 I'm going to start with a couple of anecdotal examples and a warning that I shifted my title. I'll show you the change in a minute, but let me just tell you these anecdotes first up to set the context for why I changed my title. In 2009, a seasoned Greenpeace campaigner from Sydney left behind 14 years of campaigning and advocacy to found a solar energy start-up company. Once he'd set it up, he linked the business to major environmental advocacy groups and paid them $500 for each new customer they referred. This raised substantial sums for these NGOs at the same time as expanding his new company. He even created a dual website with the company name suffixed by .com for the business side and .org for the advocacy NGO side. Around the same time, a well-known Sydney designer who had founded a successful start-up design company founded another website with the suffix .do, www.good.do providing online resources for supporting activists and campaigners and also set up a partnership with a number of Sydney local councils called the Compost Revolution and this partnership combines food recycling education, both online and community-based government subsidies of infrastructure in compost bins and worm farm equipment and contracting out arrangements to private providers. So the point of these two examples is that they have in common novel blends of both social activism and social enterprise. And in this paper, I am first of all to persuade you that hybrid initiatives drawing on elements of both social activism and social enterprise are increasingly important and interesting channels for responding to the challenge of climate change. They're attracting both popular and scholarly commentary that reflects this hybridity. I'll refer briefly to some literature but we see a bifurcation between literature from social movements addressing these topics and literature from management and business. But so far, no one's paid all that much attention to the role and salience of law in these initiatives and projects. The second aim of my paper is to draw attention to a constructive tension between different images of the role of law in relation to such initiatives and to sketch out the early outlines of a productive way forward to research this. So I want to say that this paper is part of a larger project exploring the short version of it is social legal support structures for organisations responding to climate change and it's the subject of my future fellowship which I recently arrived here to start. And this is a very early stage reflective think piece. And in the spirit of that, I have already shifted the title from now to this. So I sent you all an abstract saying responding to climate change at the intersection of social activism and social enterprise. And I'm now calling this law and the growth of grassroots innovation between social activism and social enterprise. And that signals two things. First of all, I'm no longer quite so confident of this precise intersection of the two. I think I spoke in the abstract about outlining the typologies of these hybrid initiatives the dimensions that link them. And I've really had some challenges doing that and I think that's been an interesting learning exercise that teaches me exactly what is actually exciting about them and I hope I'll be able to convey that. So we have a more fuzzy zone between social enterprise and social activism rather than the precise intersection. And I've also taken out the phrase responding to climate change and again you'll see why part of what I'm talking about and one of the sort of primary set of examples of these hybrid initiatives that I think are an important piece of the puzzle of responding to climate change nonetheless take us outside of a green wrapper. They're not wrapped in green. And again I think this is exciting and important but it presents some real challenges for defining the scope of my research to come in viable ways and I'm still grappling with those. So for all of those reasons having changed the title I've now decided after this to just speak directly to you and not use slides although one or two titles I might bring up from other people that are useful in part for delineating what I'm interested in but they don't entirely work so I hope that I'll be sort of unfolding a narrative rather than a set of headings in what comes. So there's two main portions. I'll spend about half of the time on describing the kinds of initiatives and projects that I'm interested in and discussing some of the challenges I've had in analysing their dimensions as I said and summarising the existing literature which as I say bifurcates the long activism and enterprise and then I'll turn to the question of how law can be brought into the picture and start with a dichotomous presentation of two very different angles on the role of law and then complicate that dichotomy by stressing ambiguities in each of the literatures which tends to prioritise one role and that ambiguity I'm arguing constructs a constitutive relationship between the contrasting images of law which I think is very fertile for the research agenda taking it forward and I'm just going to point to three threads of contested framing around law in relation to these hybrid initiatives around the issues of profit, harm and the rule of law so that's in the second section and then I'll just conclude by really just pointing very briefly to what I plan to do empirically and gesture towards the kinds of theoretical resources I plan to draw upon So the first main half is about the zone between social activism and social enterprise As I mentioned in the abstract which I sent around there's a real growing interest in environmentally responsive social enterprise and a reignited focus on