“Local” is a simple-enough idea—something that everyone can relate to. And yet it holds the key to a profound and urgently needed economic transformation with systemic benefits. It’s barely believable at first glance, but localisation is like a magic wand that simultaneously heals our ailing world and our thirsty souls. This is because it restores ecosystems and resonates with our deeper human needs.
Throughout human history, our cultural traditions, societies, personalities, even our bodies have evolved in relationship with community and local ecosystems. Our direct reliance on one another and the natural world around us formed the basis for deep, long-lasting connections with other people and with our place on the planet, which in turn supported healthy, grounded identities. Place-based economies also gave rise to worldviews that engendered respect and care for the living Earth.
But since the advent of colonialism and globalisation, the fabric of local interdependence has been steadily unravelling. We have been made dependent on distant bureaucracies and vast technological systems for everything from our food to our jobs, from the information we receive to our means of social interaction. To our own detriment, we have been distanced from the complex, interdependent web of life that is not only the real economy, but a perpetual source of wonder and fulfilment.
It’s not too late to find our way back home, towards healthy, interconnected local economies. Worldwide, there is a growing movement recognising that a profound shift—away from economic globalisation and towards the local—can put us back in touch with each other, with the Earth and with our deepest human natures. By reclaiming local self-reliance and community interdependence, we can withdraw our economic dependence on a resource-intensive global economy, which, as increasing numbers of people recognise, is serving neither human prosperity nor planetary wellbeing. At the same time, it enables us to create flourishing, life-affirming alternatives from the ground up.
At a fundamental level, localisation is simply about rebuilding human-scale economic structures by shortening the distances between production and consumption, starting with our basic needs. It is only common sense that our daily bread, our veggies, our milk, cheese and other food staples should be sourced regionally, in order to support local producers while ensuring our own access to fresh, quality foods. The importance of shortening distances becomes especially clear when you learn that the current economic system has given rise to the absurd phenomenon of “redundant trade”—whereby countries regularly import and export identical quantities of identical products—to the sole benefit of multinational middlemen. The US, for example, imports and exports a million tonnes of beef per year, while the UK exports about as much milk, bread and eggs as it imports. At the same time, Australia flies macadamia nuts to China to be cracked open before flying them back again, the UK sends prawns to Thailand to be peeled before sending them back again, Bolivia sends nuts to Italy to be packaged, and so on.
Why do governments allow—and in fact promote—such practices? To a large extent, it’s because political leaders are so narrowly focused on abstract economic yardsticks, especially GDP growth, that they have become blind to the real-world implications of their policies. We all want to encourage many kinds of growth: the growth of healthy forests, of human knowledge and understanding, of meaningful livelihoods and resilient communities. But GDP ignores all these unless money changes hands. This means that most kinds of healthy growth are ignored, even while symptoms of societal ill-health—expenditures on cancer treatments, toxic waste cleanups, prisons—are all added to the positive side of the ledger.
In thrall to the belief that GDP growth is the key to prosperity and the solution to every problem, policymakers have promoted globalisation as an engine for GDP growth. The policies supporting globalisation, in turn, are heavily skewed in favour of the biggest players. They provide lavish subsidies for large-scale production and the enormous infrastructure needed for global trade, and largely free multinational businesses and banks from taxation and regulation.
These policies have enabled global corporations to build up unprecedented wealth and influence, to foist a consumer monoculture on societies across the planet, and to push their “free-trade” agenda on governments almost everywhere. “Free trade” agreements may sound quite benign, but they are key instruments for the expansion of corporate control: they effectively exempt multinationals from regulation, while local, regional and national industries are increasingly over-regulated, over-taxed and systematically weakened.
Many free trade agreements go so far as to give multinationals the right to sue governments for decisions that obstruct profit-making potential—an outrageous flouting of the democratic process. And yet, governments regularly sign onto them out of fear of being left behind in the race to attract globally mobile capital.
Today, however, a slew of crises—environmental, economic, social and political—is calling into question the basic tenets of this globalising economic trajectory. Has globalisation really brought about genuine progress? Does consumerism really make us happy? The COVID-19 crisis in particular has revealed the inherent vulnerability of the global economy, and now even the mainstream media is questioning the policies that lead countries to be so dependent on global trade. At long last, there is widespread recognition that globalisation is not an inexorable force of evolution, but an economic choice. And a rather short-sighted one at that.
At the same time, there is a great surge of interest in strengthening connections to the community and the land, which are our real lifelines in times of crisis. People are reaching out to others in mutual support, planting gardens and connecting with local farmers.
