercial interest rates on their bank loan – which takes hundreds of thousands of pounds away from their community each year. Shapinsay Trust’s ability to make decisions that affect the operation of the turbine is, however, currently overseen (and sometimes overruled) by the bank, which still owns the enterprise by virtue of the loan. This has manifested several issues. For example, the bank has supported building up a reserve to cover a year’s worth of repayments but will not support them to investigate new enterprises that would generate more income to achieve their mission. The bank sees taking on additional activities as a risk to the Trust’s ability to effectively manage the turbine and meet loan repayments. As one Trust director lamented: ‘The bank basically owns it [the turbine] because we owe them so much money. The bank calls the shots . . . As time goes on, that will change because we’ll own a bigger percentage.’ The model chosen demands high levels of debt, and this comes at a cost to the real ability of the community to make decisions about the turbine and realize their mission. Lowering the level of debt and/or sourcing debt from a mission-oriented source could perhaps alleviate this challenge. These examples reveal the ways that different sources of finance can align with and support, or undermine, the realization of the enterprise’s mission through the interplay with enterprise governance, especially around decision making. Patient Finance Community finance is ‘patient capital’: a source of finance that looks to the long term and more-than-monetary outcomes of the enterprise. Patient financiers are happy to wait for a financial return, preferring instead to see the enterprise achieve its mission. Deferred payment and sweat equity are two examples of patient finance. CORE projects also demonstrate how community investment and donations can be forms of patient finance. For example, people who donate to CORENA know that the value of their money is going to be used time and time again, as the funds recycle through no-interest loans to different community organizations. CORENA is patient and considerate in setting the timelines for repayment, accepting that this needs to be in line with the electricity savings of the community organization. Rather than repayment schedules driven by commercial or time interests,

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376  The handbook of diverse economies CORENA ensures the timeline works for the client organization and supports them to continue achieving their mission in the community, rather than adding financial stress. For Hepburn Wind, a policy shift that involved removal of the price on carbon by the Australian Government dramatically reduced their forecast earnings and placed them in a financially vulnerable position. Through a member feedback process, the cooperative agreed to prioritize paying down their (relatively small) bank loan and continuing to contribute to their community grant fund over paying a return to members. They felt this decision would help put them in better financial stead, and continue to fulfil their mission of providing a local financial benefit. Through negotiation with the electricity retailer who purchases their electricity, they were able to ensure that they could continue to contribute $30 000 per year in community grants, which have funded a broad range of local sustainability and arts initiatives. Members’ commitment to the health of the enterprise and to seeing it achieve its more-than-economic mission has meant members are willing to wait for their financial return on investment. Where CORE enterprises seek community investment through a share offer, this is most often done through a localized process and does not involve being registered on a stock exchange. This means that shares are ‘sticky’ – they can take longer to buy and sell, as there is no formal market for shares and because there are often restrictions on membership (e.g. requirement of being local). The fact that the shares are not listed on a stock exchange means that there is no secondary market for shares, preventing shares from becoming a commodity that are traded for their own sake. This ensures that shareholders stay connected with the enterprise and its mission and are not driven by the profit motives associated with buying and selling shares.

GROUNDED FINANCE Sourcing finance from the community impacts on the spatiality of the enterprise and its outcomes. Where the community is based on geography, as is most common with CORE, community finance contributes to the enterprise being embedded within and appropriate for the local context. Community participation in the enterprise through community finance grounds the enterprise in the community. Deeper participation (in terms of numbers of people contributing and the longevity, regularity, diversity and importance of their involvement) integrates the enterprise more fully and deeply into the local community and into people’s hearts and minds (Hicks 2018). Hence, where opportunity allows, more local people are more likely to support the enterprise and take up opportunities to invest in it, donate to it, volunteer in it, buy from it and support future initiatives. This contributes to the enterprise making sense in the local context: being aligned with local values and cultural norms, and being more strongly tied through social relations. These things make the enterprise more viable (i.e. a broader base of support, access to finance and more advocates) and resilient in the longer term. Community finance also ensures that the economic benefits of the enterprise stay within the community. Where shareholders are local people, as with a majority of Hepburn Wind members, the benefits of returns on investment are retained locally. Several studies from the USA have found that significant added economic benefits flow to the local area when wind developments are owned and financed by the local community (Kildegaard 2010; Lantz and Tegen 2009). These can be from one-and-a-half to three-and-a-half times the local economic

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Community finance: community-owned renewable energy enterprises  377 impact of absentee-owned, corporate enterprises (Lantz and Tegen 2009, p. iii). The flow-on effects of wind farms owned by development trusts, such as Shapinsay Trust, have been found to be five times the economic benefit to the local community and three times the local jobs when a local community development charity owned a 45 per cent share in a local wind farm (as compared with a purely corporate-owned enterprise) (Allan et al. 2011).

CONCLUSION The CORE enterprises discussed here are navigating economic choices to establish community enterprises that are tailored to their ethical mission and to the assets available in their community. To be viable, they have had to be creative about finding inroads into the energy and economic systems. Community finance options provide the means to establish viable enterprises in the context of constraints, such as limited access to capital, ethical mismatch with mainstream finance options or challenges in accessing large, centralized markets. The diversity of community finance options deployed by these enterprises tells us something about how small, seemingly powerless actors are able to participate in, and thereby contribute to recreating and redefining, the energy system. Community finance options enable community actors to create enterprises that act as entry points into, and spaces of opportunity within, business-as-usual finance and energy markets. CORE has ‘familiarized thousands of people with alternative economic models’ (Rommel et al. 2018, p. 1). Through opening up our concept of what constitutes viable and effective finance options, there is increased scope for action and impact. This is particularly useful at the threshold of significant global changes that require new ways of encountering problems and solutions, as it enhances the ability for communities to take creative and adaptive action.3

NOTES 1. Interviewees have not been identified by name, in an effort to protect their confidentiality. This research involved 22 interviews and six focus groups held over 2014–16. 2. For more on mission-controlled governance and rooted membership see Chapter 5 by Hicks in this volume. 3. This research was funded through the Australian Postgraduate Award programme, the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the UNSW Law Faculty and Herbert Smith Freehills.

REFERENCES Allan, G., P. McGregor and K. Swales (2011), ‘The importance of revenue sharing for the local economic impacts of a renewable energy project: A social accounting matrix approach’, Regional Studies, 45 (9), 1171–86. Coalition for Community Energy (2015), National Community Energy Strategy, Sydney, Australia. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S., T. Foxon and R. Bolton (2016), ‘Financing the civic energy sector: How financial institutions affect ownership models in Germany and the United Kingdom’, Energy Research & Social Science, 12, 5–15.

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378  The handbook of diverse economies Hicks, J. (2018), ‘Community power: Understanding the outcomes and impacts from community-owned wind energy projects in small regional communities’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Hicks, J., N. Ison, J. Gilding and F. Mey (2014), Community Owned Renewable Energy: A How-to Guide, Sydney: Community Power Agency. Kelly, M. (2012), Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kildegaard, A. (2010), ‘Ownership and regional economic impact: The case of wind development in Minnesota’, Bremer Foundation and West Central Minnesota Sustainable Development Partnership, report presented at the University of Minnesota. Lantz, E. and S. Tegen (2009), ‘Economic development impacts of community wind projects: A review and empirical evaluation’, paper presented at the Windpower 2009 Conference and Exhibition, Chicago. MacArthur, J. (2016), ‘Challenging public engagement: Participation, deliberation and power in renewable energy policy’, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 6 (3), 631–40. Orsi, J. (2012), Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies, Chicago, IL: American Bar Association. Rommel, J., J. Radtke, G. von Jorck, F. Mey and Ö. Yildiz (2018), ‘Community renewable energy at a crossroads: A think piece on degrowth, technology, and the democratization of the German energy system’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (Part 2), 1746–53.

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42. Hacking finance: experiments with algorithmic activism Tuomo Alhojärvi

INTRODUCTION: A HACKING APPROACH If finance feels like an opening, a possibility for most of us, it’s probably doing the job it’s supposed to do. (Economic Space Agency)

Finance is a word for trouble. Activists often recognize its strategic and game-changing potential. Yet, control over finance often feels so out of reach. Exploitative and unsustainable financialization seems to continue relatively uncontested at large (e.g. Lapavitsas 2014). The increasing socialization of risks and spread of debt are leading characteristics of our financialized present (e.g. Bryan and Rafferty 2014; Coppock 2013). Unnegotiable debt inhibits our possibilities by organizing the present through foreclosing the future. Exhaustion is its phenomenological effect, as ‘[c]apital accumulates on the promise of a future that always threatens not to come’ (Martin 2016, p. 178). As a global phenomenon operating on a scale of its own and through financial technologies of the most alienating and opaque kind, capitalist finance appears to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It determines but cannot be determined. Many such representations of finance are, of course, also prime examples of a capitalocentric economic discourse (Gibson-Graham 2006a) insofar as they always already know capitalist finance to be the game in town. Moreover, this coalesces with an inability to take seriously the diverse economies and necessary ambiguities haunting seemingly homogeneous capitalist sites. Through a pedagogics of impossibility, capitalocentrism reproduces a ‘scarcity of ways to enter the edifice of finance itself and explore what it might mean to reoccupy the scheme of credit and debt that it has produced’ (Martin 2015, p. 222). It is, then, the task of this chapter to participate in upsetting this scarcity of imagination that so often seems to accompany the notion of ‘finance’ and render most of us disenfranchised. I concentrate on modes of activist organization that reformat seeming ‘heartlands’ of financialized capitalism as their playground. For Gibson-Graham (2006a, p. 138), ‘[t]he financial sector can be seen . . . as an opening in the body of capitalism, one that not only allows capital to seep out but that enables noncapitalism to invade’. This is an inspiring vision, but it also warrants the hard work of ‘reading for difference rather than dominance’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b) in the very territories currently inhabited by seemingly monstrous and hyper-alienating forms of finance. I am concerned here with a practice called financial hacking. Hacking means taking things apart and putting them together again in novel combinations to serve purposes not originally intended. I follow Brett Scott’s (2013, p. 8) understanding of hacking as a practice that ‘combines an act of rebellion with an act of creative re-wiring’. Although it is common to associate hacking with so-called high technologies, Scott sees a ‘hacker ethos’ as associated with diverse practices from parkour, which hacks movement in public space, to DIY electronics, and from 379 Tuomo Alhojärvi - 9781788119962 08:02:28PM

380  The handbook of diverse economies slam poetry to capoeira as ‘movement hacking’ and to cross-dressers who ‘hack gender codes’ (Scott 2013, p. 9). To Scott, many hacker approaches combine elements of exploring systems and gaining access to them, jamming through seeking vulnerabilities and exposing them, and building by recombining elements to create something new. Understood this way, hacking involves pedagogical, oppositional and reconstructive aspects. It is about learning the master’s tools in order to use them against mastery, but also about negotiation with the precarious, exhilarating and ephemeral space that opens between what is given and what can become possible. This space is here illustrated with two examples. The first space is the Robin Hood Cooperative (RHC) which is an ‘activist hedge fund’ for ‘minor asset management’, established in Finland in 2012. The prime strategy of RHC has been to use an algorithmic tool to infiltrate and profit from the US stock exchange and to channel surpluses to cooperative members and to grassroots political and social projects. The second is the Economic Space Agency (ECSA) which is a start-up company that grew out of RHC and has its current headquarters in a garage in Oakland, California. ECSA concentrates on exploring and redesigning the newest technologies introduced by cryptocurrencies in order to reinvent economic space and organization. What follows is not a technical summary, a detailed ethnography or a critical assessment of these projects’ prospects. Instead, I hope to illustrate problematics that might be pertinent to the challenges and promises of hacking finance more broadly. I will first provide a short description of both organizations and then draw three initial lessons that have to do with ethics, technology and space. Hacking operations illustrate, I argue, opportunities for exploring and learning from the seeming limits of the possible. This is a risky business, as it involves reaching beyond the creation of local systems of desirable finance and assured tactics to draw from practices that are genuinely contentious.

REORGANIZING WITH ALGORITHMS The activist organizations at stake here are outgrowths from artistic, organizational and theoretical experimentation in Finland. Their starting point is a drastic disillusionment with the present, in which people are increasingly tied to ubiquitous value-production (e.g. cognitive, affective and semiotic production that is irreducible to a clearly delineated space and time of ‘work’) while simultaneously being precariously remunerated and increasingly governed by constantly accumulating debt. As Akseli Virtanen, co-founder of RHC and ECSA, and current CEO of the latter, puts it: ‘Robin Hood is an attempt to think about the possibility of cooperation where it seems that distrust, suspicion, and exploitation of others has become the most important means of our survival’ (Piironen and Virtanen 2015, p. 100). Influenced by French post-structuralism and Italian post-operaismo or post-workerism, this strand of work seeks to understand and organize based on its analysis of changing value production in contemporary cognitive, affective or biopolitical capitalism (Virtanen 2006). According to this line of thinking, financialization has spread people into two categories: those who – through financial capital – have access to monetary income without the need for work, and those whose only entry point to money is through work and debt (i.e. the precariat). RHC and ECSA are shapeshifting explorations of how the latter group could use the former’s tools and drastically change the power dynamics – and, indeed, its conditions of existence.

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Hacking finance: experiments with algorithmic activism  381 Since the early 2000s, finance researcher Sakari Virkki had been developing and testing an algorithm programmed to track and mimic the most successful investors in the US stock market. Virkki trained the programme – named Parasite – to replicate the moves of successful groups of investors, to follow them through highly complex data sets and to make investment suggestions based on this information (Virkki 2010, 2013). The idea is that investment decisions in a stock market do not necessarily follow any rational intentionality driven by the individual, but move largely through affective surges, like flocks of birds. These moves can, however, be discerned and replicated with clever enough algorithmic tools. In 2012, RHC was established as an organization to benefit from and further develop Parasite. Through investment suggestions based on tracking successful investors, the crux of the strategy was to ‘tax’ the surpluses of capitalist finance through replicating its moves for value production. This parasitic strategy ‘produced a bad copy of a model that overturned the grounds on which any distinction between copy and model could stand’ (Robin Hood 2.0 2015, p. 2). RHC became a hedge fund, using algorithmic power to handle liquid assets and to leverage shifting and flocking moods within the stock market. It entered Wall Street to perform its action inside, folding this presumably ultra-capitalist site into contact with a non-capitalist practice. Through this performance, RHC became in a sense fully complicit with ‘the system’. Yet, what distinguishes RHC from most other hedge funds is, first, its organizational form, namely a cooperative with a very low threshold for membership and a democratic decision-making structure, and, second, a political ethos explicitly geared to channelling profits to people and organizations typically barred off from such possibilities. This algorithmic strategy proved successful for a couple of years. Money flowed into the cooperative, new members were acquired; the cooperative held mobile ‘offices’ around the globe to discuss and strategize, and the project’s online discussion forum (http://​discourse​ .robinhoodcoop​.org) became attended by enthusiastic financial explorers. Although the assets under management of RHC remained small compared to conventional hedge funds, its fiscal success rate was remarkable. As Huffington Post wrote, ‘[i]f Virkki was managing the fund in the United States, it would have been ranked the third best-performing portfolio in the country in 2012’ (Foy 2013). After the first years of testing the methods and concentrating on organizational development, in 2015 RHC arranged its first (and, so far, last) funding round for the ‘irrigation of the commons’, in which cooperative members were able to nominate projects for potential funding. The cooperative decided to fund a self-managed space in Rio Janeiro, a Commons Transition collaboration between the Catalan Integral Cooperative and the P2P Foundation, and a media project and community organizing against extractivist gold mining in Northern Greece (Troncoso 2015). Although the sums were still small (in the order of a few thousand euros per project), RHC had thus managed to induce its own logic of reaping surplus from Wall Street and channelling it to non-capitalist projects (in addition to cooperative members). However successful at first, the hacking of financial algorithms began to show its limits in three years. The fiscal year of 2015–16 proved difficult for many hedge funds, and RHC was no exception. Due to complex issues affecting Parasite’s hunch, its performance faltered. This strengthened the interest within the cooperative to diversify investment strategies so as not only to rely on Parasite. Already before this faltering, in 2015, RHC had begun a project of reinventing itself as a version 2.0 (Robin Hood 2.0 2015). The strategy of being solely reliant on one algorithm was deemed too one-dimensional in the sense of not creating enough options for cooperative members, but also because of the modest amounts of surplus it had actually

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382  The handbook of diverse economies managed to produce, leaving the members with some money (i.e. something to pay your bills with) but not capital (i.e. power to self-determine futures). Also, crucially, the organizational limits, inflexibility and spatial restrictions of the cooperative model were foregrounded (Robin Hood 2.0 2015, p. 3). Two new strategies were introduced. First, the inner organization of RHC was to be recreated so as to produce a marketplace within the cooperative for members to exchange their shares, to create more investment options and for testing out new organizational tools. Second, RHC was to be joined by a new organization, a start-up based in the USA, soon to be called the Economic Space Agency. The objective was to compartmentalize risks accruing from a new development phase, allow for more funding options for research and development, and to make sure RHC’s original idea and democratic ethos would not face difficulties (e.g. the possibility of co-optation with external funding involved). Both of these new strategies are involved with the notoriously rapidly changing field of ‘crypto economy’ (Bryan and Virtanen 2018) opened up by the newest developments in financial technology. More specifically, what is at stake is experimentation with the decentralized ledger or database technology called the blockchain, introduced in 2009 through the launch of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The blockchain is heralded by many as an innovation comparable to the internet or the joint stock company, because it allows for scalable systems without the need for an organizing and governing centre (Davidson et al. 2016; see also Chapter 25 on alternative currencies by North in this volume). The recent operations of ECSA and RHC 2.0 exhibit two very different sides of this much-hyped technology. The potential ECSA sees in the blockchain is that it will revolutionize economic organization, since it allows for the creation of ‘economic spaces’ that are ‘protocols of economic, financial and social interaction, of value and risk creation, of sharing and distribution of resources’ (ECSA 2018, p. 235). The group is currently programming a basic architecture that would allow for the creation of and interoperability between heterogeneous economic spaces (each with its own rules, values, valuation metrics, organizational forms, etc.) while respecting their incommensurability. The goal is that any individual or group could use the technology to quickly set up its own economy not constrained by physical distance or (currently) enforceable governance. ECSA calls its proposal a ‘computing fabric’, enabling the spread of financial technology for ‘rendering the rich, heterogeneous multiverse of values socially and financially liquid’ (ECSA 2018, p. 240). Instead of liquidity in terms of a universal equivalent, money as we know it, this multiverse would be composed of a proliferation of self-governed and interoperable metrics. The case of RHC 2.0 provides a counter-example that reminds us to stay vigilant when faced with technological promises. The organizational change launched in 2016 within the cooperative had as its aim to create a closed market of shares and a platform for the development of new options and organizational forms. The basic first step was to transfer RHC’s membership register onto the blockchain, that is, into a decentralized rather than centralized mode. However, this seemingly simple operation proved to be surprisingly complex and costly, and was burdened by technical bottlenecks. Through a series of misfortunes, this move has made the cooperative largely inoperative for around three years (e.g. with no possibility to add new members, no access to individual shares information). As of 2019, there seems to be again light at the end of the tunnel, but this experience underlines the vulnerability accompanying technological experimentation.

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Hacking finance: experiments with algorithmic activism  383

FINANCIAL TROUBLES TO STAY WITH Heretical Ethics It remains to be seen what kind of effects these organizations will eventually yield. What kind of provisional lessons can, for now, be drawn from these explorations with algorithmic activism? I want to raise three issues. First, the question of ethics. Polemics have surrounded RHC’s operations for the whole time. While the need to create more sustainable and just alternatives to capitalist finance is a widely shared goal, RHC’s parasitic strategy is unconventional. In 2014, in a colloquium in Finland, Virtanen presented Parasite’s heretical tactic of tuning into the rhythms of Wall Street in order to reap benefits. When he was questioned about the ethics of funding whatever investors venture into (including fossil fuels, arms trade, etc.), his answer was to explicitly distance RHC from ‘ethical’ investment: ‘We are the worst assholes of the precariat’ (Virtanen 2014, translated by Alhojarvi). As he explains elsewhere, ‘[Robin Hood’s] stance is an ethic-free, moral-free territory where experimentation is the only guiding principle. Anything may be expected from us. There is no criterion for good or bad since there is no solid context to which such an evaluation could refer’ (Piironen and Virtanen 2015, pp. 102–3). This is not solely a relativistic argument, but instead the ‘ethic-free territory’ here is better understood as a space of operation freed from the constant production of subjectivity, expectations, potentiality and affects so central to cognitive capitalism. To claim an ethic-free territory is to reclaim space for autonomous decisions, since ethics here is precisely about the production of desire and the cultivation of subjects that leniently produce value, take debt and do unsurprising activism. Interestingly, this comes quite close to Gibson-Graham’s view, albeit with a symmetrically opposed vocabulary. Whereas for RHC ethics is a suspicious terrain because it is so capitalized, for Gibson-Graham (2008, p. 156) ethics means precisely a space of negotiation and decision as opposed to something ‘structural’ or something ‘good’. As they write, ‘[b]y opening the economy to ethical negotiation, we do not presume to fill it up with positive notions of desirable futures’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, p. 156). Instead, economy becomes an ‘ultimately undecidable terrain’ in which, however, we need to negotiate, seeking simultaneously ‘an enlarged space of decision’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. xxxiii). This kind of framing has very little to do with activism that seeks clean and uncompromised positions, and very much to do with appreciating compromise and imperfect starting points as the grounds for negotiation and struggle. Furthermore, if we take seriously the hypothesis that the production of subjectivity and ethics are precisely key grounds for the reproduction of capitalist organizations, then perhaps all self-evidently ‘good’ activist methods and coherent positions warrant our suspicion. The parasitic strategy of RHC is uncomfortable for sure. Reflecting on RHC’s tactics, Nelms (2016, p. 3) argues that the origins of modern finance are ‘deeply intertwined in histories of slavery and racial discrimination; it is an open question to what degree parasiting off financial systems today leaves such persistent forms of inequality and dispossession not only unchanged but unchallenged’. This remains – indefinitely – to be figured out. But perhaps the opening of such questions is one of the most interesting aspects of a parasitic strategy in the first place, as it invites us to stay with an uncertainty about whether we end up challenging or benefiting ‘the host’ (Burton and Tam 2015). Despite the undecidability, decide we must. As one RHC member wrote in the discussion forum:

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384  The handbook of diverse economies [W]hile I strongly align myself with an ethics beyond good and evil . . . this doesn’t mean that we can just invest money in whatever and just claim that our post-ethics liberates us from ethical problems. It is a problem that we invest in all sorts of things, but the answer to the problem is elusive. I see Robin Hood as an approach to figure out an answer to the problem. Robin Hood is not the answer itself, it is a means not an end.

Technological Literacy The second lesson concerns the tools and methods at stake in financial hacking. One of the difficulties in studying financial hacking stems from the sheer opacity of the technologies. In my case, there is no doubt a heft of personal incapacities involved, but this seems to be a shared experience with regards to the technologies of financial activism. To explore the master’s tools is also to inherit some problematics from them. Financial technologies are key to reproducing capitalocentric discourses that consolidate an expert-driven ‘machine economy’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013), and they are intimately tied to the production of feelings of incapacity, ignorance and inadequacy among those who find their lives determined by finance but find no access to finance as an ensemble of tools for self-determination. Admittedly, part of the explicit purpose of RHC and ECSA is centred on challenging divides between experts and non-experts. Both projects strive to democratize finance and financial technologies, which necessarily means democratizing also the knowledge production and distributions of labour (Suoranta and Vadén 2008). This means that pedagogical issues – barriers to intellectual and practical emancipation – need to be at the core of financial hacking. As Virtanen (Piironen and Virtanen 2015, p. 95) argues, ‘[b]y taking something sacred, which we are not allowed to touch or which only the priests can touch and understand . . . we are returning it to common use and play’. This project entails not only singular explorations, and what Scott (2013) calls ‘experiential learning’, but also an accumulation, testing and development of richer knowledge about finance as possibility: ‘Like deeper “digital literacy”, we need rich “economic literacy”’ (ECSA 2016). However, financial technologies often push back against efforts of democratization. There is a mismatch between the ethos of democratizing finance – including its knowledges, sites and agencies – and a practice that remains exclusive in terms of intersecting forms of ability, gender, accessibility, knowledge, etc. In the case of RHC, there are plenty of examples of this friction. The irony of a group of university professors and PhDs ‘democratizing’ finance, and speaking for/as ‘the precariat’, has not escaped its analysts (e.g. Foy 2013). Although core actors have undergone remarkable efforts to explain how RHC and its algorithmic operations work, different stages of confusion have often surrounded the debates at the RHC’s discussion forum and Annual General Meetings. It may then be necessary to concentrate on how inherited forms of hierarchies and exclusive expertise may be reiterated against our best intentions. Furthermore, it might be worth looking at how the economic literacy promoted by these projects is able to connect to and foster other knowledges, ones practised very often by people disenfranchised by all that comes along high-tech. My sense is that we also need to question the capitalocentric framing that accompanies so many ‘alt.economy’ (Nelms 2016) projects and that posits them as immanent ‘solutions’ while setting up a wider canvas of hegemonic and historical capitalist financialization or ‘monoeconomy’ (ECSA 2018, p. 236). Insofar as financial technologies and discourses are marked by capitalocentric characteristics (in the sense of being disenfranchising, and offering pre-limited and hierarchically differentiated access for interventions and learning) better

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Hacking finance: experiments with algorithmic activism  385 prospects for alliances might be found through strategies of reading for difference rather than dominance. Twisted Spaces The third lesson concerns economic spaces. I see in RHC and ECSA two distinct ways of creating economic spaces. The parasitic algorithmic strategy of RHC emerged simultaneously with Occupy Wall Street, and it has sometimes been framed as a continuation of Occupy by other means. Not only a discursive ‘reframing’ of finance as a landscape full of potentiality, RHC has managed to enter the space notorious for its exclusivity and to fold it into a project operating for specific non-capitalist purposes. Although troubled by financial, technical as well as social obstacles, as we have seen, RHC’s parasitic strategy has managed to reformulate and practise finance as an unforeseen opening. Moreover, through funding rounds, grassroots projects have received an opportunity to benefit from the semiotic value production of Wall Street. Instead of reproducing the typical image of capitalist finance as a self-controlled sphere – or bubble – that determines but cannot be determined (at least not by someone like me), RHC has burst this bubble in practice and related together capitalist and non-capitalist spaces in an exhilarating sphere of potentiality. It thus provides one provisional answer to Gibson-Graham’s (2006a, p. 138) question: ‘How might we confront the economic “unthinkable”, engendering a vision of the global economy as penetrable by noncapitalist economic forms?’ In contrast, ECSA has adopted a spatial discourse to describe its efforts to redesign crypto-technologies for creating ‘n-dimensional programmable and vibratory organizations’ (ECSA 2018, p. 236). If Parasite is a topological folding of capitalist and non-capitalist spaces, then ECSA is an effort to explore other dimensions that the newest financial technologies might render possible – if hacked appropriately. These technologies are ‘synthetic, plastic, moldable, filled with topological capacities which are in effect just waiting for someone to start reengineering them for the production of a very different economic space’ (ECSA 2016). This type of financial hacking draws our attention to the crucial role that technologies have in creating possibilities for scalability and connectivity. The relations within any diverse economy are always also mediated by technologies, and these media perform and enable different kinds of relational economic spaces. If we are to think financial spaces outside the ‘binary frame’ of global vs. local (Gibson-Graham 2002), experimenting with such financial technologies might make sense. Both projects are still in development and their next steps and eventual effects are still to be actualized. Whereas RHC is now humbly picking up its pieces to go forward again, ECSA on the other hand surrounds itself with hype, not holding back its ambitions: ‘Just as the internet fundamentally changed communication . . . ECSA will transform finance, potentially enabling hundreds of millions of people to author economic spaces and control their financial relations’ (ECSA 2018, p. 238). We might want to digest such statements with care, noting the crucial role that hype and grandiose statements have within the crypto-economy and financial technology more generally to allure attention, affective energy and, quite simply, capital. As RHC’s and ECSA’s own theoretical background underlines so clearly, in an age of semiotic inflation and constant information overflow, the performance of success (as if on a stage) is a crucial precondition of possibility for any actual success. Yet, there is something in the air. Something that seems like an ephemeral promise of more space to breathe, move and self-determine, against all the odds of capitalist financialization.

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386  The handbook of diverse economies It almost feels like remembering the possibility of a future. Perhaps this is, in these foreclosed times, not the smallest achievement. As McKenzie Wark (2004, p. 178) ends the Hacker Manifesto: ‘There are other worlds and they are this one’.

REFERENCES Bryan, D. and M. Rafferty (2014), ‘Financial derivatives as social policy beyond crisis’, Sociology, 48 (5), 887–903. Bryan, D. and A. Virtanen (2018), ‘What is a crypto economy?’, accessed 16 August 2018 at https://​ medium​.com/​econaut/​what​-is​-a​-crypto​-economy​-155bdbc4ab1d. Burton, J. and D. Tam (2015), ‘Towards a parasitic ethics’, Theory, Culture & Society, 33 (4), 103–25. Coppock, S. (2013), ‘The everyday geographies of financialization: Impacts, subjects and alternatives’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 6, 479–500. Davidson, S., P. De Filippi and J. Potts (2016), ‘Disrupting governance: The new institutional economics of distributed ledger technology’, accessed 28 February 2019 at https://​papers​.ssrn​.com/​sol3/​papers​ .cfm​?abstract​_id​=​2811995. Economic Space Agency (ECSA) (2016), ‘Economic space’, accessed 16 August 2018 at https://​medium​ .com/​economic​-spacing/​economic​-space​-c87f41eb3b59. Economic Space Agency (ECSA) (2018), ‘On intensive self-issuance: Economic Space Agency and the space platform’, in I. Gloerich, G. Lovink and P. de Vries (eds), MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 233–42. Foy, S. (2013), ‘21st century Robin Hood introduces altruism to investment banking’, Huffington Post blog, 6 December, accessed 16 August 2018 at https://​www​huffingtonpost​.com/​student​-reporter/​21st​ -century​-robin​-hood​-i​_b​_3639926​ html​?guccounter​=​1. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2002), ‘Beyond global vs. local: Economic politics outside the binary frame’, in A. Herod and M.W. Wright (eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 25–60. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006a), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006b), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Other economies are already here! Response to commentaries on A Postcapitalist Politics’, Emotion, Space and Society, 1, 155–8. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy. An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lapavitsas, C. (2014), Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, London: Verso. Martin, R. (2015), Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Martin, R. (2016), ‘From the critique of political economy to the critique of finance’, in B. Lee and R. Martin (eds), Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 174–96. Nelms, T.C. (2016), ‘alt.economy: strategies, tensions, challenges’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 9 (5), 507–12. Piironen, P. and A. Virtanen (2015), ‘Democratizing the power of finance: A discussion about Robin Hood Asset Management Cooperative with founder Akseli Virtanen’, in G. Lovink, N. Tkacz and P. de Vries (eds), MoneyLab Reader: An Intervention in Digital Economy, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 93–103. Robin Hood 2.0 (2015), ‘Equity, Options, Assemblage. Robin Hood 2.0’, Grey Paper, May 2015, accessed 16 August 2018 at http://​www​ futureartbase​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2015/​04/​Robin​-Hood​ .Grey​-Paper​-April​-2015​.pdf. Scott, B. (2013), The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, London: Pluto Press.

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Hacking finance: experiments with algorithmic activism  387 Suoranta, J. and T. Vadén, T. (2008), WIKIWORLD: Political Economy of Digital Literacy and the Promise of Participatory Media, Finland: Paulo Freire Research Centre and Open Source Research Group, University of Tampere. Troncoso, S. (2015), ‘Robin Hood Coop funds 3 commons building projects’, P2P Foundation blog, 6 October, accessed 16 August 2018 at https://​blog​.p2pfoundation​ net/​robin​-hood​-coop​-funds​-3​ -commons​-building​-projects/​2015/​10/​06. Virkki, S. (2010), ‘Methods, Systems and Program Products for Market Analysis’, Granted US Patent, US 7835968 B1. Virkki, S. (2013), ‘Methods, Systems and Program Products for Market Analysis’, Granted US Patent US 8484118 B1. Virtanen, A. (2006), Biopoliittisen Talouden Kritiikki, Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto. Virtanen, A. (2014), Presentation at Talouden Uudet Muodot colloquium, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 10 April. Wark, M. (2004), A Hacker Manifesto, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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43. Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy Stephen Healy, Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra

INTRODUCTION In its nearly 30-year history, diverse economies scholarship has used a wide variety of thinking traditions to understand economic subjectivity and theorize subjects who might desire and enact postcapitalist community economies. In this chapter we aim to clarify what the term ‘subject’ has come to mean in the context of a diverse, more-than-capitalist, economy. We introduce an open-ended and anti-essentialist approach to the ‘decentred subject’ that has been core to diverse economies thinking (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2008).1 First, we contrast this approach to two competing theories of economic subjectivity that are informed by theoretical humanism and structuralism respectively. We then chart how thinking about the decentred subject of a diverse economy has developed, concluding with recent thinking that demotes the primacy of the ‘human’ subject. We argue that holding on to the open, experimental disposition of the decentred subject is crucial at a time when much of what has appeared solid – democracy, so-called global capitalism, and the stability of the earth’s life giving ecologies – appears to be faltering.2

THEORETICAL HUMANISM, STRUCTURALISM AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE SUBJECT What is it to be a subject? What is it to be subject to the economy? What is it to be an economic subject? A spontaneous answer to these questions treats the subject as synonymous with the ‘individual’. We easily recognize this figure in our daily encounters as someone we know by name and through their character and identity (gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.). In mainstream economic theory this human individual is an economic subject insofar as they are able to ‘calculate the ability of external objects to satisfy their needs and desires’ and express and act upon preferences based on beliefs regarding the possible states of the economy (Ruccio 2007, p. 34). They may prefer, for example, work or idleness, caring at home or taking a job in the market, investing in human capital or rent-seeking. While such a subject might appear common sense to those of us living in the minority world, influenced by centuries of ‘Western liberal’ thought, it is a particular, historical and essentialist conception, one that stems from what we will name, along with other scholars, theoretical humanism (Althusser et al. 2015; Madra 2017). The beginnings of humanist approaches are often traced to the historical emergence or, more properly, the violent political construction, of market society and market discourse (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). These approaches have continued to exert a broad influence, partially organizing if not directly motivating a number of different economic discourses (such as clas389 Stephen Healy, Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra - 9781788119962 08:02:33PM

390  The handbook of diverse economies sical liberal, Keynesian, neoclassical and neoliberal discourses). What is shared by theoretical humanist discourses is a centred notion of an individual subject that figures respectively in the familiar characters of the sovereign consumer and producer; the overseeing public investor and the expert policymaker; and the risk-taking and super managerial entrepreneur. This subject is a correctable and perfectible agent of decision, separate and detached from the density of human and non-human ecologies and institutions, motivated by a desire for unlimited opportunity and adaptive to changes in the environment (for an early critique, see Veblen 1998 [1898]). The centred subject is a micro-level agent whose aggregated actions give rise to markets, property relations, innovation, organizations (such as households and firms), and even the trajectory of social evolution. This subject is thus constitutive of all economic forms. Indeed, this individual subject serves as the lynchpin that centres and unifies the health of the entire economy, social well-being and life itself. It holds together the well-known national and global economic scripts about competitive skill enhancement and performance, productive industrial investment, financial stability and GDP growth. In contrast to theoretical humanism, structuralist approaches take the opposite position (Amariglio et al. 1990; Charusheela 2005). They aim to dislodge the subject from its sovereign position. This approach unifies the economy around a structural logic that operates above individual subjects. In radical economic discourses such as Marxian theory, systems of capitalist exploitation, commodification, objectification and domination order our shared reality. In institutionalist economic discourses it is structures that set the stage, including powerful networks of national and transnational corporations, international markets and law, global networks of nation-states and capital, along with key technological innovations. These forces assign subjects their positions in social processes, including who has power and who does not, determining how individuals can act. Here the subject is constituted but not constitutive. The ‘subject’ is completely objectified, compelled by a structure which now acts as the overarching Subject. These contending theories seal us into stable and hierarchical relations, distributing roles between subjectivity and economy, fixing us in space – the subject as individual is either detached from and operative above the economic structure, or the structure is above, determining the individual subject. While the humanist scenario conjures up an image of the economy as the playground of subjects who move about as immutably sovereign individuals, the structuralist scenario draws a picture of the economy as that which subjugates us, its subjects, to its inexorably capricious dictates. The megalomania underlying the first image is matched only by the paranoia lurking behind the second. From a diverse economies perspective, the very framing of this debate between the sovereign subject and the subjugated subject is problematic and deeply unsatisfying. A shared premise confines the subject (and the economy) to one or other side of a series of binary oppositions – constitutive/constituted, powerful/powerless, active/passive, determining/determined, subject/predicate, possessing/belonging, animal/ machine and agency/servitude. These opposed locations pre-emptively rule out a conception of economy and an economic subject as mutually constitutive and diverse, as an open-ended field of affects, as dispositifs of valuations, of a human/non-human assemblage distributed across various scales. As theorists operating in an anti-essentialist tradition, we would prefer not to answer – or at least not to pin down – the question what are economic subjects? Diverse economies scholarship focuses attention on a different conjugation, or shall we say another imaginary, of the subject. This imaginary is defined by a set of qualities: an openness to affect, a capacity to act

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Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy  391 ethically in a world of shared and constitutively antagonistic interdependence between both humans and a more-than-human world, and an inclination to experiment with forms of social, economic and ecological organization that further enable these capacities. This shift in attention is directed by diverse economy scholarship’s performative intention – that is to say, an impulse not to describe the world through research, but to change it through intervention. This open disposition, insofar as it also implies a rethinking of our own economic positionality, allows us to reconfigure the subject and pose open-ended questions regarding how we think about ourselves, including who we are, what we want (needs and desires), and what we can be capable of (Madra and Özselçuk 2015). It allows us to leave these questions to hang in the air unanswered long enough to generate new possibilities, new forms of life.

DIVERSE ECONOMIES AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE SUBJECT In its early development, diverse economies scholarship drew on feminist, queer, post-structural, psychoanalytic and new social movement theories to breathe new life into Marxian conceptions of the subject. Difference has played a key role in these theories and the politics they inform. For example, recognition of the multiple sexual and gender identities that constitute the human condition has given rise to vibrant and complex forms of gendered subjects and politics. Diverse economies scholars wondered, then, why it was that class subjects were bound to two monolithic and clashing identities – the proletarian subject and the capitalist subject – with the former forever waiting for the revolutionary moment. What would a class politics of difference look like? Who would be the subjects of such a differently imagined class struggle and where would it take place? A queer reading of class politics opened up not only the question of ‘who’ the agents of postcapitalist transformation might be but also the question of ‘desire’. A variety of insights from psychoanalytic and affect theory offered ways to catalyse new desires as to what a postcapitalist politics could be. And the timing of this project coincided with burgeoning alter-globalist and anti-capitalist social movements around the world that were beginning to see that other worlds are possible. The animating questions were: How could we come to desire these postcapitalist possibilities? What does a diverse and decentred economic subject want? In the past decade material semiotic, affect oriented, post- and decolonial theory, and ecological thinking have profoundly influenced diverse economies scholarship – redrawing the boundaries about who or what acts in the world. These theorizations decentre the human subject in another way – charting how affect constitutes it, re-emphasizing its properties as a distributed effect, incorporating it into a hybrid-assemblage, or positioning it within a larger ecology, literally putting it on the map alongside the more-than-human world. Here the crucial questions are how does this subject – decentred, hybridized, assembled – act with others in the world? And how can new imaginaries of commoning and sharing predicated on our ‘being-in-common’ be devised and enacted (Nancy 1991a)? Despite their different accents, in the context of a diverse economy all of these various theorizations of the subject are united by a common performative intention. We can say that the work diverse economies scholarship performs is one of ‘provocation’ (Muniesa 2014), a calling forth of the diverse economy and the subject that thinks, desires and acts in relation to it. Following Jason Read (2011) we might describe diverse economies scholars as knowledge-producers – provocateurs working to transform the ‘thinking, sensing, feeling,

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392  The handbook of diverse economies moving body’, the subject that makes history (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 127). We might think of this performative and provocative subject as a point of connection between the ontological proposition of diverse economies and the shared ethical coordinates that define a community economy in which we ‘negotiate the conditions of our shared interdependence’ – that is, a connection between where the subject is in the economy and how the subject comes to desire and act in the world (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 84).

DECENTRING THE ECONOMIC SUBJECT The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy was published in 1996, not long after the Berlin wall came down. To many, the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics felt like a confirmation of Francis Fukuyama’s (2006) assertion that humanity had reached ‘the end of history’. That is, that historical experimentation with new forms of society could cease because capitalism, free markets and democratic forms of governance clearly now represented the highest point in the development of economic, social and political organization. As Gibson-Graham (1996) observed, this capitalist triumphalism was not only found amongst capitalism’s champions but also, and perhaps more worryingly, among its critics. In fact, it is to this latter group, what we might describe as the critical left, that the book was mainly addressed. The irony Gibson-Graham identified was that the scholarly and activist left was helping to performatively elaborate a capitalocentric imaginary – where capitalism was fully present, powerful to the point of omnipotence, capable of subordinating all other elements of society to facilitate its reproduction. For example, concepts like ‘real subsumption’ were used to describe how everything from the household to the state was subordinated to capitalist reproduction. With help from feminist and queer theorists like Sharon Marcus and Eve Sedgwick, Gibson-Graham identified some of the defining attributes of the critical left subject: for some it was a melancholic attachment to the left’s lost emancipatory project with its proletarian hero; for others, particularly in the organized labour movement, it was an obsessive fixation on gaining a competitive advantage as a way of holding on in a global economy; on the popular left it was the tendency to see the threatening dangers of repression and co-optation everywhere and in relation to every experiment in doing things differently. Gibson-Graham adopted Sedgwick’s concept of ‘paranoid’ or ‘strong theory’ (Sedgwick 2003, pp. 144–5) as an apt description of a familiar tendency to anticipate every move that ‘capitalism’ makes to maintain its upper hand, to anticipate and thus avoid surprise. The End of Capitalism offered not just a diagnosis but a therapeutic intervention, shaped in part by what Sedgwick calls ‘weak theory’ (2003, pp. 120–121) – a term inspired by Melanie Klein’s ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick 2003, pp. 123–51). Here the work of theory is not to protect us from disappointment (by being vigilant for every instance of betrayal in a paranoid mode) but to open us to possibility. One of the theories The End of Capitalism uses in a weak/ open way is an anti-essentialist Marxian theory of class as a process. Rather than describe a historical agent such as the working class, class as a process focuses our attention upon the ever changing and non-economistic conditions of existence that constantly organize and reorganize the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus. As discussed in Chapter 1 in this volume, this understanding of class process was initially developed by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff (1987) drawing upon Louis Althusser’s theory of overdetermination

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Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy  393 and reproduction (Althusser 1971, 2005 [1965]; see also Gibson-Graham 1997). The concept of class as a process provided an entry point for envisioning a class subjectivity with no fixed dispositions, interests, destiny, trajectory or battles to fight. The way that Gibson-Graham extended this theory was to read Marx’s Capital against the grain of the present-day economic landscape, to look for capitalism’s ‘others’ in the here and now (Gibson-Graham et al. 2000). This reading decentred the hegemonic narratives of structural power that fix the space and identity of capitalist reproduction. It proliferated class subject positions (adding to capitalist class positions those of independent, slave, feudal and communal) and non-class subject positions allowing them to coexist side by side in a landscape of heterogeneity. In a chapter in The End of Capitalism, Gibson-Graham illustrate this approach through the stories of a Philippines-born nurse, Sue, and her Anglo-Australian coal miner husband, Bill (1996, pp. 59–63). With the figures of Sue and Bill, they confront two regulatory fictions of structural power that have led to the production of centred/essentialist conceptions of class (such as the masculine working-class identity embodied by the trade unionist and Fordist industrial capitalist worker, Bill) and non-class subjectivities (such as the classic feminine figure of patriarchal oppression embodied by Sue who is engaged in reproducing the capitalist workforce in the household). In the chapter, the firmly settled ‘selves’ of Sue and Bill are disaggregated from their stable relationship of complementarity (i.e. capitalist-patriarchy) and decentred into diverse and contradictory class and non-class subject positions from the perspective of class ‘as a process’. Bill is a wage labourer but is also a recipient of a distribution of a profit sharing scheme, in class process terms, a distribution of the mining company’s surplus value. While he belongs to a militant union, his political commitments align him with the conservative rural-based National Party. He runs a side business on the weekends running excursions hunting for feral pigs. He does work around the house to keep the home and garden in order. Sue’s class identity is likewise represented in complex terms as a trained nurse who gave up her waged employment in the public sector to engage in the long hours involved in managing a household and raising children, she volunteers with a Filipino association and, along with her husband, she is landlord to rental properties. Who Sue and Bill are as economic subjects cannot be divorced from where they are, and where they are is all over the place – across a range of positions, relationship and politics. The stories of Sue and Bill, fictional yet based on actual case studies, reposition class as a complex, inessential aspect of identity. By making visible a range of economic and non-economic subject positions, class as process approach allows us to see Bill and Sue’s class positions as multiple and the economy as composed of discontinuous and folding spaces of difference and political possibility. In place of a historically determinist and homogeneous space where the whole of society moves from one mode of production to the next, or a totalizing vision of economy in which one class process predominates, we have a differentiated landscape of class processes where economic possibility abounds. A chief consequence of decentring (a form of reading for difference), is that it enlivens possibilities for political life by means of changes in subjectivity. It is possible to imagine sites of gendered class transformations, for example, both ‘inside’ the household (towards independent and communal class processes and subject positions, for instance) and ‘outside’ the household (negotiating over surplus distributions of industrial enterprises towards child care, for instance). The direction of change of transformations of gender and class and other aspects of subjectivity is an open question, certainly more complicated and thoroughly political. Class politics, even revolution,

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394  The handbook of diverse economies moves from being something we wait for, never to arrive, to something we can practise now and here.

DESIRE AND RESUBJECTIFICATION Re-reading the economic landscape for class difference brought political economy into alignment with other domains where difference already mattered politically. In this sense The End of Capitalism helped political economy to catch up with theoretical and political conversations already underway in the fields of feminist, queer and post-colonial theory, and new social movement politics (see Laclau 1990; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Reading for class difference enables a fresh way of thinking about what a postcapitalist politics might be – one in which it becomes possible to desire and enact non-capitalist and communal ways of being in the world as well as engage in an anti-capitalist politics of opposition. But, argued Gibson-Graham (2006), a different kind of scholarship was needed to support a new politics of postcapitalist desire. Diverse economies scholars explored a number of ways of doing research differently. On one front action research with various communities was led up to acknowledging the attachments to capitalism that stymied desire. Researchers encountered workers seemingly unwilling or unable to let go of the sense of betrayal that accompanied the loss of their jobs during the privatization of publicly owned enterprises in Balıkesir, Turkey (Özselçuk 2006) and the State of Victoria, Australia (Cameron and Gibson 2005). In post-industrial and post-extractive regions of the USA, researchers encountered economic development practitioners, planners and citizens who remained invested in capitalist development in part because it was too difficult to imagine anything else providing a means of livelihood (Graham et al. 2002). In communities of colour in the USA, where exclusion from capitalist exploitation speaks to the persistence of structural racism, researchers came upon an inability to imagine living without capitalism even if it was impossible to live with it (Shear 2014). In these contexts, the question of how to desire or get attached to non-capitalist spaces and relationships is a pointedly political question (Berlant 2011). Various strategies were tried to detach subjects from capitalist identification/subjection and create the opportunities for resubjectification – that is, the process of transforming self-representations and embodied habits and practices (see Chapter 56 by Cameron and Gibson and Chapter 45 by Gabriel and Sarmiento in this volume). On another front, researchers employed playful speculation and empirical exploration into how people might come to desire postcapitalist forms of economy (see also Chapter 49 by Liu et al. in this volume). Film became an important medium for understanding how economic subjects come to have postcapitalist desires, and how such desires provoke resubjectification (e.g. Byrne and Healy 2006; Gibson-Graham 2006; Healy 2010; Roelvink 2016). One way that Gibson-Graham (2006) illustrated a postcapitalist politics of desire was through contrasting the narratives of two films on the fictional lives of working-class men in post-industrializing United Kingdom – Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty (1997). Brassed Off highlights a melancholic politic of loss as it presents the lives of working-class men in a colliery band who continue to play on in a show of solidarity after mine closures in their community. The Full Monty suggests a politics of postcapitalist possibility as it comically follows the lives of a group of ex-steel workers and their foreman who form a stripper-collective and pursue new desires for solidarity, economic possibility, sexuality and belonging.

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Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy  395 In the disorienting movement from subjection (often sustained by critical-thinking pedagogies fixated on deciphering the conditions that constrain us) to political possibility, desire becomes centrally important. It is only in this context that we might pose the sometimes terrifying question, ‘what do we want?’ Here too, the question becomes more important than any answer. As it was, the early 2000s proved to be a fertile time for asking this question. Social movements around the world began to imagine and enact other worlds in large and small ways, from the organization of World Social Forums, to the occupied factory movement in Argentina, to emerging economies of social solidarity around the world (Roelvink 2009). It is precisely in this context that what Gibson-Graham (2006) identified as the ethical coordinates of community economy gained a political urgency. In A Postcapitalist Politics Gibson-Graham initially identified questions around four ethical coordinates that act, not as a blueprint for community economy, or a positive elaboration of a utopia, but rather as a set of ordinal points by which we might get our bearings: ●● ●● ●● ●●

What is necessary to personal and social survival? How to produce, appropriate and distribute the social surplus? How is social surplus to be consumed? and How to cultivate and sustain the various forms of commons? (based on Gibson Graham 2006, p. 88)

These initial coordinates were joined by two others in Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy’s Take Back the Economy (2013): ●● How to encounter others in the process of transacting? ●● How to invest in a common future? The theory of community economy brings an explicitly anti-essentialist framing to each of the questions these coordinates pose, recognizing the contingent and therefore open-ended way in which human communities understand necessity, surplus, consumption, investment, encounter and commons. Rather than serve as a template for a postcapitalist politics, these coordinates raise questions and possibly generate dilemmas that any given community can only address provisionally. The coordinates locate the economic subject in the undecidable space of a dilemma. Negotiating the conditions of our shared and potentially antagonistic interdependence in relation to those questions is what defines us as subjects of a community economy – and in this sense we must find answers. On the other hand, these negotiations must continue, for the question of how to live in common changes with each changing circumstance. It is only in this sense that the desire of the economic subject, the answer to the question ‘what do we want?’ can be properly posed as a collective and political question: [W]e must keep in mind that any attempt to fix the fantasy of common being, to define community economy, to specify what it contains (and thus what it does not) closes off the opportunity to cultivate ethical praxis . . . This spacing, or space of decision as we have identified it, constitutes the very negativity at the heart of community economy. (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 98)3

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396  The handbook of diverse economies

THE ETHICAL MORE-THAN-HUMAN SUBJECT A growing body of diverse economies scholarship is being conducted in different places throughout the world and in an appreciative engagement with other theoretical traditions. Among others, the environmental humanities, science and technology studies (STS), actor network theory (ANT), contemporary affect theory, and critical geographic information system (GIS) have all played pivotal roles in expanding the reach and scope of the diverse economies project. If this past decade was a period of growth for diverse economies scholars, for the world it was a period marked by political foment, economic unsettlement and a deepening awareness of the complex ecological challenges associated with the Anthropocene. For Gibson-Graham (2011, p. 1) it was in relation to deepening ecological crisis that a new ‘we’ begins to emerge as a ‘new public’. It became important to see other worlds not just as ‘possible’, but necessary for our shared survival. And with these other worlds come also other selves – collective and singular. Val Plumwood’s (2007) declaration that the Anthropocene marks a time when ‘we must go forward in a new mode of humanity, or not at all’ has come to function as a coda for diverse economies scholarship. The question posed is how do we go forward? The ‘we’ in this question is now indubitably in relation to a much larger human and more-than-human ‘we’, represented by scholarship on the hybrid collective subject. In this last section of the chapter, we touch on this now burgeoning field of scholarship – one that is informed by a decentred, much larger, hybrid human and more-than-human subject referred to as the hybrid collective. The hybrid collective is a concept that diverse economies scholars have adapted from science and technology theorists (Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003; Gibson-Graham 2008; Roelvink 2009; Roelvink et al. 2015). The basic proposition is that human agency has always worked in concert with non-human processes and material objects – from photosynthesis to economic practices of exchange, to research, to the curative powers of medicine, to devices for measurement and valuation – in order to construct a shared world. If our understanding of human agency doesn’t make sense without these processes, objects, devices, measurements and systems of valuation, in what sense is agency confined to the human? In this new theorization the hybrid collective is the enlarged subject that acts in the world. Diverse economies scholars have illustrated how this hybrid collective subject acts to compose and recompose itself and the world around it, shaping the fabric of economies, ecologies and culture. For example, in the Philippines a hybrid collective comprising urban farmers, planting containers made from plastic waste and food crops was provoked into action by floods borne from a particularly volatile stormy season (Cameron et al. 2014). In birthing spaces a hybrid collective made up of a complex array of hormonal, microbial, organizational, technological and interpersonal dynamics cares for babies’ hygiene and well-being from birth (Dombroski 2013, 2016, 2018; Dombroski et al. 2019). Can we ask ‘what does the hybrid collective want?’ in the same way that we asked what does a diverse and decentred subject want? Indeed, can a hybrid collective desire a postcapitalist future? Here diverse economies scholars have considered the constitutive role that affect plays in the process of change – how it shapes our desires, but also our capacity to understand the needs and desires of others. Collective action affect theory insists that ‘coming to want what we want’ is a dynamic process. Affect is defined as ‘those forces . . . other than conscious knowing . . . that . . . drive us toward movement’ in a potentially positive sense but also threatens to hold us in place, or even overwhelm us (Gerda Roelvink and Zolkos 2011, p. 45 quoting

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Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy  397 Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Gerda Roelvink expands upon Bruno Latour’s (2004) concept of learning to be affected to illustrate how the hybrid associated is caught up in the dynamics of affect. Latour illustrates this idea with the example of experts in the perfume industry who become a ‘nose’ by training their olfactory senses to be more discerning through the use of kits that over time allow them distinguish between scents. Roelvink extends this idea looking, for example, at how farmers become postcapitalist agriculturalists by learning to be affected by the land they care for – growing more sensitive to the biological, atmospheric and geophysical dynamics of a place. Learning to be affected is about developing a capacity for attunement; it becomes the basis for a new politics of species-being (Roelvink 2013). Knowing now who this hybrid collective subject is, and understanding how it comes to want what it wants, what follows is the question of how it acts in the world (and why we should care)? In our view, the concept of the hybrid collective can provoke new economic imaginaries, in ways that put it on the map, literally. For example, Kevin St. Martin uses interviews, workshops and mapping techniques to create spaces into which fishers can project themselves as custodial stewards of an ocean commons and as members of a community, both on- and offshore. His research points out that millions of small-scale fishers worldwide participate in a non-capitalist class process, working not for wages but for a share of the catch, distributing surplus among vessel crew members. This communal subjectivity extends to how fishers participate as a hybrid collective in ‘communities at sea’. This new ‘subject’ radically challenges the individualist assumptions that inform fisheries bio-economics and policies (St. Martin, 2009). St. Martin’s work has partially inspired the efforts of fisher communities in Maine and then elsewhere to import the concept of community-supported agriculture into fishing communities as a way of stabilizing the livelihoods of small-scale fishers as well as prompting a broader practice of careful use of ocean resources. In consolidating his research practice, St. Martin increasingly works with conservation scientists in larger projects that aim to influence national and international marine policy (Rogers et al. 2019). Like Roelvink, St. Martin sees this intervention as explicitly tied to a process of (communal) re-subjectification: Counter-mapping, then, is not only an effective method for reclaiming material resources for those who have been dispossessed, but it works to counter particular forms of economic subjectivity and space. (St. Martin 2009, p. 494)

Other diverse economies scholars have deployed a similar approach of mapping/imagining via GIS and other spatial technologies in relation to community gardens and urban farming (Drake and Lawson 2014), post-Soviet and diasporic Russian communities (Pavlovskaya 2015), and the diverse economies of solidarity in the USA and elsewhere (Borowiak et al. 2017; Healy et al. 2018). All of these mapping efforts attempt to use the performative power of maps to reassemble relations for farmers, communities and emergent solidarity economies. They could also be seen to conjure a spatial imaginary that provides a thread, a knotting, or better yet, a postcapitalist semblance of being to the dispersed and distributed subjectivities of non-capitalism. In sum each of these developments in diverse economies scholarship seems to displace the human subject as a central concern. And in a sense this is what is needed. As we acknowledge the implications of the Anthropocene, we can no longer consider human well-being or ingenuity without considering our impact on planetary well-being. Conversely our shared survival cannot happen without taking more seriously the central role that other forms of life,

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398  The handbook of diverse economies atmosphere, ocean and earth play in permitting any life we might have. Each of these scholarly interventions is a provocation that calls forth a new fictional as well as an operational body to a decentred subject – a subject at home in a larger active collectivity, willing to put itself on the map alongside ‘others’. It is this enlarged collective subject that is endowed with new imaginative, representational, material and political powers. From our perspective the decentred subject is critical for any efforts at shifting attachments, of forming more sustainable relations, new forms of living together, and of recognizing and negotiating the conditions and antagonisms of our shared interdependence (what Gibson-Graham name a community economy). This performative scholarship generates new sites of encounter at the same time that it produces new objects, devices, measurements and valuations. It can play a pivotal role in telling us who and where we are while opening up the questions of what we might want and how we act in the world. While we no longer think of the ‘human’ subject as a sovereign entity, in our view this is neither a diminution of our humanness nor an attempt at avoiding our responsibilities. All the world is still a stage, we are still its players – but we are more complicated than we might appear, and we occupy the stage with still others with whom we share a world in common.