social movements in relation to climate change in different literatures but they do tend to occur as very different strands of scholarship The social enterprise studies typically relate law to business and management although corporate social responsibility strands of research take that in a slightly different direction Social movement literature grows out of political mobilisation research and it's much more interested in politically motivated social change but as I say I think there are activities taking place in increasingly hybrid sites and this is part of what the Green Alliance in the UK about five years ago signalled they had a paper called The New Green Politics and they argued that there were three shifts in green politics occurring which were important and I think all three of these shifts are really crucial to this hybrid zone between social enterprise and social activism The first shift is that advocacy focused on government by those responding to environmental change politics is increasingly supplemented or even displaced by social mobilisation focused on communities The second aspect of the New Green Politics is that an emphasis on social goals is supplementing the narrow focus on environmental goals and the third is that a largely instrumental preoccupation with institutional design is increasingly supplemented by an insistence on importance of values and identities and I'll come back to all three of those as I speak but essentially I think that the developments in this hybrid zone illustrate these shifts and we see this from a number of angles and just articulate what that zone might be through a sense of definitions and then through some actual copied examples and then explains the difficulties I had with conceptualising the dimensions of that intersection So just in terms of broad language we can see for example that there's a literature in something called Transitions Management which talks about community-based grassroots innovation and that is a phrase I think that captures that kind of hybrid activity Innovation is typically studied in the sense of scaling up niche activity to mainstream markets but the community-based activism and the grassroots aspect of it signal that there's a different kind of texture to the activities that are going on Now when we get to discussions of social enterprise there's a pretty standard definition of social enterprise that circulates amongst government policy and there is a huge and growing literature on social enterprise but the emphasis here is on the blend of trading and social and environmental mission Now I didn't want to go into a great deal of detail on definitions because I think in the abstract it's not going to take us too far Let me just read out two composite definitions of social enterprise and social activism that might be useful to focus on momentarily The social enterprise typically defined as organisations with trade to fulfil their mission and reinvest the majority of their surplus or profit in fulfilment of an environmental or social purpose Now we might say by contrast that social activists organise collective political mobilisation also to fulfil an environmental or social purpose but I would add usually on behalf of a group or cause that is neglected or disadvantaged by existing power relations Now if we define them in contrast like that there are a couple of contrasts One is obviously the emphasis on trading or the use of a business model in enterprise and not in activism And a second contrast is the focus on shifting existing power relations in activism and less of an emphasis on that social enterprise which leads I think to a third implicit contrast which isn't explicit and I think it's challenged by the initiatives that I'm interested in studying which is the idea that activism is confrontational whereas enterprise activities however much they're trying to start a new if you like open up a new market or nonetheless working broadly speaking with the grain of existing political and especially economic arrangements I think that in the initiatives, the hybrid initiatives in this zone between activism and enterprise that I'm interested in that all of these contrasts are challenged although the centrality of the profit model which is a large aspect of sort of detailed literature on social enterprise definitions how much should redistribution of profit or surplus actually should there be actual quantitative limits on defining what constitutes a social enterprise and so on this is what I don't want to go down the path too far into that but that contestation around the centrality of the role of profit does not dissolve in this hybrid zone but the contrast between political and economic means does dissolve and this issue of one being confrontational and the other working with the grain of existing status quo also dissolves and we'll see how that happens with some specific examples I want now actually to just in a sense give a list of the kinds of initiatives that I think exist in the hybrid zone so that you know roughly more concretely what I'm actually talking about a couple of ways this could be done one is to do it sectrally and just to describe sectoral responses that mix elements of activism and enterprise and the other is to point to some cross cutting developments which you might organise more along the ideas of production and consumption and even by place so let me explain what I mean if we looked at sectors the kinds of initiatives that I view as central to this exploration could exist in transport and here an example might be car share schemes I'll come back to car sharing as a thread as I can continue to talk it might be in the area of housing for example eco housing or a scheme called green strata which