Bottom-up social development.*

# 2097

Asking for bottom-up rather than top-down social development strategies for coping with climate change and related problems misses two important issues.

Timing

Numbers

Successful grassroots projects create new relationships and commitments, but holding on to these makes the glue holding society together stronger, whereas what we need is some looseness so things, institutions, and ways of living, can reorganize. Things may have to fall apart in cascading failures before anything new can emerge. So First fall apart, THEN reorganize at all levels including grassroots.

Grassroots efforts can lead to new initiatives on food, energy, and housing, but cutting fossil fuel use (rapidly enough) is a system issue that requires coordinated actions at the global level. Grassroots efforts by their nature and advantage are incommensurate across projects.  But incoherence hurts system solutions.

But for common sense it might be that the global cannot emerge and people are on their own to cope. In that case, abandoning hope for systemic solutions, and going all out at the local level should be encouraged, and emerging legal and social blockages to grassroots (lack of land reform for example) efforts removed. This will be more of a political process than a policy move requiring actions, voting, coups, and mass mobilizations.

*https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/new-systemic-bottom-up-development-model-social-enterprises-by-andrew-sheng-and-xiao-geng-2023-02?barrier=accesspaylog