Shaun Bartone Ph.D. UNB Fredericton Dept. Sociology Ecological Communication: Political Discourse of Transition Towns  Table of Contents Part 1: The Social-Ecological Context of the Transition Towns Narrative 11 Ch. 1 Introduction and Questions for Research 12 Globalization and Localization 13 Social Systems and Complexity 13 Ecological Communication 14 Transition Towns as Ecological Communication 14 Questions for Research 15 Transition Towns as a Relocalization Movement 15 Transition Towns’ Narrative: Framing the Issues 15 Peak Oil 15 Climate Change 16 Organized Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change 16 Global Economic Disruption 16 Transition Movement Spreads to Eastern Canada 17 Eco-Fredericton, New Brunswick 17 Transition Fredericton, New Brunswick 17 Transition Bay, Nova Scotia 18 Local Differences in Communication and Network Strategy 18 Is Transition Towns Political? 18 The Political Question, Revisited 19 Theory Components: Globalization and Localization 19 Theory Components: Power Analysis 20 Theory Components: Social Movement Theory 20 Theory Components: Critical Systems Theory 20 Theory Components: Systemic Communication 20 Theory Components: Narrative Analysis 21 Outline of Chapters 21 Application to Research 23 Ch. 2. Globalization and Localization 24 Globalization Defines the Local 24 Giddens: Global Modernity 24 Disembedding/Remebedding 26 Expert Systems 27 Localities 27 Risk, Trust and Security 28 Application of Global Modernity to Transition Towns 29 Globalization and Capitalism. 29 Waters and Global Capitalism 30 Globalization and Culture. 31 Globalization and Politics. 32 Political Globalization 32 Globalization and Ecological Risks. 34 The Translocal: An Alternative Globalization Theory 35 Globalization as Dualistic Development 37 Globalizing and Localizing Effects 37 McFarlane: Translocal Assemblages 39 Translocal as Horizontal Exchanges 39 Hopke: The Hyperlocal 40 The Crisis of Globalization 41 Globalization and Collapse 42 Joseph Tainter and The Collapse of Complex Societies. 42 Theories of Social Collapse 42 Tainter’s Theory of Collapse 44 Diminishing Returns on Complexity 45 Sociopoltical Complexity and Collapse 45 Energy Averaging Systems 46 Information Processing 46 Economic Growth 47 Bureaucratic Complexity 47 The Complexity-Collapse Curve 47 Avoiding Collapse: Energy Subsidies 49 Summary of Tainter’s Stages of Complexity 50 Collapse as Positive Adaptation. 50 Sociopolitical Collapse 51 Sudden Collapse vs. Slow Decline 53 Collapse in a Power Vacuum 53 Peer Polities and Globalized Societies 54 Technological Adaptation to Globalized Collapse 55 Odum’s Theory of Pulsing Collapse 56 Panarchy and Collapse 57 Crisis, Complexity and Collapse and Transition Towns 57 Ch. 2: Application to Research 59 Ch. 3 Power and Political Systems 60 Systemic Power 60 Odum: Thermodynamic Power. 60 Networks of Power 63 Niklas Luhmann: Cybernetic Power. 65 Foucault: Power/Knowledge 68 Foucault: Governmentality 73 Foucault: Biopower 74 Power: Autonomism (Holloway) and Horizontalism (Sitrin) 80 Comparison of Transition Towns with Autonomism and Horizontalism 84 Avelino: Empowerment in Sustainability Transitions 84 Avelino: Transformative Power 86 Avelino: Systemic Power 87 Avelino: Relations of Power 87 Avelino: Empowerment Model 87 Avelino: Assessing Systemic Power 88 Avelino: Typologies and Scales of Power 90 Avelino: Stages of Development & Power 90 Avelino Landscape and Transformational Power 92 Avelino: Multi-level Frameworks of Power 92 Avelino: Undercurrents 93 Avelino: Niches & Niche Regimes 93 Avelino: The power of Transition Discourse. 94 Ch. 3 Application to Research 96 Ch. 4 Social Movements 97 Survey of Social Movement Theory 97 New Social Movement Theory 97 Habermas and Critical Theory. 97 Systems Theory 98 Critical Systems Theory 98 Fuchs: Critical Systems Theory 99 Functional Systems Theory 101 Luhmann’s Functional Systems Theory 101 Blüdhorn: Self-Description and Simulation. 108 Critical Evolutionary Systems Theory (Bartone) 110 Rootes: Local Ecology Movements, Coalitions and Networks 117 Global Movements Build on the Local 117 Local Movements are Place-Specific 118 Local Movements Frame Issues as Place-Specific 119 Linking with Large-Scale Movements is Not Effective 120 Large Scale Actors Overlook Local Groups 120 Social Justice vs. Place-based Issues 121 D. Politics as Process 122 Gaed and Meadowcroft 122 Kenis, Bono and Mathijs 124 Chilvers and Longhurst 126 Hoffman and Loeber 128 Application: Politics as Process 129 E. Autonomism and Horizontalism 130 Holloway: Autonomism. 130 Sitrin: Horizontalism 139 Movements and Systems 144 Ch. 4 Application to Research 146 Ch. 5 Local Autonomist Movements: Transition Groups in Maritime Canada. 148 Three Versions of Autonomism. 148 Politics: What Transition Towns is Not. 148 Not an Environmental Movement 149 Not an anti-Globalization movement but a Localization movement 151 Eco-Fredericton: Eco-Anarchist Autonomism 152 Transition Fredericton: Autonomist Municipalism 156 Transition Bay: Autonomist Base Community 159 Neo-Liberal Survivalism: Homo Ecologicus 162 Ch. 5 Application to Research 164 Part 2: Ecological Communication, Narrative and Discourse 165 Ch. 6 Ecological Communication 166 Luhman’s System/Environment Difference as Ecology. 169 Evolution and Systems Theory. 173 Science and Subsystems. 182 Functions and Resonance. 188 Ch. 6 Application to Research 196 Ch. 7 Narratives and Frames 197 Transition Towns: Narratives and Frames 197 The Transition Towns Narrative 197 Adger: Global vs. Local Narratives 200 Frames and Transition Towns Movement 202 Frame 1—The Problem: the Energy Crisis and Peak Everything 203 Frame 2—The Result: Collapse of Civilization. 205 Frame 3—The Solution: Localism 206 Studies of Transition Narratives. 207 Eco-Fredericton: Ecotopian Transition Narrative 208 Transition Fredericton: Municipal Transition Narrative 209 Transition Bay: Base Community Transition Narrative 209 Ch. 7 Application to Research 211 Ch. 8 Method: A Discourse Analysis of Transition Towns 212 I. Interpretive Methodology. 212 A. Discourse as Communication and Action. 212 B. Empowerment Model as Methodology. 212 A. Interview Question. 213 B. Narrative v. Discourse 214 C. Triangulation of methods. 214 1. Review of Transitions Media. 214 2. Participant observation in local Transition Towns group meetings. 215 3. In-depth interviews with Transition Towns participants. 215 Ch. 8 Application to Research 216 Part 3: Discourse Analysis: The Political Discourse of Transition Towns 217 Chapter 9. The Political Discourse of Transition Towns 218 1. Eco-Fredericton: Eco-Anarchist Discourse 218 Affinity with Transition Towns 219 Social Ecology Discourse 219 Transition Towns as Organizational Model 220 Anarchism 220 Eco-Topian Community Narrative 222 The Occupy Movement 222 The Crises of Globalization 223 Globalization and Collapse 224 Autonomism 224 Communications and Critical Consciousness 226 Localization and Community 226 Democratic Process: Occupy and Horizontalism 226 Autonomism: Capitalism and the State 228 Resilience 228 Political Engagement 229 Autonomy v. Inclusion 230 Networks 230 EcoTopian Isolation v. Urban Integration 231 Occupy as a Model of Direct Democracy 232 2. Transition Fredericton: Autonomist Municipalist Discourse 234 Relationship to Transition Towns 234 Municipal Low-Carbon Transition 235 Ecological Communication 236 Shaping the Political Discourse 236 Critical Consciousness 237 Transition Fredericton and the Occupy Movement 238 Macro-Transformation vs. Micro-Scale Organizing 239 Narrow Liberal vs. Wide Scale Social Justice Organizing 239 Green Party Politics 240 Global vs. Cosmopolitan 240 Transition as Political Process 242 3. Transition Bay: A Commons Discourse 245 Systems Theory 245 NeoLiberal Economics v. Local Economy 246 Private v. Commons Ownership 246 Autonomism as Local Resilience 247 Local v. Translocal 247 Community Autonomism 248 Global Movements v. Local Autonomism 248 Transition Memes 249 Local Autonomism v. Survivalist Reactionism 250 Collapse of Complex Societies 251 State vs. Community 252 Autonomist Base Community 253 Local Energy Production 253 Autonomism v. the State 254 Autonomism v. Capitalism 255 Beyond Transition: the Commons Economy 256 The Commons as ‘Governance’ 257 Transition as Political Process 258 Ch. 10 Conclusions 261 The Power of Systemic Transformation 263 Questions for Further Study: Governance 268 Governance Everywhere at Every Level 268 Resources 270  “The brilliance of the Transition Movement comes largely from its narrative.” Erick Lindberg, (Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature) “Deconstructing Transition”, September 2017. Abstract Transition Towns is a re-localization movement that began in 2005 in the UK. The movement is a response to the perceived global crisis of peak oil, climate change, and economic crisis. The movement focuses on creating resilient responses to these crises, rebuilding local economies and strengthening local social bonds. The Transition Towns movement has spread primarily through the internet to English-speaking Commonwealth countries, US and Europe, including Canada. Transition Towns began with a stated premise that it was an ‘apolitical’ movement. In the decade since the movement’s growth, movement participants and observers have criticized the movement for lacking a political viewpoint on the global crises that it identifies and it’s own activities. This research looks at three Transition groups in Maritime Canada, two in Fredericton, New Brunswick and one in Saint Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia. Through examination of the narrative of Transition Towns as presented on the movement’s website, and interviews with founding members, the research answers this basic question: is Transition Towns political and if so, what kind of politics is it? The research incorporates several theoretical components to analyze how the movement frames the issues in its narrative: globalization and localization, power, social movements, ecological communication. The power and social movement analysis identifies the Transition political discourse as ‘autonomism’. The research examines how each group translates the movement's narrative into its own political discourse, yielding three forms of autonomism: autonomous municipalism, eco-anarchism and ecological base community. Through this discourse analysis, the research yields a political discourse of Transition Towns in Maritime Canada.  Part 1: The Social-Ecological Context of the Transition Towns Narrative Ch. 1 Introduction and Questions for Research This research analyzes the narrative and political discourse of an early 21st century ecology movement, Transition Towns, originating in Totnes, UK in 2005. The study examines the social and ecological conditions that shape and contextualize the Transition Towns narrative. The study examines the narrative elements of the movement’s self-organizing communications, how it frames the issues that become the target of its organizing efforts, and the political discourse that evolves from that organizing praxis. Part 1 of the study begins by analyzing the Transition movement and its narrative within the epoch and process of globalization, its creation of the local, and the crisis of globalization. Part 1 continues with analysis of political elements of the movement and its narrative using theories of power, Holloway’s political discourse of autonomism and Sitrin’s horizontalism, theories of social movements and political process. Part 2 of the study employs narrative analysis, including Niklas Luhmann’s theory of ecological communication, narrative framing, the narratives of ‘the local’, narratives of transition movements, the particular narratives and memes of the Transition Towns movement, and localized versions of the Transitions narrative in the three groups under study. Part 3 continues with analysis of the political discourse of leading members of the three groups under study, identifying its where it reflects the narrative of the broader Transition movement, and where it diverges in response to local conditions. Each stage of the discourse analysis compares and contrasts the discourse of the three local groups with the parent organization and with each other, revealing localized and diverse political elements. The conclusion focuses on the politics of Transition Towns in Maritime Canada as an autonomist localization movement and it’s power dynamics. The study considers whether the Transition Towns movement functions as governance, whether it develops sufficient communicative power to create transformational systemic change. Globalization and Localization This study examines globalization as the dominant social process that shapes and contextualizes the Transition Towns narrative. Globalization creates localization, the emergence of the local as a result of and counterpoint to globalization. The globalization process itself creates several crises of globalization. The Transition movement frames its mission and narrative as a response to three crises of globalization: energy regimes or ‘peak oil’, climate change and economic disruption. Transition Towns constructs its narrative by framing issues that involve global ecological conditions which have been perceived as in crisis since the millennium, namely, global climate change and ‘peak oil’, defined as the decline in the global production of conventional oil. After the global economic crisis of 2008, Transition Towns also began to frame the issue of economic instability and inequality. Governments around the world have sought to address these perceived crises, as have local communities. Social Systems and Complexity Luhmann makes the following set of propositions regarding systems theory, derived from his major works, Social Systems (1995) and Ecological Communication (1989). Systems evolve only when they are provoked by their environments, both internally and externally. Social systems consist of their self-organized communications and actions. Social systems self-organize by closing off from their environments and developing specialized communicative functions, or subsystems, becoming more complex. Social systems are provoked by communications that alert the system to changes in the environment. Social systems receive information from their environments by increasing their technological and communicative connections with the environment. Through positive feedbacks, the social system learns, i.e. generates adaptations to new stimuli and becomes more complex. According to Joseph Tainter and The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), societies adapt to their environments by becoming more complex, but they reach a point at which there are decreasing returns on the investment in complexity. Under stress from a failure to continue adaptation, societies may collapse to less complex forms and reorganize to adapt to the changed environment. Ecological Communication The conversion of stimuli from the environment into codes that functional subsystems can interpret is called ecological communication (Luhmann, 1989). Social change movements self-organize around issues that have been excluded by functional subsystems. Social change movements use ecological communication in the form of advocacy and protest to provoke critical consciousness about changes in its environment that have been excluded. Social movements present alternatives from which the system can select to adapt to those changes. Political communications signify how social movements propose to self-organize the distribution of social goods, comprising their political discourse. Social change movements must have a sufficient intensity of energy or power to generate resonance concerning those issues within the social system. Transition Towns as Ecological Communication Transition Towns is a social ecology movement that engages in ecological communication in order to provoke critical consciousness about global ecological crises, namely peak oil, climate change and economic instability under global capitalism. These ecological crises occur at various scales and levels of social complexity. Transition Towns presents ecological alternatives that the social system may use to learn from and adapt to these ecological crises at the local level. It engages in political communication when it signifies how it proposes to self-organize the distribution of social goods locally as an alternative to the system of global capitalism. Transition Towns increases its potential for ecological communication when it generates a sufficient level of communicative intensity and translative capacity to provoke the social system to confront issues that were previously excluded. Transition Towns increases its capacity for political communication when it confronts the social system with its critique of the global/local distribution of social goods, thus potentially shifting the system’s political discourse. Questions for Research The basic question for this research is “Is Transition Towns political, and if so, what kind of politics is it?” This is further refined by Luhmann’s systems theory which states that “social systems consist of both communications and actions; society self-organizes around its communications and then reduces those communications to actions (Luhmann 1995). This research will answer this question by examining how Transition Towns, as a western hemispheric movement, frames its narrative, and furthermore, how local Transition Towns groups transform that narrative into a localized political discourse, through their communications and actions. This dissertation provides a partial answer to that question by examining Transition-type groups operating in the Maritime Provinces in Canada from 2010 to 2015. Transition Towns as a Relocalization Movement Transition Towns is a localization movement that addresses global issues of ‘peak oil’, climate change and economic instability at the local level. Transition Towns employs systems theory as it applies to global, large-scale socio-ecological systems and permaculture, as it applies to local-scale systems of food, energy and economic production. Because of its focus on energy and socio-ecological systems, the Transition Towns movement works from a thermodynamic theory of socio-ecological systems. Transition Towns is concerned with the decreasing availability of energy resources at both macro and local scales and the possibility of systemic collapse. Transition Towns is a relocalization movement that seeks to prepare local communities for an “energy descent” by relocalizing and increasing community resilience through the local production of food, energy and strengthening local economies. Secondarily it is concerned with replacing fossil fuels that result in increased C02 emissions, causing climate change, with renewable energy sources.. Transition Towns’ Narrative: Framing the Issues Peak Oil The movement began initially as a response to the perceived crisis of ‘peak oil’. Transition Towns framed its response to ‘peak oil’ with a strategy of reducing dependency on fossil fuels by relocalizing the production of food, goods and services, shrinking transportation distances, and revitalizing the local economy. Climate Change Transition Towns was secondarily concerned with climate change, which they began to see as linked with the issue of peak oil as a consequence of the use of fossil fuels. As the scientific consensus on the science of climate change developed during the first millennial decade, along with an increasing sense of the catastrophic consequences of climate change, Transition Towns adopted the issue of climate change early on into its program of reducing dependence on fossil fuels, localization and permaculture design. Organized Responses to Peak Oil and Climate Change Civil society responses to these perceived twin crises has included a mixture of marshaling expert research and fostering social movements. ASPO (Assoc. for the Study of Peak Oil) organized annual conferences on peak oil. The Post-Carbon Institute provided research and organizing strategies for helping local groups respond to the issue of peak oil. Regarding climate change, a series of UN Conferences on Climate Change and global economic summits were held in Asia, North America and Europe between 1998 and 2012. In response to the perceived crisis of climate change, climate advocacy groups, such as Climate Camp in the UK, staged a series of protests at these conferences and at global economic summits (G8, G20). The leaders of the Transition Towns movement declined to involve the Transition movement officially in direct action concerning climate change or the economic summits. Global Economic Disruption Since then, the Transition Towns movement has been faced with the more immediate crisis of global economic disruption and instability, i.e. the series of global bank failures which began in the US in 2008 and which continues through the European Union today. As an ecology movement, Transition Towns UK appeared to be reluctant to confront the global financial crisis. However, Transition Towns members felt increasing pressure to address the issue of economic inequality and collapse in the financial markets, which was literally hitting home in the form of mortgage foreclosures, rising unemployment, and rising food and energy prices. By 2012, Transitions Towns UK had begun to address the global financial crisis within it’s program. Since then, the Transition Towns program lists three crises within its agenda: peak oil, climate change and economic instability. There remained however, some disagreement within the leadership of Transition Towns as to whether and how to engage in direct action with regard to these issues. Transition Movement Spreads to Eastern Canada Since its inception in 2005, the Transition Towns movement has spread to Canada. This research examines three local groups in New Brunswick, Canada that have self-organized in response to this cluster of crises, influenced by the Transition Towns model. All three groups have similar agendas with regard to the relocalization of food production, energy, goods and services in their towns. Eco-Fredericton, New Brunswick The first group, Eco-Fredericton, was established after the global financial crisis of 2008, and with the onset of the Occupy Movement in September 2011. Leaders of Eco-Fredericton were also de facto leaders of the Occupy Fredericton encampment. Transition Fredericton, New Brunswick A second group, Transition Fredericton, began in July 2012, lead by a professor at the local university, partly as an outgrowth of his campaign for Mayor of Fredericton. Several members of the Transition Fredericton committee stated that they joined Transition Fredericton as a continuation of their support for his mayoral campaign. Eco-Fredericton had from its inception been involved in direct political action and protest, in particular, the Occupy movement. Transition Fredericton focused on influencing the policy decisions of the Mayor and City Council to direct development of the City toward a more resilient path. While maintaining a similar mission and goals, the three groups employ different organizing strategies and different forms of political communication for achieving their goals. Transition Bay, Nova Scotia A third group was identified in St. Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia. The interesting feature of this group, unlike the other three groups, is that they are organized along religious-sectarian lines, being steered by members of the Halifax Buddhist community. Transition Bay has been organizing since 2012. They developed a local group, and launched a farmer’s market in St. Margaret’s Bay, which is now fully independent. They organized a skill-sharing conference in Halifax, which has been institutionalized into a skill-share “academy”. They received a grant from the Province for their activities. They have subcommittees focused on protecting and improving the local fresh water supply. Their last project was organizing a conference on rural local economies in April 2015, which was co-sponsored by the Mayor and town of Wolfeville, Nova Scotia. Transition Bay’s interaction with government has involved local officials in the St. Margaret’s Bay area, which is a subdivision of the “HRM” or Halifax Regional Municipatlity government. However, they have had little contact or support from the City of Halifax. Some members of Transition Bay have been involved in the climate justice movement. Local Differences in Communication and Network Strategy This research compares the differences in networking strategy and communication among these three groups. The research focuses on the subjective understanding of group members, examining how Transition groups frame the systemic issues concerning peak oil, climate change and economic instability; how Transition groups come to define certain features of their world as sources of crisis; and how and why those groups engage in political communication in response these perceived crises. The questions are asked from the point of view of the Transition groups under study, not from the point of view of the systems they are trying to affect. Is Transition Towns Political? The question of whether Transition Towns had a political ideology has dogged the movement since it’s beginning in 2005. Within a few years of its inception, Transition Towns was critiqued as a conservative and quiescent movement that refused to confront the political implications of its work: that the domination and gutting of local economies by global corporations was a policy choice supported by governments that were equally under the influence and control of those same corporations. Activists were especially critical of Transition Towns’ failure to participate in mass social movements, such as the climate justice movement. Rob Hopkins, Transition Towns founder, initially refused to address the political critique. He insisted that the movement should refrain from involvement in partisan politics because it could potentially alienate and divide supporters of the movement, especially at the local level. In June, 2012, Rob Hopkins again raised the question on his blog, Transition Culture, “Is Transition Political?” (Transition Culture, June 2012), and his answer this time was “yes, deeply.” However, his article on the subject said little about the nature of that politics, the politics of protest, mass movements or party politics. Instead, Hopkins noted the importance of the anti-shale gas movement. Shale gas development in the UK had the potential to destroy the health and productivity of local water and agricultural systems. He was incensed that the Queen of England had granted permission to companies to frack anywhere in the UK, contra local initiatives to ban fracking. Besides fracking, he offered examples of small, local movements, such as one town’s campaign to stop the closure of a public library. In other words, Transition Towns would officially support small, local campaigns to protect local resources, but refrained from implied support for advocacy at higher government levels, mass movements or protest. The Political Question, Revisited In September 2017, Transition groups in the US held a conference to reflect on a decade of their work in the movement. Again the question of whether Transition Towns was political came up, but little of significance was produced from the discussion. Transition Towns as a movement still had not been able to decipher its own political situation or position. Theory Components: Globalization and Localization This study presents Giddens’ theory of globalization in modernity, its unique characteristics, and tensions, and its construction of various localities. It presents the globalization of capitalism, globalized risk and trust, and the crisis of globalization, defined as the potential collapse of overly complex societies. Theory Components: Power Analysis In order to gauge the impact of these communications, this research will conduct a power analysis to understand what kind of power the movement generates and deploys through its activities, whether that power is sufficient to achieve its objectives and generate the kind of change its seeks. Theory Components: Social Movement Theory Using social movement theory, this study will examine and identify the elements of the Transition movement’s ideology and forms of organization. Using this analysis, the research will examine the ideological influences of the local organizers and the types of activities they undertake at the local level to further identify the political discourse of Transition Towns. Theory Components: Critical Systems Theory The research asks whether Transition Towns has the capacity to communicate these issues to the local populace, such that it raises critical awareness of these issues, and facilitates it’s self-organization as a social movement. It remains questionable whether Transition Towns as a social movement has a sufficient level of communicative power, intensity and translative capacity to provoke the social system to confront issues that have been previously excluded. Likewise, growth in Transition Towns’ political power depends on its capacity to network with other groups and social movements on shared issues with sympathetic goals concerning ecological issues, and with local and regional governments. Theory Components: Systemic Communication This dissertation focuses on Transition Towns’ issue-framing narrative as ecological communication, more specifically as social movement communication, and even more precisely as as political communication, primarily in the form of advocacy, but rarely as protest, except in a few instances. Theory Components: Narrative Analysis Using a method of discourse analysis compiled from several sources, this study shows that Transition Towns’ narrative is concerned with relocalization as a response to globalization. Furthermore, it proposes that Transition Towns engages in ecological communication by communicating to the social system that which has been excluded form political discourse, i.e., ecological crisis concerning energy, climate change and economic instability, especially as it affects conditions at the local level. After describing the Transitions’ narrative, the study examines how local groups translate that narrative into a political discourse at the local level and produces the political discourse of members of Transition Towns in Maritime Canada. Outline of Chapters Chapter 1: Introduction provides an introduction and brief history of the Transition Towns movement, both the western hemispheric movement and local Transition groups under study in the Maritimes, Canada. Chapter 1 discusses how the Transition Towns movement constructs its narrative by framing issues concerning the global crises of peak oil, climate change and economic instability. Chapter 1 introduces the sociological theories that will be used to analyze the narrative of the Transition Towns movement, including Luhman’s system theory and theory of ecological communication; power analysis, and social movement theory. Chapter 1 presents the questions for research, framed by systems theory, power analysis, social movement theory, and critical systems theory, and proposes to apply that analysis to the political discourse of local groups in Maritimes Canada. Chapter 2 examines how Transition Towns’ narrative is framed by world historical conditions of globalization and localization, how this world historical process shapes the meanings and geographic scales of the global, local and translocal. Chapter 2 presents Joseph Tainter’s theory of the collapse of complex societies, examines the crisis of globalization, and how those issues are framed within the narrative of Transition Towns. Chapter 3 presents theories of Power and Political Systems, building primarily on the work of Avelino and her study of power in ecology and transition movements, systems theories of power, politics-as-process drawn from several theorists of transition movements, critical evolutionary systems theory, and the power analysis of auotonmism and horizonatalism. Theories of power are used to conduct a power analysis of Transition Towns’ movement, to identify its ideology and praxis as a movement, and examine whether it has the capacity for impact related to its stated goals. Chapter 4 presents sociological theories of Social Movements, systems theories of social movements, autonomism and horizontalism. Chapter 4 uses theories of social movements to identify and describe Transition Towns as a social movement. Chapter 5 presents Luhmann’s theory of Ecological Communication as the major theoretical basis for understanding the narrative and political discourse of Transition Towns. Chapter 6 presents Narratives and Frames of Transition Towns, how it constructs its narrative based on how it frames the issues concerning globalization, localization, peak oil, climate change, economic instability, and the unique memes generated from that narrative which shape the movements’ communications and activities at western hemispheric and local levels. Chapter 7 presents the Methods by which this research conducts a narrative analysis of Transition Towns as a western hemispheric movement, and how local movements, building on and diverging from that narrative, construct a political discourse at the local level. Chapter 8 presents Three Case Studies of local Transition Towns groups in the Maritimes, Canada and their political models, focusing primarily on autonomism. Chapter 9 presents the discourse analysis of local Transition groups under study in Maritimes, Canada, yielding a political discourse of Transition Towns. Chapter 10 concludes the research by answering the research questions, summarizing the political discourse of Transition Towns, presenting a power analysis of the movement and its prospects for impact sufficient to reach its stated goals. Application to Research Although this research ultimately focuses on the narrative of Transition Towns and its political discourse, it does so by considering the narrative in the context of globalization and its systemic social conditions. This study examines the socio-ecological conditions for the Transition movement, its power dynamics, its operation as a social movement, its communicative functions, and how all of these factors shape its narrative and political discourse. Ch. 2. Globalization and Localization Transition Towns defines its impetus for organizing as a response to the globalized crises of peak oil, climate change, and the global financial crisis. These triple global crises create and shape ecological inequalities, i.e. differential impacts of climate disruption, fossil fuel constraints, socio-economic inequality and environmental impacts. The movement interprets these triple crises as impacting localities, towns, neighbourhoods, and rural sub-regions. Transition Towns bills itself as a relocalization movement. It attempts to strengthen local economies and re-embed the economy into local exchange values and cultures. This study begins by examining claims about the globalization of capitalism, and its construction of the local. Then I argue that both the “global” economy, and the “local” response to it, can both be understood as translocal phenomena. Globalization Defines the Local Luhmann said that the social system was global (1997); but he offered no conception of a localized social system. In terms of systems theory, local could be understood as a subsystem of the globalized social system. The local subsystem is not exactly a hologram of the larger system. As a subsystem, it differentiates itself from the system as a whole, through its localized history and culture, and local terrains and environments. Each local subsystem has common elements with other localities and the system as a whole, the main one being integration with the global economy. Yet there are unique elements and unique configurations of common elements that make each locality distinguishable from others as “local.” Giddens: Global Modernity In The Consequences of Modernity (1990) Giddens defined modernity as a global system, and as a globalizing process, saying further that this globalizing process constructs the experience of the local. Giddens proposed that modernist social development involves reflexivity, the deliberate construction of the local in response to globalizing conditions (Giddens, 1994). Transition Towns defines the central crisis that it responds to as a crisis of globalization, i.e. as a globalized system of production based on an abundance of cheap and powerful fossil fuel energy that makes the globalized production and distribution of goods (shipping, truck, rail) and services (air travel) economically feasible. Giddens defines globalization as linking localities: Globalisation can…be defined as the intensification of world-wide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them. Local transformation is as much a part of globalisation as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space. (Giddens 1990, p. 64). Giddens conflates modernity and globalization as different descriptions of the same historical process. He defines modernity, the epoch, and globalization, the social process, in terms of phenomenology, as an experience of the globalizing process and the way it shapes the experience of the local. Modernity involves a decisive break with the past in the experience of time and space, which he calls disembedednes and distanciation: Modernity is inherently globalising—this is evident in some of the most basic characteristics of modern institutions, including particularly their disembededness and reflexivity…The conceptual framework of time-space distanciation directs our attention to the complex relations between local involvements (circumstances of co-presence) and interaction across distance (the connections of presence and absence). In the modern era, the level of time-space distanciation is much higher than in any previous period, and the relations between local and distant social forms and events become increasingly “stretched.” Globalisation refers essentially to that stretching process, in so far as the modes of connection between different social contexts or regions become networked across the earth’s surface as a whole. (Giddens, 1990, p. 64). In modernity, time is abstract time, clock time; space is also abstracted, globalized, separated from “place,” which until modernity had been specified by the local reckoning of time embedded in the localized events of a place. Time and space thus become disengaged from each other; time can speed up or slow down, while space expands and is distanciated from personal and local experience. Giddens gives the example of the train schedule as a time-space abstraction: a train (or airline) schedule, is organized as clock time measured over vast distances, abstracting both time and space. (Giddens, 1990). Disembedding/Remebedding Giddens described the experience of modernity as disembedding; “Let me now move on to consider the disembedding of social systems. By ‘disembedding’ I mean the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.” (Giddens, 1990, pp. 21.) The disembedding of globalized social processes from local control requires an increase in trust, which he defines as an “abstract trust” in symbolic tokens and expertise: “All disembedding mechanisms, both symbolic tokens and expert systems, depend on trust…Trust here is vested, not in individuals, but in abstract capacities. Anyone who uses the monetary token does so on the presumption that others, whom she or he never meets, honour their value.” (Giddens, 1990 p. 26). The increased demand for trust in expert systems also increases the exposure of the individual and society as a whole to risk, which Giddens says is another feature of modernity. Giddens (in Waters 2001) describes how individual lifeworlds and interpersonal relationships are shaped by the global context, felt as the erosion of the difference between public/global and private/local worlds: This differentiation is registered in the well-known sociological distinctions between life-chances and lifestyles, gesellschaft and gemeinschaft, public and private spheres, work and home, and system and lifeworld. The separation was largely accomplished by boundaries in time and space but because accelerated globalization annihilates time and space, the distinctions can no longer apply.(Waters, Globalization 2001). Disembedding removes the sense of the familiar from the context of local relations. But Giddens also describes a process of reembedding, which builds trust in expert systems: “Reembedding refers to the processes by means of which faceless commitments are sustained or transformed by ‘facework' (Goffman)…Reembedding in such contexts… connects confidence in abstract systems to their reflexively mobile nature, as well as providing encounters and rituals with sustain collegial trustworthiness.” (Giddens, 1990, p. 124). What is reembedded is an insertion of parts of the globalized system into the local context, thus creating a blended experience of the global and local, the globo-local. Expert Systems Expert systems are cybernetic systems that operate with dense, complex and rapid information networks. Expert systems are necessitated by disembedding social relations from the local context, but also intensify the disembedding process. Expert systems are perceived as alienating for localities and tend to de-skill populations who then cannot rely on themselves but are dependent on ‘expert’ opinion. (Giddens, 1990, p. 28). Localities Giddens saw “the local” as an emergent phenomena defined by globalization: “local transformation is as much part of globalization as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space” (Giddens 1990, p. 64). Appadurai also defines “the local” in terms of phenomenology: the local is a “structure of feeling” rather than an existing social form, for which Appadurai uses the term “neighborhood”. The neighbourhood is drawn into the dominant context of the nation-state, through transnational movements and diaspora. (Appadurai,1996: 188–189, Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World). Robertson defines globalization as the process of compressing the spatial and temporal coordinates of the world, whereby localities become more closely linked. As localities are linked they are also “invented” and “imagined” (Robertson, 1995, p. 25, Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World). Stuart Hall sees the ‘return to the local’ as a response to the pressure of globalization, leading to the invention of new localities and identities. The local is what people return to when they no longer understand the global. (Hall, 1991, p. 33, Scales of a Local: The Place of Locality in a Globalizing World). The distanciation and disembedding of social relations from local context, and the reliance on trust in globalized expert systems, shapes the experience of the local. It is experienced as a ‘hollowing out’ of the local: a shrinkage of local culture which weakens the experience of shared meanings and thus weakens social connectedness and resilience. Globalization creates the sense that the forces which shape local life and experience—natural resources, communication and culture, economy, and political decision-making—are controlled at levels and scales far beyond the reach or knowledge of localities. Dependence on life-support systems that are controlled at distant and globalized centres of political-economy, which forces localities to rely ever more on trust as a way of coping with the loss of control, and exposes to them to a greater sense of risk. Risk, Trust and Security Giddens brings together the modern experience of trust, risk and security, which are intertwined globally and locally in environments of risk. Security is determined by a balance of risk and trust. Environments of risk and regimes of security are a response to particular kinds of dangers, as well as the generalized sense of risk: “There are “environments of risk” that collectively affect large masses of individuals—in some instances, potentially everyone on the face of the earth, as in the the case of the risk of ecological disaster or nuclear war. We may define “security” as a situation in which a specific set of dangers is counteracted or minimized. (Giddens, 1990 pp. 35-36). Giddens identifies the globalization of risk as increasing the sense of loss of control at the local level: The second category of globalized risk concerns the world-wide extension of risk environments, rather than the intensification of risk environments. All disembedding mechanisms take things out of the hands of any specific individuals or groups; and the more such mechanisms are of global scope, the more this tends to be so. Despite the high levels of security which globalized mechanisms can provide, the other side of the coin is that novel risks come into being: resources or services are no longer under local control and therefore cannot be locally refocused to meet unexpected contingencies, and there is a risk that the mechanism as a whole can falter, thus affecting everyone who characteristically makes use of it. Thus someone who has oil-fired central heating and no fireplaces is particularly vulnerable to changes in the price of oil. In circumstances such as the “oil crisis” of 1973, produced as a result of the actions of the OPEC cartel, all consumers of petroleum products are affected. (Giddens, 1990, p. 130). Here Giddens describes precisely the problem that Transition identifies, which is that globalization decreases local control over critical resources, which exposes localities to greater risk. It’s particularly telling that Giddens identifies the dependence on oil fuels as a risk of modernity, a central risk identified by Transition Towns. Even as resources and technologies reduce our risk to certain dangers (cold) they also increase our risk to the shock of resource depletions Application of Global Modernity to Transition Towns Transition Towns was specifically designed to imbue a sense of control over local resources to meet the needs residents of the locality, to reduce that sense of risk from dependence on distant facilities and contingencies. Transition Towns is concerned with globalization as it is experienced by localities. The movement frames the globalization of energy regimes, climate disruption, and economies, as an experience of crisis, a loss of control over what is necessary to sustain life: food, shelter, energy, culture and habitable environments. Transition Towns frames these crises as crises of globalization which weakens local resilience to collective risks. Transition Towns frames the response to this experience of global crisis with a movement to create local resilience, strengthen local social connectedness, local food production and local control over the economy and resources necessary to support life. Globalization and Capitalism. Wallerstein devised world systems theory (The Capitalist World System, 1974) as an historical explanation of the development of the “modern world system”. His theory emphasized that capitalist expansion through international trade drove the globalization process. Western society has been globalizing at least since the Roman Empire. The globalizing process shrank back during the Middle Ages, and expanded again in the world-colonizing period of the 17th century. Wallerstein described the process of globalization as the shrinkage of global spacialization through space-time compression, i.e. the experience of a “shrinking planet”. Wallerstein describes the compression of global relations as an increasing level of interdependence between national systems by way of trade, military alliance and domination, and cultural imperialism; and that the globe has been undergoing social compression since the beginning of the sixteenth century. (Wallerstein, 1974). Roland Robertson also defines globalization as a form of compression: “Globalization as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole…both concrete global interdependence and consciousness of the global whole. (Wallerstein 1992: 8, in Waters, Globalization.) Waters and Global Capitalism Malcolm Waters’ work on Globalization (2001) provides a summary of the globalizing effects of capitalism. Capitalist production has always sought to dislocate itself from the constraints of the local, and from political control, searching for optimal resources, markets and labour relations. The search for profitable resources, markets and labour relations is the same disembedding and distanciating process that drives globalization. (Waters, Globalization 2001). Capitalism encompasses ever larger territories within its global trade system and captures an expanding pool of labour power Capitalism enlarges the integration of populations into the capitalist system, as labourers and consumers. Culturally, capitalism promises not only an increase in personal and public wealth but liberation from the constraints of tradition, fostering both the process of modernization and globalization. It disembeds production from local and traditional contexts, allowing them to be recombined trans-nationally. (Waters, Globalization.) Waters also understood the process of localization within globalizing capitalism. Waters sees the turn toward community and dematerialized social movements as a reaction to the engulfment of localities into a globalized market system: “Localization implies a reflexive reconstruction of community in the face of the dehumanizing implications of rationalizing and commodifying.” (Waters, Globalization 2001). Waters expands on Giddens analysis to explain the power of globalization to shape the “local” and localized experience: [G]lobalization is not merely or even mainly about such grand, centre-stage activities as corporate mega-mergers and world political forums but about the autonomization of local lifeworlds. Globalization, then, implies localization, a concept that is connected with Giddens’ other notions of relativization and reflexivity. (Waters, Globalization p. 10, 2001). Globalization and Culture. Waters asserts that “Importantly territoriality will disappear as an organizing principle for social and cultural life; it will be a society without borders and spatial boundaries. In a globalized world we will be unable to predict social practices and preferences on the basis of geographical location.” The process of globalization of communications and media results in the disembedding of local cultures and the re-embedding (Giddens, 1990) of distant cultures into local contexts. (Waters, p. 12, Globalization, 2001). Waters notes that modernity takes the specific form of the globalization of Western culture: Globalization is the direct consequence of the expansion of European culture across the planet via settlement, colonization and cultural replication. It is also bound up intrinsically with the pattern of capitalist development as it has ramified through political and cultural arenas. However, it does not imply that every corner of the planet must become Westernized and capitalist but rather that every set of social arrangements must establish its position in relation to the capitalist West to use Robertson’s term, it must relativize itself.(Waters, Globalization 2001). Waters asserts that in the face of globalization, localities seek to make conscious decisions about the global forces that influence their lives. Transition Towns, as an ecology movement, calls for localities to assert choice and control over the impacts of globalization. The movement is primarily concerned with the loss of local control over a globalized economic and political system, and thus the lack of power to make meaningful decisions about its impact on their daily lives. It is concerned with the disembedding of the economy from local control, resources, financial flows and employment, and re-embedding the economy in local values and cultures. It is also concerned with the impact of globalized environmental, ecological and economic impacts on localities. For example, residents of St. Margaret’s Bay could not stop a shopping plaza in town, built for global corporate retail, from being built in their town, which they feared would destroy local businesses. Nor could the residents dissuade the arguably “local” but somewhat distant municipal government of Halifax from building it there. Because Transition Towns is centrally concerned with regaining a sense of control over systems that support life at the local level, it is thereby a political movement as much as an ecological one, akin to Foucault’s formulation of modern governance. Globalization and Politics. Waters theorizes that globalization involves three social spheres: economy, polity and culture; and three forms of exchange: material, power, and symbol. (Waters, Globalization). Material exchange is situated in place, in “chains of commodity exchanges in which each link typically is localized and interpersonal.” (Waters, Globalization). Power exchange extend over territories and is concerned with the control of populations. Symbolic exchange is dematerialized and dematerializing: “Symbolic exchanges release social arrangements from spatial referents. Symbols can be proliferated rapidly and in any locality.” Because symbolic production is dematerialized and instantly transmittable across the globe, symbolic exchange accelerates the process of globalization. (Waters, Globalization 2001). Political Globalization Globalization has redefined and in many ways created the modern nation-state. (Walter, Giddens). Because of the globalization of the economy and cross-border environmental impacts, governments increasingly function as global state actors that are more constrained by the actions of other nations than they are by internal sub-national politics. David Held and Anthony McGrew summarize “political globalization”: Economic and environmental globalization has not occurred in a political vacuum; there has been a shift in the nature and form of political organization as well. The distinctive form this has taken in the contemporary period is the emergence of ‘global politics’ – the increasingly extensive form of political networks and activity. Political decisions and actions in one part of the world can rapidly acquire worldwide ramifications. Sites of political action and/or decision-making can become linked through rapid communications into complex networks of political interaction. Associated with this ‘stretching’ of politics is a frequent intensification or deepening of global processes such that ‘action at a distance’ permeates the social conditions and cognitive worlds of specific places or policy communities (Giddens, 1990). Consequently, developments at the global level – whether economic, social or environmental – can have almost instantaneous local consequences and vice versa. (Held & McGrew, Globalization and Polity, pp. 5-6). In a sense, Transition Towns is a movement against the globalization of political control and its international policies and institutions, but it registers or ‘recodes’ that protest in the form of advocacy for local control over resources. Wallerstein argues for a center-periphery model of international economy and state relations. The ‘center’ is the European West, with its neoiberal market economy, located in the global North, as the economic, political and cultural nexus that semi-peripheral states conform to. Semi-peripheral states are physically adjacent to central states, often have shared histories and cultures, and intertwined economies, e.g. Canada as semi-periphery to the United States. Peripheral states and territories are often non-Western, located in the global South, have developing economies, and are historically and culturally separate from central states. Peripheral states are exploited through colonization of their labour, agriculture and natural resources. Peripheral states are integrated into the global economy as sites of industrial production that yield cheap goods and services to the centre, yet are excluded from the capital wealth derived from that production. Luhmann countered that center-periphery was only one possible configuration of the globalized social system, that others are possible. Both Giddens and Waters have emphasized the emergence of political dualism, the centralization of politics at the level of nation-state, and the co-emergence of interdependent nation-states. (Waters, Globalization 2001). The multi-centric world reflects the recent emergence of more than one global economic centre. China has emerged as an economic power that rivals that Western axis of the US, UK and Western Europe. States such as Brazil and Nigeria, that were once considered peripheral, have developed to the point of containing their own cadre of global competitors in the international trade system, creating a multi-nodal system of international trade. Wallerstein’s center-periphery model has indeed proven to be just one amongst many possible configurations of the global system. In the latest period of intense globalization, the nation-state has become primarily concerned with international relations, while domestic policy reflects greater sensitivity to its international impacts. Domestic policy is devolved to the sub-state or provincial level. Indeed many of the most critical services for life-support are the responsibility of cities and towns. States and provinces in North America are charged with providing roads, health care and education, but cities and towns manage the bulk of the infrastructure necessary for commerce and urban life. However cities and towns are legal subdivisions of the state or province, and have far less legal and budgetary control over their infrastructure than is required for effective management. Localities sit at the bottom of this hierarchy of governance, while decisions about health care, education, infrastructure, and economy are made at levels that scale up to the international level, shaped by domestic policy that is delimited by international relations. As a social movement, Transition Towns is concerned with moving decision-making down to the lowest local level, scaling up only to the level of municipal government when necessary. Globalization and Ecological Risks. The globalization of industrial, agricultural and technological processes means that the risks associated with these industries are not contained by national boundaries. Risks are not under the legal control of a single state, but are spread to populations around the globe. Risks intensify the experience of globalization. Risk is a product of globalization, but it also intensifies and accelerates globalization: Risk globalizes because it universalizes and equalizes. It affects every member of society regardless of location and class position. The reflexive character of risk, combined with its lack of boundedness in space, forces consciousness in the direction of globalization. The only possible solutions to risk are supra-national solutions: strategic arms reduction talks, earth summits, international agreements on emission reduction or the use of CFCs, nuclear weapons proliferation agreements, etc. (Waters, pp. 137-138, Globalization 2001). Confronting globalized conditions of environmental risk intensifies the experience that ecological conditions that affect localities are not under local control. In particular, global energy systems, such as fossil fuels, can create risks, scarcities, and environmental degradation that impact on localities. Localities are subjected to international agreements that contravene local laws and norms. Localities can respond by resisting or remediating those impacts, such as the local resistance to shale gas fracking or oil pipelines. But it is much more difficult for localities to construct their own energy systems that would substitute for global energy systems and provide localities with control over energy. The Translocal: An Alternative Globalization Theory Critiques of Wallerstein’s world systems theory have taken the form of theorizing the translocal. Sandra Halperin, in “Nationalism Reconsidered: the Local/Trans-local Nexus of Globalisation” (2009) argues that Western capitalist “globalization” has always been a translocal process. She argues that from its beginnings in the 16th century, capitalism has been a system of global trade. She argues that capitalism has had periods of being closely aligned with national interests and periods of free-market globalization. Halperin begins with Karl Polanyi’s thesis in the The Great Transformation (1944). Polanyi argued that before the advent of the unregulated market in the 18th century, markets of exchange were embedded in social relations of mutual support—reciprocity, fair allocation, and households—and governed by social values. The disregulation of capital in the 18th century disembedded capital from its localized social milieu, allowing unfettered trade across nations and cultures, the commodification of land and labour, governed only by profit. (Halperin, 2009). Halperin argues this was the path of capitalist development in Europe before it was practiced internationally: However, European economies were dis-embedded in another sense – one closely associated with the current campaign to dis-embed capital. Throughout the nineteenth century and even in the most protectionist and interventionist states, capital was largely invested either abroad or in home production that was largely for export. Thus, external markets were developed in lieu of internal ones, and labour functioned solely as a factor of production and not of consumption. (Halperin, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009). Halperin offers substantial historical evidence that European capitalism developed the same kind of ‘dualistic dependency’ form that it later exported to other countries. She shows that European capitalism developed “…networks of exchange among cities, sectors, and supra- and sub-regions. These networks had been built up over the course of previous centuries, creating synchronous developments among the mercantile port cities in north Africa, the Indian Ocean and south-east Asia. This development was principally driven and shaped not by nations but by circuits of exchange among powerful families, and business and merchant communities around the world.” (Halperin, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009). Halperin argues that European monarchial states preferred ‘moral’ economies, regulated local markets, labour markets, prices and the provision of subsistence needs. The new entrepreneurial class attacked and dismantled market regulations. (Halperin, 2009.) Halperin describes the shift from the ‘moral economies’ of the monarchial states to a free-trade economy preferred by parliamentary governments: “However, at the end of the eighteenth century a broad campaign to dismantle the regulations tying production and investment to local economies succeeded in ‘dis-embedding’ capitalist development and accelerating the globalization of capital.” (Halperin, p. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009.) Globalization as Dualistic Development Halperin describes this as a pattern of “dualistic development” in which domestic labour and internal markets were weakly integrated into systems of world trade, while capitalist production and trade was developed as an economy of transnational trade, “characterized by limited and weakly integrated domestic economies, but with strong linkages between expanding sectors and those of foreign economies.” (Halperin, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009). Halperin argues that local economies were weakened in order to shift resources and markets to international trade. Halperin says that this pattern of ‘economic dualism’, typical of 19th and 20th century exploitation of the third world, that creates economic and political dependency in developing countries, began first within European economies and then expanded globally: Dualism, dependence on a narrow range of export goods and a few trading partners, inequality (both of income and of land-tenure structures) and a growing gap between elites and masses; these and other features highlighted by dependency theories to describe and explain what is assumed to be an idiosyncratic contemporary third-world development were characteristic of development in Europe and around the world throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dependent, dualistic development was a model that Europeans first developed at home and then encouraged or helped to develop abroad. (Halperin, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009). Halperin argues that expanding industrial sectors of the domestic market were linked with related resource and industrial sectors of the global market. These sectors expanded through networks of linked export sectors. The expansion markets left other sectors of the domestic labour and foreign labour “weakly integrated” into capitalist global trade. (Halperin, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 9, No. 3, 2009.) Halperin argues further that the operation of these linked export sectors under nationalist control is a mid-twentieth century phenomenon. Globalizing and Localizing Effects Halperin argues that this global trade network had both globalizing and localizing effects: “It linked together the upper strata of communities around the world in a trans-local system of trade and inter-cultural exchange; but, by restricting access to the material and cultural products generated by this system, it simultaneously reinforced a separate set of rules, processes and conditions of life for the wider local population.” (Halperin, 2009). Halperin argues that is was because domestic populations with found themselves with weakened local markets, excluded from the benefits of global trade, and competing with sectoral labour in foreign markets, that domestic European citizens pushed for nationalism, organization of the nation-state, protection from foreign markets and a social welfare state at home. (Halperin, 2009). Halperin’s argument proposes that western capitalist development was not nationalist, but extra-nationalist. Capitalist development was not “global” in the sense of being regulated or supported by international trade agreements, as it is today, but translocal, linking together related sectors of market production around the globe. It was this translocal nature of capitalism that shaped “the local” in both European and foreign markets, weakening internal trade and labour markets, excluding them from integration into global trade, excluding them from the benefits of economic expansion. Furthermore, the translocal nature of capitalist development fostered a sense of loss of control over local production, domestic labour markets and domestic consumption. Transition Towns is a social movement that begin in Devonshire, UK, but has expanded, translocally to localities throughout the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, and Latin America. The typical way that we conceive of this spatialization of translocal social movements is as a ‘network’, with each localization of the movement a ‘node’ in the network. However, though Transition Towns UK calls its website the “Transition Network”, the movement has not focused on building and strengthening the translocal links between groups. For the most part, local groups are connected through the parent organization’s website, Transition Network. There have been regional and national conventions of the Transition Towns movement, but Transition UK assumes that each local group will focus primarily on it’s own projects. McFarlane: Translocal Assemblages Colin McFarlane reexamines translocal social movements and their spatializaiton as “assemblages”. He argues that localities do more than simply reproduce a copy of the translocal movement within their local context, but construct “assemblages” that integrate elements of the exterior movement with elements of the local culture and conditions: In using the prefix ‘translocal’, I am signifying three orientations. First, translocal assemblages are composites of place-based social movements which exchange ideas, knowledge, practices, materials and resources across sites. Second, assemblage is an attempt to emphasize that translocal social movements are more than just the connections between sites. Sites in translocal assemblages have more depth than the notion of ‘node’ or ‘point’ suggests – as connoted by network – in terms of their histories, the labour required to produce them, and their inevitable capacity to exceed the connections between other groups or places in the movement. Third, they are not simply a spatial category, output, or resultant formation, but signify doing, performance and events. (Colin McFarlane, “Translocal assemblages: Space, power and social movements”). Translocal assemblages are similar to Gidden’s concept of the ‘re-embedding’ of global forms into local contexts: ‘Global forms’ or assemblages are “material, collective and discursive relationships…phenomena that are distinguished by their ‘‘capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life.” (Ong and Collier, 2005, p. 7 in McFarlane). Translocal as Horizontal Exchanges McFarlane’s research describes how housing models were designed and re-designed as a process of cultural exchange, adapting the housing model to local terrain, culture and financial conditions. McFarlane describes this process of adaptation or “re-embedding” of a translocal housing model into local sites in urban slums throughout the global south as a process of “translocal assemblage.” Besides adaptation of the physical housing model, practices for local construction, training and development financing were exchanged and adapted to local conditions. Transition Towns’ parent organization, based in the UK, takes a more limited translocal approach to foster the startup of initiatives in new locations. The modus operandi of Transition Towns is to publish a set of guidelines and best practices to guide the establishment of new local chapters, but to encourage each local to develop its own projects and programs. These are determined by members of the local chapter and grounded in the conditions of the local community. Transition Towns encourages local chapters to organize their activities around selected themes: energy, environment, food, and local economy. It is left up to the local chapter to devise how to address those themes with their projects, and to respond to other issues that are specific to their locality. All three local groups in this study were concerned with local food supply and had local food projects. However, there were issues and projects that were particular to each of the sites. For instance, in Transition Bay, Nova Scotia, the group devised a project to address local water quality issues. In Fredericton, New Brunswick, the group was focused on the threat of fracking for shale gas. These local adaptations are what McFarlane would call “translocal assemblages”, such that each local is not just a node in a social movement network, but a distinct localization of the particular issues, culture, economy and politics of that movement. Hopke: The Hyperlocal Transition Towns’s parent organization functions in what Jill Hopke calls a “translocal brokerage role”. The parent organization monitors the activities of its international network of local initiatives. It does not steer local initiatives, but publishes statements on issues critical to the movement and shares examples of model projects with locals around the world. (Jill E. Hopke, 2016, “Translocal anti-fracking activism: an exploration of network structure and its content.”). Transition Towns’ parent organization in the UK functions on a translocal basis, fostering new initiatives around the global North, monitoring initiatives, promoting its views on critical issues and promoting model projects. However, the investigation of the three local chapters in the Maritimes shows that the local initiatives are not linked to each other, but function within a range that Hopke calls the “hyperlocal” (Hopke, 2016). For example, the leader organizer of Transition Bay said that he knew of several other similar initiatives around Nova Scotia. However, his own local group did not invest much time communicating with members of those other locals, nor did they invest their efforts in coordinating their activities with other similar initiatives in Nova Scotia. The closest approximation of that kind of coordination came through their presentation of a conference on rural economies in Atlantic Canada, but primarily directed towards rural communities in Nova Scotia. Rather than each local initiative seeing itself as part of a coordinated network of activity, each local functions independently and in isolation from other Transition Towns movements. Thus, the discourse of the locals tends to reflect, not a ‘translocal’ orientation, but a ‘global-local’ orientation, whereby the situation of the local is framed as dominated by the forces of the globalized economy. The local Transition group in this global/local dichotomy often operates as a ‘hyperlocal’ group that makes connections with other groups with similar goals on an as needed basis, but mainly operates as an isolated, autonomous group. The Crisis of Globalization Zygmunt Bauman encapsulates the crisis of globalization, explicated by Giddens, as a crisis of agency and power. Bauman identified the source of the crisis of globalization as the ‘divorce’ of power and politics. Bauman defined power as “the ability to get things done”, and politics, as “the ability to decide which things get done.” (Bauman, 2011) While politics is defined by nations, power no longer recognizes national boundaries. In a video made shortly before his death, Bauman provides the example of commercial jets that fly without pilots in the cockpit. The crisis of globalization is not just that you are not in control, it is that “No one is in control; that is the major source of contemporary fear.” Furthermore, he offers autonomism as a response to the crisis of globalization: “By deciding for ourselves what will be done, what we will do, we contain within our actions both power and politics.” (Bauman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Nmv-4jvSc&sns=em) Globalization and Collapse Along with a theory of the development of a global social system are theories of their collapse. These are relevant to the study of Transition Towns because the movement was founded in part on the prospect of social collapse caused by energy scarcity, climate change, and economic or political disruption. Joseph Tainter and The Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter is a cultural anthropologist who used systems theory to analyze the development and collapse of complex societies. Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is a detailed historical study of the phenomena of social collapse, from the Roman and Mayan Empires and laterally across the globe in a wide range of cultures. As an historical account, Tainter’s work grounds the study’s theoretical approach in an empirical study of historic facts. Theories of Social Collapse Tainter begins with a historical survey of civilizations that have collapsed, and a review of theories that explain collapse. He defines “collapse” as socio-political collapse (1988), in which societies with elaborate hierarchal political systems become unable to manage their economies and control their populations; and in which material production goes from being highly centralized mass production to divergent, localized production. These societies, which had developed complex centers of power and production over large regions, break down into flatter, decentralized systems with more localization over smaller areas. Furthermore, the process of collapse is a “rapid, substantial decline in an established level of complexity.” (Tainter 1988, p. 38) A collapsed society is suddenly smaller, has fewer specialized parts and has less control over the behavior of its people. (Tainter, 1988, p. 38). Tainter looks at “failure to adapt” theories that explain collapse. He says that they are superior in one respect in that they emphasize structural characteristics that cause an inability to adapt, rather than focusing on external problems that overwhelm it, such as ‘climate’ or ‘resource depletion.’ (1988.) Tainter looked at David A. Phillips (1979) theory of “inflexibility in resource allocation.” (1988, p. 55) Phillips’ theory is that high efficiency results in low resilience. Efficiency in production and management requires tight controls and tight integration across the entire range of operations. Efficiency requires high levels of system integration, over-connection and a lack of redundancy and flexibility. Highly efficient systems lack reserves for periods of sudden or extended depletion. This lack of resilience is often referred to as the “brittleness” of a system. Thus, high efficiency leads to an inability to adapt to a sudden change, and thus low resilience when faced with overwhelming crises. (1988, p. 60). Tainter discussed Elman Service’s (1975) Law of Evolutionary Potential: evolutionary progress is inversely related to evolutionary potential. The more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage—the smaller its evolutionary potential for passing to the next stage. (1988, p. 56) Over-adaptation results in fixation at a particular stage. Successful complex societies become locked into their adaptations, and are easily bypassed by the less specialized societies. More flexible peripheral societies gain an advantage over the fixed center. (1988, p.56) Colin Renfrew (1972) theorized that under stress, complex societies lack the ability to diversify, to become less specialized. As societies increase their specialization by adaptations to complex problems, they become more inflexible, in a positive feedback loop. (1988, p. 58) Guglielmo Ferrero (1914) examined excessive urbanization. He maintained that a loss of population and farm labour from the rural areas and mass migration into cities leads to underproduction of food and fibre, and an excess urban labour force that cannot support itself. (1988, p. 58). Tainter also examined conflict theories of collapse. Eisenstadt (1963) identified conditions in complex societies that lead to unmanageable conflict: 1) the extravagance of elites which leads to resource depletion; 2) faulty administration of complex problems; 3) problematic distribution of power among groups and regions; and 4) competition among elites. (1988, p. 65-66) Dynasties develop in complex societies: elites become ever more addicted to luxuries and security; taxes are raised until productivity declines and the polity implodes. Societies develop a plutocracy: elites become ever more addicted to building financial wealth, luxuries and security; profits are concentrated among the plutocrats while public spending declines until the lower classes can no longer afford the goods the elites produce; employment shrinks, as does the economy, except for the richest. (1988, p. 65-66). Tainter’s Theory of Collapse Tainter next describes his theory of collapse, which he defined as the “marginal productivity of sociopolitical change.” (1988, p. 91) Tainter linked energy flow and sociopolitical organization together in an equation: societies grow in complexity in proportion to energy levels and flows; societies collapse when they lack sufficient energy—in both amount and flow rate—to maintain that level of complexity. (1988, p. 92) Leslie White (1949) theorized that cultural evolution is intricately linked to the quantities of energy harvested by the human population. (1988, p. 93) There are huge differences in the energy requirements of a simple hunter-gatherer society, or simple agricultural society, and a complex industrial society. Complex societies are more energy intensive than simpler ones, and require greater energy levels per capita. (1988, p. 91) Tainter developed what might be called the ‘axiom of organizational complexity.’ As societies increase in complexity, more networks are created among individuals, more hierarchical controls are created to regulate those networks, more information is processed, there is more centralization of information flow, there is increasing need to support specialists not directly involved in resource production, and the like. All of this is dependent upon energy flow at a scale vastly greater than that characterizing small groups of self-sufficient foragers or agriculturalists.(Tainter, 1988, pp. 91-92). The result of this increasing complexity and demand for energy is that the population as a whole must allocate increasing portions of its energy budget to maintaining organizational institutions. (Tainter, 1988, p. 92) Tainter states that this energy requirement remains “an immutable fact of social evolution” whether one adopts a conflict or functionalist view of social development and collapse.” (Tainter, 1988, p. 92). Diminishing Returns on Complexity Tainter’s theory of collapse argues that the investment in complexity contains costs that diminish the benefits of complexity over time, which is known as Tainter’s Law of Diminishing Returns on Complexity: It is the thesis of this chapter that return on investment in complexity varies, and that this variation follows a characteristic curve. More specifically, it is proposed that, in many crucial spheres, continued investment in sociopolitical complexity reaches a point where the benefits for such investment begin to decline, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. Thus, not only must a population allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point, higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return. Diminishing returns, it will be shown, are a recurrent aspect of socio-political evolution, and of investment in complexity. (Tainter, 1988, p. 92). After a certain point, along the complexity curve, increased investment in complexity fails to yield proportionately increasing returns. Marginal returns decline and marginal costs rise. Complexity as a strategy becomes increasingly costly and yields decreasing marginal benefits. (Tainter, 1988, p. 93) Sociopoltical Complexity and Collapse Tainter outlines four principles that determine how complex societies collapse: 1) human societies are problem-solving systems; to solve problems, societies increase their complexity; 2) sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance; 3) increased complexity requires increased costs per capita; more complexity requires more energy; and 4) investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving strategy often reaches a point of declining marginal returns. (Tainter, 1988, p. 93). Energy Averaging Systems Tainter observed that complex societies have energy averaging systems which are “crucial in the development of densely populated, complex sociopolitical systems.” (Tainter, 1988, p. 170). As a population overshoots the capacity of its food production system, fluctuations in productivity become increasingly detrimental. By forming trading relationships, or by contributing to a hierarchically-administered regional economy, a local group can sustain itself against lean times. Temporary surpluses are converted into reciprocal obligations that are called in during times of scarcity. The scale of the production and consumption unit is raised from the local group, occupying a limited territory, to a regional economic system controlling diverse territories, resulting in an “energy averaging system.” The same process can be observed with energy production, as local sources of energy are regionalized through an electric grid; and as local fossil fuel sources are globalized into an multi-national extraction and trading system. Information Processing Information processing increases as both population and complexity increases. From Gregory Johnson, Tainter derived the principle that as the size of a social group increases, the communication demand increases even faster. Information processing increases in response until capacity is reached. After that point, information processing efficiency deteriorates, so that greater costs are allocated to processing what is less efficient and reliable. At this point information processing hierarchies develop. (Johnson, 1982). Tainter expressed the increasing demand for information processing in terms of education. A complex society that must process large quantities of information is burdened with increasing costs for education. (Tainter, 1988, p. 103). More years in education results in increasing specialization, resulting in a decreasing marginal return on investment in education. Increasingly specialized training serves ever narrower segments of the system, at ever greater costs to society as a whole. (Tainter, 1988, p. 104). Economic Growth Complex societies with large, well-developed economies have historically declining rates of economic growth (e.g. US, UK). Newcomers to economic growth tend to have higher growth rates than mature developed states (e.g. China, India). The capacity for GNP to stimulate further growth tends to decline. Technical innovation also progresses along a curve of declining marginal productivity. (Tainter, 1988, p. 108). Bureaucratic Complexity Sociopolitical control and specialization are the very essence of a complex society. Investment in bureaucratic complexity yields a declining marginal return because of the: (a) increasing size of bureaucracies; (b) increasing specialization of bureaucracies; (c) the cumulative nature of organizational solutions; (d) increasing taxation; (e) increasing costs of legitimizing activities; and (f) increasing costs of internal control and external defense. (Tainter, 1988, p. 115). The Complexity-Collapse Curve The return on investment in complexity follows a curve. Tainter does not say that social evolution carries no benefits. Rather, the marginal product of any investment increases up to that point, so that benefits increase faster than costs, and declines only after a certain point. (Tainter, 1988, p. 117). Growth in complexity carries an associated energy cost, including human energy and fossil fuel energy. A growing sociocultural system ultimately reaches a point at which investment in further complexity yields increased returns, but at a declining marginal rate. At some point, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return. When this point is reached, a complex society enters the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse. (Tainter, 1988, p. 120). There are two general factors that combine to make a society vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a declining marginal return. (Tainter, 1988). First, stress and perturbation are a constant feature of any complex society. Major, unexpected stress surges will also occur given enough time—e.g. major climactic fluctuations and war. To meet these overwhelming stress surges, society must have some kind of net reserve: excess productive capacity or surplus from past production. Stress surges of great magnitude cannot be absorbed without such a reserve. Yet a society with declining marginal returns is investing ever more of its resources in a strategy that yields proportionately less benefit. Even if the stress is successfully met, society is weakened in the process, and thus made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Second, declining marginal returns make complexity a less attractive problem-solving strategy. (Tainter, 1988). Under such conditions, the option to decentralize, that is, to sever the ties that link localized groups to a regional entity, becomes more attractive to certain segments. The population, meanwhile, must contribute ever more of a shrinking productive base to support whatever projects the hierarchy is still able to accomplish. Many of the social units that comprise a complex society perceive increased advantage to a strategy of independence, and begin to pursue their own immediate goals rather than the long-term goals of the hierarchy. Regional interdependence gives way to localized independence, requiring the political superstructure to allocate still more of its shrinking resources to legitimization and control. As this progresses, the society either disintegrates as localized entities break away, or is so weakened that its political regime is toppled militarily. In either case, “sociopolitical organization is reduced to the level that can be sustained by local resources.” (Tainter, 1988, p. 121). Examining patterns of collapse in several societies, Tainter observed that “collapse yielded at the same time both a reduction in the costs of complexity and an increase in the marginal return on its investment.” Thus the paradox of collapse is that a drop in complexity brings with it a corresponding rise in the marginal return on social investment. Collapse happens partly because it is an advantageous adaptation to a dramatic change in circumstances. (Tainter, 1988, p. 151). Populations begin to learn that devolution from complexity and from centralized hierarchy, and increased independence and de-specialization, yields at least a temporary increase in net benefit. In fact, Tainter says in several places that at first, simplification is an advantage; the base population throws off the level of sociopolitical complexity that has become too burdensome. But eventually the population once again faces the same problems that caused the sociopolitical complexity in the first place. It must either solve those problems in a different way (with a different subsidy of energy and resources) or succumb once again to those unsolvable problems. Avoiding Collapse: Energy Subsidies Civilizations have circumvented declines in marginal returns on complexity by capturing a new energy subsidy. Historically, this has been accomplished by colonizing new territories, obtaining a increase in agricultural production, labour, fuel, and other critical resources. From Rain Taagepera (1968) Tainter derived the principle that empire growth also tends to follow a logistic curve. Growth begins slowly, accelerates as the energy subsidy is partially invested in further expansion, and falls off when the marginal cost of further growth becomes too high. (1988, p. 125-126). Among modern societies, new energy sources were obtained by mining fossil fuels and developing new forms of energy (nuclear power, wind/solar). When a new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will have the potential to at least temporarily raise marginal productivity. The temporary increase in energy also vastly increases information, administration and legitimization/control costs. Ultimately, marginal returns begin to decline again. To summarize, Tainter’s Theory of collapse is that (1) human societies are problem-solving organizations; (2) sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance; (3) increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and (4) investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns. (Tainter, 1988, p. 194). Summary of Tainter’s Stages of Complexity Tainter’s stages of complexity and collapse are as follows: (1) societies first obtain the most cost-effective sources of food, energy, raw materials and information, those that are easiest to extract and distribute (Tainter, 1988, p. 194.) (2) When such resources become scarce, society must seek those resources that are increasingly costly to extract and distribute, yet which do not yield any higher returns for investment. (Tainter, 1988, p.194.) (3) Sociopolitical organizations demand increased investment from the support population to solve ever more complex problems, merely to maintain the status quo, including increased expenditure for legitimation and security of the State. (Tainter, 1988, p. 95) (4) A society that has reached this state of complexity will invariably encounter still greater problems, with dwindling resources, requiring more technological complexity to resolve. (Tainter, 1988, p. 195). (5) Declining marginal return is slow at first. The marginal return on investment in complexity begins to fall, gradually at first, then with increasing speed, at which point the society becomes vulnerable to collapse. (Tainter, 1988, p. 195). (6) Major stress surges, such as peak oil, climate change, and financial collapse, draw from society’s declining current reserves, leaving the society depleted and subject to even greater threat of collapse from subsequent stress surges. (Tainter,1988, p. 195). Collapse as Positive Adaptation. Tainter argues that highly complex societies, especially today’s globalized society, are an anomaly in human history. They are extraordinarily energy intensive and expensive to maintain. For most of history, human societies operated at a much simpler level, and will return to that simpler level as the marginal return on investing in complexity declines. (Tainter, 1988, p. 193). Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity…To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains…This notion is clearly obviated: under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response. Such societies have not failed to adapt. In an economic sense, they have adapted well…(Tainter, 1988, p. 198). In fact, Tainter says in several places that at first, simplification is an advantage. The ‘support population’ throws off the level of sociopolitical complexity that has become too burdensome. Both Transition Towns and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement are current examples of support populations ending their support for complexity. Tainter assigns considerable agency to the ‘support populations’ that revolt and refuse to support complexity, resulting in political conflict: “When the marginal cost of investment in complexity becomes noticeably too high, various segments increase passive or active resistance, or overtly attempt to break away.” (Tainter, 1988, p. 196) More recently, the Brexit movement and populist nationalist movements are the result of support populations no longer supporting the increasing costs of globalization, while social goods, in the form of social welfare, employment and cheap goods, decline precipitously. Sociopolitical Collapse Tainter’s thesis is that civilizations collapse when they collapse sociopolitically. It’s not technological collapse; it’s not even economic in the strict sense. Tainter's theory states that the immediate cause of collapse are ‘stress surges’, and those stress surges may well be technological (techno-complexity), or resource constraints (peak oil), or environmental (climate change), or even economic (financial collapse). But in terms of the historical record, the collapse of civilizations have always been a sociopolitical collapse. Tainter argues that it doesn’t matter what technological substitutes and fixes a society comes up with, its when the sociopolitical structures become too complex to be supported (however you support them, with whatever technology or economic systems), they are too brittle, too stressed, and they will fail. Civilization is going to collapse sociopolitically before it ever collapses technologically; and before climate change wipes it out. Energy, economy and environment comprise the massive stress surges that will trigger sociopolitical collapse, but they are triggering collapse in an already overly complex and brittle society. So the collapse that will happen first and foremost is exactly what we are already seeing around the globe right now: sociopolitical collapse, i.e revolution, social disintegration, mass refugee populations, mass migration, starvation, mass unemployment, and finally, mass political mobilization of the “supporting population” against the elites. As civilizations collapse sociopolitically, as they disintegrate, they also lose the capacity to fabricate and maintain complex social and technological systems. At present, global corporations, which form the operational system of globalized society, are now extracting so much wealth (labour, energy, savings) from the ‘support population’ that people all over the world are rebelling against both States and Corporations. States mediate demands between Corporations and the support population. States are also the policing and legitimizing institution that provides a controlled linkage between Corporations and the support population. Yet States everywhere are on the verge of political collapse. The support populations will no longer support the complexity of a system that deprives them of material and social security. When States collapse politically, the support population is left to fend for itself. However, as Tainter also says, initially there will be an advantage to throwing off the top layer. Support populations can reserve their labour and whatever resources they have left for their own survival. The risk and threat of reduced recourses for subsistence is one that local communities understand implicitly, and local food production is often the first goal of relocalization movement. Tainter notes the primacy of the food supply for support populations: Although collapse is an economic adjustment, it can nevertheless be devastating where much of the population does not have the opportunity or the ability to produce primary food resources…Collapse for such societies would almost certainly entail vast disruptions and overwhelming loss of life, not to mention a significantly lower standard of living for the survivors. (Tainter, 1988, p. 209). In the Arab Spring revolts, as with the French Revolution, we saw the criticality of the food supply as a stimulus for revolt by the support population. Historically, a shortage of food, increases in the price of food, or even threats of food scarcity have been enough to cause support populations to withdraw support from the elites. Sudden Collapse vs. Slow Decline Tainter defines collapse as a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of a sociopolitical complexity. He describes the elements of a collapse to a simpler society: A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and there is less centralized control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there is lower overall coordination among individuals and groups. Economic activity drops to a commensurate level, while the arts and literature experience such quantitative decline that a dark age often ensues. Population levels tend to drop, and for those who are left the world shrinks. (Tainter, 1988, p. 193). Tainter explains that collapse, as a sudden loss of complexity, is not a slow decline. He makes a distinction between societies that slowly disintegrate and those that rapidly decline. In a situation of slow disintegration, the resources of the declining State are taken over by neighboring or colonizing States. Rapid collapse only occurs in a power vacuum, when no other socio-political apparatus can take over and manage the declining State: “Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum. Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.” (Tainter, 1988, p. 202). Collapse in a Power Vacuum Tainter argues that complex societies, especially modern technological societies, do not collapse into a state of total disintegration and chaos. We have seen examples of total collapse in countries such as the D.R. of Congo and the Sudan, in which the loss of a State structure reduces society to rule by war lords and tribal warfare, a state of continuous and violent warfare. Tainter argues that total collapse, as in the Sudan, only occurs in a power vacuum, when there is no other State entity to take over the territory in crisis and exploit its resources for its own gain. Tainter’s definition of collapse is the loss of the political structure, not the depletion of resources. The depletion of resources or the stress of climate change can provoke political collapse, but it is the loss of a political structure and subsequent power vacuum which then causes rapid collapse. Peer Polities and Globalized Societies Tainter argues that one of the reasons a society will not collapse is because it is not an isolated dominating state (like the Roman Empire), but a peer polity. A peer polity is a state that is surrounded by other more or less equal states that compete in organizational complexity and strength. (e.g. the Eurozone; Latin America; Asia-Pacific Rim). Tainter argues that in a globalized society, a vulnerable society is more likely to be taken over by a peer polity than left to collapse on its own. No nation in the peer polity can afford to collapse, that is, reduce it’s complexity to a simpler level, because it will be immediately subsumed by a more powerful entity for its own use. Thus, within peer polity systems, all States must continue to compete by increasing complexity, no matter what the cost, or they will all fail together. (Tainter, 1988, p. 201). As a State declines, its resources (and territory) are taken over by another State. The current situation is that the planet is now “full”, there are complex societies and peer polities everywhere, though they are arranged as powerful regional centres and satellites. (Tainter, 1988, p. 213) When one country begins to collapse, it is quickly overtaken by another, and overall complexity is sustained. (Tainter, 1988, p. 214) Where the West, being the US, UK and Europe, is now clearly in decline (though not collapse), the East, China, South Asia, India and some of the southern countries (Brazil) are on the rise of the complexity curve and taking advantage of the West’s decline. Since they are on the rise of the curve, they have the resources to complexify where the West is on the decline of the curve and cannot afford more complexity. Tainter argues that in a condition of globalized peer polities, collapse is not possible. The three possible options are (1) absorption by a neighboring State; (2) colonization by a dominant State; (3) continued payment by the support population for the technological means to continue complexity. (Tainter, 1988, p. 213). Technological Adaptation to Globalized Collapse Tainter considers whether technological innovation can overcome the complexity/collapse curve. He argues that while technological innovation can resolve material and resource problems, it cannot resolve problems of social complexity: Economists base their beliefs on the principle of infinite substitutability. The basis of this principle is that by allocating resources to R&D, alternatives can be found to energy and raw materials in short supply…One problem with the principle of infinite substitutability is that it does not apply, in any simple fashion, to investments in organizational complexity. Sociopolitical organization, as we know is a major arena of declining marginal returns, and one for which no substitute product can be developed. Economies of scale and advances in information-processing technology do help lower organizational costs, but ultimately these too are subject to diminishing returns. (Tainter, 1988, p. 212). Thus, to attempt a steady state economy would mean that another state, on the upward curve of complexity, could take over the steady state and use it as a resource base. He argues that proposals for steady state economies, economic ‘degrowth’, for a return to a simpler phase of lower-consumption and self-sufficiency, will not work: “Given the close link between economic and military power, unilateral economic deceleration would be equivalent to, and as foolhardy as, unilateral disarmament.”(Tainter, 1988, p. 214). Tainter argues that a globalized system is subject to globalized collapse. Because of globalized peer polity system, States will either have to continue investing in complexity despite declining marginal returns, or the entire global system will have to collapse together: “Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” (Tainter, 1988, p. 214). We can reconcile Tanter’s assertion that “collapse is not possible in a condition of globalized peer polity” with the possibility that “the whole globalized system will collapse together” if we consider that the system of globalization may collapse to the next lower level of complexity, which is regionalized complexity, and below that, to the level of individual States. Tainter concludes his historical survey, and projections for the future, by speculating that it is ultimately our diminishing global energy resources that will force the collapse of a globalized peer polity system. ]Recent history seems to indicate that we have at least reached the declining returns for our reliance on fossil fuels, and possibly for some raw materials. A new energy subsidy is necessary if a declining standard of living and a future global collapse are to be averted. A more abundant form of energy might not reverse the declining marginal return on investment in complexity, but it would make it more possible to finance that investment. (Tainter, 1988, p. 215). Tainter argues that without a new energy subsidy, we cannot continue to forestall a global systemic collapse. We can, however, use our investment in a new energy resource to maintain the functional social integration that will enable the support population to adapt to the next lower level of complexity on the way down the curve. Tainter’s statement reflects the primary concerns of Transition Towns and its focus on developing a locally controlled ‘energy subsidy’ that will sustain a community through a period of collapse. Odum’s Theory of Pulsing Collapse H. T. Odum summed up the tendency of systems to collapse from the top down, in cycles of complexity and collapse, echoed in both Tainter’s study of collapse and Gunderson and Holling’s Panarchy: A century of studies in ecology, and in many other fields from molecules to stars, shows that systems don’t level off for long. They pulse. Apparently the pattern that maximizes power on each scale in the long run is a pulsed consumption of mature structures that resets succession to repeat again. There are many mechanisms, such as epidemic insects eating a forest, regular fires in grasslands, locusts in the desert, volcanic eruptions in geologic succession, oscillating chemical reactions, and exploding stars in the cosmos. Systems that develop pulsing systems prevail. The figure above includes the downturn for reset that follows ecological climax. In the long run there is no steady state (Odum, 2007, p. 54). In other words, collapse is not failure; in fact, according to both Odum and Tainter, periodic collapse to a simpler state has the mechanism that has helped human civilization persist throughout the centuries under extremely adverse conditions. Panarchy and Collapse Tainter’s exhaustive study of collapse in civilizations around the world, from the Roman empire to present cultures, showed a similar pattern to that of Gunderson and Holling’s Panarchy (2002). Social systems grew into empires, building themselves up the point of dominance over many tribes and ecosystems, extracting ever-increasing resources and labour from subjected populations. This is comparable to Panarchy’s conservation phase. At some point, the empire can no longer afford the cost of further territorial and population control, a cost that he called the “marginal return on investment in complexity”. (Tainter, 1998) Without the ability to extract more resources from its territory, empires enter an often long crisis stage where they are destabilized by dwindling resources, attacks from competing populations outside the empire, and rebellion from support populations. Successive waves of catastrophic shocks, including environmental crises (drought, disease) drain the remaining resources and overwhelm the empire’s capacity to maintain complex functioning. They can no longer afford the wars, or the political and administrative costs, and enter socio-political collapse. It is at this stage, roughly corresponding to phase space and bifurcation stages of chaos theory, and the omega and alpha stages of Panarchy, that a new evolutionary path becomes possible for support populations at the lower end of the heirarchy or panarchy, organized around a new attractor or social organization. Crisis, Complexity and Collapse and Transition Towns The narrative of Transition Towns is concerned with the “crisis of globalization”, which is felt almost as an existential crisis. Globalization provokes an existential crisis felt as the fear of the collapse of systems necessary for survival and organized social life, and as the decimation of “the local”. There is a sense that “we may not make it” as a human species through these mutually intensifying crises, of energy, economy, ecology and inequality. Transition Towns as a social movement is primarily concerned with helping localities to face that existential crisis, to develop the social resilience to persevere through whatever adverse conditions wash over their communities. Central themes in the narrative of the Transition Towns movement concern the unsustainability of the globalized economy and a globalized and overly complex civilization. The increasing complexity of global production and trade, governance, information and security systems require ever-increasing energy inputs that are unsustainable, both due to the increasing demands for energy, and the decreasing supply of high-density fuels like oil and natural gas. This dependence on distant energy resources and governing structures (both corporate and state) removes control of resources from the governance and economies of localities and municipalities. As local resources are depleted, and distant resources become more expensive and risk prone, localities feel the pressure to withdraw their support for social complexity and globalization, and demand more control over resources in their localities. The Transition Towns narrative is focused on the globalization of systems and the unsustainabilty of those systems. It offers an new narrative in which localities develop their own resources—social, economic and energy resources—at the local level. It is ultimately a narrative of local governance vs. global governance. Local Transition organizers in the Maritimes made numerous references to problems and risks posed by globalized systems of energy, particularly fossil fuels, climate change, and economic crisis. The movement defines their organizing work as building ecological resilience to these crises in their local communities. Ch. 2: Application to Research This chapter examined the epoch and process of the globalization of capitalism in modernity, primarily based on Gidden’s theory of globalization and modernity. The chapter examined how the process of globalization creates various localities, the ‘local’, the ‘translocal’, and the ‘hyperlocal.’ The chapter examined how the process of globalization creates a sense of distanciation, disembedding, risk and trust experienced at the local level as loss of control over local and global resources.The chapter examined how the process of modernity and globalization produces overly complex societies that become vulnerable to collapse, based primarily on the collapse theory of Joseph Tainter. The chapter explained how these globalized conditions and crises shaped a narrative of crisis framed by three primary issues: ‘peak oil’, climate change and economic disruption, and how Transition Towns formed as a response to those perceived crises.  Ch. 3 Power and Political Systems Systemic Power This section focuses on power, the evolutionary nexus of energy and information, as the process that generates complex societies and social change. This study presents several theories of political sociology to understand social power as polyvalent, i.e. emerging in diverse social forms. Each of these theories of power is used to identify the particular and diverse kinds of power developed by locally-based ecology movements. Odum: Thermodynamic Power. Since the groups under study frequently employ a thermodynamic model of power, this study presents power as an emergent property of physical-social systems. Cybernetic sociology posits that Information controls and directs energy, which is power, towards a particular goal, which is work. In Environment, Power and Society (1971), H. T. Odum discusses the ecology of power. Odum defines power as “the flow-rate of useful energy” and defines work as “the flow of energy driving a useful process.” (Odum 1971, p. 26). Odum defines the principle of energy degradation that some energy is lost as waste heat in the process of doing work; it exists but it cannot be organized to do more work. However, potential energy, the amount of energy available to continue processes in the future, is completely lost. Odum describes three kinds of work: storing work, which can only store 50% of the total energy used; processing work which occurs as “power flows from the potential energy source and passes through the system, arranging matter but effecting no storage and no final acceleration” (Odum 1971, p. 32); all energy is degraded as waste in this process; no energy is stored (Odum, 1971). The third kind of work involves the acceleration of objects against inertia, which releases potential energy from its storage and transforms it into kinetic energy. This form of work does not involve a degradation of energy into a heat sink; energy is retained as kinetic energy. Odum states that processing work is large proportion of the work that is done in human societies. (Odum, 1971). Only processing work involves an energy loss into a heat sink, and is what he calls a true energy transformation. Odum says that no energy is stored in the process, which means that what is stored in this process is information, but the energy used to store it is exhausted. Thus, social systems require a continuous influx of new energy to continue their process of self-organization. Furthermore, Odum said that human information, including human language, was the most embodied form of energy on the planet, i.e. the most transformed energy. Odum states that systems tend to maximize energy throughputs, and only secondarily maximize power efficiency, what Odum calls the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, or the Maximum Power Principle. (Odum 1971). Humans and human societies are the ultimate power maximizers. Information controls and directs energy (power) toward a purpose (work) in what I call the cybernetic cycle. We can look at Abel's “Heirarchy of World Energy” diagram (Abel, Tom, in Logan, M. 9-2012) , to trace how energy and information move through the social system. Moving from left to right, the diagram shows flows of energy, or eMergy, as it is transformed into more complex embodied forms. However it doesn't show emergent levels. It depicts transformations as if it were one continuous flow from solar energy to "legal codes." But there are stages of emergence that structure these flows, transformations that happened over tens of thousands of years. Solar power produces plants, which leads to human agriculture as an emergent stage. Agriculture creates the possibility of complex civilizations, including learning and cultural complexity at various stages of development. Complex civilizations create conditions for the development of fossil fuels and technology, which makes possible an advanced technological society. Finally, the knowledge sector grows until it becomes the dominant system of the planet. Unfortunately, what is missing from the diagram is "economic" and "scientific" data, which are the information sectors that control most of the human activity on the planet, and reshape the entire terrain of minerals and living things. Moving from right to left on the diagram are the backward pointing arrows, which depict what I call the cybernetic cycle. (Bartone, S. Oct. 15, 2012) At the point of agriculture, developed by human intelligence, energy is transformed into a civilization that can produce and store information. From that point on, at each successive stage, more information and energy is generated and stored in more complex forms, in cultural products and institutional routines. But knowledge and information is also deployed backwards demanding, extracting and controlling more energy from the root sources (solar, plants and fossil fuels) in order to drive the transformation forward to new stages of emergence and new levels of complexity. At the end point, human information in the form of economic and scientific data is controlling the entire chain of energy and materials, continuously demanding and extracting more energy, and continuously driving the production of culture and institutions that store more information. (Bartone, S. Oct. 15, 2012). It is essential, then, to understand power, i.e. the use of information (a highly transformed energy) to control and direct all other physical and social systems, as the most important form of energy/information in human social systems. Networks of Power Mann’s most famous statement is that “societies are constituted of multiple overlapping and intersecting networks of social power.” (Mann, 1986, p.1). Randall Collins explains Mann’s power network theory: “Networks are inherently processual; they exist as long as and just to the degree that action flows through them.” (Collins, 2006, p. 23). Schroeder calls Mann’s theory organizational materialism, that power is not a reified concept, but an actual practice. Organizational materialism is “the idea that ideology, like the other sources of power, is always contained within the reach of networks… briefly put, if it is not in a network or in an organization, it can’t do anything. (Schroeder 2006, p. 6). Jack Snyder, in his comment on Mann’s model of the state, focuses on Mann’s theory of the State as an emergent network of power. Snyder says that Mann documented historic “spurts of power” which occur “when interstitial and cross-boundary networks form around a power ideology that unleashes a qualitative leap in the mobilizing, organizing potential for social cooperation on a broader scale.” (Mann, 1986, p. 3). (Snyder, 2006, pp. 306-307). Snyder summarizes Mann’s theory of ideological power: An ideologically animated expansion of social power depends on the coming together of a latent potential for collective action in a social network, the motivation of a group of entrepreneurs to organize that collective action, and their provision of a normatively infused ideology that effectively overcomes barriers to collective action. (Snyder, 2006, p. 322). Mann identified two forms of ideological power: 1) sociopolitically transcendent, which is a diffuse influence spread a large populace and territory; and 2) immanent morale, which is intensely focused within an organization or sub-region. (Schroeder 2006, p. 5) Mann further distinguishes two types of power in social movements: collective and distributed. (Schroeder 2006, p. 5) This last distinction is critical to understanding the type of social power that dominates post-industrial capitalist democracies. Collective movements tend to massify individuals who only have power insofar as they congregate and act together, a typical example being labour unions. Distributive social power is typical for late capitalist democratic states, where the various forms of power are spread through individuals and organizations that can act independently of each other. (Schroeder, 2006). John Law (1992) uses Actor Network Theory to propose that social actants create a ‘false gestalt of power relations. Objects connected in a network of relationships makes certain objects appear ‘whole’ or emergent, but that appearance of wholeness is really a temporary effect, or punctuation of network relations. Law examines what appear to be the continuous logistics of organizations that are really discrete relays of signals from object to object, which may be disrupted at any time: Looked at in this way organization is an achievement, a process, a consequence, a set of resistances overcome, a precarious effect. Its components – the hierarchies, organizational arrangements, power relations, and flows of information – are the uncertain consequences of the ordering of heterogeneous materials. So it is that actor-network theory analyzes and demystifies. It demystifies the power of the powerful. (Law, 1992, p. 389). Law’s theory extends the concept of networks of power by laying bare the network mechanism that by its operation brings it into effect. Law argues that the power to control and direct circumstances exerted by any actant on others is merely an ‘effect’ or punctuation of the elements of a network that appear as a continuous whole, and which by this punctuation also conceals it’s discontinuity and vulnerability. By seeing through this punctuation, one can discern the mechanism of the network and realize that networks of power are not impervious. Both Mann’s and Law’s concept of networks of power are potentially useful to the study of systemic power. Luhmann (1991) defined the internal operations of subsystems as networks of communication, but he emphasized functional self-organization rather than foregrounding network operations. For Luhmann, networks are not generic but are differentiated by their functional coding. With that qualification, I can include an analysis of the way that networks of communications shape systemic interactions in this study of ecology groups. Political, social and economic power is not limited to governments or the capital class. Nancy Fraser confirms that non-governmental actors operate beyond the political power of nation-states: “No longer nation-state-centered, today’s social ordering works through the powers and wills of a dispersed collection of entities, including states, supranational organizations, transnational firms, NGOs’ professional associations, and individuals.” (Fraser, N., 2003, p. 168 in Wagler, R., 2009) Power—political, social and economic—is distributed through these sub- and supra-national and global organizations. Analyzing power relations systemically, as does Nietzsche, Foucault and Luhmann, allows one to observe where social relations generate power outside of the economic and formal political system, and to observe the complexity of power in its many forms. Niklas Luhmann: Cybernetic Power. Luhmann proposed that power was systemic and operated as a generalized medium of communications that constrained the actions of others. Luhmann argued that power is not a quality that is possessed by another or transmitted from one to another. It is a generalized medium of communication, an emergent condition of complex systems in which selections for communications and actions must be constrained and regulated: Power is observed as an emergent solution to a specific evolutionary problem, that due to escalating societal complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to rely on a situational congruence of interest for the regulation and conditioning of contingent selections. In this situation, the development of power as a way of regulating contingency ‘becomes an unavoidable priority for further evolution’ (Luhmann, 1979, p. 116 in Borch, 2005, p. 160). Power is a medium of communicative selection that solves the problem of double contingency, that one can base his or her actions on the probable actions of another: “Thus, the function of the medium of power is to render probable that ego uses alter’s action as a premise for his/her own action, or, to put it differently, to motivate ego to condition his/her action by alter’s action.” (Luhmann, 1997, p. 355, in Borch, 2005, p. 159). Luhmann makes an important distinction here that one does not transmit power, nor by exercising power, does one deplete or give up power. (Borch, 2005). The medium of power works as a structural coupling between functional objectives and sanctions for selection (reward or punishment). It works as a negative sanction when the choice is between following a command or choosing its alternative, a negative sanction. (Luhmann, 1997, p. 356 in Borch, 2005). However, in relations of power, a gain or loss of power for one in the relationship does not necessitate a gain or loss of power for the other. Thus power is not a zero-sum game: Luhmann questions this assumption and argues that an adequate theory of power must be able to take into account that power often increases one place without leading to a parallel loss elsewhere. Indeed, as Luhmann demonstrates, organizational power increases simultaneously among both superiors and subordinates when their internal relations intensify. (Luhmann,1979: 179–82 in Borch 2005, p. 157). Luhumann said that power is distributed throughout the social system as a medium for constraining selections. In different subsystems, with different functions, power has different forms, i.e. makes different selections. (Luhmann, 1997). Since subsystems of the social system are unequal in size and influence, they are unequal in power; thus social inequality as power results from a complex social system organized by functional differentiation. Luhmann said that power was the symbolic medium of communication for the political subsystem. The function of the political subsystem is to produce collectively binding decisions when, due to conflicting goals, such decisions cannot be made within or between other functional subsystems. (Lange and Schimank, 2004). Luhmann proposed that the modern state (as a subsystem) consisted of three further subsystems: party politics, public administration, and the public. The function of party politics is to cultivate the support of the public and provide legitimation for the decisions of the administration. The function of public administration is to apply the laws and policies of the state according to its own objectives. The function of the public is to vote for or support the various programs and policies put forward by the parties and the administration. The public does not put forward its own demands but merely approves or disapproves of those that are offered. The interaction of these three subsystems generates a cycle of power. (Lange and Schimank, 2004). Luhmann proposes a second cycle of power in which special interest groups lobby for the specific demands of corporate interests and advocacy groups with administration. The administration makes decisions based on these demands and then presents them to the public and the parties for approval and legitimation. This tends to cause two problems: 1) the administration is overloaded with specific demands; and 2) political parties lose their influence and legitimizing function. (Lange and Schimank, 2004). Lumhmann applied this model of the modern state to the problem of inclusion in the welfare state, saying that modern improvements in social development implied that life should improve in more sectors for more people and equally. (Lange and Schimank, 2004). Modern states strive to include more interests within the scope of the welfare state to a point that strains the functional capacity of the state. Modern states promise to include satisfying more of these interests, but often fail to do so, or delegitimize inclusion, rejecting the welfare state and shrinking the state to one of optimizing the market economy. Luhmann (1993) proposed that it is the function of political systems also to resolve conflicts over collective risks, or uncertainty about future impacts on society. Luhmann’s thesis on risk, especially risk as the subject of social movements, is highly applicable in the discussion of an ecology movement like Transition Towns. That movement’s whole raison detre is the assumed risk and danger of peak oil and climate change and its effects on local communities. It is a movement oriented towards ameliorating possible future conditions, and therefore Luhmann’s thesis on modern social movements as time bound and anticipating risky futures is highly relevant. Time binding is making possible future conditions binding on present decisions and actions. Luhmann’s thesis also includes public advocacy around the theme of ‘inequality’, but he frames it as conditions that lead to an unequal future. Because Transition Towns is an ecology movement that also address issues of social inequality, his thesis is also highly applicable to study of that movement. Luhmann’s thesis analyses the connection between concerns about inequality and a risky future. He sees these two themes as the dominant forms of public advocacy, but he also notes an emphasis on the ecological issue (risk) over the equality issue in contemporary social movements. (Luhman, 1993). The systemic concept of power as a relational and emergent property allows one to analyze structures of power, not as directly linked to the control of gross levels of energy (oil, electricity) in a linear fashion, i.e. thermodynamic reductionism, or directly generated by economic power in a linear fashion, i.e. economic reductionism, but to trace the phenomenon of power as grounded in a set of relations (social practices) that emerges from the complex interactions in discursive subsystems (economy, politics, technology, environment) in a social system. It allows one to analyze power not solely as a top-down imposition of a hierarchy, but as a property distributed throughout the social system, generated by mutual interactions, practices and communications and embedded in emergent institutions. Foucault: Power/Knowledge H. T. Odum presents a thermodynamic model of systemic power that is concerned with transformations from grosser forms of energy to more concentrated forms of energy, culminating as information in it’s most concentrated form. Luhmann presents a cybernetic model of systemic power, conceived of as a system (or network) of communications that constrain the ‘selections’ or choices of others. Between these two typologies, a third model can be constructed as the nexus of thermodynamic and cybernetic power. Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge presents a model of power that bridges these two forms of systemic power. Foucault proposes a theory of power as the field of relations that both produce and constrain the subject. Disciplines of professional practice exert institutional power that define and shape the physical and psychic condition of the subject, while discursive power defines what is said to be ‘true’ about the subject. (Foucault, 1980). Thus, power/knowledge connects the physical (the body) and psychic realms, and integrates these with the communicative or cybernetic realm as discourse. The resulting knowledge, or information, becomes the ultimate transformation, not only of thermodynamic power, but of social power, that in turn controls all the material systems on the planet through the cybernetic cycle. This model is proposed as a more thorough rendition of the transformation of thermodynamic power (Odum) into the power of social relations (Foucault), culminating in the cybernetic power of knowledge, discourse (Foucault), communication and information (Luhmann). Foucault developed a theory of social and political power based on his reading of Frederick Nietzsche. Olssen (2008) identifies Foucault as a complexity theorist who viewed social practices and institutions as the outcome of historical processes. Furthermore, Foucault saw “history” as a process of reconstruction (archeology/geology) that could not be constructed according to a grand narrative, whether Hegelian, Marxist or otherwise, but that the history of any social institution was rife with ‘disjunctures’ and ‘ruptures’, i.e. chaotic processes that allowed novel and unexpected developments (Olssen, 2008). Foucault analyzed social practices that had historical antecedents that were both discursive and pre-discursive (Olssen 2008). Foucault rejected a linear notion of causation in history and instead traced the sequence of events, with each event having multiple causes and effects (Olssen 2008, p.102). “What [Foucualt] seeks to do is introduce conceptions of indeterminacy, irregularity, openness, complexity, and uniqueness as integral to his conception of the historical process.” (Olssen 2008, p.104). Following Nietzsche, Foucault proposed that relations of power are not limited to political systems, but constitute general social relations: “It was Nietzsche who specified the power relation as the general focus, shall we say, of philosophical discourse—whereas for Marx it was the productive relation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so.” (Foucault 1980a, p. 47, in Olssen, p. 97). Olssen states that Nietzsche proposed force as a space of finite power (energy), generated by an ‘economy of signification’ in which signs metaphorically recombine and replace each other in a process of ‘becoming’ or self-organization. (Olssen, 2008). Nietzsche theorized that power was not unidirectional, i.e. ‘possessed’ by one and imposed on others, but a relational field which was open and not wholly determined, and interrupted by chance. (Olssen, 2008). Olssen states that Foucault rejected a linear causality of power and demonstrated the relational quality of power, it’s ability to constrain, but by that constraint to ‘bring into being’ social practices, relations and institutions, and enabling the expansion of capacities for individuals and collectives. (Olssen, 2008). Olssen traces Foucault’s theory of power through Nietzsche: “Power, for Nietzsche, was conceived as a relation of forces within an analytics of power/knowledge/truth” (Olssen 2008, p. 97). Foucault claimed that “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” (Foucault 1977, p. 27). Shiner says that Foucault’s theory of power is a genealogy of power/knowledge (following Nietzsche) because it is organized around the chain of relationships, the descent of power, but not located within the individual subject, who is himself constituted by those power relations. (Shiner, 1982, p. 386). Genealogy is “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of events.” (Foucault 1980, p. 112). Foucault’s genealogy examines history for the “anonymous rules governing discursive practices along with the network of power relations of which those rules are a part.” (Shiner, 1982, p. 388). Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge critiques what he calls ‘the regime of truth.’ He argues the each society develops “a political economy of truth which says what kinds of discourses are true, what the mechanisms and sanctions are for distinguishing true from false, the techniques for acquiring truth and the status of those empowered to say what is true” (Shiner,1982, p. 384). It is this regime of truth that constitutes the discourses of knowledge and thus power. Within these institutions, such as prisons and medical practice, knowledge professionals obtain authority over others by possessing the credentials that are required for one’s discourse to count as knowledge, and by employing a discourse that conforms to the set of rules, concepts and vocabulary are authoritative, while the discourse of subjected persons in those institutions—prisoners, patients, laborers, students—are discredited by those same rules. Knowledge professionals are empowered to examine the subject based on their sanctioned discourse, to produce the truth about the subject and thus the subject himself. The process of examination within a discourse is a micro-technique of power that constitutes the power relation. Despite the disparity in power relations, the oppressed subject is able to exert a counter-power to the regime by resisting and challenging the regime of power/knowledge and asserting its alternative discourse. (Shiner, 1982). In Foucault’s theory, the regime of power/knowledge generates a field of power relations, practices or conduct, which shape or govern the behavior of all actors within that field (doctor/patient; guard/prisoner). For Foucault, relations of power constitute a political field of struggle where various actors attempt to structure the actions of others, who may comply, resist, or attempt to reshape the rules and dynamics of that field of relations. (Shiner ,1982). It is a politics that transpires outside the realm of state political structures and government. Christian Borch, in Systemic Power: Luhmann, Foucault and Analytics of Power (2005), examines the parallels between Foucault’s concept of discursive power-knowledge and Luhmann’s systemic theory of power. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault proposes that discipline is a distributed form of power that both constrains and produces the capacity to act. (Borch, 2005). Foucault refutes the idea of power as a ‘substance’ that can be possessed or transferred, but instead conceptualizes it as a set relations that is continuously generated through interactions and practices. To govern, or to conduct power is to “structure the possible field of other possible actions.” (Foucault, 1982, p. 790). Foucault includes disciplinary power within a triumvirate of power structures that includes sovereignty (proceeding from a sovereign or ‘the law’ in Constitutional governments), government, and discipline which work and interact simultaneously. (Borch, 2005). Foucault proposes that the subject is generated by relations of power that result in subjectification: “This form of power….applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.” (Foucault 1982, p. 781). Thus, disciplinary power operates as self-discipline, operating within the subjected individual, and by which the individual conforms her consciousness and behavior to the expectations of her network of social relations. This is both self-empowering, enabling her to initiate action on her own behalf and in concert with others, and self-limiting, as it constricts the range of behaviors she will express. Borch extends this power of subjectification to the operation of relations that reproduce the system itself: Take, for example, the governmental studies of advanced liberal modes of subjectification, where individuals are constructed as active, responsible subjects (see Rose, 999). This may be interpreted as a strategy of power which, so to speak, seeks to infiltrate the very reproduction of social systems in that it provides and advances a semantics (of rational choices) which the systems may use to reproduce themselves as (rational) action systems. (Borch 2005, p. 163). Subjectification-as-power hides this power relation to the individual and to society, which instead interprets this operation as, in Heidegger’s words, “becoming.” (Olssen, 2008). This form of power does not require negative sanctions (Borch, 2005), but is effected by positive rewards for social conformity. Borch views social cohesion as a counterpart to negative forms of systemic power propagated by the State. Social cohesion, a form of collective empowerment, empowers individuals and groups at the level of organizations. Collective empowerment is not equivalent to State power, but both emerge as relations that both constrain and reproduce the field of action. Ecology groups in particular generate collective empowerment. Foucault: Governmentality Foucault develops his thesis of the field of power relations as a theory of governmentality. He defines governmentality as the coercion of conduct within a field of possible actions: “Perhaps the equivocal nature of the term conduct is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations. For to "conduct" is at the same time to "lead" others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict, and a way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities. The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government.” (Foucault, 1982a: 789). Nikolas Rose defines govermentality, or ‘govern-mentality’, as a neoliberal form of government that realizes its political objectives “through the freedom and aspirations of subjects rather than in spite of them”. (Rose, 1996, p. 155). The power to govern is exercised in a diffused manner, through “a proliferation of discourses, practices, and techniques through which self-governing capabilities can be installed in free individuals in order to bring their own ways of conducting and evaluating themselves into alignment with political objectives”. (Rose, 1996, p. 155).This self-deportment of conduct is the mechanism for the construction of the “neoliberal subject” who is not so much “a social citizen with powers and obligations deriving from membership of a collective body, but an individual whose citizenship is to be manifested through the free exercise of personal choice among a variety of marketed options.” (Rose, 1989, p. 226).Foucault’s governmentality describes a normative power that also constrains the behaviour of groups: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick' (Foucault. 