is attempting to assist people living in strata buildings to live in a greener way could be in the areas of food where we look at community gardens and communities supported agriculture box schemes that food connect could be in the area of energy which could include distributed solar and wind generation or the various wind cooperative renewable energy projects that are increasingly growing in Australia as elsewhere but if we move away from a sectoral sense of what these kinds of initiatives might be there are cross cutting developments in the areas of consumption production and place based localism if you like but I think capture this spirit of combining aspects of activism and enterprise as well so in consumption there's this now increasingly referred to as collaborative consumption set of activities largely using the internet and the web as a platform for allowing people to essentially share access to resources and this occurs across a range of areas barter, reuse, working space, land, food, lending tools even borrowing money so now we start to see how this is immediately pushing beyond what might look obviously green but I'll come back to that in a second if we look not at consumption but at production in many ways perhaps the original blend of activism and enterprise has to do with the unions who were always focused on collective representation of workers obviously in one sense relating to jobs and enterprise but in another to create a political identity that would shift the status quo of power relations between labour and capital and there's initiatives like the earth worker cooperative which is a recent initiative trying to get off the ground in Victoria creating a cooperative entity to foster green jobs and then there are also physical communities that host a range of productive activities on site which are organised often on a quasi market basis so there's a place called South Melbourne Commons which is set up by Friends of the Earth in Melbourne again to provide a range of services on site with the umbrella vision of creating a more sustainable way of life even though not each of the specific activities within the building might necessarily be classified as green and then even more broadly we have locality based initiatives like transition towns and transition neighbourhoods that generate a range of novel practices in different areas of everyday life but all gathered under the banner of responding to the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change so as you can see this is an enormously broad array of activities but let me just give you an example of if you organise them on a spectrum from social activism to social enterprise and we went back to car sharing which I mentioned at the start I would suggest that you could put them along an array which might look idiosyncratic and I will be really interested in your response to whether this is a helpful way to make sense of a range of activities but if you think about in a sense the practice of automobility rather than transport as a sector the most extreme end of the social activism spectrum in many ways something like the road building protests which in the UK were always a very central aspect of green radical environmentalism I think possibly less so here but we then move across to something like NGO lobbying for public transport which is still in the zone of activism but not as contested or confrontational as the first example and then peer to peer car sharing schemes which are almost community based grassroots innovation where you can share cars on web based platforms between ordinary individuals within your neighbourhood and then again moving across to the more enterprise end of the spectrum a car sharing social enterprise or a car sharing for profit enterprise and there are interesting debates about what's the actual difference on the ground between those two especially where they have the same legal form and then across to something like a multinational car rental company with a corporate social responsibility policy that might be all the way across to the spectrum of social enterprise so my argument is that viewing things on the spectrum between activism and enterprise actually will lead us in interesting ways into discussions about the role of law but I just want to make two points before I move to that section about the spectrum and first is this point that I've already mentioned in passing that they're pushing beyond the boundaries of what might be called the green wrapper the second point is also that it's actually often difficult to classify them in sectoral terms so it would be very odd in some ways to look at road building protests as part of the policy sector of transport but that is in the sense what precisely the spectrum is aiming at doing is linking up different types of activities from a fresh perspective I think these two aspects are related and the issue of activities that don't look green initially but that nonetheless might be very important for responding to climate change is really I think because especially the elements that are more enterprise based but even the activism side of things in some ways it's about new models of consumption, production and exchange rather than about greening the economy using the current model of consumption, production and exchange and where you look at the enterprise form of those activities people often talk about business models now in the language of activism they're less likely to talk about a new business model although I will come back to that because that exists too but the point is that precisely by going beyond the green wrapper they challenge our sense of how we divide the economy into professional policy sectors that each of specialized groups