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P4NE’s Monthly Roundup no.3

We want to see the new economy ecosystem grow, deepen its relationships and make greater progress together. We think that illuminating work and ideas across different aspects of the ecosystem and bringing more coherence to the field as a whole is one way of doing this. This monthly roundup is one of our contributions.

Ten things on our radar this month…

  • “The task is to pull back from the precipices that growth-oriented production ignores or does not understand, to do what we can to undo the damage already done, and to reconstruct our economic relations with one another and with the non-human world.” Geoff Mann on ‘Reversing the Freight Train’ in the London Review of Books.

  • What does an ecological civilisation look like? an exploration of how communities are already creating a society based on natural ecology, using nature’s own design principles to reimagine the basis of our civilization.

  • Money Movers, a movement of women taking climate action with their personal finances using the power of peer support, initiated by Friends of the Earth and led by Huddlecraft.

  • Where the cost of living crisis comes from and where it’s heading, an article featuring the New Economics Foundation: “Ultimately, no nation has fully decoupled economic growth from carbon emissions, and this is the challenge we urgently need to solve. Recessions are undoubtedly opportunities to accelerate new economic thinking. But we shouldn’t comfort ourselves that they are a way to protect the environment.”

  • An adapted extract from The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism by Adrienne Buller: “Market-based solutions do not offer a path to safety for the world’s majority, let alone a future that is defined by collective abundance and wellbeing.”

  • In Defence of ESG: a response to The Economist’s critique suggesting investors should only focus on emissions.

  • D-econ’s quantification of the underrepresentation of global south scholarship in climate economics: “For the 50 most cited articles on climate economics, 91% of authors were found to be affiliated with USA and UK based institutions and 0% of authors with Global South based institutions.”

  • Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts: the contribution of local knowledge to climate change research – a European Research Council funded project aiming to bring indigenous and local knowledge to climate change research.

  • Dark Matter Lab’s proposal for a new plural economy based on radical generosity: “We need to reinvigorate stagnated ways of looking, thinking and talking about the economy.”

  • Te Pai Roa Tika O Te Taitokerau, a Tikanga-led impact investment platform, showing indigenous wisdom in action. Developed by a consortium of seven Taitokerau Iwi, they first applied their kawa and tikanga frameworks to define what good looks like for them, then built the investment platform as a means to realise their vision. These four guides are designed to share some of the learnings from their collaboration.

Other things we’ve been up to…

  • Our Director, Jo, shared her thoughts in Philanthropy Impact magazine, on the root cause of competing emergencies, P4NE’s story and the need for philanthropy to resource and support economic change.

  • We’ve just returned from Berlin where we were able to attend the launch event for Earth4All’s new book Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity.

  • We’ve registered to attend the conference "Socialisation: Strategies for a Democratic Economy" in October that some of our grantees are involved in - inviting activists, scientists, trade unionists, politicians and many more to take radical perspectives on the present for a better future.

  • And this one - a feminist and degrowth workshop with Lund University

  • One of our network, Eirini Malliaraki recently wrote this great piece on Wild Law - the emergence of Earth-centred legal discourse. From October we will be co-hosting meetups with Eirni in London to explore this growing field. If you are interested in joining email Cassie on crobinson@p4ne.org.

Grantee Spotlight…

We spoke with Samuel Decker who works for Plurale Ökonomik, a German Network for Pluralist Economics, supporting the next generation of economists and changemakers. He is the Scientific Coordinator at Exploring Economics, an e-learning platform, giving you the opportunity to study a variety of economic theories, topics, concepts & methods.

What kind of progress do you see your work making? And towards what?

We started as a student network, with local groups and with an ambition to support upcoming generations of economists. Our ambitions expanded and we now do a range of different activities. This includes running a Summer Academy with training and certified programmes - all of which are ECGS accredited and a science communication practice. The Exploring Economics platform - which is our learning platform, and mostly used by students of economics, has 40,000 visitors a month. This is our main effort to socialise and spread plural economic theories, highlighting alternatives to the mainstream economic textbooks and influencing change at the level of education.

Most of the people visiting the site come through the Google search engine and we can see the potential in becoming the Netflix for learning about economics. The numbers visiting the site are growing all the time and we are increasing our sophistication in how people discover more content, find related content and stay for longer.

Longer-term we are planning to move from being an aggregator of materials to being a producer and publisher of topical and requested economic material especially in collaboration with others. And to be the go-to platform for essential economic expertise for economic change makers and the public.

What about the ’new economy’ field as a whole? Where do you think the opportunities are for greater progress?

The New Economy field has expanded massively - most of the organisations in the field didn’t exist even 5 years ago. That’s really exciting to see it grow and to see how different organisations are using different tactics to influence change. However, it also means that more effort needs to go into how these many initiatives link up and are more obviously related to each other.

A core idea behind our new ‘Strategy Platform’ is to link up different actors in the New Economy field in Germany and ask how they are related to each other in terms of mission and strategies. We believe the work they are doing is complementary to each other and so there will be ways to address strategic problems together, in collaboration. The status quo is really powerful so we need to be more powerful together if we want to change things! And more strategic - specifically looking at how legislative policy can be effectively influenced, how to create public pressure and to influence policy makers directly. We also want to see the New Economy space broadened.

Whilst there are many new university programmes and courses looking towards alternative economics they still remain niche so we have to keep looking for openings and opportunities to connect into the mainstream. The escalating crisis around energy for example, does help to make the case for our work.

What is something people could do to support your work?

Spread our message on Twitter and Instagram! Become a Club Member of the network. Let us know if you want to contribute content to the platform or have other content ideas for it. For organisations in Germany, become part of the Strategy Platform initiative - where we will be hosting convenings to build shared strategies for influencing.

Jobs…

We are starting to share jobs that we come across through our grantees and others that are broadly in the ‘new economy’ field. If you’d like us to share a job here - to go out at the end of each month - please email Cassie.

What have we missed?

We plan to publish this in the last week of every month. We'd love to include things that you want to spotlight and share. Email us if you'd like to suggest an article, event or idea for us to include in a future edition.