1982a, p.790). Edwin Ng (2015) describes how governmentality operates through the ideological domain comprised of the truth claims articulated by authorities in domains such as politics, economics, religion, science and medicine. It operates through the institutional domain, at locations such as the school, prison, workplace, and hospital, and within them the embedded practices that shape its objectives and organizational routines, its spatial arrangements, time schedules, and procedures of rewards or punishment. These forms of governmentality are ‘technological' in the broad sense that they calculate, direct, and orchestrate human activities towards certain goals, employing practical rationalities.” (Ng, 2015, p. 41). Foucault: Biopower Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics (2008) frames analysis of systemic power in terms of the production and control of systems necessary to sustain human life. In a series of lectures called The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), Foucualt traces the origins and effects of state control of the biological condition of the neo-liberal subject. Foucault did not invent the term biopower; he redefined it: Foucault’s use of ‘biopower’, however, marked a decisive break with all former attempts to reduce the nature of politics to fixed biological determinants. Instead, he investigated the historical process in which biological life (of the individual and the collective) ultimately emerged as the central object of political strategies…From his perspective, power has not always been ‘biopower’; rather, biopower presents a specific modern form of power dating from the 18th century and maturing in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was distinguished, first, by its concern with the preservation and fostering of individual life and, second, by its interest in the lives of populations. As such it was defined in opposition to an earlier ‘sovereign power’, which operated repressively over life. (Cooter, R., Stein, C. p. 110). Foucault intended to use biopower as a way to summarize his theories of power concerning the production of the subject through the several institutions of power that he had studied: prisons, clinics, the medical and psychiatric professions, and the knowledge disciplines. He had investigated the forms of power that produced these fields of knowledge, their related discourses and professional practices, and how these fields of knowledge/power produced the subject. In The Birth of Biopoltics (2008), Foucualt began to recast these various forms of disciplinary power as biopower, the power to produce the living subject in its physical, psychic and social forms. Several students of Foucault have noted that his concept of biopower is an under-developed theory—he only got as far as the birth of biopolitics—but it is a theory that is ripe for application in new fields. One field where Foucault’s biopower has not been applied with any great depth, and where it may have fruitful application, is in the ecology of human societies, particularly the production and control of environmental conditions. Foucault’s biopower could be expanded to frame the political discussion about conflicts over the means of the ecological production of human societies with regard to food and agriculture, natural resources, waste management, energy, land use, and climate. Foucault’s biopolitics helps construct the political analysis in three ways. First, his theory of biopolitics is that the social institutions that constitute “the subject”, e.g. discipline, discourse, knowledge and power, also construct the physical being of the subject by controlling every aspect of the subject’s physical development and maintenance. Bioppower is wielded by the capitalist system to control every resource that affects the subject’s physical being and self-production. Foucault’s theory of biopolitics contends that late capitalism turned the marxist conception of the ‘worker’ into the neo-liberal conception of homo economicus, the person whose task is to develop his own capacities as ‘capital’ and employ that for the production of his own life. Yet it is really capitalism which produces this subject, produces his needs and desires and the manner in which he ‘chooses’ to meet those needs through work. Franco Berardi (2005) extends biopower to include those mediated electronic processes that invade and construct the consciousness of the subject, what he thinks, feels and experiences. Foucault’s biopower could be understood as way to operationalize the cybernetic cycle, by which power/knowledge is deployed through social relations and information systems to control the environmental and material systems on a planetary scale. Biopower can be extended to the encompass the entire realm of productivity that produces the physical life of the subject and its needs, including the land and all natural resources, energy systems, and systems of knowledge, including biology, medicine and genetics. It’s important to note that Foucault’s theories of the subject are not about individuals but are transsubjective. Foucault is not referring to an individual but to a type of person that is produced by a certain cultural system; this also applies to collective subjects, such as ecology groups. The subjects, the systems that create them and their corresponding crises are collectively co-produced. Luhmann would say that the ‘subject’ is structurally coupled, or co-evolved, with the system that reproduces itself, and thus continues to produce the same kinds of subjects. Furthermore, Luhmann would say that this system is self-organized through social communications. The second way Foucault’s biopolitics directs this investigation is as a political theory. Foucault proposed that governments represent the interests of the public. Market applies price; government applies ‘utility’, not as an ideology, but as a technology of government. A self-limiting government internalizes the technology of deciding (validating) what is useful or not; the authority of government lies not in what it has a right to do, but whether or not it is successful in achieving a certain utility. According to free market theory, market is limited only by price, no other factors should constrain the setting of price. Government is self-limited by it’s utility to achieve or protect the interests of various persons and organizations. It has no other definition of what is in the scope of ‘government’ than interest. If people have an interest in health, then they make government at least partly responsible for providing for and protecting that interest. Market’s only interest is profit defined by price. What ecology movements try to do is instill another limit on market besides price: interest, defined as ‘natural limits’ and ‘social benefit’. Up till now markets have never taken into account that there is only so much of a resource, or their only accounting for it was price: as a resource gets becomes depleted and more scarce, it goes up in price, which makes it marginally more valuable (less the cost of extraction), until the resource is exhausted or not commercially viable. The additional interest that ecologist want to impose as a limit on markets is the preservation of that resource for future benefits to future populations, and the cost of use as expressed in waste production and treatment, e.g. toxic waste water, C02. Those costs have always externalized by markets and born by governments who reflect the interests of people concerned with ecology. However, it’s a weak interest when considered against the immediate demand for jobs, economic growth and revenue for government budgets. The additional limit that groups like Transition Towns want to impose on the market is social value, e.g. the production of local, cooperative and mutually sustaining relationships, and control over local resources as a hedge against times of scarcity or crisis, especially in an age of conflict-ridden energy resources. In this sense, it treats local resources as a commons, wherein everyone in the locality has an interest in the ecological use and preservation of a resource, but distant (non-local) persons have less of an interest. Luhmann’s theory of social movements (1993) is that their function is to bring attention to what has been excluded form the system. Ecology movements communicate that what has been excluded from the system of biopower are the impacts of waste and depletion. Price provides a signal to the market system that a resource has become scarce, but the higher price only drives the market to extract more of the resource until it is no longer economically viable. However, the cost of waste production, including excess carbon dioxide, is almost entirely excluded from the market system, unless the public brings pressure to bear on governments in the form of an interest in maintaining a balanced ecosystem, reducing resource extraction and recycling waste. The technological market system rigs the juridico-economic system to produce a certain kind of subject with a certain kind of consumptive life. Those who refuse that kind of subjectivity, that way of life, are left with proposing their demands for a different way of life as a political interest. Thus, biopolitics can be extended as an analysis of the conflict over biopower between ecology groups and elites, and how ecology groups attempt to shift the discourse of biopower through political communications. The third way that biopower frames the analysis is that ecology groups attempt to regain control over the production of their own subsistence and their relationship to the natural world, which is to say, to amass their own biopower. This aligns with Foucault’s analysis that neo-liberalism produces the neo-liberal economic subject. Foucault’s argument can be extended to say that this same regime produces the deteriorating conditions that undermine it’s own productive power. The neo-liberal subject perceives an ecological crisis framed as one that requires the subject, perhaps homo ecologicus, to either amass his own biopower and self-produce his own subsistence, his own physical life, or risk continued dependence on a failing technological system. Using Foucault’s argument, the power loss that the neo-liberal subject experiences is a loss of biopower, a loss of the capacity to continue to meet his subsistence needs and self-organize his own physical life. The subject attempts to amass biopower (e.g grow his own food) to regain his sense of capacity to maintain his own life. Furthermore, the subject is entangled in a deep crisis as he finds that his needs and wants as a neo-liberal subject are in direct conflict with his growing awareness that the material means to produce and sustain those needs are depleting and deteriorating. The neoliberal subject suffers a deep internal conflict in that he has been constructed so as to have these needs and wants, yet he also knows that the satisfaction of those needs and wants causes the deterioration and collapse of the ecological system that satisfies them. Foucault’s argument applied to ecology movements frames the movement as an attempt to realign the subject’s needs and wants and self-organize a way of life that is congruent with changes in the conditions of the material production of that life. This research will examine how ecology groups, the collective subjects of biopolitics, self-organize in response to the perceived crises of biopower. It will examine how ecology movements communicate politically to contest the elite control of biopower. Using the theory of ecological communication, (Luhmann, 1993; Bartone, 2011), ecology groups translate their concerns about ecological crises into language, symbols and codes that can be understood by functionally differentiated subsystems. Ecological communication is the process by which ecology groups shift the discourse on biopower that is controlled by other functionally differentiated subsystems, including the political and economic systems. Thus far this study has presented five forms of power: 1) power as the nexus of information and energy, directed toward a purpose or work, that controls and directs other all other human and major material systems on the planet; 2) power as a network of social relations, practices, and communications that produces and constrains the field of action that shapes individual and group behavior; and 3) power as the symbolic medium of political systems; 4) power as systemic power that constrains the communications and actions of subjects and systems; and 5) power as the biopower of political and corporate elites to produce and control the ecological conditions necessary to sustain human life. I propose these concepts of power as a way to operationalize the cybernetic cycle, by which power/knowledge is deployed through social systems to control environmental and material resources on a planetary scale. Power/knowledge and information systems are structural elements for the communications of social ecology movements and construction of their narrative frames. Power: Autonomism (Holloway) and Horizontalism (Sitrin) Contrasted with elite forms of power are John Holloway’s autonomism and Marina Sitrin’s horizontalism, forms of power used by self-organizing local groups to to contest the biopower of elites. John Holloway in Crack Capitalism (2010) defines power in very simple terms as “the power to do” (Holloway, p. 246). In it’s simple formulation, it mirrors the standard definition of power in the physical sciences, which is “the energy required to do work.” As stated above, Odum defines power as “the flow-rate of useful energy” for work, and defines work as “the flow of energy driving a useful process.” (Odum 1971, p. 26). In Ch. 30, “We are the forces of production: our power is the power of doing,” Holloway elaborates: Here it is clear that we are speaking of the power of human creativity, the power of doing, our power-to-do, our being-able-to. In capitalism, our power-to-do separates itself from us and appears as something alien, as the power of capital, or as the power of capitalist technology… Ours are the ‘productive powers of social labour'. The ‘productive power of social labour’ is the existence of our power to do under capitalism, our power to do in-against-and-beyond labour…We are the forces of production, the development of our creative power in-against-and-beyond capital. (Holloway, p. 246). Holloway reiterates this definition of power countless times throughout his thesis, and always distinguishes this power to do as different from political power, the power of capital (to coerce labour) the power of labour (to demand concessions from capital) and the power of the state. Holloway’s power to do is not valued for its power to produce necessary goods and services for material existence. The power to do is the power to produce meaningful social relations and activities that are gratifying in themselves, including one’s personal enjoyment. Holloway is especially careful to distinguish the power to do from labour power, which he calls abstract labour. Abstract labour is the production of things that are sold on the market, coerced by capital’s power over workers who cannot otherwise provide for themselves. Abstract labour is paid in wages, and makes a product that obliterates the identity of the producer, the labourer, It does not connect the worker to the recipient of his labour in a direct social relationship. Holloway defines the power to do as a movement against capitalism in as much as it is a movement against abstract labour. Holloway defines the power to do as a “refusal and other doing”. He elaborates on this in this in numerous places: “No, in this space, in this moment, we are not going to do what capitalist society expects of us. We are going to do whatever we consider necessary or desirable.” He defines the power to do as the drive towards self-determination. (Holloway, p. 21). Holloway argues that power to do does not inhere in conventional political power; it does not inhere in the state, nor is it rested from the state: “The state constantly draws us back into the social cohesion of capitalism by getting us to behave in certain ways, adopt certain categories of thought and forms of organization.” (Holloway, p. 56). The state’s power is to reduce people to abstract “subjects”, and to institute the violent coercion of abstracted, alienated masses of labourers into capitalist relations of production. Holloway rejects political action against (or within) the state as an effective means to “crack capitalism”: A political organization which focuses its action upon the Sate inevitably reproduces these characteristics of the state as a form of relations. To gain influence within the state or to capture what appears to be control over the state, the organization must adopt those forms of behaviour and thinking which are characteristic of the State. Thus, political parties, however, left-wing or indeed ‘revolutionary’, are characterized by hierarchal structures and tend to adopt certain forms of language and behaviour which dovetail with those of the State. The external relation to society is reproduced in the concept of the ‘masses’—a quantity of undifferentiated, abstract atoms, with limited capacities and in need of leadership. (Holloway, p. 61). Holloway points out that it takes many states to produce and maintain globalized capitalism, so a movement against any one state would be inadequate. Holloway rejects the strategy of political action as necessary for successful social movements, and instead valourizes social movements that refuse to engage in political action and ignore the state entirely. Holloway also rejects the formulation of the power to do as ‘popular power’: “‘Popular power’ the insistence that the power comes from the people: this is an attractive formulation, but the category of ‘the people’ actually conceals that the source of power is doing; it abstracts from the organization of human activity and its antagonistic existence.” (Holloway, p. 62). Only the direct involvement of people in their own doing, for themselves, by their own choice, or through the direct democracy of councils and assemblies, is the power to do, in the form of democratic counsels and assemblies, what Holloway calls ‘the politics of dignity’. Holloway distinguishes ‘national popular struggle’ and ‘communitarian-popular’ struggle: Raquel Guterrez in her profound analysis of the struggles of Bolivia (2009) distinguishes between the ‘national-popular’ struggle and the ‘communitarian-popular’ struggle. The latter comes from and develops traditional communitarian forms of direct democracy and has at its centre the affirmation of dignity and a refusal to accept alien domination. (Holloway, p. 61). If it can be called a ‘struggle’ at all, Transition Towns is a model of communitarian power, disinterested in movements of ‘nationalist populist struggle.’ Holloway argues that the power to do is a contemporaneous process that must be created in every moment of daily life. It is not abstracted into institutional forms that automate relations for the production of goods, but is expressed in the continuous reproduction of meaningful social relations. Marina Sitrin, in Everyday Revolutions, describes a form of power that is endemic to social movements that she defines as horizontalidad, or horizontalism, and defines power as horizontal power. She frames horizontalidad as ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over.’ The focus is on creating new social relations that are not dehumanized by capitalism. Thus, there is an emphasis on ‘affective relations’, love, friendship, and mutual support. Her formulation of horizontalism comes from her study of social movements in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, including the piqueteros and the desempleados (unemployed) movements. These are local movements of poor, marginalized people in neglected neighbourhoods who chose not to make demands on the state but to provide for their own housing, food, markets and services. While they were willing to accept financial help if offered by the state, they would not do so if it would compromise the autonomy and solidarity of their movement. In “Measuring Success”, Sitrin’s study looks at the following factors as elements of a discourse of non-contentious horizonatlism: —the centrality of horizontal decision making; —new conceptualizations of power; —the importance of affect and emotion; —the creation of new value production; —the non-contentious political framework nature of the new movements; and —rethinking the meaning of revolution (Sitrin, pp. 217-218). Sitrin argues that horizontal movements do not have to contend with the State in order to realize their goals for their movement. Sociological movement theories insist that “all social movements are in a contentious relationship to the state, or another form or institution with formal ‘power over’, whether demanding reforms from the state or institution or desiring another state or institution.” (Sitrin, p. 214). Conventional social movement theory is that disempowered groups must seize the power of the state in order to force concessions from capitalist functionaries for improved wages and working conditions, and for critical services like housing and health care. However, Sitrin finds that the horizontalidad movements refuse to engage with the state and conventional politics: “Their energy is placed in creating new societies and communities, rather than demanding the state change or asking for things from the state. As the data show, people in these movements are clear in not desiring a contentious relationship to power, but rather in their desire for (and creation of) alternative powers.” Sitrin, p. 214). Sitrin says that horizontal movements are concerned with forming new social relationships: “As emphasized previously, this does not mean that they are not engaging with the state (and forms of institutional power), but that the state is not the point of reference; the movement is—as is the creation of new values and new relationships. The movements are not contentious.” (Sitrin, p. 217.) These movements do not define success as controlling or replacing state power or capitalism, but as sustaining their movement to create their own way of life. Sitrin concludes that based on these criteria, “the ultimate conclusion is simply that the movements have been, and continue to be, successful. Sitriin, pp. 217-218). Sitrin’s conclusion is that the Argentine movements are successful to the degree that they create and sustain horizontalidad. Comparison of Transition Towns with Autonomism and Horizontalism Transition Town’s narrative is ecological communication, and they are successful to the degree that they communicate about ecological crises and possible responses to them. The movement is not so concerned with capitalism, the state, or even self-sufficient production, but with local resilience in the face of global ecological and economic crisis. My position is that the form of power generated by Transition Towns is most like Holloways’s autonomism and Sitrin’s horizonatlism. Holloway proposes that autonomous groups engage in a refusal and other doing. What Transition Towns is refusing is globalization and its catastrophic ecological effects. They are refusing globalization of the economy and energy, and globalized governance of the environment. They are also refusing the politics of the State, because the State, aligned with globalized corporate production, is the political agent of corporate globalization, which is why Holloway’s analysis so aptly describes the politics of the movement. This will be demonstrated in the section on social movements and in the discourse analysis. Avelino: Empowerment in Sustainability Transitions Flor Avelino’s doctoral dissertation, “Power in Transition: Empowering Discourses on Sustainability Transitions” (2011) is an analysis and typology of power dynamics in sustainability transitions. Avelino’s analysis is focused on power, but not on politics per se, i.e. not on political ideology or political discourse. Her dissertation focuses on large scale sustainability transitions at the level of “regimes”, e.g. governments, corporations, and third sector organizations, but only briefly touches on social movements. Avelino says that her typology of power is applicable to social movements, and suggests that the study of the Transition Towns movement might benefit from using her power typology. (Avelino 2011). Avelino’s work presents an exhaustive typology of power dynamics affecting many sectors and scales of complex societies. Only those concepts that are relevant to social movements are presented here, drawn primarily from chapters 3 and 7 of her dissertation. Avelino presents a typology of agents and their relative capacity for power within a “multi-level framework," a three-tiered model of spheres of action: landscape, regime and niche. At the macro-level is landscape, which Luhmann would call the environment of a social system, consisting of macro-trends shaping the broad system contours of a civilization enmeshed with its environment that slowly evolve through time. Landscapes are created through slow developments at a high level of aggregation. (Avelino 2011). At the meso-level, regime refers to the constellation of institutions, cultures and practices that “‘dominates’ the stable functioning of a societal system and defends the status quo.” (Avelino, 2011, p. ). At the micro-level, niches are sites of local adaptation, non-conformism and innovation, “constellations which are also part of the social system, but exhibit deviation from the regime’s dominant structures, cultures and practices.” (Avelino, 2011). Avelino identifies a fourth structural level, niche-regimes, consisting of networks of niches that have coordinated and scaled up to a level where they begin to transform the regime. (Avelino, 2011). In “the Systems Perspective on Power,” Avelino locates the empowerment pattern of transition movements primarily in the formation of niche-regimes: In the multi‐pattern framework, the so‐called ‘empowerment pattern’ refers to a transition process in which niches ‘gain enough power’ to replace the regime; “niches emerge and cluster, and by empowering a niche cluster a niche‐regime unfolds; the niche-regime becomes more powerful whereas the regime is weakening, and in the end the niche‐regime takes over the incumbent regime that is transformed” (Loorbach & Rotmans 2010: 2137, in Avelino, 2011). In her review of “Transition Management” literature, Avelino identifies empowerment as a management principle: “the ultimate goal of transition management should be to influence and empower civil society in such a way that people themselves shape sustainability in their own environments, and in doing so contribute to the desired transitions to sustainability.” (Loorbach 2007:284, in Avelino, 2011). The role of Transition Management is to empower niches so that they cluster and scale up to niche-regimes, and to facilitate niche-regimes so that they can take over dysfunctional regimes. (Avelino, 2011). However, a critique of transition management’s approach to civic ‘empowerment’ is that the development of niches and niche-regimes are thus under the control and direction of a regime-level management hierarchy. As such, management-driven top-down transition programs can actually disempower their civic participants. (Avelino 2011). Avelino’s refutes the definition of ‘power’ as “struggle and conflict,” and includes the operation of ‘power’ as “lack of conflict”, as passivity, reinforcement of the status quo, and normalization. (Avelino, 2011). Avelino offers a typology of “Meanings and working definitions of power”. (Avelino, 2011). As a philosophy of power, Avelino adopts Luhmann’s definition of socio-cybernetic power: power as a social medium of communication. (Luhmann, in Avelino, 2011). Power is the medium that controls communication and behavior in a complex system transparently, controlling contingencies without being noticed, so that functions appear to run smoothly and the evolution of the system continues. (Luhmann in:Borch 2005, in Avelino, 2011) . Avelino: Transformative Power Avelino defines Transformative power as impact on the valuation and distribution of social goods: “Transformative power is the capacity of actors to invent and develop new structures and institutions (be it a new legal structure, physical infrastructure, economic paradigm or religious ideology), thereby changing the way in which resources are distributed and valued. The starting point is that developing such new structures and institutions is an inherently different act then reinforcing structures and institutions, even though one may consecutively lead to the other.” (Avelino, 2011). Avelino: Systemic Power Avelino defines Systemic power as the “collective’ capacity of actors to mobilize resources for the survival of a societal system, i.e. a particular continent, region, nation, sector, industry or business (depending on the chosen level of analysis). The extent to which actors are able of mobilizing resources for the survival of a system, defines the level of ‘systemic power’ exercised by those actors within that system.” (Avelino, 2011). Avelino: Relations of Power In Relations of power, Avelino defines relations as the capacity to mobilize people and resources and identifies three types: (1) power over others; (2) reflexive power, i.e. A having more power than B; and (3) power different from other kinds of power. In terms of difference, one actor might exhibit institutional power, or technical power, or social power. Social movements, especially those at the local level, primarily exhibit social power to form and motivate groups for various tasks. Avelino also defines social power as membership within a social group, and knowledge of how to create or reproduce social lifeways. (Avelino 2011). Niche power tends to be different from regime power because it is focused on local adaptation and innovation. Avelino: Empowerment Model In “Empowerment as Intrinsic Motivation”, Avelino draws from Conger and Kamungo (1988) who view empowerment as a “motivational construct”; they define it as “a process of enhancing feelings of self‐efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerlessness and through their removal by both formal organizational practices and informal techniques of providing efficacy information.” (474, in Avelino, 2011). Avelino cites Thomas and Velthouse who add “intrinsic task motivation” as part of the ‘motivational construct.’ Avelino further distinguishes ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ motivation: the effort invested in intrinsic motivation is not dependent upon the supervision or rewards mediated by others. Intrinsic task motivation “involves positively valued experiences that individuals derive directly from a task” resulting from the cognitions about a task that produce motivation and satisfaction.” (ibid: 668, in Avelino, 2011). Empowerment involves obtaining the conditions of power: resources, strategies and skills. (Avelino 2011). An empowered entity uses strategies of power, which are activities such as lobbying, networking, protesting; and consist of “the kind of power relations they engage with, and how they play into a synergetic or antagonistic power dynamics.” (Avelino 2011). Avelino defines empowerment as the “intrinsic motivation’ or willingness to exercise power, and the belief that one can exercise such power to realize one’s goals. This involves positive task assessments: the actors has a sense of agency that his or her actions have an impact, demonstrate competence, have meaning, and exercise the power of choice. (Avelino 2011). Avelino states that knowledge is a meta-condition for exercising power: “Knowledge relates directly to the conditions of power: access to resources, strategies to mobilize them, skills to apply these methods and the willingness to do so in the pursuit of a specific goal. All four conditions depend to a large extent on having or gathering knowledge, which makes knowledge (on how to exercise power) a ‘meta‐condition’ for the exercise of power.” (Avelino, 2011). Avelino’s formulation of knowledge/power, following Foucault, is critical for understanding the kind of power that Transition Towns employ, which is primarily knowledge, or critical awareness of the conditions and crises of globalization, and developing the ‘know-how’ to find solutions for surviving under those conditions. Avelino: Assessing Systemic Power Avelino proposes four basic empirical questions about a project or program under study: “1) what is the transformative sustainability ambition, defined as projections for future transformation; 2) how is power exercised, defined as the type of power, i.e. innovative, transformative, reinforcive; 3) how and to what extent are actors empowered, defined as intrinsic motivation; 4) what is the overall transition potential?” defined as the capacity to build transformative power at the optimal level and scale, i.e. the niche-regime level. Avelino suggests that the answer to the fourth question is a synthesis of answers to the first three. (Avelino 2011). The result of this inquiry should produce answers to a general inquiry about the capacity of the movement to amass systemic power. Avelino defines “systemic power more generally as the collective capacity of actors to create, renew and/or maintain functional systems that correspond with their perceived (collective) needs and desires.” (Avelino 2011). Avelino proposes that the empowerment model is designed to explore the interpretation of the questions by the actors themselves, and is not an external measurement, e.g. “the quantity of C02 reduction resulting from projects.” The interpretive method determines that these questions should be “answered in an ‘interpretative’ manner, in the sense that the focus is on how the practitioners under study themselves construct the answers to these questions…The question of empowerment will invite us to dive deeper into the intrinsic motivation of actors involved and the organizational culture prevailing in the set up of the projects and programs. (Avelino, 2011). Furhermore, the empowerment model is also designed to study how transition projects disempower individuals due to a lack of strategies, skills, knowledge, and resources, or subjection to top-down transition programs. (Avelino 2011). In relation to the present study of the politics of Transition Towns, Avelino’s empowerment model is strikingly similar to Marina Sitrin’s horizontal power and Holloways’ autonomism, which characterizes the the political ideology of the movement. Avelino’s empowerment model is the type of power that corresponds with the autononimist politics of the Transition movement. Furthermore, Avelino’s interpretive model of ‘intrinsic motivation’ is also similar to Sitrin’s protagonista model of empowerment, in which community members no longer see themselves as passive recipients of State power, but as active agents of their collective development. In terms of methodology, this study structures the interviews with members of the Transition groups as the question: “what motivates you to engage in this movement and do this work?” This is a direct application of Avelino’s empowerment model to the study of Transition groups in Atlantic Canada. Avelino’s interpretive framework will be used to analyze the respondents’ answer to that question to yield a political discourse of Transition. Avelino: Typologies and Scales of Power In “Theorizing Power in Transition,” Avelino interprets the “multi-level framework” in terms of the typology of power: “Regimes can be defined as groups of actors that primarily exercise reinforcive power, niches as groups of actors that mainly exercise innovative power, and niche‐regimes are groups of actors that primarily exercise transformative power (see table below)." (Avelino 2011). Recall that transformative power is defined as ”the capacity of actors to invent and develop new structures and institutions…thereby changing the way in which resources are distributed and valued.” (Avelino, 2011). Thus what Transition Towns claims to achieve as a movement is to attain transformative power, i.e. the power to reposition the Local as the centre of economic production and ecological stability to transform energy regimes. However, it attempts to do so entirely on at the niche level, by each individual group using innovative power in each locality. There is nothing in Transition Towns’ public discourse that signifies an attempt to cluster and scale-up Transition groups and projects into niche-regimes or to collaborate with other kinds of ecological and social movements to cluster and scale-up to niche-regimes. which Avelino argues have the right kind of power at the right level and scale to transform energy regimes. Here Avelino’s power theory and method reveals some of the inherent weaknesses of the Transition Towns model and suggest ways that the movement can move toward a more empowered social movement. Avelino: Stages of Development & Power Avelino outlines the stages of a sustainability transition as consisting of periods of fast and slow responses and adaptations to changes in the environment which take an S-curve form. Avelino describes each of these stages, the types of power exercised by the agents at each level and stage of the transition: Starting point: defined as “the anticipation of a disruption of systemic power, i.e. actors fear that they are loosing capacity to safeguard the sustained survival of the system.” (Avelino 2011) Pre‐development phase: “niche‐level agents exercise innovative power by inventing and creating new resources as solutions for restoring systemic power. “Niches cooperate and cluster, forming niche‐regimes that attempt to exercise transformative power, by attempting to develop new structures and institutions.” (Avelino 2011) Regime‐level agents “react by trying to ‘absorb’ these niches and niche‐regimes, so that new resources and new institutions do not challenge but rather reinforce the status quo.” (Avelino 2011). The Regime attempts to force a ‘synergistic relationship’ with the niche-level agents to ‘capture’ the transition and use it to reinforce the regime’s status quo system. “If, however, niches are able to resist such absorption by the regime, they become a ‘threat’ to the reinforcement of existing institutions and structures. Such antagonistic relations at the end of the pre‐development stage are a necessary condition for a transition to continue.” (Avelino 2011) Transition Towns as a movement is keen to avoid absorption or synergistic relationships with either States or Capital, thus avoiding regime “capture.” The explicit goal of Transition Towns is to retain all economic and ecological processes under control of communities at the local level, to avoid “scaling up”, such that local communities lose control over the their social reproduction. Take‐off phase: the disruption of systemic power is manifested; a contingency overwhelms the capacity of the regime, resulting in the collapsie or severe weakening of the institution. (Avelino 2011). “A ‘bottom‐up’ power disruption is caused by niches and niche‐ regimes challenging the regime. "(Avelino 2011). Power relations between niches, niche-regimes and regimes are antagonistic, “innovative and transformative power are exercised to disrupt reinforcive power.” (Avelino 2011) Transition Towns demonstrates no aspirations to disrupt regime power, yet asserts an aspiration to transform regimes. The movement’s position is not to engage in antagonistic power struggles with regimes, as this would be fruitless and counter-productive, and potentially disempowers local communities. Acceleration phase: a synergistic collaboration evolves between innovative and transformative power; “niches and niche‐regimes amplify one another, thereby gaining more access to resources, and both new and old resources are coupled to new structures and institutions. . . As the regime’s grip and resistance has been disrupted in the take‐off stage, niches and niche‐regimes have more space to operate.” (Avelino, 2011) Stabilization phase: "niche‐regime‐actors exercise reinforcive power to establish a new distribution of resources, thereby forming a new regime.” (Avelino 2011). Avelino Landscape and Transformational Power Avelino claims that agents are not limited to adaptation to weakening or collapsing landscapes; “they can also influence and redirect landscape developments by deviating from a landscape trend and demonstrating that they can still survive, which is the ultimate exercise systemic power.” (Avelino 20110. Avelino states that landscapes can include ‘counter‐trends’, which are “slow developments with a high level of aggregation that run counter to the dominant trends.” (Avelino 2011). Avelino suggests that the protagonists of counter-trends, or in Gramsci’s terms, a counter-power and counter-hegemony, are social movements such as Transition Towns: The collective capacity of actors to challenge dominant landscape trends, relates to the notion of social (counter) movements. (Avelino, 2011). Avelino: Multi-level Frameworks of Power Avelino cites several sources examine the role of social movements in sustainability transitions (Seyfang & Smith 2007, Smith 2006, 2007, forthcoming, Haxeltine & Seyfang 2009, Avelino & Kunze 2009). As part of this new focus of research, Loorbach and Rotmans (2010) added a new level to the multi-level framework outlined here, the undercurrent level, which includes “social movements, activist groups and niches that exert pressure on niches or on the regime.” (Loorbach and Rotmans (2010) in Avelino 2011). Avelino: Undercurrents Avelino locates social movements as a constituent of the undercurrent level of the multi-level framework: “undercurrent (counter)‐ movements refer to the collective exercise of power that challenges and countervails dominant trends; this is the collective exercise of transformative power by critical masses and social movements, including critical ‘consumer‐citizens’, entrepreneurs, and activists.” Avelino, 2011). Transition Towns as a social movement occupies this undercurrent level of the multi-level framework, as a social movement that exerts pressure on niches, defined as ‘towns’ or ‘localities’ to transform the dominant energy, economic and ecological regime. Avelino: Niches & Niche Regimes Moderate niches are those that are synergistic with moderate niche-regimes, regimes and landscapes (Avelino 2011). In contrast to moderate niches and regimes, Avelino defines radical niches and radical niche-regmies. A radical niche has “an antagonistic relation with regimes, and a synergetic relation with radical niche‐regimes, in the sense that its new resources are embedded in new structures and institutions that strengthen undercurrent (counter‐) movements, and thereby challenge dominant trends….” (Avelino 2011). A radical niche-regime is defined as having “a synergetic relation with undercurrent (counter‐)movements and an antagonistic relation with regimes and dominant trends; it challenges, criticizes and counteracts existing regimes, avoids and resists the continuation of dominant trends, and strengthens undercurrent (counter‐)movements.” (Avelino 2011). Transition Towns can be viewed as an attempt to transform the niche ‘Town’ into a radical niche that adopts the innovations of undercurrent movements, and that, as the movement spreads, combine with other towns and localities to ‘cluster and scale-up’ to become radical niche-regimes, which Avelino claims has the transformative power to transform the status quo energy regime. Avelino suggests that a study of undercurrents or social movements should examine the systemic and political background of the movement, such as globalization and neoliberalism, and not just the technocratic problem, such energy production. (Avelino 2011). This is precisely how I structured my analysis. Avelino’s case studies reveal: From a power perspective, the problem with technocratic approaches lies in their a‐political nature, or rather, their illusion of being a‐political. The projects and programs under study primarily looked for synergetic power dynamics with other actors, while antagonistic power dynamics were avoided. In that context it was not surprising that these programs and projects did not develop their own vision on sustainable development… (Avelino 2011). The analysis of Transition Towns shows that the parent organization’s promise to be ‘a-political' tended to close off collaborations with other sustainability movements, thus with radical niches and niche-regimes. This was overcome at the local level by self-organized groups that made local decisions to become involved with other social and political movements, or to become involved with electoral politics. Avelino distinguishes the ‘passive’ from ‘active’ exercise of power. Passive power establishes a conceptual framework for transition but does not mobilize physical resources to operationalize the transition. Active power creates not only conceptual and communicative capacity, but mobilizes physical resources on its own behalf, rather than leaving the assembly of physical infrastructure to other entities. In that sense Transition Towns model demonstrates an active exercise of power. Its emphasis on ‘demonstration projects’ encourages citizens to mobilize physical resources in the locality to address sustainability issues. Avelino: The power of Transition Discourse. In “The Power of Transition Discourse”. Avelino argues that the power of Transition discourse, is its use by undercurrents or social movements to provide intrinsic motivation that empowers people to take action; to generate knowledge as a precondition for power; to foster the development of skills, strategies, and a willingness to exercise transformative power; to generate cognitive and resource innovation; to foster the development of new practices and institutions that transform niches into radical niche-regimes; and to drive transformation to the regime level, replacing weakening status quo regimes with sustainability regimes. In the final stage, regimes have been replaced with new functional subsystems that transform the landscape’s dominant forms, resulting in a system-wide paradigm shift. Avelino conceptualizes the power of discourse as more than the mobilization of cognitive resources: “For discourse also significantly determines the way in which we conceptualize and distribute all the other type of resources (human, natural, artefactual, and monetary), and to a great extent it shapes our institutions and structures. Moreover, discourse directly relates to the conditions of power, especially in terms of having the necessary strategies, skills, and willingness to exercise power.” (Avelino 2011). Following Luhmann, discourse as communication is the act which constructs the social system, and thus has constitutive power. Transition Towns greatest resource is its narrative, its transformational discourse, which provides intrinsic motivation and empowers people to act on their own behalf to create new system-wide trends for a ‘bottom-up’ transition. Avelino argues against the notion that in order to be effective, Transition discourse must be formalized and adopted by the regime: “If the purpose of transition discourse is, by its very nature, to question and challenge existing structures and institutions, it is rather ironic and paradoxical to formally ‘impose’ and ‘institutionalize’ this discourse. “ (Avelino 2011). Like Luhmann’s description of the ‘protest’ of social movements, the power of Transition discourse is ability to self-generate a discourse that is in opposition to the system, thus to make visible to the system that which it ignores, yet to remain outside the system as ‘protest’. Likewise, Holloway’s autonomism, Transition groups are not concerned with changing the State, Capital, or its institutions, as that would create an opening for co-optation, but in generating new discourses, practices and institutions that will replace weakening and collapsing globalized regimes with a new functional subsystem, i.e. ‘the Local’. From standpoint of this interpretive framework, it could be argued that while the concrete goals of Transition Towns are to shift localities from dependence on fossil fuels and create local resilience, the latent political goal of Transition Towns is to empower the Local as the source of its own viability through governance of its own ecological system, to obtain what Avelino calls “systemic power”, what Foucault called biopower. Ch. 3 Application to Research This chapter presented several theories and typologies of power that are relevant to the study of Transition Towns as a social movement and its political discourse. H. T. Odum’s thermodynamic model of power was presented as a model for systemic power. Michael Mann’s theory was used to model the operation of networks of power in transcendent and immanent forms. Luhmann’s systemic theory of power was used to understand how communicative power is used within self-organizing social systems. Foucault’s theories of knowledge as power, governance and biopower was used to understand the kinds of power that shape the field of actions that both produce and constrain individual and collective action. Holloway’s theory of the power to do and Sitrin’s theory of horizontal power explained how power is develop within autonomist and horizontalist social movements. Avelino’s typologies of motivational power, knowledge power, and systemic power identify the particular kinds of power developed by locally-based ecology movements. Each of these typologies highlights different aspects of the kinds of power that can be developed by local ecology groups in response to the conditions and crises of globalization. In Part 3, these typologies of power will be applied in the analysis of the political discourse of Transition Towns in particular localities in the Maritimes, Canada.  Ch. 4 Social Movements This chapter examines theories about the emergence of social movements, protest communication and protest movements as they self-organize and interact with the larger social system. The study includes Systems theory, Critical Systems theory, and Functional Systems theory. I combine aspects of these to propose a Critical Evolutionary Systems Theory. This section then presents politics-as-process and autonomist/horizontalist approaches to social movements to analyze and compare the communications and actions of three ecology groups in the greater Fredericton area. Survey of Social Movement Theory New Social Movement Theory New Social Movement theory explains how social movements develop in response to structural conditions in late capitalism. Though proceeding from a Marxist standpoint, New Social Movement theory rejects economic and classist reductionism. New Social Movement theory describes how concerns about other factors that are structurally conditioned, including social factors—such as race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality, religion—and other material factors—such as urban development, natural resources or environment—can provoke the organization of a social movement to address those issues. Habermas and Critical Theory. New Social Movement theory was developed within the Frankfurt school of Marxist thought. Others strains of New Social Movement theory have proceeded from Jurgen Habermas, who, like Niklas Luhmann, studied Parson’s systems theory. LaClau and Hoffe attribute the rise of social movements to the “massification of social life” following Fordist industrial capitalism. (Fuchs, 2006, p. 105). New Social Movements such as feminism, gay rights, and the environmental movement “are the expression of forms of resistance to the commodification, bureaucratization and increasing homogenization of social life itself.” (LaClau, E. and Mouffe, C, 985, p. 165). Touraine traces the rise of new social movements to the change from an industrial society to a post-industrial society. Post-industrial society is typified by the “technological production of symbolic goods” (Touraine,1985, p. 781) and the commodification of life in the body, identity and relationships, and the environment. As a reaction to post-industrial society, new social movements focus on biological or ‘life issues’ such as gender, bio-ethics, disability, food security and the environment. Habermas argued that the private sphere, public sphere, and communicative actions of the individual constituted the “lifeworld.” He proposed that social movements were a reaction to the colonization of the lifeworld by instrumental rationality of state and market institutions. (Fuchs, 2006). Social movements are an attempt to restore authenticity and autonomy in the lifeworld. Blüdhorn (2007) proposes that “the transition from the old state-centered politics of material production and distribution to the ‘new politics’ of decentralized social, economic, cultural and political self-determination was key to the protest movements’ emancipative struggle for a better modernity. Their reinvention of politics implied not only the politicization of the private sphere and of formerly non-political issues but also a shift from the state towards civil society as the main locus of politics. “ (Blüdhorn 2007, p. 5). Systems Theory Critical Systems Theory Critical Systems Theory developed out of Jurgen Habermas’ systems theory. In opposition to Luhmann’s “technocratic” functional systems theory, Habermas argued that social systems must also concern themselves with social problems, social improvement, democratic relations, and the advancement of humanistic values. Habermas’ theory proposes that social movements are reactions to the monetarization and bureaucratization of the public and private spheres in the lifeworld. (Fuchs 2006, p. 127). Based on Habermas’ theory, Critical Systems Theory proposes that social movements react to the colonization and commodification of life by cultural industries that induce alienation and false consciousness. Critical Systems Theory is a group of related theories based on Habermas’ normative notion of “the good society.” Critical Systems theories generally include several normative imperatives: 1) it must be emancipatory, that is, enable open dialogue free of power relations that distort analysis and communication; 2) maximize human potential; 3) enable people to think about society and social problems holistically as a system; 4) enhance self-organization of social systems; 5) foster democratic processes of direct participation and cooperation; 6) critically challenge systems that generate inequalities of wealth and power. (Fuchs 2006, p. 126-128). Fuchs: Critical Systems Theory Christian Fuchs uses systems theory to define social movements as open, self-organizing systems, exchanging inputs and outputs with its environment. Social movements are self-organizing because they are generated by an internal logic that couples with an environment that presents (or denies) resources, threats and opportunities. Social movements produce their own identities, structures and goals in a recursive practice. Using complexity theory, Fuchs explains that social phenomena are non-linear: a cause can have several effects, and an effect can be the product of many causes. Social phenomena are influenced but not determined by structural conditions, “a complex result of crisis, resource mobilization, cognitive mobilization, self-production…” (Fuchs 2006, p. 111). Political systems are also self-organizing. Based on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the state, Fuchs divides the political sphere into two subsystems: political rule, consisting of government offices and political parties that compete for them as one subsystem; the other is civil society, consisting of no-governmental organizations and social movements. These two subsystems are coupled, and organizational complexity is a result of dynamic interactions between the two subsystems: “Political events that take place within the system of rule (new laws, appointments, etc.) perturbate civil society in the sense that the organizations of civil society form opinions and views concerning these events. Political events stimulate political practices. It is not determined whether or not this will result in support or opposition. Certain political events can result in political mobilizations within civil society that support or protest against certain events in the system of rule.” (Fuchs 2006, p. 112). Fuchs argues that social movements are a reaction to social problems, but problems are not a sufficient condition. Reactions to problems will not develop into a social movement unless the actors develop a critical consciousness about those issues, or “cognitive liberation.” (Fuchs 2006, p.114). Critical reflection, debate and protest become possible when there is a discrepancy in the fit between the political structures and subjective expectations of civil society. (Crossley, 2002, p. 185). Protest thus emerges as a difference between the political system’s definition of social conditions and the social movements counter-definition. The effects of social movements is also not determined, but can result in a wide range of expected and unexpected results. Mobilization can result in strong or weak policy outcomes that may or may not institute social change. Because the political system creates itself autopoietically through communications about political issues, protest provokes the growth of the political system by introducing new issues and topics for debate, which in turn create new political structures. Fuchs proposes his own Critical Systems theory social movements based on Habermas and the principles of found in all critical systems theories. His theory requires that it 1) fosters ecologically and socially sustainable system design, defining ‘sustainable’ as “a society that advances sustainable development of the ecological, technological, economic, political, and cultural systems of society in the sense of biological diversity, technological usability, wealth and social security for all, participation for all, as well as cultural wisdom and unity in diversity as overall goals and guidelines for practice.” (Fuchs 2006, p. 128); 2) critiques systems that impede sustainability and that legitimize domination and suppression; 3) promotes self-organization and democratic process. However, he also criticizes Habermas for conceptualizing systems (after Parsons) in a way that fails to explain the how social processes produce divergent systems and social relations. Furthermore, Fuchs’ system is not organized around Luhmann’s functions, but networks. He states that “Self-organizing systems are complex networks of entities that synergetically interact and produce novelty…All social systems are networks because they communicatively link human individuals, hence in society we find networks that link individuals and networks that link groups or larger social systems, there are both inter- and intra-organizational networks.” (Fuchs 2006, p. 130-131). What he borrows from Luhmann is the process of autopoiesis: thus, he is describing autopoietic networks: “Social movements are self-organizing systems, the actors engaged in these systems have political believes [sic] according to which they want to change society. A social movement is a social system that is characterized by a certain protest identity, i.e., a specific form of giving meaning to the world and its problems and by specific practices.” (Fuchs 2006, p. 129). Fuchs argues that as capital has globalized through the growth of global hierarchal networks, social movements have reacted by assembling in the form of networks. He proposes that the creation of the network is a self-organizing processes that produces and reproduces cooperative democracy at the grass-roots level. (Fuchs 2006, p. 312). Fuchs defines protest as a communicative and cooperative network that generates knowledge and values. (Fuchs 2006, p. 133). Protest knowledge and common values communicated to a mobilized populace become the impetus for generating more knowledge, values and practices autopoetically. Protest defines itself by critiquing the dominant power structure and asserting itself as a democratic alternative. Fuchs argues that the autopoietic process of network-building and protest produces and reproduces the normative imperatives of Critical Systems Theory—critiquing systems of inequality and repressive domination, while also building democratic networks of emancipated individuals and groups. Functional Systems Theory Luhmann’s Functional Systems Theory Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory proposes that all systems are initiated by establishing a difference within the system that differentiates itself from its environment. Once differentiated from its environment, systems evolve through continued self-generated replications and variations, or autopoeisis; and social systems create themselves through communicative autopoiesis. Luhmann considered social movements to be another subsystem within the larger social system. The function of social movements is to provide a self-reflexive description of society. In Social Systems, Luhmann describes social movements as the ‘immune system’ of modern society (1995, p. 403) which reacts to perturbations caused by the failure of diverse and poorly coordinated functional subsystems to deal adequately with particular issues. The protest movement defines these orphaned issues within its own system as ‘social problems.’ Social movements not only alert the social system to issues that are unacknowledged in various functional subsystems, but they also alert the social system to issues lurking in the environment, because by Luhmann’s definition, every subsystem is the environment for other subsystems. Thus, social movements, and protest movements in particular, simulate the appearance of issues that are excluded from the system—that is, in its environment—as “within” the social system. Luhmann describes social movements as being ‘radical and non-radical’ at the same time, yet he ascribes to them what he considers to be a radical function, which is to critique either the fact or the failure of functional differentiation: “These movements embody the possibility of critique of society that is much more radical than anything Marx could envision and dare. They are broadly concerned with many consequences of the differentiation of functional systems, and if they do have a radical intention, then it would be the critique of functional differentiation.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 140-141). Luhmann distinguishes protests, which are communications that critique social conditions, from protest movements, which serve as a catalyst for the formation of new social systems. (Luhmann 1993, p. 126). Luhmann describes the function of protest movements as autocatalysis, because they accelerate and intensify the recursive generation of differences: Protest movements are and remain dependent upon the maintenance of differences. If they are successful, the difference between topic and protest has to be withdrawn. If they are unsuccessful, they are in danger of losing participants or at least of failing to recruit new ones. The movement cannot be pressed into the form of a normal organization. Its autocatalysis demands protest as a form that cannot be pressed into a quite different form of a goal; for protesting cannot very well be declared to be the goal of the movement. Topics and also participants abandon the system. And the topics are taken more and more into consideration by the environment; they gain their place on the normal political agenda…The new protest movements in their multifariousness are nurtured by the fact that protesting has become an established form and can leap from topic to topic. Individuals, accustomed to or identified with protest as a form of expression, can accordingly seek new topics when the old ones have run their course. (Luhmann 1993, p. 129). Autocatalysis is defined in chemistry as the acceleration of a reaction by one of its products in a self-perpetuating chain-reaction. As an autocatalytic process, protest movements energetically accelerate interactions and transformations from one state to another by using the product of their own process—reactions to communications about a difference, primarily the difference between a desired state of society and its actual state—to generate more communications about difference. Furthermore, without a mechanism for generating alternatives, social systems will not be able to continue evolution toward a new state, defined as the difference between its current state and a future state: “If the future is to be seen at all from the point of view of what is only probable or improbable, this means constantly reproducing differences of opinion in the present. They may be expressed as desiderata such as more information, participation, dialogue, mutual adjustment or in the form of protest.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 138) Luhamann says that protest movements employ a deviant use of language in order to bring attention to ‘topics’ or issues: “Only in a very rudimentary sense does an autonomous semantics develop, cultivating and attempting to impose deviant linguistic usage—as in the neo-nature semantics of the ecological movement.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 127) It is notable that he describes the language of ecological protest as ‘deviant’ in that the ecology movement defines the waste products of the industrial economy as ‘unnatural’, whereas a physicist or chemist would see these products as only possible within nature. He describes this deviant use of language as the ‘occupation of an abandoned symbolic territory’: “On the whole, the natural sciences now paint an emotionally not very attractive picture of nature, thus giving the ecological movement the opportunity to occupy the abandoned semantic territory” (Luhmann 1993, p. 127 note 4). In an odd way, Luhmann has anticipated the raison dêtre of the Occupy Movement, which seized the opportunity to occupy the abandoned territory of political discourse as public space. It is in his discussion of protest movements that Luhmann recognizes that other subsystems can capture the language of protest toward one system and deploy that language toward other systems: “Moreover, the topic must lend itself to confirmation in ever new situations, it must retain its relevance, must be generalized, and must be enriched with meaning rich in reference. It incorporates social relations, experience with friends and enemies, and history. But this means that aging topics can be seen in different ways and can lose in organizational strength.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 128). It is the mass media system that makes it possible for the whole social system to observe and compare the language of multiple functional subsystems, and which makes it possible for one subsystem to capture and use the semantics of another subsystem: “With the advent of the printing press, all this becomes simultaneously apparent, and it appears obvious that the protest movement must split to readjust the relation between the topic and supporters.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 128) The ‘organizational strength’ of a topic can be likened to the force of an attractor that organizes a newly emerging system. In Social Systems, Luhmann uses the term function instead of topic to describe how a new subsystem self-organizes around a particular cognitive-linguistic theme, another term that he commonly uses. For theme, topic or function, one may substitute the term attractor as a cognitive structure by which social systems self-organize. Attractors stabilize linear systems after a chaotic period of bifurcation, in which the system moves from one basin of attraction to another, stabilizing into a new system state organized around a different structure. Luhmann provides examples of the how the coding of difference in protest communications generates more topics for communication and continues the autopoiesis of protest: Just as coding in function systems requires programmes to regulate the allocation of positive and negative values, the form of protest requires topics that specify the whys and wherefores…One can introduce the probe of inequality into society and measure the evident inequalities. One then generates distribution topics. One can also introduce the probe of external stability and measure the state of instability, since it is an open question whether and how society can maintain itself in a state of instability. Both forms use utopian notions, since society can constitute a system only qua internal inequality (differences) and only qua ecological instability (differentiation). The topic-generating forms thus guarantee an infinite reservoir of topics. They guarantee society the permanent possibility of being able to describe itself by means of protest against itself. (Luhmann 1993, p. 137). Luhmann looks at protest from the point of view of its social function. The function of protest is to generate alternatives to social problems. However, thought the function is internalized, the process of protest is deemed external to the system: “Thus they protest inside society as if they were doing so from without.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 139). Luhmann says that protest movements can be nullified when their issues are included in the political agenda, but they can also be institutionalized as social movements: A society thus structured generates protest-prone situations en masse and initiates a selection procedure to choose one of the alternatives for system building in the sense of social movements. If successful, the selection process bequeaths the further problem of whether and how a protest movement that has emerged in response to a given situation can evolve into a system (even a temporary one), i.e. can achieve relatively stable forms…They can describe themselves entirely in terms of their subject matter, their ends, their implementation difficulties and their growing internal problems, and can consequently imagine themselves vis-á-vis society. Thus they protest inside society as if they were doing so from without. (Luhmann 1993, p. 138-139). While protest movements generate topics for communication, social movements facilitate the selection process for choosing a particular communication for system-building, which can then be further stabilized into a social system. However, the autopoiesis of protest proceeds from maintaining a sense of difference between actual and desired states, so that no resolution becomes possible and protest continues. The general function of protest movements is to enable the functional systems to observe itself and the effects of its own ‘self-descriptions’ or products. The protest movement is the means by which society is able to observe itself: “The only possibility is that of an imaginary projection with which a self-description can claim itself a fictitious external standpoint. In doing so it has to accept the paradox of the unity of inside and outside and find a form that annuls this paradox, that is to say, replaces and conceals it by drawing a distinction.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 140). Luhmann’s thesis on Risk as a Social System (1993), especially risk as the subject of protest movements, is highly applicable in the discussion of a movement like Transition Towns. That movement’s raison dêtre is the assumed risk and danger of peak oil, climate change, globalization and its effects on local communities. It is a movement oriented towards ameliorating possible future conditions, and therefore Luhmann’s thessis on modern social movements as time bound and anticipating risky futures is highly relevant. Time binding is the process of making possible future conditions binding on present decisions and actions. Luhmann’s thesis also includes protest around the theme of ‘inequality’, but he frames it as conditions that lead to an unequal future. Because Transition Towns is an ecology movements that also address issues of social inequality, his thesis is also highly applicable to study of that movement. Luhmann’s thesis analyses the connection between concerns about inequality and a risky future. He sees these two themes as the dominant forms of protest, but he also notes an emphasis on the ecological issue (risk) over the equality issue in contemporary social movements. Luhmann claims that ecology movements, with themes that anticipate risky or dangerous futures, have become the dominant theme of protest because it is an effect of functionally differentiated systems producing divergent and conflicting futures that are binding on present and future participants: “The risk/danger distinction in its particularly acute manifestation as risky behavior and affected involvement is an indication of dependence on social structures. As we have shown above, this pertains above all to the functional differentiation of society and to the binary coding of function systems.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 138-139). Luhmann considers protest and protest movements to serve a critical function in a functionally differentiated society. They translate the failures of the functional subsystems into a linguistic form that systems are able to observe. By representing these functional failures as within the system, the system is able to observe them and attend to subsystem coordination. With these special characteristics, protesting reflection does something that is done nowhere else. It espouses subject matter that none of the function systems, neither politics nor the economy, neither religion nor education, neither science nor law would acknowledge as its own. It impugns the self-descriptions produced by reason of the primacy of functional differentiation within the function systems. (Luhmann 1993, p. 142). In particular, ecology movements have a critical function of alerting the uncoordinated functional subsystems to unobserved threats in the external natural environment, and to translate those threats into semantic forms that can be observed within the social system: “It compensates for modern society’s manifest inadequacies in reflection—not by doing it better, but rather by doing it differently. The rapid growth in attention being paid to the ecological matters is due to such movements, as is the ever more urgent calling into question of faith in technology.” (Luhmann 1993, p. 143). In his work on Ecological Communication (1989), Luhmann elaborates on the lack of coordination in functional subsystems and its causes. As with other forms of intersystemic communication that he describes, protest and social movements represent as within the system that which has been excluded by other subsystems or the system as a whole. Using ecological communication, (Luhmann, 1993; Bartone, 2011), ecology groups translate their concerns about ecological crises into language, symbols and codes that can be understood by functionally differentiated subsystems. Blüdhorn: Self-Description and Simulation. Ingolfur Blüdhorn uses systems theory to explain social movements and protest. Blüdhorn relies heavily on Luhmann’s functional systems theory, but like Christian Fuchs, he retains a strong Critical Theory element in that social movements critique society as a reaction to structural failures. He criticizes New Social Movement Theory as “the mainstreaming of the alternative,” that is, new social movements no longer represent a challenge to existing structural inequities and social problems, but have served to accommodate the identities and politics of the left within the mainstream capitalist system: “In the era of late modernity, however, the significance of categories such as alienation, emancipation and liberation has changed considerably…As the system of the market is becoming ever more diversified and all-embracing, anti-consumerist suggestions that authentic individuality and identity might be located beyond this system are ever less attractive and convincing.” (Blüdhorn 2007, p. 4). Furthermore, Blüdhorn rejects the claim that new social movements have the potential to undermine or replace the late capitalist system because these movements are primarily counter-cultural—more concerned with creating social niches for identity and lifestyle than presenting structural alternatives to capitalism. (Blüdhorn 2007). Blüdhorn uses Luhmann’s systems theory to explain how social movements and protest are co-opted into becoming simulations of the capitalist system. Luhmann defines social movements and protest as specific kinds of communication organized around a systemic function, and is related to the transition of society from hierarchal to functional systems. Protest communications are those which appear to come from outside the system, in the environment, but in fact they are communications within the social system about the system itself. Thus, protest communications are a function of the system’s owns self-reference. (Blüdhorn 2007). Actors within the social system experience both their containment within the social system and their simultaneous exclusion from it, which is a destabilizing experience of paradox. Luhmann said that protest communications serve the function of temporarily relieving the paradox, positioning the speaker as “really” outside of society and demanding inclusion within it. Protest communications don’t really resolve the paradox, but stabilizes the experience of persons within the system, which continues the communicative function. While Luhmann assigns protest communications to resolving paradoxes involving various subsystem functions (family, environment, etc.) Blüdhorn differs from Luhmann in that he argues that in late-modern capitalism, the functions of most subsystems have been overtaken by one primary function, that of the market system. Blüdhorn argues that new social movements provide an important functional mechanism that continues the regime of consumption. In order for the knowledge economy to develop new products and services to sell to its customers, it must appeal to aspects of identity and lifestyle that subjects locate within themselves as ‘authentic’ and outside of the current market economy. Social protest movements enable subjects to position themselves as ‘outside the market economy’ and to signify their identity and their lifestyle as ‘authentic.’ Once subjects have established this position as a form of protest, the market economy then creates a new market niche that valorizes that identity and lifestyle and accommodates their place within the regime of consumption. Blüdhorn calls this process “the politics of simulation”. (Blüdhorn 2007, p. 14). Political parties must also ascribe their policies and strategies to social ‘values’ that lie outside the regime of consumption, but this becomes increasingly suspect as the logic of the market overwhelms narratives of idealism: In late-modern society, this external point of reference of the increasingly all-embracing economic system is rapidly disappearing. Ever accelerated processes of societal modernization can no longer convincingly be portrayed as pursuing any idealist project of modernity. Programmes of innovation no longer serve the incremental realization of any modernist values and ideals, but are a categorical imperative of the economic system. (Blüdhorn 2007, p. 12-13). Bludhorn describes this purpose of development and democratic process as the generation of a Self that functions for the Self, rather than for the polity, and to stabilize the Self through patterns of consumption. (Blüdhorn 2007, p. 12-13). Blüdhorn’s argument that one functional subsystem, economy, has taken over and controls all others is not substantiated by Luhmann, who refutes the claim that certain subsystems have more power than others (including the mass media). But Blüdhorn may be right in that if the economy has subsumed most other system functions, than it is the failure to differentiate into functional subsystems, and the loss of those functions in other subsystems, that becomes the topic of protest. It is arguable, on Luhmann’s own terms, that the merger of all other functions into one function—profit from the market economy—might indeed be the cause of the system’s collapse. Luhmann always argued that continued complexity assured the continued stability and evolution of the system, and the loss of functional differentiation and the dominance by one subsystem could lead to a loss of sufficient complexity that causes the system to collapse. Critical Evolutionary Systems Theory (Bartone) Using this survey of theories on social movements, this section applies these theories to the study of social movements such as Transition Towns. Because this study employs Systems Theory to contextualize the study of ecological movements, I use social movement theories based on Systems Theory, primarily Luhmann, to ground this analysis. This study also presents Critical Systems theory, particularly those by Fuchs and Blüdhorn, combined with Systems theory, to develop a new theoretical tool to analyze social movements, which I call Critical Evolutionary Systems Theory. The strengths of New Social Movement (NSM) theories are that while critiquing the failures of the capitalist economic system, they have moved away from a strictly Marxist bipolar analysis of social movements based entirely on two class categories, a narrowly-defined Capitalist class and a monolithic, undifferentiated Working class. New Social Movement theories differentiate class power structures into economic, political and cultural forms. Likewise, they differentiate subordinate classes into segments of various kinds, including workers (waged, unwaged, industrial, knowledge work, service work, subsistence, consumer) and cultural segments, (race, gender, ethnicity, generation, colonization, etc.). and the diverse forms of power relations among those segments. Furthermore, New Social Movement theories go beyond critiques of production (capital and worker) to critiques of consumption and environmental depletion. The weakness of New Social Movement theory is its piecemeal dissection of social movements into an uncoordinated array of conflicting categories based variously on power, wealth, mode of production, political ideology, culture, and so forth. This piecemeal organization is further weakened when the choice of one set of factors (capital, party, ethnicity) means the exclusion of other sets of factors. For example, a NSM theory that selects economic factors (capital, worker) often excludes political factors (party, dissident); a NSM theory that selects political factors (party, dissident) might exclude cultural segments (race, gender, consumer), and so forth. A rigorous social movement theory would account for all superordinate and subordinate factors within a generalized theory of social conflict. Systems theories provide an advantage over New Social Movement theories because they theorize the role of all social movements as a form of social action regardless of the genre of the subordinate actors (worker, race, gender) and as against the systemic power of the social system, whether that power is derived from economic, political, or cultural supremacy. Although Systems theory employs a bipolar categorization (movement vs. system), it accounts for and explains the enormous diversity of social factors within both of those positions. Moreover, Systems theory explains how social systems generate both diverse social factors and an array of conflicts that create the conditions for the emergence of social movements. The weakness of Systems theory is that it often involves tautological thinking whereby the social system appears to generate social movements as a mechanism to improve its own system functioning. Systems theory must account for individual consciousness or collective dissidence that is capable of taking a critical position against the system, regardless of whether that critique serves the system’s functional purpose. Critical Systems theory argues for the possibility of a radical dissident consciousness that triggers protest, protest movements and social movements. Critical Systems theory uses Habermas’ systems theory to understand how critical consciousness is mobilized within social movements against problems generated within social systems. The strength of Critical Systems theory is that it attempts a systemic approach that generalizes beyond the discrete historical events that constitute singular social movements in particular times and locations. Habermas attributed the emergence of social movements to the “monetarization and bureaucratization” of the ‘lifeworld’, i.e. the repression of humanistic and democratic values in civic and private spheres by the capitalist-state system. Later Critical Systems theorists, following Habermas, attribute the emergence of social movements to the alienation of the civic and private spheres by post-industrial modes of production that commodify biological life, identities and communities. All Critical Systems theories suppose a disjuncture between the current form of capitalist production and the subjective needs of individuals and social groups. Christian Fuchs’ Critical Systems theory argues that ‘cognitive liberation’ is an essential condition for the emergence of protest and social movements. The mere fact of system failure, defined in one sense as ‘social problems’, is not sufficient grounds for the emergence of social movements. Critical consciousness emerges when there is a break in the fit between social structures and subjective expectations, yielding an ‘issue for discussion’, and when individual consciousness reflects upon and debates the issue: Only if social problems are perceived as problems and if this perception guides practices, protest emerges. Hence “cognitive liberation” and rebellious consciousness are necessary (McAdam, 1982). The difference between objective structures and subjective expectations is an important aspect of protest. “When the ‘fit’ between objective structures and subjective expectations is broken the opportunity for critical reflection and debate upon previously unquestioned assumptions is made possible” (Crossley, 2002, p. 185). Fuchs argues that the emergence of problems in a society is not the sole condition for critical consciousness: “As long as one-dimensional consciousness dominates a social system, protest cannot emerge even if social problems get worse…That a problem is perceived as a problem that should be solved does not automatically result in the emergence of protest, but maybe in attempts to organize protest. Such attempts are only successful if possibilities and resources for protest can be found and mobilized.” (Fuchs, 2006, p. 114). The possibility of observing a disjuncture between subjective expectations and systemic functioning implies the existence of an individual consciousness that is able to observe system functioning, observe its failure, and formulate cognitive and linguistic responses to those failures. Individuals must communicate those responses to others, with whom a new social system, protest is formed to continue marshaling semantic resources against those failures. Luhmann’s Systems theory identifies individual psychic systems (i.e. individuals) as capable of a consciousness that differs in content and perspective from the social system. Individuals are structurally coupled to the social system through communication. Thus, individuals are capable of generating the kind of critical reflection necessary to trigger communicative responses to dissatisfaction with system functioning. The weakness of Critical Systems theory at present is that it is loaded with normative requirements for humanistic values, democratic processes, and social progress, which amounts to a political agenda rather than a social theory. Fuch’s formulation of critical consciousness, and critical systems theory is rife with normative demands and conditions: For me Critical Theory and Critical Systems Theory aim at an ecologically and socially sustainable society, i.e., a society that advances sustainable development of the ecological, technological, economic, political, and cultural systems of society in the sense of biological diversity, technological usability, wealth and social security for all, participation for all, as well as cultural wisdom and unity in diversity as overall goals and guidelines for practice. Critical thinking criticizes thinking that advances or supports structures that are detrimental to achieving sustainability, it deconstructs approaches as ideologies that legitimize domination, exploitation, and suppression. Liberation and emancipation means the critique of coercion and the advancement of the sustainability of society understood in the general sense just outlined. (Fuchs, 2006, p. 128). Fuch’s Critical Systems theory, like that of his colleagues, has too many normative specifications that are historically specific to the current late-capitalist or post-industrial era. There are too many unexamined normative demands. For example, how does he define ‘democracy’, ‘sustainability’, ‘wealth and social security’, ‘liberation’, or ‘emancipation’? What constitutes ‘domination, exploitation and suppression’ and for whom? Does the demand for ‘sustainability’ conflict the demand for ‘wealth and social security for all’? These are all historically and culturally situated norms that must be carefully defined and deconstructed if they are to be employed at all within a Systems theory of social movements. Instead, I propose that Luhmann’s functional systems theory offers the possibility of a critical systems theory that is also non-normative. Blûdhorn’s Systems theory of social movements also employs elements of Critical theory but those critical elements are constructed within his Systems’ theory and are explained as a outcome of functional systems. Blüdhorn (2007) says that Luhmann’s description of protest serves two functions. On the one hand, the function of protest is to expose the failure of functional differentiation, “to internalize issues which have hitherto been externalized, to include what up to now has remained excluded.” (Blüdhorn, 2007, p. 11). Alternatively, the function of protest is to simulate the externalization of issues that the social system ignores from within, to create “a space for something that cannot be accommodated within society and is therefore assigned to the realm of simulation: its function is to externalize issues that cannot be included.” (Blüdhorn, 2007, p. 11). In Luhmann’s scheme, nothing is excluded from society, yet the function of protest is to create a simulation of exclusion so as to stabilize the internal conflict between the actual and desired state. Furthermore, if protest movements simulate what is excluded from functional systems as within the social system, I propose that it is possible to use Luhmann’s and Blüdhorn’s scheme to argue that protest movements simulate as within the social system that which lies entirely outside the social system, namely, the natural environment. Blüdhorn restates Luhmann’s definition of the radical function of protest movements as maintaining the possibility of system difference and change: “Protest movements and discourses of radical change are the implantation of the alternative into the system itself, or the simulated reproduction of alterity from the system’s own resources.” (Blüdhorn, 2007, p. 15). Protest movements, therefore, provide a process for generating and selecting system alternatives, thus continuing the system’s evolution. Thus, a Systems theory of social movements that is also a non-normative yet critical systems theory would be constructed around one imperative: the continued evolution of the system. For this study of ecology groups, I propose a Critical Evolutionary Systems Theory which explains that social systems evolve when they are perturbed by their environments. Social systems generate social problems defined as the exclusion of issues from functional systems. Social movements self-organize by developing a critical stance toward the social system and maintaining that difference through continued critique. Individuals develop a critical consciousness to critique functional systems and the exclusion of those issues. Individuals communicate with others to deploy deviant semantics in the form of protest to simulate as within systems that which has been excluded, including issues that lie entirely outside the system, i.e the natural environment. Social and protest movements operate as communicative feedbacks to the larger social system, provoking system change and adaptation. Using ecological communication, (Luhmann, 1993; Bartone, 2011), ecology groups translate their concerns about ecological crises into language, symbols and codes that can be understood by functionally differentiated subsystems. Protest movements are self-organizing movements which autopoietically generate alternatives for functional systems. Social and protest movements self-organize around a new cognitive attractor that can generate new patterns for a ground-up production of new social forms. Social and protest movements translate perturbations from the environment to various functional subsystems, in language that those systems can understand. Social and protest movements network on an as-needed basis to create emergent social structures. Finally, social movements select among those alternatives and generate new functional subsystems which increase the complexity of the system and continue the evolution of the social system. At points of political crisis, social movements can connect with global communication networks that can spread the new attractor and chaotically spark new movements around the world. In short, social systems evolve only when they are provoked by adverse conditions in their environments; protest and social movements are forms of communicative perturbations that provoke the continued evolution of the system. Critical Evolutionary Systems theory does not imply that a more evolved social system is necessarily a “better” social system as in normatively improved—more democratic, sustainable, humanistic, or what have you. Evolution has its failures and it is possible, as Luhmann says, for social systems to arrive at an evolutionary dead-end and suffer system collapse. But the tendency is for all systems on the planet to continue the evolutionary process and generally to evolve toward a better ‘fit’ with the bio-social environment or failing that, to seal its fate in extinction. This research investigates how the exclusion of issues such as climate change and peak oil from political systems at various levels and scales provokes the self-organization of ecology groups. It explores how ecology groups develop a critical consciousness concerning, the ecological issues that have been excluded from political subsystems. It asks why and how ecology movements choose to employ the semantics of protest and advocacy concerning ecological issues against political systems and within the public sphere. It asks what ecology groups hope to achieve in terms of systemic change by engaging in political protest and advocacy. It examines how ecology groups engage in ecological communication with functional subsystems to shift the discourse of globalization and localization. Rootes: Local Ecology Movements, Coalitions and Networks Research on Transition Towns shows that Transition groups rarely participate in mass social movements, and the Transition movement as a whole does not encourage participation in mass social movements, such as the climate justice movement or 350.org. One of the questions the researcher asks in this research is why Transition groups and members tend not to participate in large scale, national and global ecology movements? An article by Christopher Rootes, “Acting Locally: The Character, Contexts and Significance of Local Environmental Mobilisations” (Environmental Politics, Vol. 16, No. 5, 722 – 741, November 2007) finally answered that more specific question. Rootes’ article is a review of several network, ethnographic and case studies of local ecology movements in Italy, Ireland and the UK. His review provides evidence which confirms that, typically, local ecology movements do not participate in large scale environmental, climate and global justice movements, and for several reasons. Rootes shows that the lack of linkages between local movements and translocal movements or the global ecology movements is not an anomaly, but normative or commonplace. It is more likely to be true of many local environmental movements that they don’t connect with national or global movements. Global Movements Build on the Local Rootes cites Carmin’s study (Carmin,1999, in Rootes, 2007) which shows that local organizations initiate action on issues, locally, while national organizations build upon those local issues and actions one or two years later. Rootes notes, “Thus local campaigners, by highlighting otherwise neglected issues, appear to perform a ‘discovery’ role for national organisations that are better placed to shape policy agendas and to affect policy outcomes.” (p. 773). This pattern of issue flagging by local movements and issue championing by national and more political organizations reflects Luhmann’s notion that social movements amplify issues that have been ignored or neglected by larger social systems (Luhmann, Ecological Communication, 1997). Local Movements are Place-Specific Rootes cites Saunders’ study which shows that local organizations tend to work on local issues, even if they are affiliated with regional and national organizations. (Saunders, 2007, in Rootes, 2007). Local organizations tend to collaborate with other local organizations, irrespective of the issue agenda of their national affiliates. Saunders’ network analysis showed frequent and intense interaction amongst local groups, and less interaction with national affiliates (Saunders, 2007, in Rootes, 2007). Local organizations tend to build expertise on local issues and local resources, rather than rely on national organizations for information and support. Local campaigns develop context-dependent knowledge, expertise and leadership which reduces the need for or interest in the context-independent knowledge and support of national organizations. (Rootes, 2007). Rootes cites studies in the UK (Doherty, Plows and Wall 2002, in Rootes, 2007) which show that environmental direct action (EDA) groups are less likely to be connected to national organizations that champion environmental issues. Rootes offers that EDAs are more interested in mobilizing and creating a culture of local resistance to global capitalism than influencing public policy. EDA methods tend to be anarchist, individualist and spontaneous, and avoid media attention. Rootes explains that “the pattern of EDA action appears to be better explained in terms of the dynamics of small groups: exhaustion following periods of intense campaigning, and interpersonal relations.” (Rootes, 2007). In “Place and Protest,” Rootes cites several studies from Italy and Ireland which show that the sense of ‘place’ was not present in the community to begin with, but was created and realized through local resistance to threatening conditions. Local campaigns led localities to develop a sense of community and identity. Communities developed a more profound understanding of the issues at stake. (Rootes, 2007), which he describes as an opposition between the ‘place value’ of the locality and its economic value to the global economy: This goes to the heart of local resistance. For locals, the fundamental issue is their defence of their habitat, their identity rooted in a sense of place, and their refusal to become ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. This is perhaps the central disjunction of our increasingly globalised age: we are governed by political, corporate and intellectual elites who celebrate their cosmopolitanism and who scorn all resistance to the imperatives of ‘progress’ by those who wish to conserve those things that give value and meaning to their lives and who either reject or cannot imagine the purported advantages of the hyper-mobility that is the lifestyle and vision of those elites. This resistance is not simply selfish conservatism, but it is instead informed by an appreciation of what it takes to live sustainably in an environmentally imperiled world.(O’Seighin, quoted by Garavan, in Rootes, 2007, pp. 732-733). The focus of Transition Towns is precisely this opposition between locality as ‘place value’ and its exploitation as exchange value in the global economy. The form of ‘localism’ that has developed under globalized capitalism is the localism of tourism, of marketing a locality as a ‘unique place’ that one must travel to in order to experience it. Many localities in the region in this study, Maritimes Canada, have chosen to market their towns as tourist attractions as a way to survive in the global economy. However, localities that cannot compete in the tourism industry, or that choose not to, do not benefit from that kind of tourist economy localism. Moreover, many residents of small rural and coastal towns resent and resist this local preservation strategy as it ultimately capitulates to cultural globalization. Local Movements Frame Issues as Place-Specific Rootes argues that environmental issues are always localized issues, because environmental policies are enacted in specific places under specific conditions. Local issues are often represented as ‘environmental’ when in fact they are more concerned with local governance, and the social dislocation and inequality caused by globalization. Local organizations do not feel adequately served by representational democracy or national movements: “Local protests…are a series of defences of place that have not (yet) been subsumed by a larger environmental movement or by a discourse of ecological resistance.” (Rootes, p. 734). However, it is this sense of place that also tends to inhibit the formation of translocal linkages with other localities or movements that are working on similar issues in other places. Large-scale environmental organizations exhibit the same dynamics of globalization, elitism and disconnection from place as that of the globalized economy. Consequently, local environmental movements tend not to develop and affinity with national counterparts in the environmental movement. Linking with Large-Scale Movements is Not Effective Rootes argues that creating links between local issues and large-scale political actors does not increase the chances of success for the local campaign. In fact, it tends to complicate the politics and the issues and make them harder to win. Local groups navigate local networks of governance through personal interaction, rather than remote demonstrations. Furthermore, inviting large-scale political actors into the campaign reframes the issues as a conflict between elites, which can displace local actors and local leadership. At higher-wider scales, local actors can be reduced to a position as ‘passive onlookers.’ Large-scale environmental actors can co-opt local movements and disempower local actors, or reframe the issues to match national and global objectives that don’t reflect local concerns. Large Scale Actors Overlook Local Groups In this debate over the politics of Transition Towns, it is often stated that Transition groups fail to connect with large-scale environmental movements. What is overlooked is that large-scale environmental actors fail to connect with local groups like Transition Towns. Rootes argues that linkages between these different levels “requires a coincidence between the interests of local campaigners and the campaign priorities of national organizations that is by no means automatic.” (Rootes, p. 736). National organizations are also limited in their ability to connect with local campaigns. Thus, it is not just that local organizations fail to ‘scale up’ by networking with national organizations; it’s also that national organizations and movements fail to ‘scale down’ by networking with local campaigns due to their own lack of resources or variance with goals and strategies. At the last UN Climate Conference in Paris, Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Towns, attended the conference and presented his vision for Transition Towns as a model that could enable cities and towns to transition from dependence on fossil fuels to a lower-carbon way of life. This was one instance when Hopkins was trying to bring the Transition Towns movement into the international discussion on climate change, However, there are few instances where international climate movements showed that they recognized the viability of Transition Towns as a model. Social Justice vs. Place-based Issues In “From the Local to the Global?” Rootes questions whether local organizations can find common interests with other localities and develop national or regional political strategies, but evidence shows that the incidence of such alliances is uncommon. Rootes’ research finds that “Discouraging examples are, however, legion. Thus far, the experience of the environmental movement in the relatively favourable circumstances of the European Union suggests that national peculiarities continue to divide environmental campaigners more than their common cause unites them.” (Rootes, 2003, 2004). Rootes argues that large-scale political cultures can invite or inhibit participation by local ecology groups. Reframing local environmental issues as issues of economic, global or social justice issues tends to displace environmental issues. Rootes review of local, regional and international ‘World Social Forums’ shows that environmental issues were not prominent on the agenda. (Rootes, 2007). Rootes examines the attempt to reframe issues in terms of the priorities of the global South, focusing on environmental justice (EJ) and human rights: If, as Pellow and Brulle (2005: 13), contend, ‘the EJ movement has succeeded in framing...environmental concerns as civil rights, social justice, and human rights issues’, it has already begun to bridge a cognitive gap between the experience of the global North and those countries of the global South where collective action on environmental issues does not take the form of distinctively environmental movements because environmental issues are so tightly bound up with issues of democracy, human rights and social and economic justice. (Rootes, 2007, p. 738). The presumption is that if local ecology movements, like Transition Towns, reframed their mission of protecting the value of ‘place’ as social justice issues, they would develop the cognitive architecture required to participate in a global environmental justice movement. Rootes has identified a ‘cognitive gap’ in the capacity of local environmental movements to frame their work as issues of social justice and human rights. Moreover, the political culture of the global North tends to suppress the links between environmental, economic, and social justice issues. Transition Towns’ parent organization in the UK, and it’s affiliate in the US, the Post-Carbon Institute, also fails to provide the ‘cognitive architecture’ for linking local ecologies to issues of equality, social justice and human rights. Since Transition Towns and Post-Carbon Institute do not frame the issues as social justice or human rights issues, they do not provide the cognitive capacity to connect Transition Towns to other broad-based justice coalitions. D. Politics as Process In 2015, the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning published a collection of articles on the ‘politics of Transition movements’. As with Avelino’s analysis, these were not discussions of political ideology, but political process. This study summarize the main points here and discuss their relevance to the Transition Towns movement. Gaed and Meadowcroft Gaed and Meadowcroft in “A Question of Authenticity: Status Quo Bias and the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook” look at the politics of futures planning in transition movements. They define futures envisioning and planning processes: “Futures, in short, are instrumental to our efforts to govern a transition towards a sustainable future.” Gaed and Meadowcroft, (2015). They state that the process of envisioning futures is necessarily political because it was embedded in particular social institutions and political contexts. (Gaed and Meadowcroft, 2015). They state that futures planning is necessarily political: “First, since futures are both expressions of ideas and/or interests for the future and tools that different actors can use to try to steer towards a particular vision of the future, they can be considered necessarily political from a transitions standpoint.” (Gaed and Meadowcroft, 2015) They cite Avelino and Rotmnan (2009) to say that the political power struggle in transition processes is between the power of pubic institutions to reinforce and perpetuate the dominant regime, and the innovative power of niche challengers to disrupt the displace the dominant regime. (Avelino & Rotmans, 2009, p. 545 in Gaed and Meadowcroft, 2015). The politics of futures planning, therefore, is a struggle between futures that preserve the dominant regime and those that replace it. Lastly, Gaed and Meadowcroft distinguish between ‘fact-based’ futures planning and ‘normative’ value-driven futures planning. (Gaed and Meadowcroft, 2015). Gaed and Meadowcroft state that the process of futures planning has been embedded in a ‘liberal democratic’ politics that seeks a diversity of ideas and interests in the planning process. I would add that whether that politics is viewed as ‘liberal democratic’ or ‘neoliberal’ might depend on who is conducting and controlling the futures planning and who benefits most from the futures planning. If it is conducted and controlled by institutions of the dominant regime, and maintains ‘Business as Usual’ (BAU), it could be qualified as ‘neoliberal.’ Their case study examined the politics of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook Report on projections of long-term oil supply between 1998 and 2009. Their finding was that the Report’s ostensible appearance as ‘fact-based’ and ‘apolitical’ was viewed with suspicion by its critics. The critique was that the Report’s futures projections reflected a BAU bias that perpetuated the dominant oil regime, as constructed by its dominant constituents, oil companies and states whose economies depend on the continued growth of oil production and supply. Thus the Report reflected a normative and political bias that was not made explicit to its audience. In terms of its application to this study of Transition Towns, the organization at the level of the parent organization and many of its local groups, fails to articulate or disclose its embeddedness in existing political and power relations. Rather it purports to espouse an “apolitical approach” or more recently, in the alternative, calls the movement “deeply political” but never articulates what kind of politics that entails. Kenis, Bono and Mathijs Kenis, Bono and Mathijs, in “Unravelling the (post-)political in Transition Management: Interrogating Pathways towards Sustainable Change” critique the presumed ‘post-political’ stance of transition movements and ask what is specifically the ‘political’ question in the politics of transition. Transition Management schemes claim to be ‘post-political’ (or in the case of Transition Towns ‘a-political’) in the sense that they “advocate a kind of consensus thinking and a technical and managerial way of looking at politics….Moreover, the existence of conflict and debate – about the way society is organized and about multiple future possibilities and different strategies to reach these – tends to remain unacknowledged.” (Kenis, et. al., 2015). Kenis et. al. argue that Transition Management fails to be ultimately transformative because “It considers change not as a power struggle between alternative visions for society, but as a quasi-market process whereby innovative niches compete with and outgrow the existing landscape.” (Kenis et. al., 2015). Kenis et. al. define two forms of democratic process: the deliberative democracy, in which ideas are debated and contested, and the aggregative democracy, in which the interests of smaller social units are aggregated and combined at a higher collective level. Kenis et. al. argue that the claim of Transition Management schemes to rely on ‘facts and scientific reasoning’, rather than deliberation and aggregation, or those that claim to replace economic reasoning with moral legitimation, also “misses the specificity of the political.” (Kenis, et. al. 2015). Moreover, the process of deciding what is to be transitioned and how is an exclusionary process, excluding the representation of divergent ideas and persons: “Precisely because there is always a hegemonic discourse which circumscribes what can be said and thought within a particular social context, exclusion is inevitable.” (Mouffe, 2000, p. 21, in Kenis et. al. 2015). Kenis et. al. adopt Mouffe’s argument for an ‘agonistic democracy’ in which constituents confront each other and articulate their conflicting interests as well as deliberate towards consensus. In their case study, Kenis et. al. identify the Transition Management’s political model as based on assumed consensus: First, the goal of transition is assumed to be shared, and what is deliberated are the strategies or pathways to effect the transition. While there may not be an explicit consensus at the beginning of the process, it is assumed that consensus will be reached through a process of “inter-relational learning.” Kenis et. al. claim that “transition management therefore resembles other green deliberative approaches in its tendency to ‘presuppose the existence of one overarching conception of “the good”’ (Machin, 2013, p. 47), even if this conception can take the form of a minimum consensus.” (Kennis et. al., 2015). Kenis et al argue further that “Democracy should imply the freedom to choose between different hegemonic projects for society, which requires that these projects are fully visible as political projects.” (Kenis et. al., 2015). Without this openly deliberative and agonstic process, “there is then never a moment in which the will of the people as such can be expressed, represented or contested, which is the political moment par excellence.” Kenis et al critique the limits of the niche-regime framework: If one thinks one can realize social change by fostering niches which can compete with and outgrow the existing regimes, change will inevitably be limited and tainted by what already exists. Again, the political moment, when the question is addressed what is the very form of society we currently live in, or strive for, is circumvented…A third option, finally, is that disagreement entails a radical choice for one or another type of society. In such a case, we are confronted with a cleavage that is constitutive and can (should) not be solved or reconciled as such.(Kenis et. al., 2015). So the primary ‘political question’ to ask participants at the outset of a Transition process is: what kind of society are we striving for? That question and deliberative and agonistic debate is what Kenis et. al. refer to as “the political moment par excellence.” (Kenis et. al. 2015). In terms of application to this study of Transition Towns, the movement at the level of the parent organization and the local level appear to assume the kind of society they are striving for: localized production of a material and social way of life that is not dependent on fossil fuels. When interested members attend Transition meetings and participate in Transition projects, it is assumed that they are self-selecting and therefore in agreement with this implicit goal. There is little open debate as to what kind of society, or its elements (economic, political, cultural) the group is striving for, thereby, according to Kenis et al, the Transition Towns movement “almost systematically avoids or conceals the moment of the political.” (Kenis et al 2015). Chilvers and Longhurst Jason Chilvers and Noel Longhurst, in “Participation in Transition(s): Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse” (2015) examine the construction of “publics” in sustainability transitions. Their study “draws attention to the processes by which collectives of participation in transitions are orchestrated: the process by which they get made and the exclusions that occur in terms of social actors or competing visions of energy futures. (Chilvers and Longhurst, 2015). They also note, like Avelino, that the “the role of consumers and ‘grassroots’ civil society initiatives in transitions is underrated and under-conceptualized within the literature.” (Chilvers and Longhurst, 2015). Chllvers and Longhurst turn to Seyfang and Smith’s definition of ‘grassroots innovations’ in sustainabiltiy movements: ‘Grassroots innovations’ are civil society groups that are actively building new forms of institution, organization, and commitment rather than just articulating political claims or objections to the status quo. Often ideologically motivated, they are innovating to meet specific social or environmental goals, thus bringing forward new forms of innovation and action (Seyfang & Smith, 2007). p. 589, in Chilvers and Longhurst, 2015). Chilvers and Longhurst claim that the construction of public participation is “emergent, relational and co-produced.” (Chilvers and Longhurst, 2015), and further, that this construction of the ‘public’ is itself a political process. They claim that “With respect to the issue in question around which publics are brought into being (Marres, 2007), collectives of participation can be subject to powerful framing effects, especially in institutionally orchestrated processes where the matters of concern are often pre-defined by incumbent interests.” (Chilvers & Burgess, 2008; Stirling, 2008). Chilvers and Longhurst identify two parts of this process, enrollment and mediation. Envrollment refers “the way in which different (human and non-human) actors are drawn into a particular form of participatory collective practice and definition of the issue at stake;” while mediation refers to the way in which a participatory collective is held together by different devices, processes, skills, or ‘technologies of participation’. (Chilvers and Longhurst, 2015). Chilvers and Longhurst claim that the processes of enrollment and mediation are always exclusive. Chilvers and Longhurst examine the UK movement Camp for Climate Action in terms of its construction of public participation. They note that the group was a self-selected and self-defined group of ‘anarchists’ and ‘anti-authoritarians’. The ideology of the group process was organized around ‘leaderless and horizontal principles,’ and consensus decision-making similar to Sitrin’s horizontalism. Climate Camp’s ‘public participation’ model also included novice climate activists who would be ‘schooled’ in the anarchist-horizontalist ideology, the process which Chilvers and Longhurst identify as mediation. Climate Camp’s model excluded from the outset technological, market and consumer-oriented approaches to sustainable transition, possibly excluding publics that would favour that approach. Chilvers and Longhurst also studied government led ‘top-down’ sustainability transitions, and by comparison, found that the horizontalist Climate Camp model “produced visions of low carbon energy transitions that emphasized wider socio-political, as well as technical, dimensions.” (Chilvers and Longhurst, 2015). In terms of application to Transition Towns, the movement assumes that the residents of a given locality are the “public” to be engaged and mediated. This may not include representatives of political and government functions that might also reside in the area. Engagement is conducted generally by advertising to the locality a series of media presentations about peak oil, climate change, technologies of mediation that present a decided bias in the fossil fuel debate, that the dominant fossil fuel regime is both destructive to the climate and to local economies. and subject to collapse. This mediation process fosters a public discussion on these issues within this particular energy framework. Other frameworks that might be relevant, but which are not framed as energy problems, such as critiques of capitalism or industrial technology, are not presented as part of the mediation framework. From this public presentation, Transition leaders recruit members who are interested in forming a Transition Towns group and participating in Transition projects. This process of public engagement and recruitment are the kinds of enrollment and mediation processes that Chilvers and Longhurst describe as the process of creating “the public”, which they define as part of the political process. Hoffman and Loeber Hoffman and Loeber “Exploring the Micro-politics in Transitions from a Practice Perspective: The Case of Greenhouse Innovation in the Netherlands.” (2015). This case study claimed to go beyond the assumed oppositional stance between niches and regimes set by Avelino and Rotman (2009), and to construct a micro-politics of ‘practices’ in transition movements. Hoffman and Loeber claim that transitions should be understood as processes that involve the interaction of niches and regimes, involving a process of translating practices between niches and regimes, which they refer to as a ‘co-evoluiton’ of niches and regimes. Hoffman and Loeber posited a micro-politics consisting of “the creativity that actors engage in (Hoffman, 2013) in processes of de- and re-routinization (Loeber, 2015) when working on innovation, and the power dynamics that are involved in the creative interactions between actors, materials, and their contexts.” (Hoffman and Loeber 2015). They define ‘creativity’ as “the ongoing reconfiguration of routines, habits, and institutions involved in making daily conduct practically effective and meaningful.” (Joas, 1996, Hoffman and Loeber 2015). They site the locus of this creative activity in a ‘field’, which they define as a ‘meso-level’ structure involving both niche and regime, and as “the local social world in which actors are embedded and toward which they orient their actions.” (Sallaz & Zavisca, 2007, p. 24 in Hoffman and Loeber 2015). The field and the interactions of niche and regime in the field become observable when new practices are being ‘articulated’, that is materially demonstrated and communicated to others: …we posit that articulation involves the identification and de-routinization of artefacts and relations as an object of knowledge that is bound to change. The manifestation of articulation implies an opening up and re-settling of fields that do not occur spontaneously but develop out of the step- by-step modification of standing practices. (Hoffman and Loeber 2015). Hoffman and Loeber claim that the manifestation of this creativity requires that agents ‘draw on and exert power’, similar to Avelino’s empowerment analysis. Hoffman and Loeber identify three moments in the transition process in which creative power was critical to the development of a new practice: (1) creative power in articulation, (2) creative power in innovation, and (3) creative power in consolidation. (Hoffman and Loeber, 2015). The agents exhibit relational power as they created new networks to develop and test the novel practices. They classified the de-routinization of existing practices and re-routinization of novel practice as dispositional power. The process of involving regime-level agents, such as technology companies, in consolidating these novel practices as part of the dominant regime yields structural power. (Hoffman and Loeber, 2015). This process of articulation, de-routinization of old practices and re-routinization of new practices produced a regenerative loop that triggered new practice networks and innovations across several fields of practice, notably engineering, science and agriculture. (Hoffman and Loeber, 2015). Hoffman and Loeber claim that this ‘ripple effect’ across several fields is the process by which innovation is translated from the niche to the regime, exhibiting innovative power. (Hoffman and Loeber, 2015). Hoffman and Loeber’s study is particularly relevant to this study of Transition Towns because the movement consists entirely in the development of new local networks and the articulation of novel practices around reducing dependence on fossil fuels at the local or ‘niche’ level, demonstrating relational, creative and innovative power; and secondarily, its power to trigger new networks and innovations at the regime level, demonstrating dispositional and structural power. Application: Politics as Process This review of the most current literature on the politics of Transition or Sustainability movements provided a much-needed focus on politics as process and power. However, it failed to identify those ideological elements that elucidate the political debates over system components, such as forms of governance, economy, ecology, and technological production. In that sense, this series of articles fails to competely articulate the political norms and goals of transition movements. Political ideologies represent those social elements that are the most conflicted and in dispute, and which require an open deliberative process. Failing to address political ideology as a component of the politics of Transition is itself depoliticizig. Power, process and political ideology are not synonymous; each requires its own articulation. An organization may have a strong political ideology, but no power or process for realizing power to achieve their goals. An organization may hold a great deal of power, but may be unable (or unwilling) to articulate their political ideology, or open up the process of participation, a situation that many government-led sustainability campaigns create. Thirdly, an organization may have a social process, but fail to articulate a political ideology, and as well, fail to develop the power necessary to realize their goals. This is the political space in which many Transition groups operate. The process-only analysis of the politics of sustainability movements involves a failure to identify specific political ideologies, which renders these movements, strangely, apolitical. This present study of Transition Towns goes further to identify the politics of the movement as autonomist and horizontalist, not just political process but as political ideology. E. Autonomism and Horizontalism Holloway: Autonomism. This section presents the major themes of John Holloway’s political discourse as expounded in Crack Capitalism, a 2010 revision of his prior work, Change the World Without Taking Power (2005). The section compares the discourse (communications and actions) of Transition Towns with Holloway’s political discourse and show the close resonance of the two. The study presents Holloway’s autonomism, and its corollary, horitzontalism, as a political model, and describes how Transition Towns exhibits the characteristics of autonomous and horizontal movements. Autonomism is both a political discourse and a model of social movements. Holloway’s autonomism is a political act that consists of a refusal and other doing. It is a refusal to “make capitalism” in the form of working as abstract labour, i.e. working for wages to produce goods that are alienated from and obscure the producer, the labourer. Instead, autonomists choose to do whatever is necessary or satisfying for themselves. This is what Holloway says creates “cracks” in the social cohesion of capitalism. This simple act of refusing, which Holloway calls the ‘No’, opens up time for other doing: “No, in this space, in this moment, we are not going to do what capitalist society expects of us. We are going to do whatever we consider necessary or desirable ,”(Holloway, p. 21). Holloway’s discourse does not insist on protest as the only valid form of political struggle: “Not just protest: protest allows the powerful to set the agenda. . .Breaking (cracking) “we” seize initiative set the agenda.” (Holloway, pp. 1-2). Power, for Holloway, is the power to do. Social change is simply the power to engage in this ordinary ‘other doing’. This ‘other doing’ does not require political ‘activism”; it is enacted in people’s daily lives as they resist participating in the economy of abstract labour: In other words, social change is not produced by activists, however important activism may (or may not) be in the process. Social change is rather the outcome of the barely visible transformation of the daily activities of millions of people…We must look beyond activism to the millions and millions of refusals and other-doings, the millions and millions of cracks that constitute the material bas of possible radical change. (Holloway, 2010, p. 13). While this is a political act, Holloway also calls this an anti-politics of dignity (Holloway, p. 17). It is ‘anti-politics’ in the sense that it does not aspire to political power or control of the State. It is not a-political, but redefines ‘the political’ as ordinary acts of self-determination: “Dignity, the movement of negating-and-creating, of taking control of our own lives.” (Holloway, p. 19).This discourse may be the key to understanding the “apolitical” stance of Transition Towns as a political discourse. Holloway (p. 23) gives some examples of this ordinary ‘other doing’, which are political acts: Various groups come together to found a social centre, both as a centre for anti-capitalist activity and as a space for developing other social relations; or a group of friends who decides that the best way to stop the destruction of nature is to live on the land and produce their own food bio-intensively. Often such activities are part-time. Or the friends who decide to live by cultivating their own food create their ideal community using the pensions they have already earned by working. (Holloway, 2010, p. 23) These examples are similar to the kinds of activities that Transition Towns groups participate in. Transition’s primary program model is the local production of food; second, local transportation solutions that include everything from bicycles to ride sharing to buses and trains, biodiesel and electric cars; third, the construction of local and renewable energy sources and systems; fourth, craft production and small businesses. Local food production is the primary model because it creates a community and culture around the production and sharing of food, which is the foundation of a culture. It is also the easiest project to organize, it can be done almost anywhere with little money, and it educates people about climate change and the energy crisis. Holloway claims it is not always possible or necessary to distinguish between a voluntary opting out or exclusion from wage labour: “Exclusion becomes refusal, and the patterns of alternative social relations constructed to deal with the exclusion become real cracks, powerful spaces of refusal-and-creation.” (Holloway, p. 25). What distinguishes autonomism is a present-oriented ‘other-doing’, which is not necessarily a protest, but a movement away from capitalist relations of production. At the same time, Holloway’s discourse insists that autonomism is form of quotidian resistance to capitalism: “There is nothing special about being an anti-capitalist revolutionary. This is the story of many, many people, of millions, perhaps billions…describes numerous examples of people who do, make or participate in activities that have no market value, done out of love for the activity, concern for the issue or community.” (Holloway, p. 2) The movement is not necessarily an organized front against capitalism or the state, but a collection of small acts, which cannot be classified according to standard political taxonomies. They are small acts that together create “counter-worlds” to capitalist social relations: The aim, however, is not to establish a typology or a classification: what is important is rather to see the manifold forms of rebellion in everyday life. We live in a capitalist society, we are dominated by capital, and yet, all the time and in a million different ways, we try to break the logic of capital… To struggle not just against but against-and-beyond is always to cross a threshold into a beyond, a sort of counter-world, that is both an experiment and a gamble, a beyond that is surreal in the sense that it projects us beyond existing reality… By envisaging a different world, by acting in a different world we actually call forth that world. It is only because we have, at least partially, moved out of what makes ‘sense’ in the old world that another world can start to make its own sense. (Holloway. p. 37) Holloway’s ‘cracks’ are an anti-politics of dignity, an alterity of social relations, a politics of social relations rather than instrumental power. (Holloway, p. 38). Transition Towns appears to be an attempt at this ‘other doing’, the creation of a local counter-world as resistance to the globalized world economy that engulfs the local. The resistance is one of locating the resources necessary for self-determination in the local, as a resistance to it’s dislocation within a globalized system. Similar to Gidden’s analysis, Holloway’s autonomism is a discourse that emerges under the conditions of modernity, and like, as a form of subjective discipline: The creation of our modern society with all that it implies in terms of labour, rational-scientific thought, dimorphous male-dominated sexuality, the objectification of nature, the homogenisation of time, enclosure in an all-embracing system, and so on, and so on: all this can be (and has been) seen simply as modernisation, the creation of a modern industrial society. More critically, it can be discussed in terms of the establishment of a disciplined society, or in terms of the critique of the Enlightenment, or, fascinatingly, as the `struggle between Pentheus and Dionysus' for the suppression of collective joy. (Holloway, 2010, p. 145). Holloway describes the decision-making process of autonomism as horizontality of a kind similar to Sitrin’s horizontalidad, as a process driven by consensus: Horizontality is the assertion of our own subjectivity, the rejection of vertical structures, chains of command which tell us what to do, which make us the object of the decision-making of others, whoever those others may be. The idea of horizontality is that all should be involved in decision-making processes on an equal basis and that there should be no leaders. In practice, it is difficult to make this work in absolute terms, since informal patterns of leadership often grow up where there are no formal structures, so it is probably more helpful to think of horizontality not as an absolute but as a constant struggle against verticality. (Holloway, 2010, p. 49). Horizontality is a peer-led self-organization of the kind that Transition Towns promotes, the direct democracy council or assembly. In particular, Transition Towns promotes self-organized “projects” or cooperatives, peer-led local organizations. For Holloway, it is a model against representative democracy as a form of organization that excludes the represented. (Holloway, 2010, p. 44). Holloway’s autonomism is a pre-figurative politics, which he locates not only in anti-globalist assemblies, but also the kind of small, locally-based projects of the kind that Transition encourages: An enormous amount of experience has been gained, especially in recent years, in this pre-figurative or ‘other’ politics, this politics of dignity. This includes both experience in the organization of the great anti-summit events of the alter-globalization movement and the organization of the world and regional Social Forums, but also the less spectacular creation of community gardens, alternative schools, radio stations in resistance, street theatre, and so on. The idea is gaining ground that the only way to change the world is to do it ourselves and do it here and now. (Holloway, 2010, p. 45). Holloway says the ‘refusal and other doing’ possesses a latent potential to disrupt capitalism, and that “Latency is the stuff of revolutions.” (Holloway, 214). Latency refers to the effect of revolutionary acts that are hidden, unsuspected, unnoticed, until it bursts forth in a more potent form. Transition Towns possesses this kind of latent characteristic. Presumed to be ‘a-political’, the Transition movement’s small town focus, lack of political visibility, its apparent quiescence hides its latent political potential. Transition works within a latency of time, preparing for future conditions, such as peak oil and climate change, that are just visible on the horizon now. The temporal element is as strong in Transition Towns as it is in Holloway’s political discourse. Holloway’s autonomist discourse is against the futurity of revolution: “This is the time of the Future Revolution: a logical absurdity because it is founded in the abstract time of abstract labour. (Holloway, p. 136). For Transition Towns, the ‘future revolution’ is the revolution that never comes; because it is always deferred to an uncertain future, a future in crisis. Transition Towns is a politics of now. The urgency of time is central to the movement. There is a sense or urgency that “we cannot wait for the State” to respond to these several impending crises.” (Holloway, 2010, p.) The Transition movement is one that refuses to contend with the State, either with the state as a partner in projects, or against the state as a locus of power and policy change, for the very reasons that Holloway elaborates: “The State draws us on a false terrain. But that means that politics draws us on to a false terrain: the very acceptance of politics as a distinct sphere leads us down the wrong road. Bring it all home, bring it home to our activity, our own doing and the way it is organized, what we do each day.” (Holloway, 2010, p. 133). This is precisely the discourse of Transition Towns. Trying to impact the state is seen as a misdirection, a waste of effort that is bound to fail. They refuse the politics of the State, because the State, aligned with globalized corporate production, is the political agent of corporate globalization. ‘We’ cannot wait for the state, the state is not interested, it works too slow to avert the crisis or even prepare for it. It has too many conflicted debts and allegiances to the very forces that create the crisis. Transition Towns is a movement of now, of here, and of us. It is a movement of “if we don’t do it, no one else will, and the State will not come to our rescue.” Transition is most certainly movement of “Bring it all home, bring it home to our activity, our own doing. . .” Holloway’s autonomism is not a movement sympathetic to labour organizing, being a movement against abstract labour, and thereby against capital. Neither is it a movement of social totalities, of mass movements, which are seen as abstractions, as a massification in the form of revolutionary parties that erase the protagonists: This is the standpoint of traditional Marxism. The traditional communist argument presents the alternative to capitalism not as breaking the social synthesis but as constructing an alternative social synthesis. One sort of totality must be replaced by another, based of course not on money and capital, but on popular planning. The struggle concentrates on the overthrow of one system and its replacement by another. The perspective of the revolutionary labour movement is that of totality. This means that the revolutionary movement requires an organisation that can adopt the standpoint of the totality: the party. (Holloway, p. 206). Holloway’s autonomism does not insist on an open and direct conflict against capitalism, but on the ‘other doing’ of creating new structures: “Building a new world does of course mean changing the existing one, the but the shift in emphasis is crucial: instead of focusing our attention on the destruction of capitalism, we concentrate on building something else. This is an inversion of the traditional revolutionary perspective that puts the destruction of capitalism first and the construction of the new society second.” (Holloway, p. 50). As he concludes in his last chapter, the discourse of autonomism is to stop making capitalism by refusing to create it in the present, whenever possible, and to engage in an other-doing, an other-making of a different world. Holloway’s discourse speaks of the temporalization of social change, much in the way that Luhmann describes the temporalization of communication, as a process continuously enacted in the present. Holloway describes this temporalization as a revolution of time as well as space.