focus on and aim to influence the shape of and they really, I think a separate paper could be written about the ways in which an economic model of access to services and goods rather than ownership could significantly change resource use but car sharing just keep going with this thread claims that it takes 10 to 15 cars of the street for each car provided and some car sharing companies do focus very strongly on the environmental benefits of their services but many do not and I think that some of what is going on in moving beyond the green wrapper if you like is a systemic change in the structure of consumption, production and exchange but in many ways is underpinned by at least two of those three shifts in the new green politics I mentioned the fact that environmental goals are now widened to include social goals first and the change from a focus on state institutions to more of a focus on business and civil society secondly and there's a recent argument made in the so-called blogosphere that there's a natural coalition between the green economy and the sharing economy and such a joining particularly if there's a strong focus on including disadvantaged and poorer communities will really be the only way that the green economy could become a mass movement and really secure the kind of take up needed to shift everyday practices enough to respond properly to climate change now that's my second point in a sense about the spectrum is that when I tried to grapple with the challenges of what were the dimensions of the spectrum in a more conceptual way and I was originally working with tables which I would have hoped to have up on the PowerPoint for you but it just they didn't work I tried to work with dichotomies between states and markets between public and private, between individual and collective and between protest and compliance as I mentioned earlier but there was too much of a structural shift going on and I think that that organisation of the change along those lines doesn't work in a neat way and I still don't know what the answer to the dimensions of it is in precise terms except to say first of all that the degree to which arranging organisations activities around profit still becomes very important and I'll come back to that in talking about law and secondly that actually what this is about is about building alternative systems of provision which then engage people in altered everyday practices and it's the everyday practices of living within the target of change and if there is an attempt to open up a new market or change a particular policy or a state law it's incidental to the deeper aim of if you like a kind of almost cultural shift in changing everyday practices and I think part of that idea that there's a cultural shift is what's behind the proliferation of umbrella labels for some of these initiatives such as collaborative consumption or a sharing economy which I'll come back to when I'm talking about the role of law in relation to this and we see those umbrella labels popping up in a way that indicates that there is a sort of identity shift going on underneath these structural changes so I did mention that there is an existing literature on these initiatives I don't want to spend too much time on that but because my main point about that really is just that almost none of it addresses the role of law I'm going to pull on to an article in a book which looked very directly at the role of law in a minute but other than that we see a burgeoning literature especially in human geography really about the hybrid zone there is otherwise quite a bifurcated literature where social enterprise has become a large focus of management studies and this transition management literature I mentioned earlier which is a sort of interdisciplinary sustainability literature but it often focuses on the governance of economic processes and the way in which it can mainstream niche green activities into more mass practices if you like the political scientists are somewhat interested and they have typically emphasised the political activism side of things or the emergent collective identities embodied in such initiatives but then tend not to address the enterprise and economic governance side of things human geographers are somewhat more active and seem to be especially interested in the cross cutting initiatives like transition towns but even within human geography you do see people either taking a social movements approach or a transitions management approach which is more focused on niche enterprises scaling up so again you get this kind of bifurcation between different angles that I think generally is reflected in the literature in this area and I want to go into the role of law by taking that bifurcation as a starting point if you like and then working towards the ambiguities I spoke of earlier so I'm turning now to what at a very general level initially might be some conceptualisation of the role of law in relation to these hybrid initiatives the blend elements of activism and enterprise and after articulating that at a general level I'm going to give you some examples of how some of these initiatives have actually been bumping up against specific legal roadblocks just to indicate some of the ways in which the contested framing of law actually is happening on the ground as a starting point for how I might research this so I'm going to make a very schematic proposal about the role of law is to try and think what would be its role in this hybrid zone to start with what the role of law might look like from the ends of the spectrum between social movement and social enterprise and to suggest that law appears in two very different guises from those two perspectives or focal senses if you like now