 Hi, welcome to the Question of Scale podcast. I'm Davy Philip. And here we're going to be imagining a cooperative community-led approach to regional resilience. And I'm Oliver Moore. And the scale here stands for supply chains and local economies. And we're exploring how we strengthen our resilience in our regions to the shocks and disruptions we are facing. And this initiative is from the Green European Foundation, which has been delivered by Cultivate, the Sustainable Ireland Co-op, and the Green Foundation Ireland. And it's part of a climate emergency economy transnational project. The initiative is made possible with the financial support of the European Parliament to the Green European Foundation. So in this project, we published a short paper. And this is a podcast we're also producing to promote the paper. And we'll be launching a longer illustrated article where we explore in more detail some of what has emerged from conversations it has had with the community. Some of those issues include, for example, the solidarity, the social and solidarity economy, just transition cooperatives in general, platform cooperatives. So there's a range of areas that come up, community well-building as well, a range of areas that come up that are quite interesting for this idea of regional resilience. We're going to start with a little interview with Dick Coleman, who is the coordinator of the Belgian Green Think Tank OICOS and the co-president of the Green European Foundation. Tell us briefly what Jeff does. Well, actually, I think the best way to describe Jeff is a platform, implementing projects in a centralized and also in a decentralized way, because we are a strong network of political foundations, institutions all over Europe, from Finland to Greece, from Spain to North Macedonia, working together on key issues just as climate and environment, just transition, basic income, and so sharing knowledge, sharing experiences. So to make, I would say, Europe more progressive, because you can look at Europe as a kind of problematic working together or not working together of member states and certainly sometimes one leaving. But if you look at all these progressive foundations, also local projects, then we have a vision of Europe as a progressive, hopeful continent. So that's briefly, I would say, the core message of Jeff. We want to invest in the public debate, in the European public debate to make it more progressive to make sure that the key ecological challenges, climate change, the collapse of biodiversity are answered in a relevant way. Fantastic, Dirk. So and thanks for Jeff's support for this question-of-scale project and your input to our webinars and to the paper that we link your article in. So you've said that in your Resilience Under Shock article that the guiding principle for recovery should be resilience. Why is resilience so important? Well, resilience means that as a system, and I'm talking about social ecological ecology, sorry, I'm going to start again. So we are talking about the resilience of a system and I'm talking about the social ecological system, not an ecosystem or not part of society. We will be confronted with many shocks, actually some shocks already happening. Look at the heat waves. And so it's very essential that our system is not only reacting to shocks, trying to absorb them, but also changing it course so we can avoid shocks. So resilience is about a system that can keep on functioning while there are shocks, while also changing course in order to avoid future shocks. And of course, to be honest, also a bad system can be resilient. You could say that capitalism is very resilient. So it's content that also needs a kind of normative embedding, but if we embed it in a progressive setting, it's important because look at the corona crisis. It shows us we have an economy, we have a health system which is not resilient. There was a need of masks, there were no masks available. We discovered that some medicines are only produced in India. So when India says we will install a ban on the export, we don't have the medicines anymore and you'll see our system falling apart. So by making our systems resilient, we are preparing ourselves for the future. And in my article, I talk about four dimensions of resilience. The first is short feedback loops. It's about information, good and bad consequences of what we are doing, how fast do this information reaches us and do we use it to change our course? The second is modularity. I just gave an example, if only one module in the world, India, produces some medicines, then we are very fragile because then if this module doesn't function anymore, it doesn't want to share everything with all the world and we are in trouble. So that's clear. I think also the third dimension is quite clear. It's about diversity. And to understand this, just think about the farm. If a farm only has one crop on its acres and there's a disease or there is drought and maybe then all the harvest is lost. But if this farmer puts 10 different crops on its acres, then probably some will be able to resist the disease, other will be able to resist drought or a hot summer and we have a kind of stable, maybe not a maximum, but we have a stable harvest. So also in our society, we need diversity, organizing things in different ways. The government has to organize things by public services. Of course, there's a market with companies, but also there are citizens, organisms themselves in commons, in corporations, so co-ops. So this diversity is very important. And by this, we make our economy and our society more resilient. The last dimension is something which is mostly forgotten, it's social capital. We saw with the corona crisis, certainly people organize themselves, organizing networks of solidarity, coming