(Holloway, 2010, p. 234). Holloway’s autonomism is a reformation of social relations of production within time, from time as the abstract ‘clock-time’ of abstract labour, to what he calls ‘doing time, the patient time required for realizing a given project: Probably we need to think of revolution in terms of both temporalities: the temporality of rave-and-rage, performance-and-dance, and the temporality of patient creation, of gardening-and-weaving. This is not the old virtue of revolutionary patience, based on the idea that we must wait until the objective conditions are ripe. This is a different sort of patience that says `no waiting, let's get on now with constructing a different world, but it is not something that can be created in an explosion of fury, it requires and always will require a process of patient creation’. Slow movements, e.g. Slow Food, Slow Transport, are transformations of social relations within time. Transition, as well, calls for a way of life that is not only localized in terms of space, territory, but localized in terms of time, the timeframe that is required for projects to be realized with local resources. Several times in his thesis, Holloway refers to community gardening projects, the model project of Transitions, as embodying autonomist politics, transforming social relations of food production, and relations with the natural world: It is little wonder then that many of the movements of recent years have placed at the centre of their struggles the overcoming of the separation between humans and other forms of life. This is the substance of many of the cracks: the development (through organic gardening, permaculture, the creation of botanic gardens, dry toilets, whatever) of a form of living, a form of doing, based on a different relation with nature. (Holloway, p. 129). We create the world that does not yet exist by living it. We simply assert our own world. The organic gardeners of the world do not wait for the revolution to create a less aggressive relation with plants: they do it now. (Holloway, p. 240). For Transition, as well, gardening and local food production it’s often the first and most important project that any local group takes on. The local production of food is a kind of ‘ecological communication’ by which Transition members learn about global issues and crises, about relocalization, ecology and systems theory. Gardening projects reintroduce the locality to its connection with and dependence on other living species. Holloway proposes that the connection of the “cracks” is a network of actions and movements: “The interconnections between rebellions in the world take the form of informal and constantly changing networks, often providing important practical support. The network is the joining of the cracks.” (Holloway, p. 69). Holloway argues that the movement towards a totality is precisely what the new social movements are against or are not interested in producing. Rather they produce particular struggles that link together in networks as the need arises: Totality is in crisis. The crisis of abstract labour is also the crisis of the social synthesis based on abstract labour. More and more in recent years, anti-capitalist movements are posing the question of radical change in terms of the unstructured confluence of struggles from below, the coming together of particular struggles. The coming together is seen in terms of loosely structured and usually temporary organisational forms rather than a more formal and permanent creation of national or international institutions (Holloway, 2010 p. 207). It is this network element that is missing in many Transition Towns groups, as they take the form of the “hyperlocal”. Transition groups form temporary coalitions with other small projects, but they often don’t result in long-lasting cooperative activities; rather they become a series of short-term projects and alliances. Nor is Transition Towns networked with similar movements around the world. Although the Brazilian Landless Peasants Movement (MIST) is often cited as an example by Transition UK parent organization, the groups studied made no deliberate connection with MIST or similar groups. The leader of Transition Bay noted that there were similar projects that he knew about around the province, and he could identify the towns, but there was no indication that Transition Bay was working with them in a coordinated fashion. Transition Towns groups tend to be networked through the internet to the parent organization in the UK, and to the Post-Carbon Institute in the US, but only as a source of information, not as a form as coordinated action. Holloway’s confluence of the cracks is a product of resonances: “what is needed is a certain resonance, and these resonances do not follow formal organisational lines and are often hard to understand. A crack touches some hidden structural fault that then opens into a crack and spreads: this cannot be planned and usually cannot be foreseen with any accuracy. (Holloway, p. 211). Holloway’s resonance is similar to the resonance of Luhmann’s ecological communication. However, Holloway’s resonance is used in novel way. Whereas Luhmann’s resonance describes emotional and political frequencies that are too strong, such that they frighten or overwhelm; or too weak, such that they are ignored, Holloway’s resonances are a kind of harmonic resonance. For Holloway, the question would be “is Transition Towns forming harmonic resonances with other movements as a way to ‘connect the cracks?’” Rather than marching with or ‘signing on’ with national contested campaigns, the movement would create a harmonic resonance with other similar movements. Rob Hopkins, the UK leader of Transition Towns demonstrated some of this sensibility when he gave workshops on Transition Towns at the 2015 IPCC UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris. He was promoting Transition Towns as a model of local “decarbonization”, of energy decent to a way of life without fossil fuels. Another example of harmonic resonance and local cooperation was the Transition Heathrow project, which worked originally with Climate Camp/Plane Stupid, a direct action climate group, on a campaign that stopped the expansion of Heathrow Airport, and unwittingly, the destruction of a greenhouse and farm near the airport. The local Transition group took over the greenhouse and created a new gardening facility at the location now called Grow Heathrow. Because of this fruitful collaboration between protest, direct action and transition projects, several other political “resonances” have been cultivated: The site is a hub for local residents and environmental activists to share knowledge and practical skills such as organic gardening, permaculture design, bicycle maintenance and wood and metal work. Over the past three years the site has played host to a wide range of political gatherings for groups such as: UK Uncut, Climate Camp, Reclaim the Fields, The Transition Network, People&Planet, No Tar Sands Network, The Kick Nuclear Campaign, PEDAL, Palestine Place, Cuts Cafe and many more. (http://www.transitionheathrow.com/grow-heathrow/). This is one of the rare instances where a local Transition group found political resonances and coordinated with direct action and protest politics. Holloway’s autonomism was strikingly prescient in its prediction of the Occupy movement, which is not framed as a movement of protest and demands, but of social process: This concept is opposed to a politics of demands. A demand is addressed to someone and asks them to do something on our behalf in the future, whereas in the politics of living now the world we want to create (or creating now the world we want by living it) there is no demand. We ask no permission of anyone and we do not wait for the future, but simply break time and assert now another type of doing, another form of social relations. (Holloway, 2010, p. 240). This is where the Occupy Movement and Transition Towns have resonance: both are a revolution of no demands; of simply doing, without asking permission, and creating another world in the now, by doing. With this political discourse, it becomes clear why the more radical transition group in Fredericton, Eco-Fredricton, became the de facto leader of the Occupy Fredericton movement. Transition Towns has resonances with Occupy, pre-figuring in the encampment what Transition Towns was trying to do on a more permanent basis in town. Sitrin: Horizontalism Marina Sitrin’s book, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (2012), was her study of recent social movements in Argentina. These movements arose in response to the repeated failure of the state, marked by a series of failed national elections and deposed leaders, and the collapse of the Argentine economy, marked by the collapse of its currency and the bankruptcy and closure of major banks. As well, these movements were a response to the intentional neglect of marginalized communities even when there was a functioning government and financial system. As with Holloway’s autonomism, Sitrin’s horizontalism is both a political discourse and a model of social movements. This section present the major themes of Sitrin’s horizontalism and explain how it resonates with the discourse and practices of the Transition Towns movement. Sitrin’s study revealed several distinct characteristics of the Argentine “horizontal” movements, and explains how revolutionary “rupture” was sustained in the everyday lives of its participants. Sitrin identifies and defines the following characteristics of horizontalidad; horizontalidad—a form of direct decision making that rejects hierarchy and works as an ongoing process autogestión—a form of self-management with an implied form of horizontalidad concrete projects related to sustenance and survival territory—use and occupation of physical and metaphorical space changing social relationships—including changing identity with regard to the personal and collective politica afectiva—a politics and social relationship based on love and trust self-reflection—individual and collective, as to the radical changes taking place andhow they break from past ways of organizing; and autonomy, challenging ‘power over’ and creating ‘power with’—sometimes using the state, but at the same time, against and beyond the state (Sitrin, 2012, p. 3). As with Holloway’s autonomism, Sitrin’s horizontalism is a ‘pre-figurative’ politics: “Many autonomous movements and communities around the globe are prefiguring the world that they wish to create, that is, creating the world that they desire in their day-to-day relationships. Many use the language of prefigurative politics to describe this relationship. Prefigurative politics, as it sounds, is behaving day-to-day as much as possible in the way that you envision new social and economic relationships: the way you would want to be.” (Sitrin, p. 4). Sitrin’s horizontalism, like Holloway’s autonomism, also refuses to contend with the state as a means of making demands, obtaining power or extracting concessions: These movements define themselves as autonomous precisely because they do not want to take over the state, and see themselves in a position different and separate from the state, therefore autonomous. They do not desire state power, as many left-wing groups and political parties have in the past, but rather want to try to create other forms of horizontal power with one another, in their communities and workplaces. This concept of power and revolution is about a total transformation of society, but one that takes place and continues to expand from below. (Sitrin, p. 7). Sitrin defines horizontalism as horizontal power relations, where the focus is on developing relationships of mutual support and community cohesion, rather than imposing a political hierarchy: Horizontalidad is a social relationship that implies, as its name suggests, a flat plane upon which to communicate, but it is not only this. Horizontalidad implies the use of direct democracy and striving for consensus: processes in which attempts are made so that everyone is heard and new relationships are created. Horizontalidad is a new way of relating based in affective politics and against all the implications of ‘isms’. It is a dynamic social relationship. It is not an ideology or set of principles that must be met so as to create a new society or new idea. It is a break with these sorts of vertical ways of organizing and relating, and a break that is an opening. (Sitrin, pp. 8-9). Sitrin’s dialogue with participants in these movements shows that participants are not always self-consciously advocating for a certain kind of politics. Rather, horizontalism is a collective response to the conditions faced everyday in marginalized communities: “There are more than 100 similar communities that not only organize as assemblies, but they also are engaged in impressive struggles, deeply interesting, and they don’t speak of autonomy or autonomous people, neither do they speak of horizontalidad, there is no pompous discussion of horizontalidad. Instead, they do it—they engage in it in practice. There are no leaders and everyone is equal to each other. They do not talk and talk about the theory of struggle—they do it.” (Conversation in downtown Buenos Aires, late 2009). (Sitrin, pp. 64-65). Sitrin’s horizonatlism was not a political movement in the conventional sense or organizing by party and leaders, but a pragmatic movement to deal with local conditions in the neighbourhoods where participants lived: “What we’re doing is constructing an experience-based practice, and it is precisely this experience-practice that speaks for itself. Since this is an open movement and one that’s territorially-based, with our located in the neighbourhood, we’re constantly discussing what horizontalidad and autonomy are and what they mean for us here. It’s an open an ongoing discussion.” (Neka, in Sitrin, p. 116). Sitrin’s horizonatlism describes a movement for social change that is change of subjectivity and social relations. The new subjectivity is the protagonist, an “actor or protagonist in his life,’. (Sitrin, p. 11) A protagonist is an agent who is the subject of his or her own life narrative, one who engages in the creation of a new understanding of self in the context of responding to one’s life conditions. Furthermore, horizontalism as a collective process generates a collective protagonist, a group that becomes the agent of their own collective destiny. The new subject is the new person formed as a part of these new relationships; a subject grounded in politica afectiva – a politics of affection, love and trust. Along with this new individual protagonism, a new collective protagonism arises with a need for new ways of speaking of nosotros (‘we/us’) and nuestro (‘our’) as these relate to yo (‘I/me’). Furthermore, the formation of these relationships, rather than the achievement of particular goals, is the measure of success of horizontalidad: “This aspiration is a genuinely new conception of the individual self through new conceptions of the collective. These new relationships, compelled by the notion of dignity, are the measure of success for these revolutions.” (Sitrin, p. 11). Sitrin’s horizontalist model emphasizes that the success of the movement is not in its ability to solve a particular problem (e.g. poverty, housing, health care), but in the ability to create and sustain horizontalism, a form of social relations. (Sitrin, p.63). In the most conventional political sense, horizontalism is a form of governance in which power is shared, goals and projects are collectively determined in a leaderless, democratic deliberation, often in the form of neighbourhood assemblies: “It is also in this way that the forms of decision making and governance take place. There is no rigid structure except that all participate, and over time participate increasingly; through participation we find new modes of participation. It is an open process that allows for more participation and agency, yet more and different participation, then changed people which, again, leads to new forms of participation. “(Sitrin, p. 64). The form that a particular project takes in a horizontalist movement is autogestion, which Sitrin says has no exact translation in English, but means “self-organizing”: “Projects in autonomous spaces, for example, are ‘autogestiónados’: they are self-created and self-managed. In the unemployed movement, bakeries, organic farms, popular schools, and clinics are all autogestíonados. They are run collectively, directly democratically and horizontally, often using decision- making processes based on consensus.” (Sitrin, p. 10). The Transition Towns movement has many of the hallmarks of Sitrin’s horizontalist discourse of horizontalism. It is self-organized, relatively flat in hierarchy, with at most a couple of key leaders in each group. Transition groups are organized locally in neighbourhoods and towns, and the focus is addressing local concerns, rather than directing energy towards the state, national or international political frameworks. Projects are selected collectively in a process akin to a democratic assembly. The goal of the projects is not to solve a particular problem in the technical sense, e.g. to end the energy shortage or stop global warming, but to accomplish a social goal, i.e. to re-localize the control over energy, food and other means of subsistence. Moreover, the goal of Transition Towns projects is to build local resilience, i.e. the social capacity to meet difficult conditions and thrive as a community. Thus, like Sitrin’s horizonatlism, the goals of Transition Towns are primarily social, not technological, a movement to create social resilience in the face of multiple globalized crises.. Movements and Systems Luhmann’s systems theory of social movements is that they self-organize through communication. Their systemic function is to alert functional subsystems to conditions in the environment of the system that have been excluded or ignored. Social movements communicate these concerns to subsystems by encoding and translating phenomena from the environment into language that can be understood by functional subsystems. Holloway and Sitrin have identified a new wave of autonomous social movements in the first two decades of the 21st century that take less account of systems and are more concerned with self-organization. My investigation of Transition Towns shows that this movement shows both features of social movements: they self-organize around communications, and are primarily concerned with self-organization, yet they also encode and translate conditions in the environment to communicate their concerns to functional subsystems. I call this dual function internal and external coding. Internal coding is accomplished through the language they use to self-organize, what Sitrin calls movement language. Marina Sitrin identified this kind of language in her study of horizonalist movements in Argentina. Luhrmann said that social movements use the same kinds of communications that all systems use, that is, communications and actions. In addition, social movements also engage in specialized communications particular to their functions as social movements: programs and protest. Social movements, as organizations make decisions and execute programs that enact their decisions. They engage in protest when they set up a form of communication which remains always an open challenge that never seeks a resolution; protest becomes a form of self-perpetuating communication loop that has no closure, but continually aggravates itself to produce more protest. This is part of the social movement’s internal coding, by which it defines its own issues, and external coding by which it communicates with functional subsystems. Both the internal coding and the external coding, within and between movements and subsystems, are forms of what Luhmann called ecological communication. Transition Towns in particular uses action as a form of communication. The way that it encodes its concerns about ecological crises is by taking actions that communicate, usually in the form of projects. Those actions or projects include growing food locally in community gardens, constructing local renewable energy projects, promoting bicycling and public transportation. As Sitrin showed with her study of movements, they self-organize through movement language. This is not limited to the language of social protest, but include buzz words, slogans and memes that communicate the particular ways that they organize their own meetings and activities, how they govern themselves. In addition to these, the study shows that Transition Towns communicates through decisions, projects, programs, activities of daily life, and protest. These patterns of communicative self-organization constitute the political discourse of the movement. This study of Transition Towns in Maritime Canada is thus a discourse analysis of the movement in this region. Movement language the language of self-organization, which is the language of autonomous self-governance. Horizontalist and autonomous movements are less concerned with influencing governments (local or higher), and show less interest in obtaining positions in government (Luhmann’s definition of political communication). They are primarily concerned with autonomous self-governance, what Sitrin has called popular power, and what Holloway calls “the power to do.” Autonomous and horizontalist movements, including Transition Towns, are not concerned with conventional forms of power and governance, that is, with influencing or changing political systems, but with creating new systems that encode within themselves the capacity to cope with issues in the environment that older system have failed to internalize. In the communications of Transition Towns, in particular the three local groups under study, movement language is used to both self-organize around the ecological crisis and to communicate those concerns to local governments, translating their concerns about the global ecological crisis into codes that local systems can understand. The internal movement language is primarily concerned with programs; the external movement language can sometimes be expressed in the form of programs and sometimes as protest. Ch. 4 Application to Research This chapter presented several theories describing the self-organizing dynamics of social movements and their relationship to the larger social system. Systems theory was used to show that social movements perform a particular function, to represent to the social system issues that have been excluded from the system. The social system permits the formation of social movements as a mechanism by which social systems can observe their own processes. Social movements present alternatives to the social system that may be used to resolve the excluded issues. Critical social movement theory was presented to show that social movements must generate a critical consciousness so that social systems are sufficiently alerted to issues and problems and are motivated to take action. Bartone synthesized these two strands of social movement theory into critical evolutionary systems theory to explain that social systems evolve when they are provoked by their environments, and that the function of the social movement is to raise awareness and critical consciousness sufficient to respond adequately to the situation, such that the system may continue its adaptive evolution. Rootes’ study of the dynamics of localized ecology movements was presented to understand why local movements typically don’t get involved with large mass movements at wider scales and higher levels of influence. The research of several authors on transition ecology movements was presented to show that ecology movements, especially small, local ecology movements, employ a politics-as-process in terms of defining issues, recruitment, education and advocacy. Holloway’s politics of autonomism and Sitrin’s politics of horizontalism were presented as models of political theory and action that most closely described the particular political form developed by Transition Towns and its local groups. Each of these models was applied to the study of Transition Towns and its local groups to understand how these ecology movements self-organize around the crises of globalization that impact localities, the role they play in addressing critical global and local issues, how that shapes the narrative they develop and communicate to their localities and the larger society.  Ch. 5 Local Autonomist Movements: Transition Groups in Maritime Canada. Three Versions of Autonomism. In the previous sections, the study identified the conditions that shaped the ecology movement called Transition Towns, classifying it as a response to three interwoven global crises, the supposed decline in quality and quantity of cheap fossil fuel energy, global climate change, and global economic disruption. Using Giddens theory of modernity and globalization, I linked these crises and Transition Towns’ response to them as ‘the crisis of globalization’. The study then analyzed Transition Towns’ response to the crisis of globalization first as localism, and then identified its political tone as a form of autonomism, as described by John Holloway, and secondarily, as similar to the horizontalist movements in Argentina described by Marina Sitrin. The study summarized this model of autonomism as the politics of the Transition Towns movement in the West. This section examines the three Transition Towns groups as forms of autonomism, both in the ways that they conform to the autonomist political model of the parent organization and how they differ from the parent organization. This research studies three self-designated Transition groups in Maritime Canada, two in Fredericton New Brunswick and one in Saint Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia. Each group exhibits ideologies and activities, what Luhmann called “communication and action”, that are congruent with the autonomist political paradigm, which I assert is typical of the Transition Towns movement as a whole. But each group also exhibits distinctive features that distinguish subtypes or “flavours” of autonomism. In addition to typical Transition activities, they engage in a variety of political actions that range from mass protest movements to electoral politics to political advocacy. Their public communications and activities reveal a range of political ideologies, from ‘deep green anarchism’ to ‘neoliberal’ survivalism. Politics: What Transition Towns is Not. While these frames comprise what Transition Towns communicates, it does not necessarily describe its political position, except perhaps in the negative. Because Transition Towns defines the root of the global crisis as an energy crisis, it decentres other conventional political explanations: capitalism, western and white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, to name a few. Energy is the problem, not labour exploitation or power inequalities of various kinds. In fact, Transition Towns and Post Carbon Institute (the parent organization of Transition Towns in the US) argue that energy-dense fossil fuels and mechanization displace labour en masse, rendering labour obsolete and creating a global class of precarious labour with no political power or means of subsistence. Thus they perceive the rise of left populist movements such as Occupy and right populist movements such as the Tea Party are provoked by the energy crisis, not class conflict. Furthermore, the State is as much a captive of the energy regime and energy crisis as the rest of the global economy. The State is caught up with maintaining BAU (‘business as usual’), securing supplies of fossil fuel by military and political means; and compensating for declines in economic growth by expanding debt and the financialization of the global economy. The State is not concerned with solving the energy crisis through a strategy of degrowth and shifting to renewables, or with managing the impending collapse of civilization. Transition Towns subscribes to the inevitability of the ‘failed State’, where a level of governance, whether local or national, can no longer function effectively to provide basic state functions of security, a stable economy and adequate subsistence, resulting in political collapse and civil unrest. Thus, the State offers no solutions to ordinary citizens who struggle with the fallout of the energy crisis and the collapse of civilization. The State’s solutions are so inadequate and so slow to implement that they cannot forestall a collapse of civilization. Since the State is indifferent or offers no solutions in a time frame that could forestall collapse, it is up to local citizens to provide their own local solutions in the form of locally produced energy, food, and basic subsistence. The absence of a political strategy aimed at either Capital or the State, and the focus on local self-reliance points to a political position that is closest to Holloway’s autonomism. Not an Environmental Movement Moreover, because Transition Towns/PCI defined the global crisis as an energy crisis, and primarily as a decline in energy supply, it was not aligned with conventional environmental movements to protect wildlife and conserve natural lands; with air and water pollution or waste control, with the impact of industrial toxins, with blocking infrastructure development, with nuclear power, ocean conservation, organic agriculture, animal rights, or most other forms of environmental political action. It became aligned with the push for transitioning to an energy regime based on renewable energy, but argued that renewable energy would never match fossil fuels in energy density or supply. Their estimates are that renewables would only replace 20% of global baseload energy, and would not supply enough energy for continued economic growth. Thus, even with renewable energy, the complex global civilization would still face degrowth, decline and possible collapse. Transition Towns began with teaching permaculture as a way of addressing the energy regime crisis at the local level. Permaculture was developed by western ecologists as a way to adapt western industrial cultures to ecological limits on energy, water, minerals and soil nutrients, to institute a circular form of food production that recycled waste into resources for continued productivity, to devise forms of agriculture and subsistence production that could be sustained within a limited biological system for many generations. Permaculture was based on the ecological version of systems theory and was certainly part of the broader ecology movement. But Transition Towns introduced permaculture as a way to think about the impacts of the energy crisis in a systematic way, and to help communities devise ways of life that could be sustained in the event of a declining global economy and transition to renewable energy. It undertook “green” infrastructure projects at a local level, mostly around food production and energy infrastructure. In that sense, Transition Towns’ pemaculture model was built around relocalizing the economy facing the limits of a severe energy crisis, secondarily as a way to adapt to biological limits. So Transition Towns’ permaculture approach was more about creating a local economy embedded in the values and lifeways of a particular locality. It was primarily a social ecology of human communities rather than an environmental ecology of an entire ecosystem. With permaculture as one of its core ideologies and technologies, Transition Towns has resonances with the broader “green” cultural movement, but is decidedly more economic, less so environmental. The one environmental movement that Transition Towns has had some resonance with is the anti-fracking movement. The anti-fracking movement is a movement against extreme and damaging forms of energy extraction. It has resonances with Transition Towns because it is primarily concerned with energy and because the anti-fracking movement is also highly localized. Small local groups of citizens ban together, often in remote rural areas to block local gas and oil fracking projects. In that sense it has some resonance with Naomi Klein’s description of blockadia in This Changes Everything (2014). Klein describes blockadia as a movement of small, dispersed and disconnected groups that block projects in remote areas, but by doing so, they effectively disrupt the construction of intra-continental pipeline systems such as KXL and DAPL. However, Transition Towns is not primarily concerned with blocking local energy projects. Transition Towns leader, Rob Hopkins, became very vocal against the designation of the entirety of the UK as a fracking zone; but by contrast, members of Eco-Fredericton were not aware of the contemporaneous anti-fracking movement in Fredericton, and never participated in its anti-fracking activities. Thus, Transition Towns is not an example of the politics of blockadia. Moreover, the absence of a conventional environmental narrative precluded Transition Towns from staking a political position as an environmental movement. Transition Towns is not primarily an environmental political movement. Not an anti-Globalization movement but a Localization movement Transition Towns frames the current crisis as a global crisis, a globalized energy regime, a global system of production and trade, a globalized Corporate and State apparatus that ignores the local and exploits local markets for global trade, and a global climate crisis. Thus Transition Towns defines itself as a movement for relocalization of energy and the economy, that production and consumption should be controlled by and embedded in local economies, fueled by locally-controlled energy sources. Transition Towns shares some elements with anti-globalization movements, but not the sort that coalesced in 1999 against the World Trade Organization. The anti-globalization movement that surfaced at that juncture was driven by an anarchist politics against Capital and the State, whereas Transition Towns is not against either Capital or State, but views them as unresponsive and irrelevant. The “alter-globalization” movement exemplified by the World Social Forum is also primarily an anarchist movement against global Capital and the State but also aligned with autonomist (Holloway) and horizontalist (Sitrin) movements in the global South, particularly Latin America. Transition Towns has never demonstrated any significant alignment with either the anarchist anti-globlaization movement or the alter-globalization movement. Transition Towns is an anti-globalization movement only in the sense that it is primarily a localization movement. This characterization is supported by the presentation of Gidden’s thesis on globalizaiton, as a problem of de-localizaiton which echoes many of the concerns of the Transition Towns movement. Moreover, the absence of an anti-capitalist or anti-State anti-globalization positions, and the absence of an alter-globalization position, and it’s primary focus on local autonomy, points again to Holloway’s autonomism as the best description of the politics of Transition Towns. When Transition Towns is at it’s most explicitly political, it is translating global issues to local contexts. Transition Towns promotes demonstration projects, such as the the relocalization and decarbonization of the economy, which can only work on a very small scale, and are rarely more than demonstrations. Such projects won’t solve the kind of complex, global problems we face. But they do help to contextualize the global crises as issues of local concern. Official Transition has emphasized demonstration projects and has shied away from political mass movements. But political communication is the most effective way to translate global crises into local contexts. Transition projects are part of the strategy of ecological communication, of which demonstration projects are a small, concretized part. Even more important than demonstration projects are policy debates that take place at municipal and regional levels. Policy debates at local and regional levels are connected to larger political structures and media arenas, so that information from the local can flow upward, across higher levels and scales. Eco-Fredericton: Eco-Anarchist Autonomism Eco-Fredericton was led by two friends who espoused radical anarchist politics. In an interview, the initiator of the project cited the works of Derrick Jensen as a strong influence on his own thinking about ecology, economics and politics. Jensen’s writings and his organization, Deep Green Resistance, advocate for dismantling urban technological civilization, an end to all forms of mechanical technology, the State, and the global capitalist society. Jensen’s deep green anarchism espouses violence as self-defense against the State and the destruction of corporate property. Despite this radical green anarchist influence, the ideology and goals of Eco-Fredericton were in line with those of the Transition Towns movement: a relocalized economy, food production and energy sources. They espoused self-organized autonomous projects that built community cohesion and resilience as a bulwark against the global crises of energy depletion, climate change and the assumed breakdown of the global capitalist economy. Eco-Fredericton was initially going to call itself ‘Transition Fredericton’, but once they learned that another group had already taken the name, they chose a name to distance themselves from “Transition Towns” as movement. While they espoused many of the typical activities of a Transition Towns group, they were clearly more radical and political in their group ideology. Initially, Eco-Fredericton was focused on re-localizing the economy, creating small cooperatives, local food production, developing local energy resources, and devising self-organized solutions for the strata of persistent poverty in the City. In this sense, they were functioning like a typical Transition Towns group. Though they espoused a radical anti-capitalist and anti-corporate ideology, their list of proposed solutions was local, autonomist and horizontalist. They were not plotting to overthrow the State or attack global corporations with strikes and blockades, but to build a local autonomous replacement for the Corporate State from the ground up. Shortly after forming the group in 2011, they were immediately presented with the onset of the Occupy Movement in the United States in September 2011. As they were the most active radical group in the City at the time, they were asked to lead the organization of the Occupy movement in Fredericton. They took on the job of handling communications and organizing for the local Occupy group. They published flyers that were posted around the City. They set up numerous email lists and Facebook groups to convene discussion of the issues, objectives and activities of Occupy Fredericton. They were responsible for organizing volunteers to stay at the Occupy tent, which was pitched in front of City Hall, and for obtaining food, equipment and supplies for the encampment. They organized the series of teach-ins at the campsite that pulled in guest speakers from local universities and the city. In this sense, they undertook many of the same activities of other Occupy movements around the US and Canada, and around the world. However, unlike the North American Occupy movement which claimed no specific demands from the State, Occupy Fredericton, under the guidance of Eco-Fredericton, had a long list of quite specific demands that they not only published, but advocated for directly with the Mayor and City Council of Fredericton. [Note: list of demands]. The list of demands reflected the combined agenda of both Transition and Occupy: a decarbonized and relocalized economy, decreased dependence on fossil fuels, reducing the domination of the global corporate economy, economic justice for “the 99%”, and a radical, horizontalist democratic process. Eco-Fredericton handily blended a deep green anarchist ideology, the radical democracy of the Occupy movement, with a Transition-style focus on local autonomy and self-organization. They blended a radical and public opposition to the Corporate State with Holloway’s autonomist approach to self-determination and Transition’s focus on localism. By articulating the Transition agenda through the language of the Occupy movement, Eco-Fredericton was able to reframe Transition Towns from an avowed ‘apolitical’ movement to a movement articulated as autonomist anarchism. Though members of Eco-Fredericton volunteered with Transition Fredericton’s campaign for Mayor, they were far more distrustful of the City Council and ‘establishment politicians’, and more vocally opposed to the City government than Transition Fredericton. When the Mayor ordered the city police to strike the encampment and remove the belongings of the Occupiers, members of Eco-Fredericton sued the Mayor for obstruction of free speech and assembly, unlawful removal of the camp, and unlawful seizure of personal property. A year after launching the lawsuit, it became apparent that Occupy Fredericton would win their case, and the City offered a settlement to the plaintiffs. Once the Occupy encampment had been forcibly ended, and the lawsuit settled with the City a year later, the leaders of eco-Fredericton struggled to find a new direction for the group. They decided on a project of starting an ‘eco-village’, and looked for land near the city centre on which to build shelter and start a cooperative farm. They promoted the concept with local organizations around the City, including Transition Fredericton and the Fredericton Green Party, seeking financing and support. They became interested in a horse farm that was for sale just over the city line on the North Side of the City. The leaders negotiated a deal to lease it from the owner, who was interested in their ideas and vision. The eco-village would be a centre for local food production, alternative energy projects, and education on ecology issues, the multiple crises. of globalization, democracy. The project was typical of many ‘back to the land’ groups, so-called ‘intentional communities, that attempt to establish a utopian community. After many months of planning and promoting the eco-village, they were unable to obtain the necessary financing and resources, and abandoned the project But the eco-village was not the only project proposed by Eco-Fredericton. For one of the leaders, the eco-village was not his first choice for projects. He wanted to focus on development work in the City, creating and supporting cooperative businesses, and ‘greening’ the local economy. Before either program of activities could be initiated, the Eco-Fredericton group disbanded. One of the leaders decided to carry on the work of Eco-Fredericton but renamed it ‘York Resilience’, referring to York County, which contained the City of Fredericton. The ideology of Eco-Fredericton has resonance with another scholar of green politics, Ted Trainer, a professor of Social Science at Univ. of New South Wales, who wrote on the anarchist politics of an eco-village type movement in “Thoughts on the Transition to a Sustainable Society”: Trainer’s “solution” is practically a blueprint for Transition Towns although he is not known to be a member of the movement itself. Trainer’s ‘anarchism’ is closer to Holloway’s autonomism in that it see no point in challenging or taking State power, and proposes to replace Capitalism by ‘ignoring it to death.’ The quote reveals an anarchist strain of transition politics that Eco-Fredericton espoused and used very effectively in its organizing activities during the Occupy movement. Transition Fredericton: Autonomist Municipalism Transition Fredericton began with people who were interested in transitioning to a low carbon community in the City of Fredericton. During their formation stage, elections for City Council and Mayor were scheduled. The leader of the group, a professor at the local university, decided to run for Mayor, in part to direct to raise visibility about issues of climate change and how it impacted the city. The leader’s most active deputy leader was also a leader in the local anti-fracking movement. The group was aligned with the local movement to ban fracking in the Province. The most active participants in the group were those who had also worked closely on the professor’s mayoral campaign. Several issues of the campaign became issues for the Transition group’ which could be broadly termed ‘sustainable development’: public transportation, affordable housing, transition to renewable energy for households, businesses and city services, walkable urban design. The professor was very concerned with the sprawl development of Fredericton, urban design that favoured big box development in ‘green’ zones, i.e. land parcels on the outer rings of the city that had undeveloped and forested areas. Sprawl development required more highways and ring roads and more dependence on automobile transport. He was also concerned with the sustainability of the storm water system, which had been overwhelmed by a succession of storms that flooded downtown Fredericton as late as 2005. The group advocated for local food production at local farms, for farmers markets, for cooperative businesses and the relocalization of the economy. These goals were aligned with the relocalization goals of Transition Towns. Though they called the group ‘Transition Fredericton’, they chose not to certify their group as an ‘official Transition’ group. The leader explained that the process for obtaining certified status was deemed to be an onerous and not relevant to pursuing their goals. Thus they remained functionally and ideologically independent of Transition Towns’ parent organization in Devon, UK, and the Post-Carbon Institute in North America. Participants said that they felt confident in setting their own agenda according to local needs. Transition Fredericton. While running his campaign for Mayor, the candidate participated in the Occupy Fredericton movement as a speaker and promoter of the Occupy encampment. Members of Transition Fredericton were also involved in the anti-fracking movement centered around Fredericton and rural areas north and west of the City. Thus Transition Fredericton participated in mass protest movements that were broadly critical of capitalism, economic inequality, and the fossil fuel industry. Their main focus, however, was sustainable development and relocalization of the economy. Their ideology was explicitly anti-capitalist, but not strongly against the State, as they saw an opportunity to realize some of their goals if they could obtain the office of Mayor and control the City Council. After the failure to secure the office of the Mayor, the group expressed an interest in working through City committees to realize some of its goals, such as the Planning Department. Three years after the mayoral campaign ended and the Transition group folded, the leader was interviewed during his visit to Barcelona, Spain where he was researching the M-15/Indignados movement. The M-15/Indignados movement was another mass protest movement organized in Spain to stop foreclosures, bank bailouts and austerity measures, preceding the US Occupy movement but similar in its ideology and tactics: anti-capitalist, anti-austerity, against neoliberalism and the extreme inequality of late capitalism. The M15/Indignados movement later became Podemos, the second largest political party in Spain, a leftist anti-austerity party, which gained seats in the Spanish Parliament and won control of the City of Barcelona. Transition Fredericton publicly espoused the ideology and the typical programs of the Transition movement, but unlike Transition, was explicitly political. It was aligned with a powerful anti-fracking movement in Fredericton that was actively opposed to the Conservative government in the Province, to fracking and energy industries that were interested in developing fossil fuel projects in the Province. It showed a willingness to participate in mass opposition movements like Occupy. Moreover, the leader’s run for Mayor of the capital city was an ambitious political goal. The group’s political activities signified a willingness to work within the electoral system, to work within municipal government, and to exert a strong influence on Provincial government. The group espoused a vision of a post-capitalist society, but was not militantly anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. As is typical of Transition movements, they advocated for a localized economy of cooperatives and small producers. By articulating the Transition agenda through the language of municipal politics and local political campaigns, Transition Fredericton was able to reframe Transition Towns from an avowed ‘apolitical’ movement to a movement articulated as autonomist municipalism. Transition Federicton’s municipalist bent shows a strong resonance with a growing Municipalist movement in Europe and Latin America, particularly the Podemos movement in Barcelona. The ideological history of the contemporary Municipalist movement ranges from Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism (From Urbanization to Cities, 1987) to David Harvey’s Right to the City movement (Social Justice and the City,1973), Manuel Castell’s uban sociology (The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, 1983)), to the horizontalist urban movements identified by Marina Sitrin in Argentina, to the Podemos movement in Spain, and the ‘post-carbon cities’ movement to meet the terms of the Paris Climate Accord through the decarbonization and redesign of cities. Though Transition Fredericton showed a strong municipalist bent, it also exhibited an autonomist preference for solutions and activities that are autonomous, local and self-organized, without assistance from local or provincial government, and without regard to the domination of the global corporate economy. Indeed, the activities of Transition Towns showed a strong penchant for organizing a localized economy in opposition to or in place of a globalized corporate economy and the Corporate State. In that sense, Transition Fredericton was also an autonomist-horizontaist movement as described by Holloway and Sitrin. Transition Fredericton disbanded as a formal group within two years after the campaign for Mayor. The group exhibited the short-lived trajectory of many Transition Towns groups that struggle with a lack of volunteer help and burn-out, lack of funds, and the complex and overwhelming nature of the identified problems which don’t have easily attainable solutions. Transition Bay: Autonomist Base Community Transition Bay in Saint Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia, is rather unusual as a Transition group in that the leaders of the group are also leaders of a local Buddhist community. Of the three groups under study, it was the only group to have a strong connection to a particular religion. The leaders’ religious orientation was not discussed at the two membership meetings this researcher attended, nor had it appeared in any of the communications released by the group to its membership or the public. Transition Bay Saint Margaret’s was a secular transition group open to people of all faiths and persuasions. But when asked to describe what motivated their work with the Transition Towns group, both group leaders mentioned that they were inspired by their religious ideal of creating “enlightened society’, though neither elaborated on it. One of the leaders, in addition to managing Transition Bay in Saint Margaret’s Bay, was also leading an effort to establish a transition movement within the Buddhist community itself at its largest community in Halifax, showing that there was at least an indirect link between the religious community in Halifax and the secular transition group in Saint Margaret’s Bay. That the leaders were inspired by their own Buddhist convictions, but organized a secular community suggests a resonance with the political model of a “base community”, such as that organized by radical Catholic clergy in Latin America in the 60s and 70s. A base community was an autonomous, self organized community established in villages and towns as a way to spur local development, and resist the oppression of Latin American authoritarian regimes and US imperialism. Base communities were organized by members of the religious community but had an open, non-sectarian membership, focusing on secular issues such as education and economic development, health care, and social justice. Some base communities in Latin America were associated with radical Marxist politics, and some organizers were imprisoned or killed by authoritarian regimes for their ideology and activism. Other base communities were not explicitly associated with Marxist ideology, but with a more moderate concern for social justice. Whether radical or moderate, and despite their connection to established religions, base communities were viewed as a political challenge to authoritarian regimes. The politics of Transition Bay, though, as a ‘base community’, is not drawn along Marxist lines, but on a theme that is common among many Transition groups: survivalism. When asked what his motivations were for starting a Transition group, the leader described the world in terms of what he called an “end stage economy”, and an “end stage civilization”. This view of the world, as a civilization on the verge of collapse or self-destruction, is similar to the world view of Derek Jensen, the green anarchist whose works inspired the leader of Eco-Fredericton. Lindberg’s comments in “Transition Political” (2017c) are that the movement should adopt a organization model similar to a religion: My overall purpose in writing this series is to raise questions about how Transition might become a space and a community that provides what people want and need while staying true to its missions of powering-down and building resilience. My working answer is to consider modeling Transition Initiatives more like a faith community and more like a political party — two things that are central to many people’s identity, and to which they show up and work at and for (dare I say) religiously. (Lindberg, 2017c) Transition Bay has modeled itself as a kind of secular base community, operating in a self-sufficient way while also enlisting the support of Provincial politicians at opportune times. However, whereas Eco-Fredericton readily espoused an anarchist strategy for mass mobilization, in the form of the Occupy movement, the leader of Transition Bay took a localist approach of building resilience into the local community. They started a farmer’s market and a community green house to localize food production. They attempted to launch a project to process bio-diesel to enable trips by diesel engine. Four of the members of Transition Bay were living “off-grid” on their own electric supply, the largest number of “off-grid” homesteaders this researcher has observed of the groups that were contacted in the Northeast. Whereas Transition Fredericton clearly took a municipalist approach to working within local government, Transition Bay viewed their town as separate from the Halifax Regional Municipal Authority (HRM), of which Saint Margaret’s Bay was a distant constituent. Saint Margaret’s Bay had been a self-sufficient town on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, south of Halifax. When it was incorporated into the HRM, they were treated as an outlying suburb of the City. The town was no longer self-governing, but was subjected to the urban planning centered around the City, for which the town became a bedroom community and a property tax base. The town was weakly represented in Halifax City Council by a City Councilor. The two leaders both expressed a sense of distance from the governing structure of the HRM, a sense that the City both ignored the needs of their town and exploited its resources. Historically, Saint Margaret’s Bay had been a self-governing town directly under the auspices of the Province, not the City of Halifax. Perhaps because of this local history, both leaders of Transition Bay expressed a willingness to work at the Provincial level, with their Representative in the Legislature, to obtain grants and official endorsements for their projects. When they organized a Province-wide forum on ‘Rural Nova Scotia’ in Annapolis Royal, they invited the Provincial Legislator to lead the opening plenary, not Councilors from the HRM. Their attempts to make political actors aware of their concerns and issues, to involve local and regional political actors in their Transition projects, and to lobby politicians for resources to support their projects exemplifies a model of politics as political advocacy. Transition Bay is an example of the more common type of transition group that exhibits a “micro-politics of transition practices”. (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016). The rubric of ‘practice’ that is typical of Buddhist spirituality, i.e. ‘Buddhist practice’, resonates with what Hoffman and Loeber describe as the micro-politics of power through transformative practice. Transition Bay’s ‘practice’ is a political practice in that it is both anti-globalization and pro-localization; and in that sense is ‘anti-capitalist’ as Capitalism is so constructed today. Transition Bay’s ‘practice’ resists “Business as Usual” (BAU)i.e. the power of global capitalism to enclose and govern the lives of the towns’ inhabitants, limiting their agency to the consumption of the global economy, whether in the form of ‘jobs’ or consumer goods. It’s ‘practice’ provides a means for local residents to develop power qua agency (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016) over their household and community lives, to engage in creative innovation of local lifeways (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016. Transition Bay’s ‘practices’ facilitate the de-routinization (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016) of practices that reproduce the global economy at the local level, and the re-routinization (Hoffman & Loeber, 2016) of local practices that centre the power, agency and creativity of the local community, as a response to the crisis of globalization. Hoffman and Loeber’s micro-politics of power through transformative practice can be understood as a more precise definition of Holloway’s autonomism and Sitrin’s horizontalism. As such, the micro-politics of power through transformative practice characterizes the politics of the Transition Towns movement as a whole. Neo-Liberal Survivalism: Homo Ecologicus The survivalist theme that coloured the political views of Transition Bay is common in the literature and media associated with Transition Towns UK and its US partner, the Post-Carbon Institute. [Give some examples]. In Foucault’s analysis of 20th century capitalism, the neoliberal social and economic ethos is extended to the individual. The “neoliberal subject” is expected to become economically self-reliant, to develop his own talents and personal resources as his individual ‘capital’, to market himself as a brand in the free market, and to exploit his personal capital as ‘homo-economicus.’ (Foucault). In the survivalist ethos of Transition Towns and the Post-Carbon Institute, the individual is likewise expected to become ecologically self-reliant, to develop his own energy resources, grow his own food, provide his own shelter and fossil-fuel free transportation, and provide for his own income and subsistence in what is presumed to be a collapsing society. Following Foucault, this is what I call homo-ecologicus, a localized neoliberal response to multiple crises of globalization. Homesteading, living ‘off-grid’, extends this neoliberal ethos to the neoliberal home and family. Households are expected to become ecologically self-reliant, engaging in a subsistence domestic economy in addition their necessary participation in the global market economy as workers and consumers. Instead of ‘simplifying’ their lifestyles, the lives of ‘homo ecologicus’ become vastly more complicated and difficult, adding hours of home-based work growing and preparing food, obtaining low-carbon and self-produced fuel, to an overloaded schedule of work in the global economy. Transition Towns extends the model of ‘homo-ecologicus’ from the neoliberal homestead to the community, turning the “town” into a model of neoliberal self-sufficiency. The presumption is that there is no government, local or national, that one can reliably depend on to solve the global problems of climate change, fossil-fuel scarcity and economic precarity. The town is expected to resolve the problem of over-dependence on fossil fuels, and to develop its local agriculture and economy independent of the global economy. Indeed, the first suggested activity of Transition UK is for the Transition Town group to write its own “Energy Descent Action Plan” (Transition Towns website). In some ways, the Transition movement becomes a willing participant in the strategy of the neoliberal State to shed its share of responsibility for climate change and decarbonizing the economy by downloading it to the local economy, via the Transition Towns group. However, Transition Bay is not just a Transition Towns group. It is also lead by two members of a local Buddhist sangha. One of the Transition co-leaders (DW) is the leader of the local Shambhala group in Saint Margaret’s Bay. The sangha is an affiliate of Shambhala, a Tibetan Buddhist sect that was started in the West (UK, US and Canada) by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. One of the unique doctrines of Shambhala is a belief in the possibility of creating an ‘enlightened society’. The vision of an enlightened society is one that is based on Buddhist principles and values, such as ‘wisdom and compassion,’ and the widespread practice of meditation. However, ‘enlightened society’ is not “theocratic” or church-based society. It is a vision of a secular society that includes people of all faiths, i.e., non-Buddhists. Enlightened society is a rather nebulous vision; it doesn’t have a specific governing structure or politics, although there is a respect for hierarchy as one would typically find in Asian religions and societies. It is based on Shambhala’s doctrine of ‘basic goodness’, that human beings are basically good, rather than ‘sinful’ or flawed. Given the right social and spiritual conditions, that basic goodness will be expressed naturally as kindness, compassion, generosity, and so forth. Both leaders that interviewed said that they were inspired by the Shambhala vision of enlightened society and basic goodness, although neither elaborated on that idea. There was no attempt to recruit members of Transition Bay into the Buddhist sangha, if they weren’t members already. There were no activities designed to promote Buddhist doctrines or practices, or to link the activities of the Transition group to the Buddhist sect. Transition Bay carried out the activities of a typical Transition group: local food production, a farmer’s market, local energy production, low-carbon transportation within the suburban region, local water quality, and education on the multiple crises of globalization. In that sense, Transition Bay was less like a religious group and more like an autonomous ‘base community’. Ch. 5 Application to Research This chapter conducted a political analysis of the Transition Towns movement as a whole as a form of autonomism, based on the autonomist political theory of John Holloway. The same analysis was conducted for each of the three local Transition groups under study in Maritimes Canada. This analysis showed that the three local Transition groups showed similar characteristics of autonomism, but also showed how they differed from the parent organization in the UK, and how they differed from each other. Although each group pursued similar projects related to local food production, energy and community resilience, each group had different analysis and reasons for undertaking those projects, yielding differences in local political discourse and local activities of each group. Furthermore, each group developed different political strategies and relationships to the political sector, including participation in mass protest movements, electoral politics and political advocacy. The analysis yielded three different local instantiations of autonomism, identified as eco-anarchist autonomism, autonomous municipalism, and autonomous base community.  Part 2: Ecological Communication, Narrative and Discourse Ch. 6 Ecological Communication According to the social theory of Niklas Luhmann, systems evolve only when they are provoked by their environments, both internally and externally. Social systems consist of their self-organized communications and actions. Social systems self-organize by closing off from their environments and developing specialized communicative functions, or subsystems, becoming more complex. Social systems are provoked by communications that alert the system to changes in the environment. Social systems receive information from their environments by increasing their technological and communicative connections with the environment. Through positive feedbacks, the social system learns adaptations to new stimuli and becomes more complex. Societies adapt to their environments by becoming more complex, but they reach a point at which there are decreasing returns on the investment in complexity. Under stress from a failure to continue adaptation, societies may collapse to less complex forms and reorganize to adapt to the changed environment.  The conversion of stimuli from the environment into codes that various functional subsystems can interpret is called ecological communication. Social change movements self-organize around issues that have been excluded by functional subsystems. Social change movements use ecological communication in the form of protest to provoke critical consciousness about  changes in its environment that have been excluded. Social movements present alternatives from which the system can select to adapt to those changes. Political communications signify how social movements propose to self-organize the distribution of social goods, comprising their political discourse. Social change movements must have a sufficient intensity of energy or power to generate resonance with those issues within the social system. Transition Towns is a social ecology movement that engages in ecological communication in order to provoke critical consciousness about ecological crises, namely peak oil, climate change and economic instability under global capitalism. These ecological crises occur at various scales and levels of social complexity. Transition Towns presents ecological alternatives that the social system may use to learn from and adapt to these ecological crises at the local level. It engages in political communication when it signifies how it proposes to self-organize the distribution of social goods as alternatives to the system of global capitalism. Transition Towns increases its potential for ecological communication when it generates a sufficient level of communicative intensity and translative capacity to provoke the social system to confront issues that were previously excluded. Transition Towns increases its potential for political communication when it provokes the social system to confront its proposed distribution of social goods, thus potentially shifting the system’s political discourse. In the Preface to Ecological Communication (1989), Luhamann states the main argument of his 1985 address at the Rhenish-Westfallian Academy of Science, on the topic of “Can Modern Society Adjust Itself to the Exposure to Ecological Dangers?”: modern society creates too little as well as too much resonance concerning environmental crises because of its structural differentiation into functional subsystems. Too little resonance and 168 fails to adequately respond; too much resonance overwhelms social response and results in paralysis. (1989:xvii) Luhmann argues that the core of the problem is the differentiation and closing off of the social system from its environment, which reduces feedback from its environment. This closure is further complicated by its subsequent differentiation into functional subsystems. The differentiation into functional subsystems means that no one subsystem is primarily responsible for causing an ecological crisis, or for failing to respond to it. Though the problem is generally ascribed to failures of the economic, technological and political systems, all subsystems are involved in the failure to respond adequately to ecological crisis. Moreover, the system as a whole is closed off from its environment as to its self-replicating operations (Luhmann,1995). While the social system continues to be open to stimulus from its environment, its openness is limited to a particular feedback loop known as structural coupling. In a coupling feedback loop, the system maintains the integrity of its boundaries, but its environment can stimulate new responses within the boundaries of the the system. Thus ecological crisis can be attributed to society as a whole. (1989:12) Furthermore, Luhmann departs from much ecological literature which attributes society’s failure to respond to ecological crisis to a “moral failure.” Luhmann dismisses this ecological argument as “naive,” caused by careless word choices and poorly defined theoretical positions. (1989:xvii). Luhmann states that ecology as a discipline, itself a product of social communication, is only one hundred years old, and only in the last twenty years has ecology focused on the social dimension of environmental conditions. I would agree with Luhmann that ecology is still in its nascent stage, which probably accounts for its ‘naivete´’ and ambiguous theoretical positions. (1989:1) Ecology is at the early stages of formation, not only as a scientific and moral discipline, but as a new functional subsystem, whose specialized purpose is to develop communications about the system/environment difference for the whole social system. Historically, the discipline of ecology has always been both a social and natural science, thus enabling its specialized function to communicate the system/environment difference. As both a social and natural science, it has the capacity to perform second-order observations of both the natural environment and the social system. Functionally it acts as a gateway between the environment and the social system that allows in certain kinds of information and translates it into a coded form of communication (fit/unfit) that other subsystems can comprehend. As such it mitigates the problem of the under-resonance and over-resonance of the social system to ecological crises. This study argues that the development of the new subsystem ‘ecology’ is possible within all the parameters for the social system and its subsystems that Luhmann specifies in both Social Systems (1984) and Ecological Communication (1989). Not only is it possible, but it is necessary for the continued evolution of a social system whose closure from its environment and division into functional subsystems renders it unable to steer itself as a whole system in relation to its environment, which reduces it’s capacity to adequately respond to threats from the environment. Without a means to perceive and communicate threats from the environment, society threatens its own demise as a system. The new subsystem ecology is a functionally sufficient subsystem that is capable of communicating the system/environment difference to society as a whole, thus ensuring its continued autopoiesis. Luhmann recognizes that ecological problems have become themes for social communication. However, he contends that themes of ecological crisis only alarms society without providing the cognitive structures for assessing environmental risk and taking coordinated action. (1989:1) I argue that the new subsystem ecology is in the process of forming the cognitive structures that enable the prediction of environmental risk and the communication of those risks to other functional subsystems. The subsystem ecology enters into a structural coupling feedback loop with other functional subsystems whereby other subsystems incorporate ecological themes into their own operations. Thus other subsystems develop the cognitive capacity to recognize ecological problems at least in terms of their own functioning. Through this feedback system, it becomes possible for the whole social system to “learn” about ecological problems. However, it is still not a guarantee that the system as a whole can coordinate adequate responses to them. Luhman’s System/Environment Difference as Ecology. Luhmann states that the genesis of the science of sociology in the early western industrial age meant that it was focused on the internal structures of society. Knowledge about nature was confined to the physical and life sciences. Thus sociology was theoretically unprepared to recognize environmental conditions and problems. (1989:2) However, Luhmann’s own social theory, as a theory primarily about the system/environment difference, is itself a sign that the social system, specifically the subsystem of science known as “sociology,” is in the process of developing the capacity to observe the system/environment difference. As Luhmann himself argues, it is the ability to perceive this difference that makes society a comprehensible entity to itself, for its own self-observation (1995). I contend also that this difference makes the environment comprehensible as an unbounded field of phenomena different from itself, and thus observable (1995). Luhmann’s own social theory is itself, therefore, a sign that the social system can perceive the system/environment difference, a necessary cognitive structure for perceiving ecological problems. In fact, I propose that Luhmann’s own social theory is itself a form of this new subsystem called “ecology”. His theory is based on the same scientific knowledge in the field of natural and physical sciences that informs ecology. His theory constructs observable phenomena as evolutionary systems, as ecology does, with self-regulating functions and feedback mechanisms. Moreover, his theory permits society to observe itself as a phenomena within the unbounded field of it’s environment, as the system/environment difference. From the turn of the twentieth century, ecological scientists recognized that human civilization had a deep impact on natural environments. By the 1930s, ecologists were faced with the prospect that most natural ecosystems on the planet had been influenced by human civilizations. Up until the 1970s, ecological scientists generally excluded human systems from their study of natural ecosystems. While some scientists continued to search for isolated pockets of “unspoiled” natural systems, the majority of ecological scientists recognized that this was no longer possible. (Chew, 2009) Since the 1970s, ecological science has delved into the study of human systems and their interactions with natural ecosystems. Ecologists have since used their science to explain human impacts on planetary ecosystems, and to advocate for social policies to mitigate those impacts. More recent ecological theories, such as Gunderson and Hollings Panarchy, theorizes the co-evolution of natural and social systems. (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) John Bellamy Foster’s thesis is that the history of ecology is marked by a double transference of concepts influenced by social structures which are then applied to the study of natural environments. In turn, models of natural systems devised with these concepts are then imported back into society as the analysis and justification that society operates according to certain “natural laws.” While Foster argues that this double transference is problematic, Luhmann’s systems theory argues that it is inevitable. Autopoietic social systems are only capable of understanding their environments through models of themselves. Social systems evolve their own structures, codes and programs by which they continuously generate new social structures. (1989) The concepts that the social system evolves to construct itself, particularly by the subsystem science, are also used to connect with and understand the environment. (Luhmann, 1996) Ecology becomes a theme for social communication because society includes itself within its exploration of the environment and notices a system/environment difference. (1989:18). I contend that both the science and the social moralism of ecology became possible communicative themes because historically, ecology always has always been both a social and a natural science. Ecology developed capacities for recognizing patterns of organization in societies that could also be observed within nature, and patterns in nature that could also be observed in societies. Luhmann himself incorporated many laws and observations from the natural sciences into his own theory of social system, including the whole concept of general systems theory. The natural sciences, particularly ecology, developed new systems theory by incorporating the law of entropy. Science had to explain why living organisms and systems seem to defy the law of entropy and become more complex and organized as they evolved. Bertalanffy’s general systems theory proposed that thermodynamically open systems, i.e. systems that obtain energy from the outside, enter into relations of exchange that make them more environmentally dependent, yet guarantee their autonomy through structural integrity. Such systems are open as to energy, yet closed as to the self-replication of its structures. Luhmann incorporated concepts from general systems theory into sociology through his theory of social systems. (1989:4). Luhmann argues that the fundamental flaw of ecology is that it has to treat all facts as both a unity and a difference, i.e. as the unity of the ecological interconnection and the difference of system and environment that breaks down the connection. Thus ecology’s theme becomes the unity of the difference of system and environment. (1989:6) However, in Social Systems, Luhmann also proposed that the entire sum of phenomena is defined as the unity of the difference between any system and its environment. Even at the level of subsystem codes, such as, for example, codes for the legal system—legal/illegal—it is the unity of the difference of legal/illegal that constitutes the entire sum of phenomena for that subsystem. Thus, ecology’s theme, as the sum or unity of the difference between system/environment, is entirely valid within Luhmann’s systems theory. Luhmann proposes that system/environment difference, as the basis of systems theory, constitutes a radical change in world view. Nineteenth century ecological science invented the term “environment” and developed modern systems theory. Components of this theory are that systems define their own boundaries; systems differentiate themselves and thereby constitute the environment as whatever lies outside the boundary; the environment is not a system of its own, not even as a unified effect. (1989:6) In terms of ecology, Luhmann defines “environment” as the totality of external circumstances that reduces the randomness of the system’s morphogenesis and exposes it to evolutionary selection. (1989:6). Luhmann argues that for the theme of ecology to become intelligible for the social system, it must develop the following properties: (1) Ecological theory must become systems theory; it must move from unity to difference, the unity of the difference of the system of society and its environment; (2) The theme for ecology is “the world as a whole” as seen through the system’s reference; (3) The system consists of self-referential operations that can be produced only within the system and with the help of a network of those same operations. (1989:7). Here, Luhmann is offering his own system’s theory as the theoretical foundation not only for the study of society, but for the study of ecology, i.e., the system/environment difference. Following his direction, I propose that ecology is a new subsystem whose specialized function is to communicate the system/environment difference to the rest of the social system. Luhmann’s system theory is either a product of this subsystem, and/or intends to insert itself as a program in the subsystem ecology. Evolution and Systems Theory. Luhmann has a unique take on evolutionary theory that differs from what is commonly known as “Darwinism.” In Darwin’s theory, species with characteristics best adapted to environmental conditions have a better chance of survival and continued reproduction. Luhmann asserts that if it were true that only the environment conditioned those selections, there would be far less species diversity than there has been; all species in a given environment would function in more or less the same way. Luhmann asserts that the system, be it a species or social system, once established, selects it’s own characteristics to facilitate its own autopoiesis. There is a huge range of variability allowed for a given species or system that will nonetheless function within a given environment. The environment only has its say as the final word: does the species reproduce in sufficient numbers or go extinct? This evolutionary scheme allows for much greater diversity in the range of species that can survive within a given environment and greater diversity within species. The independent evolution of the social system also explains why a social system can ultimately construct its own demise. Its self-reproduction can proceed in a manner so out of sync with its environment that it can reach a point where it no longer functions within that ecosystem and collapses. Luhmann warns in Ecological Communication that the total collapse of the social system remains a very real possibility. With this evolutionary theory, Luhmann avoided social Darwinism, which he considered a grave error. If the environment does not select for every characteristic, and if society is independent enough to select its own characteristics based on its