CONCLUSION: ECONOMIC SUBJECTS DECENTRED, DIVERSE AND DISPERSED In looking at nearly three decades of diverse economies theory we can discern the performative effect that a decentred subject plays in enlivening a scholarly practice in service of postcapitalist possibility. Over the course of those decades our understanding of this decentred subject has evolved in tandem with the creative and political possibilities of a diverse economy. Over the course of evolution there has been a growing recognition of the importance of considering the relationship between thinking, sensing, feeling, moving bodies and life sustaining ecologies as well as economies. In our view, there is a need to have a framework where we, the more-than-human, can recognize and affirm our interdependence, the way our subjectivity of ‘thinking, sensing, moving bodies’ connects us to one another through economies, ecologies and technologies. Any shared survival will depend upon the capacity to renegotiate potentially antagonistic relationships of interdependence with others (encounter, surplus) and with more-than-human earth processes (commons, consumption, investment), to work through common dilemmas (commons, investment, surplus), to redistribute our abilities and capabilities and cultivate new ones (commons, investment), and to ask ourselves whether we really need and desire what we have come to think we need and desire (necessity, consumption). The alternative is to deny these ethico-political concerns and the questions of subjectivity that they raise and to disavow the way the fates of humans and non-humans are bound to one another. In the present dark moment, it would seem that there is a strong and growing impulse around the world to raise the drawbridge – to define tighter boundaries and recentre attention on the needs of some individuals while denying the needs of others (and the planet). This process hardens our hearts and pits individuals against individuals, peoples against people, and humans against the planet. It is becoming increasingly clear to a great many that finding the means to make the other worlds that are here and now more politically practical, durable and extensible is a requirement for our shared survival.

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Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy  399

NOTES 1. In our view the decentred subject raises the question of ‘where’ is the subject. It is precisely the ‘where’ that Jacques Lacan (1997, p. 139) had in mind when he described the subject as ex-timate (both inside and outside us). Ex-timate describes the way that identities and fantasies reside neither wholly within the individual nor wholly outside it, circulating in a way that subverts the opposition between structure and individual, as well as outside and inside. 2. Of course, the question becomes who are ‘we’? We recognize that when we say ‘we’, we are in dangerous territory. In the first instance ‘we’ means the three authors of this text. Broader than that, the ‘we’ refers to our fellow diverse economies scholars and the various theoretical traditions that embrace anti-essentialist conceptions of subjectivity and economy. But that’s just the beginning. Later in the chapter we complicate the ‘we’ – suggesting that human subjects always exist and act in relation to a more-than-human world. We also qualify the ‘we’ – we recognize the long history of erasure that comes from the presumptive, colonizing ‘we’ that imagines Western history as the only history. Finally, we use the ‘we’ to provoke you: we are also addressing you, the reader, as potentially part of the ‘we’. 3. Gibson-Graham refer to Jean Luc-Nancy’s opposition between an inessential being-in-common, which recognizes only our existing with others as the basis for shared existence, and common-being which is a community whose singularity is a function of what it excludes. Nancy, like many continental scholars of his era, had the traumatic experience of the Holocaust in mind in his reflections on common-being and its ‘work of death’ (Nancy 1991a). It’s true that for Nancy we are in an era where the question of communism is increasingly open, open even to the possibilities of our being-with non-human others (Nancy 1991b, 2010). At the same time his precautionary thoughts on common-being seem suddenly more relevant as many communities around the world are engulfed in a politics of populist resentment.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. (1971), ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’, in B. Brewster (trans.), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London and New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 127–86. Althusser, L. (2005 [1965]), ‘Contradiction and overdetermination’, in B. Brewster (trans.), For Marx, London and New York: Verso, pp. 87–128. Althusser, L., É. Balibar, R. Establet, P. Macherey and J. Rancière (2015), Reading Capital, London and New York: Verso. Amariglio, J., S.A. Resnick and R.D. Wolff (1990), ‘Division and difference in the “discipline” of economics, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1), 108–37. Berlant, L. (2011), Cruel Optimism, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Borowiak, C., M. Safri, S. Healy and M. Pavlovskaya (2017), ‘Navigating the fault lines: Race and class in Philadelphia’s solidarity economy’, Antipode, 50 (3), 577–603. Byrne, K. and S. Healy (2006), ‘Cooperative subjects: Toward a post-fantasmatic enjoyment of the economy’, Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2), 241–58. Callon, M. and V. Rabeharisoa (2003), ‘Research in the wild and the shaping of new social identities’, Technology in Society, 25, 193–204. Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2005), ‘Alternative pathways to community and economic development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project’, Geographical Research, 43 (3), 274–85. Cameron, J., K. Gibson and A. Hill (2014), ‘Cultivating hybrid collectives: Research methods for enacting community food economies in Australia and the Philippines’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 118–32. Charusheela, S. (2005), Structuralism and Individualism in Economic Analysis: The ‘Contractionary Devaluation Debate’ in Development Economics, New York: Routledge. Dombroski, K. (2013), ‘Always engaging with others: Assembling an Antipodean, hybrid economic geography collective’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 3 (2), 217–21.

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400  The handbook of diverse economies Dombroski, K. (2016), ‘Hybrid activist collectives: Reframing mothers’ environmental and caring labour’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 9/10, 629–46. Dombroski, K. (2018), ‘Thinking with, dissenting within: Care-full critique for more-than-human worlds’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 11 (3), 261–4. Dombroski, K., S. Healy and K. McKinnon (2019), ‘Care-full community economies’, in W. Harcourt and C. Bauhardt (eds), Feminist Political Ecology and Economies of Care, London: Routledge, pp. 99–115. Drake, L. and L.J. Lawson (2014), ‘Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the US’, Cities, 40, 133–42. Fukuyama, F. (2006), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Simon & Schuster. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1997), ‘Postmodern becomings: From the space of form to the space of potentiality’, in G. Benko and U. Strohmayer (eds), Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 306–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2011), ‘A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene’, Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., S. Resnick and R. Wolff (eds) (2000), Class and Its Others, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Graham, J., S. Healy and K. Byrne (2002), ‘Constructing the community economy: Civic professionalism and the politics of sustainable regions’, Journal of Appalachian Studies, 8 (1), 50–61. Gregg, M. and G.J. Seigworth (eds) (2010), The Affect Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Healy, S. (2010), ‘Traversing fantasies, activating desires: Economic geography, activist research, and psychoanalytic methodology’, The Professional Geographer, 62 (4), 496–506. Healy, S., C. Borowiak, M. Pavlovskaya and M. Safri (2018), ‘Commoning and the politics of solidarity: Transformational responses to poverty’, Geoforum, doi:​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2018​.03​.015. Lacan, J. (1997), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. D. Porter, New York: W.W. Norton. Laclau, E. (1990), New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London and New York: Verso. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (1985), Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London and New York: Verso. Latour, B. (2004), ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–48. Madra, Y.M. (2017), Late Neoclassical Economics: Restoration of Theoretical Humanism in Contemporary Economic Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Madra, Y.M. and C. Özselçuk (2015), ‘Creating spaces for communism: Postcapitalist desire in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Western Massachusetts’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 127–52. Muniesa, F. (2014), The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn, Abingdon: Routledge. Nancy, J.-L. (1991a), ‘Of being-in-common’, in Miami Theory Collective (ed.), Community at Loose Ends, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–12. Nancy, J.-L. (1991b), The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2010), ‘Communism, the word’, in C. Douzinas and S. Zizek (eds), The Idea of Communism, London and New York: Verso, pp. 145–53. Özselçuk, C. (2006), ‘Mourning, melancholy, and the politics of class transformation’, Rethinking Marxism, 18 (2), 225–40.

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Framing essay: subjectivity in a diverse economy  401 Pavlovskaya, M. (2015), ‘Post-Soviet welfare and multiple economies of households in Moscow’, in G. Roelvink, J.K. Gibson-Graham and K. St. Martin (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 269–95. Plumwood, V. (2007), ‘A review of Deborah Bird Rose’s “Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation”’, Australian Humanities Review, 42, 1–4. Polanyi, K. (2001 [1944]), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd edn, Boston: Beacon Press. Read, J. (2011), ‘The production of subjectivity: From transindividuality to the commons’, New Formations, 70, 113–31. Resnick, S.A. and R.D. Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roelvink, G. (2009), ‘Broadening the horizons of economy’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 2 (3), 325–44. Roelvink, G. (2013), ‘Rethinking species-being in the Anthropocene’, Rethinking Marxism,  25 (1), 52–69. Roelvink, G. (2016), Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roelvink, G., K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds) (2015), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roelvink, G. and M. Zolkos (2011), ‘Climate change as experience of affect’, Angelaki, 16 (4), 43–57. Rogers, L.A., R. Griffin, T. Young, E. Fuller, K. St. Martin and M.L. Pinsky (2019), ‘Shifting habitats expose fishing communities to risk under climate change’, Nature Climate Change, 9 (7), 512–16. Ruccio, D. (2007), ‘Capitalism’, in B. Burgett and G. Handler (eds), Keywords for American Cultural Studies, New York and London: New York University Press, pp. 32–6. Sedgwick, E.F. (2003), Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Shear, B.W. (2014), ‘Making the green economy: Politics, desire, and economic possibility’, Journal of Political Ecology, 21 (1), 193–209. St. Martin, K. (2009), ‘Toward a cartography of the commons: Constituting the political and economic possibilities of place’, The Professional Geographer, 61 (4), 493–507. Veblen, T. (1998 [1898]), ‘Why is economics not an evolutionary science?’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 22, 403–14.

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44. More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods Ethan Miller

QUESTIONING ECONOMIC AGENCY ‘Agency’, understood most broadly, refers to an entity’s capacity to make particular things happen or to stop them from happening. Economic agency, in particular, is the power to shape the processes, relationships and outcomes of economic life. Who or what, then, is the source of dynamism and change in economic relations? Where does economic agency lie and how does it work? This chapter examines these questions in the context of diverse economies theory and its recent and ongoing engagements with ecological and posthumanist thought. What happens to economic agency when ‘the economy’ is expanded to include all livelihood practices? And what happens to agency in general when livelihood is expanded to include all relations of sustenance – economic and ecological? It may be that our very notions of the economy, and perhaps even of ourselves, must be radically transformed. In the common formulation of neoclassical economics, agency is exercised by individual consumers and firms maximizing or optimizing their self-interest (as utility or profit). Aggregated via the mechanisms of the market, such individual action is transformed into an external and seemingly objective force: the ‘laws’ of supply and demand or the necessities and requirements of ‘economic development’ or ‘the economy’. Multiple versions of Marxist theory challenge the ways that this story obscures social relations of class. Far from efficiently harmonizing the interests of individual agents, economic life is the ongoing outcome of struggles around the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus value – capitalists on one side, workers on the other. Agency, in this frame, lies in the forms of class mobilization and action that emerge from social conflict. Yet here, too, this agency is aggregated into a set of objective dynamics that confront its subjects (the agents) as an external force of constraint or possibility – the crisis-ridden tendencies of capitalism, the ‘objective conditions’ under which revolution might successfully unfold, or the totalized ‘system’ which must be overthrown and singularly replaced. Both the neoclassical and conventional Marxist views share a sense that agency arises from a singular or binary source (supply/demand or capital/labour) and is then aggregated into a unified – even if contradictory in its unification – force or system. While Marx (1992) argues that ‘vulgar economics’ (as he would certainly call modern neoclassical theory) obscures possibilities for true revolutionary change, J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006b) proposes that many Marxist theorizations do the very same thing by different means. Diverse economies theory has profoundly challenged these perspectives on agency by expanding our understanding of the spaces and relations by which life and well-being are enacted. If sustenance unfolds ‘in multifarious ways’ (Gibson-Graham 2006a, p. 69) of which capitalist relations are only one part, and if these diverse activities involve multiple logics, rationalities and contextual dynamics, then sites of human economic agency are radically opened and multiplied. A diverse economies perspective ‘does not presume that the relation402 Ethan Miller - 9781788119962 08:02:38PM

More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods  403 ships between distinct sites . . . are structured in predictable ways, but observes the ways that they are always differently produced according to specific geographies, histories, and ethical practices’ (Gibson-Graham 2006a, p. 71). Seeking to amplify possibilities for transformation, and in a dramatic shift from conventional notions of economic inevitability, Gibson-Graham proposes that ‘our economy is what we (discursively and practically) make it’ (2006a, p. xxii). Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy take this notion even further: ‘Our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take’ (2013, p. xiii, emphasis added). If this is not to be read in neoclassical terms as the aggregation of individual market choices (and it should not), then it implies a powerful and direct relation between conscious, intentional human choice and the institutional configurations through which livelihoods are produced and provided. It implies a profound and precious sense of possibility regarding the composition of our economies – direct and unmediated human economic agency. Much can be elaborated and debated in this formulation, including questions about the nature of human consciousness involved in such agency (Massumi 2014), the complex mechanisms of causation (including failures and surprises) linking decisions and outcomes (MacKenzie 2007), and the myriad uneven relations of power involved in any such process of collective world-making. These are, however, for other discussions (see, for example, Chapter 47 by Roelvink and Chapter 45 by Gabriel and Sarmiento in this volume). I seek here to affirm the open, transformative emphasis that diverse economy theory places on situated, ethical decisions at the heart of economic life. Why decide, pre-emptively, that things are otherwise? Why not assume agency and then determine its limits only in practice, in the midst of experimentation with new forms of life and sustenance (Gibson-Graham 2006a, p. 8)? In Bruno Latour’s words, ‘No power has been given by nature the right to decide on the relative importance and the respective hierarchy of the entities that compose, at any given moment, the common world. But what no one knows, anyone can experiment with’ (2004, p. 197). And yet it is precisely this openness that suggests another set of questions: Who is the ‘we’ from which decisions emerge? Who is the ‘we’ who acts? In its early formulations, diverse economies scholarship tended to assume – if sometimes only by default – a discrete human subject (or a collective of human subjects) at the centre of economic action. Whether maximizing, optimizing, making ethical decisions, or just ‘getting by’, rational or quasi-rational humans enact the economy through their work of making a living – labouring, producing, transacting, saving, investing, and negotiating various forms of care and access. But what if the human is only one component of a collective, more-than-human form of agency? What if it is, in fact, more an outcome of such agency than its source? These are questions that recent developments in posthumanist and radical ecological thought have opened, and that diverse economies researchers have also begun to explore.

DESTABILIZING THE HUMAN AGENT Common images of the human as the origin and centre of agency have been challenged recently in three key ways. First, it turns out that the ‘human subject’ is itself a collective of beings and processes, many of whom are not themselves human. As microbiological studies of the human organism are teaching us, a human being is not a ‘discrete, static, genetically-determined individual’ (Schneider and Winslow 2014, p. 218). Our bodies are, as a condition of life and health, composed of myriad non-human microbes – archean, eukaryotic, bacterial and viral

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404  The handbook of diverse economies (Cho and Blaser 2012; Methé et al. 2012). We are hybrid, chimera, at least half non-human or more-than-human: for every human cell, there is approximately one other non-human cell that is integral to the functional ecology that composes us (Sender et al. 2016).1 The success of human birth itself is contingent on ‘complex ecologies internal to the human body (including microbial populations in the gut, skin, vagina, mouth), yet not quite human in themselves’ (Dombroski et al. 2016, p. 234). As microbiologist Scott Gilbert emphasizes, we are not individuals, but rather communities, or ‘holobionts’ – dynamic, complex ‘consortiums of organisms that become a functionally-integrated “whole”’ (2013, p. 1). This implies that the ethical decisions of diverse economic engagements emerge not from the monospecific brains of humans, singularly and exclusively enacting our celebrated intentionality and agency, but from the interspecies dynamics of a collective that include (among other things) the affective and cognitive interventions of the ‘gut–brain axis’ that links intestinal microbiota with brain function (e.g. Foster and McVey Neufeld 2013). Furthermore, it is clear that even this complex, multispecies ‘whole’ that constitutes a human does not have clear boundaries that end at its skin. ‘What would a human be’, asks Latour, ‘without elephants, plants, lions, cereals, oceans, ozone or plankton? A human alone, much more alone even than Robinson Crusoe on his island. Less than a human. Certainly not a human’ (1998, p. 230; see also McKinnon 2016). The key move here, variously enacted by related threads of actor-network theory and assemblage theory, is to blur one’s focus on discrete, bounded things in favour of attention to the relational processes of composition and decomposition from which these things materialize and through which they come undone. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of agencement (often translated as ‘assemblage’) is powerful and influential in this regard. Perhaps better described as an ‘enactment’ (Nail 2017) or even an ‘entanglement’ (Ingold 2009), an agencement names a particular configuration of forces and relations – a coming-together of various contents and expressions – that is continually stabilized and consolidated (territorialized) in some dimensions and destabilized and unravelled (deterritorialized) in others (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 88). The human subject, then, is a (de)composition of multiple elements – bacteria, bones, brain, blood, food, families, companion animals, tools, buildings, oxygen-making photosynthesizers, bureaucratic institutions, means of production and exchange, identities, ideas, desires, climate dynamics, and so on. ‘It is not’, writes Tim Ingold, ‘that organisms are entangled in relations. Rather, every living thing is itself an entanglement, a tissue of knots whose constituent strands, as they become tied up with other strands, in other bundles, comprise the meshwork’ (2009, p. 153). Agency is not centralized in a single (human) subject but is distributed throughout a web of somatic and extrasomatic relations and is emergent from this web as the outcome of ongoing negotiation. Jane Bennett describes this as an ‘agentic swarm’ (2010, p. 32). To the extent that human subjects are seen to make decisions and take actions that influence economic life, these acts shift from constituting the starting points of agency – the origins of influence and control – and become, rather, outcomes of a wider array of more-than-human relations and actions. ‘Human intentions’, writes Bennett, are ‘always in competition and confederation with many other strivings’ (2010, p. 32). A crucial implication of this view is that economic activity cannot be described only in terms of the work of humans ‘making a living’ – producing, transacting, consuming, and distributing surplus. If human agency is, in fact, the result of a more-than-human assemblage, then human sustenance is intimately and inextricably bound up in its interdependent relations with others. ‘To be one’, reminds Donna Haraway, ‘is always to become with many’ (2008,

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More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods  405 p. 4). No entity, in fact, sustains itself, and no human or human community simply makes its own living. We are ‘bodies becoming other bodies’ (Sarmiento 2015, p. 79) and interdependency is ‘the ontological state in which humans and countless other beings unavoidably live’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p. 4). Any notion of economic agency then – even a distributed one – must include an acknowledgement of the constitutive limits of this agency, of the ways in which human assemblages make our livings, provide livings, and receive our livings from others (Miller 2019). Agency is contingent on (inter)dependency. A domain of human life-making activity (e.g. ‘the economic’) cannot, then, be clearly separated from the wider web of constitutive relations that make life, and its agential production, possible.

MORE-THAN-HUMAN AGENCY AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES What does all of this mean, then, for the proposition that ‘our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. xiii)? What does economic agency become in the context of the ‘agential swarm’? What does ‘the economy’ itself become? A number of diverse economies scholars have begun to move in recent years towards what Sarah Whatmore calls ‘more-than-human modes of enquiry’, research practices and foci that ‘neither presume that socio-material change is an exclusively human achievement nor exclude the “human” from the stuff of fabrication’ (2006, p. 604). Economic relations are, in this view, ‘a performative outcome of an array of interdependencies, between humans, environments and non-human entities’ (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009, p. 149), and the explicit goal of more-than-human diverse economies research is – as Gibson-Graham articulated in one of the earliest formulations of this new direction – ‘to enlarge the space of agency of all sorts of actors . . . non-human as well as human’ (2008, p. 14). How is this accomplished? I will map a series of strategies or ‘moves’, each offering important perspectives and presenting unique limits, by which diverse economies scholars have explored questions of more-than-human economic agency.2 A first crucial move – what I will call inclusion – is made by Roelvink and Gibson-Graham when they apply the ‘community economy coordinates’ of necessity, surplus, consumption and commons to a more-than-human context, intimately implicating human ethical decision with the lives and livelihoods of non-humans. This strategy draws non-human living beings into visibility through existing frames of human economic agency. Rather than viewing economic needs as attributes of humans alone, Roelvink and Gibson-Graham seek to ‘consider the needs of other entities that are part of the overdetermined process of production in a community economy’ (2009, p. 150) – needs for habitat, sustenance and ethical relation with human collectives. Expanding the concept of surplus beyond that which is produced by and for humans alone, they bring into view the many roles of non-human living beings in productive processes and call for us to explore ways in which surplus might be mobilized in an ethical relationship with more-than-human forms of labour. Viewing consumption as a site of relationship with human and non-human others, they call for the ‘social and environmental implications of individual, enterprise and social consumption to be explored and ethically negotiated’ (2009, p. 152). And finally, they reframe commons as sites of multispecies commoning rather than as pools of ‘resources’ for humans to (exclusively) share (see also Bresnihan 2016). Elizabeth Barron (2015) takes up this kind of analysis in her research on the gathering of non-timber forest products in the USA, describing numerous ways in which diverse practices weave

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406  The handbook of diverse economies humans, fungi, forest ecosystems and other actors together in webs of interdependence and ethical negotiation over questions of need, surplus, consumption and commons (2015, p. 184). On one hand, this approach powerfully acknowledges interdependence and renders ethical responsibility towards more-than-human relations accessible to a wide array of human actors (Barron 2015, p. 190, fn. 4); on the other hand, these human actors remain at the centre of action and risk appearing as the only true agents. The strategy of extension directly addresses this challenge by extending categories commonly assumed to be exclusively ‘human’ to non-human entities. Oona Morrow (2014), for example, makes a compelling argument for the extension of the notion of labour to acidophilus bacteria in her study of a neighbourhood yogurt production cooperative. Not only do these beings actively work, in alliance with human producers, to transform milk sugars and proteins into yogurt; they also influence and transform the behaviour of those they work with – demanding attention, discussion, cultivation of knowledge, and specific forms of material intervention and care (2014, pp. 62–7). Ann Hill, in her study of collective resilience in post-typhoon Manila (2014), extends the notion of ethical agency to non-human actors such as bamboo, tetra-pack juice cartons, and even the typhoon itself. This is not a simple anthropomorphization of these entities, as if they were seen to deliberate and decide, but rather a reconfiguration of the notion of agency itself: bamboo, Hill argues, ‘is a . . . material thing with ethical agency because it has potential in a hybrid collective that acts’ (2014, p. 218). Its agency lies in the particular ways in which it presents its own requirements, possibilities and relations to other beings as it enters into collective action, and it is ‘ethical’ because this participation matters for how all the beings involved will fare in the process. These strategies of extension are radical and provocative, opening up new pathways for unsettling anthropocentric assumptions. But might they risk accidentally importing human-centred expectations into other modes of being? Might we find ourselves arguing about whether bacteria or bamboo have this or that similarity to human labour or ethical sensibility rather than seeking out their unique forms of agential expression? Such questions may arise less frequently amidst strategies of distribution, often enacted through the mobilization of some form of actor-network theory (ANT) or assemblage theory. Here, categories of human ethical agency are neither expanded nor extended to individual beings, but rather distributed out in diverse forms among myriad actants.3 The work of Robert Snyder and Kevin St. Martin on rethinking fisheries (2015) demonstrates that different assemblages of measurement practices, accounting and mapping techniques, ocean ecologies, fishing gear, market arrangements and human collectivities can give rise to radically different ‘worlds’ of constraint and possibility. Eric Sarmiento’s engagement with local food systems and urban redevelopment in Oklahoma City challenges conventional images of (human) interest groups vying for control in favour of a much more complex picture: configurations of always-tenuous and partial power produced through the articulation of diverse passions and desires with ‘the matter of the city itself, including not just the built environment and other “concrete” elements but also . . . the energetic exchanges of bodies and food, athletic bodies in motion . . .’ and more (2018, p. 344). Agency is less a property or a starting point here than it is a result of struggles over the assemblage. In Sarmiento’s words, ‘the world becomes other not simply as the direct result of conscious “wills” of particular actors, but rather as the profoundly contingent outcome of incalculable forces pulling in all directions’ (2015, p. 79).4

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More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods  407

RETHINKING ECONOMY AND ECOLOGY While all of these strategies make powerful contributions to a more-than-human diverse economies research programme, a human actor – or at least a human world – often remains at the centre of a now multifarious web of actants. As Gerda Roelvink points out, ‘the human has remained a key point of entry in posthumanist diverse economies research . . . while we have opened up what it means to be a human economic subject, we have given less attention to how other-than-human entities might also be economic subjects in their own right’ (2015, p. 229). This is, indeed, a major frontier for future work. Roelvink suggests pathways that push the strategy of inclusion in directions that more radically decentre the human – acknowledging ‘that rivers have a pattern of life or self-realization’ (2015, p. 237), and amplifying experiments with eco-synergistic farming practice that are ‘directed by the agency, capacity and needs of earth others’ (Roelvink and Zolkos 2011, p. 53). Here, it is not so much that non-humans are included in human ethical accounting, but that humans are finally included in the constitutive webs of life that some of them (us) have attempted to deny. This work, folded together with the other strategies described above, leads to a radical destabilization of the very concept of ‘economy’ itself. This is Elizabeth Barron’s intuition when she extends Gibson-Graham and Roelvink’s theorization of ‘econo-sociality’ (2010) into the more-than-human realm, arguing that ‘nonhuman biota are integral to “social” networks, which are the basis for ethical decision-making’ (Barron 2015, p. 173). And it is the focus of Gibson-Graham and Miller (2015) when we challenge the notion that humans have an ‘economy’ while other living beings have (only) an ‘ecology’: there is no more ground for the construction of a human ‘economy’ separate from its ecological context than there would be for ecologists to consider the provisioning practices of bees as an independent ‘system’ – with its own internal laws and imperatives – wholly separate from their constitutive interrelationships with flowering plants, other pollinators, soil mycorrhizae, nitrogen fixing bacteria, seed dispersing birds and mammals. (Gibson-Graham and Miller 2015, p. 10)

We call, instead, for a reconfiguration of the meanings of economy and ecology, where the problem would no longer be one of integrating, harmonizing or balancing tensions between the two. Economy, as its Greek roots oikos (habitat) and nomos (management or negotiation) imply, would name the active negotiation of livelihoods by a given population or community – human, deer, oak, bee, flower – always in relation with living and non-living (though animate) others. It does not name a discrete domain or a particular type of action (or actor), but rather the processes by which particular collectivities negotiate the multiple biosocial and geosocial dimensions of life in common amidst a mesh of planetary interdependence. Ecology would become the impossible yet necessary attempt to understand the complex interrelationships among and between all of these co-constituted economies. To speak of ‘diverse economies’ in this frame, then, would be necessarily to speak of the livelihood practices and relations of myriad human and more-than-human collectivities. Photosynthesis, parasitism, soil formation, compost, pollination and climate regulation would be no less a part of a diverse economic accounting than would cooperatives, household labour and gift-giving. Who is an economic agent? All who act in relation to their own sustenance and the sustenance of others; all who participate in the active negotiation of livelihoods on a living planet. Such action includes the distributed and emergent agency of the assemblages in which all beings participate, as these too generate their own forms and modes of participation

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408  The handbook of diverse economies – limiting, enabling, catalysing, shaping spaces and possibilities for action and transformation. Yet we must be careful not to reaffirm a ‘system’ here within which agency does or does not unfold: while no agent is free to (re)make the world in the manner of their choosing, none of this adds up to a singular ‘economy’ or even ‘an environment’. If there is an entity called ‘the economy’, this is but one (perhaps powerful, and certainly problematic) actor added to the network of negotiation and struggle (Miller 2019), and transformative possibility remains something to be experimented with and composed rather than preordained. It is indeed the case that ‘our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. xiii, emphasis added); but the ‘we’ is larger than can be accounted for, the economy only one among many, the decisions quite complex in the making, and the actions always emergent from a more-than-human collective that makes us, that we make, and that we are.

NOTES 1. The ratio of human to non-human cells depends in large part on the definition of a cell. Commonly cited estimates of ten microbes to each human cell assume that red blood cells (which lack nuclei) are not proper cells. When included, they bring the ratio close to 1:1 (Sender et al. 2016). 2. In pursuing this categorization, I clearly run the risk of oversimplifying the work of any given scholar. Please note that this narrative is intended only to elaborate and illustrate broad patterns, not to argue for the comprehensive classification of particular research projects. Indeed, the work of some authors can be found in multiple categories at once. 3. Ann Hill’s strategy relative to community resilience – even if enacted at times via extension – is, in fact, also one of radical (re)distribution: agency, ethics and even intelligence are not properties of distinct beings, but rather of ‘a more-than-subject . . . that produces ethical action’ (2014, p. 222). Ethical action and agency are emergent from the multivalent assemblage itself, as one set of possible and provisional outcomes of complex, multi-being negotiation. 4. For other examples of work at the intersection of diverse economies and assemblage theory, see McKinnon (2016), Dombroski et al. (2016) and Dombroski (2018).

REFERENCES Barron, E. (2015), ‘Situating wild product gathering in a diverse economy: Negotiating ethical interactions with natural resources’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin, and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 173–93. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bresnihan, P. (2016), ‘The more-than-human commons: From commons to commoning’, in S. Kirwan, L. Dawney and J. Brigstocke (eds), Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures, New York: Routledge, pp. 105–24. Cho, I. and M.J. Blaser (2012), ‘The human microbiome: At the interface of health and disease’, Nature Reviews Genetics, 13 (4), 260–270. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dombroski, K. (2018), ‘Learning to be affected: Maternal connection, intuition and “elimination communication”’, Emotion, Space and Society, 26 (February), 72–9. Dombroski, K., K. McKinnon and S. Healy (2016), ‘Beyond the birth wars: Diverse assemblages of care’, New Zealand Geographer, 72 (3), 230–239.

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More-than-human agency: from the human economy to ecological livelihoods  409 Foster, J.A. and K.-A. McVey Neufeld (2013), ‘Gut–brain axis: How the microbiome influences anxiety and depression’, Trends in Neurosciences, 36 (5), 305–12. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006a), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006b), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for other worlds’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 1–20. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and E. Miller (2015), ‘Economy as ecological livelihood’, in K. Gibson, D.B. Rose and R. Fincher (eds), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, New York: Punctum Books, pp. 7–­16. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2010), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (s1), 320–346. Gilbert, S.F. (2013), ‘Symbiosis as the way of eukaryotic life: The dependent co-origination of the body’, Journal of Biosciences, 38 (4), 1–9. Haraway, D. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hill, M.A. (2014), ‘Growing community food economies in the Philippines’, Doctoral Dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra ACT. Ingold, T. (2009), ‘Point, line and counterpoint: From environment to fluid space’, in A. Berthoz and Y. Christen (eds), Neurobiology of ‘Umwelt’: How Living Beings Perceive the World, London: Springer, pp. 141–55. Latour, B. (1998), ‘To modernise or ecologise? That is the question’, trans. C. Cussins, in B. Braun and N. Castree (eds), Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium, New York: Routledge, pp. 221–42. Latour, B. (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKenzie, D. (2007), ‘Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives markets’, in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 54–86. Marx, K. (1992), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin Books. Massumi, B. (2014), The Power at the End of the Economy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McKinnon, K. (2016), ‘The geopolitics of birth’, Area, 48 (3), 285–91. Methé, B.A., K.E. Nelson, M. Pop, H.H. Creasy, M.G. Giglio, C. Huttenhower, D. Gevers, et al. (2012), ‘A framework for human microbiome research’, Nature, 486 (7402), 215–21. Miller, E. (2019), Reimagining Livelihoods: Life beyond Economy, Society, and Environment, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Morrow, O. (2014), ‘Urban homesteading: Diverse economies and ecologies of provisioning in Greater Boston’, Doctoral Dissertation, Clark University, Worcester, MA. Nail, T. (2017), ‘What is an assemblage?’ SubStance, 46 (1), 21–37. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roelvink, G. (2015), ‘Performing posthumanist economies in the Anthropocene’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 225–43. Roelvink, G. and J.K. Gibson-Graham (2009), ‘A postcapitalist politics of dwelling: Ecological humanities and community economies in conversation’, Australian Humanities Review, 46, 145–58. Roelvink, G. and M. Zolkos (2011), ‘Climate change as experience of affect’, Angelaki, 16 (4), 43–57. Sarmiento, E. (2015), ‘Umwelt, food, and the limits of control’, Emotion, Space and Society, 14 (February), 74–83. Sarmiento, E. (2018), ‘The affirming affects of entrepreneurial redevelopment: Architecture, sport, and local food in Oklahoma City’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50 (2), 327–49. Schneider, G.W. and R. Winslow (2014), ‘Parts and wholes: The human microbiome, ecological ontology, and the challenges of community’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 57 (2), 208–23.

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410  The handbook of diverse economies Sender, R., S. Fuchs and R. Milo (2016), ‘Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body’, PLoS Biology, 14 (8), e1002533. Snyder, R. and K. St. Martin (2015), ‘A fishery for the future: The Midcoast Fishermen’s Association and the work of economic being-in-common’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 26–52. Whatmore, S.J. (2006), ‘Materialist returns: Practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world’, Cultural Geographies, 13 (4), 600–609.

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45. On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies Nate Gabriel and Eric Sarmiento

INTRODUCTION Diverse economies researchers explicitly avoid explanatory frameworks that prematurely foreclose the actual and virtual progressive potential of already existing, ethically oriented economic practices and enterprises. A primary rationale for rejecting such limiting ontologies is that they rely on totalizing and constraining conceptions of power relations and do not sufficiently account for the more productive dimensions of power. But alongside attending to the productive potential of power relations, diverse economies research nevertheless examines the darker, more constraining forms of power. In this chapter, we assert that to better understand and activate the political potential and broader significance of alternatives to capitalist socio-economic forms and relations, it is necessary to trace their articulations with often far-reaching political assemblages and their constituents (Jonas 2013; Sarmiento 2017). In particular, we explore how analysing the formation of economic assemblages from a genealogical perspective has allowed diverse economies researchers to account for power in its many forms, without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that a focus on power too often engenders. The strong influence of various strands of post-structural theory is evident in the ways that diverse economies scholars have understood power in their studies (Gibson-Graham 2000). An emphasis on the constitutive power of language and discourse, for example, is exemplified in the extensive deconstruction of ‘the capitalist economy’ and the critique of capitalocentrism offered by Gibson-Graham in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1996, 2006b) (see also Gibson-Graham 2005; Harris 2009; St. Martin 2005). Diverse economy scholars have also deployed visions of power as diffuse or diffracted, multiple and contingent, avoiding visions of power as concentrated, singular and indomitable (cf. Cahill 2008; Mathie et al. 2017). Finally, much of this research has explored how power relations both shape and are modulated by spatial dynamics in specific times and places as well as the visceral, non-representational responses and often unpredictable drives of human bodies (cf. Gibson 2001; Gibson-Graham 2006a, ch. 1). In their introduction to the 2006 second edition of The End of Capitalism, Gibson-Graham offer something of a retrospective overview of the field of diverse economy studies, in which they identify different ‘phases’ of the research agenda (see also Chapter 1 in this volume). In what follows, we examine the ways in which a Nietzschean/Foucauldian analytic of genealogy runs through each of these phases of research: the deconstruction of the hegemony of capitalism to open up a discursive space for non-capitalisms and facilitate an expanded, differentiated economic imaginary; the cultivation of non-capitalist subjectivities; and the construction of community economies. But first, we briefly explain our usage of the term genealogy and its relation to theorizing power and subjectivity. 411 Nate Gabriel and Eric Sarmiento - 9781788119962 08:02:42PM

412  The handbook of diverse economies

GENEALOGY, POWER AND SUBJECTIVITY Genealogy as a social theoretical concept was developed by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued against the givenness of ‘the real’, the apparent world, or existing social structures and norms in any specific place and time.1 For Nietzsche, genealogy was primarily a philosophical pursuit premised on the ontological assumption that power, in all its multiplicity, is the generative force or ‘creative drive’ of the world in both its organic and inorganic elements (see, for example, Nietzsche 2003, pp. 23–7; 2006, pp. 88–90). More recently, French post-structuralist Michel Foucault took up Nietzschean genealogy in his efforts to trace the emergence and development of a range of topics, including punishment, modes of governance, sexuality and other expressions of what he called ‘power/knowledge’. These studies demonstrate the meticulous and arduous work required to successfully frame or give meaning to worldly phenomena, often shedding light on the contradictions, failures and political and intellectual culs-de-sac that were traversed along the path towards concretizing and stabilizing particular knowledge formations. The goal for Foucault, in the most basic terms, was to cast the taken-for-granted, natural and universal as contingent, contested and often fraught with ruptures and instability. Ultimately, such an analytical approach, for Nietzsche, Foucault and those who have followed in their wake, is an avenue through which to enable other ways of being in the world, other modes of becoming, and a methodology for what Foucault called the ‘ethical cultivation of the self’ (Foucault 1988, Part 2). To employ a genealogical approach is to trace how relations between differently situated people, processes and things generate the world as we know it. In this way of thinking, all types of relations are suffused with power in its myriad forms, or rather share a co-constitutive relationship with power. To interrogate how power takes form, animates and assigns meaning to the world, and indeed has made the world we live in and experience as subjects – this is the task of the genealogist. We must note here that this framework can be (and often has been) understood as a rather dark vision of power. That is, some readers see in Foucault’s genealogical analyses (particularly his earlier works), a casting of hegemonic discourses and power relations as not only omnipresent but inherently oppressive and totalizing. As Nigel Thrift put it, ‘In Foucault country, it always seems to be raining’ (Thrift 2000, p. 269). Yet, as became increasingly clear in Foucault’s later works, he understood power not solely as a limiting force, but as also productive. From this perspective, we can understand that although sexist, classist and racist discourses and social structures (for example) are produced by the interaction of power and knowledge, so too are ones we might consider socially ‘progressive’, such as discourses on human rights, social justice and democracy. Power, in short, is best thought of not as a layer that taints relations between actors, but as the relation between actors itself. In other words, Foucault was not describing a particular (oppressive) mode of interaction that inevitably prevails and dominates; rather, he was describing what it means to relate. It is important to underscore that genealogy is not a process of observing any given phenomenon and assessing it from an external perspective; rather, it begins with the assumption that to be in the world is to perpetually interpret and thus participate in the creation or ongoing emergence of the world. As such, to conduct a genealogy of any given thing is to take part in its continuous generation and development. And this brings us to the value of genealogy to diverse economies research, which has long focused the role of researchers – as producers of power/knowledge – in co-producing their object of study, and in the ongoing cultivation of particular kinds of subjects. As Gibson-Graham put it (2000, p. 100), while Foucault’s

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On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies  413 genealogies appear to ‘emphasize the construction and consolidation of dominant discourses that “subject” the individual to powerful forces beyond her control, his intervention also opens the way for examining the proliferation and multiplicity of discourses that can create subjects able to resist and reconstitute power in different ways’. This formulation helps explain how genealogy plays a central role in ethical self-cultivation: by evaluating the interplay of power relations and forces through which particular subjectivities have come into being, we can begin to question what has been previously taken for granted as given or ‘natural’, and work towards understanding what may be required to produce different subjectivities, configurations of power, and economic practices and structures. The genealogical threads that run through all phases of the diverse economies research agenda thus reflect Foucault’s declaration that ‘The object [of genealogy is] to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently’ (Foucault 1990, p. 9). By committing oneself to an approach that highlights difference, the researcher commits to producing a different and better world. And yet this does not demand that one should avoid researching what we called earlier the ‘darker’ sides of power. Indeed, examining how these forms of power are constituted, in order to understand their contingency and subvert their claims of universality, has long been a central aim of the diverse economies project.

DECONSTRUCTING CAPITALISM AND OPENING UP SPACE FOR ECONOMIC DIFFERENCE We have followed this tradition of using genealogy to investigate claims of universality in economic discourse as a way of deconstructing capitalist hegemony and opening a space for alternative economic imaginaries and practices. Nate’s work, for example, has drawn on a range of archival materials (maps, photographs, government records and popular writing) to trace how urban mapping projects in nineteenth-century Philadelphia enabled the formation of distinctly urban and non-urban spaces, in which the meaning of those spaces could be read through a moral system that was intertwined with the ‘proper’ functioning of a capitalist economy (Gabriel 2011, 2013). The establishment of the city’s Fairmount Park helped to prop up a narrative of an inevitably-industrializing urban world. Under this rubric, the park itself served not simply as a ‘relief valve’ for urban workers in an already industrialized city, as parks are often characterized by urban scholars, but as a conceptual counterweight that facilitated the discursive formation of the capitalist city itself: following the establishment of Fairmount Park (and other large urban parks across the USA), the city proper would thenceforth be the space of work, while the park would be the space of leisure. The central point for our discussion here is that planners and cartographers in effect erased an existing urban landscape of economic diversity. Through a combination of cartographic and photographic representation, as well as the physical policing of the park itself, working farms within the space of the planned park were cast as ‘historical’ and therefore out of sync with the new needs of the industrial city; previously robust industrial works within park boundaries were rendered invisible (via demolition) or obsolete (via policymaking and infrastructural investment that favoured businesses closer to the city’s historical core); and self-provisioning practices, like hunting and gathering, were reframed as archaic and anti-social, a designation reinforced through the surveillance of the activities of individual park-goers by a park

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414  The handbook of diverse economies police force (Gabriel 2011). A powerful representation of bifurcated urban/non-urban space emerged, based on a capitalocentric vision of the industrial city. In the spaces categorized as ‘urban’, market logics of the industrial economy were privileged above all: base maps of the city extended not-yet-existent street grids into all corners of its boundaries, stimulating a new market for urban land; vagrancy laws punished members of the working class not engaged directly in industrial labour during regular working hours; and livestock were banished from streets. Meanwhile, conditions ‘on the ground’ hardly reflected the distinction between the park and the city: woodlands extended well into some parts of the ‘city’, while streets, rail lines, and industrial facilities had existed for a generation or more in what became park lands (Gabriel 2013). This genealogy reveals the way that the ‘urban’, as we know it today, came into being through the exercise of representational and actively coercive forms of power. This then leads us to the flipside of deconstructing capitalist hegemony – making visible diverse economic practices and subjectivities (potential and existing) beyond the standard vision of capital as the sole driving force in society. A recent example of this is Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy’s (2016) discussion of climate change politics, which they approach using genealogy to trace the successful emergence of an ‘atmospheric commons’ in several instances: citywide anti-pollution efforts in Newcastle, the Montreal Protocol limiting global production and emissions of ozone depleting compounds, and the nascent Solar Citizen community in Australia that is working to create a new commons of solar energy. These genealogies of socio-economic difference trace relations between a wide range of actors and forces, including smog and citizen groups, ultraviolet rays and atmospheric chemists, utility companies and skin cancer, and many others, to show how atmospheric commoning came into being through processes of negotiation that included contestation and cooperation, and the formation of new alliances alongside confrontations between antagonists. This analysis is thus a powerful example of how non-capitalocentric genealogies can be used to trace the emergence of phenomena that are not as ‘rainy day’ as the objects of many genealogical inquiries. That is, while the atmospheric commons brought to light by Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy are neither entirely post-capitalist nor purely capitalist, they are arguably more ethical in terms of their environmental implications and perhaps offer a greater degree of shared responsibility, control and agency on the part of different actors involved.

CULTIVATING NON-CAPITALIST SUBJECTS While genealogy is typically conceived of as a retrospective engagement with the world – looking backwards in time, that is, to understand the complex power relations that have produced a present state of affairs – it is also fundamental to the more future-oriented phases of cultivating non-capitalist subjects and building community economies. Helping to foster and usher in new subjectivities, innovative economic formations, and novel worlds more broadly, requires that we grapple with the interplay of forces and power-laden but contingent processes that shape our current subjectivities and economic realities. This is because the forces that both constrained and enabled previous attempts to create more just, ethical and ecological economies in the past are often still very much alive in the present. As an example of the utility of genealogy in this respect, Katherine Gibson’s (2001) study of the development of Australia’s Latrobe Valley traces how engineers, state officials, regional planners and business interests mobilized accounting tables, urban planning models, regional maps

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On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies  415 and economic calculations to both materially and discursively produce the valley as a social and economic space, with concomitant effects on the identities of people living and working in the area. Gibson’s genealogy makes clear that, over the course of the twentieth century, diverse and competing political economic imaginaries informed the ongoing development of the area: an emphasis on least-cost accounting and economic efficiency in the early twentieth century was followed by a shift towards a consumerist developmentalism; in the 1950s, a regional plan took hold that cast aside visions of a more managed coordination of townships and industrial sectors in favour of a more laissez-faire approach; and in recent decades, privatization and disinvestment have been the order of the day. The point of examining the messy, non-linear trajectory of the region over time is not simply to demonstrate how the capitalist economy or political economic elites have done as they pleased with the place and the people that live there. Rather, Gibson’s work uses this genealogy to understand how particular economic, social and spatial imaginaries of the area have taken shape through specific technologies and techniques of representation and signification, which in turn have contributed towards particular ways in which residents of the Latrobe Valley imagine themselves – as workers, as citizens, as victims or agents of change. Understanding this process then enables Gibson to recognize some of the tensions within the subjectivities of local residents as not only the psychological fallout from the rising and falling fortunes of the place, but also as opportunities to ask what other kinds of economic practices and subjectivities might be fostered. Just as the Keynesian and then neoliberal visions of the economy and the individualistic capitalist subjects of the past came into being (in part) through economic tables and maps, the emergence of a more equitable and sustainable economy and more collectively oriented subjects also requires a different conceptual vocabulary and a range of tools and techniques. Here, we might think of the iceberg image or the inventory of enterprise diversity (Gibson-Graham et al. 2016) as examples of just such tools. Genealogy is crucial, Gibson concludes (2001, p. 665) to the goal of ‘denaturalizing the Economy as it has become known and lived’, which in turn provides ‘a breathing space’ for residents’ strong feelings about the area and its development over time ‘to be directed towards new performances of economy, region, and subjecthood, ones that tap the banished diverse economies as well as the present ethical, spiritual, and cultural resources of the Latrobe Valley’.

BUILDING COMMUNITY ECONOMIES The cultivation of ethical economic subjects is at the core of the political project of building and extending the reach of community economies. Here, we are drawn to the example provided by Mathie, Cameron and Gibson’s (2017) mobilization of the post-structural conception of power as diffracted to assess development interventions in the Philippines, Ethiopia and South Africa that rely on an ‘assets-based community development’ (ABCD) approach. Responding to concerns raised by critics of ABCD initiatives that these approaches fail to account for power relations and thus reinforce the status quo, Mathie et al. argue that such criticisms are focused on one type of power – ‘power over’ others – at the analytical expense of other modalities of power, including ‘power to’ (the active form of power that focuses on what it can do rather than what it can prevent others from doing or make others do); ‘power with’ (the potential that is activated when people join forces); and ‘power within’ (individual and collective senses of

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416  The handbook of diverse economies what people are capable of). This framework enables the authors to examine ABCD initiatives with a focus that is broad enough to account for hierarchy and entrenched power structures while also considering the expressions of other forms of power that may disrupt the status quo. In this vein, they analyse community-led efforts to create new enterprises, to organize and make collective demands on governments and non-profit groups, and to form broader coalitions and enrol allies among officials, community groups and existing businesses. For each of these efforts, they demonstrate how ‘power with’ and ‘power within’ often contribute towards new expressions of ‘power to’, in some cases helping to push back against the ‘power over’ more marginalized people that is sedimented in existing power structures and exercised by local elites. For these researchers then, a view of power as diffracted enables recognition of the utility of ABCD approaches to building community economies. While Mathie et al. do not use the term ‘genealogy’, their analysis is arguably genealogical in that its sketches of ABCD initiatives focus squarely on tracing the relations between a diverse array of actors as they form alliances, come into conflict, and generally negotiate the continued emergence of their economic and social lives. As one final example, Eric’s research on local food movements and their linkages to urban revitalization offers a more explicit indication of how genealogy could be used as a tool in building community economies. In his research in Oklahoma City, Eric demonstrates how some activists in the local food movement in that city came to focus their operations on the growing urban ‘creative class’, one result of which was the muting of social justice concerns initially emphasized by the movement. As with the other genealogies discussed above, the goal of Eric’s analysis is not simply to reveal the workings of powerful actors such as corporate food retailers, well-heeled consumers, and urban developers dominating efforts to produce a more just food system. Rather, in understanding how a more fetishized, ‘feel good’ notion of local food came to displace the more justice-oriented visions of the early local food movement, this project suggests that as the movement seeks to expand beyond its current niche in the broader food market, it might benefit by considering forming alliances with actors and groups beyond the scaled creative class. Given that catering to that demographic played a part in weakening food justice concerns in the city, we might ask what could happen if the local food movement hitched its wagons, so to speak, to alternative visions for food systems and revitalization that foreground inclusivity for all Oklahoma citizens, that resist gentrification and displacement of low income people and communities of colour, and that bring food justice concerns into more direct conversation with struggles for what Henri Lefebvre (1996) calls ‘the right to the city’? Importantly, beyond the self-identified local food movement, there are also a number of parallels among mostly disconnected groups and individuals who participate in localized networks, including black and Hispanic farmers, tribal food sovereignty initiatives, food banks and soup kitchens, urban agriculturalists, and others. As we noted above, a genealogical approach foregrounds the role of the researcher in contributing – through their genealogical work – towards the ongoing emergence of the world. The genealogical approach Eric took in his previous work shed light on the potential alliances and as yet under-explored pathways forward for building more just and sustainable food systems and expanding the right to the city. Future research could then explore synergies and help to cultivate solidarities between these disjointed efforts, potentially altering power dynamics in the state and feeding into the challenge of building community economies.

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On power and the uses of genealogy for building community economies  417

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have sketched the contours of genealogy as one important approach to analysing power in diverse economies research. We described how genealogy is fruitful for understanding how capitalist and community economy formations emerge and develop over time, and for exposing the inconsistencies, ruptures and potential points of intervention in the assemblages that constrain community economic initiatives. The work we have discussed herein demonstrates how a genealogical approach to the mundane, microphysical elements of power brings into view the laborious work that goes into making capitalist discourse, relations and practices powerful, revealing the conditions of power imposed on all social endeavours. Importantly, though, tracing the formation of economic frameworks from a diverse economies perspective is not only to reveal their constructed nature, as assemblages that became fixed at some point in the past. Instead, to understand these assemblages as always in formation means that they require ongoing renewal, reworking and re-establishment. This anti-essentialist move provides a vantage point that then informs the future-oriented task of building community economies. As a concluding note, we feel it necessary to point out that, while we have discussed Gibson-Graham’s phases of the diverse economies project sequentially for the sake of convenience, these phases should not be understood as something like periods in the intellectual development of the field but rather ongoing, coexisting and interconnected components of the whole. It would scarcely be possible to identify potential future possibilities without a genealogical understanding of the ‘history of the present’; conversely, these histories, on their own, mean little without an effort to look to the future.

NOTE 1. Here we refer to genealogy as a specific analytic rather than the more common usages of the term to signify descent through filiation, pedigree, and so on.

REFERENCES Cahill, A. (2008), ‘Power over, power to, power with: Shifting perceptions of power for local economic development in the Philippines’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49 (3), 294–304. Foucault, M. (1988), The History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1990), The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Vintage. Gabriel, N. (2011), ‘The work that parks do: Towards an urban environmentality’, Social and Cultural Geography, 12 (2), 123–41. Gabriel, N. (2013), ‘Mapping urban space: The production, division, and reconfiguration of natures and economies’, City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 17 (3), 325–42. Gibson, K. (2001), ‘Regional subjection and becoming’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 639–67. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2000), ‘Poststructural interventions’, in E. Sheppard and T. Barnes (eds), A Companion to Economic Geography, Malden, MA: Wiley, pp. 95–100.

