The Government has begun compiling a list of 100 environmental, social and economic indicators to measure wellbeing.
"This Government is expanding beyond traditional narrow measures of economic success to reflect the wellbeing of New Zealanders, including the environmental wellbeing that sustains us," Statistics Minister and Green Party co-leader James Shaw said.
"As part of the Green Party's confidence and supply agreement with Labour, we are beginning the process of compiling a list of around 100 indicators which will make up a set of measures known as Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand or Ngā Tūtohu Aotearoa.
"Treasury is also working on a living standards framework for policy and both sets of data would be utilised in next year's Budget.
"The indicators of wellbeing will form a set of measures which the government of the day can choose to use to track the country's success. The indicators will also be available for the public and organisations to use for their research and decision-making."
Public feedback on what should be tracked is being sought. People can make a submission by visiting the Stats NZ website or emailing indicators@stats.govt.nz.
Members of Urban Coup (Image: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Handout/Urban Coup)
by Michael Taylor, This Is Place: http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=c27114d0-1598-4a0c-94be-be56fba3dbd3KUALA LUMPUR - In an ideal world, Alex Fearnside would cycle home from work, park his bike in the basement of his apartment complex in Melbourne city centre, then jog upstairs through a beautiful courtyard to his flat, stopping only for a quick chat with other residents in the shared dining area.Later, Fearnside and his wife would head down to the communal kitchen to eat a meal cooked by their neighbours.Fearnside's ten-year-old dream for life in the Australian city is nearing reality as it awaits planning approval. It is shared by 50 other Melbourne residents who belong to Urban Coup, a collective that wants to turn a disused button factory in an old industrial area into a co-housing community by 2020.
"What is driving us is we want to know our neighbours," said the 38-year-old environmental scientist. "We want to know that as we're growing old, we have people around us who have similar values to who we are and what we bring."
Urban Coup is one of five innovative housing initiatives that put community at their heart.
The projects are supported with expertise and networks mobilised by Resilient Melbourne, part of 100 Resilient Cities, a network backed by The Rockefeller Foundation to help cities deal with modern-day pressures.
This year, more than half of Asia-Pacific's population will be urban, and that figure will increase to two-thirds by 2050, the United Nations estimates.
But as the region's cities continue to expand, services and infrastructure are struggling to keep pace with rising populations and economic growth, while the effects of climate change have created additional challenges.
The Melbourne projects aim to help find solutions to the city's expanding urban sprawl, worsening traffic congestion and growing social isolation - all of which can contribute to problems like alcoholism and domestic violence.
And by building stronger community bonds, Melbourne should be better placed to recover from potential shocks and stresses, such as rising temperatures and droughts, infrastructure failures and potential pandemics, the schemes' proponents say.
"Many of the people who started Urban Coup remember growing up on streets where they knew everybody on that street," said Fearnside. "We wanted a building that would enable us to know our neighbours and allow us to support each other."
URBAN SPRAWL
In the past decade, Melbourne has topped various polls as the world's most liveable city, attracting new residents to Australia's second-biggest city.
Just under 5 million people live there, and the population is expected to double over the next 30 years, putting increased strain on infrastructure and housing.
As more estates have been built on greenfield sites outside the centre, the rise in urban sprawl has brought problems.
Housing developments have outpaced infrastructure, leading to dormitory suburbs, whose residents commute daily but enjoy few services, amenities and transport links.
That causes traffic congestion and longer commute times, as well as a lack of interaction between neighbours, experts say.
"We live in a really beautiful part of Melbourne but we don't really know our neighbours," said Fearnside, who currently lives with his wife in a townhouse 5 km (3 miles) north of the central business district.
In Melbourne's central areas, high-rise blocks have become more common in recent years. But as in many other Australian cities, first-time buyers and families have struggled to afford steeper prices stoked by overseas property investors.
And much new construction has been driven by developers, which tend to put profit before the provision of leisure or communal facilities.
On average, Melbourne property prices have doubled over the last decade, said Clinton Baxter, state director at Savills property agency in the city, and this trend is set to continue.
Central government efforts to help first-time buyers include a grant for deposits and stamp duty concessions, while state governments have sought to open up more land and fast-track approval processes for developments.
Despite this, the supply of new and affordable housing in Melbourne has struggled to keep up with demand. It is not uncommon to see would-be buyers camping out overnight ahead of a land sale to be front of the queue for their own building plot.
"The state government has struggled to keep up with the infrastructure requirements for such a rapidly growing city," Baxter said.
LIVING EXPERIMENT
The five projects supported by Resilient Melbourne will bring together developers, city and state government agencies, service providers and potential buyers and renters.
Each project is crafted around different community-focused models - some based on renewal of the inner-city and others starting from scratch on greenfield sites.