this is obviously somewhat simplified but I think it's a useful starting point and I'll use one example publication for each focal sense just to illustrate what I mean from the perspective of social movements law is often the direct target of social change and its content embodies collective social identity so negatively laws that have viewed as harming society or embodying injustice are the target of change or positively new laws are promoted but they're promoted because they would express a better collective sense of what society wants to achieve but from both angles the focal image of law is one of command, prohibition or a directive that aims to prevent or compensate harm it's a kind of regulatory image of law if you like and in literature on the law of social movements important test cases and strategic class action litigation are central to the inquiry and courts appear as a forum for challenge and protest against existing legal situations so it's a focal image of law that's connected using the trilogy of Albert Hirschman's voice and loyalty this is law's voice if you like and I think there's a recent article in Law & Society review which beautifully illustrates that Lisa Van Hala has explored the legal opportunity structures for the UK environmental movement and her database consists of judicial review actions against the state and her interest is when and why NGOs turn to litigation and courts and the types of laws that she looks at include state authorisations for genetically modified crops or the licensing of nuclear waste sites or government failure to implement energy conservation legislation just to give a few examples that illustrate this regulatory focal image of law as an expression in one sense of voice that I think is how law appears from the perspective of social movements from the perspective of social enterprise by contrast law is an indirect enabler of exchange relations more facilitated than regulatory and even where it is regulatory it's focused on either constructing a framework of incentives for economic activity or on constituting the skeleton of legal personality as a precondition for an organisation going on to choose its activities and trade in the market now there isn't much of a literature on law and social enterprise as such but if there is it focuses on the different legal models for business entities so you get discussions of comparative efficacy of co-operative models or accreditation models certification models for socially responsible companies and so on community interest companies a new legal form that the UK introduced some years ago is a particular focus in this area and this facilitation of image of law comes up very strongly albeit implicitly because it's not explicitly about law in a recent report on climate change the motivated social enterprise in Australia which UTS carried out called green chrysalis and it looked at the responses by small and medium sized enterprises to the low carbon economy incidentally I think it's interesting that they too moved away from the green wrapper in doing this and they explicitly said they're not looking enterprises with carbon reduction as they call business but at enterprises who faced a new range of risks and opportunities from a low carbon economy and to the extent that law comes into it it comes in as facilitative sometimes they talk about substantial support like green purchasing policies but the umbrella framing of it is the legal framework needed to support and enable SMEs to capitalise on the opportunities of a low carbon economy so again a much in some ways you might say the green chrysalis report certifies more of the new green politics focused on business and social goals and the Van Hala article old green politics focusing on traditional state institutions and the green goals so that would be my starting point for illustrating the role of law at a very general level but now I want to complicate that simplistic dichotomy and talk about the ways in which ambiguities in each of the literature pick up on the image from the opposite end of this picture so I'll do this from two angles and this is where I have the two articles that do address law as illustrative of what I mean from the angle of law and social movements the key point is that despite the contrast I've just painted there are important ways in which law appears in the context of social movement as a framework of incentives Van Hala's article is actually focused on legal opportunity structures a phrase which itself could be read as a close analogy to a framework of incentives and when law becomes the instrument as well as the target of social change activism becomes read in terms of a set of rational actors responding to market failure and there are the resource mobilization literature on social movements in many ways does treat collective action as a market failure problem not only as that but there is that dimension to the problem and it is I think striking that market like strategies have increasing purchase in the world of political lobbying and advocacy and activism and there's a significant rise for example of social marketing techniques in campaigning and advocacy and marketing departments are increasingly writing about this in their journals but the article I want to refer to briefly because it is one of the rare references directly to law is by Graham Smith and Simon Teasdale in a recent 2012 issue of economy and society and it's about the legal and regulatory conditions that would need to be in place to support a transition towards associate of democracy they draw on Paul Hurst's vision of associate of democracy as a political vision of small scale distributed collective action that moves away from centralized state control and