Practical Optimism
December 29, 2011
The New Economics Institute is launching two projects in 2012.
The first is “Strategies for a New Economy"—a conference at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, June 8-10, 2012, with eighty workshops and special guest plenary speakers. The Strategy Themes represent the positive spirit of the conference and the optimism that a new kind of economy, reflecting our highest aspirations as a people, is possible.
1. Banking and Financing a New Economy: Scale, Criteria, Innovation
2. Measuring Well-Being: Alternative Indicators of Wealth and Progress
3. Messaging the New Economy: Education, Media, Public Campaigns
4. Rebuilding Local Economies: Engines for Resilience
5. Reimagining Ownership and Work: Coops, Stakeholders, Corporate Structure
6. Responsive Government for a New Economy: Politics as if People and Planet Mattered
7. Sharing the Commons: Identifying, Allocating, Restoring
8. Sustainable Production and Consumption: Simplicity, Sufficiency, Abundance
9. Transforming Money: Structuring, Issuing and Valuing New Mediums of Exchange
10. Visioning and Modeling the New Economy: Shared Prosperity within Planetary Limits
Each theme will have its own website with resource material reflecting some of the most innovative new thinking and experimentation in the field. Conference registration opens the last week of January. Conference workshops will be videoed and added to the web pages to further develop what will be a permanent resource of videos, papers, projects, and organizational links representing the best strategies for a new economy.
Related to this is the Global Transition Initiative—a project to organize civil society engagement in shaping and promoting a new economics agenda at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development planned for Rio, Brazil, at the end of June.
http://globaltransition2012.org/
Working in partnership with Stakeholder Forum and new economics foundation in London, the New Economics Institute's role will be to highlight actual projects on the ground that are pointing the way to a new economics, building momentum and possibility. The vehicle for this will be an interactive webmap now under construction. The map will be searchable by location, time line, type of project and will provide background material on how these projects connect and together form the building blocks of a new economy. New Economics Institute staff will populate the map with North American examples, but will give access to partner groups in other parts of the world to add projects from their regions. The goal is to have 2012 projects mapped by the Rio conference.
Ambitious and involving a range of organizations and initiatives, this project is gaining a lot of excitement. The public launch will be at a New York City media event in March. The map will show visually how citizens are not waiting for governments to regulate change in the economic system. The need is urgent and solutions are being created region by region to shape a more just and sustainable economy. A movement is building, transition is inevitable.