The projects will also be part of an academic study.
"We want this to be a genuine living experiment so that we can understand in deep ways what works and what doesn't work - and record it so the successes can be replicated in Melbourne but also internationally," said Toby Kent, the city's chief resilience officer.
The projects backed by Resilient Melbourne include a greenfield site for about 5,000 homes led by developer Mirvac.
It is working with local authorities to incorporate community aspects from an early stage.
Besides at least one new school, there will be a town centre with shops and a supermarket, and a hub to house programmes and events run by the council or residents, with a community-managed cafe and playground, said Anne Jolic, a director at Mirvac.
"Often people who move to some of these ... new housing (developments) will feel very isolated," she said.
Melbourne developer Assemble, meanwhile, plans to turn an old CD and DVD factory near the city centre into 73 flats.
The property will include communal spaces like a cafe, a co-working space, crèche and grocery store, and is consulting with potential residents and existing neighbours on the design.
When the final plans are drawn up, residents will pay a refundable 1 percent deposit to secure a place, said Kris Daff, managing director of Assemble.
Once built, they will move in and start a five-year lease with an option to buy at a pre-agreed price, or exit the lease and leave at any time.
Services and events on offer will include dry cleaning, apartment cleaning, dog walking, community dinners, walking groups and film nights in a communal room.
"There is a huge amount of research that shows that when acute shocks have struck in cities, communities where there are existing connections are better able to bounce back," said Kent, Melbourne's resilience chief.
A new website will help councils and community organisations to build ‘good’ local economies.
Launched by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies and the New Economics Foundation, with funding from the Friends Provident Foundation, it brings together case studies from across the UK on housing, finance, energy, procurement and commissioning, and local economics.
Called ‘Building a Good Local Economy’, the website sets out the powers and resources currently available to both local government and local communities to help them improve local housing provision, build up local energy supplies and create a thriving local economy.
Building a Good Local Economy website
Case studies include Homebaked, a bakery in the shadow of Liverpool football club that has become a model of community-led regeneration, and Manchester and Preston Councils’ work using local procurement budgets to build community wealth.
The website is part of the Good Local Economies programme, run by CLES and NEF for the last two years, which this year has worked with five cities – Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol and Leeds – to help them activate and model new approaches to local economic development.
The website aims to become a comprehensive database of projects across the UK that are challenging the dominant approach to local development. If you would like your project to be included, contact Clare Goff.
Longtime activist, educator, and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs passed early Monday at the age of 100.
Friends and caregivers Shay Howell and Alice Jennings said in a
statement about her passing that Boggs "left this life as she lived it:
surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas." Boggs died peacefully
in her sleep in her Detroit home.
Born in Rhode Island in 1915, the daughter of Chinese immigrants
studied at Barnard College and Bryn Mawr, where she received Ph.D. in
philosophy in 1940. These studies led to a lifetime of activism,
starting in Chicago with the movement for tenants’ rights and the
Workers Party. In the 1960s, Grace moved to Detroit, where she became
known for her work, along with her late husband, author and activist James Boggs.
Over the past 70 years, she was involved with the civil rights, Black
Power, labor, environmental justice, and feminist movements. In 1992,
she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth program, "a multi-racial,
inter-generational collective" that serves as a training ground for
youth activists. She once stated, "you cannot change any society unless
you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to
it and responsible for changing it."
"Grace Lee Boggs embraces a philosophy of constant questioning - not
just of who we are as individuals, but of how we relate to those in our
community and country, to those in other countries, and to the local and
global environment," notes a biography of Boggs, which accompanies of portrait of her painted by artist Robert Shetterly.
Throughout her life, Boggs' speeches and essays frequently made
connections between the suffering experienced by poor and marginalized
communities with humanity's overall lack of vision, exemplified by the
demand for "endless growth."
During a 2012 talk given in San Francisco, Boggs spoke alternately of the need to "grow our souls." She said: "We need to find that balance of life that respects each
other, that thinks that the most important thing at this time on the
clock of the world is not our accumulation of things, is not economic
growth which threatens and imperils all life on this planet including
ourselves, that the time has come to grow our souls, to grow our
relationships with one another, to create families that are loving and
communities that are loving, to bring the neighbor back into the hood."
And in an essay written in 2010 explaining why she did not partake in
a commemoration of the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, Boggs
boldly questioned the value of "encouraging democratic illusions" while
there was still such pervasive injustice and inequity in the U.S.
Instead, she reiterated
Dr. Martin Luther King's call for a "Radical Revolution of Values,"
which she said not only disparages racism, but also "Materialism and
Militarism."
In her final post on the
Boggs Center website, written in August 2014, she wrote, "I want my
life to challenge people to think philosophically. I want people to ask
themselves and each other what time it is on the clock of the world."
