Minutes Organizing Collective Action Day 1

We opened with a name round and the continuum exercise (eg how long have you been involved in degrowth?)

Presentation 1: Stirring paper which is outcome of 4 to 5 years action research and also based on past involvement in activism. Also being a researcher, many are activist researchers. What I have observed as part of this movement is a lack of continuing expansion of these movements. E.g. Seattle then the World Social Movements. Many are coopted, others get frustrated. Global social justice movement is kind of made of cycles. Why? One thing I think is a lack of continuous learning process. 5 years later, exactly the same things, issues, controversies are arising. This is very frustrating, and people go. The second aspect I think, to do with movements that are most transformative, are those that are most practical. A lot of movements emerging in last 5 years, urban community gardening, Transition towns etc. Inspired by the squares. Small scale, they are like seeds, very transformative potential but they are very atomised. The focus on the local is very good, if you are able to understand the role of the local within the larger context. And assess what are the limitations of the action that I am doing on a very local level.
How can we learn, both sides, with each other. Practice and theory, by having a strong theoretical framework like degrowth. e.g. Beyond our Backyards. How can we bring a space for converging ideas, communication but also tools and processes of collaboration on the tools of new knowledge, but also being critical of new knowledge that we are producing, always. A continual process of learning, communicating, developing it.

Presentation 2: Stirring paper: How to build, organise and manage degrowth movements rooted in the territory? 
a. what to do? theoretical and practical activities.
b. how to do it?
c. how to organise? (sorry didnt catch this)

Local basis, pragmatic approach, catalyser for people/associations.

Federation of autonomous association rooted in the territory. 24 Circoli, 22 Groups for Happy Degrowth, Thematic groups, 7 Adhering Association. Coordinated by national board.

Circolo di Torino. Born in 2010. 100 members, 30 active volunteers. Aim to affect as many people as we can with the idea of degrowth. We do practical activities, e.g. food garden groups. Also self production activities. Also some politics, lets say. Conferences, and act for or against specific projects, and municipal policy guidelines. Also internal training and external divulgation about degrowth.
Conviviality; friendship, new peoples meeting, convivial dinners, games, open minded.
Meet once a week. Thematic groups. Use dialogue and debate. Try always to decide by consensus and not by vote. Use gestures sometimes.

Presentation 3: Stirring paper: Multi level model: A systematic transition to a post growth society.
We tried to put some of the most important aspects into a framework. It is not a silver bullet, but should help us have more specific conversations about how change happens and what we need to take into account. 3 levels
1- regimes, institutions
2- culture
3- niches
We need to look at the 3 levels. But very often this doesnt happen, e.g. transition networks are looking very much at niches. They dont look at how the global political system can change. Some of the seeds are coopted, some are ignored because the system is fine with a level of alternatives. e.g. NGOs are self stabilising. Even if they say they are working beyond incremental change. And with everything we do we dont usually think enough about culture, the mainstream, how do we understand the world? How can we live the model and impact the world.

The message is we need to look at the three levels, and create windows of opportunity within regime that can support the system, make stronger the niches, etc etc, how can we have conversations about the three levels?

Comment: communities of practice.

Results from Barcelona.
An exit strategy, leaving the system, building alrternatives
A voice strategy: political movement and activist, a particular engagement.
Loyalty strategy: change within the political system, assimilation within the political party system, perhaps too early and perhaps against the ideas of degrowth
(Please see the notes from Barcelona elsewhere on our GAP page for more detail)

Presentation from the online discussion
(Please see notes as a PDF elsewhere on our GAP page)
We posed 3 questions.
1- do we need more details and consensus on what is degrowth in the movement in general?
2- do we need more details and consensus on how to achieve Degrowth?
3- Reasonable and necessary to link up groups and movements, What are the criteria for identifying the groups? e.g. associations, how do you determine which groups you want to associate withand appropriate way of association , how vague or prceise?

Some attempts to answer
1- no consensus is yet possible but need to strive for it
2- its a legitimate strategy to go for degrowth by intermediate steps, so in this way we do not need to agree on if it is a final or intermediate goal e.g. Universal Basic Income (in a society without money this is seen as only an intermediate step
We need to strengthen democratic abilities and participation. e.g. the mehrdemocracie organisation is not here at degrowth officially. Propose that this knowledge and connection is strengthened between democracy movement and this one.
A slow process is good, but a situation might arise where there is only a short time window for the chance of change (like happened in GDR, Russia). Perhaps there should be a workstream on this.