But the impetus to localise extends far beyond a reaction to an immediate crisis. For decades, people have been gradually waking up to the fact that smaller-scale, more localised economic relations fundamentally improve their own quality of life, while positively impacting the world around them. This is because human-scale economies:
- support long-term, intergenerational relationships and deep community, which in turn form the cornerstone of psychological security;
- rely on human labour (rather than large-scale, fossil fuel-based, automated systems), thereby creating many more stable, place-based and meaningful jobs;
- retain wealth within local economies (rather than allowing it to be drained away by mobile multinationals), thereby encouraging the proliferation of small businesses and bringing greater prosperity to the entire community (every dollar spent at a local bookstore, for example, will create three times more jobs and three times more tax proceeds to local governments than the same amount spent at a chain);
- facilitate the restoration of economic and political democracy; and
- prioritise the production of a diversity of food products for local needs, rather than massive quantities of standardised commodities for export (when you consider everything from land-clearing to food wastage, from pesticide manufacturing to plastic packaging and long-distance trade, the global food system is responsible for almost 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions).
This last point is crucial. By creating the market conditions that stimulate widespread agricultural diversification, localisation not only transforms the monoculture-based global food system (which is the biggest climate-changer), it also holds the key to actually reversing climate breakdown. While monocultures are reliant on massive inputs—including water, energy and synthetic fertilisers and pesticides—diversified local farms are sensitive to the needs of ecosystems. They recycle nutrients, organic matter and water back into the soil, thereby sequestering carbon, restoring ecosystem processes and enhancing biodiversity. And naturally, localised food economies necessitate virtually none of the energy-intensive refrigeration, plastic packaging, and transport emissions that the global trade of food commodities does.
What’s more, because diversified farms require more human hands on the land (rather than energy-intensive machinery and chemical inputs), they create more jobs. And by empowering farmers to produce a diversity of different products in alignment with local ecological and cultural needs and seasonal variation, local food economies are able to boost productivity and bolster regional food security while simultaneously minimising resource use and actively contributing to the healing of the planet.
These are not just nice theories: they have been demonstrated time and again through on-the-ground initiatives ranging from farmers markets and CSAs to “agri-wilding” projects. Nor are localisation efforts limited to food and farming: they range from local business alliances and community banks to place-based education schemes and neighbourhood mutual support groups—and they are happening in almost every country. Over the course of many decades of sustained collaboration with grassroots localisation movements on four continents, such initiatives have nurtured my faith in human nature, as well as my conviction that ecosystems, as well as individuals, can be healed so much more rapidly than people tend to believe.
I have seen caring human hands turn cracked, bone-dry earth into rich soil capable of feeding entire communities, while simultaneously restoring habitat for wildlife. In projects that involve therapeutic horticulture, animal connection and community gardening, I have seen depression healed, people given purpose in their lives, and delinquent teenagers and prisoners transformed.
But despite its multiple benefits, localisation has received virtually no support from governments. Instead, taxes, subsidies and regulations—key levers for shaping the economy —have all been devoted to promoting the large and global at the expense of the small and local. Rather than blindly promoting global GDP growth, those levers can be used to support genuine growth in the natural world: the real economy based in forests, on farms, and in the sea, thereby enabling a flourishing of biodiversity everywhere. Rather than subsidising a shrinking handful of global monopolies, we can promote a growing multitude of smaller, place-based businesses and industries. Rather than subsidising technology and energy at the expense of human labour and skill, we can grow the number of meaningful jobs.
It's not only policymakers who have been blind. The media has consistently failed to inform the public about the growing number of localisation initiatives springing up all over the world. As a result, local food is often dismissed as an “elitist” fad, while most people simply haven’t heard of the powerful voices campaigning against corporate globalisation and for local food sovereignty (such as La Via Campesina—the biggest social movement in the world, representing over 200 million small farmers worldwide).
My organisation Local Futures and I find ourselves in the privileged position of being able to report that there are millions of people around the world actively putting their time, energy and/or money into nurturing or recreating localised economies. People are walking out of stressful, meaningless corporate jobs in urban centres, and choosing instead to lead land-based lives in community. Young farmers movements are emerging from Australia to Japan, from the UK to India, and, almost every week, we come across a new localisation project making waves somewhere on the planet—from rural Philippines to the middle of Boston or Beijing.
In the past few years, and particularly in the past few months, the idea of localisation has caught on like never before. International figures in environmental and social justice movements are expressly using the term, while small-c conservatives wax lyrical about the value of small farmers, small shops and circular economies. We are delighted that almost everyone we talk to is eager to help get the word out about this systemic shift in direction in whatever way they can.
Awareness is trickling upwards too, into the mainstream media and academia. A growing number of municipal governments are even passing legislation in favour of local economies—thereby helping to re-balance the economic playing field. Finally, a movement that has been swimming upstream for generations is beginning to gain the widespread recognition and support that it needs in order to truly transform the system.