Sweden, which already
stands out among nations for its generous paid maternity leave and model
prison system, is giving everyone another reason to applaud.A number of companies and local municipalities in the
Scandinavian nation have increasingly been experimenting with a six-hour
workday.
Filimundus, an app development company, is one of several
leading the way. "I think the eight-hour workday is not as effective as
one would think," Filimundus CEO Linus Feldt told Fast Company. It's "hard to manage our private life outside of work."
Feldt told the website his company had switched to a
six-hour day last year and saw no reduction in productivity from
workers.
In exchange, the company asked employees to keep social media
to a minimum and phased out a number of previously required meetings.
Another Swedish tech company, Brath, followed suit around three years ago and saw similar results. The company wrote on their website:
We want to hire the right people and we want them to stay
with us. While our competitors write that they have an inspiring
workplace, play rooms or free sodas (or whatever it is that they write)
we don't even have to write ads. We're well known in the industry (and
in the rest of the country), partly due to our working hours.
Work-hour shift changes have also seen benefits in Sweden beyond the world of niche tech startups, like at a retirement home in Gothenburg.
The private sector changes build on previous examples set by the public sphere. In 2014, the Local.Sereported
government workers of Gothenburg would participate in an experiment
measuring efficacy of the six-hour workday. In fact, according to the Guardian, Sweden has been experimenting in one form or another with six-hour workdays since 1989.
It's not just Sweden where people appreciate shorter hours. In Secaucus, New Jersey, Royce Leather
learned the value of giving workers shorter hours long ago. Royce,
whose assembly line employees once worked nine to 10 hours a day now put
in six to eight.
"I can say unequivocally that there's an overall more
optimistic upbeat mood in the company culture and a strong desire to
want to work for a company where there are more employee perks, where
employees are treated as fellow humans and not just sources of output."
William Bauer, Royce's managing director, told Mic. "Being a historically family business, we place great importance on happiness and well-being of employees."
Since implementing the new policy in 2012, the company has
never looked back. Bauer estimated that over the last three years,
overall company productivity had increased 10% to 15%. Today, with
average American workweek creeping up, not down, the Swedish model may be more timely than ever.
Jon Levine is a staff writer at Mic,
covering politics and people. He is based in New York and can be reached
at JLevine@mic.com.
While the rest of us struggle with bike
chains and bike theft, the Japanese have already solved these problems
with underground bike parking-lots managed by robots!
In the video above, a bike is placed onto an elevator and gets sucked
into a shaft full of bicycle holders. A contraption neatly parks it
until the owner comes back. Convenient, right?
Designed by engineering company Giken Seisakusho, the underground
bike parking lots can store up to 204 standard bicycles and can park one
in just 13 seconds. Cyclists can use the facility using a rental card
that costs 1,800 yen per month (around $15).
The innovative technology has been in main cities like Tokyo and
Osaka for a few years, but it’s only now that we get to see how this
awesome system actually works.
Inigo is a writer and graphic designer from
Manila, Philippines. He is a soldier of love who will carry you on his
strong back of awesomeness when the zombie apocalypse arrives.
He talked about the forthcoming Community Empowerment Bill. "I like
the sound of that" I thought.
The workshop proved fascinating, as did
some of the powers under consideration. The following week, by email,
we went into it in a bit more depth, and Angus was able to tell me more
about the Bill, and what it could mean for Scottish communities.
What is the current status of the Bill, and where did it come from? What has motivated it?
The
Bill is currently in Stage 1 of the legislative process. A committee of
the Scottish Parliament - Local Government and Regeneration Committee -
is scrutinising the Bill and taking evidence, both written and oral,
from a range of stakeholder groups. Stage 2 and 3 follow before it
becomes law which is expected to happen early summer 2015.
In
terms of what has motivated the Bill there are perhaps two answers to
this. On the one hand it can be seen as just another milestone on a
journey which Scottish Government started in 2009 with the publication
of the Community Empowerment Action Plan -
which was significant not for what it contained by way of action
(wasn’t much) but because it was the first government strategy to
mention community empowerment specifically.
The other answer is that the
Bill should be viewed as a central strand of the Government’s approach
to public service reform. The Christie Commission report made
it clear that radical reform was required and that communities needed
to be at the heart of the design and delivery process. Austerity measures
have just reduced the wiggle room for the public services to argue for
the status quo.
The
Minister responsible for the Bill has been very positive about its
potential throughout the consultation period, frequently stating that he
expects the Bill to be the single most significant transfer of power
since Devolution.
What are the key new powers that it gives communities?
