An excellent interview with Michael Shuman, from BALLE.
http://transitionculture.org/2011/02/14/an-interview-with-michael-shuman-if-were-serious-about-localisation-all-of-us-have-to-go-to-business-school/
14 Feb 2011
An Interview with Michael Shuman: if we're serious about localisation, "all of us have to go to Business School"...
Excerpt:
In my mind, we need to make localisation politically attractive across the ideologies. I think one of the places where I depart from a lot of my fellow travellers here in the US is that I spend a lot of time working with and breaking bread with most conservative parts of American society, which put to shame the conservative parts of Europe!
What are the things that they care about? Reducing taxes, freeing markets, getting rid of big government, and so I think that it is very useful to begin to conceptualise localisation politically around those ideas. In point of fact, I think that a lot of the reason we're in the mess we're in right now is that large government agencies and major government subsidies and legal frameworks have made globalisation unwisely and irresponsibly cheap and if we begin to dismantle those, a lot of localisation will occur naturally.
In the US nearly all subsidies are around big things - big oil, big natural gas, big utilities, big cattle, big farms - it's so perverse. Stripping away those things, that conservatives want to do right now, would be a tremendous boost for localisation. Even when you get to the State level it's the same thing. I just finished a study for the Kellogg Foundation where we looked at the three largest economic development programmes within 15 US states, so we looked at 45 programmes in all. What we found, counting the dollars in the grants that went to these various economic development programmes was that 80% of the programmes were giving money to non-local business, that is out of state business attraction or attention.
About a third of them were giving more than 90% of their money to non-local business. So basically, if you abolish economic development as we know it, and save lots of money, which many conservatives are seeing the virtue in, it'll be a huge boost for localisation, because the effect of these subsidies is to make non-local business more competitive, more powerful than local businesses.
The second thing I would say - the second area where this is true - is security law, so this kind of moves into the investment domain and what I've noticed about localisation discussions in the US and Europe and in Australia, (those are the places where I've spent some time), is that things are very much focused on consumption and buy local, produce local and all that is great, but there's been really inadequate discussion about investment. What is perverse, this is true in the US and true in Australia, I don't know for sure about Europe, is that when I go to an audience and I say, "by a show of hands, how many of you are doing your banking at a local bank or credit union?", and almost all the hands go up.... but then when I say, "how many of you have your pension funds in local business?", and all of the hands go down.
We've used the book, Natural Capitalism, in our Sustainability Studio for several years, now. It's a fantastic, if shockingly illuminating, account of the business responsibility and opportunity related to all aspects of sustainability. The one complaint we receive from our students is that it seems "old," having been written and first published in 1999. Though the examples seem old, today, the points and learnings are just as relevant.
