Reference materials

Glossary

A-growth

“A-growth focuses on essential human development and people's wellbeing, emphasizing the improvement in quality of life for all. A-growth effectively ignores GDP as an overall measure of progress. This does not give priority to either growth or anti-growth and is intentionally ignorant about any changes in GDP, removing growth or anti-growth constraints in pursuit of human progress. An important advantage of the neutral and precautionary a-growth strategy is that it can bridge pro-growth and anti-growth views and thus reduce polarization in the debate.

Buen Vivir

Buen Vivir, which in Spanish means good living or living well, is an Indigenous movement that proposes a set of visions and practices of alternative ways of living together. There is no single Buen Vivir. It takes different shapes depending on the context. Its foundations lie in the cosmovisión (or worldview) of the Quechua peoples of the Andes and it was born as a reaction to the devastating impact of capitalism and extractivism in Latin America. The empowerment of women and communities are at the center of this vision, which acknowledges the relevance and power of self organisation within the community and therefore, the so-called informal economy. It promotes equilibrium vs growth and in a nutshell is a call to redefine wellbeing. It promotes a governance model that is not hierarchical or authoritarian, and which is controlled at the community level. Since the beginning of the 21st century in particular, increasing and diverse protest movements opposing the classical understanding of development have gained momentum.

Commons

Commons are shared resources, natural or cultural, which are co-owned and/or co-governed by their users and/or stakeholder communities. A commons requires three components: a resource, an associated community, and the rules the community uses to govern the resource. They are distinct from private/ market and public/state forms of managing resources. Traditional examples of commons include forests, grassland for grazing, fisheries, or water resources, but increasingly we see the term commons used for a broader set of domains, such as knowledge commons, digital commons, urban commons, health commons, cultural commons, etc.


Cooperative

A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned enterprise". It is a type of business model that distributes ways of exchange, profit and value creation. Those who create the value are also the owners of such value. Cooperatives are democratically owned by their members. These types of models limit the power and/or size of companies.

Decolonisation


Decolonisation is about undoing colonialism - for example a colonised country reclaiming its independence from the coloniser revolutionary movements in places like Cuba, Ghana or indigenous peoples reclaiming their land and the right to use their language. Decolonising can also be a mental process of self-liberation - conscious breaking free from beliefs and norms that have been imposed on us by those in power, such as women being weaker than men, black people being more prone to crime than white people, queer people being less healthy or clean than straight people and so on. Decolonisation is about resisting the current power holders and oppressive structures and actively dismantling them. Decolonisation is an ongoing intersectional process that aims to create a more free, inclusive, just and equitable society for all.

Eco-swaraj

The term swaraj, simplistically translated as self-rule, stems from ancient Indian notions and practices of people being involved in decision-making in local assemblies.This is an approach that respects the limits of the Earth and the rights of other species, while pursuing the core values of social justice and equity. It is an evolving framework of governance in which each person and community has access to decision-making forums of relevance to them, and in which the decisions taken are infused with ecological and cultural sensitivity, and socio-economic equity. Its core elements are people power, community at the core and an evolving worldview, not a blueprint set in stone.

EcoFeminism

Feminism is the belief in full social, economic, and political equality for women. EcoFeminism concerns the non-violent and ecological-feminist transformation of societal structures: not power over, or power to dominate, or power to terrorize, but shared power - abolishing power as we know it.which is the the domination of the patriarchy over women, minorities and nature. Ecofeminism is more of a mindset. The current idea of this movement is the reunification of the fights against sexism and the destruction of nature, especially through climate change; both coming from patriarchal systems. This movement is more of a movement of action, with women using it to lead their action based on the justification that “nature, sexism, same fight”.


Informal Economy

The informal economy is the diversified set of economic activities, enterprises, jobs, and workers that are not regulated or protected by the state. The concept originally applied to self-employment in small unregistered enterprises. It has been expanded to include wage employment in unprotected jobs.


Intergenerational rights

Legal mechanisms to guarantee the rights and wellbeing of future generations and ensure intergenerational justice and equity.


Participatory democracy

Participatory democracy is one form of democracy in which individual citizens and communities participate in the formation of policies and laws through consistent engagement. Examples with significant global resonance have emerged from grassroots movements such as “Eco-swaraj” (an ancient Indian practice now known as Radical Ecological Democracy), which puts collectives and communities at the centre of governance and economy and seeks to empower every person to be a part of decision-making. Participatory democracy is present, particularly in cities in the form of participatory budgets, town hall meetings or citizen assemblies. These forms of democracy can elevate the active citizens who can transform cities, putting the right for access to water and sanitation, housing, transport, food, green spaces and nature at the centre and scaling up climate ambition at the regional and national level. It engages with the needs of the community and creates citizen-led ground-up solutions where the commons thrive and “social infrastructure” fills the void created by a lack of physical infrastructure.

Pluralism

Pluralism is the belief that the existence of different types of people and organisational systems within the same society is a good thing. Pluralism assumes that diversity is beneficial to society and that autonomy should be enjoyed by disparate functional or cultural groups within a society, including religious groups, trade unions, professional organizations, and ethnic minorities. Pluralist ‘post-development’ models replace the one-sided Western paradigm of extractivist development and are based on a diversity of ways of living and developing. Pluralism emerges as the antidote to the one-sided development definition and its inherent extrativist model. Pluralism promotes active engagement with diverse ways of living known and practiced in different regions of the planet. It refers to diversity, to differences in ways of recognition, in values and beliefs, and to notions of ‘otherness’. In sum, people should be respected for what they value.

Pluriverse

Pluriverse, or the coexistence of plural meanings and connotations, is centered around the idea of building design practices that are situated in plurality: participatory, socially oriented, and open ended.​​ Pluriverse is a world in which diverse hopes can be sown, multiple opportunities can be cultivated, and a plurality of meaningful lives can be achieved by the richly different and caring people we are. There are many alternatives to the domineering, profiteering, globalizing, disempowering ‘progress’ of the West.

Seventh generation principle of indigenous cultures

is based on an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)* philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. The principle generally refers to decisions being made about our energy, water, and natural resources, to ensure that those decisions are sustainable for seven generations in the future. However, it can also be applied to relationships - every decision should result in sustainable relationships seven generations in the future.

Universal Basic Income (UBI)

A basic income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all citizens on an individual basis, without a means-test or work requirement. Universal Basic income has the following five characteristics:

  1. Periodic: it is paid at regular intervals (for example every month), not as a one-off grant.

  2. Cash payment: it is paid in an appropriate medium of exchange, allowing those who receive it to decide what they spend it on. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use.

  3. Individual: it is paid on an individual basis—and not, for instance, to households.

  4. Universal: it is paid to all, without means test.

  5. Unconditional: it is paid without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness-to-work.

Universal Basic Services

The concept of UBS is the provision of sufficient freely accessible public services, funded by a reasonable tax on incomes, to enable every citizen’s safety, opportunity, and participation. The UBS model extends the notion of a social safety net to include those elements necessary to fulfil a larger role in society. To be included as a UBS, services meet at least one of these conditions:

  • necessary to maintain the individual's or the society's material safety

  • necessary to enable the individual's personal effort to use their skills and abilities to contribute to their society, either for remuneration or not

  • necessary to allow the individual to participate in the political system(s) within which they live

Examples can include: Shelter - homeless shelters, public housing. Sustenance - Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, food banks, soup kitchens. Health and care - public health care (services that support health, and services which provide for care of disabled, elderly and others). Education - public education (education and training). Transport - affordable public transport. Information - municipal wireless network, public libraries. Democracy and legal services - policing, firefighting, legal aid, courts, social services agencies.


​​Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term meaning "humanity". It is sometimes translated as "I am because we are" (also "I am because you are"), or "humanity towards others" (in Zulu, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). In Xhosa, the latter term is used, but is often meant in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”.

Unpaid Work

Unpaid labor is defined as labor that does not receive any direct remuneration. This is a form of 'non-market work' which can fall into one of two categories: 1. unpaid work that is placed within the production boundary of the System of National Accounts (SNA), such as gross domestic product (GDP), and 2. unpaid work that falls outside of the production boundary (non-SNA work), such as domestic labor that occurs inside households for their consumption. Unpaid labor is visible in many forms and isn't limited to activities within a household. Other types of unpaid labor activities include volunteering as a form of charity work and interning as a form of unpaid employment. Housework, care for children and for sick and old people, do-it-yourself jobs and voluntary community work or work in political or societal organizations, subsistence agriculture, help in family businesses, building the family house, maintenance work, transport services etc have one thing in common: they could, at least in theory, be replaced by market goods and paid services. In principle, unpaid work can be done by a third person for money.

Relative Earnings Limit

Relative earnings limit is a limit imposed upon a business, on the amount of compensation an individual is allowed, as a specific multiple of a company's lowest earner; or directly relative to the number of individuals a company employs and the average compensation provided to each individual employee. The former implementation has the advantage of limiting wage gaps. The latter implementation has the advantage of encouraging employment opportunities, as increasing employment would be a way for employers to boost their maximum earnings. A compromise would be to base the limit upon the number of employees of a specific company and the compensation of that company's lowest earner. There has been a resurgence in favour of the importance of an equitable wage ratio. The amount of money paid out to executives has steadily been on the rise. In the US "An April 2013 study by Bloomberg finds that large public company CEOs were paid an average of 204 times the compensation of rank-and-file workers in their industries. By comparison, it is estimated that the average CEO was paid about 20 times the typical worker’s pay in the 1950s, with that multiple rising to 42-to-1 in 1980, and to 120-to-1 in 2000". While not as extreme, similar trends have been observed around the world.

Resources

Enhance fair income and allowance



UBI in countries with large informal sector


Go beyond GDP and challenge the relevance of growth by focussing on wellbeing



Incentivise economic activities that restore wellbeing and nature

Support bottom up pluralism of `post- development´ and post-extractive models


Enhance autonomous, sustainable societies such as the Commons


Some relevant global success stories for inspiration:


Promote civic participation, affiliation, universalism and shared experiences as the antidote to consumerism