The headline new powers are:
The
extension of the Community Right to Buy to all of Scotland - previously
this had been restricted under the Land Reform legislation to rural
communities with a population less than 10,000
A new right to
request the transfer of a public asset into community ownership,
management or use with a presumption that such requests will be granted
unless there is good cause to refuse it
An Absolute Right to Buy
(without the sellers consent) where an asset is vacant and derelict and
causing blight on the local area
A right to request to participate in a process to improve the outcome of a public service
The
view is that the devil will be in the detail of the regulations that
accompany the legislation. Also, in terms of ensuring that all
communities are able to take advantage of these new rights, there is a
serious question of what resources will be available for capacity
building and support.
What
new powers do communities have in relation to planning? Do these
genuinely give communities additional say in shaping planning?
The
Bill does not provide new direct powers in relation to planning.
References in the Bill to planning are in relation to Community Planning
which in itself is a bit of a misnomer.
Community Planning refers to
the better integration of efforts by public service providers through
the mechanism of a Community Planning Partnership. The Bill has a
provision within it to make it a legal requirement to formalise the
structure of the CPP.
One of the key powers is the
Community Right to Buy Land, which includes a Community Compulsory
Purchase power. How binding is this? What are the circumstances in
which it can be used? Can a community group now compulsorily purchase
any piece of land if their case is strong enough?
This
refers to the Absolute Right to Buy Land which has been determined as
land or buildings that have become vacant and derelict (and considered
to be causing a degree of local blight). Within the written evidence
submitted during Stage 1, this was one of the more contentious areas
with stakeholders concerned about the lack of detail laid out in the
Bill.
It is not yet clear under what circumstances this power can be
invoked or what will be defined as vacant and derelict. The regulations
that sit under the Bill are going to be crucial in either strengthening
or weakening the impact of the Bill.
What additional power does the Bill give to communities in relation to allotments?
The
main impact of the Bill on allotments is that it has been used as an
opportunity to modernise the existing legislation from 1892 and 1922.
New responsibilities have been created for local authorities in terms of
the how they manage waiting lists but there is no requirement to
acquire new land for release as allotments and therefore there is
concern that, in its current form it will not generate any meaningful
change.
The
Independence Referendum in Scotland has reportedly done a huge amount
to engage people in revitalising democracy across the country. This
Bill appears to reflect that spirit. What else is emerging, or close to
being approved, that would add other useful new powers to this Bill? Do you feel Scotland is genuinely moving to give more meaningful powers
to communities?
Prior to the referendum, the turnout at
local and national elections had been consistently low and there was
widespread concern that the electorate had switched off from mainstream
politics.
The phenomenon of widespread self-organising groups around the
independence debate - mainly around the Yes side - such as Women for
Independence, Radical Independence Convention, Muslims for Independence,
National Collective etc was anticipated by no-one and the political
parties were to a large extent sidelined by it.
It would be wrong
to view this Bill as being connected to any of that democratic
activity. It has been argued that because of the highly centralised
system of local democracy that Scotland has - just 32 local authorities -
this focus on community empowerment and a more participative form of
democracy is actually little more than a compensatory measure for the
complete lack of effective lack of representative democracy.
That said
there are other processes such as land reform which has created a thriving
movement of community land owners and the development of community owned
energy that have contributed momentum to this bottom up process.
The
Community Empowerment Bill needs to be seen as part of a wider
portfolio of measures designed to invest local people with more resource
and opportunities to have greater control over their communities. A new
Land Reform Bill is expected before the end of the current Parliament
which will be based on the recommendations of the Land Reform Review Group.
As
someone who works for the Scottish Communities Alliance, what
additional powers would you like to see in subsequent legislation?
The
Smith Commission has been give the job of working out what new powers
should come to Scotland.
If the management of Scotland’s Crown Estate
was devolved to the Scottish Parliament along with the powers that
currently sit with DECC around the subsidy regime and the management of
the energy distribution, this would open up a whole new range of
development opportunities over and above what the CEB might propose.
You may not have an answer for this, but why don't we have anything like this south of the border?
Who
knows? Could be any one of a number of factors, such as the
London-centricity of English politics, or that we have more panda bears
than Tory MPs, or that we had the highland clearances for which there is
residual and enduring guilt? But remember the grass is always
greener…..
Jacob Kushner reports on aid, foreign investment, and human rights in Africa.
He is the author of the recent eBook China’s Congo Plan: What the Economic Superpower Sees in the World’s Poorest Nation. full bio
The
Western Kenyan village of Nyawita is a dry, sparse place. In the
mornings, wives tend to small plots of corn or cassava near their
mud-wall homes.
Husbands shepherd their few cows around, searching for
patches of grass. Children attend a local school if their parents can
afford to send them.
Victor Ochieng has spent almost his entire 39 years here farming
corn, tomatoes, and other crops. Until recently, it was all the father
of six could do to scratch out a living for his family. He wanted to buy
pumps and pipes to irrigate his crops with water from his well but
couldn’t afford it.
