Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements

Yates, Luke

doi:10.1177/0032321720936046

Cited by 60 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…We expect that the 3D framework will be relevant to a wide variety of other networks and social movements with transformative ambitions and prefigurative approaches that seek to model alternatives to dominant institutions (Monticelli, 2018; Törnberg, 2021; Yates, 2021). For example, these might include networks promoting post-growth, circular or wellbeing economies (Felber, 2019; Longhurst et al, 2016; Raworth, 2017), regenerative agriculture (Rossi, 2017), basic income (Backhaus & Pel, 2017; Bauler, Pel, & Backhaus, 2017) or life-serving knowledge systems (Fazey et al, 2020), to name but a few.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

2022

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Non-technical summary A wide variety of social innovations exist today that offer urgently needed pathways for transforming societal systems into more just, sustainable and regenerative ways of organising human existence on this planet. However, a more systematic and practically useful understanding is needed of how individuals and organisations can strengthen the transformative capacity of people working on connecting, spreading, maturing and structurally embedding these innovations. This study presents an updated conceptual framework of network leadership roles and practices, and describes how these can contribute to more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovations. Technical summary This study tests and refines a conceptual framework, describing the roles and practices of network leadership that can support the development of transformative capacities, in the context of social innovation networks. Such capacities include spreading social innovations in wider society, embedding them in policy and public discourse, and generating continuity and further development of social innovation activities. We studied five cases of transnational social innovation networks involving community-led and student-led sustainability initiatives. Practitioners in these networks were asked to rate and comment on the perceived recognisability and importance of network leadership roles and practices, as well as challenges, which we articulated in a previous study and further developed in the current study through participant observation and document analyses. This resulted in a revision of the roles and practices, the identification of relations between roles and a better understanding of how they can contribute to transformative capacity development. The interviews also helped to clarify the practical usefulness of the framework, suggesting possible applications for evaluating, prioritising and aligning roles performed by various individuals and organisations. The findings are relevant for better understanding and guiding distributed agency in transformative social innovation networks. Social media summary Roles and practices for network leadership to enable more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

2022

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“…Social movement studies examine the external agency of more marginalized actors by focusing on the everyday actions of collectives involved in the creation of spaces—often found at the interstices of mainstream society—where new forms of social (and ecological) relations can be experimented with in hopes of creating a new world; what has been called prefigurative politics (Gibson-Graham 2006 , 2008 ; Leach 2013 ; Yates 2015 ). The literature on prefigurative politics has put considerable weight on discussing the effectiveness of these experiments for broader social change, emphasizing the tensions and paradoxes involved when navigating efforts to create new ways of being and doing (without radical revolutionary action) while also existing within a mainstream capitalistic system that still structure most of people’s lives (Monticelli 2018 ; Yates 2020 ; Törnberg 2021 ). While less studied, prefigurative politics also touch upon the interplay between internal and external agency since most of these struggles relate to the attempts of individuals to recreate new values, identities and beliefs—how they make sense of the world around them—usually through engagement in collective action (Trott 2016 ).…”

Section: Crises Agency and Sustainability Transformationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crisis, transformation, and agency: Why are people going back-to-the-land in Greece?

Benessaiah

Eakin

2021

Sustain Sci

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Transformations are fundamentally about agency: human intention, motivation, and power to influence and to resist. Most studies focus on deliberate system-level transformations, usually guided by a set of influential actors. However, system-level transformations may also occur as the result of the cascading effects of multiple individual transformations in response or in anticipation to various crises. Little is known about how crises foster these individual transformations, and how these may relate to different types of system-level change. This article fills this gap by looking at how crisis fosters two different types of agencies—internal and external—and how these link to individual transformations in the case of Greece’s back-to-the-land movement whereby urbanites sought to reconnect with land-based livelihoods during the economic crisis (2008 onwards). The article draws on the qualitative analysis of 76 interviews of back-to-the-landers to further understand why people are going back-to-the-land (their motivations), how these relate to the concept of agency and individual transformation, and what implications might there be for system-level social-ecological transformations. This article makes three key points. First, crises create different opportunity contexts that may lead to rapid changes in what is valued in the broader social discourse. While social values and discourses are usually considered to be “deep levers” and slow to change, we found that they can rapidly shift in times of crises, challenging notions of the role of fast vs. slow variables in system transformations. Second, agency is needed to respond to crises but is also further catalyzed and enhanced through crisis; activating one’s internal agency leads to personal transformations as well as collective transformations (linked to external agency), which are mutually co-constitutive. And third, systemic-level transformation emerges through multiple pathways including through the aggregation of multiple individual transformations that may lead to emergent system-level changes. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-021-01043-5.

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“…The COVID-19 pandemic exposed further need to reorient economies from growth demands to human welfare and wellbeing, as argued by ecological and degrowth economic scholars. While visions of a degrowth society seem far off, more scholars are turning their attention to the role of prefigurative politics for strengthening the possibility of change ( Jeffrey and Dyson 2020 ; Yates 2020 ; Kish 2019 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do responses to the COVID-19 pandemic anticipate a long-lasting shift towards peer-to-peer production or degrowth?

Dartnell

Kish

2021

Sustainable Production and Consumption

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The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously triggered a sudden, substantial increase in demand for items such as personal protection equipment and hospital ventilators whilst also disrupting the means of mass-production and international transport in established supply chains. Furthermore, under stay-at-home orders and with bricks-and-mortar retailers closed, consumers were also forced to adapt. Thus the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to study shifts in behaviour during disruption to industrialised manufacturing and economic contraction, in order to understand the role peer-to-peer production may play in a transition to long-term sustainability of production and consumption, or degrowth. Here, we analyse publicly-available datasets on internet search traffic and corporation financial returns to track the shifts in public interest and consumer behaviour over 2019 – 2020. We find a jump in interest in home-making and small-scale production at the beginning of the pandemic, as well as a substantial and sustained shift in consumer preference for peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms relative to more-established online vendors. In particular we present two case studies – the home-made facemasks supplied through Etsy, and the decentralised efforts of the 3D printer community – to assess the effectiveness of their responses to the pandemic. These patterns of behaviour are related to new modes of production in line with ecological economics and as such add capacity to a broader prefiguration of degrowth. We suggest an adoption of a new “fourth wave” of DIY culture defined by enhanced resilience and degrowth to continue to add capacity to a prefigurative politic of degrowth.

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Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements

Cited by 60 publications

References 35 publications

Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

Crisis, transformation, and agency: Why are people going back-to-the-land in Greece?

Do responses to the COVID-19 pandemic anticipate a long-lasting shift towards peer-to-peer production or degrowth?

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