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418  The handbook of diverse economies Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2005), ‘Surplus possibilities: Postdevelopment and community economies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26 (1), 4–26. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006a), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006b), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (with a new Introduction), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2016), ‘Commoning as a post-capitalist politics’, in A. Amin and P. Howell (eds), Releasing the Commons, London and New York: Routledge. Harris, E. (2009), ‘Neoliberal subjectivities or a politics of the possible? Reading for difference in alternative food networks’, Area, 41 (1), 55–63. Jonas, A. (2013), ‘Place and region III: Alternative regionalisms’, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (6), 822–8. Lefebvre, H. (1996), ‘Right to the city’, in E. Kofman and E. Lebas (eds and trans.), Writings on Cities, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 60–184. Mathie, A., J. Cameron and K. Gibson (2017), ‘Asset-based and citizen-led development: Using a diffracted power lens to analyze the possibilities and challenges’, Progress in Development Studies, 17 (1), 54–66. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. K. Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2006), Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. A. Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sarmiento, E. (2017), ‘Synergies in alternative food network research: Embodiment, diverse economies, and more-than-human food geographies’, Agriculture and Human Values, 34, 485–97. St. Martin, K. (2005), ‘Mapping economic diversity in the First World: The case of fisheries’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 37, 959–79. Thrift, N. (2000), ‘Entanglements of power: Shadows?’, in J. Sharp, P. Routledge, C. Philo and R. Paddison (eds), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance, London: Routledge, pp. 269–78.

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46. Techniques for shifting economic subjectivity: promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans Abby Templer Rodrigues

INTRODUCTION In the early 2000s the minority world turned towards the creative sector to revitalize regional economies. Creativity-based development strategies tended to focus on amenity building in order to attract a loosely defined, economically privileged, and implicitly white, ‘creative class’. These development policies ultimately led to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class and gender. Exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. Independent artists and artisans are rarely involved in the process of urban redevelopment and often find their affordable creative environments destroyed by the very process they are seen to have initiated. Indeed, some artists and artisans do not see themselves as economic actors who might play a role in development agendas. This chapter draws on an action research project that aimed to reframe artists and artisans as active subjects of a regional economy so that they could take more of a role in shaping the nature of redevelopment. The project employed the practice of reframing as used in post-structuralist participatory action research (see Chapter 56 by Cameron and Gibson in this volume). I focus on the techniques that were used to enable new economic subjectivities for artists and artisans to emerge. The shifts in subjectivity built on an assets-based stance that artist and artisan participants experimented with in order to see themselves as economic actors who participate in, act on, and ultimately change economic realities (see also Chapter 57 by Hwang in this volume). First, I focus on the way in which one’s occupation as an artist or artisan can shape economic subjectivity. Second, I delineate specific techniques that facilitated subjectivity shifts.

ECONOMIC SUBJECTIVITIES AND THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION Artists are highly mythologized in Western cultures. With roots tracing back to the Renaissance, the contemporary Western mythology positions the artist as a ‘Bohemian character, who adopts a disdainful attitude toward a conventional way of life’ in order to pursue their romanticized creative abilities (Bain 2005, p. 29). Artists are seen as, and often see themselves, as countercultural, existing on the margins of society while practising their art, ‘outside the realm of everyday life’ (Bain 2005, p. 30). Positioning artists outside of everyday 419 Abby Templer Rodrigues - 9781788119962 08:02:47PM

420  The handbook of diverse economies life has two effects in relationship to their economic identities. First, it shapes the way that society views artists and artisans. Their artistic labour and contributions to society are largely devalued, and they are not seen as a group who has economic wisdom to contribute to their communities. Second, some artists and artisans can come to see themselves as disconnected from the economy. This mythology is made all the more powerful given the particularities of the field of cultural production. The field of cultural production is distinct from other professional fields. The field has low barriers to entry (Bourdieu 1993). Unlike other professional fields such as medicine or law, there are no standardized educational requirements, little government regulation, and no codes of ethics. The borders of the field are thus highly elastic; anyone can call themselves an artist without formal training or professionalization. The field’s permeable borders can have negative economic effects for artists and artisans. It gives rise to a perpetual oversupply of artists. As a result, artists tend to have higher rates of unemployment and under-employment and earn less than other workers with similar forms of human capital (Menger 1999). The field’s permeable borders also lead to contestation over what is art and who is ‘rightfully’ considered an artist. Bourdieu (1993) carefully outlines multiple, competing logics within the field of cultural production. Some artists produce for what is considered the high-end, or bourgeois, art market, while others produce for what is considered the commercial, or popular, art market. Both groups organize their practices around a capitalocentric, market-based logic, with legitimacy and status dependent on success within their respective markets. In contrast to this market-based logic, some artists produce art for art’s sake while others produce social art, art utilized as a vehicle for social critique or social change. For these latter groups, legitimacy and status arise from distancing oneself from a capitalocentric market logic, giving rise to an ‘interest’ in economic ‘disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu 1993, p. 40). From Bourdieu’s (1993) perspective, there is not an objective definition of art or artist. As groups within the field of cultural production struggle for legitimacy, the ‘winner’ comes to define art and normative artistic practice. In today’s minority world context, this contestation is seen in binaries such as commercial versus avant-garde, professional versus amateur, and artist versus artisan. While binaries are regularly evoked, given the precarity of cultural work, many artists and artisans participate in art across competing logics. An artist may value producing art for art’s sake yet also produce a portion of art for the commercial market to support themselves financially. However, binary thinking can still shape artistic identity formation, such that from the non-market logic, an artist producing commercial art could be labelled a ‘sell out’ and seen as less authentic. The field’s lack of professional standards and the contestation over the definition of art and artist can lead society at large, and some artists themselves, to rely on the mythologized artist as the standard for defining ‘real artists’ (Bain 2005). As a result, some highly creative people are hesitant to adopt an artistic identity, believing that they are not ‘artistic enough’. This mythology and the anti-market logic of art for art’s sake and social art can also leave some artists and artisans reluctant to see themselves as economic actors. Reluctance to see oneself as an economic actor was amplified in the context of Franklin County, where there was a general feeling of dependence on others to fix the region’s lagging economy.

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Promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans  421

CHALLENGES FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN FRANKLIN COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS Franklin County is the most rural county in the US north-eastern state of Massachusetts. The region’s economy was originally built around agriculture, transitioning to small-scale industry during America’s first wave of industrialization in the late 1800s. The region was home to scores of small-scale manufacturers that were quite lucrative. At the height of the Second World War, Franklin County had the highest per capita income in the state. However, as deindustrialization hit the region, as in many other parts of the minority world, the region’s economy started to wane. In 2010, the year in which the research drawn on here was conducted, the region had the 4th lowest median household income in the state (US Census Bureau 2010). Within this economically depressed region, artists and artisans primarily live on fixed incomes. Excluding public workers and the self-employed, the annual wage for Franklin County workers in the Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation sector for 2009 was $15,046 compared to an average income of $33,380 for all Franklin County workers (Franklin Regional Council of Governments 2012, p. 23). Material need was real in this region in general, and for artists and artisans specifically. As part of the Franklin County’s push to revitalize the regional economy in the mid-2000s, the creative sector was targeted as a potential player in redevelopment. Planning was, however, primarily led by business and civic leaders, with artists and artisans largely left out of the process. The Fostering Arts and Culture Project (FACP) was set up to redress this absence. This non-profit organization was to be the primary advocate for artists in regional redevelopment planning. The FACP commissioned a study that brought in marketing experts from outside the region to conduct a needs-based assessment for the region’s artists and artisans. However, needs-based assessment coupled with a reliance on expert knowledge, in this case the knowledge of the marketing firm, tends to position community members as dependent economic subjects (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). By only focusing on need, existing community assets are overlooked and by only drawing on expert knowledge the diversity of community knowledges are ignored. Ultimately, the outside marketing experts concluded that outside dollars, either in the form of grants for the arts or in the form of tourist dollars based on cultural tourism, were the region’s best hope for economic revival. Not everyone at the FACP was comfortable with this needs-based and market-focused approach to redevelopment. The Chair of the FACP was aware that the economic lives of artists and artisans were rendered invisible when viewed through a market-only lens. Additionally, he was aware that artists and artisans comprised only a small portion of the leadership of FACP and that their knowledge had not been tapped into. Our study was commissioned by FACP to be a local, artist-driven research project to collect information about existing practices and values of regional artists and artisans.1 The hope was that by reframing redevelopment strategies around existing local practices and values, we could create openings for equitable and sustainable redevelopment.

A REFRAMING PROJECT Shifting focus away from the market is particularly important when exploring the economic lives of artists and artisans. To support themselves, creative workers engage in bartering,

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422  The handbook of diverse economies self-provisioning and volunteering. They also utilize grant funding and organize cooperative activities. The invisibility of these activities coupled with the artist mythology, means that artists and artisans are often not considered as possible sources of economic knowledge within redevelopment planning processes, even when the creative sector is targeted as the engine for growth. Our project aimed to reframe the local economy to see it as constituted by a range of diverse practices and diverse motivations, or values. Expanding the economy beyond a capitalocentric reading disrupts the purported incompatibility of artistic life and economic life. We hoped that such a reframing might enable artists and artisans to see themselves as economic actors without sacrificing values like art for art’s sake or social art. We also sought to foreground community assets and disrupt the over-reliance on needs-based assessment and expert knowledge used by community development agencies (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). For us, community assets included the internal assets, or strengths, of the individual artists and artisans participating in the research. We hoped that this reframing would disrupt dependence on the benevolence of philanthropic or state-based arts funders or on the whims of tourists as revenue sources. As a way of practically acknowledging the assets and capacities of creative workers, the project hired and trained 22 artists and artisans to work with us as a research team.2 We hired people based on three criteria. First, we selected for artists and artisans from socially marginalized groups, actively recruiting people of colour and women. We did not limit participation to individuals who earn the majority of their income as artists or artisans. Such a limitation would have disproportionally excluded participants who were also raising families or who lacked the financial safety net to practise art full-time even in lean times. Second, we aimed to maximize the heterogeneity of the art/craft forms represented by explicitly including artists and artisans to counteract the hierarchy between the two. Finally, we hired individuals who were open to rethinking the region’s creative economy. In September 2010 all researchers went through eight hours of training, covering the diverse economies framework, asset-based assessment, positionality, and research basics.3 We then asked each researcher to interview five of their peers. The research design included a check-in where team members came together after conducting their first interview to discuss which interview strategies worked and which needed reworking. At the check-in it became clear that maintaining a focus on assets in the interviews was a struggle, so we spent a significant amount of time discussing pedagogical tools for promoting and maintaining an assets focus. After the check-in, the researchers then conducted their remaining interviews independently, coming back together for a collaborative analysis session in early November. The formal project ended with the collaborative analysis. However, after a warm reunion dinner in January of 2011, team members decided to continue working together to share findings with the community. A group of researchers presented at a regional arts summit in March of 2011, and created a chapbook, a small paperback booklet cataloguing the findings reported at the summit. We also hosted a month-long art show Creative Multiple Realities, Phase I, in April of 2011, showcasing the work of the research team in the context of rethinking the region’s creative economy. Finally, in 2013, we launched an online art show, featuring the work of the interviewees.

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Promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans  423

TECHNIQUES FOR SHIFTING THE SUBJECTIVITIES OF ARTISTS AND ARTISANS Discursive disruptions unfolded in a specific way for artists and artisans. Much of the economic activity of researchers occurred outside of the formal economy, and most researchers organized their lives around non-market logics. This made it easy for them to reconceptualize the economy from a diverse economies perspective, seeing themselves as part of the economy. This is in contrast to how the process of reconceptualization can unfold when research participants work in economic sectors that primarily rely on employment through wage labour. When a specific population of workers has been discursively cast as dependent on wage-based employment, it can be hard for them to imagine the economy as being anything other than capitalist and their own economic subjectivity as anything other than dependent. This can initially create ‘reluctant subjects’, or an inability to entertain different economic subject positions (Gibson-Graham 2006). The process of reframing the economy unfolded differently for the artists and artisan researchers in our study. We started this portion of the training by briefly naming descriptors of the economy as a group to get researchers thinking about the concept. Then, everyone had five minutes to write down their definition of economy. A dichotomous definition of economy organically emerged from the discussion of what they had written: the ‘speculative economy’ that they do not control and the ‘concrete’ or ‘home and hearth’ economy which they do control. We then used this distinction to easefully segue to the diverse economies reframing, utilizing the iceberg image: the ‘speculative’ economy was above the water and the ‘concrete’ economy was below. The diverse economy reframing amplified the distinction researchers already saw, meaning we did not have to spend much time on this discursive reframing. Rather, we were able to focus our attention on the discursive shift towards asset-based thinking. It was here that we encountered reluctant subjects. Artists and artisans were versed in thinking about the economy from a diverse perspective in terms of their daily lives. However, in keeping with the artist mythology, they were not accustomed to being seen as people who have assets, or something to contribute, to the economy more generally. To facilitate the emergence of new subjectivities, Gibson-Graham (2006, p. 8) encourage a reparative stance, a way of approaching research that ‘welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connections, tolerates coexistence, and offers care for the new’. Our research process melded a reparative stance with asset-based thinking, creating an asset-based stance. In practice, this meant encouraging a ‘shift in organized habits of feeling and judgment’ (Connolly 2002, cited in Gibson-Graham 2006, p. 2) away from needs-based thinking towards asset-based thinking. It was an ongoing process of encouraging researchers to look for and draw out assets, both communal and personal, to create openings for an expanded horizon of opportunity. In what follows, I highlight the way in which a focus on the internal assets of participants fostered a subjectivity shift, allowing members of the research team to see themselves as artistic, economic agents. To demonstrate the ways in which the asset-based stance operated, I present a moment from the first day of research training. In this exercise, we combined two exercises from Kretzmann and McKnight (1993). The first was asset mapping in which research participants work together to map community resources such as businesses and physical resources, local associations and groups, and people. The second exercise was creating a portrait of gifts, which catalogues the everyday skills of community members. In our exercise, members of the

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424  The handbook of diverse economies research team worked in pairs to catalogue the internal assets they had to contribute to their communities. These assets could include skills like cooking, participation in civic organizations, or running a business. Each pair shared a large piece of paper on which they catalogued their assets. After completing their personal list, they then interviewed their partner about their assets. This exercise practised asset-based thinking, interviewing fellow artists, and created community between team members. Here I discuss the internal asset map done between Priya and Mia, two women meeting for the first time. Priya and Mia were sitting across the table from each other. Mia’s assets were listed in red ink in the top half of the paper: outside the box thinking; empathy; I love tamari dressing; pug therapy; fun jewellery to loan; can teach shrine building; I am happy to share lots of morning glory and oregano; I can make a kick-ass chutney or cup of coffee; I am good at organizing other people’s things. Priya’s assets were listed in green ink on the bottom half of the paper: creative problem solving; a love for dogs; I can share apples; I can sell just about anything; I can grow sprouts!; Shiatsu training; I can throw a great party!; I can care for and educate children with respect and passion!; I can teach art – jewellery, stain glass, photography, batik, silk painting; I am compassionate and empathetic! Their lists highlight the intimacy of internal asset mapping. The map provides a window into participants’ personal values. Looking to Priya’s list, she values holistic, spiritual and physical health, being an educator, and her character. Mia’s list highlights her art form; she has lots of fun jewellery to lend because she makes jewellery. This map also illustrates that they let themselves be affected by one other. Both noted the things they could teach. Seeing one label teaching as an asset, gave the other licence to see it as an asset in herself. As one member of the team noted, ‘feeding off of someone allowed me to share the deep’. As her partner in asset mapping shared, she became increasingly comfortable sharing the deeper, hidden parts of herself. Asset mapping was gentle, interaction-based encouragement that dislodged, even if only at times, a needs-based way of relating to self. The needs-based discourse is strong in Franklin County, and regional artists, including members of the research team, were not accustomed to being seen as capable economic actors. Even after participating in the training and check-in, both of which focused heavily on asset-based thinking, one member of the research team reacted with surprise when Leo asked to interview him. He responded, ‘Me? Really?’ While he could see others as asset-laden, turning that insight towards himself proved difficult. There were three elements of the research design that worked to slowly move members of the research team towards viewing themselves as asset-laden, economic actors: interacting as equals, building-in multiple forms of interaction, and practising new subjectivities through participating in the art show. First, interacting as equals at all stages of the research process helped posit participants as capable actors. As collaborators, all members of the team were seen as equally knowledgeable and capable to make decisions that shaped the direction of the research. Embedded within this collaborative structure, interviewees and interviewers also interacted as equals. Interviews were dialogic, with both participants invited to be affected by the exchange. Second, repeated interactions over the course of the research project gave the asset-based stance form. We learned how to reflect back one another’s strengths as sites of possibilities through collaborating as a research team and through conducting interviews. We were learning to be affected (Roelvink 2010) – allowing ourselves to be moved through interaction and

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Promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans  425 developing the capacity to be moved towards new subjectivities. As Gibson-Graham (2006) notes, within the action research process there are swerves between old and new economic subjectivities. We found that repeat interactions from an asset-based stance allowed for longer periods of sustaining a swerve into the new. Peer-interviewing embedded in the collaborative research process created multiple points of interaction to enact an asset-based stance. In fact, the content of the stance was fleshed out through moving back and forth between the collaborative moments and the interviews. At the beginning of the project, Joleen, a painter, told Leo that she left the initial researcher training feeling like, ‘no one will want me to interview them’. She was then deeply moved that all six members of her painting group not only wanted to participate in the study, but wanted to be interviewed by her. The self-valuation suggested by the asset-based stance, which was presented at the researcher training, came to life only through interactions with her peers. Through fleshing out the asset-based stance in multiple interactions across the research process, members of the research team started to inhabit new subjectivities. The project’s art show then created an opportunity for participants to put new subjectivities into practice. Here is David, a performing and visual artist, discussing his participation in the art show: This [the art show] was wonderful for me. Actually, every year I set goals for myself, and one of my goals for this year was to get my artwork printed out, and low and behold, this opportunity [the art show] comes along, and now [gesturing around the room] I have three pieces printed. It was really exciting for me to be able to exhibit. And . . . I was afraid, I felt some fear about doing this, I mean ‘Oh my God it’s not good enough’. And then everybody says, ‘Oh, wow, David, it’s really good!’ So it was really nice to get those strokes.

Infused with the asset-based stance, the art show provided a supportive environment for David to display his visual work for the first time. He received much praise, which facilitated his continued desire to exhibit his work. He went on to show his work a year later at an art show organized by Jim and Naomi, two other members of the research team. Naomi and Jim also credit the supportive environment of the research project as their source of inspiration for organizing their show.

CONCLUSION The structure and competing logics within the field of cultural production coupled with the Western artist mythology can leave artists and artisans reluctant to identify as economic actors and, in some cases, even reluctant to identify as artists. However, their distance from conventional, capitalocentric readings of the economy facilitated the willingness of participants to embrace new economic subjectivities in a diverse economy. For David, as for other members of the research team, the research project allowed them a safe environment in which to fully embrace an artistic identity. Participants had to first see themselves as artists before they could inhabit a related economic subjectivity. Four members of the research team reported feeling more confident and willing to publicly show and sell their work by the end of the research project. When artists and artisans publicly show their work, it enriches their communities through circulating new forms of culture. Showing also enriches artists’ economic lives by creating exposure to their work, leading to sales, networking opportunities and potential collabora-

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426  The handbook of diverse economies tions. For Cara, a visual artist, participating in the project’s art show was the confidence boost needed to start selling her work face-to-face at regional events in addition to her existing online sales. Eight years after the project ended, she and her husband, Danny, a visual and performing artist who was also a member of the research team, have made showing at events a regular part of how they share and sell their work. Publicly showing and selling work indirectly affects the region’s redevelopment agenda by making artists and artisans a more visible part of the region’s economy. For those members of the research team who already fully identified as artists, participating in the project allowed them to expand their economic subjectivities through creating new ventures. Nine members of the research team have collaborated with fellow team members and/or interviewees on projects ranging from benefit concerts, to ceremonies, to art shows, to grant writing, to local redevelopment projects. Leo has collaborated with team members, Joan, a visual and performing artist, and Adam, a performing artist, on separate projects to amplify the voices of artists and artisans in local development projects. Joan and Adam both viewed themselves as artistic, economic actors prior to their participation in the project. For them, the project served as a new vehicle through which to deepen their activism, linking artistic practice and the economy. For these artists, participation in the project led to direct involvement in the region’s creativity-based redevelopment. The diverse economies perspective provided a framework in which artists and artisans were seen as economic actors without sacrificing their non-market logics and practices. What proved more difficult was seeing themselves as asset-laden, as having something to contribute to the broader community. This stance was fleshed out through interacting with one another as equals across a variety of research settings while researchers had an opportunity to put emergent subjectivities into practice through participating in the project’s art show. Through participating in the project, some researchers came to embrace an artist identity and a related economic subjectivity. Other researchers broadened the scope of their existing subjectivities. In both cases, changes in participants’ economic subjectivities led to actions enriching the community and the economic lives of the individual artists and artisans, both indirectly and directly shaping the region’s creativity-based redevelopment.

NOTES 1. This project, Rethinking the Creative Economy: Participant Action Research with Artists and Artisans in the Greater Franklin County, was co-coordinated by Leo Hwang and myself. The project received funding from the University of Massachusetts President’s Creative Economy Fund and the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Adams Grant. 2. Thank you to all members of the Rethinking the Creative Economy Research Team. In this chapter, I have used pseudonyms for the artist/artisan researchers to protect privacy. 3. Here we adapted specific training activities from Kretzmann and McKnight (1993), Community Economies Collective (2001), Cameron and Gibson (2001) and Sato (2004).

REFERENCES Bain, A. (2005), ‘Constructing an artistic identity’, Work, Employment & Society, 19 (1), 25–46.

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Promoting an assets-based stance with artists and artisans  427 Bourdieu, P. (1993), ‘The field of cultural production, or: The economic world reversed’, in R. Johnson (ed.), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 29–73. Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2001), Shifting Focus: Alternative Pathways for Communities and Economies, a Resource Kit, Traralgon and Melbourne: Latrobe City and Monash University. Community Economies Collective (2001), ‘Imagining and enacting noncapitalist futures’, Socialist Review, 28 (3–4), 93–135. Connolly, W. (2002), Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Franklin Regional Council of Governments (2012), ‘Greater Franklin County 2012 comprehensive economic development strategy annual report’, accessed 12 June 2019 at https://​frcog​.org/​wp​-content/​ uploads/​2014/​04/​FRCOG​-Annual​-Rport​-Regional​-Summary​.pdf. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Kretzmann, J.P. and J.L. McKnight (1993), Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets, Evanston, IL: The Asset-Base Community Development Institute, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. Menger, P.M. (1999), ‘Artistic labor markets and careers’, Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 541–74. Roelvink, G. (2010), ‘Collective action and the politics of affect’, Emotion, Space and Society, 3 (2), 111–18. Sato, C. (2004), ‘A self-reflexive analysis of power and positionality: Toward a transnational feminist praxis’, in A. Robinson-Pant (ed.), Women, Literacy and Development: Alternative Perspectives, New York: Routledge, pp. 100–112. United States Census Bureau (2010), ‘State and county quick facts: Franklin County, Massachusetts’, accessed 11 August 2012 at http://​quickfacts​.census​.gov/​qfd/​states/​25/​25011​ html.

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47. Affect and subjectivity: learning to be affected in diverse economies scholarship Gerda Roelvink

INTRODUCTION Affect is a powerful force in social life and is utilized by both the left and right side of politics. Affect has become so widely used and so powerful because it is able to bypass ideology; affect creates, as Brian Massumi (2002a, p. 40) puts it, ‘ideological effects through non-ideological means’. It does so by working through the body and its capacity to act, which is felt and experienced as emotions. For example, listening to music can bring about a feeling of hope (Anderson 2006), body language and the sound of voice can create a certain political appeal (Massumi 2002b), and protesters joining their bodies together against the police can increase their feeling of power and joy (Hynes and Sharpe 2009). As a non-ideological force that works through bodies, affect can create strong emotions and attachments, and importantly a shift in one’s political or discursive position. In diverse economies scholarship focused on economic transformation affect is seen as a means to bring about change in economic subjectivity. In situations where a capitalocentric discourse prevails, it can be very difficult for people to see themselves outside of capitalism; whether you are employed, unemployed, for capitalism or against it, the capitalist economy appears to be all that there is. Even those ‘outside’ of capitalism, as Gibson-Graham (2006a, p. 6) suggest, ‘are often understood primarily with reference to capitalism: as being fundamentally the same as . . . or as being deficient or substandard imitations; as being opposite to capitalism; as being the complement of capitalism; as existing in capitalism’s space or orbit’. The diverse economies framing disrupts capitalocentrism. Yet knowing that there is more to the economy than capitalism and seeing oneself as part of diverse economic relations are different things; changing the world through knowledge also requires a change in subjectivity (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. xxxv). This is where the force of affect has been picked up. Affect offers a way to create a break in one’s subjective attachment to capitalocentrism, to break the habits of thought that make capitalocentrism so strong, and to ultimately create an opportunity in which new relationships can be formed and new opportunities for being can emerge. All in all, an opportunity for new subject positions to take hold.

INFLUENTIAL THEORIES OF AFFECT One of the most common (but not the only1) ways in which affect has been understood in diverse economies scholarship focuses on economic transformation is as a non-representational force related to a body’s dynamic engagement in the world. From this perspective, which draws on Brian Massumi (2002b) and in turn Gilles Deleuze and Baruch de Spinoza, one way to describe affect is as a bodily capacity to move and be moved by the world in some 428 Gerda Roelvink - 9781788119962 08:02:52PM

Affect and subjectivity: learning to be affected  429 way (to affect and be affected). Put another way, drawing on Jane Bennett (2001), affect relates to a body’s capacity to swerve in response to other bodies (where bodies could be anything and are always composed of multiple things). It is important to note here that, understood in this way, affect is fundamentally relational and moves in two directions; the body affects and is affected (Anderson 2014, p. 9). There is also a virtual aspect to this understanding of affect, with the force of affect used to refer to a capacity to do something that has not already taken place. As Ben Anderson (2014, p. 10) puts it, ‘Affects are about what a body may be able to do in any given situation, in addition to what it currently is doing and has done. Because capacities are dependent on other bodies, they can never be exhaustively specified in advance’. This is a dynamic, capacity orientated, relational and collective approach to affect. Eve Sedgwick (1993, 2003) is another important theorist whose work on affect (and indeed theory more generally) is widely utilized by diverse economies scholars to read for economic diversity and transform economies. Drawing on the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, for Sedgwick and her collaborator Adam Frank (1995) affects are part of a biological system, part of our physiology, and play a vital role in how we individually experience the world. Tomkins (1962–92, 1995) identified a specific set of paired affects that can vary in intensity, attach to any object and interact with each other (and the bodily drives) in interesting ways. This is a different approach from understandings of affect as a non-representational force (as described above). In Tomkins’ and Sedgwick’s and Frank’s approach affects are grounded in the human body as universal capacities that are shaped by social, cultural and individual life (see Probyn 2005). As Elspeth Probyn (2005, p. 22) illustrates in her discussion of shame: ‘It has been demonstrated that we all blush, but beyond that common element, how, where and why we experience shame and with what effects are all highly differentiated’. Drawing on Tomkins and Sedgwick and Frank in her work on shame, Probyn (2005) describes this theory of affects as a theory of minding, with the various levels of physiological affective arousal making ‘us care about things’ (p. 23): Our interest can be aroused by so many different things that we need a way of being alerted to what is important. Or to put it another way, so much is going on at any one moment that we need a system to make us discretely aware. This is why Nathanson called Tomkins a ‘theory of minding’, or as Andrew Strathern puts it in a different context, a theory of ‘the mindful body’.

In the context of the popularity of non-representational and capacity orientated understandings of affect, Anderson (2014, p. 5) suggests that Sedgwick’s and Probyn’s work on affects calls for more specificity in how we discuss affects. Anderson (2014, p. 102) sees these two approaches to affect coming together in this way: On the one hand, affect is transpersonal in the sense that affects must be thought of as things in the world that are formed through encounters and relations that exceed any particular person or any particular thing. ‘Capacities to affect and be affected’ are always collective in the sense that they are forged in and through the encounters that make up the realm of everyday life. However, on the other hand, affects are personal in the sense that they are expressed in a specific person or specific thing and change in that process of expression and qualification. Affirming affect as transpersonal is an attempt, then, to avoid beginning analysis by partitioning affect into a subject or an object, or into valued or devalued categories of the personal or the impersonal.

The appeal of both approaches to affect to diverse economies scholars makes sense given the importance of the body and its relations as a starting point for economic politics. The body

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430  The handbook of diverse economies has been central to the different strategies and tools developed to transform the economy. In the face of the strong belief that knowledge will aid political struggle, Gibson-Graham (2006b, p. xxxv) suggests that we must also change ourselves in order to be open to the kind of knowledge that will bring new possibilities: ‘What practices of thinking and feeling, what dispositions and attitudes, what capacities can we cultivate to displace the familiar mode of being of the anticapitalist subject, with its negative and stymied positioning?’ Drawing on Sedgwick, diverse economies scholars have answered this question by adopting a ‘weak’ approach to economic analysis, one which does not assume to know the outcome in advance (such as another instance of capitalism) and is open to difference (such as of non-capitalism). But to generate such a shift from the disabling strong focus on capitalism to a more open weak approach to economic analysis may require a rupture in one’s disposition. A good example of this kind of rupture is offered in A Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham 2006b). In her exploration of the film The Full Monty, Gibson-Graham focuses on the failure of subjection, where the body ‘swerves’ from its subjective attachment to capitalism to other possibilities, including the possibilities of different forms of community and connection and postcapitalist subjectivities. Affect as a shifting capacity of the body is important to understanding what is going on here but so too are particular affects experienced as emotions: ‘The affects associated with this becoming are not those traditionally linked to left politics – the outrage and anger that cluster around heroic struggles, or the cynicism and righteousness that operate in left political movements as a powerful emotional undertow’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. 20). Instead the affects of these swerves include solidarity based on independence and delight. Drawing on Bennett’s theory of enchantment, this work on affect draws attention, albeit briefly, to the combination of shifts in capacity with particular bodily states and experiences. It is the complexity of affect here and the different levels on which it operates and is expressed that makes the analysis so powerful and inspiring. More recently, this kind of transpersonal use of affect can be seen in how diverse economies scholars are working with Bruno Latour’s theory of learning to be affected in response to climate change, to which I now turn.

ADVANCING A TRANSPERSONAL THEORY OF AFFECT Climate change, and with it growing concern about our relationship to other species and the environment, has presented an enormous and daunting challenge to diverse economies scholars concerned with enabling ethical economies. Not only is the problem so all-encompassing (Val Plumwood’s 2007 work suggests that our very mode of humanity needs to be changed) but rational communication, even that which appeals to people’s values, seems to be achieving little (Hobson 2008). In this context, affect seemed to be a great starting point for pondering how we might respond to climate change: ‘Silence and slowness are openings, of course, opportunities for the body to shift its stance, to meld a little more with its surroundings; chances for the mind to mull over what floats by on the affective tide, or to swerve from its course as momentum decreases’ (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010, p. 322). It is from this position of openness that Gibson-Graham and I pursued Bruno Latour’s (2004) theory of learning to be affected as a response to a changing climate.2 Latour develops this idea in the context of the perfume industry where, using a perfume kit made up of many different smells, a teacher teaches a pupil to differentiate a variety of smells. Through this learning process of aroma differentiation, the pupil acquires a new body part and the world

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Affect and subjectivity: learning to be affected  431 changes; they become a ‘nose’, with a new, more highly differentiated world of smells. Thus the body and the world are seen to be co-transformed through this learning process; the body’s capacity to smell shifts in conjunction with the new possibilities for smell that are opened up. Importantly this shift in capacity is a collective process; it is only possible through the relations between the teacher, pupil and the perfume kit (Roelvink 2016). Diverse economies scholars have picked up and advanced this theory of learning to be affected as a tool to initiate economic transformation in response to Earth Others. In doing so, they continue to develop a transpersonal theory of affect. In what follows I draw on three examples to demonstrate this. Jenny Cameron, Craig Manhood and Jamie Pomfrett (2011) are concerned with how community gardeners learn to be affected not only by gardens and the differences in plant and insect life as the environment changes but also through interactions with other gardeners and their gardens. Through their research, Cameron et al. have deliberately created opportunities for learning to be affected through events which enable different community gardeners to interact with each other. One of these events was a bus-trip workshop that involved community gardeners travelling to and from other gardens where they had workshops with a different group of gardeners. The conversations and sense of togetherness on the bus as well as the discussions in each garden generated collective learning and the emergence of community. Cameron et al. show that opportunities for learning to be affected can be used intentionally within a research project to broaden the collective that learns and thus the possibilities for differentiation: community gardening potentially amplifies the process of registering and responding to the world around us as more contrasts are added with gardeners working alongside others (even in gardens that use individual allotments). We contend that performative and collective research can add even more contrasts and intensify the ways in which we can learn to be affected by the world around and propelled to act. (Cameron et al. 2011, p. 502, emphasis in the original)

We get a glimpse of the individually embodied experience of this process of learning to be affected through Cameron et al.’s (2011, p. 503) discussion with gardeners about their experience of the project. One aspect that they highlight is the feeling of ‘letting go of self’, being ‘a little more laid back’, to ‘go with the flow’ and ‘relax’. Cameron et al. argue that these feelings reflect a physical change in the gardeners, a personal bodily shift towards a ‘relaxed’, one might even say ‘weak’, disposition. This work has importantly shown how collectives can be made (including through diverse economies action research itself) and new possibilities opened up in the process of learning to be affected, and it gives a glimpse as to how this change is experienced, such as through the adoption of a particularly laid back or loose approach. Kelly Dombroski’s (2018) work on maternal knowledge and connection provides further insight into the biological processes that are part of learning to be affected and, ultimately, shifts in the capacity for action centred on caring for others, including other humans and the environment. Dombroski explores this through the case of nappy-free infant toilet training in China and Australia/New Zealand that involves a carer (typically the mother) learning to be affected by the baby’s signals and toilet cues. Also involved in this learning assemblage are a range of material objects, from split crotch pants to different objects used to ‘catch’ the baby’s elimination. Learning to be affected occurs over a period of confinement in China and deliberate training in Australia/New Zealand. It results in a capacity to act by the mother–baby collective that is habitual, intuitive and transformative in other areas of resource intensive and environmentally damaging forms of ‘hygiene’. Dombroski’s topic, a mother’s intuition or

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432  The handbook of diverse economies embodied knowledge generated through learning to be affected, pushes the theory of learning to be affected to more fully consider the biological processes at play, including the neural biological changes that occur during pregnancy (such as those associated with hormonal changes and breast feeding) that affect the relationship between mother and baby and set the scene for the development of maternal intuition. Yet Dombroski does not use this research to suggest that fathers and other carers’ maternal intuition is therefore limited. Rather, she notes the complex interplay between affect as a force generated between different ‘bodies’ in the maternal caring assemblage (mother, baby and material objects) and biological processes, in a similar way that Probyn investigates shame: The connection is far more complex – or ‘richly differentiated’ to use Latour’s words. Reproductive biologists have examined the ‘somatisation of emotions’ (Reiger and Dempsey 2006), whereby the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin is intricately linked with embodied and cultural practices that promote its release (and we might imagine these practices to be richly differentiated too just as different people have different material and social requirements for ‘feeling safe’ or ‘feeling relaxed’ or ‘feeling loved’). In the same way, we might argue that maternal connection and intuition is intricately linked with embodied and cultural practices that enable most mothers to learn to be affected by their infants in different ways. (Dombroski 2018, p. 78)

Drawing attention to these biological aspects of learning to be affected does not restrict other carers from maternal intuition, rather it increases the importance of practices of learning to be affected, for others to develop embodied ‘maternal’ knowledge and therefore to extend the care for babies and children across society. In this work it is clear that learning to be affected shapes brain–body connections as well connections within the carer–baby assemblage. I have also explored this layering of affect in my work with Magdalena Zolkos (Roelvink and Zolkos 2011) and in particular through our examination of the story of one farmer affected by the changing landscape on his farm due to prolonged drought. The experience of witnessing degraded soil on the farm in comparison to a much more resilient neglected weedy strip on the border of the farm with the highway initiated a process of learning to be affected for the farmer, resulting in much more diverse farming practices (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010). But what affects did the farmer experience in this process? As noted above, Probyn suggests that the operations of affects make us care about or take an interest in things in different ways (2005, p. 22). What Zolkos and I found when looking at this farmer’s story further was that his experience of learning to be affected appeared to be accompanied by the affective mode of sorrow and hope which made him care or take interest in the farmland in a particular way. Sorrow is a state in which one feels intimately connected with others (Pies 2008) and, externally orientated, is accompanied by a turning towards the other. This turning may have contributed to the farmer’s ability to learn to be affected by differences in soil–plant relations (perhaps in a similar way to the biological processes that turn mothers to their babies). Like Tomkins’ coupling of affects (although not included in his list) sorrow is related to hope, where sorrow holds out the possibility for something to be different (Pies 2008). Thus Zolkos and I suggest that the affective experience of sorrow/hope enabled the farmer to turn towards others and to be open to different possibilities and different trajectories for this farm from how it was at that moment. While the theory of learning to be affected has been developed separately from this work on the operation of the affects of sorrow and hope, putting them together here suggests that the affective modes of sorrow and hope were vital to the experience of learning to be affected in this case.

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Affect and subjectivity: learning to be affected  433 Why is attention to the different modalities of affect at work in learning to be affected in the examples above important? Well, perhaps because economic transformation does not start from a blank page. People are already affected and attached to the world in different ways. Interventions premised on learning to be affected, then, need to explore and acknowledge the affectivities people already have, not only in terms of the collectives in which they are a part (their connections to others) but also how these connections are associated with particular feelings and emotions. Most farmers, for example, whether they have been radically affected or not, already care for the land, albeit in different ways. What is important is not that care for others needs to be developed but that particular modes of care may need to be redirected or reframed. This is a point well made by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) in her work on activists learning to care for soil which is deliberately ‘not directed to learning to care about, to be affected by, something that was not cared for before . . . And therefore the intensification of proximity does not happen over an abyss; it is about learning to care differently within existing modes of taking care, displacing affectivities as the doings move’ (2017, p. 199, emphasis added). Puig de la Bellacasa continues: the appeal is transformative because it connects to an already recognized necessity of taking care of soils while gradually displacing this ethos with other affective and ethical sensitivities . . . What this brings forth is that ethical recognition of other than humans might not always prompt questions about other than human alterities but rather about modest changes in our ethos of living with others, by creating mundane paths for our doings that acknowledge how we are already ordinary everyday companions. (2017, pp. 199–200)

How do farmers already care for others and how is this felt and practised every day? Are particular modes of farming associated with different felt affects (such as anger, despair, shame, depression)? Might some of these affects be a starting point for new learning? Or might everyday doings and learning present opportunities for new affectivities and in turn a different stance towards others? Might the experience of some affects create an opening for new learning and if so which ones in what circumstances? A transpersonal approach to affect multiplies not only the questions that we can ask about how economic life is experienced but also the points of possible intervention. We might not need to focus so much on existing ‘alternatives’ (community gardens; radical, at least in Australia and New Zealand, forms of toilet training; radical farming practices) to expand or amplify the economic intervention. Instead we might increase our attention to practices throughout the diverse economy in which affective shifts may occur. In other words, while the examples I have presented here are clearly within a community economies frame (all centred on how to live well with others and on interdependence), it is equally important that scholars working towards economic transformation explore the play of affect in the diverse economy as a whole, with all its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements.

CONCLUSION As diverse economies research engages more and more with posthumanist questions and theories of affect it is pulled in two directions; firstly, towards the interconnectivity of life and collectivities that extend the boundaries of the human and, secondly, towards the embodied human experience. Taken together, I have suggested this area of inquiry can be seen as transpersonal (see also Sharp [under review] on this point). The collective nature of existence,

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434  The handbook of diverse economies where a body is affected by and affects the collectivities in which it is a part is at the same time uniquely human and the experience of affects are a human experience. Importantly, as Probyn (2005, p. xiv) notes, this is not to say that all humans experience affects in the same way or have the same vulnerability to them, but that they have the capacity to experience them as they have the capacity to bleed. Dombroski’s work illustrates this as mother–baby collectives learn to be affected in infant toilet training. Further attention to the complexity of affects is important for diverse economies scholarship. Affect theory enables us to explore the diversity of the human experience of affects; to appreciate that the embodied human is not a homogenized species but diversely and differentially populated, shaped by experiences of class, race and so on (see Anderson 2014). Contemporary global challenges, some of which are calling us to think about humanity as a species, question how we think about the diversity of economic subjective life and the collectives in which we are a part (see Roelvink 2015). Theories of affect suggest ways in which we can attend to the collective nature of life and how that shapes possibilities for action while at the same time exploring how this is individually and diversely experienced. These experiences will in turn shape what is possible.

NOTES 1. A notable exclusion of thinking on affect in this chapter is the strong tradition of psycho-analytic theory in diverse economies work that examines the role of affect in economic fantasies and desires (see, for example, Madra and Özselçuk 2015; Shear 2014). 2. Latour’s idea of learning to be affected had already been picked up by geographers, many of whom inspired us including Sarah Whatmore and Steve Hinchliffe (see their 2010 co-authored piece).

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (2006), ‘Becoming and being hopeful: Towards a theory of affect’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (5), 733–52. Anderson, B. (2014), Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions, Farnham: Ashgate. Bennett, J. (2001), The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cameron, J., C. Manhood and J. Pomfrett (2011), ‘Bodily learning for a climate (changing) world: Registering difference through performative and collective research’, Local Environment, 16 (6), 493–508. Dombroski, K. (2018), ‘Learning to be affected: Maternal connection, intuition and “elimination communication”’, Emotion, Space and Society, 26, 72–9. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006a), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (with a new Introduction), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006b), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2010), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (1), 320–346. Hobson, K. (2008), ‘Values, behaviour and the hope of “creative maladjustment” in the Anthropocene’, paper presented in the Fenner School Seminar Series, Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University, Canberra, 4 December.

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Affect and subjectivity: learning to be affected  435 Hynes, M. and S. Sharpe (2009), ‘Affected with joy: Evaluating the mass actions of the Anti-Globalisation Movement’, Borderlands, 8 (3), 1–21. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies’, Body and Society, 10 (2–3), 205–29. Madra, Y. and C. Özselçuk (2015), ‘Creating spaces for communism: Postcapitalist desire in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Western Massachusetts’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 127–52. Massumi, B. (2002a), ‘Navigating movements – with Brian Massumi’, in M. Zournazi (ed.), Hope: New Philosophies for Change, Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, pp. 210–243. Massumi, B. (2002b), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pies, R. (2008), ‘The anatomy of sorrow: A spiritual, phenomenological, and neurological perspective’, Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 3 (17), 1–8. Plumwood, V. (2007), ‘A review of Deborah Bird Rose’s “Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics of Decolonisation”’, Australian Humanities Review, 42, 1–4. Probyn, E. (2005), Blush: Faces of Shame, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Reiger, K. and R. Dempsey (2006), ‘Performing birth in a culture of fear: An embodied crisis of late modernity’, Health Sociology Review, 15 (4), 364–73. Roelvink, G. (2015), ‘Performing posthumanist economies’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 225–43. Roelvink, G. (2016), Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roelvink, G. and M. Zolkos (2011), ‘Climate change as experience of affect’, Angelaki, 16 (4), 43–57. Sedgwick, E. (1993), Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. and A. Frank (eds) (1995), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharp, E. (under review), ‘Care-full kale: Attunement and embodied politics of an “alternative” food supply chain’. Shear, B. (2014), ‘Making the green economy in Massachusetts’, Journal of Political Ecology, 21, 193–209. Tomkins, S. (1962–92), Affect Imagery Consciousness, 4 vols, New York: Springer. Tomkins, S. (1995), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. E. Kosofsky and A. Frank, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Whatmore, S. and S. Hinchliffe (2010), ‘Ecological landscapes’, in D. Hicks and M. Meaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 440–458.

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48. Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies: challenging hetero- and homonormativity Gavin Brown

INTRODUCTION Social attitudes towards homosexuality have shifted towards significantly more liberal and tolerant perspectives in many countries over recent decades. Indeed, changes in the legal standing of (some) sexual minorities have begun to destabilize and redefine the homo/hetero binary as the main fault line in sexual politics.1 However, many theorizations of these social and legal changes have linked them to neoliberalism, despite such changes having their origins in social struggles from the 1970s and 1980s, when neoliberalism was still in its ascendancy. In this chapter I trouble this lining up of neoliberalism with recent advances in gaining greater legal protection and equalities for lesbians and gay men (and/or trans people) in a growing number of jurisdictions. I point to the diversity of economic practices and relations that exist within and alongside neoliberal agendas and mainstream capitalist forms (which are themselves not singular) (Gibson-Graham 2006). I show how a diverse economies approach to sexuality can help rethink sexual politics across specific sexual identity categories and outside of hegemonic neoliberalism. Central to the diverse economies approach is the desire to make more just, equitable and sustainable worlds possible (Gibson-Graham 2008). I propose that supporting satisfying and healthy sexual and intimate lives (for all who want them) should be central to that project. In what follows I examine the diverse economies entangled with a digital dating and hook-up app and the solidarity economies which have shaped the rapid adoption of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) as a preventative treatment against HIV infection. While both cases appear, at first glance, to be saturated by neoliberal and ‘homonormative’ imperatives, my reading queers this analysis.

THE TROUBLE WITH HOMONORMATIVITY For several decades, feminists and critical scholars of sexualities have questioned the ways in which heterosexuality operates as an unremarked norm within contemporary society. Heteronormativity (Berlant and Warner 2002) refers to the ways in which heterosexuality is privileged over other forms of desire, and the heterosexual couple is privileged over other intimate relations. Key to this are a series of other normative assumptions surrounding the binary relations between men and women. Heterosexuality is privileged as ‘natural’ and this rests on certain essentialized assumptions about ‘male’ and ‘female’ bodies.

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Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies  437 Queer theorists contributed the concept of the heteronormative and have critiqued the ways in which heteronormativity is reproduced through almost every aspect of social life (including the state, economic relations, medicine, religion and culture) (Sedgwick 1994). They have also advanced post-structuralist attempts to ‘decentre the subject’ (Butler 1990, 1993). They argue that we cannot assume that sexed and gendered subjectivities are ‘natural’, nor that they are singular or self-contained. People understand themselves through a wide range of intersecting social relations and interactions that they engage in. Queer theory draws attention to subjectivities that challenge, question or confound normative assumptions about sex and gender. The diverse economies approach has utilized queer and post-structuralist thought by recognizing that people also have the capacity to cultivate themselves as subjects of non-capitalist relations. This work opens up discursive and material space for experimenting with how non-capitalist relations may contribute to producing new sexual subjects. Paradoxically, in recent years, the boundaries of socially acceptable intimacy and sexual behaviour have been redefined in part because many LGBTQ rights advocates have demonstrated how lesbians and gay men aspire to ‘sameness’ with their heterosexual peers (Richardson 2005). Rather than arguing for radical difference across the homo/hetero binary a new kind of ‘homonormative’ politics has emerged. The term homonormativity was coined by Duggan (2002) to account for why there had been such a rapid shift in the social and legal position of homosexuality since the late 1990s. Precisely because she described this ‘new homonormativity’ as an expression of the sexual politics of neoliberalism, Duggan’s work (2002, p. 179) has provoked new debates about the relationship between economic relations and sexual lives. Contemporary austerity policies certainly appear to look favourably on stable couples (of any sexuality) that have the capacity and resources to secure each other’s well-being with minimal reliance on state welfare provision (Di Feliciantonio and Brown 2015). However, my own work and others’ (Brown 2009, 2012; Wilkinson 2017) has questioned analyses that understand either neoliberalism and/or homonormativity as all-encompassing, and has sought to identify the diverse economic relations that underpin and are reproduced by contemporary sexual cultures and politics. I believe that it is essential to reconsider too strong a link between homonormativity and neoliberalism. I see two main reasons for this: first, to acknowledge that normative expressions of homosexuality predate the entrenchment of neoliberal policies; and, second, ‘to suggest that the social norms attributed to homonormativity are complex and multiple, without a single point of origin or form of expression’ (Brown 2015, p. 552). I believe it is theoretically and politically problematic to see either neoliberalism or, by extension, homonormativity as all-encompassing (Brown 2009). Such theorizations tend to overlook the diversity of other social relationships and economic practices that shape contemporary LGBTQ lives. In the spirit of the diverse economies approach (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2008), I prefer to consider homonormativity not as a homogeneous phenomenon, but as a heterogeneous assemblage of different components and trajectories (Brown 2019). Over the last decade (Brown 2009, 2012), I have built on work in the diverse economies tradition (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2008; Gibson-Graham et al. 2013) to challenge ‘paranoid readings’ of homonormativity and to recognize the diversity of economic practices and relations that shape the lived experience of sexuality and sexual politics. Just as Gibson-Graham’s work has sought to proliferate and broaden the vocabulary of economic processes, with the intention of unsettling dominant approaches to ‘the (capitalist) economy’, so I have argued that sexual lives are shaped by (and reproduce) economic relations other than ones which are obviously

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438  The handbook of diverse economies ‘neoliberal’. For example, I examined the complex mixture of (often part-time) waged labour, self-provisioning, small scale production for sale, and networks of barter and resource sharing that enabled a network of lesbian and gay ‘back to the land’ enthusiasts to support themselves and fit into rural communities in England and Wales in the 1980s (Brown 2015). By making the diverse economies of those lesbian and gay households and intentional communities visible, my work sought to challenge narratives of LGBTQ lives which too closely associate them with particular urban-based regimes of capitalist consumption. Similarly, Eleanor Wilkinson’s (2017) work on the diverse economies of online pornography seeks to open up space to support people’s struggles to become different kinds of economic subjects, by recognizing and affirming those economic relations that exist outside and alongside the corporate production of pornography In the cases discussed below I continue to read for difference at the intersection of diverse sexualities and economies.

COMMONING DATING AND HOOK-UP APPS In recent decades, online dating sites and apps have expanded rapidly. There now exist an astonishing range of different websites and apps that are designed to assist people in meeting everyone from casual sexual partners to prospective spouses. Just as the range of digital dating apps has proliferated, so their social significance has increased. While, in the USA and Europe, most couples in long-term committed relationships continue to meet through mutual friends, the proportion who have met online has increased rapidly. Figures provided by a major online dating service (eHarmony, n.d.) suggest that 20 per cent of current committed relationships in the USA began online. While this figure is significant, it is a useful reminder that dating apps are not (yet) ubiquitous and there remains diversity in the ways people meet each other for sex, companionship and romance. People of all sexualities use dating apps, but there is a common perception that LGBTQ people have been early adopters of online dating services and have helped to develop the field (Mowlabocus 2010). For this reason, I have chosen to interrogate the diverse economies implicated in the uses of the Grindr hook-up app for gay and bisexual men. While the app has developed according to a specific business model of monetizing users’ interactions with it (which could be understood as shaping sexual subjectivities through market relations), I believe the app affords a far wider range of economic practices between users, and I focus below on how it enables forms of commoning (see Chapter 31 by Kruzynski, Chapter 34 by Kennedy, and Chapter 35 by Erdem in this volume; Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). Initially, Grindr did little to directly advertise its app and was mostly promoted via word of mouth. Like many similar apps, Grindr’s business model delivers a twin-track product. There is the standard, free app which allows users to see which other men are around in their locality, and enables basic communication between them. The premium app displays more users, has additional features, and provides a user-experience uninterrupted by advertisements. Grindr generates three-quarters of its income from premium subscribers and the other 25 per cent from advertisers. Many advertisers are local businesses providing services for gay men. Over time, the maturity of the service and the data science have allowed the company to develop its services and business model. Data mining and analysis of chat conversations revealed that men were not just engaged in flirting and sex talk, but asking for travel recommendations and generally socializing. These facts already begin to reveal some of the diverse

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Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies  439 economic practices that are afforded by the application and which exceed both its intended functionality and the company’s initial business model. While dating and hook-up apps may have reshaped the meanings and experiences of sexual intimacy for many people (but, perhaps, especially gay man) (Race 2015), they also afford other forms of interactions and connections between users. In addition to the marketized relations encouraged by the in-app advertising, they also facilitate other transactions – affording potential clients to meet sex workers, as well as various forms of exchange for recreational drugs. Alongside these informal and potentially illicit markets, there is increasing evidence that men use hook-up apps to find and share information, including finding accommodation and employment. In these ways, the apps can function as a repository of knowledge held in common. Access to knowledge commons can be particularly important for LGBTQ individuals in the aftermath of natural disasters or conflict (Ong 2017). Frequently, such uses of the apps are user-initiated, but Grindr has responded to these improvisations through its corporate social responsibility initiative, ‘Grindr for Equality’, to enable displaced LGBTQ people to contact safe and appropriate services in crisis contexts. Whilst apps like Grindr might provide a platform with which people can interact in a diverse set of ways –­ facilitating a wide range of direct exchange, sharing and even a form of communing ­– these unanticipated interactions are still mined and monetized by the app developers and their advertisers. These are paradoxical spaces. They can be read in paranoid ways, as reinforcing the marketization of homoerotic desire. They can also be read to reveal that the sexual morality that underpins same-sex relationships after marriage equality is more complex and nuanced than might appear. The challenge, then, is to explore how the diverse economies that occur through these platforms can be proliferated and made more visible in ways that trouble and rework ‘homonormative’ socio-sexual relationships, opening space for subjectivities shaped by collective commons.

PREP AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMIES Since the beginnings of the AIDS pandemic, the boundaries between scientific expertise and lay, community knowledge has been constantly blurred (Epstein 1996). So too have the economic relations through which research, prevention and care have been funded and provided. In the 1980s, community organizing by LGBTQ people and their allies devised and spread information about safer sex practices to prevent the spread of HIV; communities organized collective care for the sick and dying; and activist groups lobbied biomedical researchers and the pharmaceutical industries to pursue new lines of research and enrol patients onto experimental drug trials (Brown 1997). In the contemporary period, better understanding of the HIV virus and greatly enhanced drug treatments have both significantly improved the survival rates of people living with HIV and opened up options for preventing new infections. It is now understood that a person with HIV who is sufficiently adherent to anti-retroviral drug treatments, such that the virus becomes undetectable in their bloodstream, cannot transmit HIV through sexual contact (Traeger et al. 2018). Similarly, since 2014 public health agencies in the USA (and elsewhere) have recommended that HIV-negative people should take Truvada, an anti-retroviral treatment, as a Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent infection. There is clearly a political economy of HIV treatment and prevention in the contemporary period (Di Feliciantonio 2017). Many arguments have been made for the cost effectiveness of

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440  The handbook of diverse economies PrEP compared to the long-term treatment of HIV infection (Nosyk et al. 2015). There is also a significant debate, internationally, about the patenting and ownership of HIV treatments by the large pharmaceutical companies. Truvada is produced by Gilead Sciences whose reported income was in excess of US$4 billion in 2017. While finalizing this chapter, the UK High Court overturned Gilead’s patent extension on Truvada. The wide variation in the accessibility of PrEP through official health services means that in much of the global North many people who might benefit from using this prophylaxis resort to buying the drugs (often in generic form) privately over the internet. In the UK, when the National Health Service was stalling on the approval of PrEP, activists set up the IWantPrEPNow website to connect people who would benefit from taking PrEP with extra-territorial pharmacies selling generic versions of the drug. The website makes no charge for brokering this service and can be understood as part of the infrastructure of solidarity pharmaceutical economies. The role of PrEP activists and advocacy groups in these complex economies requires some further analysis. In many ways, the actions of PrEP advocates replicate and rework the strategies used by AIDS activists since the 1980s – campaigning for access to the latest medication through clinical trials and mainstream health services; challenging pharmaceutical corporations over their control over patented medication; and facilitating individual ‘patients’ to access cheaper, generic medication when other options are closed to them (Brown 1997; Epstein 1996). There are parallels here with the ‘buyers clubs’ that were formed in the 1980s to facilitate the cheap, bulk-buying of experimental drugs and treatments that had not yet been approved for distribution through official prescribing mechanisms (Lindemann 1994). The height of the AIDS crisis destabilized the ways in which many gay men experienced their subjectivities. At a time when life expectancy seemed very limited, gay men experimented with a variety of solidarity economies in the hope that they offered a means of survival. The internet has altered how the successors to those solidarity economies now operate. The growth of PrEP advocacy websites and social media campaigns (whether they are formally provided by activist groups, charitable organizations and NGOs, or online pharmacies), has created and sustained a knowledge commons that facilitates widespread information sharing and education about what PrEP is, the epidemiological benefits it provides, how to take it safely and effectively, as well as how to access the medication. PrEP is recommended for use by people who are at risk of contracting HIV infection. This means, effectively, that it is recommended for people who are already having ‘unprotected’ sex with people who are HIV+. However, PrEP and other advances in treatment as prevention also mean that more gay and bisexual men are learning to worry less about having sex without a condom. In many ways, it is the knowledge commons surrounding PrEP advocacy that is helping men to overcome the stigma and anxiety surrounding ‘raw sex’ (Dean 2015). This presents another paradox in relation to debates surrounding homonormativity. On the one hand, PrEP users are acting as ‘responsible’ individual consumers buying access to medication through transnational markets and supply chains. On the other hand, by allowing themselves to safely dispose of condom use, these men are challenging existing community norms about what it means to be a ‘responsible gay man’ (whilst drawing on commoned knowledge and skill sharing within the community to do so).

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Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies  441

CONCLUSION Sex and sexuality are mediated by both vernacular and expert language (Dean 2015). This is as true of how we discuss the economic relations that shape our sexualities as it is of the intimate naming of sex acts. The two case studies in this chapter explore technologies that are central to the lives of gay men who might be considered to benefit from contemporary homonormative social relations. Homonormativity is considered to be an expression of the sexual politics of neoliberalism (often in quite a reductive way) (Duggan 2002). By examining these technologies – hook-up apps, such as Grindr, and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis as a preventative treatment against HIV infection – through a diverse economies perspective it is possible to identify and appreciate how their use and functionality does more than replicate neoliberal economic relations and governmentalities. By reading these technologies for economic diversity, it is possible to open up a discursive and practical space for ways of creating value and meeting economic needs that complicate dominant assumptions about ‘the homonormative’. My argument is not that many practices related to hook-up apps or PrEP are not homonormative, but that their diverse economies might also foster other subjectivities than those normally associated with homonormative social relations. This discussion has in part been shaped by debates surrounding homonormativity, but the two case studies were chosen precisely because they do not simply affect the lives of gay men. While debates surrounding PrEP (and the creation of solidarity economies in relation to it) have often been led by gay men, the medication benefits anyone who is at risk of HIV infection. Similarly, Grindr is widely used by bisexual men and trans people in addition to gay men. Whilst this user population clearly shapes the forms of commoning, and informal (or illicit) exchange that the app facilitates, it is also a productive example for exploring how dating apps in general might foster diverse economic relations. The diverse economies approach highlights the range of different ways in which people engage in economic practices and relationships in order to satisfy their needs. It is useful to think of sex and intimacy within this context and to recognize how they too have a recursive relationship to economic relations. By bringing a wider range of economic practices into view, critical sexuality scholars can develop the capacity to see contemporary sexual lives shaped by more than just neoliberalism. Thinking about the diversity of economic practices and social relations that might be associated with contemporary sexual politics, globally, might help move academic and activist debates beyond either singular frames of reference (e.g. homonormativity) or reductive binaries that imagine a sharp distinction between two worlds, one that is ‘tolerant’, egalitarian and inclusive, and another that is shaped by conservative attitudes. Just as economic relations are more diverse than debates about the all-encompassing spectre of neoliberalism might suggest, so too is contemporary sexual politics.

NOTE 1.

While these social changes have been a source of optimism and comfort for many; these gains have not been enjoyed universally and have provoked a political backlash at various spatial scales, such that some commentators believe that attitudes to sexual politics have become a major fault line in international relations (Altman and Symons 2016).

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442  The handbook of diverse economies

REFERENCES Altman, D. and J. Symons (2016), Queer Wars, Cambridge: Polity Press. Berlant, L. and M. Warner (2002), ‘Sex in public’, in M. Warner (ed.), Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books, pp. 187–208. Brown, G. (2009), ‘Thinking beyond homonormativity: Performative explorations of diverse gay economies’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 41, 1496–510. Brown, G. (2012), ‘Homonormativity: A metropolitan concept that denigrates “ordinary” gay lives’, Journal of Homosexuality, 59 (7), 1065–72. Brown, G. (2015), ‘Rethinking the origins of homonormativity: The diverse economies of rural gay life in England and Wales in the 1970s and 1980s’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40 (4), 549–61. Brown, G. (2019), ‘From nowhere: Provincializing gay life’, Droits et Cultures, 77 (1), 129–43. Brown, M.P. (1997), Replacing Citizenship: AIDS Activism and Radical Democracy, New York: Guilford Press. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge. Dean, T. (2015), ‘Mediated intimacies: Raw sex, Truvada, and the biopolitics of chemoprophylaxis’, Sexualities, 18 (1/2), 224–46. Di Feliciantonio, C. (2017), ‘The political economy of gay sex under homonormativity: Bareback, PrEP, and welfare provision’, Society and Space, accessed 20 June 2018 at http://​societyandspace​.org/​ 2017/​10/​31/​the​-political​-economy​-of​-gay​-sex​-under​-homonormativity​-bareback​-prep​-and​-welfare​ -provision/​. Di Feliciantonio, C. and G. Brown (2015), ‘Introduction: The sexual politics of austerity’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14 (4), 965–74. Duggan, L. (2002), ‘The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of neoliberalism’, in R. Castronovo and D.D. Nelson (eds), Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–94. eHarmony (n.d.), ‘10 online dating statistics you should know’, eHarmony, accessed 18 June 2018 at https://​www​.eharmony​.com/​online​-dating​-statistics/​. Epstein, S. (1996), Impure Science: AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lindemann, E. (1994), ‘Importing AIDS drugs: Food and Drug Administration Policy and its limitations’, George Washington Journal of International Law and Economics, 28 (3), 133–69. Mowlabocus, S. (2010), Gaydar Culture: Gay Men, Technology and Embodiment in the Digital Age, London: Routledge. Nosyk, B., J.E. Min, V.D. Lima, R.S. Hogg, J.S. Montaner and STOP HIV/AIDS Study Group (2015), ‘Cost-effectiveness of population-level expansion of highly active antiretroviral treatment for HIV in British Columbia, Canada: A modelling study’, The Lancet HIV, 2 (9), e393–e400. Ong, J.C. (2017), ‘Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone: “My Grindr became the United Nations”’, International Communication Gazette, 79 (6–7), 656–73. Race, K. (2015), ‘Speculative pragmatism and intimate arrangements: Online hook-up devices in gay life’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 17 (4), 496–511. Richardson, D. (2005), ‘Desiring sameness? The rise of a neoliberal politics of normalization’, Antipode, 37, 515–35. Sedgwick, E.K. (1994), Tendencies, New York: Routledge. Traeger, M.W., S.E. Schroeder, E.J. Wright, M.E. Hellard, V.J. Cornelisse, J.S. Doyle, and M.A. Stoove (2018), ‘Effects of pre-exposure prophylaxis for the prevention of human immunodeficiency virus infection on sexual risk behavior in men who have sex with men: A systematic review and meta-analysis’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 67 (5), 676–86.

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Diverse subjectivities, sexualities and economies  443 Wilkinson, E. (2017), ‘The diverse economies of online pornography: From paranoid readings to post-capitalist futures’, Sexualities, 20 (8), 981–98.

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49. Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation: a shared narrative of scholars from the majority world Anmeng Liu, S.M. Waliuzzaman, Huong Thi Do, Ririn Haryani and Sonam Pem

INTRODUCTION What does it mean to be a subject of development? And how might a perspective based on economic diversity begin to alter subjectivity? Development is the dominant regime in this globalized contemporary world. It has complex connotations and problematic implications for our subjectivities, as five majority world scholars studying in the minority world country of New Zealand. Prior to taking up study in New Zealand, we have had rich experiences as practitioners in fields related to development work. Waliuzzaman worked in Bangladesh as an urban planner focusing on land rights at the international NGO ActionAid, and has degrees from a reputable public university in Bangladesh, as well as a Master’s degree from Manchester University. Do served as a government official in Vietnam, specializing in environmental science and technology with an interest in monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation projects, with science degrees from the Vietnam National University. Haryani was a programme officer at ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance, her rich experience in disaster management in Indonesia supported by an undergraduate degree in international relations from Gadjah Mada University and a Master’s degree in public policy from the University of Melbourne. Pem was a government official in Bhutan, working on farm mechanization, agricultural research and policy development; she gained an undergraduate degree in science from Allahabad Agricultural Institute of India before coming to New Zealand to complete a Master’s in water resource management. Together with Liu, an experienced auto-ethnographer from China with an undergraduate degree from the National University of Singapore, we take this opportunity to reflect on our complex transitions from subjects desiring development to critical scholars of postdevelopment, partly through interaction with critical tools and ideas emerging from diverse economies literature. Our diverse backgrounds have somehow cohered in a shared experience, as international students in a geography department in New Zealand. Like the co-authored article of an earlier iteration of this reading group (Dombroski et al. 2018), we have decided to study our own experiences of subject transformation using an autoethnographic method. We began with writing our own responses to a piece by Nandy Shrestha (1995), describing his transition from wide-eyed subject of developing Nepal to critical post-colonial scholar wondering what he – and his country – had missed in feverishly chasing the goal of development. We share his concern with regards to the neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism imposed by contemporary development discourses. We identified with his description of the way that hegemonic development discourses have also colonized the minds of many scholars and policymakers from 444 Anmeng Liu, S.M. Waliuzzaman, Huong Thi Do, Ririn Haryani and Sonam Pem - 9781788119962 08:03:02PM

Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation  445 the majority world, making it difficult to think of alternatives. We recognized the affects he describes: a sense of oppression, inferiority, shame and all sorts of negative feelings due to the systematic exclusion of traditional and indigenous values and knowledges originating in our own societies. The devaluation of our being and our knowledge has not only made our own academic journey a constant struggle, but also to a greater extent limited our imagination and vision for seeing the potentialities for social change that are already present. In this chapter we narrate three moments where our own subject transformation became possible: in noticing, revaluing and reconnecting we were able to shift affectively and see things differently, enabling different sorts of possibilities for postdevelopment interventions that might ‘make other worlds possible’ (Roelvink et al. 2015).

WE, THE SUBJECTS OF DEVELOPMENT The work environments in our home countries unilaterally fixate on development. Indeed, it seems blasphemous in these contexts to question the role of development in change-making. It has brought extravagant lifestyles to people in the upper echelons of the majority world. In the minds of many decision-makers, belief in Western-style development is unquestioned – it has become a deeply ingrained desire. In earlier days, we clearly visualized ‘Development’ with his often assumed pals ‘Urbanization’ and ‘Industrialization’. We imagined high rise private real estate development, massive billboards, busy traffic and glamorous advertisements for a modern lifestyle. It was hard to resist the glossy images on the billboards and luxurious advertisements in airports and malls that represented abundance. These representations seduce and conquer minds, leading to what Shrestha has called a ‘monolithic culture of materialism’ (1995, p. 277), which not only creates a sense of poverty where none may have been sensed, but also ‘stigmatizes poverty and the poor’ (1995, p. 277). The devaluation of manual labour and indigenous economic activities, the loss of ‘social consciousness and humanity’ and the surrender of ‘national dignity and culture’ (1995, p. 277) are all aspects of Shrestha’s experience we can easily recognize. In a geography department in New Zealand, our diverse backgrounds were collectively referred to as ‘developing’, and in this we saw the way the heterogeneous and diverse people from the majority world could be ‘transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others’ “reality”’ (Esteva 2010, p. 2) and belittled as a homogeneous, narrow minority. But it is not only others that push us into this subject position: just as Nandy (1983) observes that the ravages of colonialism are the greatest in people’s minds rather than in the political or economic realm, so too does modernization and development colonize our minds in the post-colonial world. As the initial joy and thrill of ‘progress’ faded away, the long overlooked other side of the coin started to emerge (Frank 2018). From within, we started to notice the common feeling that ‘something is wrong’. Environmental degradation is no news where we come from – the exploitation that has fuelled economic growth in our home countries and in the minority world has taken its toll. For example, the River Thimphu in Bhutan is no longer held as priceless and the sense of belonging to the land and nature that once was at the core of community vitality has almost disappeared in some parts of the country (Pem 2018). In Bangladesh the underprivileged are displaced and further marginalized as the result of urbanization. Yet actions like slum eviction, dam construction or privatizing public spaces which have severe social and environmental consequences, seem justified in order to achieve ‘development targets’

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446  The handbook of diverse economies (Hossain 2008). In Vietnam indigenous knowledge and farming practices that have supported people for centuries are deemed to be backward and unscientific. This took one of us years of failed attempts at agricultural development in the field of Vietnam to realize (Dombroski and Do 2019). More importantly, a sense of powerlessness rose from within. As people from the majority world we wear an extra layer of shadow. We couldn’t help positioning ourselves as inferior to those from ‘the developed’ world that we are so used to aspiring to. As Haryani recalls: I was always mesmerized by the image of modern women from the minority world who seem to be independent, assertive and dominant as portrayed in the Hollywood movies . . . My thought was women in the majority world must lead with such strong agency to show that we are equal to men and elevate women’s suffering created by the patriarchy. My perspective was in line with hegemonic literature on feminism which has developed a misleading profile of women from the majority world, who are perceived as under-developed, as most of them are considered religious and family oriented.

The assumed powerlessness as one from the majority world by far took over other aspects of our lives – such as our class, gender or life course situations. Perhaps being educated in the Western context reinforced the struggle. For us, living with a second language is like living with a disability, and we struggle with things that everyone around us find easy to do. In some ways, our last bit of power and ease that we enjoyed as educated subjects in our home context was now taken away – we were silenced. We saw ourselves from what was lacking and we had lost the ability to appreciate what we possessed – an ability we probably never had. Suddenly, we are the periphery. We are the needy. We, together with our knowledge and experience, are somehow inferior and valueless. The one voice persisted, regardless of our diversity of backgrounds and experiences. The hierarchy was again consolidated. Yet we witnessed and embodied the pain induced by a universal development discourse. So, we asked, now what? How can we enable ourselves? Can we become different kinds of subjects?

ENCOUNTERING DIVERSE ECONOMIES The diverse economies framework offers a way to re-read the economy (and ourselves) ‘as always already diverse, as full of possibility’ (McKinnon et al. 2018, p. 343). It is like a pair of spectacles, enabling us to see the world in a different way, though it may take a while for our unaccustomed minds and bodies to adjust. The struggles in such an adjustment process are real – having lived the high-consumption lifestyle, and more importantly having witnessed the materialistic difference between the majority and minority world, we found ourselves deeply aspiring to live the lives of the minority. The fact that we – and others – know and recognize the destructive nature of capitalist development and its hidden costs does not offset its momentum. We were set back by our sense of powerlessness. The much needed and desired resubjectification of ourselves and others felt impossible given the monolithic representation of capitalism in today’s world. We came to see ourselves as posing the greatest challenges to the postdevelopment agenda. As ‘subjects who are constituted by development practices’ we were ‘reluctant to “become” anew’ (Gibson-Graham 2005, p. 20). Yet as we continued on our research journeys, we noticed that the empirical nature of mapping the diverse economies in our own countries provided multiple entry points for resubjectification. The inspirations of cases from all over the globe as well as those of our

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Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation  447 own fieldwork have provided us with examples of diverse economic practices and subjectivities outside of a capitalocentric analysis. With fresh ‘lenses’, we have begun to ‘start from where we are’ to see the diversity and possibilities step-by-step (Dombroski 2016). Looking back, we have been ‘involved in a micro-politics of self-transformation, cultivating ourselves and others as subjects who can identify with and undertake community economic projects’ (Gibson-Graham 2016, p. 299). In what follows, we recount three key moments during the journey – the moments of noticing, revaluing and reconnecting. These are not necessarily progressive stages as transformation occurs in all three moments. The Moment of Noticing Being open to seeing a diversity of economic activities is like wearing a different set of lenses that allows us to notice things we might previously have brushed over. Slums, for example, are overly associated with poverty and its residents are often assumed to be ‘squatters’ who are eager to flee. They are thus ‘disincentivized’ to invest in the maintenance of their dwellings and communal spaces. Through paying attention to diversity and entering with little in the way of assumptions, Waliuzzaman was able to notice the collective efforts people put into waste management in Kallyanpur Slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. When noticing how the streets of the slum were well-cared for, he was informed that the slum had its own community-based organization, which had developed a mechanism of shared waste management. Five pedal vans (rickshaws) were purchased from the contribution made by the slum dwellers. Then each household also provided 50 taka (US$ 0.60) per month that employed five individuals from the slum to collect waste from each household. If any household is not capable of paying their contribution, they can perform some additional tasks like fixing the tube-well or cleaning the toilets. In this way both monetary payments and in-kind payments were available for the service. The economic diversity that exists in slums is not just stop-gap efforts, but organized economic arrangements put in place for a better life. Since the city corporation does not provide any such service, the slum dwellers have stepped in to organize their space. Waliuzzaman was touched by the account of one of the residents: People think we are dirty. This slum is dirty. But this perception is not right. We do whatever we can to keep the slum neat and clean. We don’t want people to see trash here and there in this slum. We already face enough ignorance from outside people.

Indeed, primed by a diverse economy lens, he entered the field with the ability to notice. As Waliuzzaman recalls: I probably might not have noticed how these initiatives are also a part of the greater economy, if I had not come across the concept of diverse economies. Now that I am more capable to notice the diversity in the economy, as a researcher I seek to represent that diversity in various ways like maps, graphics, info-graphs and through many more visual platforms so that these hidden aspects of our society can be seen, felt and action can be taken to create space for them. I take inspiration from the slum dwellers of Dhaka, who despite facing extreme economic hardship, are supporting the economy of the city by creating space for a diverse range of economic practices where these practices are often driven by the motive of collective survival rather than profit gain.

Widespread well-being can be achieved when we consciously defeat the seductive power of the ‘glamorous’ notion of development, noticing how others work together to make an

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448  The handbook of diverse economies inclusive society not through competition but through a traditional spirit of shared existence. Noticing is enabled through a curious stance that does not presume homogeneity. The Moment of Revaluing In addition to starting to notice as we enter the field afresh, some of us find and revalue ‘fresh fields’ in old spaces. As researchers, we were also accustomed to the global hegemony based on a Western genealogy of history, under which diverse forms of social life have been forced to surrender to a single monoculture of progress towards ‘modernity’. With fresh lenses, we capture things that we are used to, that we once neglected or despised as not fitting in that story of modernity we desired to participate in. Haryani from Indonesia feels this way when looking at the arisan system (Gibson et al. 2018). She was born in 1980s Indonesia when the New Order regime imposed detailed and ambitious five-year development plans focused on modernization of the economy through market privatization and liberalization, encouraged by the IMF and the World Bank. In this context of burgeoning supermarkets and modern forms of consumption, traditional activities that do not produce economic growth were seen as decidedly backward. For example, arisan is a rotating credit system (see Chapter 39 by Hossein in this volume) which has been practised in Indonesia over hundreds of years. It is believed to have travelled from China through a process of acculturation with Orang Asli (Indigenous Indonesians). Members of the arisan agree on how many people will join, the money to be contributed each time, and the number of winners per round. The arisan is considered finished when everyone has had their turn winning the pool of money contributed by each person each week. Arisan is a platform for the community to care for each other by sharing their stories and helping others. There is no credit interest charged and if the member who needs the funds most wants to swap their turn with the winner, they simply ask whether the winner is willing. It is one of the financing sources for community members, both in rural and urban areas, which offers care and assistance during disruptive times, such as sudden financial burdens following family members’ accidents or death. In revisiting arisan as a useful economic practice, Haryani is seeing a fresh new field with the lenses of diverse economy and postdevelopment: Shrestha’s work on the dark side of development reminded me to stop and start re-thinking about how development has affected and changed our relations with community and sense of care for each other. As part of the modern generation, I used to perceive arisan as a wasting time activity where women gather for gossiping, and I would rather put my money in the bank that offers me high interest rate. The question is whether the materialistically driven economy offered by development can survive during disruptive times. It was in 1998 when the economic crisis hit Indonesia the hardest where all the financial institutions were affected, and many collapsed. For those who relied on the bank financing system, many lost their assets during the crisis. In fact, resilience mainly derives from the sense of caring for each other that enables the community to bounce back better and quicker than those where social capital is lacking. Is it possible to have prosperity with care for each other through development?

As we open ourselves up to acknowledging the value of diverse economic practices, we come to see our own communities differently, as valuable in their own right and not as mere precursors to some developed, modern, homogeneous future. We begin to ask ourselves how we might reconnect with these valuable practices, in order to protect, enhance and share them.

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Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation  449 The Moment of Reconnecting Revaluing not only involves practices and values that we are accustomed to neglecting, but also a revaluing of and reconnecting with ourselves and the communities we work with. With ethical concerns deeply embedded in diverse economy theory, we refocus on multiple ways of engaging with traditional values, theories, practices as well as people. As researchers, we shift from making policy recommendations to seeing ourselves as capable of taking actions. We are thus able to enact as well as embrace the possibility to resist the encroaching hegemonic tale of Modernity, by refocusing on what is already happening in place. For some of us, resubjectification happened in the form of decolonization. Bhutan, following its long Buddhist tradition, put ‘Gross National Happiness’ (GNH) before ‘Gross Domestic Product’ in 1972 (Ura et al. 2012), long before the critical reflection on GDP drew attention from Western scholars. Pem has almost ten years of experience working in the agricultural department of Bhutan. She noticed that despite the outward value of GNH, ‘the connection with nature was next to absent’. Through being exposed to training in the management of water resources, people in Bhutan were gradually losing respect for the river that they once connected to, treating water as primarily a commodity for consumption. Her research found that some people had stopped caring about what was being disposed in the river – indeed, sewage and toxic industrial wastewater was flowing directly into the Thimphu River, the health of which was declining rapidly. As Pem pondered how she might address these concerns, she turned away from Western managerial frameworks and focused on GNH, and the Buddhist values it was built on. In her research, she reconnected with the human– nature interdependence that was very much valued in Buddhist texts, known by the Bhutanese simply as ‘the way of living’. Because environmental conservation and the preservation and promotion of culture are two of the four pillars of GNH, there were values already present to reconnect with in her research. As she worked with community groups and individuals, Pem was conscious of discussing the possibility of reconnecting community and nature, which can give the pursuit of happiness a deeper meaning. Her research became an intervention and ‘a site of ethical action’ for ‘surviving well together’, trying to enable a better capacity to ‘connect and care’ and to act collectively (Gibson-Graham et al. 2015). Similarly, a postdevelopment approach built on revaluing farmers’ embodied knowledges in a diverse economy enabled Do to reconnect with the people around her that she was accustomed to neglecting. Do had been working in government organizations for more than nine years, in a job where all proposals are evaluated against a set of scientific criteria. She attributes her deeply rooted belief in the superior knowledge claims of science and technology to her communist training and upbringing. For her, spiritual and religious beliefs have been understood as backward, impractical and easily deployed for manipulation. With such a mindset, she faced significant setbacks entering the field for the first time. She failed to recognize the value in seemingly ‘superstitious’ beliefs based on traditional knowledges for some time. It became clear, after what she calls ‘on the ground failure’ that traditional knowledges and ‘superstitions’ are what lead farmers to adapt to extreme climate events like floods. Eventually, she found herself able to respect and connect with not only her farmer participants but also her relatives who farm for a living. By learning to value their knowledge, which benefited her research project tremendously, she was also able to value personal engagements and connections with people from all walks in life. Here we see a fundamental value shift – in shifting from seeing farmers as ‘the backward and lacking victims of underdevelopment’ to

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450  The handbook of diverse economies being capable and knowledgeable agents, she embraced a politics based on ‘a vision of the subjects as full of potentiality rather than lack’ (Gibson et al. 2001). The reconnection to what is valuable in our societies helps us to see the agency of not only ourselves but also our fellow people of the majority world. We noticed the agency of workers in a Bangladeshi cooperative. We reflected on women’s alternative leadership in Indonesia’s disaster management. We let farmers’ knowledge steer the direction of a project in Vietnam. We see our collective efforts making a difference, from small examples like this piece of co-produced knowledge. A community is in the making, as embedded agency is made visible in those who were once only the ‘subjects of development’.

CONCLUSION The narratives we include here may come across as situationally contingent, yet it is not hard to sense that whatever stage we might be at individually, we are on a similar journey of escaping the trap of development fetishism. Essentially, it has been a journey of growing aware and then learning to unlearn the Western values and development thinking that has colonized us. By engaging in our own research with a diverse economy take on postdevelopment, and by collaborating in this essay of shared narratives, we start to see the commonalities in our resubjectification journeys. By sharing all these self-revealing reflective narratives with an even wider audience, we see a collective in the making. We see a priceless space of possibilities opening up as we empower ourselves to re-embrace our subjectivities as researchers from the majority world, however challenging and painful it might be. Seeing the diverse economic activities ‘out there’ is a means rather than an end. It is an entry point to a resubjectification journey that involves a fundamental shift in value. How we see ourselves is as important as, if not more than, how we see the world. After all, as Roelvink et al. (2015) remind us, believing is seeing. The lens provided by the diverse economy approach enables us to notice the long neglected alternatives, laying the foundation for revaluing and enacting change. It is never easy to regain our belief of self-worth as young scholars born and raised in a world dominated by capitalocentric discourses and power laden hierarchies, as people who received Western education, as people who benefited directly from unequal development. Even up until now we can still find ourselves torn as we are negotiating with a world such as this. The journey may never end, yet the reflection itself perhaps matters more than the final outcome. We are sure that other young scholars from the majority world engaging in diverse economies and postdevelopment research will embark on journeys similar to ours. We greet you, friends, and stand with you in potentially reluctant resubjectification.

REFERENCES Dombroski, K. (2016), ‘Seeing diversity, multiplying possibility: My journey from post-feminism to post-development with J.K. Gibson-Graham’, in W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 312–28. Dombroski, K. and H.T. Do (2019), ‘The affect of effect: An affirmative political ecology of local embodied knowledge for monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation interventions’, Nordia Geographical Publications, 47 (5), 7–20.

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Journeys of postdevelopment subjectivity transformation  451 Dombroski, K., A. Watkins, H. Fitt, J. Frater, J. Turkovic, K. Banwell, K. McKenzie, L. Mutambo, K. Hawke, F. Persendt, S.Y. Ko and D. Hart (2018), ‘Journeying from “I” to “we”: Assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 42 (1), 80–93. Esteva, G. (2010), ‘Development’, in W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, London: Zed Books, pp. 1–23. Frank, A.G. (2018), ‘The development of underdevelopment’, in P.F. Klarén and T.J. Bossert (eds), Promise of Development: Theories of Change in Latin America, New York: Routledge, pp. 111–23. Gibson, K., R. Astuti, M. Carnegie, A. Chalernphon, K. Dombroski, A.R. Haryani, A. Hill, B. Kehi, L. Law and I. Lyne (2018), ‘Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59 (1), 3–16. Gibson, K., L. Law and D. McKay (2001), ‘Beyond heroes and victims: Filipina contract migrants, economic activism and class transformations’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (3), 365–86. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2005), ‘Surplus possibilities: Postdevelopment and community economies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26 (1), 4–26. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2016), ‘Building community economies: Women and the politics of place’, in W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 287–311. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2015), ‘Pursuing happiness: The politics of surviving well together’, in D. Pike, C. Nelson and G. Ledvinka (eds), On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, pp. 116–31. Hossain, S. (2008), ‘Rapid urban growth and poverty in Dhaka City’, Bangladesh e-Journal of Sociology, 5, e1–e24. McKinnon, K., K. Dombroski and O. Morrow (2018), ‘The diverse economy: Feminism, capitalocentrism and postcapitalist futures’, in J. Elias and A. Roberts (eds), Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 335–51. Nandy, A. (1983), The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pem, S. (2018), ‘Negotiating gross national happiness as community economy: A case study on the Thimphu River’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Canterbury, Christchurch. Roelvink, G., K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds) (2015), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shrestha, N. (1995), ‘Becoming a development category’, in J.S. Crush (ed.), Power of Development, New York and London; Routledge, pp. 266–77. Ura, K., S. Alkire, T. Zangmo and K. Wangdi (2012), A Short Guide to Gross National Happiness Index, Thimphu: The Centre for Bhutan Studies.

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50. Framing essay: diverse economies methodology Gerda Roelvink

INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING METHODOLOGY A core motivation for doing diverse economies research is to make new worlds and ways of being possible. Central to this work has been ‘imagining’ postcapitalist futures and ‘enacting’ these futures here and now through research interventions. As this volume indicates, diverse economies research includes a wide range of different kinds of projects encompassing a vast geographic area. So how does this imagining and enacting take place? Is there a diverse economies methodology that is common to these different projects? Before considering what is distinctive about the diverse economies methodology, the central focus of this chapter, the term methodology itself requires some consideration. This term is somewhat tricky to cover quickly as it goes to the heart of one’s understanding of what research is all about. A typical research methods textbook would define methodology as the broader strategy, plan of action, system or process of choosing certain methods (the tools of collecting and analysing data) and justifying their use. Methodology thus shapes the entire research process. Going a bit further, however, we can see that methodology is tied to certain assumptions about the world, and the goals and desires attached to research itself. In his book After Method, John Law (2004), for example, draws attention to the desire ‘for certainty’, for ‘stable conclusions’, and for ‘generality’ often attached to the research process: The implication is that method hopes to act as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible way with reality, and allow us to return more or less quickly from that reality to our place of study with findings that are reasonably secure, at least for the time being. (Law 2004, pp. 9–10)

Law argues that there is often an assumption that a methodology will provide the researcher with a process to discover the reality of an issue (note that this reality is typically singular). And following the right process serves to ‘limit the risks’ of getting this reality wrong (Law 2004, p. 9). This assumption relates to the epistemological position of the researcher, that is, how the researcher seeks to understand the world. Epistemological realism lies behind the understanding of methodology as a way to discover and reflect a reality that exists separate from our perception of it. Another common assumption associated with this approach is that we can adequately know and describe a ‘singular’ world and all the people within it through research (DeMartino 2013; Smith 1999). Critical left scholarship, while often debunking so called ‘status quo’ research (Harvey 1973), claims to get to the ‘root’ of social issues, and thus also draws on a kind of epistemological realism for its authority. There are a whole host of Western or minority world assumptions that are often not acknowledged but rather infused with this kind of approach to research; assumptions to do with the rules of doing research and standards of knowledge believed to serve ‘mankind’ (Law 453 Gerda Roelvink - 9781788119962 08:03:06PM

454  The handbook of diverse economies 2004, p. 5; Smith 1999, p. 2). These assumptions go further than those discussed above in that they tie epistemological realism to practices of power. For Indigenous peoples, for example, research has become a ‘dirty word’ as ‘the pursuit of knowledge is [seen to be] deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices’ (Smith 1999, p. 2). Here research practice is placed within the broader institutions and governance of social life, including universities, the state, the media, schools and more (Smith 1999, pp. 7–8). As Linda Tuhiwai Smith puts it ‘In a very real sense research has been an encounter between the West and the Other’ (1999, p. 8). Indigenous scholars’ work poses a daunting challenge to the assumptions researchers make about the contribution of their research, particularly for those researchers who want to use research to make the world a better place (see Chapter 55 by Waitoa and Dombroski in this volume; Cameron and Wright 2014). In addition to epistemological realism and power wielded through research, Law and other researchers (see DeMartino 2013) identify a further methodological challenge: understandings of methodology that assume a stable, unchanging and clearly identifiable world are not useful for engaging with deeply complex issues and problems. And surely it is deeply complex issues and problems that diverse economies researchers are engaging with today. How to respond to climate change and other pressing environmental issues, for example, are some of the most serious challenges diverse economies scholars have recently faced. Before jumping into action, we need to consider the question of how to respond in a time of uncertainty (but with the science of climate change increasingly certain). This is not only uncertainty about what the future will look like (have we already passed a climate tipping point which cannot be reversed?) but also ontological uncertainty in the present, a time when how to live well with known and unknown others on an unstable planet is unclear. So, do we try to reduce the complexity of the situation through our methodology in order to render a manageable scenario that can be tackled through technological innovation or might we stick with the uncertainty presented to us and see what new thinking it prompts (see DeMartino 2013)? When it comes to trying to master or manage complexity, scholarship shows that, ‘Simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent’ (Law 2004, p. 2). The more entangled things are, the less clear they become (Callon 1998). What is more, in a time of so much despair, when devastating global warming is probable, perhaps the possible is where hope lies (see Grabel 2018 on this distinction). The possible is, however, mostly unknown. This raises the question of how researchers might relate to unknown possibilities. Indeed, this is the big methodological challenge raised by Law (2004), and it prompts a certain amount of new learning. Writing in 2010, Gibson-Graham and I also pointed to the importance of new ways of learning for diverse economies scholars. Without an answer to the question of how to get ‘from an abstract ontological revisioning to a glimmer or a whiff of what to do on the ground’ (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010, p. 322), we wrote of experiencing a ‘spacious silence and a slowing down’: Silence and slowness are openings, of course, opportunities for the body to shift its stance, to meld a little more with its surroundings; chances for the mind to mull over what floats by on the affective tide, or to swerve from its course as momentum decreases. Undoubtedly these are openings for learning. Not learning in the sense of increasing a store of knowledge but in the sense of becoming other, creating connections and encountering possibilities that render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world. (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010, p. 322)

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Framing essay: diverse economies methodology  455 In a similar vein, Law suggests that new methods might be related to ‘embodiment’, ‘emotionality or apprehension’, ‘techniques of deliberate impression’, and ‘situated inquiry’ (Law 2004, p. 3). Yet, even with new methods Law argues that we need to go further when approaching the unknown: ‘There is no use in trying’, said Alice; ‘one can’t believe impossible things’. ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice’, said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast’. (Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, cited by Law 2004, p. 2)

Reflecting on the quote above from Alice in Wonderland, Law suggests that we need ‘metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable’ (2004, p. 6). Thus in opening up the space of methodology, Law hopes to make room for other, perhaps more radical, methods centred on uncertainty and the unknown, as well as being attentive to what kind of reality we are contributing to ‘performing’ with the methods we choose and use. Pushing the reader further to consider research as a ‘performative ontological practice’, he writes that methodology, and thus the ‘kinds of worlds we want to make’, is all ‘about a way of being’: It is about the kinds of social science we want to practise. And then, and as a part of this, it is about the kinds of people that we want to be, and about how we should live . . . Method goes with work, and ways of working, and ways of being. I would like us to work as happily, creatively and generously as possible in the social sciences. And to reflect on what it is to work well. (Law 2004, p. 10)

The research approach Law describes is very well aligned with the diverse economies research agenda because it deliberately attends to making new worlds and ways of being possible. Thinking the unthinkable, and engaging with complexity and the unknown to create new possibilities, is what diverse economies methodology is all about. Whether it is in relation to the unknown elements (non-capitalist) of economic life when capitalism is so often seen as the only game in town (capitalocentrism), or exploring the economic possibilities for living well with others in the Anthropocene, diverse economies methodology is grounded in an understanding of complexity and the overdetermined nature of life. As Rhyall Gordon (2014, p. 214) points out, this is not simply an acceptance of the unknown but rather it is tied to a very deliberate epistemological position of ‘overdetermination’, that is, acknowledging the multiple entry points to a problem, particularly refusing approaches based on pre-existing notions of what the economy is and how it is to be studied. Instead, economies are understood to be in process, full of moments of (potentially ethical) decision making. Having now considered the term methodology at some length, I begin to lay out the diverse economies methodology in the next section with a discussion of ethics. I also suggest that transformation, pluralism and placed-based experimentation with the economic world and the practices we want to proliferate are key characteristics of a diverse economies methodology. This methodology has several important implications which I then consider, focusing in particular on our knowledge of economy, the subjectivity of researchers and the kinds of economic intervention that are possible. The chapter concludes by noting some of the challenges likely to shape diverse economies methodology into the future.

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WHAT’S DISTINCTIVE? LAYING OUT A DIVERSE ECONOMIES METHODOLOGY ‘It’s All Ethics’ Diverse economies research gives up on control and mastery of the world in favour of a methodology centred on ethics (DeMartino 2013). By presenting an economy full of different forms of economic life, diverse economies research opens up a space of decision making and focuses on the possibilities that might emerge when diversity is foregrounded. It is within this space of possibility that diverse economies research sees the community economy emerging as a site of ethical decision making about the kinds of economic life that support coexistence. This ethical commitment to community economies is more recently formulated in the book Take Back the Economy (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013) as the ethics of surviving well with others in an interdependent world. It is this ethical commitment that guides the kind of research diverse economies scholars do, and in particular the worlds our research aims to contribute to. The ethical coordinates of community economies (surplus, necessity, consumption and the commons) become ‘analytical research tools’ (Gordon 2014, p. 211) within the diverse economies methodology; tools which enable the researcher to view and map the decision making constitutive of economic life: The four coordinates are all entangled, interdependent, both cause and effect to each other and perform multiple roles: they guide a process to rethinking economic practices; they reveal existing and potential ethical economic worlds; and they foster collective approaches to sustaining and building ethical economies. The coordinates allow for economic practices to be disentangled, for the decisions behind the practices [to be] unpacked and for the ethics that accompany both to be exposed. (Gordon 2014, p. 215)

Through the example of a cooperative furniture factory, Gordon shows how the coordinates can be used as tools to tease out the process of decision making about workers’ wages and the investment of surplus, and ultimately show that these decisions are informed by the needs of the local community and the environment, as well as those of workers. But the coordinates are not just ‘out there’ in the world waiting to be represented by researchers, they become more visible and widespread with research practices that look for them. In Take Back the Economy, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy (2013) formulate a series of ethical concerns based on these coordinates, asking: ‘How do we survive well?’, ‘How do we distribute surplus?’, ‘How do we encounter others as we seek to survive well?’, ‘What do we consume?’, ‘How do we care for our commons?’ and ‘How do we invest for the future?’ (2013, pp. xiii–xiv). Each of these concerns is accompanied by a range of methods for prompting and shaping debate in each area. Researchers and activists are invited to investigate economic diversity as an ethical terrain where decisions are made and different economic practices weighed against each other according to how they shape well-being broadly conceived. The working day, for example, is unpacked through a 24-hour clock for all the diverse economic activities the worker takes part in while at the same time viewing these activities through a well-being scorecard. Trade-offs are made clear and hard questions are raised about what makes a good life. In this way the methods used to inventory economic diversity are framed by community economy concerns. Given this ethical framework, it should be evident that diverse economies methodology is not neutral. The ethical commitments are

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Framing essay: diverse economies methodology  457 in fact held together by a political motivation, which brings me to the transformative aspect of diverse economies methodology. Transforming Economies While ethics might be the dominant characteristic of diverse economies methodology, diverse economies researchers also put the politics of research at the centre of their work, agreeing with Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who writes that ‘research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions’ (1999, p. 5). Taking a post-structural ontological view, diverse economies research goes further to state that research frames what is possible and what is impossible. We accept (with Law [2004] and others), that we are making some realities more real through our research and representation than others. Our first political priority is to make economic diversity more real and viable, particularly representing diverse economic practices that involve ethical action around one of the coordinates or concerns of a community economy. Cameron and Wright (2014) describe this as the process of ‘making visible’, such as making visible Indigenous harvesting practices (Buchanan 2014) or the vegetable yield possible in urban dwellings (Ghosh 2014). But this is making visible guided by a very different motivation than much research in political economy which, while also adopting a strategy to make visible, tends to expose and link various kinds of oppression to an underlying system of capitalism. The aggregate effect of this strategy can be to make political struggle seem futile (see Gibson-Graham 1996; Roelvink 2016). The aim of diverse economies research is to open up a politics of economic possibility, not close it down. This does not preclude researching oppressive capitalist as well non-capitalist practices, or indeed ethical capitalist alongside non-capitalist practices. Christina Jerne’s study of anti-mafia (and mafia) economies in this volume (Chapter 8) is a case in point, as is recent research by diverse economies scholars on the just and sustainable practices of a range of enterprises including multinational capitalist corporations and family businesses (Gibson-Graham et al. 2019). The methodological point to note is that we abandon any predetermined, pre-existing vision of what constitutes economic life and open to the possibilities that emerge from rich description. The idea that diverse economies research creates new possibilities is thus tied to an understanding of research as a performative practice. This understanding of performativity draws on linguistic understandings of the performative utterance and in particular how language can bring into being that which it names (Austin 1955). Economic linguistics is the focus of Tuomo Alhojärvi’s and Pieta Hyvärinen’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 51), where they open up economic language itself as a site of politics through the case study of the translation of diverse economy texts. While the linguistic utterance is important, its performative force involves many others, such as those who listen and respond to the utterance (see Roelvink 2016; Sedgwick 2003). Research that creates performative utterances or statements about economic diversity involves a whole arrangement of other things for these statements to be made real (see Callon 2007). These things include methods and their technologies, and also other researchers, activists, policymakers and so on. Michel Callon (2007, p. 319) describes all these relationships as ‘sociotechnical agencements’ while Law (2004) refers to a ‘method assemblage’. To see research as a performative practice is to thus broaden one’s understanding of research to include all those others involved (Callon 2007; Roelvink 2016). It also requires that we

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458  The handbook of diverse economies acknowledge the different power relationships in research. Diverse economies methodology attempts to recognize those involved in the research process and facilitate their participation as co-researchers so that they also have a say in how the research will unfold. In other words, diverse economies research is research with others rather than research on others. We have explored this through the idea of a hybrid research collective (DeMartino 2013; Roelvink 2016). Here it is not just the university researcher who is important but rather some of the most dramatic changes and insights can be forged through relationships with surprising participants including ginger, worms, bamboo and more. Thus Gordon (2014) describes diverse economies research as a process of ‘co-creation’ between the researcher and all else that is involved in the research process. Agency is understood to be distributed in a research collective made up of many diverse species, natures and things (see Chapter 44 by Miller in this volume). Building on a long history of activist research, Leo Hwang, in his chapter in this section (Chapter 57), argues that diverse economies action research projects aim to ‘generate agency’. Here the aim of knowledge generation with communities is to increase agency in contrast to research from a distance that examines communities for what they lack, ultimately disempowering them (Hwang, Chapter 57 in this volume). When the performativity of research and the wide range of actors involved is recognized, we can be more deliberate about the ways in which we work with others. Cameron and Wright (2014), for example, highlight the theme of collaboration in diverse economies scholarship and by taking up this theme intentionally research can be pushed out of its defined boundaries to encompass activities such as, in the case of Lyons’ (2014) research, setting up a medical clinic for the community with which one is researching. Experimenting with a Plurality of Methods The ethical nature and political agenda provide the overarching framework of diverse economies methodology. This framework also shapes the way in which particular research methods are chosen and practised. So, are there methods that are more suited to diverse economies research than others? The short answer is no. For diverse economies researchers no research method is viewed to have a privileged access to a predetermined reality. Describing this as a weak theory approach to research practice, Drake (Chapter 54 in this volume) suggests that diverse economies researchers suspend any assumptions about methods, detaching particular methods from their association with, for example, positivism, behaviourism or determinism. When methods are associated with a particular epistemological position they might be misjudged, deemed bad and perhaps excluded from the researcher’s toolkit from the outset. Drake argues, for example, that the association of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with positivism has had this effect – with some wrongly assuming that GIS necessarily treats people like objects, or ignores political and social issues. Debates about particular methods, such as about the positivist character of a particular method, tend to be blind to the important role of methodology in shaping the research process and how particular methods are used. It is methodology, rather than one’s method, that will determine the extent to which the research is positivist. Thus, it is vital that debates about method have at their core questions of methodology. When this approach is taken methods can be used for the possibilities they can help to produce without knowing what these might be in advance. Any method is thus, potentially, up for consideration. As Cameron and Wright (2014, p. 5) put it: ‘This means that the researchers are not tied to any one research method but use methods that might help chaperone particular

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Framing essay: diverse economies methodology  459 futures into being’. Indeed, a short look at the methods used by diverse economies scholars reveals a wide range: modelling, action research, observation, GIS, empirical description, quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, focus groups, reading for difference, assets based community development, translation, learning to be affected, to name just some. The choice of methods with which to generate unknown possibilities requires an experimental approach. This approach is very different from the controlled experimentation that comes to mind when we think of the physical sciences. As Cameron (2015, p. 101) describes it, experimentation involves research with others with an open mind to the outcome: Our experimental social research approach is not aimed at establishing and entrenching an end point and knowledge certainty. For a long time, the world will be changing and adapting around us, and we are going to have to respond and adjust. This understanding helps to take us away from the notion that our research has to be oriented towards determining whether things are a success or failure. Instead we will be experimenting in and with an ever-changing and uncertain world that is going to throw up surprises some of which will seem to stymie possibilities but some of which will offer new possibilities. As experimental social researchers these are the possibilities we need to be attuned to and responsive to.

This does not mean that diverse economies work is small scale (Cameron 2015), although scale is something this approach rethinks through methodology as the next discussion explores. Placed-Based, Nitty-Gritty Research Diverse economies methodology involves attending to the nitty-gritty of economic life. This is described by DeMartino (2013, p. 493) as carrying out the ‘mundane duties’ of research with others, such as ‘to show up, to be dependable and be depended upon’, or what Ilene Grabel (2018, p. 42) following Hirschman calls ‘immersion in the particular’. Immersion in the particular refers to a ‘piecemeal’ kind of ‘muddling through’, taking up opportunities and being ‘open-minded . . . rather than trying to change everything at once’ (Grabel 2018, p. 43). This attention to the nitty-gritty and experimental is sometimes critiqued for being too small scale, and researchers are asked how they might ‘scale up’ their methodology and findings for something bigger and more powerful. Grabel provides a useful perspective when she invites us to ‘learn from small-scale, gradual initiatives and from multiple examples, to recognize uniqueness and the specificity of experiences, and to appreciate the possibility of a great many sequences rather than seek universal dictates in a reductive theory’ (Grabel 2018, p. 43). The placed-based nitty-gritty approach is thus intentional. It is related to how diverse economies researchers understand social transformation, not as a singular momentous revolution, but as change which is achieved around coffee tables, in schools and universities, at home and elsewhere, in ‘disarticulated “places”’ that are connected through a shared language and understanding of economy that shapes what is possible (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxiv). One of the ways in which this emphasis on the nitty-gritty shapes how methods are used is demonstrated by Katherine Gibson’s reading for economic difference chapter in this volume (Chapter 52). Gibson discusses the method of reading for difference in which the researcher is required to immerse themselves in the texts of social life. The researcher reads these texts, not to confirm or refute a pre-existing understanding of the economy, but to produce a thick description attuned to the ways in which some realities are often foregrounded and others rendered absent. There is no desire to condense this thickness into an explanatory framework.

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460  The handbook of diverse economies Rather the research aims for the description to present a fuller view of the possibilities for economic life. Yet getting involved in the nitty-gritty of economic life does not mean that diverse economies are focused on the local, as understood though a local/global binary. In fact, diverse economies research has worked hard to disrupt the local global/binary (Gibson-Graham 2002), joining work rethinking place as relational and continually under construction (Massey 2005). In diverse economies scholarship the local is understood as part of a broader network of relationships undetermined by distance and proximity. For example, backyards are situated in food sovereignty movements spanning many countries (Larder et al. 2014) and Indian artisans joined through the Self-Employed Women’s Association’s Trade Facilitation Centre are involved in the high fashion houses around the world (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). Experiences in ethical living are picked up and adapted in projects throughout the world (Dombroski 2016). What is important here are the relationships that are established and maintained, not their scale: These endeavours might seem small; however, we see them as being like pebbles thrown into a pond producing ripples and reverberations that will contribute not to a massive overhaul or revision of a seemingly dominant food system but to the multiplication and proliferation of small-scale endeavours. (Cameron et al. 2014, p. 129)

Looking back, there are many examples showing that such an approach can lead to widespread change, with feminism perhaps being one of the best (Gibson-Graham 2006). If we take a longer view of history we can explore how these dispersed yet connected actions shape the present and what we need to do to change the future, as Gibson-Graham et al. (2013, 2016) do with a generational yardstick, or as Indigenous peoples do with a seven generations philosophy. This opens up the questions of what kinds of relationships do we need to develop and with whom to help secure change over time?

THIS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE . . .? TRANSFORMING ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE, RESEARCHERS AND POSSIBILITIES With other critical scholars, diverse economies researchers seek to change the world for the better. But, as I have outlined above, how they go about this is quite different from most critical political economy, and so is the impact that our work has. While critical political economic scholarship has often focused on providing knowledge of what is wrong with the world in order to mobilize action, diverse economies scholarship takes the position that we must first change how we know the world and ourselves as researchers, and with this both our knowledge of the world and the world itself will change (Gibson-Graham 2006). Diverse economies methodology is important because it transforms our knowledge and with this the world being examined, the researcher, and ultimately what is possible. Transforming Economic Knowledge Through making a diverse economy ‘visible’, research transforms both knowledge of the economy and the economy itself (Cameron and Wright 2014). This is vital in a capitalocentric environment where economic difference is always already framed in relation to capitalism.

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Framing essay: diverse economies methodology  461 The diverse economy frees economic difference from its relation to capitalism; as an alternative to, as transitioning to, as being surpassed by. By getting to know economic diversity through research, research makes this diversity ‘more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, p. 613; see also Cameron and Wright 2014). Research here is seen to be transformative of both knowledge and the world. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s (2004) theory of learning to be affected (see my Chapter 47 in this volume and Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010), diverse economies researchers have developed this idea of research as a process of differentiating the world. When we learn to understand, see, taste, feel or experience the world differently through research practice we also further differentiate that world, thereby increasing the possibilities for action. And the more entities involved in the research project, the more possibilities there are for differentiation. For example, Dombroski (2018) describes the process of learning to be affected in relation to infant hygiene practices in China, Australia and New Zealand. Parents, researchers, babies and other caregivers all come to observe and ‘intuit’ the signals and patterns of babies’ elimination and defecation, increasing the possibilities for appropriate nappy-free spatial practices of hygiene in each context. Representing this practice as credible, giving it visibility in academic work, contributes to a form of research and economic activism around reducing the use of disposable hygiene products (Dombroski 2016). In the same way, action research with community members that produces a picture of their economy as full of economic diversity where previously there was only capitalism, actually transforms the possibilities for economic development that community can explore (see Cameron and Gibson’s Chapter 56 on action research for more examples). For Latour, there is thus a ‘multiverse’ which still may well be singular but contains within it the possibilities for ongoing differentiation (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010, p. 325). Transforming Researchers What does this all mean for the researcher? In order to generate new possibilities, the diverse economies methodology requires a researcher to adopt a stance that is flexible, that is open to surprise, and is attentive to others. This stance further involves abandoning pre-existing theories of the economy, opening up to difference and previously unthought possibilities, and orientating to the unknown. Yet this does not mean that diverse economies researchers are unaware or unaffected by existing oppression and suffering. In fact, they are just as affected as critical political economists are about the terrible situations which people and other species face. Equally depressed by current events then, the difference is that diverse economies researchers are able to accept oppression but, rather than continuing to confirm it, they instead deliberately seek out possibilities for the world to be otherwise. Eve Sedgwick (2003, p. 136–7) describes this as seeking out positive affect. In her work on weak theory Sedgwick highlights the importance of adopting a reparative stance towards the world, one in which the researcher is orientated towards the ‘seeking of pleasure’ and joyful possibility. To do so, the researcher must care for the self and seek opportunities for self-nourishment (Sedgwick 2003, p. 137). The reparative stance, then, involves compassion for self and others, a feeling of shared suffering combined with an orientation towards reparative action. For diverse economies scholars the opportunities for nourishment lie in supporting and building community economies (that is, ethical economies).