“Farming has so many challenges, and one of the biggest is that rains
disappear,” he said. “I wanted to farm even during the times of
drought, so I could take my crops to the market while the price is
high.”
One day last year, a couple of out-of-towners showed up in his
village. They walked from house to house, chatting with the locals. When
the visitors, Kenyans like Ochieng, arrived at his home, they told him
something astonishing: some Americans he’d never met wanted to give him
and nearly all his neighbors a fortune. Not a loan, a giveaway. With no
strings attached.
The out-of-towners worked for GiveDirectly, an American charity with a radical and yet somehow obvious approach to solving rural poverty: unconditional cash transfers.
For decades, international aid to places like Kenya has generally
taken the same approach: Hold the hands of indigent Africans as you walk
them through predetermined ways to improve their lives.
Yet interested
parties, from right-wing research organizations to former aid workers, have argued for decades that the approach is paternalistic, inefficient, and ineffectual.
The families in Nyawita are part of a global experiment testing a new
theory: that low-income, low-asset people in the developing world can
do what many have done in Europe and other big economies - lift themselves
out of poverty.
The recipients of GiveDirectly’s cash grants can do
whatever they like with the money: buy a new roof for their house, or
build a new house entirely. Pay their kids’ school fees. Invest in
livestock, land, fertilizer, seeds. For Ochieng, it was enough money to
build the irrigation system he’d always dreamed of and then some.
Today unconditional cash transfers are a drop in the giant bucket of
international aid, but they’re rapidly gaining the attention of
charities, academics, and governments.
GiveDirectly has funneled more
than $6 million into Western Kenya, and other donor groups have launched
similar programs in at least half a dozen countries, including Uganda, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Indonesia. India, home to one-third of the world’s poorest, is experimenting
with the idea.
Proponents say cash transfers offer a promising
alternative in international development aid, an industry rife with
waste, top-down ideas, and dysfunction.
I saw firsthand some of the pitfalls of traditional foreign aid
during the two years I spent in Haiti after the earthquake that
devastated the country in 2010. The U.S. government
funded multimillion-dollar projects that were left unfinished, like a
new building for Parliament that was unusable until Haiti dipped into
its national treasury to complete the job.
Money given to private
American contractors was spent on corrupted projects, like the one that
paid workers to clear rubble from its own parking lot instead of from
the debris-strewn streets of Port-au-Prince.
Sometimes the very mentality behind aid policies was deeply flawed.
The United States Congress continues to enact a food aid policy that is
geared more to helping American shipping companies turn a profit than to helping feed the world.
U.S. food aid policy has even been blamed for hurting poor farmers
across the globe. Private aid from nongovernmental organizations such
as the Red Cross and World Vision often does little better. Many
organizations come and go, and effects are often fleeting, leaving the
communities where they once were felt forgotten.
Cash transfers offer a way to change the lives of impoverished
families by letting them take matters into their own hands. The concept
dates to the 1990s, when Brazil began a program of giving impoverished
mothers small, recurring cash payments if they attended health seminars
and made sure their children stayed in school.
The programs worked,
achieving immediate results through drastically improved school
enrollment and vaccination reach. The idea spread. Governments around
the world now offer similar conditional payments to boost the income,
health, education, and well-being of their most destitute constituents.
In some ways, unconditional cash transfers are a logical follow-on to
the micro-credit movement. Popularized in the aughts, the practice of
giving small loans directly to individuals marked a devolution of the
trickle-down theory of loaning large sums to companies with the hope
that they would generate employment.
“One of the great virtues of the recent movement among microcredit
enthusiasts and others to recognize the nascent capitalist inside every
poor man and woman,” write MIT researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther
Duflo in their book Poor Economics, “is that it moves us away from this view of the poor as either carefree or totally incompetent.”
The shift to cash grants is believed to have started in Afghanistan
in the aughts, when Oxfam and Mercy Corps began giving out cash. Though
that program has since ended, the idea behind it has taken root,
especially in Western Kenya.
Here, Have Some Money!
Ochieng’s visitors from GiveDirectly explained the setup to him. He
was eligible to receive two cash payments worth a total of about $1,000.
That’s more than twice what the average family here earns in a year.
All he had to do was register his cell phone with the mobile banking
company M-PESA, so he could receive the money in receive the money in
his account there.
One day Ochieng received a message on his cell phone. He’d just
received his first cash transfer, a small amount meant to ensure his
bank account was ready. Weeks later came the real deal: nearly $500.
