English In this blog, LWA members Ama Crowe and Alice Taherzadeh write about the ‘Resisting, Learning, Growing’ group that was brought together last autumn to explore social movement learning and agroecology. They have so far completed a course on Living Systems for effective and sustainable organising, and here is some of their learning so far.
The movement for agroecology and food sovereignty has a powerful vision. We’re not just about producing food in ways that don’t mess up the planet, or ensuring everyone can eat well. We’re fighting for and bringing into being food systems that are based on respect for each other and all of life, that activate our agency, celebrate our interconnectedness, and release our communal abundance. We envision a fundamental transformation in the power relations in our food system. Rooted in the peasant and indigenous social movements in Latin America, the now global movement for agroecology encompasses all aspects of being human on this earth.
Right now, that feels somewhat like a distant dream. An ambition hanging out somewhere near the clouds, while on the ground we’re still having to play by the rules of capitalism. Despite our beautiful values and vision, the reality involves working really hard to make a fairly meagre living and support tiny fragments of ecosystems, while generally failing to meet the desperate food crisis of folk in poverty or to threaten the power of corporations to profit from our basic needs. Some rewards are real and immediate: the golden sunrise accompanied by audacious birdsong, the warm words from someone in the community that remind you that this work is essential service, the sense that it may be small but we are making the world we want to live in – day by day. But what about the big vision? The real transformation that we’re all desperate for. We’re not really content with nice bits around the edges. We’ve heard it for years don’t get angry, get organised etc., and we’ve been trying. We’ve been making progress in many ways – unionising, creating infrastructure for an agroecological food system, challenging the neoliberal approach to food in market towns and Westminster lobbies – but we’re pretty far away from winning right now.
There are many explanations for this, but the rest of this article will explore the idea that too often we are organising in ways we’ve inherited from the system we’re trying to transform. We rely on practices that are so normal they go unnoticed, but constantly restrict our capacity to become a strong force and bring our vision to life.
In the autumn of 2020, groups from across the agroecology/food sovereignty movement in the UK (amongst dozens of other groups working for social and ecological justice) attended a course run by Navigate Collective to support effective and sustainable organising. Paul Kahawatte and Jana Light from Navigate shared their commitment to developing Living Systems as a critical component in making groups and movements powerful enough to win. At the core, their approach emphasised intentionally co-creating systems that align with the groups purpose and values, as a much needed alternative to the default patterns and power dynamics of our dominant culture. Rather than static structures or policies, they emphasised living systems that were based on continued agreement and engagement, systems that are able to constantly evolve to empower and meet the needs of people involved.
If we attend to how as groups, organisations, as a movement, we distribute resources (resource flow), respond to conflict (conflict engagement), share information (information flow), make decisions (decision-making), support and care for each other (care, support, and connection), and incorporate feedback (feedback), we can better mobilise our collective power. These six systems are just one way of cutting the cake, but it’s a way that is based on a wealth of experience. Paul and Jana’s developed the course drawing on principles from multiple processes and systemic approaches including: Restorative Circles and the Dialogical Systems work of Dominic Barter, the organisational systems model of Miki Kashtan, Self-Organising Systems (Sociocracy and Holacracy), Convergent Facilitation, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and the work of Frederic Laloux and others on Reinventing Organisations.
Systems are everywhere and shape how we act, how we work with others, and what we can achieve. If we are not aware of those systems, if they remain implicit and hidden, then we risk not just being ineffectual but also reproducing oppressions and hierarchies. We have to ask ourselves, if there is no clear system of decision-making, for instance, then who is it who has the most recourse to making decisions? It is the person who is most charismatic? Has the most social connections? Speaks the loudest? Is free from childcare or financial worries? If we don’t have explicit systems for distributing information and resources then what is the impact of information and resources being held by just a few people? And what if those people already have many roles and responsibilities or get burnt out? How then can others feel empowered to act and make change? How do we decide who gets access to information and resources? Is it fair? Is it transparent? Or looking at our systems of care, how do we ensure that everyone is cared for and supported within our projects and organisations? Are there clear support mechanisms for people to access? Who is taking on the labour of the care and support? How do we support new members, new interested landworkers and activists to connect to others and establish networks and a sense of belonging?
These are a few examples of the kinds of questions that we could be asking ourselves and each other. The course provided a framework to facilitate the shift from wanting a future which is more sustainable and just, thorough to beginning to enact it. One of the systems is feedback: we won’t get everything right straight away, we’re all steeped in the oppressions we want to transform, but with a functioning feedback system we can keep integrating information and upgrading our systems. Often the inadequacies of the systems we use show up as conflict in our groups. Many of us will have experienced how conflict limits us – without support and holding conflict often means the loss of a lot of energy and willingness to participate creatively. Developing a system for responding to division before we’re deep in it can strengthen us and make us infinitely more effective. If we’re able to respond to conflict well, we can probably do anything. It will be an ongoing process to organise in ways that are more clearly based on our values and attuned to the various injustices and inequalities present in everyday life. The model provided by Navigate allows a holding for this work, which otherwise can so easily slip down the agenda.
The movement of agroecology and food sovereignty may be relatively young in the UK but it is growing rapidly and so are its systems of organising at all levels. The Landworkers’ Alliance has massively expanded its capacity by taking on more staff and developing a system of organising which enables regional and sectoral branches and internal groups to work both more autonomously and collaboratively. Other new groups and organisations are springing up and also paying attention to how they organise to be effective and just. As we grow as a movement, it becomes more critical that our systems evolve to respond to the needs of all those involved and enable us to use our capacity effectively in addressing the multiple crises we face. This involves not just considering dynamics and processes within our farms, projects, and organisations but also thinking about how we coordinate at a movement-level to effect change.
This is the proposal of the Resisting, Learning, Growing (RLG) action learning group. We are a group of activist-landworkers and food system activists who took the Navigate training and are now meeting regularly to apply our learning to the agroecology movement. The group forms part of the research project ‘Resisting, Learning, Growing: Investigating the Role of Place-Based Social Movement Learning in Scaling UK Agroecology’. We are interested in sharing our learning from the training and, through connecting it with the diverse range of experiences in the movement, strengthen an analysis of how the agroecology movement organises and what we need to do to be a truly transformative force. We want to do this in three ways:
- We invite others to join our action learning group. We meet every other Monday evening currently but will soon shift to monthly as the growing season gets busier.
- We are making a series of podcasts on the different systems of organising and would love to hear from landworkers, activists, and organisations that have either good examples of systems to share or challenges they want to discuss.
- We will write more blog posts to document this process and share different case studies that might be useful for others.
To join the group or suggest a good example of a system to share/challenge to discuss, please contact taherzadeha@cardiff.ac.uk
