"Just Transformations" shows grassroots movements for alternative futures arising across the planet
We love to bring you free stuff of very high quality, and here’s a PDF of a new book which exactly fits that bill. Just Transformations: Grassroots Struggles for Alternative Futures is a compendium of global initiatives, arising from the grassroots, that present positive “alternatives” to current models. As they write in their introduction below:
Transition and transformation are buzzwords on everybody’s lips in today’s climate crisis-ridden world. If we are to save humanity and other species, something big must change.
This has led to a wealth of literature aimed at understanding, managing and guiding society towards the needed transformation. Much of this has focused on the potential contribution of markets (the green economy), the state (green technocracy) and technology (the eco-modernist utopia/dystopia, depending on your perspective).
Yet surprisingly absent from this conversation are activists, communities and movements on the ground who have been struggling and building social transformations, crafting alternatives and recreating their worlds from the ground up, as well as engaged activist academics who are working with movements in trying to make this change happen. This book seeks to contribute to this necessary conversation.
Environmental justice movements may not use terms like transformation, sustainability or environment, but they have a lot to teach about how just transformations happen. Such lessons become particularly relevant nowadays, when climate and pandemic crises are fostering accelerated top-down technocratic and authoritarian paths that are making invisible and sometimes disabling ongoing bottom-up transformative processes.
However, little is still known about how bottom-up just transformations to sustainability are taking place, what makes them possible and what sustains them over time. Understanding this is not merely of academic interest.
Resistance movements and communities are also often interested in reflecting about this, and learning with others about how to make their strategies stronger or understand better what might be preventing them from achieving their objectives. Yet the urgency of their struggles often leaves little time for reflection, let alone for developing the methods for joint or cross-learning.
…We draw on a variety of case studies in Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, India, Lebanon, Turkey and Venezuela where resistance movements have been taking the lead, with different degrees of success and failure, in bringing about just sustainability transformations. These case studies range from
resistance to the fossil fuel rush (Turkey),
Indigenous peoples’ struggles against extractivism (Venezuela),
urban mobilizations around waste management (Lebanon)
and against the building of a mega-prison (Belgium),
the search for alternative transformations such as new forms of political governance for managing commons (Lomerío in Bolivia, Korchi in India),
the articulation of women’s pastoralist vision for the future (the Raika in India)
or a revival of communal and family-based economies (Kachchh in India).
This book also draws out lessons from country-wide transformations against mining and for the defence of Indigenous lands (Argentina and Canada respectively) from a global atlas of resistances (the EJAtlas).
Available on Pluto Press (and free here)
The introduction goes on to profile one of the book’s research partners, of obvious interest to us here: Vikalp Sangam (or ‘Alternatives Confluence’), India (see their promo video posted at the top of this blogpost):
Vikalp Sangam is an Indian platform for networking between groups and individuals working on alternatives to the currently dominant model of development and governance, in various spheres of life.
Its major activity is the convening of regional and thematic confluences across India, whereby people exchange experiences and ideas emerging from practice and thinking in a whole range of endeavours.
This includes sustainable agriculture and pastoralism, renewable energy, decentralized governance, community health, craft and art revival, multiple sexualities, inclusion of the differently abled, alternative learning and education, community-based conservation, decentralized water management, urban sustainability, gender and caste equality, and more.
Beyond the sharing of practical experiences and the documentation and dissemination of stories of transformation hosted on the website, one of the most important outputs of the Vikalp Sangam process is a conceptual framework of transformative alternatives. This framework aims to dissect the different spheres of transformation involved in radical alternatives. I
It is important to realize that while this framework has significant elements of ‘ideology’ in it, it is not based on or emanating from Marxist, Gandhian, Ambedkarite or other radical ideologies to which movements in India relate, but rather on the wisdom and concepts emerging from grassroots communities and groups.
It is constantly evolving, after discussions at each Sangam. Several hundred people from the range of sectors mentioned above have debated the various aspects of this framework.
The authors conclude:
Our intention with this book has been to capture, understand and support transformations to alternative futures that are born from community resistance, often on the margins. We have wanted to see how communities ‘on the commodity frontiers’, suffering directly from the impacts and injustices of extractive economies, have managed to organize and intentionally transform these conditions towards situations of justice and sustainability.