Placecast Episode 22: Ecological Citizenship, Stewardship and Local Democracy

I've always sort of struggled with the fact that there is an artificial distinction between international development practice and local practice in this country.

And I think the keeping apart of knowledges and sort of experience from international development into community development at the subnational scale in this country.

I wonder why you think that is historically? Do you have a sense of why they were separate or is it just one of those things?

Yes, I was actually writing about taking a regenerative approach to international development.

And I think that it's a lot to do with political economy.

And I remember I used to work this decentralization project that I told you about.

It was funded by USAID, which no longer exists.

But USAID is the United States Agency for International Development.

And it has indicators.

My background is monitoring and evaluation.

It's very much something I've been looking at as well in terms of how do you measure this kind of stuff that I'm interested in talking about just now.

But essentially, a

lot of the international development funding There's a lot of social good in it, but it's also been heavily driven by the objectives of foreign countries and foreign interests.

So at that time, democracy was a very key thing of USAID.

And so a lot of their indicators, and they're talking about how many mechanisms were being developed as a result of this project, etc, etc.

So I think that the political economy, although it's not obviously all about that, has kind of shaped the particular relationships in a slightly more top-down way.

Although there's a lot of learning, particularly around participation, some of the most advanced ways of kind of doing participation has been from the international development sector.

But I think partly it's also to do with language.

Now we have the internet, it's been able to make these community practices and particularly around the regenerative space like Echoles, which is a European regenerative movement.

And a lot of the people also kind of had some ties to a transition town, but also this kind of wider new economy approach.

So there is a slight parallel infrastructure arising from a more community-based regenerative approach to international development.

And interestingly, some of the work that I've been doing with Middlesex University, we've been looking at integrating finance and biodiversity as part of the IFB program, which is funded by NERC.

It's something that I've kind of noticed and it's been verified through this particular work that we've got setting up a nature positive accelerator in the Niger Delta.

And when I was working in Africa, it wasn't really the kind of younger entrepreneurs didn't have so much the conditions and the voice and the capacity to become like entrepreneurs for social good.

And actually, I've seen quite a few younger African based and I'm sure it's happening in many other global self.