It was an immense privilege to record this first podcast in an ongoing collaboration with Professor Tara Brabazon in the build up to my new book on postcapitalist economies of care. This first episode revisits a book chapter from 2015, where I first began to engage with the concepts of life’s work, care, social reproduction and postcapitalist possibilities. Check it out here, on Youtube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Category: Economies
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Introducing a new project: Reduce, Reuse, Repair: Emerging waste subjectivities for postcapitalist economies
By Dr Lila Laird, Postdoctoral Researcher, Massey University
What is the project about?
We are embarking on a project that traces how groups of people move up the ‘waste hierarchy’ and how such transformations shape people’s sense of self in relation to waste. This matters because issues like microplastic pollution, environmental contaminant leaching, and dwindling landfill space continue to negatively impact ecosystems and communities. In order for Aotearoa to avoid further waste crises, our use and disposal of material goods must change. Despite warnings and ample evidence, plastic, metal, organic material, food, excrement and building waste continue to grow.
Shifting towards ‘circular economies’ is often proposed to stop such crises and to avoid the linear take-make-dispose model. Instead, a circular economy keeps resources in use for as long as possible, and the waste hierarchy (pictured below) conveys the kinds of actions that are most beneficial in circulating materials for reuse. Near the top of the waste hierarchy includes reduce, reuse and repair, and these are the forms of circular economy we are most interested in investigating.
The Waste Hierarchy — we should be doing more the top and less of the bottom! Circular economy research often points to high tech advancements, hoping to deal with our waste and also create business value from it. However, these ‘solutions’ do not often lead to less waste! Instead, they often end up adapting to the current flows of waste being produced. Social scientists researching circular economy practices have found that in order to reduce, reuse, and repair materials, large amounts of often invisible or undervalued labour is required.
In simple terms, it takes a fair amount of people-power to wash, sort, clean, store and transport resources for their reuse. Or to undertake research, connect with knowledgeable people, upskill oneself, and foster patience to repair an item to keep it in use. And it takes a significant amount of effort to avoid waste altogether. Therefore, because a circular economy is a matter of who is engaged and what kinds of action they are taking, our research is interested in meeting with people focused on being less wasteful and keeping their items in use.
Waste is a culturally situated concept. Different cultural groups have different norms and taboos with regards to waste, including what is considered necessary waste. Different cultural groups also have different kinds of relationships to land and the ways land is currently used to ‘deal with’ waste. For example, in te ao Māori, understandings of tapu and noa might guide waste disposal in different ways from western norms. All of this difference is an important part of the ways people approach waste, and what moving up the waste hierarchy may look like for them. And these differences provide important insights into the challenges and solutions to current waste crises.
What does the project involve?
We have partnered with three important organisations who help people in Aotearoa to become less wasteful.
Para Kore is a Māori zero-waste organisation. Para Kore educates and advocates from a Māori worldview for zero carbon and zero waste in Māori communities and beyond. They run sustainability programs across Aotearoa, working with marae, iwi, early childhood centres, churches, community organisations, businesses and more.
Repair Network Aotearoa is a charitable trust that works with repair cafes and similar projects like tool libraries and maker spaces across Aotearoa, advocating for the right to repair legislation in Aotearoa.
Zero Waste Aotearoa is an organisation that supports over 150 groups across Aotearoa that are working towards zero waste in their local community.
To explore our interests in waste and identity, we are undertaking field work with our research partners and collectives engaged in practices at the top of the waste hierarchy. We will also be undertaking cooperative inquiry groups that enable us to bring together like-minded people to explore their practices relating to waste and to items that could become waste, their concerns and feelings surrounding waste, and what they would like to change in relation to waste practices for themselves and their wider collectives.
Who is this research for?
By the end of the project, we will have co-created an action plan with our community partners that identifies how government and community can invest in social innovations needed for circular economies in Aotearoa. The action plan will support practices at the top of the waste hierarchy and will be directed at waste decision-makers in community and government. As many people grapple with the waste that enters their households, workplaces, marae, community centres and the nature surrounding them, we hope that our action plan can help to bring us one step closer to a waste-less Aotearoa.
What’s next?
We are currently connecting with collectives on the ground who are engaged in actions of reduce, reuse and repair. This includes repair cafes, textile recovery groups, resourceful-craft organizations, makerspaces, tool libraries, community composters, and more. We look forward to keeping you informed of what we find out in the process!
You can find out more about who is involved in the project here:
Gradon Diprose | Kelly Dombroski | Lila Laird | Matthew Scobie
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The Desire to Write Grows with Writing
“The desire to write grows with writing” is a quote attributed to Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, a prolific writer, theologian and humanist in the 15th Century. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, but it continues to circulate because it seems like the truth of it is widely recognised by writers.
It has been on my mind lately as I have committed to writing 250 words a day on a new book, tentatively titled Postcapitalist Economies of Care. The 250 words started out as difficult — I needed to figure out a structure, a point, then write within that structure and point, which usually required some reading. But as I have gone on, for 3 weeks now, it has become easier. In fact, I come to sit in my home study in both early morning and late afternoon in the weekend just for the pure pleasure of it, even if I have already managed the 250 words.
It’s a strange experience really. I think the desire to write grows with writing as you start to figure out what you are trying to say then find the time and the way to say it. Right now, I’m only halfway through my chapter structure, but already at my word count for it — what that means is that I’m quite motivated to get back to it, get on with the next section and get to the end of the piece of work so I can then return to edit and sharpen.
I would also add that for me, the desire to write also grows with reading. When I read books, especially, I feel quite motivated to interact with their arguments and figure out how they differ or complement what I am thinking.
Finally, I’ve been working on a variety of interesting projects for a decade, and working on a new book is an opportunity to reflect on what they all mean and how they all help me consider my broader project of transitioning to postcapitalist economies of care. Watch this space!
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Left behind or left out? A case study of economic subjectivities in Pātea
Economic subjectivities in Pātea are not about catching up with capitalist norms but about sustaining inclusive, diverse economies rooted in cultural values and local agency. The town’s identity and resilience challenge dominant narratives of decline.
Ben Lilly researched Pātea for his Master’s of Arts in Geography at Massey University in 2024. Over the last year, he has been working on turning his thesis findings into an article for New Zealand Geographer. This week it was published — you can read it here.
Ben interviewed community leaders in Pātea showing them the results of a media analysis he had conducted and getting their thoughts on the way their town was represented. He also explored a range of ‘more-than-capitalist’ cultural and care practices that had enabled Pātea’s ongoing survivance. Many of us have seen this showcased in one of the nation’s informal anthems — the hit song “Poi E” released by Pātea Māori club in the 1980s.
Pātea Māori Club released the hit song Poi E in 1983, not long after the freezing works closed. Ben argues that when we label small towns as ‘left behind’, we buy into a linear trajectory of capitalist economic development where local autonomy and values are minimized. He suggests we shift to the language of ‘left out’, to highlight that the issue at hand is exclusion from decision-making rather than a failure for small towns to ‘keep up’. He provides examples of ways that Pātea residents have emphasized economic self-determination and autonomy after previous encounters with paternalistic industry relationships.
Ben Lilly is PhD candidate at Waikato University. He is the co-chair of the Early Career Research Network of the New Zealand Geographical Society, and is a member of the Community Economies Research Network.
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When we think about circular economies, we must consider social innovation
This is a plain language summary for the article Expanding Circular Economies Through Transformative Community Investment authored by Gradon Diprose, Kelly Dombroski, Dean Stronge and Alison Greenaway. There are 50 free copies available from here.
This article is all about how we can make our economies more circular and sustainable. It’s not just about fancy new tech or being super efficient with resources. It’s also about social innovation and making sure everyone benefits.
Key Points:
- Three Cool Examples: The article looks at three different enterprises in New Zealand – one in transport, one in energy, and one in food. There’s a regular business, a social enterprise, and a charity. Each one is doing awesome stuff with their profits to help people and the planet.
- Reinvesting Surplus: Instead of just pocketing the profits, these enterprises are putting their extra money back into circular economy innovation. They’re supporting social equity and helping to build a circular economy where waste is designed out. This is NOT about designing new products for consumption, but about innovation in services: car-sharing, energy hardship programmes, and vegetable distribution.
- Social Innovation: These businesses are coming up with creative ways to use their surplus. They’re challenging the old-school, take-make-waste model and showing that we can do things differently. The innovation is in the organisation and logistics, rather than new materials or tech.
- Equitable Practices: They’re all about refusing, reducing, re-using, sharing, and repairing. It’s not just about recycling – it’s about changing how we think and act to create a fairer, less wasteful world. The organisations have an eye to equity and justice, making sure that a wider range of people can be empower to use more ‘circular’ and low-waste services.
By documenting what’s happening in these examples, the article shows how enterprises can use surplus in smarter, fairer ways to support the transition to circular economies. This article contributes to the goals of moving towards a caring, postcapitalist economy — but uses contemporary business language like ‘innovation’ and ‘investment’ in order to reframe these ideas for people and planet!🌱
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🌿 Transitions in Action: A Field Guide to the Wellington Region’s Emerging Future
We wrote this guide because we could feel something stirring across the region.
Recently I was part of a project documenting awesome projects in the Greater Wellington Region. In our work as researchers, community collaborators, planners, and advocates, we kept coming across people doing the quiet, determined, and deeply hopeful work of transition. These included composters and kai growers, local energy innovators, housing cooperatives, council staffers working behind the scenes, artists hosting place-based experiments, iwi-led projects regenerating whenua. As someone born in Wellington and who grew up in Wairarapa, I was really keen to connect with projects in this region but also to connect them with each other!
Often, these efforts were siloed or invisible to each other. But taken together, they point to something larger: an emerging transition infrastructure already in motion. Transitions in Action: An Urban and Regional Transitions Guide for Te Upoko o te Ika / Wellington is our attempt to document, honour, and connect these efforts.
What the guide is (and isn’t)
It’s not a plan. It’s not a blueprint. We explored a few different ideas for titles (I suggested ‘look book’), but it was Amanda that came up with the idea of a ‘field guide’.
So it’s a field guide—something that invites attention, orientation, and learning. It draws on interviews, workshops, and mapping work to identify over 50 projects across six transition domains: housing, energy, mobility, ecosystems, economy, and community.
To me, what is important is that these are not hypothetical futures—they’re already underway. And they’re reshaping our shared sense of what’s possible here.
What we’ve learned
Writing this guide affirmed a few things we suspected, and clarified many things we hadn’t yet articulated. A few key insights:
- Transitions are already happening, but they’re uneven, precarious, and sometimes invisible to themselves.
- Place matters. Transition in Wellington looks different than in other regions—it’s shaped by wind, faultlines, iwi relationships, governance structures, harbour edges, and long-standing networks of resistance and repair.
- Community and institutional work are entangled. The most promising initiatives weren’t either grassroots or top-down—they blurred those lines.
- Transitions need time and infrastructure. Many of these projects operate on goodwill and temporary resourcefulness. Without scaffolding—funding, policy shifts, relational infrastructure—they risk burning out or being co-opted.
Who we wrote it for
We wrote this guide for people already doing the work, to help them find each other. It was so awesome to see a range of the people who feature in the book turn up to the launches and meet each other!
We also wrote it for funders, public servants, and elected officials—those who say they want climate action or community wellbeing, but often don’t know where to start. The guide shows what’s already in motion, what’s needed, and where policy or funding could shift to support grassroots capacity without overriding it. We have had such a great response from local and central government — with Masterton councillor Stella Lennox, Wellington City Councillor Yadana Saw, MPs Celia Wade-Brown and Tamatha Paul appearing at our two launches!
Finally, we wrote it for ourselves. To better understand the ecology of transition in our home region. To see the patterns, the synergies, the tensions, and the possibilities.
What’s next?
Our hope is that the guide becomes a resource for conversation and connection. That it helps to legitimise and amplify the work already being done. And that it invites deeper reflection on what kinds of transitions we’re part of—and for whom.
We’re already hearing from local councils, community groups, and educators who want to use it in their work. And we’re in ongoing conversations with collaborators about how this guide might seed similar efforts in other regions.
You can download the full guide here:
📘 Transitions in Action (PDF)You can find out more about the authors here:
Amanda Yates | Gradon Diprose | Kelly Dombroski | Thomas Nash
The book was launched in Wellington in March and in Wairarapa in May
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Caring for Life: New book release challenges us to learn from places often considered ‘undeveloped’
In February 2006, 6 months pregnant, I left Palmerston North NZ for Canberra, Australia to pursue a PhD with Katherine Gibson (of JK Gibson-Graham). Thus began a journey of research and learning in Australia, China, Aotearoa NZ, through the birth of four children and homes in five different cities. And in February 2024, some 18 years later, I celebrate the monograph that emerged from all that work!
When I went into the project 18 years ago, I was really interested in how the processes of Westernisation and globalisation were playing out unevenly around the world. I was particularly interested in pockets of resistance to corporate globalisation. In my fieldwork in the far west of China in the province of Qinghai, I studied the relationship between the local nappy-free infant hygiene practice, space, place and cultures of health and wellbeing. During that time, I discovered a whole online community of westerners also trying to learn the nappy-free infant hygiene practice but without the support of their local environments or cultures. In both groups, there was a resistance to the use of disposable nappies, and the deliberate cultivation of embodied practices of hygiene that required less material (and plastic) stuff.
Fieldwork was conducted in the city of Xining, in Qinghai province in the far west of China Hygiene is social, material and spatial
As a book project, Caring for Life: A postdevelopment politics of hygiene speaks more to our post-pandemic hygienes, as well as the broader question of how does social change happen. In the revisions made for the monograph, I significantly rewrote and retheorised most of the material to build an argument about hygiene assemblages.
Hygiene assemblages is a term referring to the social, material, cultural and spatial practices that come together to keep hygiene. In the Qinghai examples, these assemblages gathered around strong social and spatial practices — caregivers learned the specific signals for baby’s wee and poop, and held them out over appropriate places — wee against a tree, on the concrete, on the tiles, or over a drain. Poop over a newspaper, a basin, a toilet or a pile of ash from the fire (in rural areas). But they worked to keep hygiene nevertheless. In the Australian examples, caregivers were trying to learn these signals too, but with less historical and cultural knowledge to draw on. Their assemblages gathered around the material aspects of the practice: potties, bags, nappies, wipes, toilets, containers and more.
Of course, all hygiene assemblages have both social and material practices, and all have a spatiality and cultural component. What I was interested in was the possibilities of learning and assembling new hygiene practices and assemblages through cross-cultural learning. Could these practices from the far west of China influence hygiene assemblages in Aotearoa, Australia and other places in the West? In asking this, I developing thinking around hybrid research collectives to argue that the early adopters of ‘elimination communication’ (as the nappy-free hygiene practice was called) were researchers, experimenting and documenting their hygiene assemblages in ways that made it more possible for others to pick up the practice.
It has been interesting to work on the book over such a long period: things that were not normal 18 years ago have become normalised. During this time, elimination communication has become more mainsteam, as have other alternative hygiene practices such as using menstrual cups, reusable pads or period panties, and a whole range of modern cloth nappies. We have also had a global pandemic where the first response was not really medical, but social — in the form of social distancing and changing behaviours and habits before vaccines were produced.
Photo by Eric Lafforgue, from Flickr What does Caring for life have to say about transition?
So what does the book tell us about transitioning to caring economies? Here’s three thoughts on that:
- Transition and social change is material, social and spatial. It’s not about individuals, although individuals and their behaviours matter. It’s about the broader assemblage of these materialities, socialities and spatialities.
- Passionate collectives of individuals experimenting with different material, social and spatial arrangements can spark and seed change. In the area of economic change, this means paying attention to what collectives of community groups are doing — degrowthers, community economy organisations, artist collectives, Indigenous economies, regional and local economies and more. It’s not that these experiments have to be scaled up ‘as is’, but that they produce important knowledge that can inform change.
- We can and should learn from places that are considered ‘less-developed’, ‘out of the way’ or ‘undeveloped’. For it is in these places where different diverse forms of cultural, social, material and spatial arrangements can be found that might be better adapted for transition.
If you are interested in taking a look at the book, see here.
I’m also available to give talks on the book this year, just get in touch!
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An article about uncovering a postcapitalist counter-city…in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
With my colleagues David Conradson, Stephen Healy, Gradon Diprose and Amanda Yates, I recently published an article for a special issue of the journal Cities. Here’s a plain language summary!
In the aftermath of devastating earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand gaps in the landscape emerged, and some new ideas and possibilities were able to take root and eventually thrive. Our article pulls together some of these interesting alternatives and uses the idea of ‘counter-city’ to describe what’s going on.
What is a counter-city?
When we think about cities, we often think of those in charge making decisions, sometimes influenced by the interests of big businesses and industriesto maintain a preference for capitalist modes of competitive development. But we might also think of the ‘counter-city’, thinking of everyday people, artists, Indigenous leaders, and communities who maintain more collaborative modes of urban change.
The counter-city isn’t a fully formed alternative to the regular city, and it doesn’t completely get rid of the business-as-usual ways of doing things. Instead, it’s a mix of innovative changes that invite us to think about a different kind of city. It’s a city where we explore new possibilities beyond the usual, always-capitalist city.
In our article, we discuss how changes and experiments in Christchurch, often led by community groups, transformed the city into a place where people could do things differently. This counter-city is a place where “hidden but now emerging ideas and ways of doing things” have turned into a “different way of doing things.”
If concrete is the usual infrastructure for the business-as-usual city, what is the infrastructure of the counter-city?
The counter-city is made up of structures, or “infrastructures,” that provide the foundation for how people organize and interact in their community. These infrastructures were shaped by the earthquakes and the changes they brought.
If we think of the counter-city within Christchurch, we think of the “commons” and “commoning” practices present, where people came together to share resources and spaces. While these were often temporary, they aimed to shift the management of resources and spaces from private responsibility to shared responsibility. They were led by the community, with people working together for the greater good. We can think of these as “social infrastructure”, relatively stable structures that provide a foundation for people in the counter-city.
One such commons/infrastructure was an urban farm run by a social enterprise. In our work interviewing young people and staff on this urban farm, we found that in this counter-city, people also started to see themselves differently even if their commoning activities were temporary. They moved away from the idea of “everyone for themselves” and embraced a sense of caring for each other and the community. This way of thinking and being is what we call a “postcapitalist” subjectivity. In simple terms, it’s like moving from just thinking about money and profit to thinking about taking care of each other and the environment.
In the postcapitalist counter-city we are trying to describe, we called these people “commoners.” Commoners are individuals actively involved in caring for shared spaces, knowledge, or resources. They are at the heart of the counter-city’s transformation.
How do these infrastructures relate to people and the way they understand themselves?
In our article, we look at an urban farm in Christchurch. We explore how it became a “commons” where people and the environment came together as a kind of infrastructure of care. We’ll see how this farm changed young people’s way of thinking and acting, making them more focused on caring for the community and the environment. They spoke of a shift in their relationship with the world around them, encompassing everything from the land and garden to the larger ecological systems, the food system, the community, and their fellow workers. These transformations were collective, bearing a striking resemblance to the concept of “homines curans” – the collective caring subject – rather than the individualist, work-focused “homo economicus.” Another way to say this is that they became something more like “commoners” — people who care for commons together.
This journey through this example can help us understand what a counter-city might mean, and how the shift in how people see themselves and their community can shape the future of cities.
Drawing from postcapitalist theory, we explored the dynamics of commons as infrastructure, commoning, and subjectivity in this example. Encounters with more-than-human infrastucture/commons created conditions for collective caring urban subjects to emerge. The commons, often overlooked, can be viewed as an infrastructure of care for the counter-city. It sets the stage for the growth and flourishing of collective caring subjectivities.
Many thanks to ChatGPT, who helped to simplify some of our language in this summary.
The reference for the article: Dombroski, K., Conradson, D., Diprose, G., Healy, S., & Yates, A. (2023). Cultivating commoners: Infrastructures and subjectivities for a postcapitalist counter-city. Cities, 143, 104635. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2023.104635
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Introducing Ben — Researching changing economies in Taranaki
Ben is a co-funded Masters student studying economic change in the small town of Pātea, Taranaki. I’m part of his supervisory team and took a trip out to Pātea to meet up with Ben and have a look around South Taranaki.
Tell us a bit about your background and how you got interested in economic geography
I’m originally from North Taranaki, in fact I’m currently there now studying by distance. I went to study geography at Massey Manawatū straight out of school. I came to the topic because geography allows for academic diversity, being able to address topics and borrow ideas from other physical and social sciences. Economic geography is a particular interest as I can explore impacts of and solutions to capitalism’s flaws.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently completing my Masters’ thesis, where I am exploring people’s responses to change in the context of a small town, Pātea. This project includes a media analysis and semi-structured interviews with community leaders.
What do you think the biggest challenges will be?
One of the biggest challenges in my research is the interviewing. Having never done anything like this before, I have found it a difficult process to work through: planning interview questions, conducting interviews, and then discovering mistakes or oversights made, during transcription and analysis. It has definitely been one of those skills that can’t be just read about – it has to be continuously tried and improved for oneself, but I do think I am much better at interviews now than I was before my first.
What are some of the surprising or interesting things you have discovered in your fieldwork so far?
An interesting part of Pātea is the culture which stands in contrast to statistics and some media coverage. It has been evident with everybody I’ve talked to that they understand their community is sometimes called ‘lower socioeconomic’ by others. But they reject this as a sole identity and instead have embraced an engaging community lifestyle where local people and families can thrive peacefully and cooperatively. While there are certainly economic challenges, to identify a community like this only as ‘poor’ is to miss the point entirely. It is also clear that this identity is constantly shaped by the community leaders I talked to, who are passionate about their place, and inspire others to share in that passion.
Ben Lily is researching people’s responses to change in Pātea as part of a Master’s project funded by the John McArthur Scholarship in Geography -
Wellington Transitions
How do cities transition to places of wellbeing for both humans and the environment? This is a key question in our book-in-progress “A Fieldguide to Wellington Transitions”. Amanda Yates, Thomas Nash, Gradon Diprose and myself are interviewing in Wellington this week to aquaint ourselves to the details of transformative transition projects already underway in Wellington.
It’s only Tuesday and we have already interviewed folks about Capital Kiwi, the Living Pa, sustainable energy transitions, and protocols for wellbeing decision-making. In our other fieldwork periods we have interviewed Kaicycle, Mevo, Te Hiko, Toast Electric, and the Wellington Sustainability Trust. Thanks to everyone that suggested awesome projects and people we should talk to — it’s been really interesting so far! You can still suggest projects here.
Photo by Jason Eric Bunderson — Kaicycle runs a community composting intiative in urban Wellington -
Why we should talk about economies rather than ‘the economy’
Below is the script for my response to Amanda Janoo’s talk at the Economy for Public Good Conference, August 31st at AUT. The conference was organised by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance of Aotearoa. Thanks to Gareth Hughes for the invite.
Tēnā koutou katoa, ngā mihi nui kia koutou.
E ngā mana whenua o te rohe nei, ko Ngāti Whātua ki Orakei, tēnā koutou.
E ngā kaikōrero o te ra, tēnā koutou.
E ngā tāngata katoa kua tae mai nei kei te tautoko te kaupapa o tēnei ra, nōku te hōnore ki te tu, ki te mihi ki a koutou katoa.
No Wairarapa ahau, he tangata tiriti ahau. No Kotiwana ōku tūpuna. E noho ana ahau ki Papaioea, e mahi ana ki Te Kunenga ki Purehūroa Massey University. Ko Kelly Dombroski tōku ingoa.
Mauri ora ki a tātou katoa.
Kia ora everyone, it’s such an honour to be here today with all of you at this event looking at wellbeing economies – and I use it in the plural – I will get back to that later.
Amanda, thanks for your talk today laying out how we got here in terms of economic thinking and practices. There are two responses I’d like to make in support of your talk – both for situating this kaupapa in Aotearoa but also about the way we think about economies more generally.
Have you noticed already that I’m talking about economies in the plural?
I’m a geographer, and the big thing that we are into is this idea of ‘place’. Place matters. Where you are in the world matters. It makes a difference. And although we have experienced incredible globalisation of our economies in the past century, place still matters for economies. I’m going to ask for a small change to our language here today – to speak not of ‘the economy’ as if it was this big coherent immoveable and solid thing, but to speak of economies – and to speak of economies as diverse, place-based, interconnected yes, but also unique and uniquely ours.
Even now, some of you are thinking – yes of course ‘the economy of New Zealand’. Others are thinking ‘but the system!! The system!! It’s all connected!!’. YES it is all connected, but kao, it is not one economy necessarily. We all participate in interconnected but place-based economies. As Amanda has alluded to, it is their ubiquity across the world that our hope for further change lies.
So the first step for those of us interested in wellbeing and economies is this: to recognise the diverse range of economic activities already in play in our place-based economies. The vast majority of these economic activities lie below the waterline – that is, they are not measured by GDP, they are not studied by many economists, they are not considered when economic planners think about how we might try to secure housing or food for our whānau. These are the gifting, social surplus, commoning, solidarity, hapū, community and volunteering economic activities – noncapitalist labour, noncapitalist enterprises, noncapitalist transactions, property and finance. These are already here if we look below the waterline. I’ve interviewed and researched dozens of community economy groups over the last decade, and done in depth studies into what they’re doing.
For wellbeing economies in Aotearoa, the first step is to inventory what we already have in our place-based and regional economies at hand. These are like the ingredients in our pantry. We can cook up a boring meal based on one big lump of potatoes while everything else rots, or we can pull out and support all the decent ingredients that we have already at hand.
The meal has some parameters: it has to be nutritious and filling, but it also has to meet cultural requirements of our places– to feed our guests without shame, to include important foods that have meaning to us. It has to be ethical too – to not be made up of foods that are destroying our lands and seas and peoples lives. It also has to be affordable, and hopefully to not be wasteful. The parameters of dignity, purpose, particpation, care for the natural world that Amanda mentioned are good start points. If we think of our economies as pantries rather than massive singular systems, we can also think of ourselves as ethical collective actors in our place-based economies. What meal we cook up is also a result of the decisions that we collectively make – they are not automated laws of the market or economy that force us to act to only in one way, as if we were rational economic robots constantly outsourcing the costs of our lives to others if given half a chance. We can think a bit more about what these meals might look like.
If we think of our economies as pantries rather than massive singular systems, we can also think of ourselves as ethical collective actors in our place-based economies.
Kelly DombroskiSo for me – and this is my main point: we have to talk about economies in the plural, to map out the ingredients we have to work with already, to build on that and make decisions about combining these economic activities into economies at a lot of different scales and in different places around the motu. And this is what our mahi has been doing – in Ōtautahi, and now in Te Whanganui a Tara – inventorying the best ingredients that we already have and writing them up and sharing them around.
It is about collectively working with what we have in full recognition to the diversity of answers to the question “how do we live well together”? with the answer partly being ‘start where we are, with what we have at hand’.
Nō reira, ka tika te kōrero: mauri mahi, mauri ora – let’s be the people that do that mahi of working out how to live well together in these challenging times.
Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities 