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.
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!🌱
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.
This research note reflects on the fieldwork I carried out in China, also detailed in my book Caring for Life: A postdevelopment politics of hygiene.In the research note, I explore how researchers can study care and caregiving by paying attention to embodied experiences and considering cross-cultural differences. Here are the key points:
Embodied Methodologies: I explain how I used embodied methodologies in ethnographic research on care. This means understanding how our bodies and experiences shape our understanding of care and caregiving. For me, paying attention to what my body was telling me as I crossed cultures of care helped me perceive and understand cross-cultural differences in care.
Awkward Engagements: I think about how my body perceived and experienced difference through Anna Tsing’s concept of awkward engagements, where different cultural understandings and practices of care interact. These interactions can lead to new insights and understandings of care.
Pluriverse Concept: I reflect on the concept of the pluriverse, which refers to the multiple, overlapping realities of ontology, culture, and experience. This concept helps us understand the diverse ways care is practiced and experienced, and to make space for other care realities in our research rather than seek to find one universal approach to care.
Throughout the article, I draw on various scholars’ work and provide examples from my own research in the Asia Pacific region.
I think this article would be useful in methods classes where ethnography or cross-cultural research is discussed. It’s relatively short and easy to read.
Conducting research into infant and childcare in a range of homes in western China in 2009
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!
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
Measuring and communicating the holistic wellbeing outcomes of community intiatives is often difficult, time-consuming and can miss important intentions and outcomes. Our recent report documents our 3 year project with Christchurch organisation Life in Vacant Spaces (LiVS), trialling a method of evaluating wellbeing outcomes of 27 of the more than 700 projects supported by LiVS over ten years.
Enabling Life in Vacant Spaces: A partnership approach to evaluating holistic wellbeing in disaster recovery projects reports on our experiment with a “Community Economy Return on Investment Approach” combined with a holistic urban wellbeing tool based on evidence-based urban wellbeing actions for change. We found that this way of assessing holistic wellbeing ‘returns’ on investment could help communicate outcomes in a more holistic way.
However, we found that the method still relies on some expert input and some more time-consuming qualitative and relational methods.
Next steps are to develop then test a community-based ‘how to’ guide that helps community groups develop their own methods for assessing their holistic wellbeing returns. The report will be a useful start point for community groups, local government and funding agencies to think about how they approach evaluation for both human and environmental outcomes with reference to the ‘inputs’ of investment — both financial investment and investments of time and energy!
This report was part of a the Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities Urban Wellbeing National Science Challenge. The first two years of my Transitioning to Caring Economies through Transformative Community Investment research programme specifies collaboration with the Urban Wellbeing stream. The report was authored by Kelly Dombroski, Gradon Diprose, Matt Scobie and Amanda Yates.
People harvesting green leafy vegetables from damp, dark soil
People in Aotearoa New Zealand spend more and more time indoors, and less time connecting with te taiao than our ancestors did. For many of us, we don’t think of ourselves as connected to the land in a practical way — although we may feel more abstractly connected to places and spaces. How do we build relationships with the land and places that are intimate and knowing? Why should we?
Scholars have talked about the idea of ‘metabolic rift’ — the disconnect that many urban people have when it comes to the metabolic cycle. Our food is produced far away from us, and our food scraps are taken away from us to landfill or other (hopefully better) places. Even our shit is taken away through pipes to who knows where. This mean we aren’t really viscerally connected to the cycles of production, consumption and decomposition that keep us all alive. The metabolic rift can be bigger than this too: in Aotearoa New Zealand our soils produce foods for export and the waste from those foods is handled elsewhere in the world — but we then have to import fertilisers to keep that system going! The ‘circle’ of the metabolism is broken.
Jenkins, J. (2005). The humanure handbook: a guide. Grove City: Joseph Jenkins.Broken and intact nutrient cycles
This is a big problem for our economies and our whenua. When there is no circularity to our production, consumption and decomposition, we are disconnected from the effects of our actions on the land. It’s also a big problem for our understanding of ourselves as economic and environmental actors. How can we see ourselves as relating intimately to the environment if we are encouraged to see ourselves as part of a massive import export global system machine?
When there is no circularity to our production, consumption and decomposition, we are disconnected from the effects of our actions on the land.
In my work, I’m interested in the relational side of economies, how we understand ourselves as economic and environmental beings, and how that affects the way we act in the world. I have had the privilege to study an urban farm where young people and others are invited into a relationship with the soil through practices of composting and gardening. They are invited to close the metabolic rift quite literally by eating and even shitting on site in a composting toilet! But they are also invited to close the metabolic rift by coming into an attentive and observant relationship with te taiao, the natural world.
Reconnecting with the soil in this way creates space for reconnecting with oneself as a different kind of economic actor. It invites us to understand ourselves and our role in the economy as relational and as more active producer and activist, and less of a passive consumer. Sasha Goburdhone and myself wrote a commentary on this for New Zealand Geographer, which just came out this week. I invite you to check it out, and leave a comment to get the conversation going. What do you think about the idea of metabolic rift? Is it a useful analysis?
Researching Postcapitalist Possibilities 