(See also the comments so far on our GAP page e.g. on scaling up)
Windows of opportunity. Within the permaculture movement, in Brazil, there was big floods, in one place quite well networked, they have provided a viable alternative for responding to the floods. The small seed basically became the seed that built the whole system new. Also in Indignados movement, also something very spontaneous, attempts to bring degrowth into the debate. Also some traditional Marxist also took place in Indignados. Traditional groups from the left that call just for the strengthening of the state.

Proposals brainstorm for our collective action
There is a wide range between system approach and local groups.
Discussion on the shape of the three days. Some call for feedback, responses to the stirring papers and the PDF now.
Do we have to produce a consensus here and now on Relevance and Time?
We decided to brainstorm rather than focus on consensus for today.
-creating degrowth hubs
-mapping
-Conflictive actions
-international network of degrowth movement
-etc etc etc 

Then we used physical space to put these ideas on the Relevance and Time continuums.
Blue is somewhere in the middle.
Green indicates that there is a consensus in our position, Red indicates there was a great diversity in our positions and we just wrote up an average
-Extend Italian Association model internationally: (I dont know how to extend it, you cant force people to be in that movement, we need the ideas how to get there. Could be like a club, and from then on build. e.g. could propose it here with 2500 people) HIGHLY RELEVANT, FAIRLY URGENT
-Link up with nature protection NGOs, seed degrowth idea there (WWF, Greenpeace etc). MID RELEVANCE, MID TO LATER URGENCY
-Link between researchers and activists. HIGHLY RELEVANT, FAIRLY URGENT
-Link up with the democracy NGOs. MID RELEVANCY, MID URGENCY

The potential of coming together is to have good conversations. This is just proposals and not discussions.
Vibe manager: time is short, let us just continue the exercise and discuss our doubts later on,

-Fight against specific expansions of expansion of capitalism into new environments, and fight for the good life with people who live in those regiosn AND direct action, civil disobedience. FAIRLY HIGH RELEVANCY, FAIRLY URGENT
- Training for locals and in schools, about degrowth: MID RELEVANCE, MID URGENCY
- Establish translation infrastructure for degrowth community: LOW to MID RELEVANCY, LOW TO MID URGENCY
- Organise a vote about investment protection (EU, US, Canada): no consensus, MID RELEVANCY, MID URGENCY
- International connection MID to HIGH RELEVANCY, MID TO HIGH URGENCY
- Collective action of dissent with the old system and make mass actions and make it visible, sometimes we have to clash with the old society (eg auto industry, agro industry), we have a role within the whole society AND a conflictual strategy: FAIRLY HIGH RELEVANCE, PRETTY URGENT
- exchange our success stories and best practices: largely consensus, HIGH RELEVANCE, FAIRLY URGENT
- support and link communities of practice using online collaboration and networking tools: largely consensus, MID RELEVANCE, MID URGENCY
- geomapping of academics, activists etc: not consensus but MODERATE RELEVANCE, FAIRLY HIGH URGENCY
- think beyond the state and institutions: consensus PRETTY RELEVANT, URGENT
(NB many people had left or sat out by this point so not a consensus of the whole GAP)
- physical structures, social centres etc, identify themself as degrowth places
(Sorry power was very low here and missed minutes for a minute)
- campaigns... PRETTY RELEVANT, MID TO HIGH URGENCY

I dont know how we could have discussion in 20 minutes.
Who will present tomorrow in 60 seconds

How much of top-down and how much bottom-up, grassroots 
based organisation? What do the 3 papers write about the strategies? Lets start listing the main points, consensus and controversies here!

Main proposals/strategies for collective action suggested in the papers

Aillon

Baptista

Narberhaus

Memory

Here we list existing actions/initiatives that attempt/contribute to organize collective action for degrowth

• International Degrowth Conferences (since 2008, bi-yearly) - R&D
• Picnic4Degrowth (yearly in xx June, since??)
• Objecteurs de Dècroisssance?
• March(es) for voluntary simplicity - where and when?
• Beyond Our Backyards (2011-2013) - http://agroecol.eu
• GROWL (2013-2015) - http://co-munity.net/growl
• The Proposal for a Pop-Up Degrowth School. 
• ...

Info on the proposal for a Pop-Up Degrowth School. --> maybe publish a document with this idea to keep a better overview? (follow + sign on top right) 
Hi all! When I have been participating in the summer school in Barcelona in July, we had the idea of a Pop-Up School. As numerous trainers/facilitators would be trained by the Growl project, the idea is to set up a kind of tool-box which would be able to help the new trainers to organize, in their own city, a Degrowth Pop-Up School.
The aim would be  to spread the degrowth narative to activist in all Europe, and to allow  activist to co-construct, critic and join the degrowth narative. At the  end, we would could have a social phenomen moving in a nice direction.
The public is the activists who are organising event in the frame of Degrowth, but who don't know it yet, or d'ont feel it that way; and curious people interested by the critic of society and who would like to make a move.
It would be a session of two days : one to expose the degrowth narative; the other to agregate and let speak activists together (urban gardener, bikers, open sources programmer, festival organizer, researchers, citizens...). 
The tool-box would give pedagogic and organising advises to trainers, advertising material, spread articles and powerpoints, key-words... It would also create a web platform were pedagogic articles are online, and that will also create a forum for the discussion (but which it is already in preparation in co-munity!).

So in brief, "Degrowth week-end" could pop up easely in all Europe, gathering activists for spreading and co-constructing the degrowth narative. And it will be a good step :). 
To be widely discussed. 

There is also a large funding proposal submitted by R&D to the EU, with partners in 9 countries, to create a network of degrowth relays - physical spaces that train "colporteurs". Colporteurs should then play a role in articulating the global theory and discourses of degrowth with their local communities and politics (both ways). 
This proposal was a further development of an original project idea originating at the Paris Degrowth conference. Independently of the Erasmus+ application results (probably coming out end of August), the concept and model of relays can be discussed and further developed during our working group.
Very good !


ps : I'm also interested by the redifining values WG. It would be great if I could participate to both.[this is not possible - you have to choose one or another and attend fully the 3-days :) - we can anyway exchange freely across groups, online and at the conference (assemblies and infopoint)] [All right :) ]


May I suggest that collective action for degrowth need not -- and probably should not -- only include activism directed toward degrowth per se. In most places, there are quite a number of other things that have to change in order for degrowth to be implemented. (To clarify: I'm speaking in this post about implementing new public policies, not private initiatives such as voluntary simplicity.) 
For example, where I live, there are such diverse needs as (i) improving labor arrangements and support systems (day care, etc.) so that working people will find it easier to raise families, (ii) avoiding or even pulling out of certain free trade agreements, and (iii) making the electoral system more democratic. The coalitions supporting each of these propositions will often be quite different, even though there may be some overlaps. The constituencies who must be persuaded in order to change them will also often be different -- sometimes citizens, sometimes employers, sometimes bureaucrats, sometimes politicians, sometimes a mix of these and others. 
When you target degrowth directly, you are often aiming only for an overlap constituency among citizens. But you can't make degrowth more than a slogan unless you get these local, heterogeneous obstacles out of the way. That goes for private initiatives, too: they may have little or no effect if public policy is pointed in the opposite direction.
So a task for activists is to identify these roadblock policies, and to create an action plan for removing them. My own starting point is that degrowth is most likely to be implementable at a country-by-country level, and that the roadblocks will vary a lot according to a country's specific situation. I know little enough about Europe to be at best agnostic about the chances for success of a Europe-wide movement; to my outsider's eyes, Germany, Greece and Bulgaria, for example, seem to be quite differently situated. But obviously, the more transnational the level at which you want to implement degrowth, the greater the number and complexity of the particular obstacles you need to assess and remove. 

I'd like to make a suggestion for a concrete action: We could organize a vote (how?) on the inclusion of investor protection in free trade agreements (TTIP, CETA, TiSA). The vote should take place in all affected countries, i.e. EU, US, Canada. 
This could be a quite visible collective action trying out and forming all kinds of new coalitions - this was my comment - Arndt :-)