What makes a climate response-able community?

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few months about how to tell a really strong story about the work we do in my team. I’m — ironically for an experimenter— more of an inductive rather than a deductive thinker: I like a model. But whilst models like the three horizons framework are helpful in thinking about the space where we play (check out this video from Kate Raworth), they don’t enable me to visualise our portfolio, or help me explain how supporting women to align their finance with their values fits with thinking about regenerative technology, or my colleague Chris’s brilliant hands-on practice to co-build a sharing economy in North Wales for example.

The light-bulb moment came when I started to think about my practice in my own neighbourhood, how equipped we were to deal with the pandemic and what might support us to deal with the coming disruptions. We have lots of assets: access to green space, strong local connectivity, creative resources (including an arts studio), community growing space with permaculture expertise. But… not everyone is involved or aware of the local opportunities, we don’t mix across racial and religious divides as much as we could, there are isolated older people reliant on a less-than-bare-bones care system, and there is a big deficit in terms of understanding of and practice of community and political organising. We are also depressing entangled in a patchwork of big monopoly tech tools: Gmail accounts that aren’t fit for purpose, a Facebook group and WhatsApp that range from the very useful (e.g. for tool-sharing) to downright maddening (exchanges about parking that get everyone worked up but don’t lead to any action).

Through the work of the Boundless Roots collective I’ve also thought a lot about the ‘enablers’ and the ‘themes’ that underpin radical change (or rather, change that is commensurate with the scale of the challenge). My thinking about the needs of resilient communities has also been formed by this report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the work that partially underpinned it on community resilience to flooding (which I was fortunate to lead on behalf of Defra). Finally, working with the Disabled community locally has really helped shape my understanding of inter-dependency.

Bringing together the immediate neighbourhood practice with resilience theory slowly settled in my mind into a new model, shown below. The model is intended to set out six characteristics of a ‘response-able’ community of the (near) future, and four enablers. I don’t make any claims for how widely this could be applied, but I feel it could work for the UK context in which I am operating. I’ve used ‘response-able’ rather than ‘resilient’ as I think the term resilient is overloaded, and can be read as a passive quality rather than a proactive set of capacities, as I intend it. ‘Response-able’ is a borrow from Donna Haraway, who talks about ‘learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.’ She also draws on Hannah Arendt, to frame ‘response-ability’ as cultivating the capacity to ‘be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time’, to not look away. To stay with the coming trouble.

Finally, response-able moves us away from the increasingly unhelpful mitigation / adaption divide. I have never believed that building our capacity to respond to disruption could undermine our efforts to fend it off. Response-ability reflects this: the future we need to build must be low carbon and climate-adapted. Response-able communities are better able to act and adjust.

The climate response-ability framework

Six characteristics of a climate response-able community

I’ve captured this in the round, as a wheel (like the permaculture principles) because there is no hierarchy. All of them presume however that a response-able ecosystem — in the broad sense — will have both a degree of redundancy (surplus) and strong diversity. They also overlap. They are:

1. Healthy biosphere: clean air, clean water, health soil, species diversity, nature everywhere (not just in designated green space).
2. Rich & diverse social capital. In addition to the obvious justice and inclusion questions, the greater the range of voices in the conversation, the greater the capacity for innovation and the wider the pool of possible solutions.
3. Networks and structures. How do people communicate / work together / grow ideas / share things?
4. Creative capacity. How able are people to imagine and experience different ways of being and living together, including through making together? Does everyone have access to them? I’ve been inspired by the idea of imagination infrastructuring here (but I’ve not used the term for avoidance of jargon). More basic (but necessary): is there a library?
5. Diversity of supply. In a world of disrupted supply chains we need opportunities for local provisioning. This applies to food — empty supermarket shelves supplemented (displaced) by a healthy stream of locally-grown produce, collective purchasing and redistributed surplus, for example — but also to things like repair capacity, and the ability to produce parts through e.g. 3D printing, where appropriate. Energy supply might also fit this category, enabled by micro-grids.
6. Infrastructure / physical commons. Where are the physical spaces for gathering, doing and being together? Are there larger collectively-owned assets e.g. wind turbines, community solar? Is there a physical library of things for borrowing? Are there places where people can safely seek shelter in the event of a flood or heat wave? Are there larger green spaces — ideally also with co-benefits like flood risk management? Space for food growing?

Diversity of supply / infrastructure / social capital / healthy biosphere: juicing at Royate Hill Community Orchard, September 2021

4 enablers

1. Process / organising capacity. I’ve drawn this directly from the Boundless Roots work. Every dream or idea relies on this to move from intention to action. And it’s often neglected. For me, it also includes structures like peer groups, as well as understanding of political process and how to engage with and influence it.
2. Humane tech. We cannot build response-able futures on the engines of polarisation. The work that careful.industries is doing around Community Tech is a good example of the kind of future we need here.
3. Working with division. In the Boundless Roots group we called this ‘polarities’ but I didn’t always find that helpful. I’ve written more about this here. We need to be constantly looking for the things we have in common and using those to build change, as well as developing the skills to manage conflict. (This is closely linked to point 2 too, as a lot of the tech is engineered to increase conflict).
4. Access to resources (including finance). It’s hard to do any of this without being able to mobilise resources. That could be money— but it could also be spare capacity (in physical spaces, in the grid, in people’s energy) or time. We’ve been exploring this with our postcode gardener model for a while, through things like a community subscription model. I wonder whether things like the decentralised finance movement help here?

Final thoughts — living the questions

I like this model because it provides an over-arching story for all our various projects — and it re-connects me with a purpose that has shaped my professional journey over the last decade. It’s very much work in progress though, and it hasn’t been developed with my colleagues yet (which is why it’s on here) so I would really welcome thoughts and comments below. What have I missed? (Spiritual practices maybe? If so how can this be framed in a way that is meaningful and doesn’t alienate people who feel uncomfortable with this language). Can it be simplified? Are there additional dimensions I need to consider? (I’m already wondering if it’s too static, for example). How should I use it? I can imagine it using it to ‘audit’ a portfolio — do we have the right balance of projects? for example — or to understand where the big gaps in a community’s response-ability are. How could this work with other models? (For example the Doughnut Economics Peer-to-Peer Learning Journeys to bring the ‘neighbourhood doughnut’ to life). Lots of questions. But then, as I am often reminded by some of the wise people who have accompanied me on different stages of this journey, living the questions is how we grow.