Gill Seyfang is one of a core faculty team teaching about Grassroots Innovations and Sustainability Transitions at the Second Annual Summer Institute in New Economics hosted by the Wingspread Retreat Center, Wind Point, WI (USA) August 12-18, 2013. Dire ecological news and the failures of the global economy are fuelling interest in a “new economics” grounded in … Continue reading »
Parallel sustainable monetary systems are being developed by civil society groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), informed by ecological economics perspectives on development, value, economic scale and growth, and responding to the unsustainability of current global financial systems. These parallel systems of exchange (or community currencies) are designed to promote sustainable development by localising economic development, … Continue reading »
A Global Community Currency Movement? Unity and Diversity in Practice We present key findings of the GICC (Grassroots Innovations: Community Currencies) project’s analysis of the activities and characteristics of the international community currency movement (November 2012) GI briefing 17 A Global Community Currency Movement?
Community Currencies and Sustainability: New economics objectives and orientations Community currencies have long been associated with the environmental movement, and in this briefing we identify various sustainability rationales for developing these grassroots innovations. (October 2012) GI briefing 15 Community Currencies and Sustainability
“Community food projects are not about food, and community energy projects are not about energy” was one of the conclusions from an international workshop of experts on ‘grassroots innovations’. These are initiatives which aim to promote sustainable development from the bottom up, and commonly have broad objectives including community-building and social inclusion, as well as … Continue reading »
Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new environmental policy objective, but there is a limit to the changes in consumption behaviour that individuals can make within current socio-economic frameworks. The ‘new economics’ literature argues that sustainable consumption is characterized by five factors: localization, reducing ecological footprints, community-building, collective action, and building new social institutions. … Continue reading »
Grassroots Innovations for Sustainable Development Conference, UCL London, 10th June, 2005 The UK government’s new Sustainable Development Strategy, Securing the Future, places greener innovation and local action at its foundation. Yet these two themes are considered apart: greener innovation is presumed to be an industrial concern, whilst local action is identified with the community dimension of sustainable … Continue reading »
Seyfang, G. (2009) The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption: Seeds of Change (Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke) ISBN 978-0-230-52533-7 [paperback published 2011] Climate change is forcing us to rethink our lifestyles, but green consumerism won’t save the planet – mainstream approaches simply cannot deliver the radical changes we need for a sustainable society. This book offers a fresh look … Continue reading »
Introducing Grassroots Innovations for Sustainable Development. Here we explain what Grassroots Innovations are and why they’re important, and present the key arguments of our Environmental Politics article (Summer 2010) Grassroots Innovations Briefing 1: Introducing Grassroots Innovations