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462  The handbook of diverse economies Adopting such an approach to methodology will therefore transform the researcher. Being open to others and to new possibilities necessarily means that the researcher is open to being affected by the world (see my Chapter 47 in this volume). The researcher will be moved, put into action, by those they encounter through the process of research. This kind of receptivity is so important if researchers are to learn from the past mistakes and to decolonize research relationships (see Chapter 49 by Liu et al., and Chapter 55 by Waitoa and Dombroski in this volume). It is also important when it comes to forging connections with others through our research, such as when receptivity enables one to recognize planetary kinship with another person or species (Gibson-Graham 2011). Quoting Nikolas Kompridis, Gibson-Graham (2011, p. 3) writes that, ‘To acknowledge “the world as one’s ‘kin’ and ‘twin’” is to see that a change in one’s condition is coextensive with a change in the condition of the world’. Here compassion and reparative action is interwoven with self and others. Transforming Possibilities Researchers who adopt a reparative stance that is open to unknown possibilities should not worry that their research will be purposeless or that they will stumble around blindly. In fact, Grabel’s (2018) analysis of Albert Hirschman’s work shows that a researcher can in fact quite purposefully embrace the unknown as productive of new possibilities. For example, ‘side effects’ can occur when research projects generate the conditions for change in unanticipated areas and ways, which will impact on the original project (Grabel 2018, pp. 37, 40). And a lack of information, such as on the challenges ahead, can actually propel research projects forward and generate important long lasting creative solutions along the way (Grabel 2018, pp. 37, 40). The key point in this engagement with the unknown is that the researcher must be wary of paradigms and grand narratives that map out the economic terrain of the past, present and future. The pre-existing assumptions about economic change that these narratives contain can be wrong, misleading, and ultimately a barrier to economic change for the better, closing off new possibility. Diverse economies scholars have used post-structural feminist critique as a method to challenge these assumptions and indeed the theories they support. This was one of the goals of Gibson-Graham’s now classic The End of Capitalism (1996). Sometimes the intellectual nuance of this strategy is lost on critics, and diverse economies researchers are painted as naïve optimists. Gibson-Graham have replied to this criticism with reference to being intentional about what possibilities are enabled through research: To me the label ‘optimist’ denotes someone who is willing to engage in the work of theorizing contingency, of taking situations that are ‘not fully yoked into a system of meaning’ and finding the dislocation, the wiggle room, the moment of rupture, the empirical richness of excess and working with it to fashion a politics. It’s not just about looking on the bright side of things, of only accentuating the glass half full; it’s about refusing to line things up, to make strong connections that discourage thinking and close off options for transformative action. (Gibson-Graham 2016, p. 360)

While all diverse economies research has something of this open stance, there is no one method for engaging with the unknown or for creating new possibilities. For example, engagement with the unknown means that no areas or agents for change are closed off from exploration (Miller, Chapter 44 in this volume). Ethan Miller investigates how, in response to climate change, diverse economies researchers have embraced the agency of Earth Others in a number of different ways. For Miller, agency is an open question to be explored, an outcome

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Framing essay: diverse economies methodology  463 with an unknown source. This enables experimentation with how others are engaged in diverse economies research and in turn generates rethinking of some of the very ways in which we know economic action, and indeed economy. Another site of unknown change taken up by diverse economies scholars is ‘failed’ projects, which, far from failures, have enabled important longer term changes for participants and co-researchers. Dombroski and Do (2019), for example, fail to produce new indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of climate change, but participate in longer term changes for Vietnamese farmers’ lives through Do’s attention to their embodied knowledge about local climate-related change. Through their engagement with diverse economies projects, participants such as these come to see the economy differently and also become different economic subjects, capable of new enterprises and initiatives. In the same way, unexpected outcomes arose in a diverse economies project in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, which explored ‘community-based understandings of gender equality’ (McKinnon et al. 2016). While the task was to examine ‘universal indicators of gender equality’, what emerged from discussion with local women was the importance of diverse forms of economic empowerment (including from the non-cash economy). The project developed surprising metrics of economic development that reflect the economic diversity of these women’s lives rather than expected universal standard measurements (Carnegie et al. forthcoming 2019; McKinnon et al. 2016). These are just a few examples of what a research project centred on possibility can generate rather than confirming an already known picture of the economy.

CONCLUSION: FUTURE DIRECTIONS Diverse economies researchers are not the only researchers who seek to make the world a better place. This is a long-held ambition by researchers with many different epistemological positions and ontologies. What sets diverse economies apart from those on the left is the way in which diverse economies researchers go about their work. While much political economic scholarship seeks to expose the underlying ‘capitalist reality’ creating systemic inequality in order to mobilize action, for diverse economies researchers making visible is a political exercise with performative effects. We make some economic practices more visible than others through our research so that they can become the subject of ethical decision making and their practice potentially enlarged. Another notable difference is that while many political economists have a strong theory of economy at the start of their research, diverse economies researchers try to put aside pre-existing visions of what constitutes the economy, and thereby throw everything open to exploration. This has led to radical new pathways, including the abandonment of economy, society and environment divisions in Ethan Miller’s (2019) work. Finally, we are not waiting for a revolution. Rather, diverse economies researchers see change happening in diffuse and diverse ways, with the belief that what happens around the kitchen table is just as important as what large corporations do, although in different ways. In crafting this distinctive methodology, diverse economies researchers have responded to many of the challenges I mentioned at the start of this chapter, including that of the relationship of research with power and our current time of ontological uncertainty. Challenges will continue to emerge, prompting further development of diverse economies methodology, and it is with these challenges that I conclude. As outlined above, diverse economies research is research with others, whether these others are other human beings, technologies, other species

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464  The handbook of diverse economies or more. Creating innovative methods to research with others is a continuing question, especially when these others are not human and might also be unknown. This area is perhaps where diverse economies scholars will develop and adopt innovative methods in future projects, such as in the theorization of other subjectivities (see Healy, Özselçuk and Madra, Chapter 43 in this volume). One major challenge in this task is to find respectful ways to work with other traditions, including those with vastly different ontologies. As Joanne Waitoa and Kelly Dombroski highlight in Chapter 55, Indigenous peoples have their own well-developed ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies. As diverse economies scholars work alongside other traditions, we are keen to develop ways of acting across ontological pluralities. Priorities include developing ways to work across difference, drawing on concepts of multiverse (Law 2004) or pluriverse (Escobar 2018), while prioritizing relationship building with marginalized groups, and consciously seeking ways to subvert the ‘white gaze’ so often associated with research. Another challenge is in our research with other species and the more-than-human more generally. Miller in this volume (Chapter 44) points to how other species have agency in our research projects. He suggests that for us to recognize diverse agencies we also need to recognize the diverse economies of all others, in the sense that all living creatures partake in ‘their own sustenance and the sustenance of others’ (see also Chapter 16 by Dombroski and Chapter 17 by Barron and Hess in this volume). There are also the challenges involved in acknowledging the important roles of technologies in our research. These technologies become part of us through the research hybrid collective, as discussed by Healy, Özselçuk and Madra in their chapter on subjectivity in this volume (Chapter 43). As the chapters that follow demonstrate, diverse economies methodology is an evolving field of interest where representational strategies, methods and politics intersect and entangle.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to all the framing chapter authors involved in the Bolsena writing retreat on this volume. I would especially like to thank George DeMartino and Ilene Grabel for their thoughts on uncertainty and the unknown, and Jenny Cameron for her thoughtful and constructive feedback on this chapter. And a big thank you to the editors, Katherine Gibson and Kelly Dombroski, for all their help and support in the writing process.

REFERENCES Austin, J.L. (1962 [1955]), How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Buchanan, G. (2014), ‘Hybrid economy research in remote Indigenous Australia: Seeing and supporting the customary in community food economies’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 10–32. Callon, M. (1998), ‘An essay on framing and overflowing: Economic externalities revisited by sociology’, in M. Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 244–69. Callon, M. (2007), ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative?’ in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 311–57. Cameron, J. (2015), ‘On experimentation’, in K. Gibson, D. Rose and R. Fincher (eds), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, New York: Punctum Books, pp. 99–102.

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Framing essay: diverse economies methodology  465 Cameron, J., K. Gibson and A. Hill (2014), ‘Cultivating hybrid collectives: Research methods for enacting community food economies in Australia and the Philippines’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 118–32. Cameron, J. and Wright, S. (2014), ‘Researching diverse food initiatives: From backyard and community gardens to international markets’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 1–9. Carnegie, M., K. McKinnon and K. Gibson (forthcoming 2019), ‘Creating community-based indicators of gender equity: A methodology’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint. DeMartino, G. (2013), ‘Ethical economic engagement in a world beyond control’, Rethinking Marxism, 25 (4), 483–500. Dombroski, K. (2016), ‘Hybrid activist collectives: Reframing mothers’ environmental and caring labour’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 9/10, 629–46. Dombroski, K. (2018), ‘Learning to be affected: Maternal connection, intuition and “elimination communication”’, Emotion, Space and Society, 26, 72–9. Dombroski, K. and T.H. Do (2019), ‘The affect of effect: Affirmative political ecologies in monitoring climate change adaptation interventions’, Nordia Geographical Publications, 47 (5), 7–20. Escobar, A. (2018), Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ghosh, S. (2014), ‘Measuring sustainability performance of local food production in home gardens’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 33–55. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2002), ‘Beyond global vs local: Economic politics outside the binary frame’, in A. Herod and M. Wright (eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 25–60. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for other worlds’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2011), ‘A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene’, Gender, Place and Culture, 18 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2016), ‘“Optimism”, place and the possibility of transformative politics’, in W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 359–63. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2016), ‘Commoning as a postcapitalist politics’, in A. Amin and P. Howell (eds), Releasing the Commons, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 192–212. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, S. Healy and J. McNeill (2019), ‘Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography: Economic geography, manufacturing, and ethical action in the Anthropocene’, Economic Geography, 95 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2010), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (S1), 320–346. Gordon, R. (2014), ‘Food sovereignty and community economies: Researching a Spanish case study’, in L. Shevellar and G. Westoby (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Community Development Research, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 210–222. Grabel, I. (2018), When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harvey, D. (1973), Social Justice and the City, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Larder, N., K. Lyons and G. Woolcock (2014), ‘Enacting food sovereignty: Values and meanings in the act of domestic food production in urban Australia’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 56–76. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies’, Body and Society, 10, 205–29. Law, J. (2004), After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, New York: Routledge. Lyons, K. (2014), ‘Critical engagement, activist/academic subjectivities and organic agri-food research in Uganda’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 103–17. Massey, D. (2005), For Space, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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466  The handbook of diverse economies McKinnon, K., M. Carnegie, K. Gibson and C. Rowland (2016), ‘Gender equality and economic empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: A place-based approach’, Gender, Place and Culture, 23 (6), 1376–91. Miller, E. (2019), Reimagining Livelihoods: Life beyond Economy, Society, and Environment, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Roelvink, G. (2016), Building Dignified Worlds: Geographies of Collective Action, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sedgwick, E. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, L. (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London and New York: Zed Books.

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51. Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene Tuomo Alhojärvi and Pieta Hyvärinen

LANGUAGE STRATEGIES IN DIVERSE ECONOMIES The concern for language is one defining characteristic of the diverse economies approach. Influenced by post-structuralist, anti-essentialist, feminist and Marxist reframings of social life, one of the profound innovations of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work is to reclaim economic language as a site for ethical and political possibility. Indeed, we can read the diverse economy framework as a continuously evolving effort to explore the potentials of linguistic intervention to practise economies differently. At least three intertwined strategies of linguistic intervention are apparent. First, the strategy of dislocation, which uses deconstructive and anti-essentialist theory to ‘dis-order the capitalist economic landscape, to queer it and thereby dislocate capitalocentrism’s hegemony’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. 77). Economic language thereby becomes suspect to questioning and disarticulation. Second, there is a strategy of reframing, which we associate with ‘reading the economy for difference rather than dominance’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. 59). This is the proposal of ‘diverse economy’ to approach economic landscapes heterogeneous and to concentrate on situated and differentiated rather than universal or structural ethics and politics. Third, there is the strategy of preliminarily choosing some shared concerns for constructing desirable economies. ‘Community economy’ is a keyword for this practice, interested in ‘specify[ing] coordinates for negotiating and exploring interdependence, rather than attempting to realize an ideal’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. 86). Far from suggesting a blueprint for an ‘alternative’ economy, this strategy entails sketching and expressing common languages that enable concrete shifts in ethical-political practice, all the while reflectively admitting the provisionality and situatedness of any such effort. Despite the increasing interest in the material, affective and more-than-human aspects of diverse economies, language has remained a central concern within the framework (Miller and Gibson-Graham, forthcoming). Language continues to be a central ground for intervention that intersects heterogeneous work on diverse economies. Here, we want to concentrate on a hitherto little explored field of linguistic practice that is becoming increasingly central as the diverse economy framework gathers international recognition and evolves in different contexts. What we have in mind is the concern for differences between languages. While different registers of language and different discursive projects have received considerable interest within the framework, we want to formulate acts involved with translation from language to language as sites of ethical-political trouble and possibility. Our interest in translation stems from several years of work to foster diverse economies in Finland, which has recently yielded a translation project of the book Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (TBTE) into Finnish.1 Our starting point is that translation should not be considered just as the export and import of ready-made 467 Tuomo Alhojärvi and Pieta Hyvärinen - 9781788119962 08:03:11PM

468  The handbook of diverse economies meanings, or as a disseminative application of existing methodological, theoretical or political frameworks. Such simplistic views of translation are bound to reproduce problematic hierarchies between languages and cultures, but also to be detrimental to the very heterogeneity that is at stake in the diverse economies approach. Rather, we approach diverse-economic language as an opportunity to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) of linguistic inheritance that is restricting as much as it is enabling. Whereas ‘translation’ in English concerns carrying or bringing over, across and beyond, such transmissions (from place to place, across contexts) do not belong to the usual connotations of the Finnish word for translating, kääntää. In addition to linguistic translation kääntää also means to turn, to reposition, to flip, bend, twist and rotate, but also to change the course or direction of something. In colloquial language, it can also mean to steal something. Exploring this semantic field comes close to how Tsing (2015) conceives ‘translation’ as reaching across differences, turning things into other things, and as the ‘drawing of one world-making project into another’ (2015, p. 62). But translation also becomes a space of surprises, unexpected flips and co-implicating twists, thus messing with any clear distinction of two distinct languages and their clearly delineated relation. To bring forth such surplus possibilities in translation is to invite attention to linguistic difference and its connection to economic diversity, and to ask how work in between languages can foster rather than smother heterogeneity. We argue that moving between contexts and languages warrants its own modes of inquiry and ethical-political concern. We first problematize the context of translations by focusing on problematics arising at the crossroads of Anglo-centric and capitalocentric understandings of economy. We then explore some more concrete ethical-political concerns foregrounded in our translation of TBTE. To end, we return to highlight the invigorating and challenging nature of work between languages.

DIVERSITY AND TRANSLATION IN THE ANGLOCENE Scholars working with the diverse economies framework foster heterogeneous forms of coexistence in the Anthropocene through ‘taking back’ economies. They acknowledge the inseparability of ecological and economic diversity (see e.g. Gibson et al. 2015; Gibson-Graham 2011; Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009). Furthermore, recent work has acknowledged that linguistic diversity plays a crucial part in any mesh of ecological-economic coexistence (see e.g. Gibson et al. 2018; Gombay 2012; James 2017; Jerne 2017; McKinnon et al. 2016). As the diverse economy approach evolves into more variations, it is crucial to study its ways of accounting for and being affected by linguistic as well as other forms of contextual difference. As scholars working at intersections of different languages, we find it crucial to acknowledge how most research and activism in this vein originates from Anglophone regions and takes place mainly in English. Critical scholarship on ‘academic capitalism’ has made clear that the hegemony of English and the structural discrimination of small languages are an integral part of the political economy of thought (see e.g. Fregonese 2017; Paasi 2005). Indeed, one of the new names of ‘our’ epoch is the Anglocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016), highlighting the historical role of Anglophone and European forces in pillaging and destroying ecological-economic diversity. Ecocides (as in ecologies and economies) are intimately connected to ‘linguicides’ (Skutnabb-Kangas and Harmon 2018) and ‘epistemicides’ (de Sousa Santos 2014). As Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas (1996) argue, the consolidation of English

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Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene  469 as the global language of communication and common sense has run alongside modernization, the dominance of certain sciences and technologies, and the historical-geographical development of capitalist relations. Framing the context this way, the prevalent use of English does not only appear as a pragmatic communicative strategy, although it can be that too. The least we can say is that it is not unrelated to the unravelling of ecological-economic diversity. Nicole Gombay (2012) illustrates this well in her research on Inuit economies, reflecting on what it means to discuss economies in English in a context where the monetization of social relations, the capitalocentric equivalence between economy and money and the arrival of a new vocabulary and foreign language (that is, English) are all deeply intertwined. As ‘Jamisie’, an Inuit man, recounts: ‘My father was a busy man. He’s the guy who told me that “time is money”. In English. Even though he didn’t speak English, he learned from the Whites that time is money’ (Gombay 2012, pp. 22–3; original emphasis). Whether we are ‘resignifying the economic’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b) or practising ‘ontological reframing’ (Gibson-Graham 2008), the prospects of diverse economies are dependent on the success of an articulation of diverse practices, sites and spheres of life in economic terms. We have little doubt that such a move has tremendous capacity to ‘reshap[e] the terrain of [our] social existence on a daily basis’ (Gibson-Graham 2006a, p. 251). Yet, our work to foster diversity comes to a stage always-already influenced by problematics of language that are beyond individual concerns or intentions. We tread on a troubled ground, as we try to practise economic language differently. To resignify things as ‘economic’ risks refiguring heterogeneity in economic terms derived from and modelled upon historically and geographically specific Anglophone understandings, all the while neglecting this situatedness. This risks reproducing a god’s eye perspective not particularly well positioned to question itself (see Haraway 1991). To take another example, consider the paper on place-based community economies in Monsoon Asia, in which Gibson et al. (2018) make an important contribution to a diverse-economic approach with more linguistic and local awareness. The authors aim at ‘producing a radically different “map” of Monsoon Asia’s economic geography’ (2018, p. 3) by collecting economic terms from non-Anglophone contexts and producing a linguistically diversified economic geography full of words and practices radically different from the business as usual of the English language. However, we might also spot a reproduced problematic that accompanies this inventive approach, because the contrasting of languages happens in English and this relation remains unproblematized in the paper. English is thus reproduced as a sort of unsuspicious background – a carrying bag for linguistic and contextual diversity – that does not need to be troubled. Now, it is absolutely necessary to do this kind of trans-contextual translation and to reclaim English as a language penetrated by non-English diversity. Moreover, as the authors thankfully make explicit, their intent is ‘not to pull these words from their localized contexts and launch them into some idealised realm of inter-cultural understanding’ (Gibson et al. 2018, pp. 14–15). Yet, we wonder whether such a move also might reassert a sort of implicit division of labour between the language of ‘theory’/‘synthesis’ and those of ‘empirics’, or between the language of ‘global communication’ and those of ‘contextual practices’ (see also Kuokkanen 2006). In other words, might the linguistic asymmetry cause a sort of sticky binary (cf. Gibson-Graham 2002) that simultaneously allows and restricts inter-contextual translation and communication in the Anglocene?

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470  The handbook of diverse economies Such problems of language do not go away with our best intentions, as they are both the precondition and effect of our linguistic interventions. In the Anglocene, we are deeply invested in international learning and shared ethical-political projects that take place in English. But as scholars of and activists for diverse economies we need to become increasingly aware of the inheritance of (economic) language that is haunted and enabling at the same time. Through making contradictions visible, we can build up richer situated practices of working with the troubles of language.

IT’S ALIVE! TRANSLATING TAKE BACK THE ECONOMY What kinds of ethical-political openings can the translation of diverse economies generate? Here, we want to use our translation process of TBTE to illustrate what is at stake when the diverse economies framework disseminates into and transforms in different linguistic contexts. This process has involved a working group of three people: Eeva Talvikallio has worked as the translator while we (Pieta and Tuomo) have joined her for support and consultation. Our group had its first face-to-face meeting in July 2015, and as we write this, the Finnish text is nearing its final stages and is to be published in 2019. As discussed above, the languages that we inherit are products of long histories very much related to political economies and to relations of power. Before the early twentieth century, the territory currently known as Finland was a peripheral region colonized by various powers (Christianity, Sweden, Russia) at various times. Finnish, part of the group of relatively small Finno-Ugric languages, has been profoundly shaped by Indo-European languages, especially Germanic (e.g. Swedish) and Slavic (e.g. Russian). The Europeanization and modernization of Finland are relatively recent developments, as is the country’s inclusion as a core region in the ‘Western’ or ‘minority’ world during the twentieth century. That said, many concepts central to the predominant ‘modern’ understanding of the economy occupy more or less similar understandings and meanings in Finnish as in English, for example markkinat (markets), lisäarvo (surplus value), palkka (wage) and vauraus (wealth). ‘Aika on rahaa’ (time is money) is a proverb in Finnish, too. Economy can be relatively straightforwardly translated as talous, from talo (a house); or, oikos in Greek. Although Finnish does not have articles, the object-like quality of ‘the economy’ riffs well with a general understanding of how talous seems to work as a self-contained sphere ‘out there’, known by ‘experts’ and governed by ‘policymakers’. Insofar as capitalocentric economic language has successfully made itself into Finnish, this is a product of many centuries of ‘slow colonization’. This is not, however, to claim a similar position as indigenous languages and epistemologies (cf. Gombay 2012; Kuokkanen 2006) in relation to the Anglocene. On the contrary, Finland has played its role in the colonization and exclusion of knowledges and languages, especially in relation to the Sámi peoples (Kuokkanen 2006; Lehtola 2015) but also in a broader sense, by complying with colonialist epistemologies and taking advantage of their outcomes (see e.g. Tuori et al. 2012). Colonization of Sámi knowledges by Finland and other Nordic states means for example the continuous exclusion of gift philosophy concepts such as láhi and attáldat from the mainstream understanding of the economy in the region (see Kuokkanen 2005). In this troubled linguistic landscape, our translation process has attempted to reach across differences between the context(s) and language(s) of the original book and the semantic

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Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene  471 and political fields occupied by prospective readers in Finnish. This, we felt, was consonant with the intentions of the authors to diversify economic thinking and to provide practical and place-sensitive tools to do economies differently. Our aim was to domesticate the text, meaning to adapt the source text to fit into the target culture. The domestication of TBTE took place in terms of stylistic choices but also by incorporating local examples of diverse economic practices in addition to the original ones. We wanted to try to produce a text that would feel like an organic outgrowth from local concerns, more than the average translated book. In practice, this meant drawing from local knowledges and practices as well as from Finnish etymology. For instance, jokamiehenoikeus (everyman’s right), the right to roam in nature irrespective of land ownership as long as it is done responsibly, is a highly popular commons in Finland. It also provides a good example of legal and cultural protection for a shared ethical concern. Moreover, considering the renegotiation of gender relations as a crucial ethical-political task of diverse economies, in the translated book we used the emerging gender sensitive term jokaisenoikeus (everyone’s right). Another example, derived from Finnish etymology, concerns words for property and possessions. The words omistaja (owner), omaisuus (property) and omistukset (possessions) are all derived from the ancient root oma. Oma means ‘own’ (as in my/your/their own), a word to individualize and possess, but etymologically it goes back to the same roots as the verb olla, ‘to be’ or ‘to have’. Rather than using it as a word to describe a property owned by a subject (‘I’), something to be counted and exchanged, we used this etymological affinity with ‘being’ to foreground registers of co-implication and coexistence. Through this twist, oma becomes a kind of ‘being-with’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b) that blurs distinctions between subjects and objects. In the Finnish version of TBTE we use footnotes to inform readers of such ethical-political considerations. This is also a practical way to keep the trouble of language(s) in sight and to foreground concrete acts of staying and working with it. The notion of ‘property’ constituted another trouble when translating a set of tools called Diverse Economy Identifiers. The identifier tools are tables used to visualize diversity in five economic spheres (work, business, markets, property, finance). As Gibson-Graham (2006b, p. 60) explains, ‘[t]his language expands our economic vocabulary, widening the identity of the economy to include all of those practices excluded or marginalized by a strong theory of capitalism’. However, we found it difficult to fit the Finnish practices of property into the three categories of private, alternative private and open access (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. 147). Instead, as part of the domestication strategy, Eeva divided the middle category into two as follows: Privately owned resources Collectively owned resources Publicly owned resources Resources owned by no one (Gibson-Graham et al. 2019, translated from Finnish by Petra Hyväri). First, the split two categories reflect better the Finnish context, in which public ownership of land, infrastructure and facilities is such a prominent form of property that it warrants foregrounding through its own category. This also underlines the set of political possibilities specific to publicly owned resources. Second, in the Finnish version the latter three categories are not defined in relation to private property, which is a constitutive part of the mainstream understanding of ‘the economy’, but are rather descriptive of the diversity of economic prac-

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472  The handbook of diverse economies tices. Therefore the new categorization also works to overcome the capitalocentric problematic that supplements ‘the economy’ with proliferating ‘alternatives’ (White and Williams 2016). The notion of ‘community economies’ provides another example of such concerns. As Miller (2013) underlines, community economy combines an ontology, an ethics and a politics, balancing the ‘negative’ deconstructive spirit that constantly un-fixes and opens up conceptual grounds and a ‘positive’ ethical-political project of taking back economies wherever and everywhere. Appreciative as we are of all the conceptual work with this notion, again the context makes a difference. In recent years, a plethora of new notions have entered economic discussions in Finland, including terms like jakamistalous (sharing economy), vertaistalous (peer-to-peer economy), solidaarisuustalous (solidarity economy) and kiertotalous (circular economy). Notably, these notions are all translations of discussions already taking place elsewhere, usually in English, invested in their respective problematics and solutions derived from specific understandings of economic change. Mimicking international discussions about what ‘the economy’ is and how ‘it’ ought to change is something we did not consider very interesting. On the contrary, these translated terms come with a burden, as they easily reproduce an international division of labour whereby notions originating in ‘core’ regions are imported into our ‘(semi-)peripheral’ context. At play is a logic that places the heart of ‘the global economy’ elsewhere, most often within Anglophone contexts. Thus, we feared that despite our aims to foreground the radical reconceptualization of ‘community economy’ by Gibson-Graham, we could not avoid our translated notion being read as another brand for ‘alternative’ and another signpost telling us how systemic changes (whether positive or negative) happen elsewhere and the best we can do is to replicate them. Instead of inventing another new notion to describe ‘our’ alternative, we opted for more descriptive and open-ended expressions. Mostly, we replaced ‘community economy’ with a less term-like expression ‘elävä talous’, meaning ‘living economy’, an economy that is ‘alive and changing’, ‘vivid’, ‘animate’, ‘supportive of life’. This decision, yielding the book’s title Elävä talous, does not solve the intersecting problems of translating economic vocabulary. However, it does dilute the definitive character of the reconceptualization and it messes with the division of conceptual labour in which Anglophone notions disseminate around the world – hopefully opening space for more local and diverse understandings of non-capitalocentric economies.

THE JOYS OF TROUBLING LANGUAGE Dear Katherine, Jenny and Stephen, below is a list of issues that have come up during the translation/rewriting process of TBTE thus far, and that I wish to bring to your attention. . . . (Letter from Eeva to the authors, 8 March 2017)

This is the beginning of an almost 20-page letter by Eeva to the authors of TBTE. As the latter can attest, this translation process has continuously challenged any notion of translation as a straightforward transfer of meaning from one language to another. In addition to the hefty number of ethical-political negotiations with the authors, the translation project entailed discussions with almost 30 other consultants – researchers and activists from diverse economic

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Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene  473 spheres of Finland. The outcome of this relentless and at times exhausting negotiation was a book, Elävä talous (Gibson-Graham et al. 2019) that is in many ways different from the original (including one extra co-author, namely Eeva) and which, we claim, shoulders its linguistic responsibility better than anything we could have produced through a more straightforward approach. Negotiating the book’s transformation with the authors and a number of others has been an in-depth learning process, as the core task of translation remains to carefully study the authors’ intentions and strategies in order to come up with inventive and context-sensitive ways to make them work well in the target language – and to explore the possibilities of transforming it. As de Sousa Santos (2014, p. 15) writes, ‘[w]hat cannot be said, or said clearly, in one language or culture may be said, and said clearly, in another language or culture’. Perhaps we could say that translation, as an ethical practice in between languages, is an effort to bear witness to the surplus meanings that any singular language enables in addition to that which is communicable. Through negotiations in translation, language, like economy, ‘loses its character as an asocial body in lawful motion and instead becomes a space of recognition and negotiation’ (Gibson-Graham 2006b, p. xxx). What we hope to have made clear here is that such work is necessary not only for ‘spreading the message’ of diverse economies but for continuously rethinking and challenging both the message and its spreading. Still, we want to end this chapter by returning to one of the guiding lights of this translation process: the joy. To work with diverse economies is a source of constant inspiration, fascination as well as creative and necessary frustration. To have been able to stay with the trouble of diverse-economic language within our working group, with the authors of the book and with a larger network of accomplices has been sustaining and enabling. Learning to be attentive to and affected by linguistic diversity opens sites of negotiation where a presumably smooth surface of communication had prevailed. Perhaps the joy stems from the nature of this very work, from taking up the task of generating actual possibilities for ethical-political practice where few formerly existed (cf. Gibson-Graham 2008). As Christina Jerne (2017, pp. 69–70) puts it, ‘[t]here is much solitude in the space between worlds, in the realization that some things just cannot be translated because too much of them dies in the process’. To try to do so, anyway, ‘even if in a crippled form’, is an inventive and joyful, if inescapably difficult, opportunity. The translation of TBTE into Elävä talous is no doubt only one beginning in a continuing process, an opening for further negotiations to make economies more alive and life-sustaining in unexpected ways (see also Chapter 4 by Heras and Vieta and Chapter 40 by Bargh in this volume). The good news is that language, like economic practice, is everywhere. If we are to take seriously the task of attending to linguistic difference in the grim prospects of the Anglocene, translation provides a key site for taking back economies any time, any place (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013, p. 189).

NOTE 1. This book by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy (2013) was written as a popular introduction to the diverse economy framing and the political project of building community economies. It has been translated into Spanish and Korean, with other translations on the go into Greek and Mandarin.

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474  The handbook of diverse economies

REFERENCES Bonneuil, C. and J.-B. Fressoz (2016), The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. D. Fernbach, London: Verso. de Sousa Santos, B. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers. Fregonese, S. (2017), ‘English: Lingua franca or disenfranchising?’, Fennia, 195 (2), 194–6. Gibson, K., R. Astuti, M. Carnegie, A. Chalernphon, K. Dombroski, A.R. Haryani, A. Hill, B. Kehi, L. Law, I. Lyne, A. McGregor, K. McKinnon, A. McWilliam, F. Miller, C. Ngin, D. Occeña-Gutierrez, L. Palmer, P. Placino, M. Rampengan, W.L.L. Than, N.I. Wianti, S. Wright and the Seeds of Resilience Research Collective (2018), ‘Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59 (1), 3–16. Gibson, K., D.B. Rose and R. Fincher (eds) (2015), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, New York: Punctum Books. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2002), ‘Beyond global vs. local: Economic politics outside the binary frame’, in A. Herod and M.W. Wright (eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 25–60. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006a), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006b), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2011), ‘A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene’, Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, S. Healy and E. Talvikallio (2019), Elävä talous, Yhteisen tulevaisuuden toimintaopas, Tampere: Vastapaino. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2009), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (S1), 320–346. Gombay, N. (2012), ‘Placing economies: Lessons from the Inuit about economics, time, and existence’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 29 (1), 19–38. Haraway, D. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: Reinventions of Nature, London: Free Associations Books. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, T. (2017), ‘I learn you’, in K. Böhm, T. James and D. Petrescu (eds), Learn to Act: Introducing the Eco Nomadic School, Paris: Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, pp. 322–3. Jerne, C. (2017), ‘Movements of rupture: Effectuating, assembling and desiring anti-mafia economies’, Doctoral Dissertation, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. Kuokkanen, R. (2005), ‘Láhi and attáldat: The philosophy of the gift and Sami education’, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 34, 20–32. Kuokkanen, R. (2006), ‘The logic of the gift: Reclaiming indigenous peoples’ philosophies’, in T. Botz-Bornstein (ed.), Re-Ethnicizing the Mind? Cultural Revival in Contemporary Thought, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 251–71. Lehtola, V.-P. (2015), ‘Sámi histories, colonialism, and Finland’, Arctic Anthropology, 52 (2), 22–36. McKinnon, K., M. Carnegie, K. Gibson and C. Rowland (2016), ‘Gender equality and economic empowerment approach’, Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (10), 1376–91. Miller, E. (2013), ‘Community economy: Ontology, ethics, and politics for radically democratic economic organizing’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 25 (4), 518–33. Miller, E. and J.K. Gibson-Graham (forthcoming), ‘Thinking with interdependence: From economy/ environment to ecological livelihoods’, in M. Zourazni (ed.), Thinking in the World: A Reader, London: Bloomsbury Press.

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Translating diverse economies in the Anglocene  475 Paasi, A. (2005), ‘Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 37 (5), 769–89. Phillipson, R. and T. Skutnabb-Kangas (1996), ‘English only worldwide, or language ecology’, TESOL Quarterly, 30 (3), 429–52. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and D. Harmon (2018), ‘Biological diversity and language diversity: Parallels and differences’, in H. Penz and A. Fill (eds), Handbook of Ecolinguistics, New York: Routledge, pp. 11–25. Tsing, A.L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tuori, S., S. Keskinen, S. Irni and D. Mulinari (eds) (2012), Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, London and New York: Routledge. White, R.J. and C.C. Williams (2016), ‘Beyond capitalocentricism: Are non-capitalist work practices “alternatives”?’ Area, 48 (3), 325–31.

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52. Reading for economic difference J.K. Gibson-Graham

INTRODUCTION The task of the social scientist is to make sense of the world. This is usually done by drawing on two kinds of ‘tools’. One is inherited knowledge shaped into theories that have stood the test of time and seem to offer explanatory insights; the other is newly created knowledge acquired by empirical observations and interventions in the world. For the most part, making sense of the world involves organizing newly acquired empirical material and ‘reading’ it in such a way as to identify patterns and repetitions that align with certain theories of connection and causality. As they arise, anomalies are important as they test out the explanatory capacity of theory and provoke new theoretical development (Kuhn 1962). But what if the practice of making sense of the world was constraining what is possible? Indeed, what is the relationship between making sense and making possibility? Increasingly social scientists are appreciating that how we represent and theorize the world around us actually has performative effects; that is, we make the world we inhabit as we understand it (Butler 1993; Law and Urry 2004). How we apprehend the world sets the stage for how we act in that world. Indeed, the entities we ‘make more real’ can even gain agency in ways we can barely imagine (see Chapter 44 by Miller in this volume). So, if, as social scientists, we are interested in enlarging the scope of action and knowing in the world so as to change it in ways that increase well-being and minimize suffering, then we must be attentive to how we go about ‘reading’ the world around us. This is particularly important when it comes to reading the economic world because this world is usually seen as the ultimate ‘real’ – the obdurate container and constrainer of life. ‘The Economy’ sets the stage for the story of life and we can only ever relate to it as a reader of a page turner novel, passively awaiting the next chapter – will it open up the happy ever after pathway? or the ‘go back to the start, do not pass go, do not collect $200’ dead-end? We can either retreat into the passive embrace of the couch reader who lets the text/world lead and refuses to interrogate the author about motive and outcome, or we can act as more engaged and feisty readers who battle with the story and try and shape it. A technique for doing so involves the practice of reading for economic difference. This chapter introduces this method. In what follows I discuss reading as a practice of knowledge production. I introduce the project of ‘critical reading’ and argue that this is a reading for dominance. I then turn to the techniques of deconstruction and queering, both forms of reading against dominance and for difference. The last section of the chapter illustrates reading for economic difference with respect to activism in place and across a world region.

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Reading for economic difference  477

READING AS A PRACTICE OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION . . . as there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 14)

The term ‘reading’ is being used here in a rather specific sense. When we read a written text we are not just comprehending words in sentences and paragraphs that convey their meaning in a straightforward way – although this may be the way we read a novel for pleasure where we want to find out who did what and how the story will turn out. What makes a ‘scholarly’ reading is the requirement that we critically interrogate the motives of the author and as a reader position ourselves with respect to these motives. The task of critical reading involves a conscious engagement with the words in front of us to discern what the author is ‘doing’ by writing in a certain way about a topic. Gordon Taylor’s list of the motives that animate academic writing is an instructive guide to help readers identify how authors are positioning themselves with respect to established knowledge, points of view or theoretical framings. They include (Taylor 1989, p. 67): ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Agreeing with, acceding to, defending or confirming a point of view Proposing a new view Conceding but qualifying Reformulating to increase explanatory purchase Dismissing on grounds of inadequacy, irrelevance, incoherence or criteria Rejecting, rebutting, refuting Reconciling according to some higher principle Retracting or recanting in face of new arguments or evidence.

To some extent this list also provides a guide for ‘reading’ the world around us as social scientists. As we gather new primary evidence or analyse secondary data or read others’ accounts we are continually selecting and aligning, foregrounding and overlooking, splitting and lumping, differentiating and homogenizing, connecting and disconnecting, judging, accepting and dismissing. How we do this will relate to the theoretical frame to which we are attached and through which we are looking. A strong influence on the methodology of diverse economy scholarship was Louis Althusser, whose ‘reading’ of Marx’s Capital introduced the idea that reading was a form of knowledge production (Althusser and Balibar 1970). As the quote above states, reading a text (or the empirical world, for that matter) is not an innocent activity. The meaning of the text, or the world, is not reflected as if in a mirror that one just needs to look at, register and recognize.1 Reading is not neutral, it is a guilty act, it involves actions for which the reader must take responsibility. In Reading Capital Althusser identifies a number of these actions. First, is to make one’s positionality transparent. He situates himself ‘as a philosopher’ who poses of the text certain questions that are different to the ones asked by an economist or historian. Second, is to attend to presences and absences in the text, to identify what is invisible, what is forbidden, what is overlooked, and to analyse how these very absences are crucial to meaning making.2 Third, is to activate an ‘informed gaze’ produced from the standpoint of a new terrain (or problematic) that emerges from the necessity of these absences. These ‘methods’ have been crucial to analysing economic discourse from a critical perspective. Take, for example, the reading of economic texts by feminists who bring to the task

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478  The handbook of diverse economies questions of how the work of women is acknowledged and positioned in theories of economic functioning. Even a cursory reading of texts about national economies and their development will reveal the absence of women’s work in the home and community. Marilyn Waring’s landmark 1988 Counting for Nothing and Nancy Folbre’s 2001 The Invisible Heart both attend to this lacuna. Feminist readings of the economy have proposed that this absence is symptomatic of the political valuing of ‘men’s work’ in the sphere of production over and above ‘women’s work’ in the sphere of reproduction (see Chapter 15 by Clement-Couzner in this volume). When the economy is read ‘as a woman’ (as opposed to as a philosopher, or as a seemingly gender neutral economist) we are prompted to ask why is there is no need to account for those activities, largely performed by women, that sustain lives directly, while those that sustain lives indirectly, that is by being priced, bought and sold, are documented and accounted for? From the standpoint of the feminist, the identification of this difference generates a critically ‘informed gaze’ that troubles the settled nature of economic knowledge. At this point in the feminist reading project there has been a proliferation of strategies for making and reshaping worlds. One has been to read the invisibility of women’s work in the sphere of reproduction as essential to the smooth workings of capitalism and shaped by the ‘needs’ of the capitalist sphere of production (Battacharya 2017; Mackenzie and Rose 1983). This is a reading that offers a powerfully encompassing narrative that foregrounds the, at times uneven, but ultimately sympathetic alignment of spheres of production and reproduction in an evolving trajectory of capitalist development. It performs what could be described as a reading for dominance – a kind of reading that is typical of critical, or radical, social science.

CRITICAL READING Karl Marx was a proponent of what he called a ‘radical’ reading of history – one that pierced the veil of ignorance produced by established, mainstream knowledge and delved deep into the root causes of inequality and oppression. His reading was famously aimed at not only understanding the key relations that structured social life but advocating fundamental change. Marx’s reading of capitalist society inspired subsequent critical social scientists to identify underlying structures that are not evident on the surface, to identify these powerful structures in dominance and show how they are changing and reshaping the world. This kind of reading rests on the practice of critique whereby existing readings are shown to be inadequate, irrelevant, incoherent, but most importantly, ideological in that they support a capitalist status quo. Critical readings are readings for dominance in that they are focused on identifying the ways that capitalist relations are ever inventively shaping social, economic, political and ecological realities. The role of the researcher/reader is to use her critical expertise and healthy scepticism to see below the surface of life as it is lived and help educate the masses as to what is ‘really’ happening. Reading for capitalist dominance offers a particularly persuasive way of narrating change – indeed it offers a ‘strong theory’ in which events are organized into seemingly coherent and even predictable trajectories (Gibson-Graham 2006, pp. 4, 204; Sedgwick 1993). Since the emergence of mercantile capital and later capitalist industrial enterprise, strong theories of capitalist reorganization have dominated understandings of economic change. Processes such as the enclosure of common property, proletarianization, marketization, commodification, the accumulation of capital, globalization, technological change and the neoliberal privatization of state resources are all read as ‘capitalist dynamics’ and represented as strengthening or

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Reading for economic difference  479 bringing capitalist relations into being (Gibson et al. 2010). It is tempting to align small facts with these large issues of economic import, employing what Clifford Geertz has called ‘thin description’. Thin description jumps too quickly to name an action in culturally (or economically) loaded terms and runs the risk of bleaching human behaviour of complexity (Geertz 1973, p. 7). But a strong theory of capitalist dominance endows ‘thin description’ with added veracity privileging evidence of identification (of new capitalist forms), extension (of existing capitalist reach), and completion (of capitalist projects). For critical social science, it would appear that no amount of ‘thick description’ of details, multiplicity, counterfactual or contradictory evidence is sufficient to dislodge the powerful capitalist narrative (Geertz 1973; Gibson-Graham 2014). For example, whereas a thin description of rural change might make small changes associated with the exchange of cash for harvesting or planting labour speak to the large issue of advancing proletarianization of the countryside, a thick description might attend to the specificity of multiple transactions of allegiance, gifting, reciprocity or coercion that are bound up in the cash payment (see Chapter 18 on reciprocal labour exchange by Gibson in this volume). But in an economy that is strongly theorized as becoming capitalist the appearance of cash payments is read as evidence of the increasing hold of capitalist relations of production. The paradox of critical reading is that the desired aim of understanding the world in order to change it is undermined by the performative effect of reading for dominance. If one’s reading continually exposes the dominance and inventiveness of a system of economic relations that exacerbates inequality and environmental destruction, or a form of neoliberal governance that shores up capitalist hegemony, that is what gets reinforced as ‘reality’. The possibility of change evermore diminishes. We are less able to identify openings, emergence, prefiguration, possibility. In the process of apprehending the world we become less able to perform other worlds. For this to happen, our reading must shift its focus to read for difference and we must consciously work to open up possibility.

DECONSTRUCTION AND QUEERING – READING AGAINST DOMINANCE Why might we want to read for difference? And how might we do it? These questions have been partially answered by the philosopher Jacques Derrida who developed a reading practice that worked against what he called the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (1978). Derrida was part of an intellectual movement that rejected the Eurocentrism of structural theory that posited underlying systems and relationships universally ordering all social phenomena. His ‘post-structuralist’ approach troubled the recurring pattern whereby meaning is produced in Western thinking traditions via a binary of positive and negative (e.g. A/not A; economic/ non-economic) (Derrida 1978; Gibson-Graham 2000). This structure of meaning that he named logocentrism, endowed one term with positivity, presence and value at the expense of its ‘other’. His project of reading revealed the way that certain terms were represented as dom-

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480  The handbook of diverse economies inant, stable, bounded, while their ‘other’ was subordinate, unstable, unbounded. In Western thought the following binarisms are associated with this uneven valuation: Man/Woman Mind/Body Reason/Emotion Objectivity/Subjectivity Economy/Society Production/Reproduction Factory/Household. Attempts to (re)value the subordinated or absent term in a binary hierarchy are easily undermined. This is because, as de Saussure (2011 [1916]) pointed out, the dominant master signifier stabilizes relations of difference defining all subordinate terms only in relation to the dominant term with no independent identity, positivity or value. But not only is every un-bolded term positioned in relation to its bolded partner, all the terms in bold congeal into a strongly interlinked knowledge formation. Feminist post-structuralists picked up on Derrida’s extended neologism phallogocentrism, to highlight how the figure of the masculine (the phallus) fixes meaning by anchoring together the disparate qualities and identities in bold (Cixous and Clément 1986 [1975]; Grosz 1995). Power and effectivity are linked to the ‘masculine’ side of the binary, accommodation and diffused (ineffectual) agency attached to the ‘feminine’ side. Economic thinking is similarly influenced by phallogocentrism. As we have seen, when reading the economy ‘as a woman’ the sphere of production is endowed with presence (accounted for and reported on), positivity (where growth and dynamism is located) and value (priced). By contrast the sphere of reproduction is seen as amorphous (encompassing disparate activities taking place in households, communities and government agencies), a negativity (soaking up wealth and taxes and putting a brake on growth) and unvalued (until recently, unmeasured by national statistical agencies). But we need not stop there. The economy is associated with other dominant activities that are literally valued (priced) and others that are seen as subordinate, passive, unproductive and inefficient: Commercially traded goods and services/gifted, bartered, shared goods and services Waged and salaried labour/unpaid labour, cooperative labour, reciprocated labour Employment/unemployment Capitalist business/self-employment, cooperatives, social enterprise. Drawing on the readings of post-structuralist philosophy and feminism together, J.K. Gibson-Graham coined the term capitalocentrism to capture the way that economic difference was disciplined and subordinated (1996, pp. 6, 35). This neologism refers to the way that all economic activities and identities are given meaning only with reference to the master economic signifier of Capitalism. So any economic activity that is on the right hand side of the binaries listed above is seen as ‘fundamentally the same as (or modelled upon) capitalism, or as being deficient or substandard imitations of capitalism; as being opposite to capitalism; as being the complement of capitalism; or as existing in capitalism’s space or orbit’ (after Gibson-Graham 1996, p. 6; see Chapter 1 in this volume).

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Reading for economic difference  481 The recognition of capitalocentrism came from a deconstructive reading of economic thought and practice. Deconstruction identifies dominance and the tenuous hold by which stable presence is maintained. Identifying dominance is thus the grounds upon which a reading for difference takes place. Reading for economic difference starts by making the subordinated identities and activities more visible and allowing the possibility that they have independent agency (see for example Roelvink 2007). A related reading technique, also a precondition of reading for difference, is that of queering. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pioneered the practice of de-aligning, or queering, dominant terms. Not only is the A/not A distinction hard to maintain, but all the A’s that line up together against all the not A’s are not perfectly aligned. She famously listed the dominant meanings of the heteronormative family (Sedgwick 1993, p. 6): ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

a surname a sexual dyad a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage a circuit of blood relationships a system of companionship and succour a building a proscenium between ‘private’ and ‘public’ an economic unit of earning and taxation the prime site of economic consumption the prime site of cultural consumption a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations a daily routine a unit in a community of worship a site of patriotic formation.

Sedgwick showed how this dominant meaning formation was challenged by LBGTIQ relationships and queer families. The legalization of same sex marriage in many countries has been an outcome of struggles to de-align these terms, objects and practices and allow for different configurations of relationship and alignment (see Chapter 48 by Brown in this volume). So reading for difference is not just about identifying the shaky grounds upon which certain valued presences are defined at the expense of others, but also about unpicking the alliances that yoke certain presences together. When it comes to the economy it is clear that commodified transactions, capitalist business and waged labour are lined up in a capitalonormative formation and that these activities are associated with certain subjectivities and practices and not others. The practice of reading for difference is to unravel capitalonormativity and to highlight the radical heterogeneity of economic identities and relationships and trajectories. The third aspect of reading according to Althusser was to activate an ‘informed gaze’ produced from the standpoint of a new terrain that emerges from the necessity of the absences, and we might add the alignments, that deconstruction and queering has revealed. The diverse economies research agenda is conducted from such a standpoint – one that seeks out economic difference in order to explore the possibility of creating more just and sustainable economies. In the next section of this chapter I illustrate different ways of reading for economic difference in contemporary social research and historical archival research with this agenda in mind.

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READING FOR ECONOMIC DIFFERENCE A first thing to note about reading for economic difference is that it requires the researcher to actively adopt an open, exploratory stance. The purpose of reading for difference is to proliferate what we have to work with in terms of economic identities, and to challenge ingrained alignments of power that shut down the potential for multiple trajectories of possibility to take flight. In a world where ‘progressive’ critical analysis takes perverse joy in its grasp on the ever increasing power of neoliberal capitalist patriarchal globalization one must make a conscious decision to read ‘against the grain’.3 A second thing to note is that a reading for difference will never achieve the explanatory power of dominant narratives. By reading against strong theory, the researcher can only ever produce a weak form of theory – one that foregrounds detail and description and tenuously performs connections. This is not to say, however, that a weak theory of economic difference might not have powerful effects – for example, unleashing desires to experiment with non-capitalist economic forms. A third thing to note is that highlighting economic difference differentiates the world (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, p. 325; Latour 2004) and this intervention is not to be easily dismissed. A world that is more differentiated is a world where more unexpected innovations and unforeseen developments might be fostered. Reading for economic difference thus becomes a first step in many new kinds of interventions and collective actions. Reading for Economic Difference in Interview Transcripts Jenny Cameron’s qualitative study of the gendered dynamics of households in which women were full-time employees in the paid workforce employed in-depth interviews with women about their household work and the division of labour in their domestic settings. Starting from a feminist standpoint, Cameron listened to her interviewees to hear some of the ways that domestic labour was positioned in their eyes. In one close examination of a single interview transcript (Cameron 1996), she read against the dominant narrative of patriarchal household oppression, seeking out the differences in expressions of gender identity, desire and sexual power that did not necessarily ‘line up’ with a heteronormative and patriarchal mode of production. Her reading for difference sought out moments of instability and disruption and ventured into new theoretical terrain by, for example, describing her subject Pam (who talked of the pleasure and power she gained from being in charge of a large range of household tasks at home over the weekend) not as a domestic slave but as occupying a self-appropriating class position that allowed her to perform a preferred gender identity two days a week, while acting out a very different identity during the work week when she lived in town. Reading for difference in the alignments of sex, gender and desire made the multiple identities of Cameron’s research subjects more real.4 This mode of research makes space for there to be multiple ways of performing gender equity, not just one. Reading for Economic Difference in Place-Based Field Studies Many studies of diverse economic activity are grounded in place-based field research. A first step in the research process is to identify the range of diverse economic activities that people are engaged in. Reading the economic landscape for difference entails going beyond the official documentation of formal occupations, industries and paid employment, though these

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Reading for economic difference  483 provide useful data. Using the diverse economies framing as a guide, the researcher can use a range of methods to uncover the less visible economic practices that sustain livelihoods but are largely dismissed as unimportant or ‘not economic’. Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes this work as moving from a ‘sociology of absences’ whereby certain livelihood activities have been devalued by mainstream economic discourse or are said to have disappeared, to documenting ‘ecologies of difference’ (2004, p. 238). While Santos is mainly addressing the way that economic difference has been treated in the majority world context, there are similarities in all localities across the globe. In the region often referred to as Monsoon Asia, rapid urbanization and industrialization are changing the social, economic and ecological landscape. The forces of modernization are portrayed as all powerful, sweeping away traditional livelihoods and instating capitalist relations in all spheres of existence. A collaboration of minority world scholars working on Southeast Asia and majority world researchers living in Southeast Asia is reading against this dominant narrative by compiling keywords of still current livelihood sustaining community economic practices (Gibson et al. 2018). Their inventory is producing a range of thick descriptions of practices, trust, care, sharing, reciprocity, cooperation, divestiture, future orientation, collective agreement, coercion, bondage, thrift, guilt, love, community pressure, equity, self-exploitation, solidarity, distributive justice, stewardship, spiritual connection, and community led environmental and social justice (see also Gibson et al. 2010). This work is highlighting the variety of unappreciated ways people and environments have of interconnecting that could be even more effectively harnessed towards resilience building (Gibson-Graham et al. 2016). Reading for Economic Difference in Policy Analysis The introduction of a neoliberal framing of nature as a source of ecological services has, according to many researchers, enrolled farmers as unwitting agents of neoliberal policy, portraying them as subjects driven by economic incentives. Sophie Wynne-Jones (2014) has explored reading for difference in this contested terrain. Her research in rural Wales revealed the many ways that farmers disrupt the neoliberal agenda by, for example, regarding the land as much more than a source of commodities, taking a nuanced view of market policy that undermines their role as providers of food security, working cooperatively and working for intergenerational, not short-term, returns. In this work Wynne-Jones has, as did Cameron, listened to the detail, given the disruptive elements of her findings equal value as those that ‘lined up’ with dominant readings. What is produced is a counter to the reading that privileges the depoliticized farmer subject. This research contributes to opening up a lively debate about the still unsettled politics of land management in which farmers in their multiple roles can have a voice.5

CONCLUSION By accepting that how we represent the world contributes to enacting that world we collapse the distinction between epistemology and ontology. Reading for economic difference is a thinking practice, a research method and an intervention in making worlds. It is a practice that needs careful cultivation within a scholarly environment in which strong theory is pre-

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484  The handbook of diverse economies ferred. But the rewards of reading for economic difference are many. The nature of economic identity and dynamics of change become an open-ended empirical question, not a structural imperative. This allows for a different imaginary in which economic possibility proliferates and situates the researcher in a responsible position with respect to what stories she tells.

NOTES 1. Althusser was critical of realist and empiricist epistemologies that conceived of knowledge as a reflection of the essence of the real object, an essence that predates the process of knowledge making (Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 24–5, 35). 2. Not that this process of identification is not open ended but it is specifically directed and constrained by what has gone before. As Althusser puts it, ‘In the development of a theory, the invisible of a visible field is not generally anything whatever outside and foreign to the visible defined by that field. The invisible is defined by the visible as its invisible, its forbidden vision’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 27). 3. With thanks to Walter Benjamin (1940) who famously wrote that the task of the historical materialist was to ‘brush history against the grain’. 4. Another reading of interview transcripts that proliferates economic difference is offered in the work of Gibson-Graham et al. (2019) on manufacturing companies in Australia. In this paper the authors read against the dominant narrative of profit maximizing capitalist corporations to listen for moments where commitments to economic justice and environmental sustainability are privileged as shapers of the business trajectory. 5. Wynne-Jones’ active refusal to accept the neoliberal capture narrative is akin to that of Ed Harris’ readings of the 100 mile diet (2009). In this paper Harris juxtaposes a reading for dominance and a reading for difference of this form of local food activism.