they discuss where the social enterprise would be the legal model that would take this vision forward and in a sense the vision of associate of democracy that animates the paper has a more natural resonance with social activism but then the paper quickly moves to exploring the legal aspects of entity formation in detail I have to say I was actually on the editorial committee that reviewed this paper and there was enormous debate about whether the two halves made any coherent sense so if you're interested it was contentious as to whether these two things could be brought together in a productive way but obviously decided it was so their questions began with activism but brought in forms of enterprise as crucial to their answer and the constitutive nature of the two is very clear in the article and it's also a great challenge because as they noted in the article trying to embed democracy internally within economic entities cuts against the grain of facilities of law now they don't frame it in those terms but I think they run up against the problem that law is fundamentally permissive in this area rather than regulatory and so within organizations it's very rare for law to actually require democratic participation and then they try and imagine some permissive legal structures like a purchasing procurement law that might give preferences for associations for highly democratic internal structures but note that this would probably run up against procurement law that exists that is premised on very different issues usually of best value or even just of the cheapest price and it would probably be illegal to give such preferences so as they argue exit rather than voice ends up being the reigning principle in this area but they do make this attempt to bring the two together from the opposite angle of social enterprise and this takes us very much back to the third point of the new green politics about cultural identity I think there are interesting ways in which law is appearing in the context of social enterprise as the expression of a new collective identity and one which is actually changing mainstream ways of running the economy in many ways there's a general sense of fresh identity that's very palpable in the field of social enterprise genuinely so much so that some of the critical commentaries speaking weirdly of the messianic identity pervading particularly the grey literature and there is a sort of wealth of blogs and debates and discussions around collaborative consumption that reflects that excitement at some sense of a new way of doing things of consuming and producing and perhaps most relevant for law this all comes out in a very interesting book by a woman called Janelle Orsey just published by the American Bar Association called Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy and this is a practitioner's book but it has a couple of introductory chapters where she explicitly argues that law can be reconstituted and reimagined in the context of the sharing economy I'll just read you out one passage to most law students and lawyers practicing transactional law is not an obvious path to saving the world but as the world's economic and ecological meltdowns demand that we redesign our livelihoods our enterprises, our food system housing and much more transactional lawyers are needed on mass to aid in an epic reinvention of our economic system this reinvention is referred to by many and the sharing economy, the grassroots economy the new economy sharing economy lawyers make the exploding numbers of social enterprises or operatives, urban farms, co-housing there's a long list of examples of the kind of work she does they make all of these unique organizations possible and legal now there's a great flurry of activity around this there are blogs and debates as I said and in March 2012 San Francisco where she's based there was a sharing economy working group and it sort of exploring the policy changes that were needed to foster this, the growth of this and actually in Melbourne last November there was a sharing economy launch and a call for a similar kind of working group to be established in Australia I'm still working out exactly who that was by, I just found that very recently so I don't know much detail there but in a comment by David Bolia who's written a lot on the commons and concepts of the trust and how they can be worked into legal forms and legal policies on this issue he has an article which he actually refers to this is a new development paradigm and comments that the shareable city he says is a more dramatic departure and development policy than the mayor of San Francisco actually lets on instead of pursuing strategies based on big taxpayer subsidies for big capital projects managed by political and corporate elites the shareable city's vision aims to decentralise participation by ordinary citizens and neighbourhood groups in conjunction with nimble, socially attuned start-up businesses so this broad idea is in a sense becoming a hook for a coalescing sense of cultural identity which as I say I think takes us back to that food aspect the new green politics I think that just as that is emerging and gaining this umbrella name of the sharing economy or other people say the solidarity economy or the new economy it's starting to bump up against legal roadblocks in very interesting ways so I've got about I think five minutes just to give you a few examples of how that's happened which are not organised in any conceptually systematic way I just think they're not providing interesting material and one of those now one of the biggest legal debates at the moment about collaborative economy is a classic example of something that's not obviously a green issue but Airbnb is a website