own operations, then the onus is on the social system for the selections that it makes, not on “nature.” The social system decides it’s own standard of “fitness”, and thus whether or not an individual or group meets that standard of fitness. The system’s selections are not morally determined—Luhmann denies any moral justification to society—they are determined by prior selections which could have been otherwise. (Luhmann, 1996) For Luhmann, it is a matter of inclusion or exclusion; those who are not socially fit are excluded by the system, not by “nature”. In his theory of evolution (1989:Ch. 3), Luhmann restates his formula for systems theory: that the environment for any system is always more complex than the system itself; no system can match the kind of complexity possessed by its environment or else lose it’s distinctive boundary; it must select elements within itself to differentiate itself from its environment; the reduction of complexity in the environment can only be performed within the system. (1984; 1989) Luhmann proposes that one way a system can distinguish itself from its environment is to completely close off its boundaries and operations from its environment, to reduce dependency on its environment. He asserts that this has not been possible for either biotic or social systems. He proposes that a system can differentiate itself by becoming both more complex though establishing a different kind of complexity than its environment, and by developing an array of adaptations to the environment that insulate it from various shocks. Luhmann argues that “systems with greater complexity are generally capable of entertaining more and different kinds of relations with their environments . . . and thus of reacting to an environment with greater complexity… At the same time, they have to select every individual determination internally with greater exactness. So their structures and elements become increasingly contingent.” (1989:12). By obtaining a greater independence from its environment through complexity and multiple adaptations, a system becomes capable of self-replicating without having to strictly conform to environmental conditions. Luhmann argues that this capacity was a product of evolution and a necessary condition for further evolution. (1989:13). Luhmann’s systems theory proposes that autopoietic systems, as they become more complex, become recursively more closed as to their own operations. Yet paradoxically, they also develop a wider range of adaptive connections to their environments, and thus become more “open” and sensitive to environmental conditions. (1989:13). Systems also become increasingly temporalized; i.e. they develop a type of complexity built on events whose continual passing stimulates new events and structures. (1989:14). However, this evolutionary scheme is not without its flaws. A system can become both so complex and so autonomous from its environment that it fails to respond adequately to environmental changes and jeopardizes its own existence. The environment is the final arbiter as to whether a system survives or becomes extinct. Strangely, Luhmann appears to take what would usually be called a “deep ecology” stance toward environmental crisis: all of civilization is involved, and all of civilization is responsible for its own ecocide: “On the level of our analyses this question would lead to the discovery that society itself is guilty—and we know this already.” (1989:10). Often environmental selection is catastrophic: the environment becomes so hostile, and the species so poorly fitted, that sudden changes in the environment cause the mass extinction of multitudes of species in a relatively short time. This is known to be the case for several of the earth’s six mass extinctions. (Ward, 2007) For example, mammals appeared on the planet before the dinosaurs, but climate change that created the earth’s warmest biotic climate, the Jurassic period, favored the domination of the dinosaurs for millions of years. Scientists have sufficient proof that an asteroid impact with the planet ended the hot climate within a few thousand years, wiping out the dinosaurs, in geologic time, overnight. In the ensuing colder climate, mammals became the dominant order. The environment was thus the final arbiter of whole orders of species. (Ward, 2007) Yet within those orders, whether dinosaur or mammal, there was an astounding array of diverse characteristics and adaptations to the planetary climate. Whether or not Luhmann’s evolutionary theory strictly applies to biotic kingdoms, his argument is certainly plausible as applied to the evolution of human societies. Planetary climate change poses an enormous threat to a human civilization that was fostered by a stable, temperate climate, the Halocene period, that has lasted tens of thousands of years. The geologic history of the planet is one of frequent and extreme climate shifts, not stability. (Ward, 2007) It remains to be seen whether the present human civilization can withstand the chaotic shifts in the climate that may ensue with global warming. Luhmann’s evolutionary theory allows that a civilization may become so poorly fitted to its environment that it threatens its own survival. A system that is closed to the environment as to its operations tends to want to ignore environmental conditions until they become catastrophic. In the often catastrophic process of evolution, systems that are over-exposed to ecological self-endangerment are eliminated. (1989:14). Luhmann proposes that the goal of autopoietic systems is to continue their autopoiesis without disturbance from the environment. (1989:14). Auotpoietic systems, he proposes, rely on a smooth, uninterrupted coupling with the environment. The smooth coupling and low level of disturbance is effected by technological complexity that permits more diverse adaptations to the environment. (1989:13). In a positive feedback loop, environmental shocks to the system require technological adaptations and thus more complexity. Responding to the shocks, society becomes highly reactive to the environment. It responds with more technological adaptations that will reduce its reactivity to the environment. However, technological adaptations also provoke changes in the environment, which in turn create more problems for society. Thus, society must continuously increase its competence for technological intervention. (1989:13). Technological competence must also account for the problem that technological complexity poses for society’s own operations. Joseph Tainter’s thesis on the diminishing returns of complexity (Tainter,1990) shows that the benefits of increasing technological complexity diminishes with time, until society becomes unable to make further adaptations or sustain its complexity and collapses. Like Tainter, Luhmann also cautions that greater system complexity is not a straightforward solution to the problem of environmental adaptation. Complex systems evolve an array of adaptations to the environment, but with increasing specialization for each adaptation. Each adaptation must be selected more individually, with greater exactness. Specialized adaptations are thus increasingly contingent, i.e. they work in a narrower range of conditions and quickly become obsolete. The system the becomes reliant on contingent structures that must be quickly replaced with new structures and adaptations (temporalization). This is similar to Gunderson and Hollings concept of ecological “brittleness” (Gunderson, Holling, 2002). As the system becomes more complex and dependent to a set of highly specialized adaptations, it obtains an increasing risk of system-wide collapse, should environmental conditions change radically. From this, Luhmann proposes two questions as the problematic for ecology: 1) does society possess enough technological complexity to continue its evolutionary selections, i.e. does it give society enough freedom from nature? and 2) does society possess enough social, i.e., communicative competence to be able to carry out the selective function? (1989:14). The new subsystem ‘ecology’ is peculiarly charged with this communicative function. Through its competence in the natural sciences, and its openness to the natural environment, it is able to read signals from the environment and communicate them to the social system. Simultaneously, through its competencies in social science, it is able to monitor feedbacks in the social system to both environmental shocks and technological complexity. It is the only subsystem that is capable of this dually selective function. Luhmann asserts that complex autopoietic systems had to evolve independence from their environments as a condition of continued evolution. In the same way, I argue that complex autopoietic systems, including social systems, must evolve a system for adequately responding to threats from the environment in order to continue evolution. Certainly, throughout geologic history species have developed sufficient capacity to adapt their systems to changes in the environment, even catastrophic changes. The proof is that many species, genera and orders on the planet today have survived successfully for millions of years, some nearly unchanged. Human civilization, the social system itself, has been evolving for tens of thousands of years, evidence of its ability to adapt. Failure to detect and adequately respond to threats from the environment would result in the total self-destruction of the system; no further operations, no further evolution, no further autopoiesis. If the ultimate imperative of the system is to ensure its autopoiesis, then it seems more probable than not that a system would also evolve a means of adequately responding to threats from the environment to assure continued autopoiesis and avoid extinction. I am proposing that the new subsystem ecology, whose function is to observe and communicate the fitness/unfitness of the system/environment difference, is an evolutionary necessity within meaning-based social systems. Luhmann argued that historically ecology had focused on the unity of system and environment. The evolutionary change in ecology came with observation of the difference between system and environment. I propose that the subsystem ecology is designed to observe the fitness or unfitness of this difference. Focusing on the difference between system and environment enables the system to observe where the system is in a detrimental relationship with its environment or unfit. The function of ecology is to monitor whether the system’s difference from the environment—its fit—enhances the system imperative, i.e., continued autopoiesis, or renders it unfit, threatening extinction. This function requires the dual capacity to observe both the system and its environment to determine the fitness/unfitness of this difference. Moreover, I propose that ecology has emerged as a new functional subsystem, developing its own code and programs. (1989) The code for the new subsystem ‘ecology’, using the Luhmanian schema, is fit/unfit. The criteria is whether a system and its environment are a mutually sustaining fit for each other, or whether the system and its environment are unfit, such they they cause a mutually reinforcing breakdown or collapse. The determination of fit/unfit is derived through ecological programs that monitor the structural coupling of the system and its environment. The program of ecology is adaptation, the adaptation of the system to the environment and the adaptation of the environment (by the system) to the system. All species and systems must adapt to their environments, including all autopoietic systems, and the continued evolution of a given species is proof of that. Science has shown that most species, those that have left an archeological record, have survived for millions of years; some for shorter periods. All species and systems develop adaptive strategies based on their interaction with and feedback from their environments. Some species adapt through innumerable mutations and some remain unchanged for millions of years. It is clear from the history of human societies, evolving from simple to highly complex systems over tens of thousands of years, that human societies have developed adaptive strategies that enabled their continued autopoiesis. Strategies are developed as needed, abandoned and replaced as conditions change. Indeed, the whole history of socio-cultural evolution is one of increasingly complex adaptations to the environment that also freed human societies from strict conformity with the environment. This does not mean that because a given civilization has survived and evolved in the past that it will continue to do so. The failure to adapt and subsequent collapse of complex societies has occurred many times in human history (Tainter, 1990 ) But despite numerous failures, human civilization has continued to evolve on this planet—certainly proof that socio-cultural adaptation to the environment is both possible and necessary. Resonance In Ecological Communication, Luhmann examines the reactivity of social systems to changes in the environment, which he calls resonance. He states in the Preface that society’s ecological problem is one of too little or too much resonance. He proposes that auotopoietic systems strive to maintain independence from their environments by reducing disturbances from the environment, resulting in hypo-reactivity or under-resonance. Environmental shocks cause hyper-reactivity or over-resonance. Over-resonance stimulates the production of new adaptive technologies that work to reduce the hyper-reactivity and return the system to a state of smooth coupling with its environment. Thus, the central problem examined in Ecological Communication is the problem of resonance. Luhmann describes resonance as a kind of reverberation, i.e. a sound wave that carries energy. This is one of the few times that Luhmann drops his strictly abstract verbal formulation and uses a term that denotes physical energy. By defining resonance as waves, as carriers of physical energy, Luhmann indicates that there is a kind of energy flow through the social communication system. Communication systems are thus energy driven systems that can have high or low energy frequencies: ”Society is a system uncommonly rich in frequencies.” (1989:16) This energy is independent of the energy used to drive the technological systems (media) that are the environment of the social communication system. Moreover, Luhamann describes the societal response to ecological crisis as one of “alarm”, of society provoked by self-agitation. This indicates an emotional energy as well. There is a kind of emotional energy in social communication systems: low-energy or low reactivity, or high energy and high reactivity. That emotional energy can agitate or intensify communications is one of the central problems that Luhmann identifies in Ecological Communication. Luhmann uses resonance to describe the degree of openness of the social system to its environment. First he proposes that, in closed complex social systems, resonance is highly selective. Less complex societies, such as hunter-gatherer societies, are very open to and highly resonant with their environments, having not yet achieved autonomy from the environment. Conversely, agricultural and industrial societies are insulated from their environments. The evolution of social systems, therefore, is marked by the loss of resonance with the environment: “from an evolutionary standpoint, sociocultural evolution is based on the premise that society does not have to react to its environment.” (1989:16). Resonance is the system’s capacity to detect something of importance, a distinction, shaped by the mode of information processing that is common to both psychic and social systems, i.e. meaning. Communications and their meanings are only a momentary grasp of the knowable world, most of which remains an unknowable and an ever receding horizon. (1989:17). The environment is an unbounded sphere, and contains only data. Meaningful representations of the environment, that is information, happen entirely within the social system (1995). The system creates its own distinctions by which subsequent events become information. Thus, social systems cannot really “know” the environment; they can only “know what they know” about the environment. Luhmann identifies this as the “insolubility of ecological problems.” (1989:18). However, Luhmann allows that systems can distinguish themselves from their environments; this is essential to defining the system/environment difference by which systems establish themselves. Thus, “the ecological problem” is not just one of moralistic “concern for the environment.” It is an essential system-level operation. The system, especially a highly temporalized complex system, must continuously distinguish itself from its environment in order to maintain the system/environment difference. This requires that the system to constantly monitor its environment. Monitoring enables the autopoises of the system by contributing to the closure of its operations, but also diversifying its selective connections to the environment. From this, Luhmann also allows that the system can assume possibilities and form expectations from the environment; what it finds there is a selection from numerous possibilities and expectations. (1989:18) The system’s capacity to select from its environment is its capacity for resonance. His theoretical question is then: which concepts and distinctions in social communication help us to deal with the exposure to ecological dangers? (1989:19). Science and Subsystems. Though a social system may be open through resonances to its environment, it is not able to respond as a unified system to its environment. The only unity that Luhmann allows is the unity of its autopoietic operations. Responses to stimuli are subdivided into functional subsystems. Each subsystem reacts to other subsystems and its environment and to the system as a whole as its “environment.” (1989:19) Each subsystem responds to stimuli according to its own functions, and does not effect the response of the system as a whole; there are no all-encompassing operations. (1989:19) Through functional specialization, each subsystem is relieved of responsibility for the whole, and for the operations of other subsystems. (1989:19). Therefore, how a society reacts to environmental crisis is constrained by the capacity of its subsystems. It would appear from Luhmann’s description of the system that neither society as a whole nor any of its subsystems can make an adequate observation of the environment that could protect the system from its own self-endangerment. However, Luhmann allows one operational loophole in this ever-enclosing system: the system’s unity can, if necessary, be represented within the system itself. (1989:20) The representation reintroduces the system’s unity within itself as a difference vis-a-vis seeing itself as a whole rather a collection of parts. He states that “the presentation of the system’s unity within itself must fit the pattern of differentiation” at the system level. (1989:20) He identifies examples of patterns of differentiation, for example, hierarchical, as stratification; or as center/periphery. With this system-level operation, Luhmann allows himself to devise a sociology of systems, enabling him to work from within one subsystem—social science—to make observations about systems as a whole. Indeed, Luhmann’s whole premise for systems theory is derived from the nearly paradoxical claim that though the system does not operate as a whole (operational closure is its only unity), yet one can observe both the system as a whole and the system/environment difference. From this one can propose the possibility of a new subsystem called “ecology” whose specialized function is to observe the social system as system, and to observe the fitness/unfitness of the system/environment difference. It comports with the system’s own pattern of differentiation, first, as the essential system/environment difference, and second as a differentiation into functional subsystems. From within this subsystem, one can make observations not only about the society as a system, but observations about the system/environment difference. It clarifies the system’s boundaries and diversifies its connections to the environment, enabling both system closure and environmental resonance. The subsystem ecology employs its facility with natural science to make direct observations of the environment. It makes further observations about natural science as second-order observations, turning first-order observations about environmental data into second-order observations about those facts as systems. Second it employs its facility with social science to make observations about the system/ environment difference, another second-order observation. Third, it makes observations about the interaction of the system as a whole and its environment. Luhmann argues that the subsystem science provides little resonance for society because what it offers as knowledge is theoretical. Its truth claims must be verified through numerous trials and can be disproven by new discoveries. Regarding science, he states that “Not much is gained therefore by following an ontological theory of reality which corresponds to a first-order observation of the environment.” (1989: 26) The subsystem ecology is better equipped to observe the system-environment difference because it is a science of second-order observations. It provides resonance for the system because it contains both information about the system (by which the system recognizes itself) and information about the system/environment difference (by which the system constructs the difference), in addition to information about the environment. It presents only that information from the environment that is relevant to the system and thus graspable; all else is left as “horizon” or the unknown. Ecology functions as a gateway subsystem, enabling more selections from the environment and translating those selections into information that the system understands. It conveys that information to other subsystems, which in turn convert that information into forms useful for their own functions. Each subsystem observes the subsystem ecology and its code, fitness/unfitness of the system/environment difference. Each subsystem imports that information in such a way as to continue with its own self-building operations. For example, in economics, “fitness” becomes the measurement of its fitness/unfitness with markets, or with supplies of natural resources. Eventually, each subsystem develops a capacity for seeing the fitness or unfitness of the system/environment difference and begins to expect that kind of information. It employs that differential device in its relations with other subsystems and the social system as a whole, it’s total “environment.” Thus, gradually, each subsystem encodes the fitness/unfitness of the system/environment difference into it’s own operations. This enables more complex interactions with the environment in all subsystems, and increases the resonance of each subsystem. Eventually, the social system as a whole and in its parts is encoded for the fitness/unfitness of the system/environment difference and develops capacities for dealing with ecological threats. Ecology is meta-science that makes second-order observations of many sciences, both natural sciences and social sciences, and their interactions. Ecology is constructed by the code fit/unfit; its program is adaptation. This differs from the subsystem science, which is a system of first-order observations that is constructed by the code true/false, and its programs are called theories. Luhmann proposes that the disciplines of science are loose, expandable and non-integratable. Science discovers and proves truth or falsity, but the knowledge it provides does not necessarily lead to the selection of actions for the rest of society; science steers it’s own programs, but it does not steer the rest of society. All other subsystems are steered by their own codes and programs. Moreover, scientific knowledge does not lead to moral selections for resolving complex social problems. (1989:76-80) Luhmann proposes that science is directed toward the discovery of the new. Science finds resonance in its own programs, which are predetermined by its cognitive structures; it does not find resonance in the environment as such. Science does not work to solve problems, but to multiply them. (1989:78) It begins with what are assumed to be facts, or states of reality; it questions and tests those assumptions and thus develops new facts and theories. Science is a process of decomposition into constituent parts—by analysis—and recombination—by synthesis—into new analytic and technical combinations. Luhmann states that science is a reflexive process, that “research encounters the resistance of reality, forcing [science] to understand itself in terms of structured complexity. . . it encounters itself as a complex system that allows self-provoked disturbances from the environment.” (1989:80). Scientific theories are directions for comparisons of a wide array of research objects, yielding a set of non-integratable theoretical descriptions. Selecting what is to be compared requires isolating variable within a causal relationship and ruling out intervening or co-varying factors. Luhamann argues that controlling for intervening variables is a false assumption; yet it is through false assumptions (the null and test hypothesis) that knowledge can be obtained. It is impossible to account for all variables in the environment, the sum total of complexity. Luhmann asserts that the problem of hyper-complexity is the central problem for the field of ecology. (1989:79-81). Luhmann argues that hyper-complexity is “unavoidable if our theme of social resonance to the exposure to ecological dangers is to become the theme of scientific research.” (1989:80). He proposes that science describes society and itself in terms of its own subsystem, and “applies to itself whatever it postulates for all systems: limited resonance according to its own frequencies” and its own binary coding. (1989:80) I argue that the subsystem ecology, whose code is fit/unfit, is a functional code that is better suited to observing the system/environment difference and communicating the exposure to ecological dangers. It is not provoked by its ignorance of complexity, but by rifts in its observations of the system/environment difference. The term “rift” denotes the observation of a difference, a gap, a widening fissure between one system boundary and another. John Bellamy Foster expounded upon Marx’s concept of the “metabolic rift” between society and the environment. (Foster, 2002) Society extracts resources from its environment into its urban centers but fails to integrate its beneficial wastes back to the environment; instead, used-up resources become toxic wastes that are dumped in landfills or into water and soil. This reduces the total quantity of resources available to the society for future production and consumption and destroys the environment, creating an ecological crisis that threatens the collapse of society. Luhmann examines the science of ecology in his analysis of the subsystem science. Ecology purports to describe ecosystems, and ecological problems as the internal problems of an all encompassing system. This is only possible if science delineates a boundary for the environment. But since the environment is unbounded and unknowable at its outer limits, it is not possible to speak of a “boundary” for the environment. (Apparently, for Luhmann, the planet itself is not a sufficient boundary.) Therefore, the environment is not a system, and ecology is not a science of environmental systems.(1989:81). Luhmann allows, however, that in scientific research, one must account for interactions of the environment with a particular research object. This conforms with the “limited resonance” constraint that he applies to all subsystems. Paradoxically, though he states that science has limited resonance in its programs, he says, [in a rare burst of exuberant language] that science possesses: an almost endless capacity for resolution [that] has revealed unbounded domains of possibility to society….Science produces a transparent world that, wherever it concentrates, reflects itself and transforms the transparency into access to something new. Imagination is given wings, new kinds of combinations are conceivable—whether as technological artifacts, or as their unwanted, perhaps catastrophic, side-effects. (1989:82). Luhmann argues that society in not in a position to make use of a scientific worldview that opens up an overwhelming, almost infinite number of possibilities, either communicatively or technologically. Society is left with the task of sorting out what is technically feasible. (1989:83) From this I conclude that the problem of scientific resonance is a problem of over-resonance for society, because it represents the extreme complexity of an unbounded environment. Thus I argue that the subsystem ecology is better suited than science to communicate the complexity of the environment to the social system. Ecology operates as a gateway, translating the complexity of the environment by reducing its complexity to an explanation as a system, though it remains an unbounded world. I agree with Luhmann that the environment is not a system, yet it can be explained as a system, or more precisely, as a collection of interdependent systems. Ecology reduces the complexity of the environment by selecting elements from the environment according to its cognitive structures and arranging them in a systems model. Ecology communicates to society information about the system/environment difference as rifts in that difference that reveal its fitness/unfitness. Its program is one of adaptation; thus its imperative is not pure science—to discover all that is possible to know—but a program of limited resonance whose imperative is to assure survival and continued evolution. Thus, by representing the environment in a system model of reduced complexity, ecology avoids the extreme over-resonance of overwhelming scientific knowledge. Ecology attenuates those scientific frequencies to a level that society can cope with, and amplifies those resonances with the environment that society is otherwise unable to detect. Ecology achieves both attenuation and amplification of resonances by selecting elements from the environment that can be modeled in systems, and by presenting only that information that is relevant for adaptations. Luhmann argues that “What science really exports is the consciousness of selection and technology: the consciousness of selection in reference to still-indeterminate recombination possibilities and technology as already determinate and realizable.” (1989:83) Ecology, as a subsystem, communicates the consciousness of selection related to the system/environment difference, and sets the parameters for technological selections that enhance survival and continued evolution. Functions and Resonance. Luhmann defines the problem of resonance in Ecological Communication as stemming from society’s division into functional subsystems. A theory of system differentiation requires that “every formation of a subsystem is nothing more than a new expression for the unity of the whole system.” (1989:107) Every subsystem divides the unity of the system into system/environment. Each subsystem uses this boundary line to reflect the entire system, according to its functional specificity, which leaves possible other subsystem formations. Therefore, every function system presumes to be society for itself and is open to the rest of society as its environment. (1989:107) As with the total system/environment, each subsystem develops resonances with other subsystems. Thus, each subsystem that encounters the new subsystem “ecology” in its environment develops resonances for its information, codes and programs. Moreover, functional specialization means that each subsystem is more dependent on society as a whole. (1989:111). No subsystem can substitute for the function of another. De-differentiation is possible, but only partially. (1989:109) Non-substitutability leads to increasing interdependency among subsystems: “precisely because function systems cannot replace each other they support and burden one another reciprocally.” Their irreplaceability causes the continual displacement of problems from one subsystem to another, resulting in the intensification of interdependencies. (1989:110) Functional subsystems are continuously off-loading their unresolved problems onto each other. For example, a stock market crash caused by unregulated derivatives securities (economic system) demands action from the political system (policy for derivatives regulations) which are then encoded by the legal system (laws enacted to regulate derivatives and prosecution for failure to comply with regulations). Each system off-loads its unresolved problems onto another, which disturbs the environment of other subsystems. Each subsystem devises solutions based on its own specialized function and passes it on. The economic system could, for instance, self-regulate its derivatives trading, but that might interfere with solving its liquidity problem (payment/non-payment), so it passes the problem onto other subsystems. Subsystems can learn from each other and adapt cognitive structures from one subsystem for use in another subsystem. For example, the economic subsystem must import and use formulas from the scientific subsystem mathematics in order to conduct is financial calculations. The difference is that while the subsystem math develops formulas for its own sake, as part of its program of scientific discovery, the economic subsystem makes use of mathematical formulas to enhance its own functioning as a financial system. Functional specialization makes it more difficult for society as a whole to adapt to changes in its environment. Adaptive changes that enhance the autopoiesis of one subsystem can have detrimental impacts in another subsystem. Coordination among subsystems is difficult, though not impossible, and generates more complex interactions and interdependencies among subsystems. Differing definitions of the problem contribute to the lack of coordination toward a particular problem, as well as different functional capacities to deal with the problem. For example, many subsystems in society manage to coordinate their efforts to provide food for people: the agricultural system produces food; the economic system finances food markets and makes a profit off it; the legal system regulates it, and the household system purchases and consumes it. Each functional subsystem contributes to the food security system in such a manner as to enhance its own functions. Because of this, adaptive changes are situated within a complex net of dependencies and independencies. Thus, more complex societies may be less able to respond effectively to environmental crises as a whole. Luhmann also said, however, that increased specialization leads to more diverse connections with the environment, and thus greater sensitivity to it. Functional specialization increases the capacity for learning more about a narrower range of phenomena. (1989:111). Moreover, the specialization of functions leads to greater sensitivity to a narrower range of environmental frequencies. For example, the economic system may be extremely sensitive to the supply of oil, but completely indifferent to CO2 emissions that result from the burning of oil. The scarcity of oil becomes a “crisis” for the economic system. By contrast, increased CO2, and the resulting weather instability, becomes a “crisis” for agriculture, but it may resolve the scarcity of oil by producing its own biofuels. The “crisis” is thus defined in terms of the function of that particular subsystem. Therefore, each subsystem defines its own crisis, and it is difficult to identify conditions that would create a sense of crisis for the whole society. If one considers that the problem of resonance stems from society’s division into functional subsystems, thus diminishing its capacity to respond to environmental crises, then it would appear to be an essential stage of evolution for society to develop a subsystem whose specialized function is to enhance society’s resonance to environmental crisis. Still in its formative stages, the subsystem ecology is in the process of developing the capacity to model society as a whole system, and the environment as a collection of dynamically interdependent systems. Ecology presents to society an internalized model of society as whole, a function which Luhmann affirms as possible. It also presents to society a model of the system/environment difference. If it is possible for Luhmann to present these models in his theory of social systems, then it is possible for an ecological subsystem to do the same. Indeed, I would assert that Luhmann’s own systems theory is a branch of this subsystem ecology; if not, his theory is a branch of the subsystem social science that has learned and applied concepts from the subsystem ecology. The subsystem ecology enhances society’s ability to observe the system/environment difference, and to observe rifts in that difference as either enhancing or reducing its capacity for continued evolution. Other functional subsystems that lack the capacity to adequately respond to environmental crisis can “off-load” that problem on to the ecological subsystem. The ecological subsystem observes that problem as data in its environment, turns that problem into information according to its cognitive structures, i.e. as a model of the problem of the system/environment difference, and communicates that model to other subsystems. The subsystem ecology thereby reduces the over-resonance and alarm caused by society’s inadequate response to environmental crises. It creates cognitive and linguistic structures that can be imported for use in other subsystems. This enhances the ability of other subsystems to recognize and respond to environmental crises. As this capacity spreads through all functional subsystems, it enhances the possibility of coordination among subsystems to respond to environmental crises. As a subsystem, ecology creates resonances with the environment as an internal social process: “a much greater amount of resonance is more likely to occur within society than to result from its relation to the external environment.” (1989:118). Once the subsystem ecology has established its code (fit/unfit) and begun its programs (adaptations), it develops a cognitive-linguistic structure that then becomes available to the rest of society as a symbolically generalized media of communication. (Luhmann, 1996) Words and concepts like “sustainable”, “green”, “resilience”, “efficiency”, “natural”, “organic”, “local”, “recycling”, “emissions reduction”, “environment” and “ecology” become commonly used in all subsystems, and most importantly, in the mass media subsystem. Corporations launch “green marketing” campaigns and tout the environmental benefits of their products. Cities undertake ambitious “carbon reduction” plans to reduce emissions. Households buy products that are “local” and “organic” and “recycle” their wastes. This doesn’t guarantee to steer all of society into an adequate response to environmental crisis. Often such adaptive programs become mere gestures; for example, ecological advertising becomes “green washing”. But it does show that subsystems and society as a whole can learn ecological concepts and then “reduce them to actions.” (1995). Through its scientific capacity, the subsystem ecology develops diverse connections with the environment. Through a broad array of natural sciences, it makes direct, first-order observations of the environment. It translates that data into information through the second-order observation of what science observes about the environment. It reformulates that information into ecological systems and models which can then be communicated to other functional subsystems. It both amplifies the under-resonance of society to otherwise weak signals from the environment, and reduces the over-resonance of society to overwhelming scientific possibilities and the alarm of environmental crisis. By performing this function for itself, it expands its own functioning as a subsystem. As Luhmann says, each subsystem encounters the paradox of representing the unity of society within itself, which involves both including and excluding itself as a system within that representation. (1989:113). But in this case, ecology is able to include itself holographically as a mirror of the system/environment difference. It represents itself to itself as yet another permutation of the system/environment difference. Luhmann argues that the field of ecology works to increase the range of values that society may become concerned with, values about species protection, pollution, soil and water degradation, resource depletion, climate change, and so forth. (1989:12). He argues that the inflation of values only makes them the equivalent of all other values in society, such as democracy, equality, women’s rights, etc., but doesn’t help society to prioritize which values to act upon. He proposes that the inflation of values is an outcome of functional subsystems that multiply the possibilities of what can be considered as themes or concerns of social communication, but for which no action can be immediately taken. These themes or concerns are suspended indefinitely as “values” that become a deferred obligation to act in the future. (1989:112) Campaigns to “stop climate change” or “save the planet” make use of these value imperatives to induce a moral motivation to act, usually without much success. The reduction of resonances to “values” thus further impedes society’s ability to respond adequately to ecological crises. I argue that the deferral of resonances into “values” is not the only possible avenue for selection and action. The other possible method is the creation of a subsystem ecology is whose function is to create cognitive models of system/environment fitness, which in turn aid in selections of new social and technological adaptations. This takes ecological responses to environmental crisis out of the realm of deferred “values” and places it squarely with the system imperative to continue autopoiesis and evolution, within its base-level operation to observe the system/environment difference. Luhmann proposes that the political system is presently where ecological communication begins and acts as a launching pad and transmission system for ecological problems: “we must realize that politics is used a launching pad, as a transmission system for ecological desiderata whenever those enter the consciousness of individuals and social communication. . . but this only increases the probability that, on the occasion of the exposure to ecological dangers, a socially internal intensification of resonance will result that combines politically convenient solutions with functional disturbances in other systems.” (1989:120). What is significant here is that Luhmann himself proposes that there could be a functional subsystem that serves as ‘gateway’, a ‘launching pad’, a ‘transmission system’ for communicating environmental crises. Luhmann’s systems theory anticipates the system’s capacity to evolve a new subsystem called ecology to undertake that task with greater specialization, as its sole function, the effect of which is to attenuate environmental resonances within the social system to correct both under- and over-resonance. Luhmann considers the possibility that a social system can devise an internal subsystem that could remain open to the environment and produce rational communications about the environment. (1989:137). Luhmann asserts that it must begin from within the social system: “Social rationality would naturally require that the ecological difference of society and its external environment is reintroduced within society and used as the main difference.” (1989:137). Furthermore, Luhmann asserts that “a centerless society cannot assert a rationality of its own but has to rely on the subsystem rationalities of its function subsystems.” (1989:134). The functional subsystem ecology reintroduces the system/environment difference within society and generates communicative selections that delineate that difference. It is the attention to difference that enables a subsystem to perceive data from the environment and introduce it as information within the system: “This changes the focus of all previous theories of reflection from unity to difference and enables them to acquire information in ways that [differ] from those accepted previously.” (1989:36). Furthermore, Luhman is opposed to the ecological idea of representing the environment within society as “the whole within the whole” (1989:135). Rather, an ecological subsystem would represent the system/environment difference within society as interconnected and socially contingent systems. While Luhmann argues that no internal subsystem successfully coordinates subsystem responses to the environment, Luhmann also maintains that “within subsystems the possibility exists of a hierarchal organization through which the difference of system and environment can be transformed into internal system directives.” (1989:138). Thus, it remains possible for the subsystem ecology to communicate the system/environment difference in terms of the system’s continued autopoiesis such that other subsystems can learn and internalize that operation within their own functional subsystems. The one condition that Luhmann adamantly maintains is that for ecological choices to be rational, they must be synonymous with the system’s own operations; it must be functionally rational, not rational in terms of ultimate truths or utopian goals. Since the subsystem ecology makes selections based on the system/environment difference it is therefore, functionally rational. If the subsystem ecology is functionally rational, This signifies the possibility of reintroducing the difference of system and environment within the system, and thus the possibility of directing the system’s information processing systems by means of the unity of the difference of system and environment…Then it makes sense to be guided by the Utopia of rationality: to see whether and how individual systems can be used to provide solutions to problems that are more rational and include further environments. Today it is already clear that communication about ecological themes is beginning to examine such possibilities. (1989:138). With this statement, Luhmann has afforded an autopoietically closed social system a way out of its self-imposed ecological dilemma, through the new functional subsystem ecology. Luhmann’s Ecological Communication (1989) argued that ecological communication was ineffective in a social system that is closed to its environment. Yet within his own schema, Luhmann argues that subsystems can develop the capacity to communicate with each other, to transfer functions from one subsystem to another, and to thus to support the functioning of the whole system. I have argued that the historically new moral science of ecology is an emerging subsystem that has developed the specialized function of developing a generalized medium of communication by which it can translate signals from the environment into codes that other subsystems can understand, thus informing the social system as a whole and improving its chances for survival and continued evolution. Further questions in this line of argument would examine whether the new subsystem called ecology will develop sufficient capacity for communicative structures and translation codes that will enable the social system, indeed the whole of the global civilization, to adequately respond to severe ecological shocks, such as global climate change, that threaten the collapse of the system. As Luhmann said, the question remains whether the social system will develop sufficient complexity to carry out this function, and whether the new subsystem called ecology develops the capacity to do that job. Ch. 6 Application to Research This chapter presented Niklas Luhmann’s theory of ecological communication as a way to understand the self-organization of ecology groups, the communicative role they play as part of the larger social system, how ecology movements receive information from the environment and translate that information into codes that functional subsystems can understand, the relative effectiveness of that communication as resonance, the role they play in pushing the social system to confront issues it has excluded, namely, the environment, and thereby develop sufficient complexity to increase its connections to the environment. The theory of ecological communication was applied to the study of Transition Towns as an ecology movement whose narrative, consisting of both communication and action, is a form of ecological communication that enables social systems, in particular, the town, to develop capacity to respond to global ecological crises and their impacts on localities.  Ch. 7 Narratives and Frames Transition Towns: Narratives and Frames Luhamann described social systems as composed of both communications and actions (1995). Communications are self-organizing systems that select for future communications, and are then reduced to actions. Extrapolating from Luhmann’s theory, I claim that actions are then routinized into practices and projects, organizations and institutions. This study considers both the communications and actions of the groups under study as components of their communicative system, which includes their narrative. The Transition Towns Narrative Transition Towns first US national conference in 2017 yielded some critical insights on both the narrative of the movement and its politics. Erick Lindberg, (Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature), who attended the conference, wrote in “Deconstructing Transition”: “The brilliance of the Transition Movement comes largely from its narrative.” (http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-21/deconstructing-transition/) Lindberg relates the the story told by Rob Hopkins in the Introduction to The Transition Handbook: from Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, a story about peak oil and industrialization. As Lindberg says, Hopkins “turned that story on its head.” (LIndberg, 2017b). Transition first presents the typical story of 20th century industrial progress, that societies in modernity progress on a trajectory from agrarian and industrial manual labour to postindustrial “knowledge economies”, where most manual labour is done by machines. Furthermore, modern societies can and will continue this trajectory of economic growth, widespread wealth and technological proficiency at solving problems and fostering more growth. (LIndberg, 2017b). Lindberg says that the Transition narrative then presents a ‘plot twist’ that ‘turns the story of progress on its head’ by arguing that all the progress obtained in the industrial era was facilitated by ever-increasing supplies of oil, gas and coal—high quality, cheap fossil fuels in abundant supply, (LIndberg, 2017b). This made the progress and complexity of global postindustrial civilization, completely dependent on this supply of fossil fuels, increasingly vulnerable to shock and collapse. The primary ‘shock’ is conventional oil reaching its ‘peak’ supply, causing a shift to unconventional fossil fuels, which become increasingly difficult to locate and extract, expensive to mine and process, of poorer quality, thus causing a decrease in the total supply of energy available to society. The Transition narrative continues that the presumed technological capacity to solve the compounding problems of our global civilization will be limited by the decreasing amount of energy required to produce and implement those technologies. Lindberg says that Transition narrative “plays upon a very acute, modern discontent that has great historical roots–a discontent over the price we pay for our highly complex and always growing modern culture.” (LIndberg, 2017b). The Transition narrative then offers a possible solution to the unfolding crisis: the relocalization of cultures and economies. Lindberg classifies Transition Towns’ ‘return to localism’ as a kind of Romanticism of the pre-industrial past. However, previous Romantic movements, in the Late Victorian Era and ‘Back to the Land’ movements of the 60s, were always optional, a choice to live differently. Transition’s ‘twist’ on the Romantic narrative qualifies it as a ‘Romantic Necessity’. (Lindberg, 2017b). The ‘necessity’ is that Northern civilization will be forced to return to a simpler, more local and more agrarian society because it will lack the energy and technology to maintain a growth trajectory, or to develop the technologies required to cope with the loss of fossil fuels and the increasing ecological disasters caused by climate change (loss of top soil, floods, drought, species extinction, etc). (Lindberg, 2017b). Lindberg says that the ‘romantic notion’ in the narrative is the idea—or ‘hook’—that Local communities can construct a new culture at the local level that reshapes local life to adapt to these crises. Lindberg cites two paragraphs from the Introduction to the Handbook that describe the ‘plot twist’ that ‘hooks’ the reader into the story of the Transition Movement: The concept of energy descent, and of the Transition approach, is a simple one: that the future with less oil could be preferable to the present, but only if sufficient creativity and imagination are applied early enough in the design of this transition. We have a choice. We can descend the hill on which we are standing if the same imagination and drive that got us to the top in the first place can be harnessed.  The reality is that the only way from here is down (in net energy terms), but that ‘down’ need not necessarily mean deprivation, misery, and collapse…The idea of energy descent is that each step back down the hill could mean a step towards sanity, towards place, and towards wholeness.  It is a coming back to who we really are…Energy descent is, ultimately about energy ascent—the re-energizing of communities and culture—and is the key to our realistically embracing the possibilities of our situation than being overwhelmed by their challenges. (Lindbergh, 2017b) Lindberg argues that the narrative frame of the Romantic Local ‘hooks’ the reader into joining the Transition movement or attempting a Transition project. Lindberg then deconstructs this narrative of the Romantic Local: Most political narratives and hooks make appeals somewhat like this, suggesting, for instance, with your vote or your protest you can put yourself on the right side of history.  The Transition Handbook goes much further, when it says that you can actually design that history, if only you gather up your friends and unleash your collective genius. So powerful was this appeal to my sense of who and what I wanted to be that I turned off a good bit of my critical thinking capacity, accepting the notion of Romantic Authenticity and cultural design as useful fictions for a much greater cause (Lindberg, “Deconstructing Transition.”, 2017b.) Lindberg says that Transition strategically offers a narrative of the Romantic Local, that even though impending collapse of industrial society and resource scarcity will mean extreme hardship, it will also be an opportunity to recover a lost sense of local community. Lindberg writes, "For evidence, of course, we can look to the several places where he suggests that life in a low energy society might be preferable to modern industrial society, and the way he provides brilliant exercises in back-casting and imagining a future in which humans are more focused on what humans really need: good food, community, and each other.” (Lindberg, 2017b). Lindberg then critiques the Transition Movement’s admitted failure to sustain its projects and realize its goals, and the attrition of its memberships and local groups. Lindberg cites the Transition narratives’ reliance on the Peak Oil narrative as the context for this failure and attrition: To put this another way, Transition, it seems to me, was built around a sense of imminence and a sense of a relatively fast-moving crisis. That’s one of the reasons it was called a “movement.” We may have told ourselves that we were in this for the long haul, but with our modern attention spans most of the people who joined or dabbled with Transition had a sense of a 3 or 5 year long haul and were emotionally unprepared for the recovery (however temporary and uneven, or even mainly rhetorical) of international finance, the rising production of liquid fuels, even if with little net energy gain, and the return to growth and middle-class normalcy. (Lindberg, 2017b). Lindberg argues that the Transition narrative hinged on a presumed collapse of fossil fuel supplies and global complexity. When that collapse failed to materialize in the expected time-frame, Transition Towns faltered as a movement; it lost its energy, membership, local groups and successful projects. (Lindberg, 2017b). Lindberg argues for the ‘sobering up’ and retooling of the Transition narrative to focus on gradual, long-term adaptation to ecological and social change: “More specifically, we need to recreate it with an entirely different sense of time, drama, history, choice, and design.” (Lindberg, 2017b). Lindberg notes that the question of Transition politics surfaced again at the 2017 US conference, showing that, ten years from its inception as a movement, the ‘political question’ is still a live question and unresolved at this point. Adger: Global vs. Local Narratives Neil Adger, et al, in “Advancing a Political Ecology of Global Environmental Discourses” (W. Neil Adger, Tor A. Benjaminsen, Katrina Brown and Hanne Svarstad, in Development and Change Vol. 32 (2001), 681-715, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford:UK.) execute a discourse analysis of globalized ecological crises. They demonstrate a method of discourse analysis that is highly applicable to analyzing the discourse of Transition Towns. Adger et al. examine narratives shaping global ecological issues and find that local narratives around those same issues diverge from globalized viewpoints and represent a ‘heterdox’ discourse. Adger, et al identify three elements that construct the discourse analyses: regularities in expressions that distinguish the discourses; identifying the actors that produce the discourses; and analyzing the policy outcomes and social impacts of the discourses. They identify the “caste of actors” that promote narratives of global environmental crises. Both the GEM and Populist discourses are globalized discourses advanced by globalized actors, such as international development NGOs, UN officials, state actors, and international environmental NGOS. In each of these caste of actors, they identify the “heroes, villains and victims” of each discourse. The article conducts this analysis for four globalized crises: deforestation, desertification, biodiversity, and climate change. Adger et. al. frame the discourse analysis of globalized ecological crises in two fundamental ways: a Global Environmental Management (GEM) discourse, and a Populist discourse. The Global Environmental Managemnt (GEM) discourse has been used to advance a neo-liberal response to local and global environmental issues, driven by government and corporate actors. The Populist discourse has been used to advance an anti-state, anti-capitalist, community-based response, also driven by globalized actors such as climate justice activists and indigenous rights groups. In both of these discourses, Adger et. al. identify the “heroes, villains and victims” of each narrative. Adger et. al. contrast both of these discourses with local responses “on the ground” where the environmental crises take place. They find, based on empirical case studies of localized crises, that localized experience does not align with either the GEM or Populist discourses, but shows elements that are a mixture of the two, i.e. a mixture of state and local actors, a mixture of victims, heroes, winners and losers. Furthermore, localized accounts of environmental crises contain a level of detail that show complex interactions between local conditions and actors and state and globalized conditions and actors. Adger et. al. claim that “environmental change at the local level is largely illegible through the lenses either of the dominant managerial discourse or of the populist alternatives that we identify.” (p. 682) Adger et. al. argue that because globalized discourses, whether GEM or Populist, are based on the dominant discourses of globalized actors, “the political prescriptions flowing from them are often inappropriate for local realities.” (p. 683) In other words, they argue that localized experience and discourse differs markedly from either globalized discourse, and represent a third or “heterodox” discourse. Local discourse tends to be less ideologically driven, more nuanced and fine-grained, yielding a narrative that is reflective of the politically ambiguous and pragmatic realities of everyday life at the local level. Frames and Transition Towns Movement Narratives generate the symbolic frames that a social movement deploys to shape its communications with its members and publics. In a linking manner similar to Luhmann’s theory of communication, frames are derived from narratives as structural components that select for and shape further narratives. Luederitz, et. al. describe ‘transition narratives’ as system frames which articulate system boundaries, elements, dynamics and goals (Luederitz, et. al. 2016). Lindberg’s description of the Transitions Towns’ narrative of the Romantic Local is also a frame, an editorial choice to select facts and story elements to fit a particular narrative arc. Gamson and Modigliani (1989) employ a theory of frames as part of their analysis of ‘media packages’ that shape public discourse around environmental issues, in particular, nuclear energy. Gamson and Modigliani state that media package is a set of interpretive conceptual and linguistic structures that give meaning to an issue. A package has an internal structure. At its core is a central organizing idea, or frame, for making sense of relevant events, suggesting what is at issue….This frame typically implies a range of positions, rather than any single one, allowing for a degree of controversy among those who share a common frame….Finally, a package offers a number of different condensing symbols that suggest the core frame and positions in shorthand, making it possible to display the package as a whole with a deft metaphor, catchphrase, or other symbolic device. (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989 p. ) Gamson and Modigliani list five framing devices: “(1) metaphors, (2) exemplars (i.e., historical examples from which lessons are drawn), (3) catchphrases, (4) depictions, and (5) visual images (e.g., icons). The three reasoning devices are (1) roots (i.e., a causal analysis), (2) consequences (i.e., a particular type of effect), and (3) appeals to principle (i.e., a set of moral claims).” (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989, note 2). Interpretive frames are socially constructed through dialectical discourse: “There is no theme without a countertheme. The theme is conventional and normative; the counter-theme is adversarial and contentious.” (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). Frames are effective at shaping public discourse if they are culturally resonant and sponsored (or opposed) by public actors. Interpretive frames are "a site on which various social groups, institutions, and ideologies struggle over the definition and construction of social reality.” (Gurevitch and Levy (1985, p. 19) in Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). Furthermore, Gamson and Modigliani claim that social movements are critical actors that construct, sponsor and contest frames, shaping their meaning in the public sphere. Social movement organizations are also important sponsors in this framing process. Snow and Benford (1988, p. 198) point out their role as "signifying agents" that are actively engaged in the production of meaning: "They frame…relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner by-stander support, and to demobilize antagonists.”(Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). The Peak Oil narrative and the Civilization Collapse narrative, which originally drove the organization of the Transition movement, and the Localization narrative, are the source of Transition frames. From these narratives they derive the three major frames that organize how Transition Towns communicates with its members and audiences. Frame 1—The Problem: the Energy Crisis and Peak Everything Energy: the crisis in the global energy regime is the primary cause of all global crises in the 21 century. The global dominance of western capitalism would not be possible without fossil fuels beginning with coal mining in the 18th century and the invention of the steam engine in the 19th century; and the global expansion of capitalism with oil and gas mining and the invention of the internal combustion engine in the 20th century. Global population growth exploded from the 19th to the 21st century because of the revolution in agricultural technology based on fossil fuels, primarily nitrogen fertilizers derived from natural gas, and the mechanization of growing, transporting and processing food. The exponential increase in energy from fossil fuels increased the total available energy to the global civilization and fueled social hyper-complexity. Additional gains in complexity from computer technology are only possible from a base energy load supplied by fossil fuels. The sustainability of the global capitalist economy is dependent on continued economic growth; economic growth is dependent on the continued growth in the supply of cheap, energy-dense fossil fuels, primarily conventional oil. The globalized economic crisis began with the contraction of the supply of conventional oil in 2005. Peak Everything: Transition Towns argues that society is not only at the peak of oil and energy production, soon to enter a period of permanent decline and social collapse, but we are also at a peak and decline phase for many other critical resources, such as industrial minerals, arable land, fresh water, and an adequate food supply. “Doomers” argue that peak population will be followed by a population crash, caused by declining food supplies, violence and civil unrest, and disease epidemics. Global warming was not initially seen as the defining global crisis for Transition Towns, but as a facet of the global fossil fuel energy crisis. When the movement began in 2005, the impacts of climate change were projected to manifest relatively slowly, by the 2100s, whereas ‘peak oil’ would manifest as early as 2010. Climate change became, however, an increasingly urgent and complex crisis that was about to eclipse peak oil as the defining energy crisis. The speed and severity of the climate crisis developed faster than Transition Towns and PCI had anticipated. Climate change, (the “e” of “ecology”) is now on par with peak oil as the defining twin crises of the global fossil fuel energy regime. Memes: Peak Everything: Hubbard’s curve, EROI, hyperbolic, exponential, carrying capacity, decreasing return on investment in complexity, overshoot, die-off, failed state, BAU (Business as Usual), ‘the Government will not save us’, ‘peak everything’, ‘limits to growth’. The Four E’s; energy, economy, ecology, equity. Frame 2—The Result: Collapse of Civilization. Globalized society is at risk of global collapse.This collapse is predictable and already underway, caused by the failure of the global fossil fuel energy regime and climate change. Energy regime collapse: Global civilization is overly complex, requiring an ever-increasing supply of energy; and overly dependent on fossil fuels, which are both declining and destructive to the climate. As the energy regime fails to supply sufficient energy to the global system that is safe and affordable, resulting in decline and collapse of the energy regime, the global civilization that depends on this supply of energy will also collapse. Climate change is proceeding faster and with more destructive power than anticipated by the climate scientists, compounding the operational failure of the energy system and its dependent technological systems, causing the collapse of food production and capacity for climate adaptation. Compounding Collapse: The combination of system-wide failure in the fossil fuel regime (either due to a depletion in supply or decline in demand) and the catastrophic impacts of climate change mean that the current global civilization will collapse, involving loss of technological and social complexity, a decline in total available energy to society, inadequate food and lack of clean water, operational failure in systems such as health care, transportation and communication, resulting in the large scale migration and die-off of large segments of the global population. Socio-political collapse will follow the social and technological failure, due to the government’s failure to adequately respond to the crisis. Governments, at the local, state/provincial, national and international levels will not come to the aid of local communities. Economic collapse. Elites will continue to compete for wealth and power, to over-extract the depleting supply of natural resources to produce wealth; to take advantage of the inequalities of the current economic system to extract more wealth, even as it collapses. Poverty and unemployment will grow in all societies, causing civil unrest. Elites will refuse to face the limitations imposed by the over-extraction of natural resources, extracting wealth beyond the system’s capacity to produce wealth, leading to global economic collapse. Memes: Models of collapse: sudden collapse, catabolic collapse, rapid decline, Goebell’s cliff, socio-political collapse, EROI, decreasing return on investment in complexity, competition of elites, die-off, failed state. Frame 3—The Solution: Localism Resilience. To survive the impending collapse of global civilization, local communities must promote community cohesion and provide for their own subsistence to help members survive and resume basic functioning. Relocalization. Local communities must develop their own sources of safe, clean energy, provide their own local food and clean water, strengthen local economies and ecologies, provide appropriate health care and social support systems. Local communities must become independent of the global economic system. Localism: Local communities know best what they need to survive; local communities develop the strongest and most trusted social ties; local communities can exert direct control over their natural resources, labour, skills, and means of support. Self-reliance: Governments will ignore the problem or fail to respond adequately; the global economic system will collapse on its own. In order to survive, local communities must develop their own social cohesion and capacity to provide their for their own needs. Memes: Cultures: Transition Culture, Permaculture, Localism, Doomers, Two R’s: Resilience, Relocalization Studies of Transition Narratives. Throughout this study, I have discussed the narratives of the Transition Towns movement as a whole, and the globalized conditions that shaped and contextualized that narrative. This section examines local variations on the Transition narrative by Transition groups under study in the Maritimes, Canada. Luederitz, et. al., (March 2016) identifies four sustainability transition narratives: (1) the green economy (Ja ̈nicke 2012; e.g., Bowen and Hepburn 2015); (2) low-carbon transformation (e.g., Lo 2014); (3) ecotopian solutions (e.g., de Geus 2002; Anderson 2007) and (4) transition movements (e.g., Kurland et al. 2012; Shawki 2013) (in Luederitz, et. al., 2016). Transition narratives are constructed to define problems and propose solutions to sustainability challenges. (Luederitz, et. al., 2016). Transition narratives frame issues and responses, but also justifications for interventions: As such, narratives represent system framings, which differ according to the actor that articulates system boundaries, elements, dynamics and goals as well as the ways in which the system should be transformed to generate desired outcomes (Leach et al. 2010). Thus, narratives are not merely stories, but they function as justification for particular interventions, essentially creating pathways of change (Leach et al. 2010; Scoones et al. 2015). (Luederitz, et. al., 2016). Luederitz, et. al. claim that transition narratives are effective not so much in terms of their effectiveness at solving the defined problem, but in their resonance as a worldview. Transition Towns, for example, states in their ‘disclaimer’ that they are not sure their solutions will actually work (to transition to lower carbon fuel dependency), practically admitting the real possibility of failure. Rather, Transition Towns is highly effective as a resonant worldview. Transition Towns does not favor or promote the “green economy” solution because it frames the issues as global resource scarcity and ecological crisis in international economies, and requires the cooperation of intergovernmental organizations, state and corporate actors at the global scale. In fact, it explicitly discredits the green economy as a viable solution, as it views state and corporate elites as having no vested interested in reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Likewise, the Transition groups in this study also rejected “green economy” as an explicit goal of their activities. However, the other three transition narratives—low-carbon transformation, ecotopian, and transition—are articulated in the three groups in this study. Eco-Fredericton: Ecotopian Transition Narrative The ecotopian narrative maps onto the politics of autonomist anarchism, as articulated by Eco-Fredericton. Luederitz, et. al. state that proponents of the ecotopian narrative “rebel against conventional state and corporate power that dominate ordinary citizens”, resources and landscape. Luederitz, et. al. describe the ecotopian narrative as employing “visionary imaginaries of an ecological-oriented system framing which emphasizes environmental ethics, natural conservation and technology use to facilitate simple living (Naess 1973), Luederitz, et. al. 2016); ecotopian actors includes individuals, local communities and small businesses. The emphasis is not so much on technological solutions, but autonomous self-governance: The narrative’s core emphasis is on defining rules, powers and self-organization, and less on the more mechanistic changes that may accompany shifts in system’s intent and design…Finally, ecotopian solutions actively support self-organization in ‘placemaking’ creating new, unconventional arrangements opening the urban anonymity and strengthening social connections (Milbourne 2012; Coates 2013b). (in Luederitz, et. al, 2016). Eco-Fredericton was driven by a ‘visionary ideal’ drawn from the writings of anarcho-primativist Derrick Jensen and his totalizing critique of technology and civilization; and by the anarchist rhetoric of the Occupy movement. Their interpretation of the Occupy movement cast it as an ecotopian ideal of autonomous self-governance and decision-making, communal education, advocating for and employing sustainable practices at the Occupy campsite and within the City. Once the Occupy movement subsided, Eco-Fredericton reframed it’s mission as a project of ‘ecotopian placemaking’, building an eco-village on the edge of the City where they could experiment with an autonomist ecological lifestyle, and educate the local populace on sustainable practices. When that project failed to materialize, they turned to urban-focused projects, such as promoting cooperative small businesses, and growing food at public housing sites for elderly and poor residents. Thus, Eco-Fredericton was concerned with working out the ecotopian narrative in their various political and sustainability projects, based primarily in autonomist anarchist politics. Transition Fredericton: Municipal Transition Narrative Luederitz, et. al. found that the low-carbon transformation narrative maps onto the political and technical functions of the municipality: The low-carbon transformation addresses climate change and related impacts on municipality and city life. City administrations and local governments advocate this narrative as they target the activities of local enterprises and citizens that cause carbon emissions. The goal is to transition toward resilient cities that are capable of mitigating climate change and adapting to unavoidable impacts through spatial planning and controling appropriate behavior. (Luederitz, et. al., 2016). This study of Transition Fredericton revealed a politics of ‘autonomist municipalism’, directing its transition activities to decreasing dependence on fossil fuels and increasing climate resilience within the City of Fredericton, culminating in a bid for Mayor. Many of the objectives and projects of Transition Fredericton were concerned with a transition to sustainability and resilience in the city’s operations, such as storm water management, construction of highways vs. public transportation, and installation of solar power. The resonance between municipalist narrative and municipalist politics suggests a cohesive convergence between its politics and its narrative frame. Transition Bay: Base Community Transition Narrative Transition Bay in Nova Scotia presented the most typical transition narrative of the three groups studied. Luederitz, et. al. describe the transition narrative as anti-globalization and pro-localization, steering local communities away from dependence on globalized systems and towards locally-controlled systems: Transition movements focus on counteracting the growth-based economy and globalization trends that impact social and environmental well-being. This narrative is driven by citizen initiatives that identify neoliberal politics and multinational corporations as harmful to the integrity of local communities. The aim is to transition toward a society that promotes local governance, culture and economy through fundamentally changing personal behavior and interactions between citizens…They construct a locally embedded narrative that seeks radical change in personal behavior to replace current decision-making and everyday practices (Aiken 2012; Shawki 2013; Lo 2014). Transition Bay presented the most pronounced narrative of civilization collapse, caused by Peak Oil, an ‘end stage’ economic system, and climate change. This impending collapse, whether immanent or in the distant future, required that communities prepare for decreasing supplies of fossil fuels, increasing climate impacts, shortages of food from the industrialized food system, water supply challenges, and social unrest. Their transition narrative presented a solution of localized production of food and energy, local control of water supplies, and local governance. Transition Bay presented an historical narrative of Saint Margaret’s Bay as a once self-sufficient fishing village that lost its autonomy by being integrated into the Halifax Metropolitan Region, both politically and in terms of urban infrastructure. Transition Bay presented a narrative of the collapse of rural communities around Nova Scotia caused by centralization of Provincial governance and globalization of the economy. Relocalization as a ‘base community’, founded on rural self-sufficiency, was presented as a solution to these political and economic challenges. However, the transition narrative has received much critique for its failure to address political issues and for its hyper-localized solution: Transition movements are critiqued for their reluctance to engage in broader political issues beyond localism-oriented approaches and for lacking the capacity to generate consensus over specific targets of what needs to be changed (Connors and McDonald 2010)…In fact, they are criticized to fail to conceptualize integrated economies, or upscale the approach to the city level or a metropolitan area. (Luederitz, et. al. 2016). Though the Transition Towns narrative claims that its organizational principles are derived from systems theory, presenting a systemic analysis of the crisis of globalization, it falls short in that it fails to present a systemic solution to the crisis. Transition Towns’ hyperlocalization, with isolated groups each working out their own “energy descent plan” without coordination with other localities, is an atomized solution that seems to ignore systemic connections and impacts. The leader of Transition Bay said he knew of other Transition groups in Nova Scotia. He said that he did, but did not offer any evidence of coordination with other groups, or among all Transition projects as a whole. Ch. 7 Application to Research This chapter presented a theory and method of narrative analysis, how narratives are constructed as frames and the framing of issues, how social actors take different positions with regard to issues producing different narratives, the finding of Adgers et. al. that local organizations frame global issues affecting them in ways that are very different than global social actors and frame them in terms of local concerns and conditions. The chapter presented key elements of the narrative of Transition Towns through Erick Lindberg’s study of the movement’s narrative, its strengths, weaknesses and contradictions. The chapter presented the major frames of Transition Towns as (1) the problem of globalization as ‘energy crisis’ and ‘peak everything’, (2) the result of globalization as crisis and collapse, and (3) the solution to globalization as localization. Sitrin’s method of identifying “movement language” as ‘memes’ was used to understand the language of Transition Towns narrative in greater detail. This chapter presented the research of Luederitz, et. al. which described ‘narratives of transition’ to identify the different forms that transition narratives can take. This narrative typology was then applied to each of the three local Transition groups under study in Maritimes Canada to understand in greater detail the narrative of each of the three groups. This analysis yielded an identification of the narrative of each of the three groups: ecotopian transition narrative, municipal transition narrative, and base community transition narrative.  Ch. 8 Method: A Discourse Analysis of Transition Towns I. Interpretive Methodology. A. Discourse as Communication and Action. Luhamann described social systems as composed of both communications and actions (1995). Communications are self-organizing systems that select for future communications, and are then reduced to actions. Extrapolating from Luhmann’s theory, this study proposes that actions are then routinized into practices and projects, organizations and institutions. This study considers both the communications and actions of the groups under study as components of their communicative system, their ecological communication (Luhmann, 1997) with other functional subsystems. As indicated by the study of ‘politics as process,’ this study identifies how local groups shape their membership through enrollment and mediation. (Chilvers and Longhurst). The study identifies the practices that each group undertakes, how those practices de-routinze dominant practices and re-routinize novel practices. B. Empowerment Model as Methodology. Avelino proposes that the empowerment model is designed to explore the interpretation of the questions by the actors themselves, not an external measurement, e.g. “quantity of C02 reduction resulting from projects.” The interpretive process is as follows: [t]hese questions should be answered in an ‘interpretative’ manner, in the sense that the focus is on how the practitioners under study themselves construct the answers to these questions. For instance, I do not decide ‘what is to be transformed and why’, but explore how a particular group of actors constructs its transformative ambition and problem definition. Equally, I do not ‘measure’ whether the approaches of the project under study are ‘new’ or ‘sustainable’, rather I critically explore how the actors present the novelty of their ideas and how they themselves deal with the concept of sustainability…The question on empowerment will invite us to dive deeper into the intrinsic motivation of actors involved and the organizational culture prevailing in the set up of the projects and programs. (Avelino, 2011). Avelino’s empowerment model asks tests how undertaking this work empowers the organizers to realize their goals, empowerment defined as intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, the empowerment model is also designed to study how transition projects disempower individuals due to a lack of strategies, skills, knowledge, and resources, or subjection to top-down transition programs. (Avelino 2011). In relation to the present study of the politics of Transition Towns, Avelino’s empowerment model is strikingly similar to Marina Sitrin’s horizontal power and Holloways’ autonomism, which I argue characterizes the the political ideology of the movement. Avelino’s empowerment model is the type of power that corresponds with the autononimist politics of the Transition movement. Furthermore, Avelino’s interpretive model of ‘intrinsic motivation’ is also similar to Sitrin’s protagonista model of empowerment, in which community members no longer see themselves as passive recipients of State power, but as active agents of their collective development. Avelino proposes four basic empirical questions about a project or program under study: 1) what is the transformative sustainability ambition, defined as projections for future transformation; 2) how is power exercised, defined as the type of power 3) how and to what extent are actors empowered, defined as intrinsic motivation; 4) what is the overall transition potential? defined as the capacity to build transformative power at the optimal level and scale, i.e. the niche-regime level. Avelino suggests that the answer this question is derived from a synthesis of the first three. (Avelino 2011). The result of this inquiry should produce answers to a general inquiry about the capacity of the movement to amass systemic power. Avelino defines systemic power more generally as “the collective capacity of actors to create, renew and/or maintain functional systems that correspond with their perceived (collective) needs and desires.” (Avelino 2011.) II. Explanation of Methods A. Interview Question. In terms of methodology, this researcher structured the interviews with members of the Transition groups as the question: “what motivates you to engage in this movement and do this work?” This is a direct application of Avelino’s empowerment model to the study of Transition groups in Atlantic Canada. Avelino’s interpretive framework will be used to analyze the respondents’ answer to that question, combined with that narrative analysis of its political ideology, to yield a political discourse of Transition. The most interesting feature of this interview question was that the researcher did not ask a political question, but got political answers. The researcher did not specifically ask respondents about their political ideas or ambitions in relation to their Transition efforts, but respondents freely offered political ideas and ambitions as part of their motivation for doing the work. B. Narrative v. Discourse Avelino’s empowerment model (2011) makes a useful distinction between ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’. For her study, ‘narrative’ includes those communications, actions and organizational processes that construct in a total sense the “story” of the movement, what the movement is presenting to the public about what they are trying to accomplish. Avelino defines ‘discourse’ as the specific communications that are presented through the interviews with her respondents. In this analysis of the interviews with Transition members, when members speak in terms that reflect the frames and ideologies and of the larger Transition Towns movement, the study identifies them as “Transition Narrative.” When members speak in terms of their own motivations for participating in the movement, the history of their local groups and their involvement in them, the study identifies them as “Transition discourse.” Furthermore, using the discourse analysis method of Adger et al, the study identifies nuances in respondent interviews that show a local discourse that differs from the globalized Transition narrative. C. Triangulation of methods. The research method used in this study involved a triangulation of investigative methods, including the following practices: Review of Transition Towns media, primarily online, both from the parent organization and local groups; Participant observation in local Transition Towns group meetings; In-depth interviews with Transition Towns participants. 1. Review of Transitions Media. Since 2007, the researcher has been studying the online documentation, related websites, books, videos, audio recordings of Transition Towns’ parent organization in Devon UK. Transition Towns UK promoted and helped organize local Transition Initiatives in the UK, Europe, US, and Canada, and to a lesser degree, South America. Also since 2007, the researcher has studied similar documents related to the Post-Carbon Institute, based in the US, which later partnered with Transition Towns to organize Transition groups in the United States. The researcher also studied the online communications of the three groups in this case study, including their Facebook pages and groups, related websites, email newsletters, shared documents and meeting minutes, and hand-made materials such as posters and flyers. In terms of narrative and discourse, narratives are derived from examination of documents produced or referenced by the Transition Towns global parent organization in the UK. Discourse is derived from analysis of the documents produced and referenced by organizers of the local Transition groups under study, and the respondent interviews. 2. Participant observation in local Transition Towns group meetings. From 2011 to 2013, the researcher attended at least three meetings for each group under study, with their permission. In two of the groups, the researcher took minutes of the meetings and provided the organizers with copies of those minutes. The researcher also attended presentations of films and speakers organized by the groups that were open to the public. The researcher personally observed several evening sessions of the Occupy Fredericton campsite. 3. In-depth interviews with Transition Towns participants. From 2013 to 2015, the researcher conducted in-depth interviews with organizing members of the three local Transition groups under study in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada. Members were selected who were identified as primary organizers of the groups under study, those who made the most decisions for organizing the group, who did most of the work of setting up meetings, overseeing projects, and developing the group’s potential. The researcher also interviewed members who made important contributions to each group, who organized particular projects, but were not the lead organizers. The interviews were recorded using software on a laptop computer. In two cases, the researcher conducted Skype video interviews with members who were at an extreme distance, and recorded those video interviews with their permission. All the interviews were conducted, recorded, transcribed, coded and analyzed by this researcher. Ch. 8 Application to Research This chapter presented the particular empirical methods by which the study of the three Transition groups in Maritime Canada was conducted. It presented Avelino’s model of motivational power as the model for framing the primary question that shaped the interviews with the subjects as “what is it that motivates you to participate in Transition Towns?” Part 3: Discourse Analysis: The Political Discourse of Transition Towns  Chapter 9. The Political Discourse of Transition Towns This study previously identified the politics of Transition Towns as autonomism, as a response to the crisis of globalization in the form of localism, and as a social movement for relocalization. Putting these together, the political narrative of Transition Towns could be labeled local autonomism. The three groups under study in Maritimes, Canada, adopted the narrative of the Transition parent organization and its goals of relocalization. The narrative of the Transition movement’s local autonomism was expressed by the local groups in three particular forms: anarchist autonomism, municipal autonomism, and autonomist base community. However, the three groups under study also demonstrated more overt and more radical political discourses than the parent organization, which will be examined next. The following is a discourse analysis of the interviews conducted with founding leaders from each of the three Transition groups under study. The interviews with these three respondents were selected because they were exemplars as thought leaders of their groups. While others who were interviewed were also leaders, they were often secondary or operational leaders, organizers. The three respondents were chosen because their dialogue revealed a wide range of opinions, ideologies and experiences that they brought to the work of organizing a local Transition group. 1. Eco-Fredericton: Eco-Anarchist Discourse The co-founder of Eco-Fredericton and co-leader of Occupy Fredericton, ‘AT’, is an activist who espouses green anarchist ideas as motivation for his activism. ‘AT’ presents the most radical political discourse of the three Transition groups under study. In this interview, AT weaves together green anarchism with the economic inequality discourse of the Occupy movement and the ‘civilization collapse’ narrative of Transition Towns, including ‘peak oil’ and climate change. ‘AT’s reading of Derick Jensen’s book Endgame (2006), and Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael, on the unsustainability of urban civilization, supported his belief that urban societies will collapse, and are already showing signs of collapse. In turn, his analysis supports his adoption of the Transition narrative, that is, preparing localities for civilization collapse by creating eco-villages based on ‘permaculture’. AT’s anarchist discourse supports his work with both Transition-type projects and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Affinity with Transition Towns AT says that the goals of his group, Eco-Fredericton, were similar to Transition Towns. He identifies his group’s orientation as understanding that cities and towns we live in are human ecosystems: AT: The the group that I started that was kind of—oh it was a good maybe 80% similar to Transition Towns, was called Eco-Fredericton, the idea being that the cities and towns that we live in are human ecosystems. And most people don't think about their surroundings that way… And so with that course of study looking at history, pre-history, different cultures, different sciences, had kind of put together, somewhere around 2006-2007, I realized was remarkably similar to this thing that was being developed, this idea that was being developed in Ireland by a guy named Rob Hopkins. And his his project was called Transition Towns.(AT 2014) Social Ecology Discourse AT explains how his discourse for Eco-Fredericton was based on his personal studies in anthropology, and his reading of Ishmael (1995) by Daniel Quinn. And so, in the book it basically proposes just a different way for people to look at the world and their relationship with it…So that kind of started me down a more focused path of a kind of anthropology in relation to ecology and human ecology, and paleo-anthropology, evolutionary biology, the kinds of things that um led up to the development of our society. (AT, 2014) AT’s political discourse is informed by a broad reading of social science literature, generally coming from an anthropological and ecological perspective. AT reported being deeply impressed by Daniel Quinn’s philosophical novel, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (1995). Ishmael is is written as a telepathic dialogue between a gorilla, named Ishmael, and the author, in which the gorilla relates that “unrestrained population growth and an obsession with conquest and control of the environment” shape our current ecological crisis, and traces these problems back to the agricultural revolution. (Publisher’s Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-553-07875-6) The narrative themes of Ishmael echo a book with similar ideas, Endgame (2006), written by green anarchist Derrick Jensen. AT had reported to the researcher, during an Eco-Fredericton meeting, that he had read Endgame and that the book, and others by Jensen, had influenced him a great deal. The difference between the two books is that Jensen’s book calls for the deliberate destruction of urban civilizations, whereas Quinn’s Ishmael does not seem to advocate that kind of violence as a solution. This may be why AT referred to Ishamael in the interview and perhaps why his proposals for Eco-Fredericton framed a constructive and pro-social anarchism, rather then Jensens’ violent anarchist rhetoric. AT advocates for a different kind of society built from the ground up, rather than the destruction of the current civilization, which, following the Transition Towns narrative, he believes will collapse through it’s own failure. Transition Towns as Organizational Model AT says that his affiliation with Transition Towns helped shape his political discourse into an organizational form that could be implemented in a practical way: “A lot of the stuff that I had developed at that point was mostly theoretical. So, the inclusion of the Transition Towns idea was— really helped me to think of my own ideas in a much more practical way, more in a way that— in a way that could be implemented.” (AT, 2014) In this passage, we see that AT’s discourse connects his deep philosophical analysis with the Transition Towns’ narrative. He reports that he felt his ideas were similar to those of Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Towns. What the Transition movement provided for him was an organizational structure, a pragmatic way to implement his ideas in achievable projects. Anarchism Next, AT offers an explanation of his anarchist political discourse: S; What political ideas did you have at that point? A: I was trying to strip down what was what human political activity is, without like outside of the of the historical context. When you come down to it, people can't live by themselves. So they have to live in groups, essentially. So we're at least social animals but um, for 99% of our history, We were not hierarchical, we were not, we didn't live in "States", we didn't live in under a state of coercion. So what that eventually equated to, by just by deductive reasoning, was anarchism. (AT, 2014) AT elaborates with an in-depth explanation of his anarchist political beliefs, his analysis of human nature and societies, and advocates for a non-violent approach. We see here that AT’s philosophical analysis of human nature and complex societies is shaped by his anarchist discourse. AT’s view is that complex societies are fundamentally flawed, not human nature. He defines ‘complex societies’ as “stationary, agricultural and hierarchical.” (AT 2014). AT argues that current societies are ‘dominator’ societies, constructed by the State as a way to enhance the power of corporations over people. Modern States turn corporations into ‘people’ and people into ‘things’. So there there's ideas and materialism that we're kind of that we're materialism, the objectification of people, where people are lowered to the status of things, things are elevated to the status of people. Corporations are considered people. where they're actually just they're actually ideas, It's the idea of a group of people. It's not a person. So anarchism kind of strips away a lot of that stuff and starts from a more basic, more empirical premise. (2AT, 2014) From this discourse, AT proposes that the only possible alternative to ‘dominator society’ is to re-construct society from the ground up, which is a radical proposal. The public perception of the Transition movement has been that it’s participants aren’t interested in fundamental social change. AT’s political analysis presents the opposite: his political analysis is so radical and his demand for social change is so far-reaching that only a completely new kind society would suffice as ‘change’. AT presents his philosophy of human nature, that humans are ‘basically good’, notably the same perspective presented by BC and his Buddhist philosophy, only AT’s perspective comes from his anarchist beliefs and a rejection of religion. Like the other two thought leaders, AT also has a politically sophisticated, multi-faceted and critical view of society. However, that discourse did not necessarily lead to a choice to either reform or destroy society, Rather, it led to a desire to fundamentally reconstruct social relations from the ground up, and a choice to work at the local level in the community, which I call the autonomist choice. Eco-Topian Community Narrative Next we discussed how he got started with organizing the group. It turns out that the immediate motivation for starting Eco-Fredericton was the death of a friend who had shared his ideas: A: So there was someone [DH] who I had met through some friends who who was interested in developing an eco-village. His interests were mostly along the lines of economic instability and it was an idea that he'd pretty recently started thinking about like in depth. And so his concerns were like how to live off the grid and how to live without money and if there was like a massive complete economic collapse then how would people get by? how would they how would they survive?… So, we had coffee one day and we started talking — he kind of ran through his idea for a kind of communal or intentional community at the edge of town here. And I kind of did a bit of trouble-shooting on the idea saying well ok you (pause) you'll have to address some things like food production and you know water water supply and things like that, basic food security, water security; things like that. And then we decided to continue the conversation and that turned into um uh us actually formally um developing this idea of Eco-Fredericton. (AT, 2014) ‘DH’ was the other co-founder of Eco-Fredericton, who also became the co-leader of Occupy Fredericton with AT. AT related in other conversations with this researcher that DH was very focused on the concept of creating an ‘eco-village’, a kind of off-the-grid separatist community, but located in or near the city limits, so that it could function as an ecological demonstration project. When the Occupy Fredericton affair came to a close, Eco-Fredericton moved forward with the eco-village idea, without much success. AT related to this researcher that he was more interested in working on economic issues in the City, particularly with developing cooperative business and jobs that were not tied to corporations or the ‘dominator’ State. The Occupy Movement AT next relates how he and DH got involved with Occupy Wall Street and the local Occupy Fredericton movement: AT: And the reason that we kind of that we ended up being that supportive and that invested in it [Occupy] was because—and this also ties into the Transition Towns idea, because the main areas of concern that Transition Towns talks about is peak oil and all of the materials that are related to to what energy consumption that climate change and the kinds of chaos that that that that creates. basically in every aspect of life. And the idea of economic instability. And the Occupy Wall Street movement was this massive global coming together this show of solidarity on one of those principles, the the economic issue. (AT, 2014). AT is able to connect his work with Occupy with his ideas for his Transition group, claiming that Transition Towns was working from a similar narrative premise, that society is collapsing due to ‘Peak Oil’, whereas Occupy was concerned with economic instability and collapse, the ‘economic issue,.’ AT, along with DH and participants in Eco-Fredericton and Occupy began to take charge of the Occupy Fredericton movement, handling social media and communications, managing the camp, and coordinating events. The Crises of Globalization AT continued the discussion linking the political discourse of the Occupy movement with the Transition narrative and his own discourse around Eco-Fredericton. The discourse included concerns about globalization, economic disruption and collapse, and peak oil, and how he relates related it to the political discourse of the Occupy movement: AT: So the that third pillar of the Transition movement and pretty much the entire Occupy Wall Street movements were identical. So the idea being you know we can't trust our economic institutions. We can't that the kinds of instability that that the Transition Towns movement warns us about happened in 2008 with the global economic—cascading global economic collapse. And we're still feeling it. We've never had entirely recovered, and this is the kind of thing that Transition Towns is designed to address, pulling back our dependencies from these global systems, these inherently unstable and constantly devaluating global systems… Occupy Wall Street drew attention to this idea and showed how many people are concerned about this and who desperately personally feel the need to do something about this. And they're both manifestations of the same problem… And with these other ideas, the climate change, the peak oil, most people don't realize that the reason that the New Brunswick and other Canadian governments are are developing these these inferior energy sources is because we're running out of easily accessible cheap oil. That's the concept of peak oil… Our global system is essentially falling apart. It's it's what happens to every empire when it spreads itself too thin. It happened to the Greeks, the Romans, the the French, the British, um When you try and hold on to too many things at once, you you run out of hands, you start dropping things. You can't keep you can't keep the plates spinning indefinitely. (AT, 2014). The ‘three or four pillars’ that AT refers to are based on the Transition narrative: peak oil, climate change, inequality and economic collapse. AT then equates the issue of economic collapse to both Occupy and Transition Towns, that the economic collapse caused by ‘peak oil’ and the economic crisis caused by the financial crisis in 2008 were essentially the same: both signified an instability and systemic weakness that required restructuring the energy regime and the economy from the ground up, at the local level. Whether caused by the crisis in the energy regime or the financial crisis, both required the solution that the Transition narrative proposed: “pulling back” from dependence on globalized systems. AT then makes an even more specific analysis concerning the energy regime, that dependence of Canada and the Province of New Brunswick on “inferior energy sources” (fracked gas and oil sands) is because of the declining supply of cheap oil, which is squarely the Transition narrative. Notably, AT does not make the connection with Occupy’s emphasis on democratic process, which is not as explicit in the Transition narrative. AT touches on that issue with his anarchist political ideology, about using debate instead of force or coercion, but does not specify what kind of deliberative political process he would envision for a reconstructed society. Globalization and Collapse The ‘collapse of empire’ meme is a part of the Transition narrative. AT connects his discourse to the ‘peak oil’ thesis, and the economic collapse narrative, which is the raison d'être for the Occupy movement: And then we see things like the economic collapse in 2008, because there's no more—because since oil is the energy that runs the planet, and if there's any kind of uncertainty or or sense of insecurity about that, then investments start to become unprofitable, and once something like that happens, then people start making dishonest or more dishonest investments. They start making promises that they know they can't keep, because they know that all that's wrong. It doesn't it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter anymore. So you start making, you start offering people houses that they know they can't pay for because, who cares? (AT 2014) The peak oil and economic collapse discourse is drawn from Transition Towns’ dominant narrative. Autonomism AT continues the discussion with specifics his group’s involvement with the Occupy movement, relating its political discourse to the elements of autonomism and horizontalism, and the Transition Towns narrative: AT: This Occupy stuff took over….it happens, just falls into our lap in the sense that the one of the main things one of these three or four pillars that we wanted to get people talking about and get people mobilized on just happens to coalesce into its own movement. And not only is it it's it's not like it's not like something like the Zapatistas in South America where their their militant actions were specific to their concerns and what was going on in their country at that time. This was something that everybody in the world felt that they could get behind and there were students and single mothers and business people and—most people don't realize this but we we actually had we had a a prize draw for Christmas as Occupy Fredericton. The gifts were gift certificates that were donated by I think ten different businesses from downtown the downtown Fredericton area. So this wasn’t this wasn't an anti-capitalist movement. These are business owners that can't be anti-capitalist because they their operating in a capitalist system. This was an anti-inequality movement, and this is what the core of Occupy was about. It was about anti-dishonesty anti-equality. It was about drawing attention to all of these systemic institutional problems the reasons that the— that our current economic model didn't and couldn't work for everyone. It was just structurally impossible for it to work equally well for everyone and what Transition Towns does that once that problem is is once that problem has been tabled, it takes the approach in general, Transition Towns takes the approach in general of looking for positive creative solutions to any kind of issue that that might come up. So that’s that’s the rule in discussing these these issues is it's not about, its not about protesting the problems that currently as they currently exist. It’s about looking at the looking at the structure of the problems, basically looking at the data and and unpacking a solution to it. It’s an inherently creative approach to, a creative horizontal approach to to types of issues that affect everyone. (AT, 2014) AT easily relates his discourse around Occupy, inequality and the economic crisis, comprising two of the ‘four pillars’ that Eco-Fredericton was concerned with, to the Transition narrative. AT argues that Occupy Fredericton, as he framed it, was not an anti-capitalist movement, but an anti-inequality movement. He argues hat the global capitalist economy, so constructed, did not and never could “work for everyone.” He frames the Transition narrative as taking the general approach, not of attacking society or capitalism, not resorting to protest, but instead performing a structural analysis and proposing “creative solutions”. AT calls this “an inherently horizontal approach” to these issue, which relates it to Sitrin’s horizontalidad. (AT, 2014). AT’s discourse, that he is not working against capitalism but for creative local solutions, also reflects Holloway’s autonomist discourse. Although its not clear from this statement, it suggests that AT might be referring to a horizontalist political process, which would also be typical of the Occupy movement. Communications and Critical Consciousness AT discussed the role of Eco-Fredericton in handling communications for the Occupy movement, so that they were able to communicate the narrative of Transition Towns thorugh the political discourse of the Occupy Movement. That was kind of the was part of the surprising part, like I said, so many business people were supportive…Someone donated power inverters so that we could go and charge we could go and charge these huge battery packs, so we could go in charge it one of our participants’ houses and then bring it back so that we could run the computers at the camp all night and keep track of communications and emerging events and things like that. It just kind of showed that it's not just people who are very obviously poor that want to do something about the economy… Like Literally 90% of the people were down there had jobs, they had families, they were actually going down there and showing and sitting in the tent area or handing out information or talking to people raising awareness. (AT 2014) Localization and Community AT continues his framing of the Occupy movement with an economic analysis, how the discourse of Occupy Fredericton played out at both the global and local levels: …Yeah there were a lot of people very supportive very, very invested. And I always have the sense that it’s because the concerns that the movement was talking about which where the Occupy movement drew attention to the the issues themselves and what what my group Eco-Fredericton was trying to bring into the discussion was that creative positive solution to the idea. So people could get behind, people were almost unanimously supportive of the idea that things aren’t working, to do something we need to as community, as both local communities and as global communities have to come together and fix this. (AT, 2014). Here AT expands on a general theme that ‘ordinary people’ from the community, workers, parents, farmers and business owners supported the Occupy Fredericton encampment, because the frame was not ‘against’ the capitalist system as much as it was ‘for’ local and creative solutions to economic conditions that people were facing in greater Fredericton area. Interestingly, AT also connects local and global communities, and sees both as necessary for working out solutions. Democratic Process: Occupy and Horizontalism The Robin Hood tax march was their kick-off event, highlighting the Occupy meme of economic inequality. Initially there was no definite plan to set up an encampment. Later AT describes how the Occupy group decided to go through with setting up a camp, through the horizontal democratic process of consensus that became the hallmark of the Occupy movement, the General Assembly: That first afternoon we had nothing but folding chairs and signs and like 300 people and I guess somebody said there was close to 500, but I don't know it's hard to say, and then we had the General Assembly there that evening and we decided to to stay, the decision was made like that, based on the people who were dedicated enough to stick around after the initial excitement. They kind of equalized a little bit, and so we decided to set up the camp and so that first night we all just camped on the ground like we all just huddled up and we had sleeping bags and we just slept out under the stars and that that was that initial experience of that community. I was saying that is the purpose of an eco-village, of any kind of solidarity effort. It's common to a lot of counterculture movement I think it is is the core of counterculture because most of our mainstream culture is about hyper-individualism its about competition it's about Capital, its about getting what the gods or the the prevailing economic model of the century says is is allotted you and counterculture in general is has always been a reaction to that—whether you're talking about Jesus and Buddha or Che Guevara Malcolm X Gandhi Martin Luther King—it’s that’s counterculture that's ‘this isn’t working’, people are objectified, people are abused, so let’s not do that. That’s the sense that everybody seemed to to have in common that first night. (AT, 2014) AT relates his political discourse to the need to create solidarity and community, which he says is the purpose of both an Occupy-style protest encampment and an eco-village, as a counter-culture to a Capitalist culture that is about ‘hyper-individualism’ and ‘competition’. He then lists inspirational religious and social justice leaders who represent for him a counter-culture: Jesus, Buddha, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King. ‘AT’ showed a strong social justice focus that also reflected the social justice ideals of the Occupy movement. AT relates how Occupy Fredericton continued to make use of the General Assembly system of debate and decision-making. “I think at one point the Mayor actually said to us ‘You said what you had to say, now I don't understand why you can’t go.’ And the reason that the camp was still there is because most of the group—because it's a consensus-based decision-making process—most of the group disagrees with that. They don't feel that they've adequately expressed what they came here to express so we wanted to stay. I said ‘I'm just the messenger you have to talk to them.’ So he did actually come down to camp two times.” (AT 2014). Autonomism: Capitalism and the State AT continues his discourse on the futility of trying to reform an authoritarian State or an inherently unsustainable economic system, which is a hallmark of autonomism: And one of the things that I would bring up sometimes during our General Assemblies was ok you have to focus on solutions and we know that there's all the horrible things happening all over the place but the the I one of the things that I would say and I still feel the same way is that there’s no way to make something that's inherently, structurally, fundamentally unsustainable into a sustainable version of that. If something is this at its very core unsustainable, you can't turn it into sustainable version of that. You can't make capitalism, which is all about extracting resources from one place and concentrating them in another place, egalitarian. They’re contradictions. So since we can't make capitalism or just what capitalism has kind of mutated into, we can't make that fair or sustainable, then how can we transition towards something that is? What options are there, what examples, what models, what experiment have been done and what were their findings? (AT 2014) AT expounds on his earlier discourse that complex civilization and Capitalism are inherently unsustainable and thus beyond reform. His analysis of ‘inequality’ is that the Capitalist economy extracts resources from one area and concentrates them in another, creating a system of distribution that is inherently unequal. Resilience From this analysis, which was apparently shared by members of Occupy Fredericton, the group assembled a collection of exemplary practices from communities around the world that would enhance the City’s resilience: So we started to put together this kind of body of best practices for—this is one of our working groups—we started putting together this body of best practices where these are the best most sustainable systems like subsets of of economic and political structures that could be found around the world like France's healthcare system, Finland's education system, Cuba's relationship between food and the economy. So over the course of basically December we assembled this body of best practices and that we made this presentation to— in November we presented it to the Mayor saying that these are these are programs that could be implemented, that the city could implemented to make the city more sustainable, more resilient, because that’s what the Transition Towns concept comes down to. It’s just making something sustainable but making it— because sustainable just means that you can keep doing it for a long time. (AT, 2014) The group’s effort to present ‘best practices, what Transition would call ‘doable projects’, to the Mayor and City Council, was a clear departure from the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States. The rational of the US Occupy movement was that there was no need or desire to present any specific list of demands to any government. Here the discourse of AT and the Occupy Fredericton group, apparently shaped by the Transition narrative, motivated them to come up with a list of projects that could be adopted by the City of Fredericton, with the goal of making the City more resilient. Ideas for projects were drawn from cultures around the world, showing a ‘cosmopolitan’ world view that wasn’t just local. That Occupy Fredericton was willing to engage with the City shows that they had framed the discourse of Occupy Fredericton along ‘Progressive Municipalist’ lines. The typical criticism of the Transition movement is that it could benefit from the political discourse of mass protest movements. However, what transpired in Fredericton is an example of how the Transition narrative could, conversely, have a constructive effect on the discourse of mass protest movements, by shaping the discourse towards programs and policies that might actually work, that would satisfy the political and practical demands of those movements, and shape the social-economies of global and local communities towards resilience. Political Engagement AT continues by relating how the plan was for Occupy Fredericton to insinuate itself within the committee structure of City Council, where it could work on actualizing these projects One of the things we also suggested was actually having a yeah, this was my main thing that I wanted to get across when we had the initial meeting with the City in November—is that if nothing else happens we would like the group the Occupy group to continue under another name if necessary but the group as an entity to continue existing within the structure of the City government, municipal government, even formally if necessary as a kind of advisory committee. (AT, 2014) AT reports that the general public was very supportive of their list of programs, and that at some point the Mayor might have been sensitive to the public’s support of Occupy Fredericton and considered their proposals, but on the whole, the City rejected the idea of working with Occupy Fredericton as some kind of advisory committee, even if under another name. Autonomy v. Inclusion AT returns to the discourse of the Occupy movement and its meme of “no demands” or “ one demand.” AT’s discourse shows that he is sympathetic to the rhetoric of Occupy, that when a group makes demands of the State, as they did with the Mayor, it gives the power to the State to accept, reshape or reject those demands. AT: One of the things that the media was saying was well what's what are these people demanding? you know what do they want? so that they can report. And I said well what first of all why do we have to make a demand? because when you're making a demand of someone else, you’re essentially placing your your sense of agency you surrendering your agency to them. And because then they can refuse your demand. Rather than by-passing them and accomplishing your goal yourself. So you know I would say in these meetings um why are we why are we talking about demands? Ok yeah, let’s go in and meet the Mayor and give him our list of demands, but like that that shouldn't be our purpose that should be our strategy. (AT, 2014) AT had to balance the discourse of the Occupy movement as a whole, that protest movements should not make demands, with his own inclination, and those of Occupy Fredericton, that they prefer to offer ‘creative solutions’ and work with City government rather than just protest. He attempts to reconcile this contradiction by saying that although they presented ideas to the City, they were not ‘demands’, but offers of ‘solutions,’ and that making demands on the City was not the purpose of the group. Networks The researcher asked AT about the relationship of the area Universities with Occupy Fredericton, and he described the organization of the Speaker’s Series. I asked him what other group worked with Occupy Fredericton. AT reported that once it got too cold to hold teach-ins and workshops outside, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, one of the oldest environmental advocacy groups, allowed Occupy Fredericton to use their offices to hold meetings. AT also reported that the Downtown Fredericton Business Improvement District also offered support in the form of gift certificates for Occupy’s fundraising raffle. It’s apparent from AT’s dialogue that the process of the Occupy movement itself brought together many constituencies, but AT described it more as “social networking” using social media such as Facebook. In terms of political process, Eco-Fredericton/Occupy did not target specific groups in it’s enrollment phase, recruiting participants from self-selecting volunteers. In terms of mediation as a political process, Eco-Fredericton/Occupy relied heavily on social networking, Facebook, Twitter and email networks, which at that time was just becoming the kind of political force that mobilized mass protest movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy. EcoTopian Isolation v. Urban Integration AT discussed how Eco-Fredericton reorganized itself after the end of the Occupy movement to focus on new projects. In particular, the group wanted to move forward with the development of an eco-village as a site for educational programs that would teaching permaculture and community resilience. (AT, 2014) The concept was to locate the eco-village near the City so it could fulfill an educational purpose for residents of the City. But some members of Eco-Fredericton took a more separatist approach of setting up an off-the-grid commune or intentional community. ‘AT’ describes how the project unravelled in a way that revealed disagreements about the mission of Eco-Fredericton: Like the different members had wanted to do wanted to go in one direction with certain aspects of the project and others of us wanted to go in a different direction, have a different focus. My focus has always been on education. So I was really big on the demonstration of the place. And one of our members really wanted to have like an independent intentional community…So there were there were always these kind of things that we were trying to mash together that weren’t necessarily compatible we weren’t sure would even work. (AT, 2014) Eventually, the group split up. A couple of members continued to pursue the intentional community concept, while AT pursued the goal of ecological education in the form of a ‘free school’ located in public space in downtown Fredericton: Basically a lot of stuff that I wanted to do with the eco-village but just distributed across the City in a modular kind of way. So all of these things become like standalone efforts. And if they are already happening then I want to try and connect them together. And if there's something that would help the concept of resilience, if it doesn’t exist, I want to help it come into existence. And if it already exists I want to try and network it with compatible groups that would benefit each other in some way. (AT 2014) Facing the loss of members of the Eco-Fredericton group and the eco-village project, AT was able to re-design the project in an ingenious way, later under a new name, ‘York Resilience’. His concept was to distribute the same ecological demonstration projects and skills education in a modular fashion around the City, networking with other local community groups, thereby enlarging the participants and the public that would engage with his work. AT’s concept was to identify and support ongoing projects, fill in the gaps where projects were needed, and bring together like-minded groups and projects that could benefit from each other. This strategy demonstrates the kind of networking capacity that could build niche networks that could eventually become the kind of niche-regimes that replace parts of the older regime, thus building systemic power. (Avelino, 2011). Occupy as a Model of Direct Democracy The following is a letter sent by email to supporters of Occupy Fredericton designed to engage the public in the horizontal consensus process of Occupy: Occupy Fredericton, exploring new strategies to achieving change, has made no 'demands'. Focusing on establishing alternative solutions, we will be presenting a collection of solution-based initiatives to the city, beginning Christmas day, in our 'Ten Days of Christmas Present-ation’. Very soon after, we will begin hosting discussions on these proposed initiatives in which citizens will be encouraged to participate in the Occupy Movement's distinctive form of direct democracy. Your participation will encourage local governments to implement sustainable and socially responsible programs, and it will form new institutions developed and directed by and for the people of Fredericton through uniting like-minded groups. In the case of urban agriculture, for example, we are bringing local gardening groups to one table to discuss a plan for an urban agricultural network in Fredericton to help address the issues of food security, poverty, and energy use. The initiatives will grow out of the following vital concerns: Food Security, Clean Water, Sustainable Energy, Local Economy, Comprehensive Healthcare, Effective Education, Affordable Housing, Ethical Employment, Efficient Public Transit, and Responsible Waste Management. We respectfully invite you to send representatives to join one or more discussion groups of interest, and take part in these initiatives. We would also very much appreciate it if you would speak to your members about the initiatives and discussions surrounding them. By working together, we can help create a better world. Thank you and be well, The General Assembly of Occupy Fredericton (from email newsletter, November 2011) In terms of discourse analysis, Items #1 Food, #2 Water, #3 Energy, #4 Local Economy, #9 Transit and #10 Waste, from the list of issues or areas of concern, are all solidly within the Transition narrative; while #5 Healthcare, #6 Education, #7Affordable Housing and #8 Employment reflect the group’s Occupy discourse, addressing economic inequality and the quality of urban life. The proposal for an urban food network brings together concerns for both ‘energy’ and ‘poverty’, showing that this group, through the discourse of the Occupy movement, was able to integrate issues of inequality and social justice into the Transition narrative. Eco-Fredericton’s radical eco-anarchist discourse was the most explicit of the three groups under study about its concern for social justice as well as economic viability and ecological integrity. The first paragraph reads: “Very soon after, we will begin hosting discussions on these proposed initiatives in which citizens will be encouraged to participate in the Occupy Movement's distinctive form of direct democracy.” Signed by “General Assembly of Occupy Fredericton”, this shows an awareness of political process and reflects the Occupy movements’ emphasis on democracy. In the second paragraph, the phrase “it will form new institutions developed and directed by and for the people of Fredericton through uniting like-minded groups.” shows an awareness and intention to network with local groups on Transition-type issues, suggesting that Eco-Fredericton/Occupy, as a niche organization, might have had the capacity to build the kind of broader niche network that could eventually be part of niche-regime that could replace parts of the older regime. 2. Transition Fredericton: Autonomist Municipalist Discourse Relationship to Transition Towns Transition Fredericton decided not to become an official Transition Initiative recognized by the parent group in the UK: “Early on the group considered whether to become a certified Transition Towns group; decided it was too much energy would be put into certification; decided to work on their own local issues, perhaps different issues than Transition Towns model. (Minutes of meeting, 2011, transcribed by S. Bartone). MH was a social science academic who understood the logistics of social research, so the researcher took a different approach to the interview with him. The researcher posed the question directly, in several forms: what would you say is the politics of the Transition movement? MH had been a founding co-leader of Transition Fredericton, and also ran for Mayor of Fredericton. The researcher followed up by asking which came first, the Transition Fredericton group, or the campaign for Mayor. He said that the Transition group came first, beginning with a public forum on Transition issues in April 2011. At that time, MH had also read a book by John Urry, Climate Change and Society, which influenced his thinking about ‘high carbon’ versus ‘low carbon’ ways of life. John Urry is a sociologist, and his position is that economics has had too large a role in determining how to respond to climate change. A review of his book by Seth Gustafson, Ph.D. on Society Space summarizes Urry’s position climate change is a social problem, and that economics fails as a discipline with regard to understanding the social dimensions climate change. Urry argues that these assumptions: 1) attempt to reduce the complexity of human behavior to economically calculable actions; 2) rely uncritically on economic institutions as non-social, non-political actors; and 3) miscalculate the centrality of material resources to the perpetuation of human life. http://societyandspace.org/2012/08/28/climate-change-and-society-by-john-urry-reviewed-by-seth-gustafson/) Municipal Low-Carbon Transition Although MH said that there are many books in the genre of Climate Change and Society, its clear from the interview that the discourse of this book, focused on carbon reduction and a transition to low-carbon lives, formed a major part of the discourse for MH and the Transition Fredericton group. Climate change became the main issue for the Transition Fredericton group, whereas ‘peak oil’ was the main issue for other local groups, and ‘the new economy’ was the driving issue for Transition Bay. MH then relates that after the forum, the group decided to make carbon transition issues part of the larger social discourse in the City of Fredericton. They were seeking ways to make carbon transition part of the upcoming campaign for Mayor the following year, in 2012. MH describes how the group decided to put up a candidate for Mayor: I was thinking maybe running for Council and it was only in the fall that we had began putting things together that it became pretty evident that we had a Mayoral campaign, not a Council campaign…It became political because we wanted to have a broader conversation. If you think about you know kind of municipal politics in Fredericton and your main news sources are the local CBC and the Daily Gleaner and both of them kind of cheerlead for the city rather than actually asking solid questions so we wanted to kind of interject in there and I was the person who was most electable I guess. (laughs) (MH, 2015 This statement shows that the political campaign for Mayor functioned as a form of ecological communication, whereby issues that the City had excluded from its discourse, low carbon transition, would be made central to the city-wide discourse of the Mayor’s campaign. MH describes how the Transition group, now the ‘campaign team’, chose to frame carbon transition issues in terms of urban planning. MH describes how the carbon transition issues played out in the campaign: I think some of them played out well but I don't think that the environmental angle of it, except on shale gas fracking, really went anywhere because I don't think there is really any sustained conversation about the carbon content of our everyday lives. I think the public transit issue, the urban planning issue, those were things that connected with people and there's been sustained conversation since of the walkability of the neighborhoods. (MH, 2015) Ecological Communication Throughout the interview, MH repeatedly framed the political work with Transition Fredericton as ‘changing or enlarging the conversation’ about climate change, carbon transition and ecological transformation. Rather than undertake low-carbon demonstration projects, the group had a consistent mission and goal to shape the public dialogue around carbon transition. Transition Fredericton had already conducted a survey of “transition-type” projects in the Fredericton area. There were already so many underway, affecting so many facets of life in the city, including food production, transportation, forestry and storm-water control, that they did not see a need to produce more projects. The low-carbon transition discourse formed the core of the work and the political discourse of the group. In that sense, the work of Transition Fredericton was most clearly a form of ecological communication. MH describes how the issue of shale gas fracking in the Province, which had already surfaced a couple of years before, became part of the discourse of the Mayoral campaign (MH, 2015) The Transition Fredericton campaign team was concerned with making the anti-fracking movement part of the Mayoral campaign, for reasons of both health and water safety, and to reduce the Province’s carbon impact, but the carbon reduction ‘angle’ was difficult to communicate to the electorate. Again we see here a concern with communication, with getting particular messages out through the campaign. Furthermore, MH showed that he and his Transition group were working across issues, movements and constituencies. When the researcher asked him whether the Transition group ‘intersected’ with the anti-fracking movement in the Province, he replied “Absolutely.” Thus, carbon transition was tied to urban planning and to anti-fracking, as local issues, as electoral campaigns and as political movements, so that all of those issues became part of the political discourse of the group. Shaping the Political Discourse The researcher asked MH what he thought was the outcome of the Mayoral campaign for the group. He replied that the Transition Fredericton got larger, with more volunteer involvement, and stronger connections to the community. But the main result was a increased public dialogue on carbon transition: “So you know we've held a couple of really more informational type public lectures and had some people involved in those. I mean enough people who found those helpful and interesting but I think really the most important thing that you know that the campaign—Transition Fredericton have done is really just kind of talk about or change the public conversation that was possible about those issues.” (MH, 2015). MH said that the group held several public forums on carbon transition, and that the public forums were a way to build agency, capacity and networking within the community to take action on climate change: So what we've done is we have we've done these kind of workshops or public conversations about transition-related issues. They have been kind of issue oriented so they’re they’re kind of stop and go type things, so there’s not necessarily any sustained—you know we haven't necessarily done anything, we just try to mitigate certain policy areas where we can be doing different things, we can be doing things better or what have you and making networking opportunities for people who are green friendly. They fall sort of in opportunities for people who are interested in particular topics to learn more about them so they can improve their activism. (MH, 2015) Critical Consciousness In terms of their political work, Transition Fredericton was most concerned increasing knowledge and critical awareness, building capacity for more political work around carbon transition. This echoes Avelino’s thesis that ‘knowledge is power’, (Avelino, 2011), that knowledge is a necessary pre-condition for amassing and using power. The researcher asked MH which messages resonated most strongly with the public: I think even just the abstract post-carbon economy. People I think can understand the concept of that and that I think that most people in their day-to-day lives expect us to have a kind of Jetsons future where without changing our way of life we’re going to resolve environmental problems through more technology. That’d be great if it were so but I think it's extremely unlikely and I actually think it's probably better if we do something else. There are new opportunities for human life beyond just technological fixes. (MH, 2015). Here, MH relates a rejection of ‘Techno-Optimism’, that more efficient, ‘green’ technology is the best path to a low-carbon society. Later, MH expands on this disavowal of technology and what he calls “market environmentalism”. Transition Fredericton and the Occupy Movement The conversation then turned to the relationship of Transition Fredericton and the Occupy Fredericton movement, which brought up several critical issues around the involvement of Transition-type groups with mass protest movements. MH began by saying that there were many shared issues between the two groups—Transition Fredericton and Occupy Fredericton—which was not surprising since Occupy Fredericton was run by two members of Eco-Fredericton, a more radical and anarchist transition group. As well, several members of Occupy Fredericton volunteered for the Mayoral campaign. The overlap of these two organizing efforts strengthened the capacity of both groups to push those issues into the public arena, one through the Mayoral campaign and the other through public protest. However, it also created certain tensions and problems for both groups: MH: Well you know there were obviously lots of different people with Occupy and a lot of them actually were putting a lot of time and energy into the campaign but there were other people who, you know they were doing their own thing and some of what they were doing was not helpful in terms of—you know certainly the timing of suing the City and what not it gave the CBC an excellent opportunity to shoot a few torpedoes at our campaign which we had spent a lot of time and energy putting together, knowing that you know that they are likely that someone was gonna talk about Occupy but not in the way that we do you know. (MH, 2015) The tension between the two groups demonstrates the mismatch between electoral politics and mass movement or protest politics, both in terms of tactics and goals. The researcher followed up on that tension between the two movements: “How does Transition Fredericton, or Transition as a movement, work with or not work with volatile protest movements like Occupy? Do you see it working or do you think there were tensions or problems in Transition becoming part of a protest movement or participating in a protest movement?” MH responded with a more in-depth political analysis of two different kinds of social and environmental movements in Canada: A lot of the people involved in Transition Fredericton were involved in Occupy peripherally or were supportive in some way, but a lot weren't. If you take a look at the progressive environmental movements in Canada, there are kind of two to my mind, two significant …There are two roads that people are traveling. One is that you know we have this green technology and wouldn't it be great if you know municipalities, provincial and federal governments bought into it and we could have technological fixes for some of these things. So Its a kind of a market environmentalism and maybe there's a role for some of that in the kind of transition work that needs to be done, but in the other are people who I think recognize that “time’s up”, you know, you can't live in an overdeveloped super mass consumption society forever where we continuously expand credit so that people can buy more stuff that's gonna end up in a dump and destroy the environment in the process, that that's a a bad way for organizing a society and living life and we can collectively resolve some of those problems by organizing things differently. (MH 2015) Macro-Transformation vs. Micro-Scale Organizing MH continues with a comparison of ‘social liberal’ discourse versus ‘wide-scale social justice’ discourse and their differing approach to political organizing: “It’s a huge issue, a huge question in terms of how you actually bring some of that kind of macro-transformation into micro-politics that is oriented towards practical issues and also towards um you know that’s it's a big its a big sandwich to bite off. (MH 2015). Narrow Liberal vs. Wide Scale Social Justice Organizing MH made further distinctions in terms of a more narrowly-focused Liberal approach to social justice and a more inclusive, radical approach to organizing: But you know I think that that tension's going to exist in the same way that it exists in progressive social movements or in social justice there are some people who are kind of social liberals. You have other people who are more committed to a to a wide-scale kind of social justice and who really don't see the point of existing material inequalities. Those two groups have a kind had a not a very easy time in formal politics or in social movements so I think probably in the 21st century you see the same type thing in the Green Party and a lot of places. (MH 2015) Here MH is probably referring to differences between the caution required to run a successful Mayoral campaign, to avoid alienating mass media outlets such as the CBC or the Daily Gleaner newspaper, nor to offend public sensibilities over issues such as the Occupy encampment. While Occupy Fredericton was suing the City for removal of the encampment from City Hall grounds, the Transition campaign team had to present a viable candidate for Mayor. This suggests why many Transition groups do not get involved in electoral politics or mass protest movements, but develop other, less direct or confrontational forms of political discourse. However, it’s not clear whether MH sees Transition, as a movement, as presenting a ‘social liberal’ discourse or a ‘wide-scale social justice’ discourse. MH identifies what is probably the most difficult problem for Transition’s political discourse, how to bring the macro or global level issues, which tends to be more ideological, into micro-politics at the local level, which tends to be more pragmatic. MH claims that there are ongoing and perhaps unresolvable tensions between those two levels of discourse and action. Green Party Politics The researcher asked if he felt that Transition Fredericton’s work with the Mayoral campaign and Occupy Fredericton as setting the stage for what would transpire a year later: the election of the first Green Party MLA in Fredericton to the New Brunswick Provincial Legislature, the second Green MLA elected in Canada. MH was surprised by the question: “Well that's a nice thing to think about. I think that— Look I think that it [TF] was a group allowed a lot of people to cut their teeth with organizing in a way that helped; beyond that I think that you know it was a group of people that had a lot of support including from the national party that had a great candidate and that had a ground team that believed in the candidate so ah you know you can do a lot of things with a campaign like that.” So MH appears to consider it possible that Transition Fredericton’s work around changing the public discourse on climate change and carbon transition might have helped create a political climate that elected the first Green MLA in New Brunswick. He asserted that the Transition group’s efforts helped build organizing capacity that in turn supported the Green Party’s campaign. Global vs. Cosmopolitan In the last segment of the interview, the researcher asked more directly about MH’s personal political views, whether and how he brought that into his work with the Transition group. It was at this juncture that MH expanded the discourse into what he called the ‘cosmopolitan’ view. We discussed the issues presented by the proposed Energy East pipeline which was supposed to bring bitumen from the Tar Sands projects in northern Alberta to seaports in New Brunswick, for processing and shipping to world oil markets (The project was cancelled as of this writing). MH situates mega-projects like Energy East in what he calls “global social fields”: The other thing with that obviously in terms of you know the global social field is that stopping that project becomes an international or global issue in the sense that you know some of the big infrastructure projects that will lock in high carbon lives for 30 or 40 years… What would happen with that opposition if it were if there were people in India or Kenya protesting against Energy East?