Ochieng was ready. He bought a pump and a system to irrigate his
crops year-round. Today he grows three times as much corn as before. So
much corn, in fact, that he has decided to repurpose some of it for an
entirely new endeavor. He plans to use his second and final cash
transfer to buy chickens and a coop. He’ll feed them surplus corn, and
he'll have chickens and eggs to eat and sell for years to come.
“Poultry will fetch me money very fast if I maintain it properly,” Ochieng told me.
For Ochieng, things are working out much better than under the
traditional aid model. He recalls a time when the Kenyan Red Cross came
to help farmers improve their cassava harvest.
“The Red Cross worked well, but there are so many challenges,”
Ochieng said. “People do not attend their trainings and then don’t plant
the cassava per their instructions.”
Here, said Ochieng, people are accustomed to planting their crops in a
certain way, and they’re not easily persuaded to risk trying something
different with no contingency plan if it doesn’t work.
Caroline
Alouch Ogutu, 35, stands with her son in front of their home in Koga,
Kenya. Ogutu used approximately $1,000 from GiveDirectly to put a new
roof on her home, pay her children's school fees, and buy pigs to raise
and sell (Photo: Jacob Kushner).
“It is more respectful for someone to give me the cash and let me use
it the way I wish,” said Ochieng.
“Maybe you give me maize seeds, but I
wanted to plant cabbage. Maybe I’ll plant [them] because you gave me
the seeds free of charge, but I won't put as much effort so maybe I
won't even achieve what you want. But the thing that is in my mind, I
will achieve."
The Limits of Cash
Ochieng has the most ambitious plans of the dozen-odd cash-transfer
beneficiaries in Western Kenya I interviewed. Most spent their money on
repairing or improving their homes.
Though that doesn’t generate income,
it can save a family thousands of dollars in avoided expenses - not
having to replace the thatch roof on your house every year, for example,
because you invested in a durable tin one. Others paid their kids’
school fees, or bought assets like livestock or household goods to sell.
It is
more respectful for someone to give me the cash and let me use it the
way I wish. Maybe you give me maize seeds, but I wanted to plant
cabbage - Kenyan farmer Victor Ochieng.
Nearly all said the cash approach is giving them a new sense of
dignity by allowing them to take control of their own livelihoods.
“Since getting the money my life has significantly improved,”
said Caroline Alouch Ogutu, 35, who lives in the village of Koga. “I
have freedom to spend the money. It’s better - this allows you to
prioritize the things you really need.”
James Akwany Oduor, a 66-year-old resident of Amudho village, said he
and his neighbors were skeptical of GiveDirectly at first, recalling a
previous aid project meant to help elderly residents that never came to
fruition. “We were shocked when we received the money almost
immediately,” he told me.
“We view this as a much more respectful aid intervention,” said
Carolina Toth, GiveDirectly’s Kenya field director. “It doesn’t assume
that we know better what people need to improve their lives.”
Still, not all cash-transfer programs are successful. A collective of Haitian journalists uncovered deep flaws
in a “cash for work program” in which supervisors hired their friends,
siphoning aid away from its intended recipients.
Many programs set up
like that one - handing out small, recurring cash payments rather than
single, large ones - tend to have few lasting effects unless their
duration is measured in years or decades rather than weeks and months.
Recipients might earn enough money to feed their families for a while or
pay school fees for a month, but once the money stops flowing, people’s
livelihoods stop improving.
A large cash grant enables an investment
for the future: Loice Anyango Ocholla, 24, a schoolteacher, used a
GiveDirectly grant to buy solar panels and a battery, which she uses to charge the cell phones of her neighbors for a fee.
Nonetheless, such programs have their limitations. For people to have
the chance to succeed in places like rural Kenya, they need more than a
new roof or some chickens: they need roads to connect them to their
surrounding economies, water systems to quench the thirst of entire
communities, and hospitals, health clinics, and doctors.
Cash transfers
of $1,000 are large, but they can’t build roads and water systems or buy
systematic, long-term health care.
Another challenge is in the logistics: Handing out cash isn’t as
simple as it sounds. You have to decide who, in a given village or
community, receives it and who does not. Local GiveDirectly staff don’t
give to every house in a village; they skip houses that have tin roofs
or fully plastered walls, signs that the family is better off than their
neighbors. That can breed resentment.
Location matters too. In Kenya, millions of people use the popular
M-PESA system, making it simple to transfer cash with only a cell phone.
But elsewhere in the developing world the absence of easy banking
systems makes cash transfers less viable.
Then there’s the possibility that recipients will just blow their windfalls. But that doesn’t seem to be happening much. A randomized control trial of GiveDirectly cash transfers in Kenya found that few recipients wasted their grants on alcohol or gambling.
Meanwhile, perhaps the deepest study of cash transfers to date, in
which Columbia University political scientist Christopher Blattman spent
four years conducting randomized trials of a large government program
in Uganda, found encouraging results.