that allows people to stay in other people's houses instead of hotels now I do actually think you could do a very interesting systematic study of the ways in which that becomes a less resource intensive way to travel that could have significant green implications I obviously can't do that here but because the platform of collaborative consumption that Airbnb works on is modelled in other initiatives it is an interesting example of the way in which law comes into this and it's run into legal problems over the second well I'm going to give you three examples of the contested framing which law attracts in this area and I was going to start with profit but let me just give you the Airbnb example because it relates to harm which is in many ways the standard regulatory issue and it's in some ways perhaps not unexpected that it's run up against health and safety regulation about accommodation for offering accommodation to travellers is your house becoming a hotel and are you subject to health and safety regulation and if you're not complying then be an illegal transient hotel by participating in this and they have actually New York City has instituted a large lawsuit against a particular individual who was utilising the site to buy up apartments and rent them out on a mass basis so essentially using it as a business so actually there are interesting threads of both the idea that this person was making a profit was what attracted the legal against him as well as breaching the health and safety laws in a more standard regulatory story and the response of the company was in many ways as one commentator preferred to try to turn it into a conversation which was about following the rules but turning it into one about sad or struggling people just trying to get by so the idea that most people were not making this business of which profit was the main aim was in a sense their defence but the obvious regulatory issue in providing services in a new way if you cause potential harm to those who use them the law must intervene has come in quite directly there and as I say this sort of tart debate online about whether or not in fact the site is facilitating a peer to peer sharing economy rather than empowering a new breed of cold blooded hospitality and at the moment I think the risks of running up against the regulatory laws that are aimed to prevent harm has been emphasised by what's happening in that area now we can contrast that with what happened with car sharing again in this is in the United States where the sort of litigation side of things seems to have taken off more rapidly but peer to peer car sharing schemes where you rented a car to a neighbour came up against the potential harm problem of what happened if someone had an accident in the car and they were in it and so there was a debate with insurance about how that would apply with the opposite results instead of being sued for illegally turning your private car into a rental business the legislature after a sequence of activities actually passed a law legalising this to prevent legitimate and I think what's interesting about that law is that it quite explicitly takes the issue of profit as central to the legal definition of why this is an acceptable activity and although the provision is longer and then legalise the essence of it is that the legal and regulatory framework that applies to a car rental business will not apply to an ordinary person renting a car out through this method provided the car earner does not make more money than costs to earn their car so Aussie has a comment on this that it's legally defined sharing as a way to offset costs in distinction to sharing as a way to make a profit and this could potentially be the basis of a wave of sharing laws that could expand that new economy which allows access and sharing of resources in a less carbon intensive way so that means that of course accounting tricks could be brought in to respond to the legal definition of exactly what counts as profit and what doesn't and there are also in many ways standard regulatory literature about creative compliance for example becomes relevant and also the larger questions of to what degree does this issue of harm function as a smoke screen for actually protecting the market share of people who are renting cars in the traditional way in the mainstream economy and so private interest theories of regulation versus public interest in theories of regulation are immediately brought into play so I think as you can see this is a very broad palette I it's the essence of what I want to research I am still working out the precise way of defining a feasible scope for this but I have several elements to that which I'll just list in and would be happy to take comments on interesting ways of taking this forward but I imagine four case studies that would represent the spectrum that I've spoken to you about today but also to build on databases of a wider array of initiatives that seek to respond to climate change or to respond to produce services that help people to reduce their carbon footprint and there are two geographers in Australia who have built a data set of just such initiatives for a project on urban carbon governance that I'm hoping to build on and I also think there's a third area that's turning out to be potentially very fertile which is there's certain legal professionals increasingly moving into this area some of them as part of their private business and some as part of pro bono programs like a particular venture between citizens and social venture Australia and to actually interview the legal professionals in this area I think is another fertile route into working out the dimensions of the spectrum and its relevance to respond to climate change