REFERENCES Althusser, L. and E. Balibar (1970), Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster, London: New Left Books. Battacharya, T. (ed.) (2017), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, London: Pluto Press. Benjamin, W. (1940), On the Concept of History, trans. D. Redmond (2005), accessed 16 July 2019 at https://​www​ marxists​.org/​reference/​archive/​benjamin/​1940/​history​ htm. Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London: Routledge. Cameron, J. (1996), ‘Throwing a dishcloth into the works: Troubling theories of domestic labor’, Rethinking Marxism, 9 (2), 24–44. Cixous, H. and C. Clément (1986 [1975]), The Newly Born Woman, trans. B. Wing, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. de Saussure, F. (2011 [1916]), Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (1959), New York: Columbia University Press. de Sousa Santos, B. (2004), ‘The World Social Forum: Toward a counter-hegemonic globalisation’, part 1, in J. Sen, A. Anand, A. Escobar and P. Waterman (eds), The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, pp. 235–45. Derrida, J. (1978), ‘Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, London: Routledge. Folbre, N. (2001), The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, New York: New Press. Geertz, C. (1973), ‘Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–30. Gibson, K., R. Astuti, M. Carnegie, A. Chalernphon, K. Dombroski, A.A.R. Haryani, A. Hill, B. Kehi, L. Law, I. Lyne, A. McGregor, K. McKinnon, A. McWilliam, F. Miller, C. Ngin, D. Occeña-Gutierrez, L. Palmer, P. Placino, M. Rampengan, W.L.L. Than, N.I. Wianti, S. Wright and the Seeds of

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Reading for economic difference  485 Resilience Research Collective (2018), ‘Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59 (1), 3–16. Gibson, K., A. Cahill and D. McKay (2010), ‘Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippines municipality’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (2), 237–55. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2000), ‘Poststructural interventions’, in E. Sheppard and T. Barnes (eds), A Companion to Economic Geography, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 95–110. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2014), ‘Rethinking the economy with thick description and weak theory’, Current Anthropology, 55 (S9), S147–S153. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, S. Healy and J. McNeill (2019), ‘Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography: Economic geography, manufacturing and ethical action in the Anthropocene’, Economic Geography, 95 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K., A. Hill and L. Law (2016), ‘Re-embedding economies in ecologies: Resilience building in more than human communities’, Building Research Information, 44 (7), 703–36. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2009), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 41, 320–346. Grosz, E. (1995), ‘Women, chora, dwelling’, in S. Watson and K. Gibson (eds), Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 47–58. Harris, E. (2009), ‘Neoliberal subjectivities or a politics of the possible? Reading for difference in alternative food networks’, Area 41 (1), 55–63. Kuhn, T. (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (2004), ‘How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies’, Body and Society, 10, 205–29. Law, J. and J. Urry (2004), ‘Enacting the social’, Economy and Society, 33, 390–410. Mackenzie, S. and D. Rose (1983), ‘Industrial change, the domestic economy and home life’, in J. Anderson, S. Duncan and R. Hudson (eds), Redundant Spaces in Cities and Regions, London: Academic Press, pp. 157–76. Roelvink, G. (2007), ‘Review article: Performing the market’, Social Identities, 1, 125–33. Sedgwick, E.K. (1993), Tendencies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, G. (1989), ‘Interpretation: Reading and taking notes’, in The Student’s Writing Guide for the Arts and Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–85. Waring, M. (1988), Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, Auckland: Allen & Unwin. Wynne-Jones, S. (2014), ‘“Reading for difference” with payments for ecosystems services in Wales’, Critical Policy Studies, 8 (2), 148–64.

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53. Field methods for assemblage analysis: tracing relations between difference and dominance Eric Sarmiento

INTRODUCTION Assemblage thinking (from the French word agencement referring to a collection of things gathered together or assembled) is an analytical framework and a mode of thought developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987). As a non-dualistic technique of thinking, it is especially useful for exploring relationships between the material world and processes of meaning making. Moreover, it refuses to grant a priori explanatory power to particular actors or political economic social structures and thus has been adopted by social researchers as an effective way of avoiding the totalizing and essentializing tendencies of structuralist ontologies (Gibson-Graham 1996; Sarmiento 2017). To practise assemblage thinking we must actively trace connections between actors and forces over space and time, allowing that connections might seem initially counterintuitive, and that the actors involved are likely to be of wildly divergent kinds or orders. For scholars of postcapitalist economies this has meant attending to the animating forces of more-than-human, as well as human, actors and agencies (see Chapter 44 by Miller in this volume and Cameron et al. 2014; Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010; Healy 2015; Hill 2015; Hosking and Palomino-Schalscha 2016; Miller 2014; Roelvink 2015; Snyder and St. Martin 2015). It has also meant tracing how emergent community economies are influenced by actors, forces and processes operating at various spatio-temporal extents, within and through entrenched hierarchies and power disparities. When researching diverse economies and the possibilities and limits of community economy initiatives, assemblage thinking is particularly useful. Until recently, however, relatively little has been written about field research methods that are suitable for assemblage analysis, that is, about how such tracings are carried out in practical terms. In this chapter, I briefly sketch the methodological implications of deploying assemblage thinking, illustrating my argument through a brief account of research on the linkages between the local food movement in the state of Oklahoma, in the central United States, and urban redevelopment processes in that state’s capital, Oklahoma City.

ASSEMBLAGE ONTOLOGY AND ANALYSIS Assemblage approaches generally deploy a relational ontology, holding that phenomena do not exist as discrete subjects or objects defined by intrinsic, essential qualities, but rather emerge and develop in and through relationships between a wide array of actors and agencies, human and more-than-human. The analytical framework is processual, emphasizing the contingent, dynamic and potentially alterable ebb and flow of relationships over time and space. Relationships can be, and typically are, hierarchical, but hierarchies are understood as the 486 Eric Sarmiento - 9781788119962 08:03:20PM

Field methods for assemblage analysis  487 emergent outcome of historical and ongoing encounters, upon which power relations are contingent. Importantly, an assemblage approach emphasizes researchers’ roles as co-mediators of their objects of study, not neutral observers simply apprehending ‘data’ about the world. For Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are constituted by the ongoing relationship between dominance and difference. Every assemblage is simultaneously constituted by territorializing and de-territorializing movements, lines or forces. By territorialization, they are referring to the coming together of various materials, meanings and affects to produce a degree of order, systematization and cohesive identity, or what they call ‘molar’ segmentarity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The practice of reading for dominance is one that seeks out molar organization. De-territorializing forces are by contrast ‘molecular’. They are ‘quantum’ elements that ‘flow’ or ‘leak’ from molar organization, escape vectors or ‘lines of flight’ leading to the outside of the assemblages from which they emerge (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The practice of reading for difference is one that seeks out molecular forms (see Chapter 52 on reading for difference by Gibson-Graham in this volume). As Deleuze and Guattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, p. 225), ‘molar segments are always necessarily immersed in the molecular soup that nourishes them and makes their outlines waver’, and ‘there is always a proportional relation between the two’ (1987, p. 215). Tracing the relationships between the molar and the molecular is, for Deleuze and Guattari, the point or goal of assemblage analysis (Fox and Alldred 2015). Researching an assemblage involves accounting for the constitutive elements and dynamics of what is becoming and might yet become. Assemblage analysis employs a type of ‘weak theory’ (see Chapter 1 in this volume); it does not know too much about the world in advance of tracing connections. But as I’ve touched on here, it does foreground a specific ontology of power and politics. When fully mobilized in research design the focus is on tracing the relationships between the molar and the molecular, between dominance and difference. I turn now to consider what field methods designed to trace these relations might look like, drawing on my study of the linkages between Oklahoma’s local food movement and urban redevelopment in Oklahoma City.

RESEARCHING THE ‘IN-BETWEEN’ I began my research with the local food movement in Oklahoma in 2009. This was something of a heady time for the movement, which had begun with the creation in 2003 of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, an innovative enterprise that brought producers and consumers together as owners of a cooperative enterprise built on the core values of social justice, environmental stewardship, and economic sustainability. It was also a time when a series of obstacles were beginning to loom large. Efforts were being made by supermarket chains and corporate restaurant groups to co-opt local food, making it increasingly difficult for smaller producers to maintain a foothold in a competitive market. Food health and safety regulations, which in the eyes of small producers were excessive and onerous, presented barriers to small producers’ efforts to expand. And tensions between factions and individuals within the movement and its associated enterprises were taking a toll on morale and energy. The movement’s dynamism and hopes – and its challenges – presented an ideal opportunity to explore how a nascent community economy develops over time and space.

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488  The handbook of diverse economies Tracing Assemblages I chose to employ an assemblage approach to avoid the kinds of a priori assumptions about capitalism’s scale, hierarchy and power that may have limited my ability to recognize and explore political possibilities being created by or opening up for the local food movement. At the same time, this approach allowed me to critically scrutinize a wide range of actors impinging on the development of the movement. These actors ranged from state agencies with whom local food enterprises sought to collaborate in creating fair and sensible food regulations and policies to dilapidated buildings in central Oklahoma City that would come to serve as a nascent local food hub; from national supermarket chains that marketed themselves as purveyors of local food, to Omega-3 fats that helped distinguish grass-fed beef from cattle raised on feedlots; and from giant fossil fuel companies that built organic employee gardens on their corporate campuses to ice chests that not only kept perishable foods cold in the hot Oklahoma summer but also brought cooperative members closer together both physically and socially. Through preliminary research I identified several major factors shaping the development of the local food movement, including state and federal regulatory agencies, political and interpersonal dynamics within the movement, and a period of robust urban redevelopment in Oklahoma City. I initially set out to explore all of these realms and their connections to the local food movement, but as I relate below, I soon came to focus primarily on one. As with many assemblage-oriented research projects, the field methods I relied on were primarily ethnographic: I was a participant-observer at dozens of Oklahoma Food Cooperative work days and meetings, food fairs and trade shows, and redevelopment-related events in Oklahoma City; I conducted over 60 semi-structured interviews with participants in the local food movement, state agencies’ personnel, and urban developers; and I convened two focus groups with Coop members. I also analysed hundreds of archival documents, reports, press articles, and other textual and visual materials. In all of these activities, I focused on how the assemblage of the local food movement changed as its territory expanded across the state, cutting into existing markets for food, reshaping producer and consumer subjectivities, and encountering a range of other assemblages. Relying on these methods, I came to focus my research on the linkages between the local food movement and the intense urban redevelopment occurring in Oklahoma City. The city was pursuing an ‘entrepreneurial’ development agenda (Harvey 1989). This was centred on quality of life initiatives, mostly in and around the city’s long-disinvested urban core, and was geared towards attracting and retaining big businesses and the so-called ‘creative class’ (Florida 2012) that such firms rely on for their labour force. Through my immersion in the daily life of the movement and the city, the centrality of the redevelopment process to the development of the local food movement became increasingly clear. In the interviews I conducted with local food proponents and the board meetings I observed, the rapidly changing city was often interwoven into discussions. And throughout the city’s redeveloping areas and at events in the city that I participated in, ‘local food’ – variously conceived – was rarely absent. The same was also true for media coverage of the changes in the food cultures and the spaces of the city, which frequently commented on the linkages in the development of these two milieus.

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Field methods for assemblage analysis  489 Becoming-Molar in the Molecular Soup: Experiencing the Assemblage Further insight into the dynamics of the growing territory of redevelopment and its links with local food was gained from an approach I developed that I came to think of as ‘annotated driving’. I spent hundreds of hours on the state’s streets and roadways during my fieldwork, and I frequently used this time to capture my thoughts by speaking into my recording device. Over time several trends in this practice gradually took shape. I began to comment on the landscapes I was passing through as I moved to and from various sites, making observations about what I was seeing, and interpreting the connections between sites. As my focus narrowed to scrutinizing the linkages between redevelopment and local food, I began to use annotated driving to understand the spatiality of changes in the city. Noticing patterns in my routes through and around the city as I traced the sites linked to local food, I not only sought to understand what patterned my movements, but also asked myself why certain areas were left out and what I wasn’t seeing. I developed the habit of taking different routes so as to focus on the connections and discontinuities between areas of the city or particular sites within and beyond the city. Frequent visits to the former location of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative’s Operations Centre in the predominantly Hispanic area of Capitol Hill led me to take a number of ‘annotated drives’ connecting this area in various ways to the redeveloped urban core. I also made several drives to and from Capitol Hill and more marginalized swathes of the city to the east and south. As a supplement to these drives, I began walking from one area of the city to another, taking in the changing sensory textures and cultural milieus along the way. These drives and walks drew my attention to the material processes of development and neglect, investment and disinvestment, from the iconic architectures and massive infrastructural works galvanizing some areas to the empty lots, dilapidated houses, and profuse vegetation and forest cover colonizing others. In a city where driving to get from place to place is for most people an absolute necessity, the drives were particularly important as a way of coming to grips with how the materiality of urban space affected the experience of people in the city. As I drove, I narrated into my recorder what I was seeing, noting the different sensory textures and socio-spatial dynamics of diverse urban spaces through movement between them, while also highlighting the infrastructures that are themselves in-between sites, sometimes connecting sites, other times bifurcating them. This led me to more specific questions, such as ‘how do sites such as a freeway viaduct or an abandoned meat packing plant mediate the assemblage of local food?’ While the city was (and continues to be) a patchwork of unevenly developed spaces and marked social and economic inequality, I came to see a relatively coherent assemblage emerging in and through the changing urban landscape. This assemblage was cobbled together and infused with meanings by way of renovated infrastructures, iconic architecture, sports milieus, computer generated films, media coverage, festivals, and other materials. Bits and pieces of the local food movement featured in this assemblage, anchoring gentrifying neighbourhoods by attracting ‘creative class’ workers, reclaiming a sense of this long-neglected city being part of the broader modern world, and contributing to the legitimacy of redevelopment policies. But redevelopment was neither benefiting all Oklahoma citizens equally, nor appreciated universally in the city. Most pointedly, I found that while the local food movement in some respects benefited from a growing market for speciality foods in the city, it was being drawn into the territory of redevelopment and was arguably leading the movement towards a more

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490  The handbook of diverse economies fetishized approach to local food, in which commitments to social justice and cooperativism were largely marginalized (Sarmiento 2017, 2018). Parasitic Symbiosis and Lines of Flight While the relationship between the local food movement and urban redevelopment is hierarchical and marked by power disparities, it is also to an extent symbiotic. If we read for dominance, this symbiosis is parasitic – the ‘molar’ force of redevelopment is sapping the local food movement of its vitality, halting its growth. At the same time, the assemblage conjoining redevelopment and local food is shot through with inconsistencies, ruptures and tensions. If we read for difference, these moments of rupture might be linked to lines of flight into other assemblages, both actual and virtual. In my fieldwork, I sought to constantly maintain focus on how these ‘molecular’ dynamics and de-territorializing vectors related to the increasingly coherent assemblage linking redevelopment and local food. The most obvious examples had to do with the frequency with which the co-optation of ‘local food’ was expressed as a topic of concern by my interviewees, in board meetings, and many other sites. As one Oklahoma Food Cooperative member put it in an interview, ‘if a business . . . is able to call itself a ‘farmers’ market’ and is not in any way a farmers’ market . . . that’s a big threat to a real farmers’ market. . . . I think that’s really wrong. It’s beyond false advertising, it’s like straight-up lying’. Such expressions of indignation were common among long-time members of the local food movement, and demonstrate some of the tensions generated by the movement’s engagement with redevelopment. But through annotated driving, used in conjunction with other methods, I also became aware of other less obvious molecular currents that were eating away at the molar assemblage. Towards the end of my fieldwork, a member of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative campaigned for mayor in Oklahoma City, running partly on a critique of the unevenness of redevelopment. While his bid was unsuccessful, his campaign illuminated the significant counter-currents of affect in the city. These did not simply dissipate in the wake of the election. Meanwhile, my work eventually led me to a site called the Farmers Public Market, just west of Oklahoma City’s central business district in an area that for decades had been neglected. There, the local food movement increasingly concentrated its activities, just as developers were hatching a redevelopment plan. Several years later, vast swathes of the landscape near this Market are being transformed by redevelopment interventions. The Market lies in something of a borderland between those redeveloping areas and still-dilapidated areas where the city’s homeless population is concentrated. Arguably, this site is a focal point where the expanding territory of redevelopment meets its outside, where the molar encounters the molecular. It remains to be seen whether the local food movement continues to work with redevelopment to plug up and block lines of flight, or instead joins with those lines and contributes towards the stabilization of an alternate territory, in which a community economy of local food and redevelopment can better flourish. This is a question for future research. Without the theoretical and methodological apparatus I have outlined in this chapter, such a question would be difficult to ask in a manner that did not prematurely foreclose political possibilities or elide the constraints on those possibilities.

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Field methods for assemblage analysis  491

CONCLUSION By drawing on diverse economies scholarship in conjunction with assemblage thinking, my analysis has shed light on the lines of flight emanating from the dominant assemblage of fossil fuel and agro-food companies, property developers, and corporate supermarket chains that has largely territorialized local food. The health woes, economic inequalities and ecological concerns generated by conventional food systems in the state continue to produce frictions for Oklahomans, as do the uneven material, social and economic impacts of redevelopment in Oklahoma City. These frictions can be viewed as expressions of the molecular currents eating away at the stability of the current configuration of power relations, of matter and meaning. Presenting this sketch of my field methods and analysis, it is important to clarify that I do not claim to have been positioned as an analyst ‘outside’ the city in any way. Nor do my observations and analysis present an objectively ‘real’ or complete picture of the city and its relationship to the local food movement as a totality (Deutsch 1991). To the contrary, I view myself as physically immersed in a number of interrelated points and specific processes sited in the city and beyond, only some of which are connected in readily apparent ways. As it turned out, my analysis ended up traversing and taking a place within the contours of an uneven and rather motley topology of actors that together work as a relatively coherent, durable and capable force that is structuring both the ongoing development of the local food movement, and the life-worlds and affective circuitry of the city itself. A central question emerging from this work is how such an approach might more strongly support the situated, participatory, and possibly molecular role of the researcher working in conjunction with collaborators that are human and more-than-human?

REFERENCES Cameron J., K. Gibson, and A. Hill (2014), ‘Cultivating hybrid collectives: Research methods for enacting community food economies in Australia and the Philippines’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 118–32. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deutsch, R. (1991), ‘Boys town’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 9, 5–30. Florida, R. (2012), The Rise of the Creative Class: Revisited, New York: Basic Books. Fox, N.J. and P. Alldred (2015), ‘New materialist social inquiry: Designs, methods and the research-assemblage’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18 (4), 399–414. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2010), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (S1), 320–346. Harvey, D. (1989), ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler, 71 (1), 3–17. Healy, S. (2015), ‘Biofuels, ex-felons, and Empower, a worker-owned cooperative: Performing enterprises differently’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 98–127. Hill, A. (2015), ‘Moving from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern” in order to grow economic food futures in the Anthropocene’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32, 551–63. Hosking, E. and M. Palomino-Schalscha (2016), ‘Of gardens, hopes, and spirits: Unravelling (extra) ordinary community economic arrangements as sites of transformation in Cape Town, South Africa’, Antipode, 48 (5), 1249–69.

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492  The handbook of diverse economies Miller, E. (2014), ‘Economization and beyond: (Re)composing livelihoods in Maine, USA’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46 (11), 2735–51. Roelvink, G. (2015), ‘Performing posthumanist economies in the Anthropocene’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin, and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 225–43. Sarmiento, E. (2017), ‘Synergies in alternative food network research: Embodiment, diverse economies, and more-than-human food geographies’, Agriculture and Human Values, 34 (2), 485–97. Sarmiento, E. (2018), ‘The affirming affects of entrepreneurial redevelopment: Architecture, sport, and local food in Oklahoma City’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50 (2), 327–49. Snyder, R. and K. St. Martin (2015), ‘A fishery for the future: The Midcoast Fishermen’s Association and the work of economic being-in-common’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 53–7.

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54. Visualizing and analysing diverse economies with GIS: a resource for performative research Luke Drake

INTRODUCTION Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computer-based systems for storing, processing, analysing and visualizing data that are linked to locations on or near the Earth’s surface. GIS evolved through the emerging computer technologies of the 1960s. It grew from the far slower technique of spatial analysis that had until then been done by manually overlaying translucent hardcopy maps as layers on top of one another in order to combine variables such as land ownership, soil type and population. GIS offered advantages in speed, automation and the ability to handle large data sets in a way that was not previously possible. As such, it became a key tool of scientific geographical research that was part of the larger ‘quantitative revolution’ sweeping through the discipline of geography in the mid-twentieth century. By the time GIS became more prevalent at major universities in the 1980s, it was mainly aligned with a positivist approach to knowledge that privileges quantification and scientific verification via logical or mathematical proof along the methodological lines followed by much natural scientific inquiry. However, recently scholars engaged with more interpretive modes of knowledge production have found ways to use GIS in a variety of settings. Today, it is used across fields as diverse as engineering, natural and social sciences, and humanities. This chapter examines how GIS can be used for diverse economies research by tracing how critical GIS scholars experimented with applications and with new links between GIS methods and interpretivist epistemologies.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEBATES ABOUT GIS, METHODOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY Deploying GIS in research has a contentious history within the discipline of geography and the social sciences more generally (Crampton 2010; Pickles 1995; Schuurman 2000). A first wave of debate from the 1980s to 1990s was characterized by opposition between advocates and critics of GIS, who both saw it as essentially positivist, which was a problematic view because it conflated epistemology with method. Advocates viewed GIS as progressive yet neutral, with the strength to analyse and interrelate detailed data concerning both physical and social systems covering very large spatial extents (Openshaw 1991). Early advocates provided examples of what they saw as successful GIS projects, including the optimal siting of coal mines or missile systems (Dobson 1983). Unsurprisingly, critiques appeared, framing GIS as a step backward to the fraught history of geographers aiding and facilitating imperialist expansion around the world (Pickles 1993). For critics, GIS was risky in many ways. It was a danger to society as an expensive and elite technology to be used by large and powerful insti493 Luke Drake - 9781788119962 08:03:25PM

494  The handbook of diverse economies tutions for surveillance and other ends. Epistemologically, they saw GIS as limited to treating humans as atomistic objects and reduced to data points, thus eliminating human agency and subjective experience from spatial analysis, and limited to representing space as a discrete surface separate from political and economic processes (Curry 1995). Whether coming to the debate from a techno-positivist or critical social theory perspective, the interlocutors of this first wave promoted a polarized and simplistic view of GIS – it was either essentially neutral or inherently flawed. A second wave of debate emerged when scholars trained in both GIS and social theory worked to see past such binary divisions to use GIS for critical social science. Since the 1990s, GIS has been used in a variety of interpretivist approaches (Crampton 2010). Participatory GIS has involved community members in GIS research and decision making by contributing local, non-official data (Craig et al. 2002). Feminist scholars have depicted multiple subjective representations of space through GIS data structures (Kwan 2002; Pavlovskaya 2002, 2004). Qualitative applications of GIS have used photographs and metadata to store contextual data, and analytical possibilities have expanded to using GIS within focus groups (Aitken and Kwan 2010; Cope and Elwood 2009). These applications have revealed the coexistence of multiple spatial rationalities. They have disrupted the narrative of a uniformly positivist GIS. Importantly the argument has been made that GIS is not tied to any particular knowledge system (Pavlovskaya 2006). The first and second waves of debate differed in their assumptions about the relationship between methodology and epistemology. The first wave framed GIS as a unified and coherent method and epistemology. The second wave rejected a deterministic relationship between method and epistemology to instead see GIS as being compatible with a range of theoretical approaches. This move was enabled, I suggest, by broader debates in geography about methodology and epistemology that argued, for example, that feminist theory can be applied through quantitative methods (Lawson 1995), and that even positivism itself can be used critically (Wyly 2009). What has become known as critical GIS has nurtured experimentation on how existing tools and data structures of GIS could be used with non-positivist epistemologies, and how GIS could be changed to better fit those epistemologies. Reflection on what should be done next, and an openness to experiment without knowing where the path may lead, characterizes critical GIS. This is quite different from the first wave of debate, when critics found shortcomings in GIS and then closed off conversations. This open and inquisitive stance of critical GIS is also deliberately foregrounded in diverse economies theory, where just because an economic alternative might have negative impacts or face the chance of co-optation does not bring just cause to stop thinking through it. These similarities are one way that GIS and diverse economies are compatible. GIS can be a means of revealing economic diversity, resisting capitalocentric discourse and reading for difference.

USING GIS TO VISUALIZE AND ANALYSE ECONOMIC DIVERSITY GIS databases can be used to visualize a range of labour practices, types of enterprise, transactions, property or finance. Further analysis of such data could include a range of techniques, from using maps within focus groups, to spatial statistics or modelling. By mapping where diverse economic practices take place, GIS extends other visualization techniques such as the

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Visualizing and analysing diverse economies with GIS  495 iceberg image to show that not only can we have a vocabulary of economic diversity but also that it exists in real places. Researchers and activists have used maps in this way to create counter-narratives that show spatial patterns of the growth and expansion of non-capitalist enterprises. Projects in North and South America as well as Europe have mapped the solidarity economy by drawing on secondary data, field observations, interviews and participatory approaches (Borowiak 2015; Safri et al. 2017). Outputs from this work include online interactive maps. They allow users to see point locations of solidarity economy enterprises on web-based maps, which are hosted on a variety of platforms such as OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, or custom-built applications, many of which are maintained by grassroots organizations. Second, advanced techniques are used to dynamically cluster points at regional and national map scales on other web maps. For example, the US Solidarity Map (solidarityeconomy.us [accessed 12 May 2019]) shows individual locations and types of enterprises at local scales, and it clusters points when zoomed out so that users can easily see broader spatial patterns (Safri et al. 2017). These maps allow users to find solidarity economy sites and also serve a performative role in showing the geographical ubiquity of economic diversity. This cataloguing and visualization leverages the power of maps to make the invisible visible (Pavlovskaya 2018). As Safri et al. note ‘being on the map requires articulation in theory, policy, and practice’ (2017, p. 72). Such work provides a different discourse than one in which alternatives are understood as piecemeal or anecdotal and disrupts a narrative of an all-encompassing capitalism. Spatial analysis of urban diverse economies shows how GIS can help explain the complexity of diverse economic processes. Pavlovskaya (2002, 2004) examined daily household experiences in Moscow to understand women’s lives in light of the expected improvements after the fall of the Soviet Union. To reveal urban change at a neighbourhood scale, she constructed data sets with the following materials: phone books of urban establishments, maps of building footprints that showed the spatial area of individual buildings, and household interviews. Through the combination of interviews and GIS, a diverse economy comprising household labour, informal exchange, and formal markets were traced in a way that was not possible through official state data. Likewise, the automation and speed of GIS allowed her to process a large amount of data that otherwise would have been unfeasible. While the project drew on the ontological power of mapping to reveal the invisible as in the visualization examples above, it also used the analytical capacity of GIS to explore the processes that accompany diverse economies. In a project on solidarity economies GIS has supported the analysis of demographic and diverse economy data for Philadelphia and New York (Borowiak et al. 2018; Pavlovskaya and Eletto in press). These projects examined whether the growth of enterprises such as cooperatives and people-focused financial institutions such as credit unions had uneven race and class impacts. This was done by comparing enterprise locations to socio-economic census data in GIS. In both cities, there was spatial fragmentation in terms of both race and class, which showed that diverse economic enterprises and institutions are not evenly accessible or experienced. Credit unions in New York, for instance, were spatially clustered according to whether they were simply member-owned or also had explicit aims to serve racial minority and working-class populations (Pavlovskaya and Eletto in press). In Philadelphia, GIS was used to integrate analysis of multiple types of enterprises, including cooperatives, community gardens, community land trusts, time banks and credit unions, rather than record only individual types of enterprises (Borowiak et al. 2018). This meant that the solidarity economy as a whole was

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496  The handbook of diverse economies visualized. One aim was to perform economic diversity by visualizing a coherent whole – the resulting maps showed that solidarity enterprises were a part of larger interconnected local and regional economies not isolated or fragmented practices. Commons and commoning processes are also visualized through GIS analysis through both primary and secondary data. As the following examples show, this includes using data specifically created about commons, and also turning secondary data on capitalist activity into a source of diverse economies data. Drake and Lawson (2015) have used GIS to reveal the spatial extent of an actually existing commons. They conducted a survey of community gardening organizations in the USA and Canada to complement a literature characterized by detailed qualitative case studies of individual gardens. Statistical analysis of the survey data revealed shared challenges and benefits of the process of sustaining commons, and GIS was used to visualize the locations of the survey respondents. With this, the ontological power of mapping showed a spatial pattern of community gardens that stretched across nearly all the populated areas of North America. This form of commoning thus appeared as an expansive presence. Second, commons can be revealed by reading spatial data for difference. Reading for difference within the diverse economies framework is a technique to resist reading landscapes, ideas and practices as dominated by capitalism and to instead look for hidden but potentially ubiquitous non-capitalist ones. I suggest here that spatial data can also be read for difference, as shown in the following example of fisheries. Spatial data used in GIS often originates as state-produced data sets about populations, especially in the USA where secondary data is publicly available. The process of producing data and maps about populations and territories has been theorized not as a neutral reflection of space but as a process through which knowledge and power are co-produced (Foucault 2007). As such, official government statistics are not neutral reflections of a place and its people but actively work to discipline how people think and behave. Economic indicators such as gross domestic product, for instance, normalize capitalist practices as legitimate, bring formal market-based exchange into being, and render economic diversity invisible (Mitchell 2008). Fisheries data likewise is constructed in a way that privileges the individual commercial fisherman as discussed below. From a critical interpretivist approach, state-produced data sets could be read for the dominance of capitalism. However, data sets can also be read in ways that do not reproduce the discourse of capitalist dominance to instead find emergent economic diversity. The case of community fisheries management in New England illustrates how to read spatial data for difference (St. Martin 2005; St. Martin and Hall-Arber 2008). Marine spatial planning is largely based on the assumption that fishermen are utility-maximizing individuals and thus apt to overharvest. This assumption has pushed policy towards privatization of the marine commons. St. Martin’s research with others used secondary GIS data to reveal another reality – that certain areas of the Atlantic Ocean have been collectively managed by communities of New England fishermen. Data on commercial fishing trips from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which was originally encoded in a way that represented fishing as an individualistic pursuit, was instead processed to show territories at sea. Point data on the locations that individual boats travelled to were categorized by each boat’s home port. Kernel density surfaces were then made from these points. This resulted in colour-coded regions in the ocean that corresponded to ports. The project revealed that the ocean was not a site of hyper-competitive individualistic fishing but a commons that was negotiated and shared by communities for responsible fisheries management.

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REVEALING PAST LAYERS OF ECONOMIC DIVERSITY GIS can also uncover historical economic diversity, which matters because alterity is not just a contemporary phenomenon (McKinnon 2010). Historical approaches to diverse economies have included discourse analysis of parks and urban agriculture, showing how narratives of monolithic capitalist urban space are the outcomes of historically contingent and fragile processes rather than unstoppable forces (Drake and Lawson 2014; Gabriel 2011). In terms of GIS, the following example of my research draws on historical census data and maps in order to create a spatial narrative of urban space as something other than dominated by capitalist processes. Chavez Ravine, two kilometres north of downtown Los Angeles, has been the location of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball stadium since 1962 but was home to semi-rural, primarily Mexican-American neighbourhoods from the late 1800s until the 1950s. Popular and scholarly narratives focus on the eviction and razing of three neighbourhoods through an urban renewal programme (Laslett 2015; López 2005). While the case exposes institutional racism, it also typically employs a capitalocentric narrative of urbanization. The community is thus defined and identified by its displacement. Rarely told is how the community persisted for decades so close to the centre of a rapidly growing city, or the spatial dimensions of residents’ lives (cf. Normark 1999). A spatial data binary was evident in the dominant narrative – displacement and enclosure were easy to recognize and made even more real through the use of quantitative data, yet everyday life was moved to the background and had little evidence except for anecdotes. Although displacement occurred, it is reified as the only possible story through systematic, structured data, while stories of livelihoods are tangential side notes. Indeed, state documents in the 1950s represented the area as a slum and wasteland instead of as a place filled with social life, and critical scholarship in recent years quantified the number of people forcibly removed but provided few statistics on the socio-economic livelihoods preceding the removals (Laslett 2015). I aimed to bring those livelihoods into the centre by assembling systematic, structured data in a way that rendered those livelihoods visible once more. I used data from the 1940 US Census and archival maps to make demographic maps of pre-displacement Chavez Ravine and overlaid these data onto current maps. Such mapping is routine work for current or recent data, but for Chavez Ravine it meant taking streets and houses that no longer exist and returning them to maps, and then using census data to describe variations in neighbourhood social geography. First, scanned original enumeration documents were accessed from the 1940 census. These records showed individuals’ responses to census questions, which were made public in 2012. They also provided the street addresses of each person who was surveyed. Archival maps were then used to identify street names and locations within Chavez Ravine. These maps were necessary because nearly all streets in the study area from 1940 no longer exist – they have been replaced with the stadium’s parking lots. Historical street intersections (i.e. not found on current maps) were used as search criteria to download census data. A random sample of 62 individuals was selected and digitized as GIS point data based on the home address shown in the census enumeration data; these individuals were marked as the head-of-household, meaning they were the primary breadwinner. The locations of the points corresponded to home addresses, and the attribute data were selected from census variables such as place of birth, housing and employment. Address locations were determined

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498  The handbook of diverse economies by consulting archival Sanborn Fire Insurance atlases, which were highly detailed maps showing the addresses of individual parcels. This data unsettles historical discourses that the area was a slum or wasteland, and also gives vibrancy that is missing from dominant accounts (Figure 54.1). First, there was more spatial variety in Chavez Ravine than previously discussed. I identified two more neighbourhoods in addition to the three that are the focus of existing accounts. Two of these neighbourhoods overlaid spatially with current-day neighbourhoods. Additional homes were scattered throughout Chavez Ravine but did not appear to be clustered into neighbourhoods. Next, the 62-person sample’s socio-economic geography was diverse: 42 per cent were born in Mexico, 32 per cent in the USA, and 26 per cent in Europe. Across the five neighbourhoods, the sampled heads-of-household were spatially dispersed by place of birth; there was no clustering of people according to where they were born. Last, in terms of cash economy, there was an uneven spatial pattern in annual income: the 1939 average annual income of the five neighbourhoods, based on the sample, ranged from $153 to $925 (the average US income in 1939 was $956). Census respondents from neighbourhoods with lower average incomes reported a less diverse range of occupations, such as labourers and gardeners, while higher-earning neighbourhoods also reported skilled trades, merchants and truck drivers. Two brick-making factories had also been located in the area. This snapshot of Chavez Ravine shows how GIS and historical maps can be used for historical diverse economies work. The methodology required conscious effort to resist slipping into a strong theory of historical change. This was challenging; indeed, it would have been easier to use the data to affirm the timeline of displacement and destruction. To do so would have performed a discourse of dominance, and the neighbourhoods would have remained erased. Instead, I aimed to make those livelihoods real through the mapping and measurement of historical data, and to bring those spaces out of tangential anecdotes into a formal map discourse that lends a sense of truth to what had been located there.

CONCLUSIONS The use of GIS to research and perform diverse economies follows critical reflection on the multiple ways that methodology and epistemology are related. Critical GIS emerged through a shift in views on GIS from inherently problematic to having transformative possibilities. Diverse economies emerged from critical economic geographers’ efforts to theorize postcapitalist possibilities. Both involve an open stance towards experimentation with method and theory. When negative social impacts of GIS were identified, critical GIS scholars did not summarily dismiss the technology but instead sought creative ways to work through these issues (see Elwood 2006). Diverse economies scholars take a similar approach to critique, in that their aim is not to find ways that economic alternatives are doomed to fail or co-optation, but to ‘seek pathways, connections and surprising alignments’ (Gibson-Graham 2016, p. 360). Critical GIS and diverse economies share a resistance to ‘I told you so-ism’ (Gibson-Graham 2016, p. 360), and they show how critical research does not have to be driven by a strong theory of dominance. Indeed, scholars working from a diverse economies perspective contributed to the development of critical GIS. However, the use of GIS for diverse economies research has been limited. There is much opportunity to expand and extend the brief examples provided here.

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Visualizing and analysing diverse economies with GIS  499

Figure 54.1

Overlay of 1940 neighbourhood data with a basemap of current locations of stadium, parking lots, streets and residential areas

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Katherine Gibson and Kelly Dombroski provided very helpful comments on previous drafts of this chapter. Suzette Mera and Jonathan Tejeda assisted with research on Chavez Ravine for this chapter. Research was supported by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas Collection at the CSUN Department of Geography and Environmental Studies and by the CSUN Map Library.

REFERENCES Aitken, S. and M.P. Kwan (2010), ‘GIS as qualitative research: Knowledge, participatory politics and cartographies of affect’, in D. DeLyser, S. Herbert, S. Aitken, M. Crang and L. McDowell (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography, London: Sage Publications, pp. 287–304. Borowiak, C. (2015), ‘Mapping social and solidarity economy: The local and translocal evolution of a concept’, in N. Pun, B.H.-B. Ku, H. Yan and A. Koo (eds), Social Economy in China and the World, London: Routledge, pp. 17–40.

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500  The handbook of diverse economies Borowiak, C., M. Safri, S. Healy and M. Pavlovskay (2018), ‘Navigating the fault lines: Race and class in Philadelphia’s solidarity economy’, Antipode, 5, 577–603. Cope, M. and S. Elwood (2009), Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach, London: Sage Publications. Craig, W.J., T.M. Harris and D. Weiner (2002), Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems, New York: Taylor & Francis. Crampton, J. (2010), Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Mapping and GIS, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Curry, M. (1995), ‘Rethinking rights and responsibilities in Geographic Information Systems: Beyond the power of the image’, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 22, 58–69. Dobson, J.E. (1983), ‘Automated geography’, The Professional Geographer, 35, 135–43. Drake, L. and L.J. Lawson (2014), ‘Validating verdancy or vacancy? The relationship of community gardens and vacant lands in the US’, Cities, 40, Part B, 133–42. Drake, L. and L. J. Lawson (2015), ‘Results of a US and Canada community garden survey: Shared challenges in garden management amid diverse geographical and organizational contexts’, Agriculture and Human Values, 32, 241–54. Elwood, S. (2006), ‘Critical issues in participatory GIS: Deconstructions, reconstructions, and new research directions’, Transactions in GIS, 10, 693–708. Foucault, M. (2007), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gabriel, N. (2011), ‘The work that parks do: Towards an urban environmentality’, Social & Cultural Geography, 12, 123–41. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2016), ‘“Optimism”, place and the possibility of transformative politics’, in W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 359–63. Kwan, M.-P. (2002), ‘Re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 645–61. Laslett, J.H.M. (2015), Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Lawson, V. (1995), ‘The politics of difference: Examining the quantitative/qualitative dualism in post-structuralist feminist research’, The Professional Geographer, 47, 449–57. López, R. (2005), ‘Chavez Ravine’, in S. Obolerand and D. J. González (eds), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, accessed 23 May 2019 at https://​www​.oxfordreference​.com/​view/​10​.1093/​acref/​9780195156003​.001​.0001/​acref​ -9780195156003​-e​-143. McKinnon, K. (2010), ‘Diverse present(s), alternative futures’, in D. Fuller, A.E.G. Jonas and R. Lee (eds), Interrogating Alterity: Alternative Economic and Political Spaces, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 259–72. Mitchell, T. (2008), ‘Rethinking economy’, Geoforum, 39 (3), 1116–21. Normark, D. (1999), Chávez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. Openshaw, S. (1991), ‘A view on the GIS crisis in geography, or, using GIS to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 23, 621–8. Pavlovskaya, M. (2002), ‘Mapping urban change and changing GIS: Other views of economic restructuring’, Gender, Place and Culture, 9, 281–9. Pavlovskaya, M. (2004), ‘Other transitions: Multiple economies of Moscow households in the 1990s’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94, 329–51. Pavlovskaya, M. (2006), ‘Theorizing with GIS: A tool for critical geographies?’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38, 2003–20. Pavlovskaya, M. (2018), ‘Critical GIS as a tool for social transformation’, The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 62, 40–54. Pavlovskaya, M. and R. Eletto (in press), ‘Credit unions, class, race, and place in New York City’, Geoforum. Pickles, J. (1993), ‘Discourse on method and the history of discipline: Reflections on Dobson’s 1983 Automated Geography’, The Professional Geographer, 45, 451–5.

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Visualizing and analysing diverse economies with GIS  501 Pickles, J. (1995), Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, New York: Guilford Press. Safri, M., S. Healy, C. Borowiak and M. Pavlovskaya (2017), ‘Putting the solidarity economy on the map’, Journal of Design Strategies, 9, 71–83. Schuurman, N. (2000), ‘Trouble in the heartland: GIS and its critics in the 1990s’, Progress in Human Geography, 24, 569–90. St. Martin, K. (2005), ‘Mapping economic diversity in the First World: The case of fisheries’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 37, 959–79. St. Martin, K. and M. Hall-Arber (2008), ‘The missing layer: Geo-technologies, communities, and implications for marine spatial planning’, Marine Policy, 32, 779–86. Wyly, E. (2009), ‘Strategic positivism’, The Professional Geographer, 61, 310–322.

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55. Working with Indigenous methodologies: Kaupapa Māori meets diverse economies Joanne Waitoa and Kelly Dombroski

INTRODUCTION Many scholars of diverse economies have used community engaged methods to uncover and ‘map’ diverse economic practices in place, beginning with an open stance towards what is present and not assuming that everything will be subsumed into capitalism. Some Indigenous scholars such as Bargh (see Chapter 40 in this volume, and Bargh 2011) have argued that a diverse economies approach makes space for Indigenous ontologies and even cosmologies because of its recognition of multiple ways of being and doing in the world, and the more open framework for research (see also Ringham et al. 2016). Approaches that make space for academic recognition of Indigenous ontologies and economies are useful when Indigenous scholars are connecting with global conversations in social science and science (Chitondo and Dombroski 2019; Larsen and Johnson 2017), and can also be useful when applying for research grant funding (Underhill-Sem and Lewis 2008). But making space is different from recognizing and appreciating the inherent significance of the research theories and methodologies inherited and developed by Indigenous scholars (Chilisa 2011). In this chapter we discuss Kaupapa Māori1 methodology, an approach to research by, with and for Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. We do so as a first step towards identifying instructive points of connection and dissonance with diverse economies methods and approaches. Indigenous knowledges, informed by ancestors, have accumulated over generations, even millennia for many Indigenous peoples. This knowledge has provided the blueprint for how to live sustainably on and with the land and both human and non-human inhabitants. Much of this kind of knowledge has been accumulated by Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori ancestors voyaged across the Pacific 800–1000 years ago, settling in Aotearoa at a time when the prevailing thought in Europe was that the world was flat. They navigated with the knowledge passed down through generations of how to read the stars and landmarks (Ballara 1998). This body of knowledge is a form of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). Mātauranga Māori consistently informs Māori thought and cultural practice. It informs tikanga (custom) and kawa (rules), which lay out the theory and praxis of a culture embedded with values including whanaungatanga (relationships), aroha (love), manaakitanga (hospitality) and utu (reciprocity) (Mead 2003). These all form the basis of kaupapa Māori, which can be understood as action and plans that emerge from a Māori world view (Royal 2007). British arrival and subsequent colonization disrupted Māori society violently. Colonial supremacy saw existing Māori social, cultural and political organization as primitive and European systems of education and governance as superior. This assumed supremacy was also evident in the privileging of knowledge. Enlightenment thinking, and specifically positivism in Western science, was valued over all other knowledge and has informed the research approach of the academy in Aotearoa New Zealand. Western approaches to science 502 Joanne Waitoa and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:03:30PM

Working with Indigenous methodologies  503 were extractive in nature, taking knowledge from communities with no reciprocity. Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes that such research has ‘dehumanised Māori’ and led to practices ‘which have continued to privilege Western ways of knowing, while denying the validity for Māori of Māori knowledge, language and culture’ (Smith 1999, p. 183). The movement to reclaim the power for Māori to define themselves in research is an important step towards redressing the violent imbalance that the colonial hierarchy of knowledge systems imposed. Any future reciprocity between knowledge systems cannot proceed without recognition and support for Māori self-determination and the reclaiming of custom and culture.2 In writing this chapter, cognizant of our diverse global audience, we intend our attempt to explore the dissonance and connection between Kaupapa Māori and diverse economies methodologies as a small first step to a larger conversation between Indigenous, settler and other scholars about methodology, epistemology, politics and making better worlds for all. Writing together as a Ngāti Porou scholar with experience in diverse economies (Joanne) and a Pākehā (settler) diverse economies scholar with experience in mātauranga Māori (Kelly), we are connected by our relationship to our hometown in rural New Zealand and our journeys from there into higher education and work with iwi, university and government entities. From this base, we specifically explore how Kaupapa Māori approaches to methodology work alongside and at variance from diverse economies approaches, with respect to Māori knowledge and kaupapa Māori. Two themes emerge: the role of relationships in research, and the high priority placed on the principle of self-determination.

THE RISE OF KAUPAPA MĀORI METHODOLOGY IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND A Kaupapa Māori approach allows Māori to tell their own stories. Informed by mātauranga Māori, and underpinned by key Māori principles,3 it is a research theory and practice that emerged in the 1980s out of the language reclamation movement of kōhanga reo (Māori language preschool) and kura kaupapa (Māori language primary school). This movement was influenced by the research of scholars Graham Smith and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who in turn were influenced by critical scholars such as Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire. Graham Smith states that Kaupapa Māori presupposes that (a) the validity and legitimacy of Māori is taken for granted, (b) the survival and revival of Māori language and culture is imperative, and (c) the struggle for autonomy over cultural well-being, and over Māori lives is vital to Māori survival (Smith 1990, p. 100). As Leonie Pihama (2010, p. 6), reminds us, however: While the theoretical assertion of Kaupapa Māori theory is relatively new, kaupapa Māori as foundation is not. Kaupapa Māori is extremely old – ancient, in fact. It predates any and all of us in living years and is embedded in our cultural being.

Over time, Kaupapa Māori theory has been implemented outside the discipline of education; the approach is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Highlighting the importance of Māori self-determination, and set within the context of the Māori language version of the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti), Kaupapa Māori theory and methodology asserts that Māori researchers and Māori communities should be part of all conversations and research that impact on Māori futures. As such, while any research method may be appropriate, the overall

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504  The handbook of diverse economies research methodology should be transformative, beneficial to Māori, under Māori control, informed by mātauranga Māori, include an analysis of power, reject cultural deficiency theories, and be emancipatory and non-essentializing (Curtis 2016). In practice, this means that even in research based on analysing statistical data collected by census or other state-led methods, Māori researchers should be involved in its interpretation and communication (Cram 2017; Cram et al. 2006; Kukutai and Taylor 2016). The sayings ‘nothing about us, without us’, or ‘by Māori, with Māori, for Māori’ apply here. Māori communities are not to be studied as objects of research, but retain sovereignty over their data and have the chance to lead, to grow their research experience, and to connect with Māori communities according to the obligations of Te Tiriti (Hudson 2016). Pākehā researchers are also, through a partnership relationship, educated in Te Ao Māori ‘the Māori world(view)’ in a hopefully transformative encounter that builds on and contributes to the nation through learning to value and respect tino rangatiratanga ‘Māori sovereignty’ over Māori lives, treasures and lands. While Kaupapa Māori as an official ‘methodology’ is not required by any law, the New Zealand Government attempts to address its treaty obligations by incorporating the language of mātauranga Māori into government research grants. The Vision Mātauranga strategy is applicable to government-funded research grants and their monitoring and evaluation.4 Researchers are invited to state how their proposed research applies to or draws from mātauranga Māori and may receive feedback (from funders and ethics committees) that Māori communities should be included further in research design and consultation. While it could certainly be argued that this consultation runs the risk of being ‘tick box’ or overstretching Māori communities,5 it has served to raise awareness of situations in research where a form of Kaupapa Māori methodology might be appropriate. All scholars based in Aotearoa New Zealand will need to think about the relationship between their research approaches and kaupapa (and mātauranga) Māori.

DIVERSE ECONOMIES WITH KAUPAPA MĀORI: CONNECTIONS AND DISSONANCES To date, there are few scholars working at the margins of diverse economies and Kaupapa Māori. As one of the few scholars who do, Joanne asked two foundational Kaupapa Māori scholars about the compatibility between Kaupapa Māori theory and Western approaches that emerge from critical theory. Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith pointed out that in general, non-Indigenous approaches need to be more open to other ways of asking and answering questions. Associate Professor Leonie Pihama stressed that Kaupapa Māori can’t be forced to fit another methodology – it’s either tika (correct) or it is not. Building on these discussions it is helpful to identify points of connection between Kaupapa Māori and diverse economies approaches and explore their fit. Like the Kaupapa Māori approach, diverse economies approaches accept that research is not a neutral activity that produces objective, neutral knowledges, somehow separate from ethico-political processes – but also produces and reinforces the realities which it purports to describe (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010). Thus, diverse economies methodologies engage deeply with the ethico-politics of knowledge production and representation, favouring participatory action methodologies with community researchers and partners evident in the

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Working with Indigenous methodologies  505 research process (see e.g. Chapter 46 by Templer Rodrigues, Chapters 47 and 50 by Roelvink, Chapter 52 by Gibson-Graham, Chapter 56 by Cameron and Gibson, and Chapter 57 by Hwang, in this volume). For diverse economies researchers, the key political act of knowledge production is to choose methodologies that bring to light ethically oriented community economic activities already in action, as a prefigurative strategy for imagining and enacting a postcapitalist world (DeMartino 2013). For Kaupapa Māori researchers, the key ethico-political act of knowledge production is to choose methodologies that recognize and privilege Māori ways of knowing and being in the world, as a prefigurative strategy for imagining and enacting tino rangatiratanga, Māori sovereignty. While capitalism (and the cultural practices of the societies most enamoured with capitalism) can certainly impinge on Māori sovereignty, particularly through processes of commodification, ‘Westernization’, Anglicization, and through increasing inequalities in income and so on, not all Māori scholars and activists necessarily frame tino rangatiratanga in postcapitalist terms. Yet a key point of methodological connection remains: the centring of ethical concerns and the performativity of research. In this, we can identify a fit that is tika. Beyond the concerns of knowledge production, many of the values implicit in Kaupapa Māori research broadly coincide with community economies shared concerns. For example, tino rangatiratanga ‘sovereignty/self-determination’, manaakitanga ‘hospitality and care’ kaitiakitanga ‘guardianship’6 and whanaungatanga ‘relationships and connections’ cannot translate exactly but do intersect with ‘caring for commons’, ‘negotiating surplus’, and ‘encountering others’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). In other words, both imagine a possible world where relationships and connections with human and more-than-human are privileged over profit-focused disconnection and destruction (Ringham et al. 2016). It is also important to identify places where there are points of dissonance. For example, the shared concerns of community economies cannot (and do not necessarily need to be) translated into Māori (see Chapter 51 by Alhojärvi and Hyvärinen on translation in this volume). In her research on Māori economic activities, Maria Bargh (2012) does not attempt to translate or transliterate the ‘ethical economic coordinates’ she admires in the work of Gibson-Graham and Roelvink (2010). Instead, drawing on Māori law and concepts appropriate to Māori enterprise, she outlines an alternative set that animate Māori economies: mana (authority), utu (balance), katiakitanga (guardianship) and whakapapa (genealogical connections).7 Commons, for example, is a term many Māori and Indigenous scholars are suspicious of, since the Left has often used this to celebrate commoning practices that are in fact occurring on stolen land that should be returned to the commons management of indigenous peoples (Bargh and Otter 2009; Diprose et al. 2017). The commons is not endlessly open to all, nor is it the project of a community becoming-in-common, but is subject to the coordinates Bargh outlines above: iwi and hapū ‘clans’ have the mana whenua or authority over the land, established through whakapapa ‘genealogical connections’ and they are responsible as kaitiaki ‘guardians’ alongside ancestors. Reclaiming and revitalizing these norms of land management is an essential part of tino rangatiratanga. There are also important new connections to be made, sometimes out of these apparent dissonances: in her 2011 paper Bargh identified property and resource ownership as a major area of diverse economies scholarship that was at that point underdeveloped. The importance of land to Māori self-determination cannot be underestimated: battles for self-determination in areas as apparently diverse as Māori physical and mental health, economies, employment,

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506  The handbook of diverse economies spirituality, education and more are linked to the return of land (Ringham et al. 2016). Bargh suggested that diverse property forms needed to be included alongside labour, transactions and enterprise in the diverse economy framing (Bargh 2011), an addition that makes sense for more than Māori economies. This dimension of economic and legal diversity is now being addressed (as is evident by the chapters in Part IV of this volume). In what follows, we take two further case studies of intersection between diverse economies approaches and Kaupapa Māori approaches; in the first case, one where diverse economies approaches were experimented with, and in the second, where diverse economies framing was used primarily to communicate with funders rather than Māori participants and end users.

EXPERIMENTING WITH KAUPAPA MĀORI AND DIVERSE ECONOMIES FRAMINGS Diverse economies approaches provided some inspiration for Joanne in her research on diverse forms of Māori political participation, and she found a number of convergences between diverse economies and Kaupapa Māori as outlined above. The kinds of political activity her research was interested in included food sovereignty and waste reduction activism, environmental education, protest and public awareness, and activism around transforming the constitution to centre tikanga Māori and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. All of these forms of political participation tended to be overlooked, and discussions on political participation instead focused on ‘low Māori voter turnout’. Joanne’s research took inspiration from the iceberg approach to economic diversity, whereby the ‘above the waterline’ aspects of the (capitalist) economy are contrasted with the multiple and diverse (non-capitalist) economic activities that might appear ‘below the waterline’. She used a similar visualization in her research to ‘reframe’ how Māori political participation is often thought of as Māori voting behaviours, rather than the diverse forms of political activity that diverse groups of Māori might undertake. The convergences between diverse economies and Kaupapa Māori were therefore primarily around using methodologies to decentre conventional deficiency narratives, and make diversity and multiplicity more visible. While Gibson-Graham have successfully used inventory strategies to describe the diversity of indigenous economic activities found in communities in the Philippines (Gibson-Graham 2005b, 2008), Joanne’s experiments adapting these approaches to her research in political activism eventually led to her embracing a more fully Kaupapa Māori approach. As Joanne talked more to other Kaupapa Māori researchers and read more, she questioned her initial goal of creating a visual table representation of political activism, which would appear to rigidly categorize activities into boxes. Māori participant world views which emphasize multiple understandings and interrelationships between all things seemed at odds with a categorizing type of research analysis. Joanne was prompted to revitalize and reclaim Māori understandings of politics rather than introducing further European concepts, however consonant. This reveals the limits of non-Indigenous methodologies in Indigenous research: not only may they have difficulty representing Indigenous approaches to reality, they may not be the appropriate ethical choice in Indigenous communities, where the whakapapa ‘genealogy’ of a methodology is significant and Indigenous approaches are struggling for recognition. Because the whakapapa of methodology is important, and the battle for recognition real, in the end Joanne moved away also from the language of reframing and the visualization that

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Working with Indigenous methodologies  507 went with it. While value can exist in finding a new language to redefine systems, within the context of Māori communities, Joanne’s research found that the appropriate language to describe political and economic activity is already there, but has been ignored by scholars and Eurocentric methodologies, theories and approaches. While reframing was a methodological strategy often useful in overcoming deficiency approaches, in the end it was appropriate for Joanne to put aside the language of reframing. She instead incorporated the diverse economies language of ‘decentring’ and worked at ‘recentring’, reclaiming and revitalizing indigenous ontologies and epistemologies that have been pushed aside for too long. For Indigenous scholars, there is an ongoing struggle to validate Indigenous knowledges and perspectives, which have been commonly devalued by practitioners of mainstream science, yet are key to living sustainably on Earth with human and non-human others. As a Māori scholar, it was to this struggle of recognition and self-determination, and the relationships with other kaupapa scholars, that Joanne aligned herself in the process of her research, despite useful initial insights from diverse economies methodologies.

THE POLITICS OF RESEARCH FUNDING: DIVERSE ECONOMIES AND RESEARCH WITH AND FOR IWI In 2005, geographers Nick Lewis and Yvonne Underhill-Sem of the University of Auckland were approached by Te Puni Kokiri (the Ministry of Māori Development) to work with Te Runanga o Te Rarawa (the administrative council of the Te Rarawa iwi) to assist in rapidly writing a grant proposal to access funding streams for Te Rarawa research development projects (Underhill-Sem and Lewis 2008). Neither Lewis nor Underhill-Sem is Te Rarawa, although Lewis had family ties to the iwi and Underhill-Sem is Ngaputoru (a related but distinct people hailing from a group of nearby Pacific islands known as the Cook Islands), Niuean and Pākehā. Neither was experienced in Kaupapa Māori research methodologies, but both were well-versed in decolonizing and post-development methodologies due to their development studies fieldwork. Cognizant of the importance of Māori-led research and development, they envisioned their role as place-holders, as professionals with the time, space and skill set to rapidly write a research grant proposal that could then be used to gain access to the funds in the timeframe set by government, while making space for Te Rarawa researchers to pick up the threads of the project when time permitted. They used the open framework of assets-based community development (ABCD) as a way to structure this, drawing on the work of diverse economies scholars (Gibson and Cameron 2005; Gibson-Graham 2005a, 2005b). They were not themselves undertaking research with Māori communities, but using diverse economies methodologies to make a case for the kinds of revitalizing and reclaiming strategies Te Rarawa might take up in their own self-directed project. For Lewis and Underhill-Sem, ABCD is a research methodology that sits well with Kaupapa Māori approaches for two reasons. Firstly, it emphasizes the economic activities and ways of being that are already providing for communities – that is, it moves away from the deficiency approach so often used in research on Indigenous peoples. Using a strengths-based approach is important when Māori communities are routinely pathologized by the research process. Deficit narratives are constantly being challenged by Kaupapa Māori researchers across a range of sectors, for example in justice (Jackson 1988), health (Durie 1994) and education (Smith 2000), and in Joanne’s research on Māori political participation discussed

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508  The handbook of diverse economies in the previous section. Secondly, ABCD emphasizes the importance of community-based researchers – people from within the community who operate as researchers with their own communities rather than outsiders coming in to ‘assess’ or ‘observe’. This means that the politics of knowledge production is front and centre to the methodology and tilted towards community knowledges, as it is in a Kaupapa Māori project. Yet Underhill-Sem and Lewis, as they report it, held the ABCD method lightly: they used it to lay out an achievable research project backed up with an internationally tested research methodology that required that the research project ultimately be handed over to community – that is, iwi, researchers. This handover was so successful that a report on the project from the Te Rarawa researchers who eventually took over makes no mention of ABCD, diverse economies, or indeed Underhill-Sem and Lewis (Henwood and Harris 2007). The project used an entirely different methodology emerging from the knowledges of Te Rarawa researchers. In this way, we see a model for appropriate relationships between diverse economies methodologies and Kaupapa Māori, to make way and enable appropriate research engagements that support Indigenous self-determination and tino rangatiratanga.

CONCLUSION In contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, researchers can no longer ignore either matauranga Māori or Kaupapa Māori. As discussed above, both Kaupapa Māori and diverse economies research approaches are about respectful relationships that honour the aspirations of communities. We have emphasized that diverse economies have the capacity and the impetus to embody respectful relationships with Indigenous approaches such as Kaupapa Māori. In our case studies, Kaupapa Māori has been the central research approach, with diverse economies providing tools to express ideas. Researchers in both traditions prioritize the tikanga (Mead 2003) of the place in which they work, seeking to ally with others in solidarity for change. Concepts emerging from diverse economies approaches can be held lightly: ‘reframing’ and ‘rethinking’ are central themes in diverse economies scholarship, yet for Indigenous scholars, these words could be seen to presume a deficiency in Indigenous approaches – other words such as recentring fit better. But as Roelvink (in Chapter 50 in this volume) points out, letting go of control is a central ethic of diverse economies scholarship, enabling diverse economies methodologies to make way for Indigenous ontologies and methodologies as needed. We may find that many of the ideas we have been struggling to express are already present in Indigenous thinking, useful for challenging and educating non-Indigenous scholars (Sepie 2017). If diverse economies methodologies have any role in Kaupapa Māori research it is this: to make way for tangata whenua ‘the people of the land’, to start where we are with what we have to enact respectful relationships and support Indigenous self-determination.

NOTES 1.

We use Kaupapa Māori (non-italicized, capitalized) to refer to the English language usage of the theory and methodology known as Kaupapa Māori. However, following publisher guidelines, we italicize non-English words throughout the text, including kaupapa Māori, which refers to Māori ways of doing things in general (that is, not a methodology). Although Māori words in general New

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Working with Indigenous methodologies  509 Zealand English usage are not commonly italicized in Aotearoa New Zealand (since Māori is not a foreign language), we have done so here for our international audience. 2. We agree with Pihama that any Western theory should be seen as a hoa mahi ‘collegial’ relationship, working alongside Māori theory where ‘the defining parameters of that relationship are negotiated from a Kaupapa Māori framework’ (2001, p. 105). 3. See http://​www​rangahau​.co​nz (accessed 13 June 2019) for more information about these. 4. See https://​www​.mbie​.govt​ nz/​science​-and​-technology/​science​-and​-innovation/​agencies​-policies​ -and​-budget​-initiatives/​vision​-matauranga​-policy/​for more information (accessed 12 March 2019). 5. It has also increased the workload of many Māori scholars who end up providing unremunerated or unrecognized informal support in their institutions, or end up with reduced research outputs or other performance indicators due to this expectation. 6. While kaitiakitanga has become a principle widespread in conservation management in Aotearoa New Zealand, we stress that this human-centred view of kaitiaki ‘guardians’ is not consistent with Māori use of the concept. The spiritual kaitiaki of Joanne’s hapū Ngāti Putaanga, manifests as the native owl, ruru, for example. When humans are extending kaitiakitanga it is in a partnership of mana whenua ‘those with authority over the land’ which can include the non-human (see Mutu 2010). 7. While in this work Bargh did not use a ‘full’ Kaupapa Māori methodology of engaging with community throughout the research process, she argues that it would have been irresponsible to take up the time of iwi leaders and members who have already provided the full details of the enterprises under examination on their website and through published reports.

REFERENCES Ballara, A. (1998), Iwi: The Dynamics of Māori Tribal Organisation from c. 1769 to c. 1945, Wellington: Victoria University Press. Bargh, M. (2011), ‘The triumph of Maori entrepreneurs or diverse economies?’, Aboriginal Policy Studies, 1 (3), 53–69. Bargh, M. (2012), ‘Rethinking and re-shaping indigenous economies: Māori geothermal energy enterprises’, Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy, 6 (3), 271–83. Bargh, M. and J. Otter (2009), ‘Progressive spaces of neoliberalism in Aotearoa: A genealogy and critique’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 50 (2), 154–65. Chilisa, B. (2011), Indigenous Research Methodologies, London: Sage Publications. Chitondo, M. and K. Dombroski (2019), ‘Returning water data to communities in Ndola, Zambia: A case study in decolonising environmental science’, Case Studies in the Environment, doi: 10.1525/ cse.2018.001552. Cram, F. (2017), ‘Kaupapa Māori health research’, in P. Liamputtong (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences, Singapore: Springer, pp. 1–18. Cram, F., T. McCreanor, L. Smith, R. Nairn and W. Johnston (2006), ‘Kaupapa Maori research and Pakeha social science: Epistemological tensions in a study of Maori health’, Hulili, 3 (1), 41–68. Curtis, E. (2016), ‘Indigenous positioning in health research: The importance of Kaupapa Māori theory-informed practice’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 12, 396–410. DeMartino, G. (2013), ‘Ethical economic engagement in a world beyond control’, Rethinking Marxism, 25 (4), 483–500. Diprose, G., K. Dombroski, S. Healy and J. Waitoa (2017), ‘Community economies: Responding to questions of scale, agency, and Indigenous connections in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa, 4, 167–84. Durie, M. (1994), Whaiora: Maori Health Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, K. and J. Cameron (2005), ‘Alternative pathways to community and economic development: The LaTrobe Valley community partnering project’, Geographical Research, 43 (3), 274–85.

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510  The handbook of diverse economies Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2005a), ‘Building community economies: Women and the politics of place’, in W. Harcourt and A. Escobar (eds), Women and the Politics of Place, Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, pp. 130–157. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2005b), ‘Surplus possibilities: postdevelopment and community economies’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26 (1), 4–26. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for other worlds’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron and S. Healy (2013), Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and G. Roelvink (2010), ‘An economic ethics for the Anthropocene’, Antipode, 41 (S1), 320–346. Henwood, W. and Harris, A. (2007), ‘Innovation as necessity: Te Rarawa and the challenges of multi-purpose research’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Scholarship, 3 (2), 146–62. Hudson, J. (2016), ‘The world’s most liveable city – for Māori: Data advocacy and Māori wellbeing in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland)’, in T. Kukutai and J. Taylor (eds), Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 179–92. Jackson, M. (1988), Maori and the Criminal Justice System: He Whaipaanga Hou – A New Perspective, Part 2, Department of Justice, Wellington, New Zealand. Kukutai, T. and J. Taylor (2016), ‘Data sovereignty for indigenous peoples: Current practice and future needs’, in T. Kukutai and J. Taylor (eds), Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda, Canberra: ANU Press, pp. 1–22. Larsen, S.C. and J.T. Johnson (2017), Being Together in Place: Indigenous Coexistence in a More than Human World, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mead, H.M. (2003), Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values, Wellington: Huia Publishers. Mutu, M. (2010), ‘Ngāti kahu kaitiakitanga’, in R. Selby, P. Moore and M. Mulholland (eds), Māori and the Environment: Kaitiaki, Wellington: Huia Publishers, pp. 13–35. Pihama, L. (2001), ‘Tihei mauri ora: Honouring our voices: Mana wahine as a kaupapa Māori theoretical framework’, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Pihama, L. (2010), ‘Kaupapa Māori theory: Transforming theory in Aotearoa’, He Pukenga Korero, 9 (2), 5–14. Ringham, S., N. Simmonds and L. Johnston (2016), ‘Māori tourism geographies: Values, morals and diverse economies’, MAI Journal, 5 (2), 100–112. Royal, Te Ahukaramū C. (2007), ‘Papatūānuku – the land’, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed 3 May 2019 at http://​www​.TeAra​.govt​ nz/​en/​papatuanuku​-the​-land. Sepie, A. (2017), ‘More than stories, more than myths: Animal/human/nature(s) in traditional ecological worldviews’, Humanities, 6 (4), 78. Smith, G.H. (1990), ‘Taha maori: Pakeha capture’, in J. Codd, R. Harker and R. Nash (eds), Political Issues in New Zealand Education, Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, pp. 183–97. Smith, G.H. (2000), ‘Māori education: Revolution and transformative action’, Canadian Journal of Native Education, 24 (1), 57–72. Smith, L.T. (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books. Underhill-Sem, Y. and N. Lewis (2008), ‘Asset mapping and Whanau action research: “New” subjects negotiating the politics of knowledge in Te Rarawa’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49 (3), 305–17.

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56. Action research for diverse economies Jenny Cameron and Katherine Gibson

INTRODUCTION Since the late 1940s, some social science researchers have sought to disrupt knowledge hierarchies and counter what has been called the ‘extractive’ model of research in which researchers take and use knowledge from research participants. In the 1960s and 1970s, this approach gained more acceptance thanks to the pioneering work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and others in parts of Latin America and Africa and in India (Freire 1970; Kindon et al. 2007). These efforts to involve research participants in the research process, and for researchers and participants to work together towards social action and change, is variously called Action Research, Participatory Action Research and Participatory Research. This research approach can take different forms, reflecting the range of its roots and uses around the globe. In this chapter, we discuss how the approach has been taken up by researchers using a diverse economies framing. In diverse economies research we are interested in foregrounding economic practices which prioritize ethical interdependence (between humans, and between humans and the non-human world). We identify and highlight the ways that people are already engaged in these types of practices (albeit sometimes in nascent ways) and how research can play a practical role in helping to strengthen such economic practices. We characterize this as a form of Action Research to highlight how research can be part of the social action agenda to build new economies. In earlier writing (e.g. Cameron and Gibson 2005a), we described our research as a form of Participatory Action Research (PAR). At the time this was an appropriate descriptor. Consistent with the familiar understanding of PAR, we were collaborating with groups who could be portrayed as disempowered, and economically and socially marginalized. Increasingly, however, diverse economies researchers have been collaborating with groups that could hardly be described in these terms (such as the fishers and manufacturing firms that we will discuss in this chapter). This reflects our recognition that economic diversity is everywhere in the world (in households, in neighbourhoods, in community groups and associations, in schools, in businesses),1 and that this diversity is the seedbed for new economies built on the recognition of interdependence. Thus, our research involves collaboration with research participants who are scattered throughout the diverse economy, working with them to help strengthen and create economic practices that might be the basis of new economies that enact interdependence. Action research for diverse economies uses three main strategies. The first is focused on language and reflects the understanding that words have a crucial role to play not just in describing the world but in shaping the sorts of actions and possibilities that are considered feasible. Action research for diverse economies has to grapple with the ways that economies are described and the effects these words have. Invariably, diverse economies researchers come up against portrayals of economies that limit what is considered feasible, and therefore 511 Jenny Cameron and Katherine Gibson - 9781788119962 08:03:35PM

512  The handbook of diverse economies have to weave new languages of economy that expand options for action. The second strategy for action research for diverse economies is focused on what is known as economic subjectivity, that is, the ways that people imagine themselves in relation to economic practices. When economic practices are defined with respect to capitalism then economic subjectivity is similarly defined in capitalist terms: for example, one is a worker, a manager, an owner, a consumer, a shareholder, an investor or an entrepreneur. But when economic practices are located in a diverse economy then economic subjectivity is not confined to a small repertoire of subject positions. People occupy multiple subject positions such as carer, volunteer, reciprocator, partner and co-operator, as well as those positions listed above. Thus economic subjectivity becomes shaped by myriad concerns, desires and identifications. New languages of economy work hand-in-hand with this decentring of the subject. However, diverse economies researchers invariably come up against strong attachments to current forms of economic subjectivity and therefore have to find ways of opening subjects to new possibilities. The combination of new languages of economy and the decentring of economic subjectivity provide the foundation for the third strategy, the undertaking of collective actions to build new forms of economies. These actions are not known in advance but emerge from the research process as diverse economies researchers and participants start to use the new languages of economy to explore how they might become new types of economic subjects. The collective actions also continue well beyond the life of a research project. In this chapter, we discuss three projects conducted by a range of researchers who have drawn on diverse economies thinking and deployed the three strategies introduced above in projects across the globe. We start by introducing the three projects.2 The ‘Community Partnering Project’ was based in the Philippines in the rural municipalities of Jagna on the island of Bohol and Linamon in northern Mindanao. The project was a collaboration with the NGO Unlad Kabayan Migrant Services Foundation Inc. (an organization that helps overseas Filipino migrant workers to invest their savings back into community-based projects in the Philippines) and two local municipalities to whom responsibility for local economic development had been recently devolved. The project was designed to pilot pathways for endogenous economic development.3 The ‘Atlas Project’ was based in the US northeast and used participatory mapping techniques with fishing communities to map the use and stewardship of marine resources by commercial fishermen.4 At the time, new geotechnologies were helping fisheries scientists and managers recognize the rich heterogeneity of the marine environment; however, understanding of the humans who fished the marine environment was limited. This participatory project sought to address this gap.5 The ‘Shifting Cultures of Manufacturing Project’ was based in Australia and focused on a selection of manufacturing firms that were running viable businesses while also prioritizing environmental sustainability, socio-economic justice or a combination of the two. The research was designed to reveal a range of possible future pathways for Australian manufacturing.6 Each of these projects, while very different in focus, used the three strategies introduced above. Initially, each encountered a portrayal of the economy that illuminated a narrow set of features and had the effect of limiting the options for economic development, and so steps were taken to activate new languages of economy that would help reframe economic possibilities. Each also grappled with familiar but limited forms of economic subjectivity and had to find ways to animate new economic subject positions. Building on the attention to language and subjectivity, each of the projects resulted in collective actions that created new economic

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Action research for diverse economies  513 options. In what follows we take each strategy in turn and discuss how the strategy featured in each project.

ACTIVATING NEW LANGUAGES The Community Partnering Project encountered the dominant understanding of rural municipalities and rural residents in the Philippines as lacking the resources and capacity for economic development. This understanding meant that development solutions were thought to lie outside municipalities, through strategies such as out-migration as overseas workers or securing external funding for infrastructure projects that would then underpin further inward investment (Gibson et al. 2010). To counter this understanding and development approach, the project inventoried the diverse economic practices that maintained livelihoods and identified the assets and capacities of people, associations and environments in each community.7 Local residents drawn from marginalized groups (itinerant labourers, older women farmers, young mothers) were employed as community researchers to work with their neighbours to document transactions, labour practices and enterprise forms in the municipality. What emerged from this exercise was evidence of ‘the rich patchwork of market and non-market exchanges, paid and unpaid labour and capitalist and non-capitalist surplus generating enterprises that work together to sustain livelihoods’ (McKay et al. 2007, p. 62). A newly differentiated language of the local economy began to emerge and provided the basis for the subsequent steps in the project (as we discuss in the following sections). The Atlas Project encountered the widely held view in the US northeast that fishing stocks were in decline and that the fishing communities that relied on these stocks were dying. For many fishermen this representation produced a sense of foreboding that not only were their own livelihoods doomed but there was no future in fishing for their children or their children’s children. The academic researchers in collaboration with fishermen used log book data from vessels based in different ports that used a range of fishing gear to generate maps that told a new story of how fishermen interacted with the marine environment. St. Martin and Hall-Arber describe the effect of these maps in the following way: ‘[f]ishermen were seeing for the first time an outline of the territories and locations of greatest importance to them and their “communities”’ (2007, p. 55). At the fishermen’s request, the log book data had been superimposed onto the standard nautical maps that the fishermen used as an everyday working tool. But in place of a space devoid of human activity, the new maps showed the richness of the social and economic landscape of fishing territories and the communities supported by these territories. The new maps provided a visual language of human/non-human interconnection that captured the imagination of fishermen across the region and drew them into discussion not about the decline of fisheries and their communities but their use of and interaction with the marine environment. This new portrayal of their everyday working world became the foundation for hitherto unthinkable possibilities and actions (as we will discuss shortly). The Shifting Cultures of Manufacturing Project also encountered a dominant representation of decline. In Australia, the manufacturing sector is represented as being in demise in comparison to growth in other sectors such as the service sector and the financial sector, and the future of the manufacturing is consistently under question. Those working in manufacturing were concerned that this prevalent representation was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, they reported instances when parents and educators had been convinced by the

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514  The handbook of diverse economies representation of decline and discouraged their children and students from considering a career in manufacturing; at the same time, some manufacturers were struggling to find skilled employees raising the possibility of offshoring to places where the skilled workforce could be found. As a counter to this representation the research team drew on data about the extent of manufacturing activity across Australia,8 but also identified and researched examples of manufacturers who were doing more than ‘merely’ running an economically viable operation but were also manufacturing in ways that address two critical challenges for the twenty-first century: environmental degradation and socio-economic inequality. The research initially involved interviews with owners, managers and employees in these manufacturing firms, followed by workshops in which the research team presented the main findings back to the manufacturers.9 To describe the crucial contribution that these manufacturers were making, the research team used the language of ‘just sustainability’, a phrase coined by Agyeman et al. (2003, p. 5) to describe the importance of addressing ‘a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems’. This phrase was new to the manufacturers, but it was one that resonated. It helped to ‘name’ in a concise way what some saw themselves as doing explicitly, and for others it helped identify what they sensed they were doing, but had not had the time or opportunity to reflect on. As we discuss in the next sections, this phrase became a pivotal point of identification for the manufacturers involved and has led to a series of actions. The three research projects encountered representations of lack and decline. In response the projects sought to expand possibilities and as a first step they developed new languages: the language of diverse community and economic assets in the first project; a new visual mapping language, in the second; and a powerful phrase, in the third. All research can be said to be performative in the way it uses specific languages (in the sense of concepts, vocabulary, images and so on) to represent and enact the world in particular ways. However, not all research reflects on the language that it uses, the representations that it generates and the impacts of these representations. In the case of action research for diverse economies there is often a focus on using languages and representations to counter dominant economic narratives and reveal the existing economic diversity and economic possibilities that all too often lie dormant and unrealized.

SHIFTING SUBJECTIVITIES Building on the activation of new languages, a second strategy in action research for diverse economies focuses on shifts in subjectivity. The new language can reveal new possibilities but responding to and acting on these possibilities requires a shift in how researchers and participants position themselves as economic subjects. In the Community Partnering Project in the Philippines, the inventorying of diverse economic activities and assets had the effect of shifting participants’ sense of their own capacities. A wide range of skills and knowledges were identified, including, for example, technical farming skills, food processing and craft skills, and basic marketing and accounting knowledge (Cahill 2008). The inventorying exercise, which participants conducted in small groups with the community researchers, ‘challenged the common assumption many participants, NGO and government staff held of people in the community as somehow deficient and needing more training’ (Cahill 2008, p. 299). This was the beginning of a shift from a subject position of eco-

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Action research for diverse economies  515 nomic lack (as ‘just’ a farmer or ‘just’ a labourer) to one of economic capacity and confidence as a community entrepreneur. It was also a recognition of the multiple identities and subject positions that people occupy. This shift continued as participants learned more about the skills and knowledge of others in the community. Some participants began to imagine themselves as initiating and running community-based enterprises. To help consolidate this shift, the research team organized field trips so groups of interested participants could learn more about community-based enterprises in nearby municipalities. The effect of this was potent, as Cahill recalls, ‘[p]articipants were amazed and inspired to see people “just like them” succeed in business’ (2008, p. 299). This is not to say that the shift in subjectivity was easy. As Cahill notes, participants had to counter their own and other people’s disbelief and even cynicism that the rural poor could operate community-based enterprises. In the Atlas Project, fishermen largely had a sense of themselves as powerless in the face of changes around them and there was widespread lament for a way of life they felt was disappearing (St. Martin and Hall-Arber 2007). As well, the fishermen had to contend with a fisheries science and management framework that positioned them as centred subjects who acted as competing and self-interested individuals roaming across the fishing grounds in search of the best catches (St. Martin 2009). The new maps offered a different framing of the fishermen. By mapping aggregate fishing trips by port and type of fishing gear, a picture emerged of fishing territories whereby fishermen from the same port and using the same fishing gear tended to fish in the same areas. Furthermore, in the process of producing these maps, fishermen were prompted to discuss their local fishing practices and environmental knowledge, the cooperative (rather than competitive) relationships between fishermen, and their experiences of and ideas for area-based fisheries management. Both the maps and the process of producing them helped to consolidate a sense of the fishermen as communal subjects who are part of a ‘community-at-sea’ that shares a fishing commons. St. Martin (2009, pp. 503–4) notes that expressions of individual demands, needs, hardships or desires were displaced by a more collective voice as fishermen repositioned themselves as peer group and community members. As we will discuss shortly this shift in their sense of self was crucial for the collective actions that followed. In the Shifting Cultures of Manufacturing Project, a similar shift from an individual to a collective subject was discerned. This took place through a series of workshops that the research team conducted individually with each manufacturer, culminating in a group workshop with all the manufacturers. At the individual workshops the research team presented back to the manufacturers the results of interviews with owners, managers and employees framed in terms of the features of just sustainability that were evident in the business; the conditions and strategies that were enabling the firm to enact the various dimensions of just sustainability; and the challenges to just sustainability. Although the focus was on the individual enterprise, participants in the workshops were curious about the other manufacturers and what they were doing in terms of just sustainability. A larger one-day workshop attended by all the manufacturers provided the opportunity for the representatives from each manufacturer to learn more about the just sustainability dimensions of each other’s enterprises. In this process a shared sense of a collective subjectivity based on ethical manufacturing began to emerge (albeit in nascent form). This cut across other forms of business subjectivity (such as the positioning of family-based manufacturers as part of a network of family businesses and the positioning of the cooperative manufacturers as part of a network of cooperatives). This subjectivity consolidated around the suggestion by one manufacturer and strongly supported by the other

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516  The handbook of diverse economies participants that the workshop participants collectively produce a public declaration on just and sustainable manufacturing in Australia.

COLLECTIVE ACTION The third strategy in action research for diverse economies involves collective action, especially action focused on the creation of new economic possibilities. Action is initiated during the project but continues well beyond the formal span of the project, and outcomes can be unpredictable as the research participants incorporate the new language of economy and shifts in economic subjectivity into their own lives. In the Community Partnering Project, collective action took the form of groups of participants working together to initiate and operate community-based social enterprises. The focus on groups of people working together was important as this tapped into existing economic practices and logics (such as the practice and logic of CIVAC, a form of cooperative and volunteer labour involving local residents carrying out municipal repair work).10 This was an important counter to the imported mindset of business entrepreneurialism as being based on individual or household-run micro-enterprises (such as tiny street-side sari sari grocery stores) (Community Economies Collective and Gibson 2009). The enterprises that were initiated included the Laca Ginger Tea Community Enterprise, Jagna Nata de Coco Community Enterprise and a sewing enterprise run by young mothers making graduation gowns. Some enterprises that groups were interested in starting did not necessarily go ahead. For example, the porters who worked at the local port were interested in starting a trucking business but when they investigated the feasibility of such a business they realized that it was beyond their capacity (Cahill 2008). Nevertheless, flow-on effects resulted. For example, the skills from the feasibility exercise were transferred to help manage other family-based livelihood activities, and with a new-found sense of his own capacity the president of the porters group accepted a mayoral invitation to join a municipal government committee investigating the training needs of part-time labourers and he also ran for local council election (Cahill 2008). In the Atlas Project a range of collective actions resulted, building on the sense of communal subjectivity that emerged through the collaborative mapping process. The fishermen from the small fishing community of Port Clyde, in Maine, organized themselves into the Midcoast Fishermen’s Association (MFA) (Snyder and St. Martin 2015). Over a 12-month period, they devised their own version of an area-based fisheries management plan that ‘exemplified the sense of conservation and community that the [Atlas Project] had discovered among the fishermen of Port Clyde’ (MFA 2009, cited in Snyder and St. Martin 2015, p. 35). This plan, which involved fishermen catching fewer fish, focused on conserving fish stock while providing the fishermen with viable livelihoods. The plan informed what became known as the Area Management Coalition (AMC) involving fishermen, academics and sustainability advocates (Snyder and St. Martin 2015; St. Martin and Hall-Arber 2007). The AMC then put a proposal to the New England Fisheries Management Council, based on the MFA’s plan, for an alternative to the quota-based system that was being considered at the time. This proposal was rejected in part because the AMC proposal (and MFA plan) used finer-scale mapping than the Council was using (and so fish stocks and fishing practices could not be accounted for) (Snyder and St. Martin 2015). However, this rejection spurred the groups on to work outside the Council and put their own programmes in place. This resulted in the formation of the first

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Action research for diverse economies  517 Community Supported Fishery, named Port Clyde Fresh Catch. In this version of Community Supported Agriculture, subscribers purchase shares of the catch which are then delivered weekly.11 This Community Supported Fishery approach was taken up by fishing communities across the USA who also wanted to ensure the sustainability of fisheries while securing their livelihoods. Currently almost 40 Community Supported Fisheries operate across Canada and the USA. A second ongoing action has been the expansion of the MFA, with the organization becoming the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association with members from along the Maine Coast and a staff of four. At the time of writing, the Shifting Cultures of Manufacturing Project was still in progress and the first collective action had just occurred. This was the release of the public declaration on just and sustainable manufacturing in Australia (see Reconfiguring the Enterprise Research Project 2018). The declaration was signed by the participating manufacturers and the research team, and was widely distributed, including to state and Federal members of parliament. This led to a series of meetings with parliamentarians from across the political spectrum to discuss the future of manufacturing in Australia, including how this future could be based around manufacturing in ways that are environmentally sustainable and social and economically just. A more detailed research report will be the next public output and the team plan to also use this as a vehicle to generate more public and policy discussion about manufacturing in Australia.12

CONCLUSION Action research for diverse economies aims to help create new economic possibilities and is founded on recognizing that new languages and shifts in subjectivity are crucial to the change process. In the examples discussed in this chapter, new languages of economy were activated, namely the diverse economies framing of local economic practices in the rural Philippines, the visual mapping language of community fisheries in the northeast of the USA and a language of ethical manufacturing in the Australian context. The new insights generated by these languages were accompanied by shifts in subjectivity, especially shifts to more collective forms of subjectivity which then laid the groundwork for collective actions. In the rural Philippines, research participants worked collectively to initiate and run community-based social enterprises, thereby demonstrating the potential for endogenous economic development. Resources to adapt this economic development approach in other contexts are available via the Community Partnering for Local Development website (see http://​www​.communitypartnering​ .info [accessed 20 June 2019]). In the northeast of the USA, fishermen also worked collectively devising novel approaches to area-based fisheries management that would simultaneously protect fishing stock while securing livelihoods of fishermen (and their families and their communities). Their strategies have spread well beyond the immediate fishing communities to include impacts in other USA and Canadian fishing communities. At the time of writing, the Australian manufacturing project was starting to have impacts with the participating manufacturers collectively identifying as contributors to more ethical forms of manufacturing, and with politicians and policymakers starting to take notice of how the national manufacturing agenda could be reoriented around the development of ethical manufacturing.

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518  The handbook of diverse economies

NOTES 1. Indeed, even capitalist businesses can include diverse economic practices. Some of the manufacturing businesses discussed in this chapter are capitalist. For more on the potential of capitalist businesses see Chapter 2 by Cameron in this volume. 2. We have selected these three projects because of their range of geographic locations and topics. Other action research projects by diverse economies researchers include those discussed in this volume (see Chapter 46 by Rodrigues, and Chapter 57 by Hwang), and the Pioneer Valley Alternative Economies Project (see Community Economies Collective 2001), the Community Partnering Project in Australia (see Cameron and Gibson 2005a, 2005b), the Newcastle Community Gardening Project (see Cameron et al. 2011), the Empower project with the community group, Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement (Healy 2015), and the Growing Food Economies Workshop in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines (Cameron et al. 2014). 3. The research was funded by the Australian Research Council and Australia’s official development assistance agency, AusAID (Grant No. LP0347118, ‘Negotiating alternative economic strategies for regional development in Indonesia and the Philippines’). The Philippines research team included Joy Apag, Maureen Balaba, Amanda Cahill, Katherine Gibson and Deirdre McKay. 4. ‘Fishermen’ is the preferred term used by both women and men who harvest fish in this part of the USA (St. Martin and Hall-Arber 2007, p. 59). 5. The research was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through the Northeast Consortium (Grant No. 01-840, ‘An atlas-based audit of fishing territories, local knowledge and community participation in fisheries science and management’). The research team included Madeleine Hall-Arber, Kevin St. Martin and Rob Snyder. 6. The research was funded by the Australian Research Council (Grant No. DP160101674, ‘Reconfiguring the enterprise: Shifting manufacturing culture in Australia’). The research team included Jenny Cameron, Katherine Gibson, Stephen Healy and Joanne McNeill. 7. The approach used drew on an earlier pilot project conducted in Australia (see Cameron and Gibson 2001, 2005a, 2005b), which in turn drew on the work of Kretzmann and McKnight (1993). 8. For example, the fact that manufacturing employs almost a million people (or 10 per cent of the Australian workforce) and the fact that in the 12 months to August 2018, manufacturing had the largest increase in employment of any sector (Scutt 2018). 9. These workshops generally included all those who had been interviewed. 10. For more on the range of labour practices see Gibson-Graham (2006, p. 176). 11. For more on Community Supported Agriculture see Cameron (2015). 12. Other outputs at the time of writing include presentation of the invited Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography (see Gibson-Graham et al. 2019a and 2019b) and a Hands at Work video (see https://​ vimeo​.com/​306315303).

REFERENCES Agyeman, J., R. Bullard and B. Evans (eds) (2003), Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, London: Earthscan. Cahill, A. (2008), ‘Power over, power to, power with: Shifting perceptions of power for local economic development in the Philippines’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49 (3), 294–304. Cameron, J. (2015), ‘Enterprise innovation and economic diversity in community supported agriculture: Sustaining the agricultural commons’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 53–71. Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2001), Shifting Focus: Pathways to Community and Economic Development: A Resource Kit, Latrobe City Council and Monash University, Victoria, accessed 14 June 2014 at http://​communityeconomies​.org/​resources/​community​-resources/​shifting​-focus​-alternative​-pathways​ -communities​-and​-economies.

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Action research for diverse economies  519 Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2005a), ‘Participatory action research in a poststructuralist vein’, Geoforum, 36 (3), 315–31. Cameron, J. and K. Gibson (2005b), ‘Alternative pathways to community and economic development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project’, Geographical Research, 43 (3), 274–85. Cameron, J., K. Gibson and A. Hill (2014), ‘Cultivating hybrid collectives: Research methods for enacting community food economies in Australia and the Philippines’, Local Environment, 19 (1), 118–32. Cameron, J., C. Manpower and J. Pomfrett (2011), ‘Bodily learning for a (climate) changing world: Registering differences through performative and collective research’, Local Environment, 16 (6), 493–508. Community Economies Collective (2001), ‘Imagining and enacting non-capitalist futures’, Socialist Review, 28 (3/4), 93–135. Community Economies Collective and K. Gibson (2009), ‘Building community-based social enterprises in the Philippines: Diverse development pathways’, in A. Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity, London: Zed Books, pp. 116–38. Freire, P. (1970), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Herder and Herder. Gibson, K., A. Cahill and D. McKay (2010), ‘Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippines municipality’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (2), 237–55. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006), A Postcapitalist Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, S. Healy and J. McNeill (2019a), ‘Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography: Economic geography, manufacturing, and ethical action in the Anthropocene’, Economic Geography, 95 (1), 1–21. Gibson-Graham, J.K., J. Cameron, S. Healy and J. McNeill (2019b), ‘Economic geography and ethical action in the Anthropocene: A rejoinder’, Economic Geography, 95 (1), 27–9. Healy, S. (2015), ‘Biofuels, ex-felons, and Empower, a worker-owned cooperative: Performing enterprises differently’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 98–126. Kindon, S., R. Pain and M. Kesby (2007), ‘Participatory action research: Origins, approaches and methods’, in S. Kindon, R. Pain and M. Kesby (eds), Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place, London: Routledge, pp. 9–18. Kretzmann, J. and J. McKnight (1993), Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets, Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research. McKay, D., A. Cahill and K. Gibson (2007), ‘Strengthening community economies: Strategies for decreasing dependence and stimulating local development’, Development Bulletin, 72, 60–65. Reconfiguring the Enterprise Research Project (2018), ‘A public declaration: Just and sustainable manufacturing in Australia’, accessed 14 June 2019 at http://​communityeconomies​.org/​publications/​ popular​-writing/​public​-declaration​-just​-and​-sustainable​-manufacturing​-australia. Scutt, D. (2018), ‘An industry that many had written off is now hiring faster than any other in Australia’, Business Insider, 21 September, accessed 14 June 2019 at https://​ www​ .businessinsider​ .com​ .au/​ australia​-unemployment​-manufacturing​-jobs​-growth​-2018​-9. Snyder, R. and K. St. Martin (2015), ‘A fishery for the future: The Midcoast Fishermen’s Association and the work of economic being-in-common’, in G. Roelvink, K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds), Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 26–52. St. Martin, K. (2009), ‘Toward a cartography of the commons: Constituting the political and economic possibility of place’, The Professional Geographer, 61 (4), 493–507. St. Martin, K. and M. Hall-Arber (2007), ‘Environment and development: (Re)connecting community and commons in New England fisheries, USA’, in S. Kindon, R. Pain and M. Kesby (eds), Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place, London: Routledge, pp. 51–9.

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57. Focusing on assets: action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace Leo Hwang

INTRODUCTION In higher education, efforts to diversify the workforce and create a more inclusive and representative environment for students and employees have often been stymied by institutionalized racism, a lack of resources, and a lack of institutional energy. In this chapter I discuss an action research intervention, inspired by diverse economies scholarship, that was aimed at valuing and strengthening diversity and inclusion in a community college setting. A starting point for the project was the recognition that within the workplace there are multiple forms of work being performed, and associated ways of being, that fall outside of the traditional identity of a waged worker being paid for services rendered. For instance, the work of creating an inclusive workplace relies on volunteering, college service, gifting, mentoring, professional development, sweat equity – all practices that help create a sense of community that is larger than just an educational services enterprise in which teaching is delivered in return for monetary payment. In a complex organization like a community college, the business orientation of the ‘enterprise’ thus sits alongside non-capitalist orientations. In a climate of increasingly limited resources, it is the combination of non-capitalist practices and diverse identities that has the potential to engender change and drive the mission of the workplace to become more diverse and more inclusive. This chapter describes the context and process of using an assets-based approach to highlight diversity and enhance inclusion in a community college setting.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION IN THE EDUCATION WORKPLACE: THE CASE OF GREENFIELD COMMUNITY COLLEGE Within higher education in the United States, the term ‘diversity’ has become synonymous with quality. Diversity has become a commodity that links the institution to a multitude of quality connotations when applied to the student body, the demographics of the faculty and staff, or when describing the curriculum. As an indicator of progress and a purported vision for a post-racial student body or workplace, diversity, within the context of higher education, has value on a superficial surface level. This purported value is in stark contrast to the increasing segregation of neighbourhoods, the widening gap in income, life expectancy, and actual representation of people of colour at colleges and universities (Chang 2016). The reality is that colleges and universities are less representative than they were in 1980, ‘despite decades of proactive efforts aimed at recruiting individuals from marginalized backgrounds’ (Golom 2018, p. 16). There appears to be a disconnect between the purported value of diversity, and the actual enactment of diverse and inclusive staff hiring, student recruitment and curriculum development. The evidence of implicit bias, the lack of representation 520 Leo Hwang - 9781788119962 08:05:30PM

Focusing on assets: action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace  521 in employment, and the achievement gap in graduation rates between white students and students of colour, is damning. As Richard Prystowsky states, ‘Without such introspection and concomitant actions, our good-faith, conscious intentions to create meaningful, lasting change could be severely undermined by our unexamined biases and initiative-crippling self-deception’ (Prystowsky 2018, p. 94). So, while the values of diversity are touted in the workplace, in higher education, without systemic change that is community focused, we risk hypocrisy. Greenfield Community College is a small associates degree granting institution in rural Massachusetts in the United States. It employs a wide range of faculty and staff, totalling approximately 307 employees. As an Asian American member of the senior staff and also a community economies action researcher, I have been keenly interested in the diversity makeup of the college and how to promote an inclusive workplace. I am a second-generation Korean American who identifies as a person of colour and, while born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States, I still relate closely to the first-generation immigrant experience of my parents and many of my relatives. For the majority of my career, I have worked at Greenfield Community College, first as an English faculty member, and then as an administrator. Like many of the students of colour at the college, throughout my life I have struggled to strike a balance of fitting into a predominantly white educational, work, and residential environment, and honouring, celebrating, and finding strength in my own identity as a Korean American. Within the context of the college, my role as Dean of Humanities, Engineering, Math and Science enables me, to a certain degree, the privilege to shape my own work agenda and reach beyond the usual academic silos that typically house specific academic disciplines. I try to utilize my own flexibility and access to resources to help foster interdisciplinary work with faculty, who in the community college system do not typically have as much flexibility with their workload and are less likely to engage in college-wide work without incentives or assistance. Additionally, because of my positionality, until recently, as the only administrator of colour, I have been allowed wide latitude in integrating college-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion activities into my workload. The region surrounding Greenfield Community College is predominantly Caucasian but is undergoing fairly rapid change in its demographics. In the early 2000s, Franklin County, the college’s primary service area, was 5.8 per cent people of colour (US Census Bureau 2018b). At that time, the college’s student population, as well as the demographics of the faculty and staff, nearly matched that of the surrounding region at 6 per cent. However, in the time since then Franklin County has increased to 9 per cent people of colour in 2015 (US Census Bureau 2018a). Meanwhile the faculty and staff at the college has stayed at 6 per cent (or slightly less) people of colour, but the student body has risen to 21 per cent people of colour (Greenfield Community College 2018). This highlights a potential disconnect between the experiences and backgrounds of the people teaching, working and making decisions at the college, and the lived and experienced lives of the students attending the college in increasing numbers. Within the complex intricacies of staffing at the college, work is accomplished by a complex combination of salaried employees, part-time hourly wage earners, and work performed for a stipend. Faculty and staff belong to one of two unions or may belong to a non-union classification. Faculty are divided into full-time faculty who are eligible for tenure, and adjunct faculty who are contract workers employed semester to semester. Duties are drawn out in job descriptions, incorporated into college service (work deemed beneficial to the college), volunteer work (often with community organizations or the boards of local non-profits), and

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522  The handbook of diverse economies gifted work, which in the context of an educational institution can be when faculty and staff go beyond their job description or generally accepted college service to help a student or community member, or to contribute to the sense of helping the college as a whole. Within the college community, there are informal networks of barter and trade through online networks and at various ‘free table’ locations. There is gifting or gleaning of unused food from college functions. Food grown in the college’s permaculture garden is utilized in the cafeteria and sold at a ‘farm stand’ in the lobby, and an active food pantry serves students who cannot afford to purchase food for themselves or their families. The college is structured around a mission and vision that is decidedly egalitarian. Community colleges are open enrolment institutions, which means that they accept anyone with a high school diploma (and also dual enrolled high school students), and serve everyone from traditional age students to retirees. At the very core of the community college is a design for access and equity, therefore all the structures of the institution are, theoretically, designed to help students to be successful. While some of those structures are not as helpful as originally intended, and on particular days the core of the mission is obfuscated by various distractions, still, the mission is there and it is helpful for all the faculty and staff to remember that everyone who works at the college wants to strengthen the community and help students. While community colleges are often viewed as primarily sites for workforce preparation, at Greenfield Community College, this has been interpreted as a mission to prepare students to be healthy, active citizens in our communities, and this is accomplished through a strong focus on the Liberal Arts. Therefore, critical thinking, communication skills, civic engagement and social justice are central to the mission and identity of faculty, staff and students at Greenfield Community College. This shared identity is a helpful touchstone when conversations become heated. With a growing realization that the future of growth in rural Franklin County and at Greenfield Community College will be driven predominantly by people of colour, I began to engage the college in a process to rethink diversity and inclusion at the institution. As the outmigration of Caucasian youth continues in the rural United States and the remaining population ages, it is the new immigrants that will drive the economy and fill the local public schools. Greenfield Community College seeks to position itself as a welcoming workplace and educational environment for these new cohorts.

ACTION RESEARCH IN THE CONTEXT OF WORKPLACE DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION The work of diversity and inclusion is most often driven by a deficit-based approach. Various identities are categorized as ‘other’, and certain measures are used to identify each identity’s relative attainment or deficit in comparison to a white control group. The greater the disparity, the greater the deficit; the greater the absence, the more powerful the data. This deficit-based approach prioritizes problems and lacks and emphasizes the inability of communities to address disparity and a lack of equity. It highlights the intractability of the situation due to the lack of available resources in the form of personnel, funding, or time to change things. The end result is a loss of agency and a general inability to enact change. At Greenfield Community College, we were keen to employ action research as a means to promote, not diminish, agency among faculty, students and staff and to help them have owner-

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Focusing on assets: action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace  523 ship and authority of the diversity and inclusion endeavour. This was enabled by starting with an asset-based approach (see also Chapter 46 by Rodrigues, and Chapter 56 by Cameron and Gibson in this volume). Looking at diversity and inclusion from an asset-based perspective, in the same way Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) use it to refocus community development, it is much easier to imagine what one can do with available and existing resources than to imagine how to overcome the absence of needed resources, policies, activities, etc. The assets-based approach is a form of reading for difference (see Chapter 52 by Gibson-Graham in this volume). It brings to the fore and values endogenous knowledge creation and solutions. In the context of diversity and inclusion work, by helping a community recognize that it is doing good things that strengthen diversity and inclusion, it allows for an ownership of the endeavour. It allows a community to overcome initial feelings of shame, blame or persecution. What at a regional or national level feels like an insurmountable crisis, at the local level is revealed as, not only surmountable, but something always in flux and something where progress is being made in many valid, countable and map-able ways. Working from assets engages J.K. Gibson-Graham’s theory of possibility (Gibson-Graham 2008, p. 14). Ultimately, working with possibilities is infectious and makes it easy for more people to become engaged and participate in the work that furthers diversity and inclusion, and when more people become engaged, more assets are brought to the table. By asking students how they are successful, we are building on an already solid foundation (Harper 2012). By focusing on the strengths rather than the weaknesses, one can engender a grassroots approach to change that is customized to the culture and history of a particular institution. Action Research Cycle 1 At Greenfield Community College the assumed starting point was that everyone at the college was engaged in work that impacts diversity and inclusion in a positive way. The first task, then, was to find out what those practices were and share them with others so we could learn from one another. I formed an ad hoc group of staff, faculty and students called Beacon that existed outside of the regular governance and committee structure. The group met on a volunteer basis over lunch and I provided the only incentive, which was salad and pizza. Beacon started a process of creating asset maps. Beginning with maps of personal assets the members of the group brought to diversity and inclusion work, the group then moved on to creating asset maps of the college. They made lists of people, offices and practices that worked to strengthen diversity and inclusion. These were grouped into categories and then used to identify potential areas for collaboration when engaging in diversity and inclusion projects. At the same time the Beacon group engaged in a language project of creating living definitions of terms related to diversity and inclusion. We recognized that words or terms have multiple definitions, multiple connotations and multiple associations, and that these definitions, connotations and associations change depending on context, perspective and how they are used over time. The intervention sought to develop empathy for how different people respond to words and terminology that we might have initially ascribed with a fixed understanding. For example, when mapping the term, ‘Black Lives Matter’, we not only focused on how the phrase has been used by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi to rally people to fight against the killing of black people by police officers in the United States, but we also diagrammed how, for some people, the term triggered feelings of anxiety and upset paradigms of power that then produced terms like ‘All Lives Matter’, or ‘Blue Lives Matter’.

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524  The handbook of diverse economies By deconstructing where these, often confrontational, responses came from, we could begin to understand some of the insecurities and fears that were underlying those responses and why people might react negatively to the Black Lives Matter movement. Depending on the makeup of the group of people present, and their ability to inhabit intersectional identities, the living definitions could then possess different multiple definitions. These living definitions were, by nature, dependent on the people defining the words and terms at a specific moment in time and their ability and willingness to see how definitions might be interpreted differently for people who had different perspectives. Collective Action Initiatives Both of these activities began to shape new senses of what was possible. Utilizing some of the assets and capacities identified in the asset mapping, the Beacon group then spawned several initiatives. The first, called Just One Thing, focused on fomenting collective change through individual action. A website was created where people could submit their One Thing they could to do each year to strengthen diversity and inclusion. By sharing the submissions on a public website, if someone was unsure about what to choose as their One Thing, they could get ideas from other people. Importantly, the whole college could collectively feel the impact of individual actions, and there was now the potential to track the number and kinds of submissions over time and see real shifts that occur at the college. Another initiative emerging from Beacon was the First Minute Response. After seeing a similar programme at Framingham State University, the group recognized the value of preparing to respond to traumatic events before any specific event occurred. Instead of hastily pulled together last-minute responses, the college would have a thoughtful and resourced first minute response where students, faculty and staff could gather and discuss their initial feelings, fears and concerns, and have a place to turn to, to find out more information. The college gathered a core group of people that included the Dean of Students, the Dean of Humanities, the Director of Student Development, the Coordinator of the Library, and faculty and staff who coordinate the kind of response the college might have for an event or issue. This includes finding appropriate articles or other sources of information, utilizing on-campus expertise or bringing in outside speakers to address an issue, or facilitating a discussion. One noon hour each month was set aside for a First Minute Response event. In an environment where the President of the United States was initiating immigration policy changes that seemed counter to the mission of an open enrolment college, the Beacon group initiated an inclusion pledge that stated, ‘The undersigned, faculty, staff, and students pledge, in the spirit of the Greenfield Community College Statement of Inclusion, to help “create a culture that values, encourages, and embraces a wide range of individual and group differences”’. Copies of this pledge were posted in the two main buildings at the college along with a large sheet of blank paper where people could add their names and make a clear visual statement for Greenfield Community College’s immigrant students and employees, that they are supported and embraced. The power of these documents was generated by the community participation and the gradual filling of the sheets of paper by community members.

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Focusing on assets: action research for an inclusive and diverse workplace  525 Action Research Cycle 2 and Further Initiatives Working with a sociology faculty member, Professor Linda McCarthy, we began a further action research initiative that involved training 12 students in co-facilitation. This tight-knit group of students was selected primarily for their diversity of identities, for their previous interest in sociology classes, and for an ability or willingness to look at issues from an asset-based perspective. After undergoing training, these students recruited some of their peers to attend one of four focus groups with students where we asked, ‘What and where is Greenfield Community College doing well with diversity and inclusion?’ With a smaller group of students, we analysed the transcripts and tried to note what people, offices and policies were identified. We then invited faculty and staff who were identified, or were from identified offices, to a focus group to share what they thought they were doing that encouraged a positive environment for diversity and inclusion. We then decided to formalize this peer-to-peer learning by creating a series of workshops called Let’s Talk Shop, where one faculty member and one staff member, both of whom had been identified by students as supportive of diversity and inclusion, tackled a specific diversity and inclusion issue, sharing their own practices and facilitating a discussion with their peers about the topic. These workshops were conducted on a voluntary basis; I again provided lunch as the only incentive. The fact that the faculty and staff selected to run the workshops had received recognition by students was a strong incentive to participate. Professor McCarthy and I also started a student group called Collective Voices–Common Ground that focused on talking about issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and identity, and how to move beyond discussion into action. After exploring topics that included gun control, toxic masculinity, and the #MeToo movement, a decision was made to focus on #MeToo for the coming semester. The students designed an interactive bulletin board that explained the #MeToo movement and gave space for other students to add their story to the board or to symbolically demonstrate their solidarity by colouring in a segment of the board. Professor McCarthy then pulled together a panel discussion of local academics and activists that was incredibly successful and filled the college’s largest lecture hall. The strength of all of these activities emerged from community participation in the generation of data in the form of creating community generated definitions of diversity and inclusion terms; asset maps of where the college is doing well with diversity and inclusion; cataloguing those assets by asking people to share their own personal initiatives; preparing for crisis or trauma in advance by creating a mechanism to respond; fomenting peer-to-peer learning through workshops run by faculty and staff sharing their best practices; and helping students explore topics centred on diversity and inclusion and transforming that into action. The fact that all of this was accomplished primarily over the lunch hour and largely through voluntary participation speaks to the capacity of people to engage in work that they feel is meaningful and has the potential to transform the community.

CONCLUSION Greenfield Community College is a workplace and an educational environment that aims to inspire lifelong learning for students and to model what lifelong learning looks like. The action research we conducted and continue to conduct on diversity and inclusion provides an oppor-

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526  The handbook of diverse economies tunity to model what lifelong learning looks like. Subjects are able to reclaim their agency by generating and analysing their own data. The researcher’s role shifts from traditional data collection and analysis, to that of moderator and facilitator. Action research facilitates learning, critical thinking and the development of potential solutions so that communities can develop natively designed, developed and performed approaches to strengthening their own communities. Value is generated in the collective assets of the whole, rather than the tokenized novelty of the individual. When we are open to looking for diversity in race, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexual orientation, and also class, veteran status and life experience, we enable greater participation. Additional assets enable greater empathy, greater understanding, and greater opportunities for transformational change. As a college we are collaboratively creating living definitions, knowledge that evolves, changes and transforms in different contexts, times and environments. If we embrace this notion of continual transformation, we can be more generous with forgiveness; with helping others understand; with creating an environment that allows people to ask questions and share their experiences and expertise; and with recognizing those experiences and expertise as things of value. Through the use of action research, the workplace then becomes a location of opportunity to create social change in ways that can strengthen diversity and inclusion.

REFERENCES Chang, J. (2016), We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, New York: Picador. Gibson-Graham, J. (2008), ‘Diverse economies: Performative practices for “other worlds”’, Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 1–20. Golom, F. (2018), ‘Alternate conversations for creating whole-system change around diversity and inclusion’, Diversity and Democracy, 21 (1), 16–19. Greenfield Community College (2018), ‘Fast facts – about GCC’, accessed 21 March 2019 at http://​www​ .gcc​ mass​.edu/​about/​fast​-facts/​. Harper, S. (2012), Black Male Student Success in Higher Education: A Report from the National Black Male College Achievement Study, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. Kretzmann, J. and J. McKnight (1993), Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets, Evanston, IL: Institute for Policy Research. Prystowsky, R. (2018), ‘A systemically collaborative approach to achieving equity in higher education’, Metropolitan Universities, 29 (1), 94–101. US Census Bureau (2018a), ‘American Community Survey 1-year estimates’, accessed 21 March 2019 at https://​censusreporter​.org/​profiles/​05000US25011​-franklin​-county​-ma/​. US Census Bureau (2018b), ‘American fact finder’, accessed 11 May 2019 at http://​factfinder​.census​ .gov/​faces/​tableservices/​jsf/​pages/​productview​ xhtml​?src​=​CF.

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58. How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: the case of Company Drinks Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder

INTRODUCTION What people usually see as ‘art’ is only the peak of an iceberg. The international circuit of fairs, biennales and large museums, splashy displays, covers of lifestyle magazines – that is, the glittering mainstream art world, populated by celebrities, and dominated by seven figures transactions – is only the most visible one of many actually existing art worlds. In this chapter we discuss other ways of doing art, where business becomes a means to set up and culture up different economic relationships and economic underpinnings. We base our argument on the ongoing work by the Centre for Plausible Economies, a practice-led research cluster hosted by Company Drinks. Company Drinks is an artist-initiated drinks enterprise based in east London which practises and conceptualizes possibilities within the arts to ‘take back the economy’. The enterprise makes its full drinks production cycle publicly accessible to local residents, making use of a broad range of accessible and available local resources, and practising the possibility for new commons. Company Drinks produces an annual drinks range with the involvement of more than 1200 residents every year, where each single bottled drink becomes an embodiment, representation and demonstration of a new collectivity, productivity and identity in a so-called ‘economically deprived’ neighbourhood. The motto of the Centre for Plausible Economies is therefore to ‘walk the walk while talking the talk’. The initiative aspires to combine critical inquiries with practical interventions, mapping and re-imagining economic systems in the arts and beyond. The centre also aims to oppose the exploitative economies of contemporary art that confidentially capture value and sequester wealth aided by the mechanisms of financial capitalism. We will elaborate on how to reclaim everyday economies by artistic means in the third part of this chapter. We would like to start by situating our enterprise in the overarching ecosystem of contemporary art.

THE ICEBERG OF CONTEMPORARY ART London is a global centre of finance. It is also an artistic hub, with many prominent institutions, galleries and art schools. In London, circuits of finance and art collude and intersect continuously, creating constant peaks of record art sales, unheard of deals and sold-out solo shows. Increasingly, the mainstream art world caters to (and depends upon) upper middle-class global elites and the ultra-rich who purchase, collect and speculate with art, claiming it as a luxury for the affluent and educated. Access to artistic professions is underpinned by privilege, based on hierarchies of class, gender, race and geography. 527 Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder - 9781788119962 08:05:37PM

528  The handbook of diverse economies These divisions are more often than not reproduced rather than resolved in the field of contemporary art that otherwise likes to perceive itself as a progressive avant-garde of globalized society (see Chapter 46 by Rodrigues in this volume). This situation provokes anger. The collective White Pube, young and vocal art critics from London and Liverpool, explain why they hate the mainstream art world in the following words: At the top of the mountain are all the middle class white people holding onto their director and executive position jobs so tightly their knuckles are as white as their faces n PUBES tbh. . . . I don’t want to inherit this bullshit, and also wtf does it say about the people in (all positions of) power that they’re okay working like this, that this is the state they support? (The White Pube 2018)

As they suggest, most artists do not benefit from this model. They subsist on a multitude of incomes from precarious jobs, occasional commissions or money from family and savings. Underneath the glossy surface of the mainstream art world thrives a much larger realm of other artistic practices and their economies, which the New York based artist and theoretician Gregory Sholette (2011, 2017) calls artistic dark matter. Dark matter is a concept gleaned from the realm of physics, which posits that the cosmos is composed – to a vast extent – from an invisible mass, a dark matter, which does not shine, yet maintains the gravitational forces keeping the universe from falling apart. According to Sholette, the artistic universe is very similar to the physical one, as the bulk of its social energy is generated by people who are not registered as valuable contributors to the world of art. The daily labour of all artists, assistants, art aficionados, students, art activists, Sunday painters or Saturday conceptualists maintains the machinery of the art world, which venerates only a couple of people – famous artists, curators, directors, collectors – placing them in a spotlight. In other words, the artistic universe is like an iceberg, with a visible peak dominating over hidden, dark, social matter. The concept of artistic dark matter not only reveals the disparities in prestige and earnings characterizing the artistic mainstream; Sholette highlights the exploitative nature of this system. The strategic invisibility of the 99 per cent is a condition of their exploitation in the art economy, where even small differences accumulate over time, and result in glaring inequalities – not only in earnings, but also status, fame and position in art networks. According to many economists of art, such as Hans Abbing, the art economy is a winner-takes-all economy, as for one ‘winner’ there are hundreds if not thousands of so-called ‘failed artists’ (Abbing 2002, 2011). Most of them work precariously, the condition exposed and discussed by many (see, for example, Apostol 2015; Aranda et al. 2011; Lorey 2011; McRobbie 2015; Precarious Workers Brigade 2011). Just imagine an artist working on her project, frequently without any payment at all, sometimes for months on end. The model of artistic dark matter suggests that this daily, unrecognized and unremunerated toil of the many is exploited for the benefit of the few, underwriting record sales and rankings of popularity. Artistic ideas and idioms, which emerge and flow from the multitude are turned into artworks by individuals, out of whom only a tiny minority is celebrated. Meanwhile the institutional infrastructures are maintained by the interests of many, who attend exhibitions, go to art schools or frequent openings, but far too often are attuned to the interests of a few. Andrea Fraser (2011) in her thoroughly critical and self-reflective text ‘1% is me’, analyses the close integration of the New York based art world with the financial oligarchies of new capitalism. She points out the direct relation between inflated prices of art and economic inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, and provides evidence of the personal collusion

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How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: the case of Company Drinks  529 between the boards of hedge funds and key institutions of contemporary art, such as MOMA (Museum of Modern Art). But the artistic universe should not be disregarded as a mere marketplace or in Tom Wolfe’s terms a ‘bonfire of the vanities’ (1987). One should not mistake the peak of the artistic iceberg with its whole. Under the surface is a rich ecosystem brimming with artistic practices that do not conform to the normative art market. Just as the economy is constituted by much more than monetary exchanges and wage labour, these submerged practices constitute the bulk of the art universe. In his seminal treatise Art Worlds Howard Becker (1984) defined the art world as a network of social cooperation, which facilitates the production, dissemination and consumption of art. His pragmatic understanding of the art economy was picked up by a theoretician of contemporary art, Stephen Wright (2013) and an art-activist collective Basekamp (2013) to sustain their argument that there are many – both plausible and actually existing – art worlds. The market-based art world is only one of them, and its norms are not universally applicable. In contrast to what Fraser (2011) and others maintain, one does not need to be rich to be an artist, one does not need to produce luxurious objects, one does not need to thrive on global inequalities, detrimental to the livelihood of multitudes. The plethora of artistic and economic activities is not only a resource to be exploited by those at the top, but also a mode of resisting this very exploitation on an everyday basis. The Centre for Plausible Economies and Company Drinks contribute to this daily resistance by instigating more mutually beneficial modes of making art and sustaining economies.

THERE ARE AS MANY MODES OF MAKING ART AS THERE ARE ART WORLDS Art is not bound by any medium. It can be anything – a painting, a sculpture, an installation, an airplane or a urinal. But as Stephen Wright (2013) emphasizes in his influential Toward a Lexicon of Usership, the mainstream art market is only superficially pluralistic. In fact, it operates according to a strict set of rules, propagating the uniformity of artistic practice, just as capitalist economic discourse compartmentalizes and manages human creative powers. Neil Cummings (2014) once quipped that markets mark the things that circulate through them. He meant that to be marketed, art has to be socially, economically and ideologically formatted as a collectible object, something that can be sold, owned and speculated with, with an individual authorship serving as an anchor for present and future evaluations. But art is a paradoxical commodity. Its value stems from aesthetic conventions, as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1996) in his treatise The Rules of Art. Bourdieu analyses the autonomous fields of cultural production, which emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, and their foundational beliefs in aesthetic autonomy, the aura of the artistic object and the creative genius of individual creators (see Chapter 46 by Rodrigues in this volume). Even now art has to be priceless and considered useless to cost a lot and be used as a token of social distinction. However, what one sees at art fairs or in most commercial art galleries is just the tip of an iceberg, as there are many other art forms that people make, use and cherish. Plausible art worlds sustain different forms of art that facilitate the richness of social practice, rather than simply allowing the rich to instrumentalize art to feel even richer.

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530  The handbook of diverse economies The conventions of the art market are naturalized by artistic education, which focuses on making objects (paintings, sculpture, performance, film) and moulds students’ expectations accordingly. The art market offers a semblance of the ‘ivory tower’. It promises that practitioners ‘can do what they want’. In reality it exposes them to poverty and precarity, the situation ironically deconstructed by Rosalie Schweiker in her map of the ‘London art world’ commissioned by the Centre for Plausible Economies (Schweiker 2018). In a series of comic strips she illustrates the daily struggles of critical practitioners in the city of rising living costs and diminishing opportunities, a conflicting world where empty promises and underlying competition are countered by critical friendships, radical pragmatism and sense of humour. We can offer not only anecdotal evidence that quite a lot of artists are not particularly happy with the art market as they find it: the emergence of many artist trade unions and art-activists both in London and in many other places, proves this beyond any doubt. There are many artists who choose art not as a career path to production of luxurious objects, but because they are genuinely interested in experimenting with social and aesthetic conventions, contesting existing value systems in their artistic practice. Whichever form their art takes, it embeds itself within the world at large, and can be found there, in abundance. When one goes to a demonstration, to a disco, to a hipster coffee shop or to a village fair, one experiences multiple and different forms of visual culture. Some of these events are not art, but some are more art-like; some are not made by artists, but quite a lot are. There are throngs of dissident, activist and avant-garde artists who activate their competences in different walks of life. Responding to the prominence of artists amongst occupying crowds, Yates McKee (2016) interpreted Occupy New York as a work of art, though possibly he should have thought about it as an actually existing art world. People who populate plausible art worlds play with form, recontextualize daily rituals, confront stereotypes, transform imagination – all what good art is really about. Very often, they do it outside of the mainstream art world, and very rarely conform to the narrow definitions of art embedded in the art market. The Association of Arte Útil, with which the Centre for Plausible Economies sympathizes and cooperates, champion the use-value of art, that merges with the everyday life of communities. In their online database1 they archive examples of useful artistic practices dating back to the nineteenth century, ranging from art-infused community gardens to borderless states established by artists. Socially applied art doesn’t distinguish itself from other cultural expressions, as it is situated in everyday practices and cultures. Such art does not pretend to be elevated above diverse communities of practitioners and their concerns. Such art begs to be used. Wright (2013) proposes to think about this kind of art as made on a 1:1 scale. Such activities are not ‘just art’, mere conceptual models or utopian propositions. Artists working at a 1:1 scale instigate social practices, transforming them in artistic processes. Such art can be both an enterprise and an art work, as with the case of Company Drinks.

COMPANY DRINKS: RECLAIMING THE MANY MEANINGS OF THE WORD COMPANY An increasing number of artists make economics not just their subject matter, but their practice. Just as some artists or art groups make artistic objects, other artists directly intervene in the social and economic realms, setting up enterprises or establishing economic experiments

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How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: the case of Company Drinks  531 as constitutive elements of their practice. Radical practice, which unfolds at a 1:1 social scale, is not only more conceptually endearing than a merely imaginary radicalism, it is also harder to maintain. In such cases, the ‘radical’ and the ‘new’ are not just topics to be discussed, but practices to be instigated. Artists working at a 1:1 scale talk the talk while walking the walk. They do not fashion themselves as observers or portrayers of social ills. Instead they engage the society around the very subject with which they dissent (see Chapter 56 by Cameron and Gibson in this volume). Company Drinks is art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise. It operates as a seasonal, local and intergenerational drinks production cycle, where the different elements of the cycle are opened up to everyone who has a reason or interest to be involved. The annual production cycle includes growing, picking and foraging trips, drinks making, educational sessions on fizzy drinks, branding and trading. This cycle can be described as a new public space, one which connects and reconnects people with available and common resources (cultivated and wild food, sociability, collective histories, nature, public buildings, infrastructure, etc.). Company Drinks presents and represents itself in many different formats, from caterer to educator, food manufacturer to exhibitor, trading partner to sponsor, highlighting an underlying pluralism of artistic practice, which does not conform to the binaries enforced by the mainstream art world (between art and not-art), nor caters to the pressure of the art market to produce tradable goods (painting, installation, etc.). Company Drinks is situated in a particular geography, the Greater London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, a post-industrial area towards the eastern edge of Greater London, once a centre of British car manufacturing. Currently the area is undergoing excessive housing development and financial investment and speculation. Large numbers of its community deal on an everyday basis with the effects of imposed and prolonged austerity. In this context Company Drinks invites the residents and users of this area to join a collectivized cycle of drinks production. Even though Company Drinks is housed in a former outdoor bowling pavilion, in the midst of Barking Park, it is not bound to any physical space but rather exists as a constantly renegotiated network of connections between engaged partners, organizations and individuals. If one wanted to think about Company Drinks as a work of art, one would need to imagine it as a composition or assemblage including the gardeners who run our community garden, where we pick some plums, the park rangers with whom we chat every morning, the students who glean blackcurrants with us, the families with whom we go hop picking every autumn, the partnering companies who produce our sodas and so on. Company Drinks is not made by an artist, but initiated by one, Kathrin Böhm, who is also active in other collective enterprises, such as Myvillages. The format – a drinks enterprise – has been carefully chosen, as something understandable for most people. Previously, Kathrin has worked with many other familiar formats of art on a 1:1 scale, such as a market place, school, shop and haystack. The familiarity of the format facilitates communication of three important points: that this art partakes in everyday lives, that the artist engages in common struggles, and that all this is made together. Even though Company Drinks involves a basic division of labour, as not everyone engages in the same capacity, rather than reiterating hierarchies and exclusivities, is it organized around principles of cultural democracy. By its daily activities it propagates the belief that every community deserves respect, and that each must have a voice in the decisions that affect the quality of everyone’s lives.

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532  The handbook of diverse economies Even though Company Drinks is a democratic enterprise, it is practised as art too. It articulates itself on many different fields simultaneously, with emphasis shifting with the ebbs and flows of the imagination of those involved. If, in a given moment, people focus on financial sustainability, they will work raising money. If they desire something more aesthetic, they will refurbish Company Drinks’ home. If they want community and food, they go picking and produce drinks together. The fluidity of roles is central to Company Drinks’ operation, as any given person shifts between the roles of consumer, provider, facilitator, trader, supporter, artist. This flexibility is mirrored by the hybrid status of Company Drinks’ produce. Any soda or beer is at the same time a delicious drink, a poster that communicates Company Drinks’ values, and an art work that embodies the process of its own collective creation, just as Miranda Pope (2016) remarked in the first catalogue of Company Drinks. This is reflected in the hybridity of forms through which Company Drinks manifests itself – as a bar, an educational session, an exhibitable art project, a sponsor providing drinks, a radical community enterprise, etc. The cycle of drinks production consists of several phases, involving agricultural, educational, commercial and social activities, intersecting different interests and communities. You might be interested in Company Drinks if you want to meet new people in your area, or if you want to learn how to grow, or if you want to share memories of the past or simply if you fancy a drink. A hop picking tour will be of interest either if you need an affordable day off out of the city, shared with your family and friends, or if you are a researcher keen on getting to know more about community economies. Company Drinks started as an artistic project about the local heritage of east London. The age of ‘Hopping Days’ is a history particular to working-class women and their families from London’s traditional East End. It spans roughly one century from the 1850s (when the first trains travelled to Kent) to the 1950s (when hop harvesting became mechanized). At the time, Kent, which borders London from the south-east, was the main producer of the highly valuable hop. Farmers relied on a mobile and cheap labour force to handpick the hops during the annual harvest in late summer. Described by many as a temporary matriarchy (most of the men would stay back in the docks to work), women had many reasons to participate: to make extra money, to get fresh air, arrange countryside holidays for the kids, and to share good company. Two elements stand out: the camaraderie of collective picking and the decision to do something for more than one reason. Even though exploited as cheap labour, the women used the space they gained during these weeks to cultivate other things of importance. In the extended East End families and neighbourhoods, organized around a multi-layered net of relationships, women usually took on multiple roles, not limiting themselves to the role of a housewife. We shouldn’t be too nostalgic about the Hopping Days, but it represents a unique rural culture developed by an inner city working-class community, and the essence of this heritage merges social and financial functions. It wasn’t just about the money: it was about being in good company. This memory of a time when we organized our everyday around a certain collectivity and publicness (using the street, the hop fields, the shared yards) is important, as it is remembered as something valuable. This is where public space comes in, when the public spaces we use to collectivize, to casually mingle and share, are taken away from us (the streets by road traffic, the back yards by housing development, the extended family by a conservative push towards the nuclear family, the pubs by falling sales). This collectivity, sociability, camaraderie needs space. Social media can offer this, but if we don’t insist on actual physical spaces as spaces in which we shape and define our social lives, then our dependency on means provided by others

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How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: the case of Company Drinks  533 (smartphones, software, contracts) will only expand. Lane Releya (2013) points out that if we lose control of actual space of the architectural built realm, we lose control of what’s possible for the networked society we live in. When the public space erodes, people lose access to a means by which they can facilitate and constitute change. For this reason, Company Drinks fashions itself as a public space, where it cultivates sociality, art and economy as part of a community enterprise. The whole range of activities organized around a seasonal cycle involves collective negotiations. Using a very basic definition of economy as a system in which we organize and practise our relationships to others (including the planet), then economy is cultivated through how we behave and make everyday decisions, and is brought back into the realm of everyday culture (and art). Using this argument in an area like Barking and Dagenham, where many residents struggle with daily sustenance and feel completely excluded from democratic policies, is a tricky matter. But as soon as the non-monetary enters the equation the possibilities become tangible again.

CONCLUSION In this chapter we have not only criticized the economy of the mainstream art world, but also sketched alternatives, on both systemic and practical levels. Just as our thinking about the economic dynamics of contemporary art is inspired by feminist economies, our practice is motivated by similar values. As with other community economies, at Company Drinks the notion of economics is returned to its core meaning – of managing livelihood and exchanging values. In contrast to what happens in the Canary Wharf, the Thatcherite financial services district a few miles away, where it is a matter of ultra-fast speculations and financial algorithms, in Barking and Dagenham, I give you something in return for something I value from you. It is a recognition of our shared condition, of social interdependence. The way we organize relationships will either set up a system that we want to live in, or reproduce the economy that exploits many for the benefit of a few. Sadly, in the mainstream art world the second is too often the case. Company Drinks arranges the social form of enterprise as a means to create and grow a new public realm of collectivized production, geographically dispersed, but socially, economically and culturally connected. This shared richness of artistic and social practice is the bottom-line of an artistic iceberg.

NOTE 1.

http://​www​.arte​-util​.org/​projects/​ (accessed 25 March 2019).

REFERENCES Abbing, H. (2002), Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Abbing, H. (2011), ‘Notes on the exploitation of poor artists,’ in M. Kozlowski et al. (eds), Wieczna Radośc. Ekonomia Polityczna Spolecznej Kreatywności, Warsaw: Bęc Zmiana, pp. 329–40. Apostol, C. (2015), ‘Art workers between precarity and resistance: A genealogy’, Artleaks Gazette, August, 7–21.

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534  The handbook of diverse economies Aranda, J., A. Vidokle and B. Kuan Wood (2011), Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, E-Flux Journal, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Basekamp Group and Friends (2013), ‘Plausible artworlds’, accessed 6 June 2019 at https://​www​ .plausibleartworlds​.org/​. Becker, H.S. (1984), Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996), The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cummings, N. (2014), ‘A joy forever’, in M. Kozlowski, A. Kurant, J. Sowa, K. Szadkow and K. Szreder (eds), Joy Forever: Political Economy of Social Creativity, London: MayFly Books, pp. 31–47. Fraser, A. (2011), ‘L’1%, c’est moi’, Texte Zur Kunst, September, pp. 114–27. Lorey, I. (2011), ‘Virtuosos of freedom: On the implosion of political virtuosity and productive labour’, in U. Wuggenig, G. Raunig and G. Ray (eds), Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’, London: MayFly Books, pp. 79–91. McKee, Y. (2016), Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition, London and New York: Verso. McRobbie, A. (2015), Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pope, M. (2016), ‘Drinks’, in M. Pope and K. Böhm (eds), Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks, Amsterdam: Jap Sam Books, p. 179. Precarious Workers Brigade (2011), ‘Fragments toward an understanding of a week that changed everything . . .’, E-Flux Journal, accessed 25 March at http://​www​.e​-flux​.com/​journal/​fragments​ -toward​-an​-understanding​-of​-a​-week​-that​-changed​-everything​%E2​%80​%A6/​. Releya, L. (2013), Your Everyday Art World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schweiker, R. (2018), London Art Economies, self-published fancine, commissioned by the Centre for Plausible Economies, Independents United, accessed 28 May 2019 at https://​www​.independentsunited​ .co​.uk/​product/​london​-art​-economies. Sholette, G. (2011), Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London: Pluto Press. Sholette, G. (2017), Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism, London: Pluto Press. The White Pube (2018), ‘I literally hate the art world’, accessed 20 November 2018 at http://​www​ .thewhitepube​.co​.uk/​i​-literally​-hate​-the​-art​-world. Wolfe, T. (1987), The Bonfire of the Vanities, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Wright, S. (2013), Toward a Lexicon of Usership, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum.

Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder - 9781788119962 08:05:37PM

Index

access 317–18 access, benefit of property 19 Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) 240 Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) 350 Accra, Ghana 186–92 action research 511–18 action research cycle 523–5 collective action 516–17 collective action initiatives 524 collective practices and actions 183–4 inclusive and diverse workplace 522–5 subjectivities, shifting 514–16 Action-Watchdog 283 activism 147 algorithmic activism, experiments 379 feminist activism 150–51 shareholder activism 34 actor-network theory (ANT) 406 affect 428–34 transpersonal theory, advancing 430–33 After Method 453 agency 70, 122, 240, 243, 263, 301, 390, 396, 402–3, 406, 414, 446, 450, 458, 462, 494, 522, 526 distributed agency 404–5, 480 economic agency 122, 402–3, 405 ethical agency 406 grassroots agency 263 independent agency 481 loss of 522 more-than-human agency 396, 402–8, 462, 464, 476 rational economic agents 31, 99, 101, 106, 109, 120, 186, 200, 248, 273, 281, 357, 403 Airbnb 328 algorithms 379 reorganizing, algorithms 380–82 Alice in Wonderland 455 alternative currencies 230–36 valuation and convertibility 231–3 Alternative Education Map 316 alternative food networks 225 Althusser, Louis 6, 392, 477, 481 Anderson, B. 429 Anderson, Ray 33, 34 Angkor Language School (ALS) 77 Anthropocene 85, 176, 184, 230, 396, 397, 455, 468

anti-extortion association (AddioPizzo) 87 anti-mafia enterprise 82–9 property, commoned vs. enclosed 84–5 Aotearoa New Zealand 159, 198, 235, 362–8, 503–4, 508–9 Ardener, S. 354 Ariff, M. 351 Aristotle 332 Arrowsmith, S. 254 art worlds 529–30 Art Worlds 529 Asian Women at Work (AWatW) 149, 150 assemblage 236, 259, 260, 271 assemblage analysis, field methods 486–91 assemblage ontology 486–7 assemblage theory 7 tracing assemblages 488 assets-based approach 523 asset-based thinking 423 assets-based community development (ABCD) approach 415, 416, 507, 508 associational bonds 35 Atlas Project 512, 513, 515, 516 austerity politics 90–92 authority, decentring 106–13 autogestión 48, 53 Banchirigah, S.M. 180 banks 17, 45, 85, 103, 226, 230, 233, 284, 333–44, 346–7, 354–6, 358, 366, 372, 375, 448 Banker Ladies 354–5, 358 food banks 206–8, 416 Grameen Bank 356 group banking 355, 358 Islamic banking 338, 347–50 (micro) banking 354, 357 ‘other’ banks 339 public banks 339 seed banks 265 time banks, 122, 230–31, 234, 238–44, 262, 325, 332, 495 wetland banking 166–7 Bargh, Maria 4, 364, 366, 505, 506 Barraket, J. 255 Barron, Elizabeth 163, 166, 405 Basekamp Group and Friends 529 Bauwens, M. 199, 202, 265 bayanihan 171, 176 B-corps 31, 59

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536  The handbook of diverse economies Beard, A.H. 36 Becker, Howard 529 Beggs, M. 201 Beldo, L. 168 Benkler, Yochai 265 Bennett, Jane 404, 429 Bentham, Jeremy 273, 275, 280 Berkowitz, Sean 110 BerkShares 234, 235 Best, Elsdon 198 Bitcoin 382 Black Lives Matter movement 523, 524 Boggs, C. 40 Böhm, Kathrin 531 Bollier, D. 318 Boston, Massachusetts, USA 208, 210, 294–5 Bourdieu, Pierre 420, 529 Bransons, Richard 100 Brassed Off 394 Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa (BRIICS) 5 Broome, Richard 310 Brown, W. 108 Buddhism for Social Development Action (BSDA) 76–8 building community economies 415–16 Burman, S. 354 Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) 103 Butler, J. 197 Cabanban, A.S. 207 Cahill, A. 515 Cahn, Edgar 238–40, 242, 243 Caja Laboral model 343 Callon, Michel 202, 457 Cameron, Jenny 19, 31, 155, 308, 395, 414, 415, 431, 456–9, 482 campesinos/as 249 Cantillon, R. 99 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 26, 477 capitalism 1, 2, 5, 6, 28, 134, 280 capitalist corporation 106–13 capitalist enterprises 31 capitalist firms 44 capitalist modernity, fetishization 4 and deconstruction 413–14 by design 130 disaster capitalism 131 capitalist class process 6 capital-managed firms 40 capitalocentrism 8, 379, 480, 481 capitalocentric economic language 470 capitalocentric framing and 358–9

capitalocentric understandings implications 301–2 gender and 122–3 work and 122–3 care 61, 75, 84, 121, 135, 148, 166–7, 188, 252, 286, 290, 308, 403, 505 Bush Care 177 care for Earth Others 166 care by environment 159, 165 care for environment 122, 210, 309, 365 care ethics 197, 338 care for infrastructure 94 care labour 18, 140, 154, 241 care for the land 296, 304, 397, 432–3 care for non-human life 66, 368 care sector 44 care work 1, 76, 119, 154–60, 182, 187, 191, 239 care in workplace 120 carer allowances, payments 122, 151 carer subject position 512 collective care 177, 207, 439 community care 158, 448 family care 13, 103, 119, 121, 157–8, 432 female care workers 133 Fureai Kippu, tickets for caring relationships 241 health care 130, 134 routine care 79 self-care 107, 461 care labour, urban farm 158–9 care work, redistributing 154–60 caring labour 154–60 Carnegie, M. 123 Cato, Molly Scott 102 Chaloupky 68 Chiemgauer regiogeld 235 cities, sharing 266–7 Citizens Own Renewable Energy Network Australia (CORENA) 372, 375, 376 class 219 class difference 391 class exploitation 333–4 class identity 98, 125, 393 class justice 338, 340 class politics 33, 391, 394 class struggle 5, 316–17 class subjects, subject position 391, 393, 482 creative class 416, 419, 488–9 landed class 49, 176 Marxian class analysis 124 middle class 129, 149, 219, 283, 527–8 as a process 11, 124, 200, 207, 392–3 working class 196, 289, 394, 414 working class men 394

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

Index  537 working class organizing 48–50 working class women 147, 532 working class women of colour 156 Climate Take Back™ 34 cognitive justice 17 collective autonomy factory 287–90 Collective Copies 29, 35 collective self-management 319 collectively performed reciprocal labour 170–78 collectivization 65 colonial violence 76 comercio mas justo 249 Comercio y Justicia 43 commercial sharing, platforms 264 commodification, property 292 commoning 55, 84–6, 262, 265–8, 272, 279, 281, 283–90, 298, 438–9 practices 318–19 property, city 283–90 commons academic commons, free universities 316–21 commons challenge, public authorities 284–5 commons challenge, white supremacists 287 in Greater Boston, reconnecting 210–11 law as commons 328–9 lineage of 293–4 and waste, transactions 206–12 Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission 148 community 19, 320–21 actors 265 community economies 19, 56, 467 becoming community economies 3 building community economies 415–16 enterprise structures 58–9 sustainable community economies 19 Community Economies Research Network (CERN) 3, 4 community economies scholarship 125 community enterprises 18, 31, 56–63, 90–96 design 57–62 voting and quorum 61 community finance 370–77 accountable and ethical finance 374–5 value of 374–6 community land trusts (CLTs) 292–8 establishing in Australia 296–7 commons lineage of 293–4 contemporary examples 294–5 community-owned energy infrastructure 56–63 renewable energy (CORE) enterprises 56, 370 Community Partnering Project, Philippines 514 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) 214–21, 225

Art programmes 217 Bakeries (CSBs) 217, 218 class and race concerns 219 Enterprises (CSEs) 215, 217–18 Fisheries (CSFs) 218, 219 wild transactions, cultivating 216–17 Yoga (CSY) 217, 220 Company Drinks 527 reframing company, reclaiming meanings 530–33 Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic 357 Conill, J. 71 Connell, R. 108 consumption 1, 333, 405, 448, 481, 529 alternative circuits of consumption 236 basic consumption 133, 189, 334 capitalist consumption 438 community consumption 210 conscious consumption 248 consumption behaviour 249 ecological consumption 217 ethical consumption 225, 250, 352 high-consumption lifestyle 446 human food consumption 227, 309 mass consumption 248 necessary consumption fund 190–91 plant food consumption 165 self-consumption 224 sustainable consumption 19, 265 water consumption 91, 93–4, 449 contractual reciprocity 171 Cooper, Davina 239, 243, 325 Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) 42 cooperatives Collective Copies 29, 35 Evergreen Cooperative Corporation 43 Fagor 29 Mondragon cooperative 29, 30, 42 Oklahoma Food Cooperative 487, 490 producer cooperatives 250 the Seasoned Spoon Café 78 worker-owned cooperatives 27–8, 40–46, 103, 124, 272 Corleone, Vito 88 Cotterrell, Roger 328 couchsurfing 325 Counting for Nothing 478 cryptocurrencies 231 crypto economy 382 Cultivate Christchurch 158–9 cultural values, Te Pumautanga 366 Cummings, Neil 529 dagyaw system 175 D’Aprano, Zelda 147

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

538  The handbook of diverse economies dark matter 528 Davies, William 327 Day, R. 242 De Barbieri, E.W. 43 debt bondage 335 decolonial love 76 degeneration thesis 29 Deleuze, Gilles 428, 486, 487 De Peuter, G. 52 Derrida, Jacques 479 de Saussure, F. 480 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura 17, 473, 483 de Spinoza, Baruch 428 Diaz, Junot 76 Dikovic, J. 207 Diprose, Gradon 230 direct producer-consumer transactions 214–21 disaster capitalism 131 distributed renewable energy generation 370 diverse labour practices, mapping 140–41 diverse legalities 323–9 law as commons 328–9 property, substratum 328–9 diverse sexualities 436–41 diverse subjectivities 436–41 Do, T.H. 463 Dombroski, Kelly 431, 432, 461, 463 domestic care work cooperatives 43 doughnut economics 5 Drake, L. 458, 496 Du Bois, W.E.B. 41 Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative (DSNI) 294–5 Duggan, L. 437 Dyer-Witheford, N. 52 Earth Others 18, 163–8 agency of 396, 462, 464, 476 work of 166–8 ecological livelihoods 402–8 The Ecology of Commerce 33 economía social y solidaria 53 Economic Cooperation among Negro Americans 41 economic difference deconstruction 479–81 place-based field studies 482–3 policy analysis 483 reading for 482–3 economic plurality 179–84 economic pluriverse 19 Economics of Household Production 119 Economic Space Agency (ECSA) 380, 385 economic subjectivity 2, 419, 447, 512 artists and artisans subjectivities, shifting techniques 423–5

reframing project 421–2 regional development challenges, Franklin County 421 shifting, techniques 419–26 economic transition 129, 172 and reciprocal labour 172–6 state co-option and contestation 175–6 violent economic transition 172 econo-sociality 407 eco-social enterprises 65–72 non-market production 67–8 ecosystem services 163 Eigg Isle, Scotland 295 eight hours recreation 117 Elävä talous 473 Electrical Commission of Montreal 285 Elyachar, Julia 200 Emery, M.R. 163 empirical realism 6 empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs) see worker-recuperated cooperatives The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy 2, 5, 392–4, 411, 462 Enron Corporation 106 masculinity, detoxing 111–12 enterprise 11–12 diversity 11, 26–38, 328 dynamics 32–6 joint stock corporation 327 mafia enterprises 35, 83–4 non-capitalist enterprises 11 state enterprise 90–96 Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) 240 entrepreneur 88, 101 eco-entrepreneurs 98 entrepreneurialism 98, 99, 104 heroic entrepreneur 99–100 industrial capitalist entrepreneurs 100 merchant capitalist entrepreneurs 100 epistemology 493–4 epistemicides 468 methodology, diverse economies 453–64 equal employment opportunity (EEO) 149 Erasmus, Charles 171 Escobar, Arturo 17 Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General 99 ethical action, refocusing 19–20 business, post-socialist context 65–72 consumption 225 ethical self-cultivation 412 ethically oriented small business 101–2

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

Index  539 ethically responsible encounters 19 markets 247 more-than-human subject 396–8 self-governance 211 ethics 196–7, 220, 456–7 heretical ethics 383–4 Etxagibel, Azkarraga 29 Evergreen Cooperative Corporation 43 Fagor 29 fair trade 246–52 livelihoods, Chiapas 248–9 reframing 248–9 Fastow, Andy 109 female care workers 133 feminist activism 150–51 Australian feminist activism 151 feminist economic activism 146–52 feminist scholarship 117 finance 15–17 finance beyond debt 340–42 finance capital 333 finance diversity 15–17, 332–44 financial hacking see hacking finance financial inclusion 336 financial troubles and 383–6 financial value 374–6 financialization 336 financing postcapitalist politics 342–3 grounded finance 376–7 Islamic finance 346–52 iwi, finances 365 mutual aid financing 354–9 non-market finance 16 patient finance 375–6 payday loans 335 peer-to-peer personal credit money 234 profit-sharing finance 340 public banks 339 rotating loan fund 373 rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) 339, 354–9 unnegotiable debt 379 zero-interest funds 340 finance diversity see banks Finland 470 Folbre, Nancy 148, 478 food alternative food networks 225 for building community economies 411–17 collective food procurement 223–8 commons and waste, transactions 206–12 direct food provisioning 223–8 gleaned food 209 governance 211

Oklahoma Food Cooperative 487, 490 for people and planet 28–32 procurement 228 Slow Food Movement 309, 310 stewardship food sharing model 210 surplus food, diverse economies 208–9 waste 208 foraging 224 formal paid labour 138 formal volunteering 139 Fostering Arts and Culture Project (FACP) 421 Foucault, Michel 412, 413 Frank, Adam 429 Franklin County, Massachusetts 421 Fraser, Andrea 528, 529 free market 13, 292 Friedman, Milton 26, 107 Fukuyama, Francis 392 The Full Monty 394, 430 fungal work exchange and compensation 163–6 fungal metabolic division 165–6 fungus and ant reciprocal labour 164–5 Fureai Kippu 241 Furneaux, C. 255 Fusion21 assemblage 259 reframing efficiencies, social good 258–9 social enterprise 259 Geertz, Clifford 356 gender 122–3, 251, 289, 319, 384, 106, 111–12, 132, 146, 154, 191–2, 380, 391, 471, 482 gender division of labour 10, 133, 251 gender equality 148, 152, 463, 482 gendered class transformation 393 gendered economy 117 gendered power relations 107 gendered subjectivity 437 genealogy 412–13 for building community economies 411–17 capitalism, deconstructing 413–14 non-capitalist subjects, cultivating 414–15 whakapapa 505, 506 working-class women 147 gentrification 103, 264, 283, 289, 294, 328, 416, 419, 489 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 396, 397, 458, 459, 493–9 economic diversity and 494–8 methodology and epistemology 493–4 George, Henry 293 gharar 348 Gibson, Katherine 414–15, 459, 469

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

540  The handbook of diverse economies Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2, 4, 6–8, 19, 28, 31–3, 45, 106–7, 155, 168, 197, 200, 207, 211, 244, 308, 338, 358, 379, 383, 392, 394–6, 402, 405, 407, 411, 412, 414, 423, 425, 428, 430, 456, 460, 467, 471, 472, 480, 506, 523 Gilbert, Scott 404 The Gleaners and I 209 gleaning 206–12, 224 commons in Greater Boston, reconnecting 210–11 modern-day gleaning 207–8 Glick, B. 43 Global Financial Crisis 238 The Godfather 88 Gombay, Nicole 469 Good Samaritan’s Law 208 Gordon, Rhyall 455, 458 Gordon-Nembhard, J. 358 governance 3, 29, 31, 41–3, 211, 259, 260, 502 and decision-making 41–3, 211 Grabel, Ilene 352, 459, 462 Graeber, D. 199 Graham, Julie 125, 176 Grameen Bank 356 Granovetter, M. 232 The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time 358 Greenfield Community College 520–22 Gregory, L. 242, 243 Griffin, C.J. 275, 277 Grindr 441 grounded finance 376–7 group water schemes (GWS) 90, 92–5 water quality compliance 93–4 Guattari, Félix 486, 487 Gudeman, Stephen 308, 320 Guthman, Julie 219 hacking hacker ethos 379 hacking finance 379–86 hacking finance 379–86 financial troubles and 383–6 heretical ethics 383–4 reorganizing, algorithms 380–82 technological literacy 384–5 twisted spaces 385–6 Hall, T. 76 Hamilton, T. 34 Haraway, Donna 404 Hardin, G. 320 Hardt, Michael 337 Harper, Malcolm 357 Harrison, Faye V. 356 Haryani, A.R. 446, 448

Havelaar, Max 246 Hawken, Paul 33 Healy, Stephen 19, 113, 308, 395, 414, 456 hegemonic masculinity 108 Hēnare, M. 199 Hepburn Wind 58–62, 372 heroic entrepreneur 99–100 heterodox economics 200 heteronormativity 436–41 heterosexuality 436 Hill, Ann 406 Hilson, G. 180 Hirschman, A.O. 459 Hirtz, Frank 174 Hollnsteiner, Mary 171 Holt-Giménez, E. 310 homines curans 158, 159 homo economicus model 106–13, 158, 159, 200 homonormativity 436–41 homosexuality 436, 437 horizontalización 53 Hossein, C.S. 357 household debt 336 household survival strategies 179–84 Household Work Practice Surveys (HWPS) 137, 140 Howard, Ebenezer 293 Hudson, Michael 341 Huron, A. 242 iceberg, diverse economies 10 independent businesses 27, 98–104 Indian Gramdan Village movement 293 Indigenous activism 20, 48 see also activism collectives 41 commons 174, 310, 368, 505 cosmologies 4, 502 enterprise 79 exchange 14, 198 finance 362–8 food 313, 457 knowledges 4, 79, 248, 445–7, 502, 507 land 15, 75, 172, 279, 283, 308 lifeways 75–6 methodologies 464, 502–9 ontologies 464, 502, 507–8 peoples, and research 454 scholars 15, 454, 502, 505, 507 self-determination 508 seven generations philosophy 460 struggles 4, 20, 76, 252, 318, 506 youth 79

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

Index  541 industrialization 5. 121, 147, 196, 214, 273, 421, 445, 483 infant care work see care work, redistributing informal economy informal activities and businesses 1, 14, 67–8, 103 informal economy 77, 118, 146, 186, 225, 325 informal financial collective 354 informal land markets 300 informal livelihoods 129, 131–5 informal mining labour 179–84 informal and unpaid labour 123, 137–44 informal work 49 in-kind contributions 373 in-kind reciprocal labour 138, 139, 191 institutionalization 208, 271, 275 Interface Carpets 34 International Labour Organization (ILO) 116, 147 inventory inventory, strategy 9–17 enterprise 11–12 finance 15–17 labour 12–13 property 15 transactions 13–14 inventorying, diverse economies 18 thick descriptive inventory 9 investments 370–77 The Invisible Heart 478 Ironmonger, D. 119 Islamic finance 346–52 contract, forms 349 reading for difference 346–7 Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB) 350 Iturraspe, F. 49 iwi, finances 365 Le Jardin de la Liberté 284–6 commons challenge, public authorities 284–5 Jerne, Christina 35, 473 Jobs, Steve 100 joint stock corporation 327 Jones, C. 367 Kaupapa Māori methodology 502–9 iwi and 507–8 Kelly, Alan 91 Kelly, M. 57, 58, 60, 61, 374 Keynes, John Maynard 333, 334 Klein, Naomi 276 Klein, Patti 110 Knowledge and Class 35 Konzum 69 Koranic principles 347 Kretzmann, J.P. 423, 523

labour caring labour 154–60 collectively performed reciprocal labour 170–78 defined 120–21 emotional labour 156 formal paid labour 138 fungus and ant reciprocal labour 164–5 in-kind reciprocal labour 138, 139, 191 informal mining labour 179–84 informal and unpaid labour 137–44 internal temporary labour migrants 132 labour diversity 13, 116–27 labour-managed firms 40 labour policy and economic activism 146–8 labour, slowness vs. speed 85–6 labour taxonomy, social organization 138–40 mushroom reproduction labour 165 non-human labour 163, 165–6 paid informal labour 138 paid labour 146–52 precarious labour 125, 129–35, 335, 528 reciprocated labour 170 surplus labour 26, 27, 32 temporary labour migration 131–3 ‘total social organization of labour’ (TSOL) approach 137, 138, 140, 144 undeclared paid labour 138 unpaid labour 121, 146–52, 210 volunteer labour 373 waged labour 9 labour diversity 13, 116–27 diverse forms of 118–20 reconfigure work, power and possibility 123–5 Laca Ginger Tea community enterprise 177 Lachine Canal 284 la economía de lxs trabajadorxs 50, 53 la economía social y solidaria 53 Lahiri-Dutt, K. 325 land ownership 272 Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 295 see also Indigenous land land rent model 293 Latour, Bruno 397, 430, 461 law as commons 328–9 diverse legalities legal instrumentalism 232–9 legal pluralism 323–9 Law, John 453–5, 457 Lawson, L.J. 496 Lawson, V. 197 Lay, Ken 108 LBGTIQ 437–9, 481

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

542  The handbook of diverse economies Lefebvre, Henri 416 leisure 118 Leviticus 206 Lewis, Avi 276 Lewis, Nick 507, 508 LGBTQ 437–9 Lim, M. 120 livelihood livelihood-making dynamics 181 livelihoods, Chiapas 248–9 sustainability 219–20 sustaining livelihoods 186–92 well-being 19 Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS) 230, 232, 233, 236 logocentrism 479 Lyon, S. 247 mafia enterprises 35, 83–4 Mahathir Mohamad 350 Manhood, Craig 431 Manila 406 Māori 198–9, 362 community 198, 199, 362, 364 community economies 363, 367 compensation 363 cultural values 363–4, 367–8 fisheries 363, 365 iwi ‘tribes’ 362 New Zealand Māori Council 365 organizations 367 ownership rights 362, 365 research methodologies 362 scholars 199, 362 sovereignty 362 treat settlements 362, 367 Māori Fisheries Act 363 Marcora Law 343 market 9, 14. 17, 107, 124, 151, 199–200, 241, 246, 254, 372 see transactions art market 529 carbon market 166–7 deregulated markets 48, 129 ethical markets 247, 266 exchange 9 fair trade market 248 farmers markets 223, 490 free market 13, 292 housing market 264 labour market 85, 129–30, 147, 149, 174, 180, 238 land market 295, 300–306 making markets work for the poor 301

market economy 129, 141, 265 market failures 254 market forces 5, 130, 292, 317 market logic 67, 69, 297, 414, 420 market mechanisms 233, 402 market-non-market dualism 138–9 niche markets 223 Old Fadama market 192 online market place 264 stock market 34, 106, 333, 381 time and space, framing markets 304–5 traditional markets 218 transactions and markets 13–14, 305 water market 312 Martin, Kevin St. 397, 406, 515 Marx, Karl 6, 100, 121, 337, 402, 477 Marxian class analysis 37 Marxist political economy 120 masculinist discourses 156 Massumi, Brian 428 mātauranga Māori 502–4 Mathie, A. 415 Mattern, Sharon 76 Mauss, Marcel 198–200, 341 McCarthy, Linda 525 McDonagh, B. 275, 277 McKee, Yates 530 McKnight, J.L. 423, 523 Mei-Ling Yang 198 Melbourne Free University Guide 316 Messerschmidt, J. 108 metabolic labour 164 methodology 412, 453, 458, 477, 493, 508 diverse economies 453–64 Indigenous/ kaupapa Māori methodology 503–4, 509 researchers, transforming 461–2 rethinking methodology 453–5 transforming economies 457–8 Mettā teachings 76 microfinance business 356–8 migrants 98, 154, 339, 521, 522, 524 internal temporary labour migrants 132 migrant women’s labour 186–92 unregulated labour migration 132 Mildura, Australia 310–13 Mill, John Stuart 107 Miller, Amissa 112 Miller, Ethan 407, 462, 463, 472 Minahang Bayan 180 Mission Zero® 33, 34 Mondragon cooperative 29, 30, 42 monetized community exchanges 143 monetized family labour 142

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

Index  543 Money-Go-Rounds: The Importance of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations for Women 354 Moore, M.P. 171, 174 more-than-human agency 396, 402–8, 462, 464, 476 Earth Other agency 163, 164, 168 Morrow, Oona 406 Mosaic law 206 Mundraub 224 Murabaha contracts 349 Musk, Elon 100 mutual aid financing 354–9 Myanmar 123 Nancy, J.-L. 196 Nandy, A. 445 National Federation of Group Water Schemes (NFGWS) 92 Negri, Antonio 337 neoliberal ideology 129 neoliberal capitalist patriarchal globalization 482 neoliberal responsibilization 242–3 neoliberalism 147 Niaros, V. 199, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich 412 Nishnaabeg, Michi Saagiig 76 Nogojiwanong, Central Canada 78–9 non-capitalist enterprises 11 non-human labour fungal work, exchange and compensation 163–6 fungus and ant reciprocal labour 164–5 non-market finance 16 non-profit organization 66, 288 North, P. 239 Nova Scotia public health system 201 Ogbor, J.O. 99 Oklahoma Food Cooperative 487, 490 Old Fadama market 192 O’Neill, P. 31, 33, 107 open-access sources 312 Orde Baru regime 175 Orsi, J. 57, 370 outworkers 150 overdetermination 6, 35, 392, 455 Owen, Robert 116, 118, 230, 231 Owning our Future 58 Pahl, Ray 138, 140 labour policy and economic activism 146–8 Pang, V. Ooka 358 Parasite programme 381, 383, 385

Parnell, Samuel 116 Participatory Action Research (PAR) 511 Pavlovskaya, M. 198, 495 payday loans 335 pedagogy critical pedagogy 318 embodied pedagogy peer-to-peer personal credit money 234 peer-to-peer sharing, goods 262 Pem, S. 449 performative research 7 performativity 112, 202, 457, 458, 505 Perry-Kessaris, Amanda 328 phallogocentrism 480 Phillipson, R. 468 Pierre, Maurice St. 356 Pihama, Leonie 503, 504 Pilgeram, Ryanne 220 platform cooperatives 262 Playcentre 155 Plumwood, Val 396 Polanyi, Karl 358 Pomfrett, Jamie 431 Pope, Miranda 532 Popke, J. 196, 197 postcapitalism 3 postcapitalist 3, 45, 210, 414 A Postcapitalist Politics 2, 395, 430 postdevelopment subjectivity transformation 444–50 subjects of development 445–6 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 76, 77 Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy 356 Poverty Capital 357 power 2, 3, 6, 17, 61, 65, 412–13 precarious labour 125, 129–35, 335, 528 poverty production 129–31 Russia 129–35 prefigurative politics 40 Probyn, Elspeth 429, 432 procurement 228 social procurement 255–6 sustainable procurement 255 Profit and Loss Sharing (PLS) 348 property 15 private property 272–3 property common sense 272–3 property diversity 15, 271–81 property relationality 292–8 property rights, defining 304 property values 283 property, commoned vs. enclosed 84–5 property, substratum 328–9 Prystowsky, Richard 521

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

544  The handbook of diverse economies public benefit 254 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 154, 433 pwesto system 182 quasi-contractual reciprocity 171 queer theory 437 race 108, 154, 219, 221, 223, 224, 264, 419, 434 black or black women 355, 356, 523 Ranapiri, Tamati 198, 199 Rankin, Katherine 357 rational economic agents 200 Read, Jason 391 reading critical reading 478–9 queering-reading against dominance 479–81 reading for difference 58, 106, 346–7, 476–84 reciprocal labour exchange 171 reciprocity 1, 14, 68, 78, 79, 101, 121, 139 quasi-contractual reciprocity 171 reciprocal labour exchange 170–71 reframing 248–9 reframing efficiencies, social good 258–9 reframing project 421–2 reframing, economy 8 Reid, Margaret 119 Releya, Lane 533 repair value 74–80 reproductive labour 122 residence registration system 131 Resnick, Stephen A. 6, 26, 32, 35, 392 Rethel, Lena 351 Robin Hood Cooperative (RHC) 380, 385 Roe, Claudia 111 Roelvink, Gerda 168, 200, 209, 394, 405, 407, 450 rotating loan fund 373 rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) 339, 354–9 Rowe, J. 242 Roy, A. 357 Ruemmler, Kathryn 110 The Rules of Art 529 Ryan, Edna 149 Sacchetto, D. 44 Safri, M. 125 Sahlins, Marshall 171 same sex marriage 481 Santino, Umberto 82 Sarbanes Oxley Act 111 Sarmiento, Eric 406 scale 17, 18, 20, 68, 107 Scholz, Trebor 264, 266 Schumpeter, J. 99

Schweiker, Rosalie 530 Scott, B. 379–80, 384 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 392, 429, 461, 481 self-determination 227, 248, 252, 358 tino rangatiratanga 362, 504, 505 self-employed labour 190 self-help 242 self-managed enterprise 48–54 self-provisioning 142, 208 Semenzin, M. 44 sexuality 436–41 heterosexuality 436 homosexuality 436, 437 Shapinsay Development Trust 58–62 shareholder activism 34 shareholder primacy model 34 Shari’a law 348 sharing 373–4 sharing cities 263 Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons 266 Sharing City Seoul programme 267 Shifting Cultures of Manufacturing Project 512, 513, 515, 517 shock therapy 129 Sholette, G. 528 Shove, E. 36 Shrestha, Nandy 444 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 76, 78 Skilling, Jeff 109, 111, 112 Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 468 slow food commons 308–14 Slow Food Movement 309, 310 Slow Pig salami making workshops 311 small business 98–104 small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) 100–101 ethically oriented 101–2 smart economics 186 Smith, Graham 503 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 457, 503, 504 Smith, R.J. 76 Snyder, Robert 406 social economy, Canada 75 social enterprises 30, 31, 74–80, 259 AbilityMate 265 Angkor Language School 77 Asian Women at Work 149 Buddhism for Social Development (BSDA) 76–8 Clothing Exchange 265 Company Drinks 527 Cultivate Christchurch, 158–9 Dudley Street neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) 294–5 eco-social enterprises 65–72

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

Index  545 Flint corn community project 79 Fusion 21 259 Hanchey Bamboo resort 77 Hepburn Wind 58–62, 372 Homeboy industries 84 Laca Ginger Tea community enterprise 177 the Seasoned Spoon Café 78 Trent Market Garden 79 social good 256–9 social good, case of Fusion21 256–9 social good, market transactions 254–60 socialist Soviet Union 5 social procurement 255–6 social reproduction 155, 157 Soft Landing Mattress Product Stewardship Scheme 36 solidarity economies 134, 439–40 special purpose entities (SPEs) 109 The Spoon 78 state enterprise 90–96 enterprise 11–12 Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) 240 state socialism 3 stewardship food sharing model 210 Stoler, A.L. 207 Stone Age Economics 171 Strike Debt 341 strong theory 8, 28, 124 subjectivity 238, 243, 302, 304, 383, 389–99, 412–13, 428–34 communal 516 consumer 488 cooperative 29 desire and resubjectification 394–5 economic subjectivity 2 economic subjects and 398 ethical more-than-human subject 396–8 gendered subjectivity 437 homo economicus 108 individual 4 post-capitalist 430 post-development 444 researcher 450, 455 risk 336 sexual subjectivity 438–40 structuralism 389–91 subjectivities, shifting 514–16 theoretical humanism 389–91 white toxic masculine 108 subjects 146, 273, 383, 389, 390–91, 402–3, 412, 414, 415, 419, 421, 423, 437, 515, 526 economic subject, decentring 124, 392–4 economic subjects 88, 109, 398, 407, 438, 446, 450, 463, 512, 514

non-capitalist subjects, cultivating 414–15 subjects of community economies 19, 395 subjects of development 445–6 working subjects 50 supermarketization 224 surplus food, diverse economies 208–9 surplus labour 26, 27, 32 sustainability 14, 17, 53, 165, 166, 167, 168, 217, 219, 220, 340, 352, 364, 373, 487 just sustainability 514–17 sustainable community economies 19 sustainable procurement 255 Tabachnick, D. 207 The Take 276 Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (TBTE) 19, 338, 395, 456, 467, 470–72 Talvikallio, Eeva 470 Taylor, Gordon 477 Te Arawa iwi (tribe)362–8 Te Arawa entities 363 Te Arawa Fisheries 365 Te Arawa Group Holdings Limited 366 Te Arawa values 363–7 Te Arawa values and management entities 363–7 Te Pumautanga o Te Arawa 365–7 territorialización 53, 54 Textiles Clothing and Footwear Union (TCFU) 150 Thick description 247, 459, 479, 483 thick descriptive inventory 9 A Thousand Plateaus 487 time banking 238–9 anxiety 239–40 co-option and neoliberal responsibilization 242–3 time, nature of 243 tino rangatiratanga 504, 505 Tomkins, S. 429 Totnes Pound 236 Toward a Lexicon of Usership 529 transactions 13–14 transacting services 238–44 transactional sharing 263–4 transactions diversity 14, 195–203 transactions and markets 13–14, 305 transactions and markets 13–14, 305 transactions diversity 14, 195–203 trust and certainty 201–3 value 199–200 wild transactions, cultivating 216–17 transformational sharing 263, 265–6 transformations, surviving well 152 translating diverse economies, Anglocene 467–73

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM

546  The handbook of diverse economies treaty settlement finance, Aotearoa New Zealand 362–8 Treaty of Waitangi 362, 364, 503, 506 Treaty of Waitangi Act 362, 503 The Trent Market Garden 79 Tři ocásci 70 Tronto, J. 158 Tsing, A.L. 468 undeclared paid labour 138 Underhill-Sem, Yvonne 507, 508 undesirable practices 18 unionist activism 146 United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) 148 unnegotiable debt 379 unpaid community exchange 142 unpaid labour 121, 146–52, 210 unregulated labour migration 132 unwanted practices 18 urban imaginaries 262–8 urban land markets, Africa 300–306 plural legal systems 303 property rights, defining 304 recognition and recognizing 304 time and space, framing markets 304–5 transactions and markets 305 Usmani, Muhammad Taqi 348 US Solidarity Map 495 value 199–200 valuation and convertibility 231–3 value crisis 200, 201 Varda, Agnes 209 violent economic transition 172 Virkki, Sakari 381 Virtanen, A. 380, 384 Vision Mātauranga strategy 504 volunteer labour 373 vulgar economics 402 waged labour 9 Wages for Housework campaign 122 Waliuzzaman, S.M. 444, 447 The Wall Street Journal 106 Warde, Ibrahim 347, 351

Waring, Marilyn 148, 155, 238, 478 Wark, McKenzie 386 water management 90–96 water quality compliance 93–4 Water Services Act 90 weak theory 9, 17, 28, 70 wealth distribution 19 Weeks, K. 238 well-being budget 5 Wellington Timebank 239–41, 243 Werner, A. 120 Western-centric critical theory 17 wetland banking 167 whakapapa ‘genealogy’ 506 Whatmore, Sarah 405 white collar professionals 117 white savior complex 43 Wilkinson, Eleanor 438 Williams, C.C. 137, 138 Wilson, Catherine Anne 172, 173 Wolff, Richard D. 6, 26, 32, 35, 392 women 147, 186–92, 355, 356, 523 black women 355, 356 migrant women 148, 149, 151, 186–93 racialized women 354, 357 women of colour 112, 154, 156 working-class women 147, 532 Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) agenda 123 Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) 149 work 122–3 care work, redistributing 154–60 non-human labour 163, 165–6 work-life balance 117, 119 work, surviving well together 41–3, 125–6 worker-owned cooperatives 27, 28, 40–46, 103, 124, 272 worker-recuperated enterprises 272 working-class women 147 work-life balance 117, 119 World Social Forums 20, 395 Wright, Stephen 457, 458, 529 Wynne-Jones, Sophie 483 Zeměkvítek 70 zero-interest funds 340 Zolkos, Magdalena 432

J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski - 9781788119962 08:05:42PM