… And there probably a half dozen other projects around the world that are of similar scope. But I think if they go through then everybody loses but not everybody is necessarily part of the decision-making process or that even necessarily has a say or that is represented by the institutions that will make the decision. So there's like that's one of the things that I’ve been thinking about kind of global social fields and cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan ethos is that a decision that affects everyone’s lives, everyone should be involved in having a say. (MH, 2015) MH’s reference to ‘global social fields and cosmopolitanism’ widens the political discourse out to the global level, where individuals and localities are deeply affected by fossil fuel-intensive mega-projects, but have little influence over how those decisions are made. Here MH is primarily concerned with political process, how the public discourse is shaped, who gets to make those decisions and who is affected by them. He’s concerned that everyone affected by global infrastructure should have a say in that decision-making process, regardless of their national affinity or location. The juxtaposition of ‘global’ vs. ‘cosmopolitan is similar to Halperin’s distinction between the global and the translocal. MH seems to refer to linkages between localities around the globe, which is a translocal configuration, rather than a totalizing ‘global’ discourse that assumes all places are subject to the same globalized conditions. Finally, MH discloses what he considers to be his ‘personal politics’ around carbon transition issues. Here again, he is concerned with public discourse and communication, how to reach segments of the public with particular messages that will engage them in the discourse and the political process. Creating a sense of agency and control over local and global environments is what MH considers to be “the really important political question”. He proposes to accomplish that primarily through public dialogue and creating an inclusive political discourse: So it matters how the conversation goes, how it is that you speak, and for me that is the main problem. You have to find the language that enables people to see that reality is unacceptable and have the language that’s not some you know sociologist who's gonna come in and tell them 'here's what reality looks like.’ Have a critique of reality if it’s to understand how they’re critiquing reality so you know I think that that's the kind of work that I want to be involved and whether I’m an intellectual or politically involved as an activist or you know if I run again at some point. (MH, 2015). MH’s describes his personal politics as primarily concerned with discourse itself, how language shapes the dialogue, how to understand the other’s points of view, language, issue frames and interests, how to engage people in the process of shaping political discourse. Though he is primarily concerned with public discourse, it is with the intention of “winning” in political circles and in the sphere of ‘formal institutions’. This is clearly a political discourse that is intended to have an impact on both policy and public discourse. MH defines ‘winning’ in the political arena as having an impact on ‘shaping the conversation’, steering the political process through discourse. Transition as Political Process In addition to the interviews, the researcher also attended three of Transition Fredericton’s regular meetings and took the minutes, as a participant observer, which were submitted to the group. The following are excerpts from one meeting in which the group planned a World Café focus group to elicit ideas for the future direction of the group. The minutes of the meeting reflect the group’s struggle with defining their role within the Greater Fredericton area. They decided to focus on networking and connecting various Transition-type initiatives rather the pursue their own projects, and focus on communication: T: What are we doing? What are our objectives & purpose? Are we a clearing house to connect people with each other under principles of Transition? MS response to T: Connecting people in different networks into Transition Network; Improve visibility of initiatives to know what is happening. MH: Work toward a community forum next winter; Get different networks involved in forum; Build momentum in the City; Best practices from other cities for City Council; Get people familiar with Transition Concepts, Language. Transition Fredericton is not so much a producer of local projects, which is the typical model for Transition groups. Rather, this group saw its mission as one of creating a critical awareness of the issues, public education and discussion, networking with other groups and networks, building capacity and momentum for a broader movement, and in particular, communicating with elected officials at the municipal level of City Council, and the Provincial level, with MLAs and political parties. Transition Fredericton attempted to network with a large number of groups that were active in the City and the Province. At the meeting, Transition Fredericton discussed it’s networking with the Great Gathering, organized by ‘DA’ of the Greater Fredericton Social Innovation, Fredericton Community Bike Organization, Transition Woodstock, Post-Carbon Moncton, Occupy Fredericton, Council of Canadians, Conservation Council, Faculty, NDP, Green Party, Shale Gas Caucus, Seniors, NB Community Harvest Gardens. Of the three groups under study, Transition Fredericton put the most emphasis on networking with other social organizations and movements, and with elected officials. The members view Transition Fredericton as an umbrella group, as a group that connects other groups that are working on Transition-type projects and brings them together under a conceptual umbrella of a ‘carbon transition’, transforming the locality to a low-carbon way of lifea. In terms of political process, MH and Transition Fredericton have been primarily concerned with process, with networking and engaging different publics in a pubic discourse on carbon transition. In terms of power, the group demonstrates the empowerment model (Avelino 2011) typical of the Transition movement, with self-selecting participants coming together to engage in a transition strategy, whether to address local issues in the short-term or more global issues in the long-term. While the group had an ongoing discussion about what kind of group they wanted to be, there was not an explicit discussion in the group about ‘what kind of society’ Transition Fredericton was trying to create, at least not during the researcher’s group observations. However, based on MH’s report, it involved (implicitly) transitioning to a low-carbon way of life, a choice against techno-optimism, market environmentalism and consumerism, and a choice for ‘a different way of organizing society.’ Just how that society was to be organized is not clearly spelled out, but it included other kinds of social interaction beyond ‘just buying stuff’ and enriching transnational retailers. What stands out about Transition Fredericton is their consistent effort to open up the political discourse to the public, to enable various segments of the public to engage the issues and decide for themselves ‘what kind of society’ it would like to create. Moreover, although MH and Transition Fredericton were aware of global infrastructure projects and their impacts, they made a clear choice to work at the local level, through public forums, community organizing efforts, urban planning and municipal elections. This shows once again that participants in the Transition movement can have a very sophisticated, critical, multi-faceted political analysis of the global situation, yet still make the autonomist choice to work in the community at the local level. MH and Transition Fredericton were willing to work within conventional electoral politics to broaden and shape the political discourse around carbon transition. The group demonstrated an intention and a capacity to work across issues, to work with other social movements, even to engage with mass protest movements. Despite the group’s tensions and conflicts with those movements, they saw these different modalities as an opportunity to engage in ecological communication, to increase public knowledge and organizing capacity, to amplify messages about carbon transition, and to broaden public engagement and debate. They showed a willingness and capacity to network with multiple publics and movements. Because of this, it seems possible that groups like Transition Fredericton, if they persisted, could be part of building the kind of networked niche-regime that could eventually replace parts of a dominant political regime that favors fossil fuels and global corporate trade, with a new niche-regime that reorganizes society within ecological limits. 3. Transition Bay: A Commons Discourse The researcher began by asking BC, lead organizer of Transition Bay, what motivated him to do the work of starting a local Transition group. He related that Transition Bay had celebrated its third year as an organization. BC had started thinking about starting the group six months prior to starting Transition Bay, but even long before that. He said that he was 61 years old, and realized that he tended to forecast further into the future than most people, who just focus on the immediate situation. Systems Theory BC got an undergraduate degree in Forestry at Purdue University, which included the study of population dynamics: Then we got into population dynamics. And then he shows the classical curve, proven time and time and time again, of let's say a deer population, in a specific habitat. I think I might have even mentioned this in the talk I gave in the North End meditation group. Classic curve, you remove the predation pressure, the population goes up. They degrade what's called carrying capacity, basically just eating everything because there's so many of them, it degrades the habitat, so now the habitat can support less, even though there's more, and then at some point the population crashes. And so the guy said, "Well that could very well be the human race." And I think "wow!" yeah, that kind of sunk in. (BC, 2014) Population dynamics is a central concept of ecological systems theory. It’s also typical of the kind of Malthusian principle that is at the core of the Narrative of Transition Towns and the Post Carbon Institute. As a scientific principle, population dynamics, and ‘carrying capacity’, is based on conventional and accepted science. But as a political principle, it is just one view of the trajectory of the human population. An alternative trajectory would be the ‘Techno-Optimist’ view, that despite resource limitations, humans have always been able to overcome those limitations by developing new technologies (e.g. industrial agriculture) and forms of social control (e.g. birth control). The Transition Narrative explicitly rejects Techo-Optimism as a miscalculation of the global ecological crisis, and as an inherent cause of the crisis rather than a solution. Population dynamics and ‘carrying capacity’, as a political concept, is part of the Transition Narrative. NeoLiberal Economics v. Local Economy Then BC turns to economics as part of his analysis: Then I had another moment somewhere along the way where I began to realize that um….This weird thing called "the economy" which is a totally artificial human construct. Completely and totally artificial. But yet it rules the entire behaviour of mankind. And everything else tends to be kind of a side effect of this thing called the economy. So somewhere along the line I had, kind of the light bulb went off on that one that it would be really good to understand the economy. That was 25 years ago. So I started corresponding with the E. F. Schumacher Society…corresponding with a whole lot of other people on the internet, did some of my first projects on local currency, the Blue Note in Halifax and the Maritime Hour. (BC, 2014) BC showed me an example of the local paper currency he started for Halifax, the ‘Blue Note’. He also discussed the Maritime Hour and the Carrot, two other local currencies in Nova Scotia, the ‘Berkshare’ in western Massachusetts and the Ithaca Hour in New York. He mentioned several leaders who were involved in local currencies around the US. He considered himself to be a member of the movement for local currencies, one of the key projects for a political economy of Localism. The Transition Narrative supports local currency projects. BC also had contacts with the E. F. Schumacher society, one of the leading educational institutions in the West for the ‘Small is Beautiful’ economics of Localism, which is a core piece of the Transition Narrative. Private v. Commons Ownership Next BC discussed the problem of private ownership of land: You know other people have had other light bulbs that went off….One of my mentors was Bob Smott—he was one of the original people holding the torch for the Schumacher Society and from his point of view most of the ills of the world were at least the developed countries was that real estate was based on personal ownership. Land. Which is completely foreign to say aboriginals and First Nations and that sort of thing. But we come along and you can own this chunk of land, you can sell it make money, that kind of thing. So it's the real estate speculation in his point of view is that now we see it manifest with a lot of problems with land use, that takes place. So that was just an example of a different kind of epiphany for him. (BC, 2014) The critique of the private ownership of land is a more ‘marxist’ discourse and critical of capitalism, which is not a feature of the Transition Narrative. That BC also has a colonialist and racially sensitive analysis is also a more radical discourse than the Transition Narrative, which tends to avoid issues of racism, colonialism and inequality. Autonomism as Local Resilience BC talks about his move from Massachusetts, USA to Nova Scotia twenty years ago, and his move to Saint Margarets Bay shortly afterwards. BC developed his property in Saint Margaret’s Bay to grow his own food and build ‘resilience’. BC talks about the shift from the household as a locus of consumption to a locus of production: BC. So there was about a ten year period of just building kind of the resilience we had had with this forward-looking sense that we could see where the world going. And that context in all kinds of levels comes right down to making a shift from the person's home being a centre of consumption to, which is the old model, that started maybe in the 40s and 50s with the idea of the subdivision in particular, rather than being a centre of consumption that takes input, it could be a centre of production, as well, which is somewhat the old style, go back a hundred years. (BC, 2014) BC introduces the idea of home-based ‘resilience’, growing one’s own food, setting up a home greenhouse or workshop, to shift the home from a place of consumption to a place of production. Locating the production of ‘resilience’ in the private, individual household is a key feature of the Transition Narrative. Local v. Translocal BC then shifts to the focus from the private home to ‘the rest of the world’ and ‘the whole species’: If you see what I mean…Then at some point, realizing that having your own household be resilient was one thing, so at least you kind of start at home, first by showing an example, but then at some point for me, realizing that we have to reach out to the rest of the world because it's going to need help, and was with the sense of feeling some responsibility for happening, you know, BC being alive at this particular point in time in history…Plus here we are in a completely different point in history. We have much more awareness of what's going on internationally. And because of this point in history, which I believe is an incredible juncture point for the whole species…that there comes with it some inherent responsibility, as opposed to just having a good time, which is kind of the Western model. (BC, 2014) BC makes several critical statements rejecting the ‘western model’ of materialism and consumption, showing a preference for individual productivity, which is a feature of the Transition Narrative. This discourse is also an example of Holloway’s autonomism, rejecting Capital’s bargain with Labour to work for a wage and spend it on consumer goods. The autonoimst move is to shift one’s labour power toward one’s own self-fulfilling projects. BC also shows an awareness of the international situation and ‘the whole species’, though he does not provide specifics, except for his analysis of ‘population dynamics’. He does not mention, for instance, climate change or peak oil, which are core rationales of the Transition Narrative. Community Autonomism BC then shifts from the ‘international’ and ‘whole species’ to the Local, as community: So that kinda I think set the stage for personally anyway, um realizing that it's important to reach out and take what I got, my knowledge base um with economics, with domestic resiliency, and that sort of thing, and um how can I reach out and help others in the community. So then it gets into different "what are you going to do?” So then it gets into different "what are you going to do?” Cause there's a lot of people you see throwing their energy into different things, cause theres some sort of sense of I gotta you know these are weird times, the human race is getting all stressed out here and then they pick a cause and they throw themselves into it…And you see that going on all the time. So in my case, I guess I was thinking a little bit ah, tactical about it, and where could I actually make a difference, as opposed to some…so the um, I guess the philosophy is that starting at the community level you could make a difference. However you define community. (BC, 2014) Here BC demonstrates that what Avelino (2011) identified as the motivational model of power, in which his personal knowledge is a critical resource for that motivation. BC is motivated both by his desire to address these issues and help the community using his acquired knowledge. Global Movements v. Local Autonomism BC next discusses how he makes this choice to focus on local activism as a strategic response to a global situation. He then makes an argument for choosing not to work on at a larger scale within a mass movement: But nevertheless some desire to help at that level by educating and that sort of thing. Now certainly other people, if you're going to get big into climate change, if that's really what…you pick your cause kind of a thing. You could start protesting pipelines, protest the tar sands, go picket in Ottawa, and people do. Or Bill McKibben, you could really leverage a huge amount of—I'm not saying anything bad about Bill, but it's kind of focusing on one larger thing, which is much harder to move on at a meeting. You see what I mean. I mean you can do it. But it would take a Bill McKibben 350.org massive international and sustained pressure to move the needle a tiny bit with a large federal government. And Harper’s [Prime Minister of Canada] not about to move. (laughs). And how much am I going to fight Harper? along with thousands of other people. So it’s I guess it's a—that's what I mean by tactics—where are you going to throw your energy? What's the most productive way to put your—and I could do the same thing so that's just energy let's say, as opposed to climate change. I could the same thing with the economy, or the Occupy movement. (BC, 2014) Here BC is struggling with the choice to work at wider scales using mass organizing vs. working at the local level with an autonomist strategy. He sets aside ‘energy’ and ‘climate change’ as pivotal organizing issues, which are the two main drivers of the Transition Narrative. Likewise, he explicitly rejects national political movements focused on climate and the economy, and the Occupy movement, which was both about economics and political process. BC also hints at a political calculus regarding national politics, vis-a-vis ‘Harper’, Canada’s then Prime Minister. This echoes the ‘the State won’t save you’ meme of the Transition Narrative. This signifies that his choice is focus is local resilience conducted through a local autonomist model. Transition Memes BC then discusses how he discovered the Transition movement and why he decided to participate. He reveals that he had already been thinking along the lines of the local resilience movement and then discovered that Transition Towns was doing what he already had in mind: But again it's kind of a personal tactical issue of, if you can show something that works at a small community level and if its replicable, then it will. So that leaves me with the question of well Ok um are there other people that are looking at the same thing? I've gravitated towards the Transition Movement particularly because it looks at everything as a whole, the Three E's. It's now actually sort of the Four E's. they all relate to an E so Economy, Environment, and Energy, and more recently the fourth one is Equity. (BC, 2014) Here, BC is echoing several of the memes of the Transition Narrative, although he arrived at this formula himself, as the “three (or four) E’s”, energy, ecology, economics and equity. The ‘E’ meme provides a sense of connecting the issues through alliteration. From his analysis of the Four E’s, BC decided that he would work on the nexus of those four factors at the community level: So he hooked up with Jeff Rubin and he started doing national tours. Now he's got two of the E's linked up, realizing that the issues are joined at the hip. So the Transition movement basically started out that way, with that focus of let's start with the community because where else are you going to start? as opposed to going with the left, advocating or lobbying with some larger group on the left. (BC, 2014) BC’s rejection of left advocacy movements, including a ‘larger group on the left’ marks a clear distance from mass movements. Local Autonomism v. Survivalist Reactionism In addition to rejecting mass advocacy movements, and again rejecting the efficacy of working with politicians who have no motivation to change conventional culture, he also rejects an isolationist view that he calls ‘the Mad Max approach,” and rejects the ‘techno-optimist” response. This rejection of working at larger, higher scales and levels leaves him the option of organizing at the community level, where he senses he can be of most help to others: The other nice thing about the Transition movement is it had a positive spin on it. Because I believe that when you really understand the pickle we're in, it's freaky—The pickle that the human race is in. We're in for some really tough times, is what it comes down to. And there's other movements that "get it" and they take the kind of um ‘I'm gonna look after me’ spin; like you know I could build my bunker in Montana and surround myself with ammunition, stockpile three years of food, that kind of a Mad Max approach to things, which is no good either. And there's plenty of people doing that. Cause there's no, there's no sense of wanting to be helpful…There’s no up side at all for the politician. All you really want to do is just get re-elected, so you'll always spin everything from that point of view. So, people really have to do their own homework and unfortunately it's just not that readily available. So again the Transition Movement has a positive spin that 'you can do this' that a community can do this, that we can actually come through some clearly significant changes in an orderly way as a species—we don't have to go to the Mad Max level of things. And on the other hand there's not going to be any kind of techno-fantasy way out either. You know we're not going to suddenly invent fusion that's in everybody's car and you know um off we go to Star Trek kind of realm. That's not going to happen either. Cause we, we had our chance but everything is sort of too congested to really go that way. You know there are some interesting new technologies, but they're just not, with the culture and the power structure, just not able to scale up, to be adopted and scaling in any meaningful way, and in any meaningful time frame. (BC, 2014) Collapse of Complex Societies BC continues with a discourse of the domination of “elites”, which is not part of the Transition Narrative. This discourse resonates strongly with Joseph Tainter’s (and others) analysis of socio-political collapse caused by the competition of elites. The language he uses also derives, surprisingly, from the Occupy Movement and its meme of “the 99% vs. the 1%”, showing that some people involved with the Transition Towns movement are influenced by the political discourse of mass movements even if they don’t participate in them. BC continues; BC. That's part of the problem And I think you do begin to see that because there’s—you know it all ties together at some point. You've got fewer and fewer groups with more and more power, and for them it's all about status quo. And locking in status quo and that's why you could have twenty years of climate change talks and nothing's really happening…It’s working for them, not only is it working for them, it's getting better and better all the time. It’s getting more and more efficient at aggregating resources, aggregating political power, they're getting really really good at it. Yeah and so it used to be the one percent, and it used to be the tenth of the one percent, now it's kind of the 100th of the one percent. And I just read a statistic that the average income of 50% of the US working force is $28,000 per year…That’s what I mean. And and I begin to realize that this is predictable, this is human nature. This is what human species does when you look at, pick your culture, pick your point in history, you get dramatic stratification…You get ruling elites and you get the masses, rather it's and that's why they had the French Revolution, or you could go back to the Roman Empire, take your pick. (BC, 2014) BC is reiterating the kind of systems theory and collapse theory typically espoused by Transition Towns and the Post-Carbon Institute, that as the economic system increases in complexity and power, it concentrates power in fewer individuals. BC summarizes this discourse on economic elites referring to it as an “end stage economy”: It's what we do. And so the outcome you create this thing called the economy, ya let it run for a hundred years, and it's a fully predictable outcome. We're now looking at end stage economy, end stage economy…You let it run, and various authors have predicted it in various ways from George Orwell, 1984, well he had the date wrong but he could see where it was going in terms of the State and Big Brother and all that sort of thing…So and Karl Marx they're all, they all saw it coming…So then the only question is how does it play out from here? You know you could read Chris Hedges and a bunch of other people that are sort of the rabble rousers, like we really gotta fight this thing. And the first people that fight it are probably just put away in a gulag. (BC, 2014) This discourse, as a whole, shows a very sophisticated political analysis, a broad knowledge of history and complex social issues, but that does not necessarily call for a mass political resistance or ‘revolution’, which BC sees as dangerous and futile. Instead, his choice is an autonomist response, the decision to work at the level of the local community, producing demonstration projects that can be replicated elsewhere. State vs. Community BC continues with an analysis of deciding what “level and scale” he would choose to work in. He dismisses the efficacy of working with or against State as being irrelevant, and instead chooses to work with the local community, using the Transition Towns model: And that's not lost on when somebody said well you can produce a lot of food, but if the neighbors are starving, what good is that going to do you? And that again gets back to the whole idea of the Transition movement. It takes one community at a time. So if the individual level is not enough, the community level is meaningful, and the governments are (pause) just never going to respond in time, because they're a government. And public sector always is more reactionary than proactive They react, they're not proactive. It takes a community to be proactive. And then one of my favorite sayings is by Winston Churchill, back in the Second World War, he said that in times of crisis, the solutions that get adopted are the ones that you can point to. Meaning that if things are falling apart, you're not going to somehow come up with a brand new solution. You’re going to look around and go "oh, what they're doing over there, that looks like it might work, and then you try it out. So what that means then is it becomes important for somebody to run a pilot project. All kinds of pilots of all kinds of wild and crazy ideas. And all you need is a visible pilot. Ok and when times get stressed, somebody goes "wow, look what they're doing; let's give that a try. And so that's a lot of what drives me in the Transition movement. Let's just do tiny little pilots…So we started with the Transition Towns—I would have never guessed when we started that it turned out to be the first one that actually could get registered with the national organization or network. I mean they have full initiatives and they have "mullers". So we ended up being the first full one in Nova Scotia. (BC, 2014) At this point, BC provided a list of Transition-type initiatives in communities around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that he was aware of, though he never mentioned coordinating Transition activities with them. For BC, its the community level that is a ‘meaningful’ arena of action, where other levels, the individual and the state, are not worth pursuing. BC continues with a discussion of the start of Transition Bay its goals and projects. He describes the mission as including all that the parent organization in the UK promotes, and local initiatives. BC relates that Transition Bay’s approach to local autonomism encompasses most of the major features of Transition Towns with an additional focus on economic resilience for rural communities. (BC, 2014). Autonomist Base Community However, Transition Bay is something more than just a secular local autonomy group. The group has several ties with the Buddhist community of Halifax. Evidence for this is in the following passage where BC uses the strange term “magnetizing”: BC. So you basically are magnetizing in some sort of people who are like-minded and what did was want to do? It tends to be project-centric. Um so rather than advocate for something or study something, what can we just do? C. And typically, you a lot of them start around food. Everybody's gotta eat. It tends to be a fun project. It tends to magnetize in other people. (BC, 2014) The term “magnetizing” is a word used among members of the Shambhala Buddhist community, which means to ‘attract’ or to ‘draw in’ people or resources. This is an indication that the respondent’s religious interests are in ‘the background’ of his work with the project. During the interview, there were only two explicit references to his affiliation with Shambhala Buddhism. The second reference was the expression of his desire to create an “enlightened society” through Transition Bay: “And of course we want to create an enlightened society.” The concept of the enlightened society is not well-defined even in Shambhala Buddhism, which championed the term as their version of ‘engaged Buddhism.’ However, from this researcher’s study of Shambhala Buddhism, it seems to involve creating ideal social conditions for the ‘basic goodness’ of human beings to express itself; it embodies Buddhist norms of friendship, generosity, compassion, empathy and equanimity. It is BC’s desire to create enlightened society that puts Transition Bay in the realm of a religious base community, though that may not be the explicit goal of other members of the group. Local Energy Production BC then describes the start-up of the group as focused on growing food locally, starting a local greenhouse, which brought in new volunteers to the project. Once started around local food issues, BC describes how the new Transition group started an energy discussion group and shifted to more ambitious projects, such as developing local biodiesel as a ‘pilot project’: But then there's, we're starting now a pretty cohesive energy discussion group. There's two or three four people, some of them, one guy, CF who you know lives in an off-the-grid house, he's kind of a techno-geek type…And what would it be? Would it be some sort of photo-voltaic micro-grid? Would it be a neighborhood windmill?…So my point was that one of the things we're noticing is that everything that moves other than self-propelled, you have to pump something through a nozzle…That’s the way the world works right now…Everything. Take whatever it is, air, sea, land, you gotta pump something through a nozzle…So the question then becomes "Is the technology available today for a community to own it's own ability to produce something that pumps through a nozzle? Even if it's pilot-scale, for thee percent of the community's needs. And the community pays for it, maybe it's a cooperative ownership, whatever the model, CEDF [Community Economic Development Fund] take your pick, and you're producing three percent of the transportation that's in the community. And if its economically viable, that is huge….That’s game changing. Right, around the world. Game-changing around the world. And who can create the model, the pilot that everybody else can point to…So that's, in my mind, that's the "to die for" project. (BC, 2014) So although BC is not quick to espouse Transition UK’s central focus on “peak oil” and the “energy descent action plan”, he still sees energy independence as a core issue for his local group, and bio-diesel as a model pilot project that would have a trans-local impact. His secondary aim is to produce this liquid energy in a cooperative model. He echoes the ‘EROI’ meme (energy return on investment) of the Transition Narrative, indicating a kind of ‘weaving’ of Transition Narrative into his own discourse. Autonomism v. the State BC discusses the failures of local governments, especially for small coastal towns in Nova Scotia. Working within conventional politics yields sparse rewards at best, as local governments are over-ruled and even dismantled by governments at wider levels and scales. The disempowerment and collapse of local governance disempowers residents of local townships; thus the turn towards autonomism: So if I'm Springhill [NS] Mayor, but I'm not the mayor anymore because they just amalgamated with the county, and I've passed our economic problem onto the county level, and we've lost our voice, which is what happens, so we no longer have a voice or a say in anything because we're no longer a town….So we can't say anything about what we want to do because we don't have a local government….We abrogated our right to have a voice….Because we amalgamated…So we are now truly and completely at the mercy of the county and whatever they're gonna do. And so my first question was always well what's if now towns do that, abrogate to the county level, when's the first county gonna pack it in and say our budget's shot, we're screwed, you know, and now we're gonna now amalgamate with the Province Who's left? it's like the shit flows uphill. (BC, 2014) In this dialogue, BC is relating a political problem that is affecting rural and coastal communities in Nova Scotia, including Saint Margaret’s Bay: amalgamation. As small rural towns are unable to finance their own services, they must amalgamate to larger urban or regional entities that can centralize services. In the process of amalgamation, the community’s power to make decisions about their own needs and resources is lost. Saint Margaret’s Bay lost that political power when it was amalgamated into the Halifax Metropolitan Region. Autonomism v. Capitalism In the next part of his discourse, BC offers a thorough critique of global capitalism: How do you rejuvenate your Main Street? Because, pick your Main Street, it's going to be empty storefronts, 'cause that's the way it is, 'cause they all went out to the big strip, where they have parking lots outside of town. with the Big Box, and they're quietly extracting all the wealth out of the region…So how do you rejuvenate a downtown?…The ones that are more efficient at aggregating wealth win…It’s simple. So now you see a few big players that are really good at cherry-picking what's left. And that's disparity and that's why corporations now have a bad rap, and which they didn’t have a bad rap fifty years ago because we just hadn't gone that far along the, now we're in the end stage…So there's just not that many, there's fewer and fewer and they're bigger and bigger. They've bought up each other. Pick your sector—pharmaceutical sector they're doing it, grocery sector they're doing it. agricultural sector they're doing it. Everybody amalgamated and aggregated. So you've got a few dominant players and nobody else in between, so they stratified the whole the energy sector, you got Exxon Mobile, you got Shell. There used to be a bunch of tiny little energy companies. And that's how you start, and that's when the economic model really worked well is when you have a lot of little—but it's whole end point was to aggregate and…Yeah, so it should be no surprise, yeah and extract—and they'll exploit anything they can exploit. So you got that's these slave mills going on, whether it's in Pakistan, textile mill, the whole factory blows up and kills a few hundred people, or it could be Amazon, which is also another slave mill. But you know that's our our own third world, our first world version of a third world problem. Um, like they get really good at exploiting anything that they can exploit. Cause that's what you're supposed to do if you're a corporation. That's your mandate. (BC, 2014) BC offers a sharp and insightful critique of global capitalism, what Avelino called the regime. The regime he describes is a globalized process of aggregating and amalgamating economic and political power, and using that power to exploit labour, resources and extract wealth from local economies. BC’s discourse includes a critique of the extreme exploitation of labour and economic inequality fostered by global capitalism. HIs discourse goes beyond the Transition Narrative that the primary inequality caused by global capitalism is the disadvantage of the ‘local’. He goes further to include the exploitation of labour in third world ‘slave mills’, and the spread of ‘slave mills’ to the ‘first world’ in the Amazon labour model, a “first world version of a third world problem.” Beyond Transition: the Commons Economy BC then describes Transition Bay’s next big project, which is to hold a conference on rural economies and explore a ‘new economic model’, one based not on economic growth through dependence on large multi-national corporations, but on ‘sustaining a quality of life’, which he also names “the Commons.” BC sees the model of economic growth as the primary model for city and provincial politicians, indeed, the only model for conventional politics, while the ‘new economic model’ of ‘the commons’ is unknown or undervalued. So you start out at that level, then the community level where you help the communities do the transition, and now the bigger one is this conference, where now we're leaping into a regional setting. We're expanding out of Transition, where you don't even hear the word “transition”. it is focused on one of the E's which, embedded within it ties in all the other ones, it's Economy, ok? but this is a new economic model.…which governments don't get, okay, they kind of are realizing if you push them that the old story line really just doesn't cut it anymore….You talk to any economic development guy in provincial government, and it's all about growth…So this new model is, it's not a question of growing, or not, it's a question of sustaining quality of life. And that they only way a small community can do that—the only way—is to relocalize it's assets back into the Commons.…You got all these large, all these large structures that are really good at extracting and aggregating wealth and resources of whatever kind. And that's why you get the equity disparity and everything else coming out of it. So the only thing left for a small community is to relocalize it's ability to leverage its assets. (BC, 2014) BC describes attending two conferences on new economies, which promote land trusts, cooperative economic models, which BC hoped to present at the conference in Nova Scotia. Two years ago in upstate New York, and now this last spring in Boston Common Bond, it was called, there was some 800 people there from around the world. Everything you can possibly imagine in every community setting, hard-pressed urban core Detroit, Jamaica Plains, you know people just hard-scrabble, how we gonna pull something together? You got Vermont, you got all these other agricultural communities, incredible, innovation coming out on how people are doing things. A lot more use of land trusts, and cooperative models, all kinds of other things. So we're pulling out the whole gamut for this conference. (BC, 2014) BC describes this initiative towards a new economic model as going ‘beyond Transition’, beyond it’s narrative focused on energy, and beyond it’s ‘town’ limitation, working at the ‘regional’ level. BC’s statements shows that he is part of an active network of community organizers who are focused on a nexus of issues affecting localities: local currency, land trusts, the cooperative economic models, and the Commons. Furthermore, Transition Bay as a group undertook to organize a Province-wide conference on the new economy to showcase these ideas. This shows that although Transition Bay is a local group, it is not just hyperlocal but translocal. BC and Transition Bay are part of a growing network of what some describe as a community resilience movement, a movement towards establishing a post-global and post-capitalist society based on local resilience, cooperative economics and the Commons. The Commons as ‘Governance’ BC then offers a discourse of “the commons” as a means to restore self-governance and resilience to small rural communities: So how can these hard-strapped communities actually pull their own selves back together and build resources around control by the Commons, whether it's fisheries resource, forestry resource, agricultural resource, shared resources, consumer goods, you know can you start a tool library, okay? Why have everybody own a drill in town if you can have ten drills and rent them out and loan them out as a library, you know or extension ladders, food processors, whatever, and just and there's a million ways that sharing creates wealth. S: Sharing creates wealth, ok. BC: Yeah, a million ways, fantastic ideas pop up. So let's pull them out, and let's put them up on stage, and let's show people this is what, and you don't have to do a study and you don't have to get permission, just do it…So that's a new economic model. The government doesn't really get it. We're gonna have to educate them so there's a section on ‘governance’….How can we change policies that are operating at the municipal level. We're not even gonna—forget the Provincial, forget the federal level, but at least at the municipal level, how do you change land-use, zoning, all kinds of things that start to integrate some of these ideas. (BC, 2014) In this part of his discourse, BC relates some ideas that are indeed ‘deeply political’: the replacement of the grow-by-consumption model of global capitalism with a local economy model that focuses on sharing, innovation and quality of life, rather than individual consumption. BC introduces the idea of ‘the commons’ and elaborates on it as a multiple commons of fisheries, forestry, agriculture, and even consumer goods, such as a tool library. His proposition is that sharing creates wealth. And for those in the political sphere that don’t understand this economic model, he proposes a ‘section on governance’ at the municipal level to change policies on land-use, zoning and planning, to shape them into a governance structure that supports the Commons and the ‘new economic model’. For BC, the provincial and federal level of governance are of no use, but he sees the municipal level as a site of meaningful intervention, something akin to the growing ‘municipalist’ movement. Transition as Political Process In addition to the interviews, the researcher attended Transition Bay’s Third Anniversary and Visioning process. The researcher took minutes of the day-long event as a participant observer and provided the minutes to the leaders of the group. The minutes of the visioning process provides some description of what kind of organization the members want to create, what kind of projects they would like to take on, and in that sense, what kind of ‘town’ they would like to create. Questions for discussion included What components are needed to make a sustainable community; connectivity? Are there some things we’re missing? Should we just do what we’re already doing? Who are the power-influencers: who are the people who influence the issue? What training is needed? What community awareness is needed? What partnering is needed? Proposed projects and interests included: Water protection & education environmental sustainability; increased awareness of water issues; watershed protection Aquaculture; closed loop aquaculture; removing waste stream; pilot project to see if it could be done this far north Share career knowledge and business experience for people who want to start business in local area Community biofuels; community-owned biofuel, gas pump Environmental and social activism Food security, gardening and farmers markets Off-grid homesteading Accessible transportation (Minutes of meeting, 2014, transcribed by S. Bartone) The projects listed are within the realm of ‘local sustainability’ and ‘local economic development’, shaped not so much by the Transition Narrative (peak oil, climate change) as by local conditions and issues around water quality, fishing, and small business development. The “Components” section includes questions that pertain to “systems thinking”: systems or network as ‘connectivity’, power in the form of “power influencers”, knowledge and critical awareness in the form of ‘community awareness’, and local networking and capacity building in the form of ‘partnering.’ Since the ‘town’ comprises the scope of society that they are concerned with, this in a sense can be understood to be their idea of ‘what kind of society’ they would like to create. In summary, BC’s political discourse is very sophisticated, detailed, multi-faceted, critical, ideologically driven, and yes, ‘deeply political’, but that doesn’t necessitate, for him, starting or joining a political party, running for office, taking part in mass political movements, writing manifestos, or engaging in other kinds of typical political activities. His ‘politics’ is in his analysis followed by the decision to work at the local level in an autonomist fashion. In particular, his choice is to initiate a local sharing and commons-based economy, which he describes as ‘governance’. In that sense it resonates with Foucault’s concept of governance as the self-imposed initiation of self-rule. The governance of the resources necessary for collective local subsistence comes close to a new definition of bio-power at the local level. In terms of power, BC’s discourse is one of self-empowerment based on his motivation and initiative to start a Transition group, to start local currencies, to foster local food security, to question and challenge the dominant global economic model—the regime in Avelino’s terms—and to propose a new economic niche model that concentrates ‘governance’, and therefore power, in the local community that controls local resources. BC has connection to a network of leaders in the ‘new economy’, and potential connections to Transition-type initiatives around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick that may provide opportunities for networking at the Provincial level. This networking capacity offers the possibility of developing this niche model into a niche-regime of the type that, in Avelino’s model could challenge and possibly replace the current regime. Transition Bay’s focus on technological and social innovation, such as the group’s experiment with energy innovation, are what Avelino describes as ‘innovative power’. BC’s method of attracting and organizing volunteers is a kind of ‘social power.’ BC and Transition Bay conduct these activities without expecting assistance from the State—in fact they expect resistance—and outside the labour-for-pay bargain with Capital, is what Holloway calls this ‘the power to do’ of autonomism. In terms of political process and the method of enrollment, as described by Chilvers and Longhurst (2015) BC’s method was to “magnetize” or attract volunteers to a particular project. Some were initially interested in local food production, others were later attracted to the idea of starting an energy discussion group. The method of mediation, as described by Chilvers and Longhurst (2015) was to advertise locally for volunteers for projects, to enlist new volunteers through personal contacts. BC did not relate a scenario in his interview in which Transition Bay explicitly discussed “what kind of society” they wanted to create, which Kenis, Bono and Mathijs describe as the “political moment par excellence” (2015). However, BC’s discussion of the ‘new economic model’, described as ‘the sharing economy’ and ‘the commons’, and the fact that the group organized a conference to popularize these ideas, indicates that there is some tacit agreement about ‘what kind of society’ Transition Bay would like to create: a localized resilient sharing economy governed as a Commons.  Ch. 10 Conclusions This study of Transition Towns movement examined its narrative, how that narrative was shaped and contextualized by the crises of globalization—particularly peak oil, climate change and economic disruption—and how that shapes local conditions and local responses to the crisis of globalization. Globalization and localization shaped the Transition movement’s response to globalized crises, its narrative and its praxis as a movement, in the form of relocalization. This study next examined Transition Towns as a social movement and its power dynamics. The most salient model for Transition Towns as a social movement to understand it as a movement that created a critical consciousness about the crises of globalization, educated and motivated its members on those issues, executed projects concerning those issues. At the same time, the Transition movement made the larger social system aware of the issues that it had excluded from the system, namely, peak oil, climate change and economic disruption and its particular effects on localities. The study identified it’s most salient power dynamic as motivational power as a way to create systemic power through establishing niches and niche regimes. In particular, this study asked the question, ‘Is Transition Towns political, and if so, what kind of politics is it?’ This inquiry linked the localization narratives of Transition Towns’ to the political discourse of autonomism, which has the following characteristics: resisting the forced labour of the capitalist system through self-determination in the choice of what one chooses to work on; viewing the resistance to the State as irrelevant for the achievement of one’s goals; advocating a ‘politics of dignity’, that self-determination of the personal or collective goals of a group is a sufficient political position. In addition to autonomism, this study identified localism as a political form congruent with relocalization that explains its tendency not to get involved with larger mass movements or larger scales of political action beyond the level of the municipality. The political analysis of the three groups under study yields three forms of autonomism: eco-anarchist autonomism, autonomist municipalism, and autonomist base community. Using Luhmann’s systems theory, this study identified the Transition Towns narrative as a form of ecological communication by which it communicated to the larger social system issues that it had excluded, by translating those concerns into codes that functional susbystems could understand. As a social movement, and sometimes a protest movement, the movement internalized to the social system issues that it viewed as outside the system, j.e., the three crisis of globalization, ‘peak oil’, climate change and economic disruption, and the impacts of those global crises on localities. This study conducted a narrative analysis of Transition Towns, identifying its frames, themes, and memes. It identified the main narrative of Transition Towns as a response to the crisis of globalization as the perceived crises of ‘peak oil’, climate change and economic disruption, and its response to these global crises as a movement to create local resilience. The narrative analysis identified the strengths, weaknesses and contradictions of the Transition Towns narrative. The same narrative analysis was applied to its local instantiations of the movement in three local Transition groups in Maritimes, Canada. The narratives of each of those three groups was described, compared and contrasted with the parent organization in the UK, and with each other. This analysis identified three different narratives: ecotopian transition narrative, municipal transition narrative, and base community transition narrative. All of these factors together shaped and contextualized the narrative of the Transition Towns movement, and explained its seemingly ‘apolitical’ stance. In fact, it revealed that Transition Towns is indeed “deeply political”, and identified that political position as local autonomism. Having identified the broader narrative of the movement as local autonomism, I was able to more describe in more detail the political discourse of the three groups under study, to understand how they reflected the movement’s broader narrative but also differed from it, identifying local political discourses that were much more overt and radical than the political position of the parent organization. The close analysis of the political discourse of each of the three groups yielded three distinct political discourses: Eco-Anarchist Discourse, Autonomist Municipalist Discourse, and A Commons Discourse. The Power of Systemic Transformation Having conducted this meta-analysis of the political model and discourse of Transition Towns, this study can now address Avelino’s key questions: Does the movement demonstrate systemic power defined as “the collective capacity of actors to create, renew and/or maintain functional systems that correspond with their perceived (collective) needs and desires.” (Avelino 2011). The research can conclude that yes, the Transition Towns movement does create and maintain functional systems that correspond with their perceived needs, so long as the ‘perceived need’ or goal is defined as ecological communication, that is, educating and creating critical consciousness in localities about the perceived crises of globalization and its effects on localities. If the perceived ‘need’ or goal is defined as local self-sufficiency to meet all their needs for food, water, energy, material goods and economic stability, the Transition Towns movement demonstrates capacity to achieve those goals only in very limited ways. For example, although all the groups under study undertook local food production as a critical goal, none of the groups were able to produce any more that supplementary food supplies from their gardens and local farms. However, in terms of ecological communication, all the local groups under study were able to educate the localities about the ecology and economics of food production and how it impacts local communities. Avelino expands her definition of systemic power into more specific elements: Does this movement produce systemic power sufficient to transform the ecological landscape? Does it have the capacity to turn its niche into a transformational niche regime? Recall that Avelino argues In “The Power of Transition Discourse”, that the power of Transition discourse, is its use by undercurrents (social movements) is to provide intrinsic motivation that empowers people to take action; to generate knowledge as a precondition for power; to foster the development of skills, strategies, and a willingness to exercise transformative power; to generate cognitive and resource innovation; to foster the development of new practices and institutions that transform niches into radical niche-regimes; and to drive transformation to the regime level, replacing weakening status quo regimes with sustainability regimes. In the final stage, regimes would be replaced with new functional subsystems that transform the landscape’s dominant forms, resulting in a system-wide paradigm shift. From the analysis of the power dynamics of Transition Towns, in both its parent organization and its local instantiations in the Maritimes Canada, I can conclude that the Transition Towns movement does generate intrinsic motivation, it does generate knowledge as a preconditions for building power; it does promote the development of skills and strategies; but it has not yet demonstrated a ‘willingness to exercise transformative power.’ The reason for this is that each local Transition group operates as hyperlocal. As such, it fails to make sufficient and continuous connections to other groups and movements that could build the kind of network power (Mann) that would generate new radical niche-regimes. Its rather paradoxical that a permaculture movement which takes systems theory as its foundational analysis fails to employ an axiom of systems theory which is that network power builds systemic power, that systems grow and extend their reach through networks. The connections and networks do not necessarily have to occur at the wider levels and scales of global politics, which would negate its own power as a localized movement. However, it could make connections and build networks with other local groups that have complimentary missions and goals, and with other Transition-type groups that could extend the power of the Transition movement throughout a region and create what Avelino calls a radical niche-regime. The power to do, as Holloway, Odum and Bauman define it, is not enough to generate the kind of coordinated network of power that creates and supports niche-regimes with sufficient capacity to ‘replace weakening status-quo regimes with sustainability regimes’. The failure to identify the power of the network is also one of the limits and weaknesses of autonomism as a political model. As Holloway said often in his book, Crack Capitalism, metaphorically, making that initial “crack” is not enough, because it is quickly sealed up. The point is to make ‘thousands of cracks’, and to connect those cracks into the kind of growing and moving network pattern that can shatter the structure of capitalist power. Each of the three Transition groups under study in Maritime Canada showed the capacity to make those kinds of connections and to build those kinds of networks. Eco-Fredericton seized the opportunity presented by the incipient Occupy movement to connect issues that affected a broad base of the local populace, and generate local activist networks that could initiate the transformation of the locality. The brilliance of Eco-Fredericton is that it was able to make the ideological connections between local economic conditions and the global economic conditions that were foregrounded by the Occupy movement. Yet Eco-Fredericton was able to transform the global political discourse of Occupy into a local narrative about local ecological conditions and demands, thereby maintaining itself at the center of the movement’s power. Transition Fredericton demonstrated the capacity to build local networks across a broad range of issues, to link with other local movements that were currently active, such as Occupy and the anti-shale gas movement. Transition Fredericton saw its chief role as one of connecting, educating and networking amongst many small, diverse, local movements in the Greater Fredericton area. In addition, the co-founder, MH, had the vision to see the possibilities of Transition Towns as a translocal movement, which he called “cosmopolitanism”; to connect with other municipalist movements around the world, exemplified by the Podemos party in Spain. Furthermore, Transition Fredericton was not afraid to launch into electoral campaign politics and use that as a platform for ecological communication, to broadcast it’s message to the widest range of local political actors and communities in the Greater Fredericton area, and to attempt to use that platform to influence urban politics. Transition Bay several times identified possibilities to connect with other Transition groups in Nova Scotia, but did not present to this researcher an ongoing effort to generate and support that kind of network. Transition Bay’s organization of the regional conference was one way that it attempted to bring in a broad range of local political actors from a neglected and disempowered segment of the Province’s political geography: small rural and coastal townships. Its attempt to start the discussion about revitalizing the political agency of small towns is the kind of networking project that could build radical niche-regimes that might transform weakening status quo regimes into transformative niche-regimes. BC also had the vision to understand that Transition Towns represented a new kind of governance that was feasible to enact at the local level: a Commons governance. BC understood that the creation of a new form of governance would probably not happen within already established and petrified political regimes that were already coopted by global corporate regimes. This new form of governance could be gestated in precisely those places that were abandoned by status quo regimes: small rural towns. BC was articulating what turned out to be a nascent political discourse, the governance of the commons. This governance model has the potential to transform the relationship to both Capital and the State, because it redefines property as a Commons to be shared and managed by everyone connected to it, and it redefines the function of the State as protecting the Commons as a resource and mediating the fair share of the Commons amongst connected populace and species. Furthermore, I can use Foucault’s analysis of biopower to answer the question as to whether this autonomous localization movement is a form of governance, and does the movement generate localized governance as biopower. From this study, I have no doubt that the Transition movement has the potential to redefine itself and its narrative as a movement for local governance that generates biopower at the local level, the biopower of local resilience. This localized biopower operates as a counterpower (Gramsci) to global power elites that control local resources and limit localized chances for subsistence and survival. This movement does not necessarily have to ‘scale up’ to the level of nation-states or match global power elites in order to assert its potential for biopower. Some ecologists have warned that we must be careful that when you scale-up a proposed solution, you also scape-up its unintended consequences and problems. Extending a new kind of locally-generated biopower for resilience, one example being the governance of the commons, to an urban and regional level, using network power and creating radical new niche-regimes, may be the appropriate scale for establishing a new sustainability landscape. The strength of this study was that it foregrounded the uniqueness and diversity of political discourses and strategies found at small scales at the local level. The study showed that indeed “local is different.” The study revealed the intelligent and sometimes profound analyses of the global situation by local Transition actors who otherwise appeared to be running modest community projects. Another strength of this study was how it approached the ‘political question’ from the point of view of motivation. The researcher did not ask a political question, but got political answers. The researcher did not specifically ask respondents about their political ideas or ambitions in relation to their Transition efforts, but respondents freely offered political ideas and ambitions as part of their motivation for doing the work. This proved to be not only the most productive way for interview subjects to freely elaborate on their political ideas and motivations, but it also avoided posing a leading question that could have biased the interview toward an expected answer. That asking an ostensibly ‘a-political’ question led to political answers was further proof that political motivations were at the core of participants involvement with Transition Towns. The weakness of this study is that it is limited to three groups in the Maritime region of Canada, sharing a similar political culture, amongst a fairly homogeneous class of white, middle class, educated, and politically privileged activists, although several members of Eco-Fredericton/Occupy clearly identified as ‘working class.’ This study of Transition Towns as a working model for local governance should be extended to a more diverse range of groups and places, in large and small cities, amongst people of colour and groups with lower incomes and less political power, to see if it can be replicated and effective under a variety of conditions, but more importantly, to identify an even greater range of diversity its political discourse and actions. Questions for Further Study: Governance Governance Everywhere at Every Level After nearly ten years of studying the Transition movement, both on a personal level and formally as an academic study, I am finally hearing a new political discourse from the Permaculture movement that influenced the founding of the Transition movement in the UK. The Permaculturists are moving away from an ‘apolitical’ stance of “designing” landscapes and eco-systems. They are moving toward articulating a new awareness that what they are doing in local communities is not an ‘apolitical’ process; it is a process that is fraught with political issues and consequences. They are finally starting to recognize that permaculture design and localization is an inherently political process of governance at small, finely-grained scales. In a series of videos published by The Perma Warriors on Nov. 11, 2017 (https://youtu.be/UDmvmtEbsP8) Andy Goldring, Chief Executive of the Permaculture Association UK, made the following proposals: —Shift from Westminster Politics to Local and Regional Politics —Recognize the City/Region as the critical unit of change —Recognize multi-nodal forms of governance —Recognize multiple regions, regions containing multiple communities —‘Government’ is elected —Governance can happen at many different scales, organizations and networks —Governance can’t just be left to the ‘government’ —Practice complementary ‘governance’; distributed ‘governance’ —Governance is a distributed, multi-nodal, multi-level, local-to-global activity, —We need to get really good at governance —Governance everywhere at every level Future studies could investigate whether the Transition Towns movement takes on this new turn toward governance and makes it a central feature of the movement’s mission, to develop knowledge, skills and capacity for political process and local self-governance. Some questions for further study of Transition Towns and similar ecology movements are these: does the Transition or localization movement recognize its potential as a new form of governance, and does it carry out a politicized form of governance by asking the ‘quintessential political question’, “What kind of society do we want to create?” Does Transition Towns and similar movements expand into networking with other groups and localities on complementary issues? Does Transition Towns ‘mature’ from a reactionary movement responding to an immediate, perceived crisis, to a movement that sets forth long-term visions, goals and strategies? Does the Transition and similar movements recognize the Commons as a form of governance, and other forms of post-capitalist economy as governance? Does it develop into more organized and institutional forms of local self-governance and production?  Resources Bartone, Shaun UNB Soci #3309747 Ph.D. Candidate Page 270 Dissertation