The many faces of Post-Development: alternatives to development in Tanzania, Iran and Haiti

The social and environmental failure of successive Western development models imposed on the global South has led local communities to pursue alternatives to development. Such alternatives seek radical societal transformations that require the production of new knowledge, practices, technologies, and institutions that are effective to achieve more just and sustainable societies. We may think of such a production as innovation driven by social movements, organizations, collectives, indigenous peoples, and local communities. Innovation that is driven by such grassroots groups has been theorized in the academic literature as “grassroots innovation”. However, research on alternatives to development has rarely examined innovation using grassroots innovation as an analytical framework. Here, we assess how grassroots innovation may contribute to building alternatives to development using Zapatismo in Chiapas (Mexico) as a case study. We focus on grassroots innovation in autonomous Zapatista education because this alternative to formal education plays a vital role in knowledge generation and the production of new social practices within Zapatista communities, which underpin the radical societal transformation being built by Zapatismo. We reviewed the academic literature on grassroots innovation as well as gray literature and audiovisual media on Zapatismo and autonomous Zapatista education. We also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a Zapatista community and its school. We found innovative educational, pedagogical, and teaching–learning practices based on the (re)production of knowledge and learning, which are not limited to the classroom but linked to all the activities of Zapatistas. Our findings suggest that innovation self-realized by Zapatistas plays a key role on the everyday construction of Zapatismo. Therefore, we argue that a specific theoretical framework of grassroots innovation for the pluriverse, based on empirical work carried out in different alternatives to development, is an urgent task that will contribute to a better understanding of how such alternatives grassroots groups imagine, design, and build, particularly across the global South.

Section: Theoretical Framework: Grassroots Innovation Post-developmen...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Grassroots innovation for the pluriverse: evidence from Zapatismo and autonomous Zapatista education

Maldonado-Villalpando

Paneque-Gálvez

Demaria

et al. 2022

“…From the reluctance to address the underlying mechanisms that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of the 'Pink Tide' in Latin America, to the ineffectiveness of the Sustainable Development Goals framework or the general disappointment on the Paris Agreement as the key to address the climate emergency, incrementalist efforts and mainstream policy-led plans and expectations are being increasingly questioned in their inadequacy (Arsel 2020;Hickel and Kallis 2019). In this article, as part of the Pluriverse in Practice special issue, we focus on alternatives to these ways of seeking change, analysing practical engagements with creating a world where many systems of value and ways of inhabiting the world can co-exist and nurture each other in relations of care with the other living beings of the world: the Pluriverse (EZLN 1996;Maldonado-Villalpando et al 2022;Schöneberg et al 2022;Akbulut et al 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decolonising money: learning from collective struggles for self-determination

Cabaña

Linares²

2022

As a reflection of our politically engaged research, this paper addresses the multiple challenges of transforming money for the emergence of the Pluriverse, arguing that practical efforts of emancipation and autonomy need to dismantle the colonial nature of our current monetary system: the flip side of the colonial state. On the one hand, we look into Chiloé, a territory marked by long-term relations of colonialism, dependency and extraction, where the arrival of monetised forms of work in extractive industries has meant the destruction of former ways of inhabiting the territory. On the other, we explore the emergence of the Circles project, in Berlin, that aims at creating a basic income from the bottom-up, whereby people in different communities issue money equally and exchange with each other without the need for state cash. More than assuming that money in itself is 'bad', we suggest that a recovery of the social and ecological fabric of life could be done through local money systems, designed and managed by the communities themselves, delivered and redistributed as a basic income. Moving to a plural monetary system based on relations of care would lead to a recovery of history as a project of collective self-determination.

“… 3 See Franzen 2022 , Naylor 2022 , Kasi and Saha 2022 , and Schöneberg et al 2022 for illuminating explorations of the complex, contradictory ways that development and post-development ideology are organized around and through. …”

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confidence: 99%

Fight and build: solidarity economy as ontological politics

Loh

Shear

2022

This essay explores the potential of solidarity economy (SE) as theory, practice, and movement, to engender an ontological politics to create and sustain other worlds that can resolve the existential crises of ecological destruction and historic inequalities. We argue that such a politics is necessary to go beyond the world as it is and exceed the dictates of a dominant modernity—capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy—that positions itself as the only singular reality—or One World World (Law J (2011) What’s Wrong with a One World World. Heterogeneities. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2011WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf ). What is needed are alternatives to development in contrast to alternative developments. Over the past decade, the SE movement in Massachusetts has advanced a fight and build approach, which has reframed economy as a matter of concern, as something that communities can, and already do, shape themselves—and that powerfully disrupts the reality of a singular capitalist economy. At the same time, the heterogeneous elements of SE are caught up in and assembling political projects with multiple orientations: modernist, social justice, and ontological (Escobar, Pluriversal politics: the real and the possible, Duke University Press, Durham, 2020). SE movement can remain stuck in a modernist politics of growing and scaling businesses and jobs. Even though a social justice approach attends to power and is more amenable to a relational view of reality where things only exist in interconnection, it too can remain mired in One World World liberal politics of redistribution and market ‘solutions’. How SE movement might actualize an ontological politics is a matter of care, an attunement to how relational worlds are coming into being and maintained. As an ontological politics, SE is not about economy qua economy at all, but about creating and sustaining worlds, pluriversal realities where we can be in solidarity with other people, beings, and planetary life systems.