2018 Conference

Individual Paper Presentation

We are currently in an age of social and ecological instability driven by processes of globalization and climate change. Localities experience these changes in locally-specific forms, temporalities, and intensities. The disjunction between local impacts and global processes has driven affected communities to engage in community-level governance to address and insulate themselves from externally-imposed harms. The local is the inevitable unit of coping, but it also offers the possibility of reimagining communal life in ways that can foster ecological and economic sustainability and reinvigorate democracy. Given the diversity of local action, how can we conceptualize this emergent resilient localism? In this paper, I bring together insights from the theory and practice of the transition town movement, collaborative environmental governance, and adaptive management to develop a vision of resilient localism. These movements share commitments to the social and ecological community as the functional unit of action, to deliberative, citizen-led decision-making, and to experimentation as the mode of interaction with ecological systems. Mobilizing the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett, I provide a normative grounding for this vision rooted in a pragmatist understanding of community, deliberation, and experimental action. While these visions taken together offer a model of resilient localism, they, and pragmatism, share a blind spot when it comes to inequalities in the social community. I conclude by arguing that resilient localism must incorporate the insights of environmental justice in order to live up to its democratic potential.