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A Bioregional Economy
Regeneration and Provisioning:
Moving on from Money
Professor of Strategy and Sustainability
University of Roehampton
Green Party Economics Speaker
Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces
real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas
that are lying around. That, I believe, is our
basic function: to develop alternatives to
existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible
becomes the politically inevitable.
Milton Friedman
Why the globalised economy is insecure
• 99% of UK food imports
depend on our ports:
unsurprisingly they are
at sea-level.
• In 2007 the IPCC
predicted a 0.35m rise in
sea levels by the end of
the 21st century.
• In 2009 scientists
declared that sea-level
rise was occurring at
twice the rate they had
estimated just two years
earlier
Where are the world’s ports?
Prosperity without Growth?
• Sustainable
Development
Commission suggested
‘flourishing within
limits’
• This means switching
our focus from quantity
to quality, and asking
whether we get social
value for our energy
investments
CO2 intensity of GDP across nations:
1980–2006
Carbon Intensities Now and Required
to Meet 450 ppm Target
A Balanced Economy
Challenging our preconceptions
• ‘the origins of the
cataclysm lay in the
utopian endeavor of
economic liberalism to
set up a self-regulating
market system’
• ‘previously to our time
no economy has ever
existed that, even in
principle, was
controlled by markets’
Welfare and community
• Side by side with family
housekeeping, there have been
three principles of production
and distribution:
 Reciprocity
 Redistribution
 Market
• Prior to the market revolution,
humanity’s economic relations
were subordinate to the social.
Now economic relations are
now generally superior to social
ones.
Can we make the rich pay for their
emissions?
‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’
Wordsworth
• ‘As a nation we are already so rich that consumers
are under no pressure of immediate necessity to buy
a very large share – perhaps as much as 40 per cent –
of what is produce, and the pressure will get
progressively less in the years ahead. But if
consumers exercise their option not to buy a large
share of what is produced, a great depression is not
far behind.’
• A McGraw-Hill executive writing in Advertising Age in
1955
Opportunities offered by the transition to a
green economy
What is a bioregion?
• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than
political) boundaries’
• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘lifeplace’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and
ecological character capable of supporting unique
human and non-human living communities. Bioregions
can be variously defined by the geography of
watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and
related identifiable landforms and by the unique
human cultures that grow from natural limits and
potentials of the region
• [We] have ‘forgotten’ that the economy and
all its works is a subset and dependent upon
the wider ecosystem. . . Modern citizens have
not only lost contact with the land, and their
sense of embeddedness in the land, but at the
same time they have lost those elemental
social forms of more or less intimate and
relatively transparent social relations. Thus a
basic aim of bioregionalism is to get people
back in touch with the land, and constitutive
of that process is the recreation of community
in a strong sense. (Barry, 1990: 9).
An economic bioregion
• A bioregional economy would be embedded
within its bioregion and would acknowledge
ecological limits.
• Bioregions as natural social units determined
by ecology rather than economics
• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic
resources such as water, food, products and
services.
• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity
Key characteristics of the bioregional
economy—
•
•
•
•
Locality
Accountability
Community
Conviviality
Locality but not autarky
• Cultural openness and
maximisation of exchange
that can be achieved in a
world of limited energy,
within a framework of
self-sufficiency in basic
resources and the limiting
of trade to those goods
which are not indigenous
due to reasons of climate
or local speciality.
Accountability as reconnection
• Your bioregion is
your ‘backyard’
• Each bioregion
would be the area
of the global
economy for
which its
inhabitants were
responsible
Community not markets
• Reclaiming of public
space for citizenship
and relationship.
• ‘putting the economy in
its place’
• Market as agora—
public space for debate
and sharing of ideas,
not just commerce
Conviviality instead of productivity
• I choose the term
‘conviviality’ to designate
the opposite of industrial
productivity. I intend it to
mean autonomous and
creative intercourse
among persons, and the
intercourse of persons
with their environment
• I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced
below a certain level, no amount of industrial
productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates
among society's members. (Illich, 1974).
Find out more
www.greeneconomist.org
gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
Green Economics: An
Introduction to Theory, Policy
and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)
Environment and Economy
(Routledge, 2011)
www.greenhousethinktank.org