For the farmers and businesspeople
receiving grants, Blattman wrote in the Quarterly Journal of Economics,
“the program increases business assets by 57%, work hours by 17% and earnings by 38%.” On average, the investments they
made with the money paid returns of 40% to 80% per year.
The results showed that even in rural Uganda, people can figure out how
to invest their money gainfully - they just need the capital and the
freedom to do so. In a July op-ed in The New York Times,Blattman
argued that cash transfers might even help here in America.
“The poor
do not waste grants,” he wrote. Handing out cash “is surely only part of
a larger solution. But why not try?”
Access to capital and a shortage of infrastructure and
human services are just some of the impediments to growth in rural
Kenya. Enduring change will require more than a few sudden cash
infusions.
But if, over the long term, GiveDirectly’s program helps
people like Victor Ochieng and Caroline Ogutu as it appeared to be doing
when I visited Amudho and nearby villages, it may indicate that such
change can happen elsewhere, too.
The
thriving Spanish town of Marinaleda runs on the principles of mutual
aid and direct action.
In a country paralyzed by debt, is this an
alternative?
In
the south of Spain, the street is the collective living room.
Vibrant
sidewalk cafes are interspersed between configurations of two to five
lawn chairs where neighbors come together to chat over the day’s events
late into the night.
In mid-June the weather peaks well over 40 degrees
Celsius and the smells of fresh seafood waft from kitchens and
restaurants as the seasonably-late dining hour begins to approach.
The
scene is archetypically Spanish, particularly for the Andalusian region to
the country’s south, where life is lived more in public than in
private, when given half a chance.
Specifically,
this imagery above describes Marinaleda. Initially indistinguishable
from several of its local counterparts in the Sierra Sur southern
mountain range, were it not for a few tell-tale signs.
Maybe it’s the
street names (Ernesto Che Guevara, Solidarity and Salvador Allende
Plaza, to name a few); maybe it’s the graffiti (hand drawn
hammers-and-sickles sit happily alongside encircled A’s, oblivious to
the differences the two ideologies have shared, even in the country’s
recent past); maybe it’s the two-story Che head which emblazons the
outer wall of the local sports stadium.
Marinaleda
has been called Spain’s ‘communist utopia,’ though the local variation
bears little resemblance to the Soviet model most associate with the
phrase.
Classifications aside, this is a town whose social fabric has
been woven from very different economic threads to the rest of the
country since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in the mid 1970s.
A
cooperatively-owned olive oil factory, houses built by and for the
community, and a famous looting of a large-scale supermarket, led by the
town’s charismatic mayor, in which proceeds were donated to food banks,
are amongst the steps that have helped position Marinaleda as a beacon
of hope.
The currency of direct action
As
the Spanish economy continues its post-2008 nosedive, unemployment sits
at 26% nationally, while over half of young people can’t find
work. Meanwhile, Marinaleda boasts a modest but steady local employment
picture in which most people have at least some work and those that
don’t have a strong safety net to fall back on.
But
more than its cash economy, Marinaleda has a currency rarely found
beyond small-scale activist groups or indigenous communities fighting
destructive development projects: the currency of direct action. Rather
than rely exclusively on cash to get things done, Marinaleños have put
their collective blood, sweat and tears into creating a range of
alternative systems in their corner of the world.
When
money hasn’t been readily available - probably the only consistent
feature since the community set out on this path - Marinaleños have
turned to one another to do what needs doing. At times that has meant
collectively occupying land owned by the Andalusian aristocracy and
putting it to work for the town, at others it has simply meant sharing
the burden of litter collection.
While
still operating with some degree of central authority, the local
council has devolved power into the hands of those it serves.
General
assemblies are convened on a regular basis so that townspeople can be
involved in decisions that affect their lives. The assemblies also
create spaces where people can come together to organize what the
community needs through collective action.
“The
best thing they have here in Marinaleda, and you can’t find this in
other places, is the [general] assembly,” says long-term civil servant
for the Marinaleda council, Manuel Gutierrez Daneri.
He continues:
“Assembly is a place for people to discuss problems and to find the
solutions,” pointing out that even minor crimes are collectively
addressed via the assembly, as the town has no police or judicial system
since the last local cop retired.
In
his time as mayor, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo has managed to leverage
considerable financial support from the state government, a feat which
Gutierrez Daneri attributes to the town’s collective track record for
direct action. “If you go ahead with all of the people behind you, that
is very powerful,” he says.
As a
result, the small town boasts extensive sports facilities and a
beautifully-maintained botanical garden, as well as a range of more
basic necessities. “For a little village like this, with no more than
2,700 people, we have a lot of facilities,” says Gutierrez Daneri.
