Grassroots (Economic) Activism in Times of Crisis: Mapping the Redundancy of Collective Actions

In the current economic crisis of industrialized society, social movements face two types of challenges: firstly, they are confronting institutions that are less capable of and have no propensity for mediating new socio-economic demands; secondly, they are experiencing difficulties in building strong and lasting bonds of solidarity and cooperation among people. The latter are fundamental resources for the emergence of collective action; however, the highly individualized structure of contemporary society makes the creation of social ties ever the more difficult. As a consequence, contemporary waves of protest are often short-lived. Nonetheless, in response to the multidimensional crises, the consolidation of grassroots mutualistic and cooperative experiences, within which new affiliations for collective action are experienced, is on the rise. Indeed, it is a fact that even though conditions are not favorable, social movements have continued to ex-pand and promote community-led initiatives for social and economic sustainability. In some cases, these initiatives play a decisive role in the fight against poverty and in guaranteeing human livelihood. Solidarity-based exchanges and networks, such as barter groups, urban gardening, new consumer-producer networks and cooperatives, time banks, local savings groups, urban squatting, and others similar experiences are typical examples of continuous reactivation of people's desire to be agents of their own destiny. This combination of formal and informal networks are a testimony to an ability and an aspiration. Indeed, on one hand, they are indicative of citizens' capacity to self-organize in order to tolerate, absorb, cope with and adjust to the environmental and social threats posed by neoliberal policies. On the other hand, they are attempting to change an economic system, increasingly perceived as unfair and ecological disruptive, by building an alternative in the cracks of the former, based on greater mutual solidarity between individuals and more sustainable connections with the environment. This special issue is a reflection, among the many that have being proposed of late, on some of these self-organized collective actions that have pass through and/or emerged from the aftermath of the crisis. It is the result of an attempt to cross various disciplinary fields, in order to explore the redundancy of their respective explanations as to why and how some grassroots activities last and succeed, and turn this redundancy into the powerhouse for relaunching more robust and less aleatory initiatives

Grassroots (Economic) Activism in Times of Crisis: Mapping the Redundancy of Collective Actions

In the current economic crisis of industrialized society, social movements face two types of challenges: firstly, they are confronting institutions that are less capable of and have no propensity for mediating new socio-economic demands; secondly, they are experiencing difficulties in building strong and lasting bonds of solidarity and cooperation among people. The latter are fundamental resources for the emergence of collective action; however, the highly individualized structure of contemporary society makes the creation of social ties ever the more difficult. As a consequence, contemporary waves of protest are often short-lived. Nonetheless, in response to the multidimensional crises, the consolidation of grassroots mutualistic and cooperative experiences, within which new affiliations for collective action are experienced, is on the rise. Indeed, it is a fact that even though conditions are not favorable, social movements have continued to ex-pand and promote community-led initiatives for social and economic sustainability. In some cases, these initiatives play a decisive role in the fight against poverty and in guaranteeing human livelihood. Solidarity-based exchanges and networks, such as barter groups, urban gardening, new consumer-producer networks and cooperatives, time banks, local savings groups, urban squatting, and others similar experiences are typical examples of continuous reactivation of people's desire to be agents of their own destiny. This combination of formal and informal networks are a testimony to an ability and an aspiration. Indeed, on one hand, they are indicative of citizens' capacity to self-organize in order to tolerate, absorb, cope with and adjust to the environmental and social threats posed by neoliberal policies. On the other hand, they are attempting to change an economic system, increasingly perceived as unfair and ecological disruptive, by building an alternative in the cracks of the former, based on greater mutual solidarity between individuals and more sustainable connections with the environment. This special issue is a reflection, among the many that have being proposed of late, on some of these self-organized collective actions that have pass through and/or emerged from the aftermath of the crisis. It is the result of an attempt to cross various disciplinary fields, in order to explore the redundancy of their respective explanations as to why and how some grassroots activities last and succeed, and turn this redundancy into the powerhouse for relaunching more robust and less aleatory initiatives.<br /

Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy, Community and Forests in Puerto Rico

Political ecologists have developed scathing analyses of capitalism’s tendency for enclosure and dispossession of the commons. In this context commons are analyzed as a force to resist neo-liberalism, a main site of conflict over dispossession, and a source of alternatives to capitalism. In this paper we elaborate a view of the commons as the material and symbolic terrain where performative re-articulation of common(s) senses can potentially enact counter-hegemonic socio-ecological configurations. Expressly drawing on the concepts of hegemony, “common-senses” (inspired by Antonio Gramsci) and “performativity” (developed by Judith Butler), we argue that counter-hegemony is performed through everyday practices that rearticulate existing common senses about commons. Commoning is a set of processes/relations enacted to challenge capitalist hegemony and build more just/sustainable societies insofar as it transforms and rearranges common senses in/through praxis. The paper draws on the experience of an anti-mining movement of Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, which for the last 35+ years has been developing a project self-described as autogestion. The discussion pays special attention to Casa Pueblo’s praxis and discourses to investigate how they rearticulate common senses with regard to nature, community and democracy, as well as their implications for counter-hegemonic politics

Victims in the ‘Land of Fires’: Illegal Waste Disposal in the Campania Region, Italy

This chapter aims to shed some light on this phenomenon mainly through the lens of the victims of this environmental crime, and challenges the idea of being the environmental crime a crime without victims. Indeed, as we show in this chapter the victims are the main actor that fought against the illegal waste dumping. All along the 20 years of the Campania environmental conflicts, the victims have reinforced their networks unveiling the environmental burden of waste illegal trafficking, and denouncing the tragic health consequences of such activity. The findings allows us to drow some preliminary conclusions that, in the last years, victims are playing an important role in influencing: (i) the recognition of waste-related crime as penal felony by the Italian Legislation, (ii) the promotion of epidemiological studies to investigate the relation between health and the illegal and legal waste dumping practices, (iii) the launching of judicial actions against those actors which got rich thanks to their illegal waste businesses

The vocabulary of degrowth: A roundtable debate

Podeu consultar el llibre 'Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era' a les Biblioteques de la UAB - https://cataleg.uab.cat/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1922043Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Roundtable about the book Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era, published by Routledge in 2015. The roundtable took place at the ENTITLE conference in Stockholm, titled Undisciplined environments (20-24 March 2016). This is an edited transcription of the discussion