When globalisation goes local
Town & Country Planning, March 2008
With great apologies to Rudyard Kipling: local is local, central is central, and never the twain shall meet.
The great problem of how they should meet is puzzled over by people with tidy minds in every generation, trying to work out afresh exactly what function of government should take place at what level.
I have always suspected that the reason this hierarchy is never actually finalised is partly because the scope it gives for academic papers – it’s good for the Research Assessment Exercise – and partly because reality isn’t like that.
The problem is that there is hardly any practical objective that doesn’t require the exercise of imagination at every administrative level at the same time. Try discouraging smoking or truancy just from Whitehall – and they have – and you’ll discover that it doesn’t work.
Try doing it family by family, street by street, and you might have more permanent effect, but that is a slow business that requires unprecedented leadership and resources. Small plus small equals big, say the community activists in the USA – it’s true, but that requires big time and big resources as well.
I mention all this because I recently ran across a man with a genuinely fresh approach to localism which knits it together with globalisation in the most unexpected ways.
Stan Thekaekara is from the Nilgiri Hillas in India, now a visiting fellow at the Said Business School in Oxford. He spent a decade or so setting up an innovative fair trade scheme, linking the impoverished tea planters of south India with cities in Germany. It was called Just Change, and it worked – providing extra income to the growers and helping them use that income to invest in enterprise and education.
But he became disillusioned with fair trade because it still depended on the largesse of people with money. “We had to be grateful because the deal was fair,” he told a Local Alchemy conference in Leicester. He went on to explain how a visit by the tea growers to meet their customers in Germany had changed the way they worked, and turned fair trade on its head.
“These people pay us more for our tea, so they must be our friends,” said one of his farmers after meeting the customers. “But if they are our friends, they should pay less for our tea, not more.”
The result was a series of links between Stan’s grower communities, under the auspices of Just Change, and similarly impoverished local neighbourhoods in Germany and the UK. It wasn’t fair trade any more; it was a sort of localist version of globalisation. The growers got guaranteed markets without the manipulations of middlemen and global commodity prices, but the poor communities in the north got access to cheap food which they could sell on themselves.
One of those communities on the receiving end now is the fascinating and innovative Marsh Farm estate on the outskirts of Luton.
People in Marsh Farm have been adopting some of the Local Alchemy techniques, including mapping where the money goes after it passes through their hands. They found that they were spending a combined £1 million a year just on fast food outside the estate, and are working now to provide healthy fast food employing people in Marsh Farm instead, leasing an unused field next door to grow the necessary vegetables.
This is an excellent example of the technique known as ‘plugging the leaks’ – which finds out where money is leaking out of the local economy and replacing the leaks with imports. Stan Thekaekara is talking instead about “plumbing the leaks”, making links between impoverished communities across the world for mutual economic support.
Marsh Farm has just received its first ton of fair trade Just Change tea from south India. It will become another way of plugging the local money leaks, and hopefully to underpin local employment too. “If it doesn’t also create a job in Marsh Farm, then we will have failed,” says Stan.
What I enjoy about this story is the way it breaks out of our neat categories about ‘local’ and ‘global’, just as some rural neighbourhoods are able to find a new foothold in the global economy by using the internet to sell rare products internationally. But with a difference: Stan’s ‘plumbing the leaks’ leads to new, trusting relationships between communities that are that much more likely to cut and run.
There used to be a radical slogan in the 1970s which urged us to ‘think global, act local’. But by the 1990s, it was being used by Lord Chadlington, John Gummer’s brother, as chairman of the international PR conglomerate Shandwick, a clear sign that it had lost its radical edge.
It is true that global warming and the coming energy crisis will limit these international trading links, but the great cultural benefits of globalisation remains – neighbourhoods that are powerless on their own can link up across the globe to their own mutual benefit. If they have the vision and the nerve, they can still deal with the forces of global centralism and technocracy just by bypassing them.