British
ex-pat Chris Burke has lived in Marinaleda for several years, and he
explains that access to the public swimming pool only costs €3 for the
entire summer.
Burke recounts Mayor Sánchez Gordillo saying to him, “The
whole idea of the place being somewhere good to live is that anyone can
afford to enjoy themselves.” Burke adds pragmatically, “You can’t have a
utopia without some loss-making facilities.”
From occupation to cooperation
In
1979, Sánchez Gordillo was first elected as the town’s mayor. He led an
extensive campaign to change Marinaleda’s course, which began with
hunger strikes and occupying underutilized land.
Manuel Martin Fernandez has been involved in la lucha
(the fight) since the beginning. He explains how through the general
assembly process the community decided something had to be done to stem
the flow of migration from the town. They began a weeks-long occupation
of a nearby reservoir to convince the regional government to allocate
them enough water to irrigate a tract of land.
After
this proved successful, they then went on to occupy 1,200 hectares of
the newly irrigated land, which at that time was owned by an
aristocratic family. In 1991, the plot of land was officially
expropriated and turned over for local use. “It took 12 years to obtain
the land,” Martin Fernandez explains, calling their victory “a
conquest.”
Today, extensive fields of
olives, artichokes, beans and peppers form the backbone of the local
cash economy. The land is collectively managed by the cooperative El
Humoso and a canning facility has been set up on the edge of town.
“Our
aim was not to create profits, but jobs,” Sánchez Gordillo told British
author Dan Hancox, explaining why the town chose to prioritize labor-intensive crops to create more employment for local people.
Like
most agricultural employment, whether in the fields or the factory,
work in Marinaleda is both seasonal and varied from year to year. But
unlike many small agricultural towns, Marinaleda shares the work amongst
those who need it.
Dolores
Valderrama Martin has lived in Marinaleda her entire life and she has
worked at the Humoso canning factory for the past 14 years.
From the
upstairs office she explains that if 200 people are looking for work,
but they only need 40 workers, they will bring everyone together. “We
gather all of these people who are directly affected,” she says. “We
make groups of 30 to 40 people and each group works for two days.”
While
the cooperative is formed of nine separate entities, Valderrama Martin
says they collectively decide on important issues like the allocation of
work. They may even take the issue to a general assembly for wider
input from the town. But she cautions, “When there is no work they are
unemployed, like anywhere else.”
Most
of the town decries the relative lack of work, but the wider social
security net built on the principles of direct action and mutual aid
have meant that unlike other parts of the country, two months’ wages can
go a long way to keep you afloat for the year.
At the core of this is
the town’s approach to housing, which offers one of the clearest
examples of how collective effort can fill the void left by a stagnant
cash economy.
The houses that community built
When
many young people think about making their first foray into the housing
market, money is inevitably the biggest obstacle. State of the economy
aside, a down payment is always a sizable sum, even in relatively tame
markets, and is increasingly unattainable for what has been described as
‘the jilted generation.’
But high on
the list of maverick decisions spearheaded by Mayor Sánchez Gordillo,
using a combination of state housing subsidy for building materials,
free labor for construction and land given by the town, housing has been
partly removed from the free market in Marinaleda.
Instead, community
members come together with architectural plans provided by the council
to build a block of houses, with no sense in advance which home will
belong to which family.
The houses -
some 350 units in total, with twenty new builds underway at the time of
our visit - become part of a housing cooperative. Needless to say, when
citizens are only left paying €15 per month for mortgages, this has a
massive knock-on impact on work requirements.
The direct action economy
While
capitalism frames our relationships as a series of self-interested
economic transactions, Marinaleda relies on a model of mutual aid, as
locals work together to meet shared needs, with far less money
circulating.
While it can be easy to forget, money is simply a way of
facilitating action, which creates an incentive for people to do tasks
that they otherwise may not have any interest in doing.
Direct
action, on the other hand, is rooted in common interests and explores
the practicalities of what needs doing, based on who is there to do it.
Direct action eliminates the consumer-provider divide, making cash an
unnecessary intermediary in getting things done, as those who want
something done, and those doing it become one-in-the-same.
While
Marinaleda has its flaws, it reminds us that alternative economic
models are not only possible, they already exist. A striking piece of
graffiti on Marinaleda’s main road depicts a dream-catcher,
super-imposed with a hammer and sickle. The accompanying message
implores us, “Catch your dreams - utopia is possible.”
This article was originally published at Contributoria.
Jen Wilton is
a freelance journalist, researcher and photographer based in London,
UK. Her interests include social movements, sustainable energy,
alternative economies and Latin America. She tweets as @guerillagrrl and blogs at Revolution Is Eternal
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For more on Marinaleda, check out Dan Hancox’ excellent recent book, The Village Against the World (Verso 2014), which is now out in paperback:
