No abstract

No abstract

After the financial crisis in 2008 and amid growing concerns about climate change, interest in systemic alternatives to neoliberal capitalism is growing. This cultural shift helps explain the enthusiasm from political elites, media, and academics that greeted the launch of Evergreen Co-operative Corporation in 2009. Based in Cleveland Ohio, Evergreen is a network of worker-owned co-operatives with scalability and replicability woven into its design. But how warranted is the broad-based enthusiasm around Evergreen? Is this a model that can be replicated across North America as its founders suggest? Based on site visits and stakeholder interviews, we argue that there are important limits on desires to reproduce the "Cleveland Model." However, its ambitions for scalability and replicability position it to contribute to the important project of movement building that can facilitate the policy change needed to scale up the co-operative alternative.

We examine two recent cases of relative Left success -the Battle of Seattle and OccupyWall Street -and argue that in each case an effective dynamism between radical and reform wings drove gains. This analysis is not meant to deny political difference and hawk false unity. Instead we want to challenge the luxury of mutual dismissal with the actually existing benefits of movement dynamism. By dynamism we mean contributions arising from different activist wings and productively interacting to increase overall movement power. Our ultimate claim is that the North American Left will yield greater success by becoming more self-conscious about the concrete benefits of movement dynamism. 6 See Herbert Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954-1970 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. While influenced by Political Process Theory, primarily the work of Doug McAdam, Haines' sustained accounting of radical contributions to larger social change processes distinguishes his work in the field. This said Haines is primarily interested in how radicals affect the success or failure of more moderate groups. In this regard he shares an ultimate focus on reform efforts with political process theorists. 7

Throughout human history, Indigenous and local communities have stewarded nature. In the present article, we revisit the ancestral principle of reciprocity between people and nature and consider it as a conceptual intervention to the current notion of ecosystem services commonly used to inform sustainability transformation. We propose the concept of reciprocal contributions to encompass actions, interactions, and experiences between people and other components of nature that result in positive contributions and feedback loops that accrue to both, directly or indirectly, across different dimensions and levels. We identify reciprocal contributions and showcase examples that denote the importance of reciprocity for our ecological legacy and its relevance for biocultural continuity. We suggest that the concept of reciprocal contribution can support transformation pathways by resituating people as active components of nature and restructuring institutions so that ethical principles and practices from Indigenous and local communities can redirect policy approaches and interventions worldwide.