together, producing masks. Big companies were not able to deliver them, people were able to produce them. And so social capital is about not only people coming together very quick, but also what they are able to produce as tools, as products and strengthening society. And if we take those four dimensions into account while changing our society, I think we will end up with a stronger society, which is more capable of delivering a good life for all within planetary boundaries. So now we're going to explore the outputs of the wider Green European Foundation climate emergency program. The scale was part of. With us, we have Jonathan Essex from the greenhouse in the UK, and Brand Van de Glend from Groenlinks in the Netherlands. Welcome, Jonathan and Brand. So you've been working on complimentary initiatives in the UK and the Netherlands that are also supported by Jeff, both for exploring and sharing ideas of how we break through the obstacles currently preventing us from reaching a zero carbon goal. Tell us, Jonathan, in the UK, what was your program about? So in the UK, we were looking at what are the links between trade, infrastructure, and industry. So I'll give you one example. At the moment in the UK, we import iron ore and coal, vast distances, to burn in the UK to make steel. And then we both import and export vast volumes of steel as well. So the current process of making steel is reliant on trade, trade of goods, the industry produces carbon, and then that is used for the infrastructure which funds our economy and makes the whole problem bigger. Now, we were looking at if you shifted to, for example, electric arc furnaces, and we used the scrap steel, which we have in the UK, then we wouldn't need to import iron ore, we wouldn't need to import coal, we wouldn't need to export scrap, and we would reduce the imports and the exports because we'd be making the kind of steel in the UK that we need to use in the UK. But basically what we did start with is say, well, how big is the problem? So how much carbon emissions are there associated with the transport element of international trade? And what were the results then? You were looking at blockers and enablers, what were the sort of, what did you find? Well, the first thing we did is we found there's a very big problem. We found that the total amount of carbon, just for the product, we didn't look at packaging just for the products, which we ship, we fly, we train and we truck in and out of the UK. It's 36 million tonnes of carbon that isn't reflected in the UK's carbon budget. It isn't reflected in anyone's carbon budget because these international shipping and international aviation emissions, which is the bulk of it, aren't in the Paris climate agreement, no one's taking responsibility for it. So we found a gaping hole in the way we currently do climate. And we found that one of the blockers, I think the biggest blocker, which we discussed in our part of the project, was called trade. As the UK is planning to leave the European Union, it's looking to do these trade deals with the US and many others. But climate isn't part of the trade deal. And as I've just set out, trade currently isn't part of the deal, which we call the Paris climate agreement. So it sounds like it's easy to identify the blockers. Did you surface any enablers? I think our biggest enabler at the moment was just identifying that there's a problem and better publicizing that so that there is an awareness because I think the biggest problem at the moment we have is that while we focus on what's obvious and immediate, things which are further related, these global connected issues aren't really being picked up. I think, yeah, I'll maybe come back to the neighbors in a separate bit, but I would say at this stage, this project was mainly identifying blockers at the global scale. And unless you alleviate the blockers, what you might enable to bring a local economy about simply isn't going to happen. Yeah. Well, let's look at the other project Netherlands and might come back if we've got time, but Bram, what did your project in Holland focus on? So our scope was slightly different. We also looked at harder to debate, harder to abate sector within the wider Jeff project, but we focused specifically on energy intensive industries, on Dutch energy intensive industries. And we did that because just the steel, oil refinery and chemistry industry together, they account for around a quarter of all emissions in the Netherlands. So this is really a core sector to address. And our project really focused on the question, what sort of policy do we need to get rid of these emissions? What should government do? And to find out, we talked with a lot of experts. We talked also with people from industry itself. We assessed academic literature and in the end we'll bundle all this together in a report and some external authors will also write chapters. And we're finalizing this report at the moment. So both your report, Bram and Jonathan, will they be available on the Green European Foundation or both in the greenhouse and grown links? Well, our final output, the big report will be written in Dutch, but there will also be an English version of it, which will be sort of a small version. But that one will be published on the Jeff website also. And Jonathan, where will we find the results of your project? Both on the Green European Foundation and the greenhouse think tank websites. And maybe for both of you, where does this lead us? What's your next step? Are you going to continue and go deeper into this issue? Bram? I could start on this. We are considering to do a follow-up on this because we found that hydrogen is probably a key technology that is going to be required to reduce emissions from energy-intensive industries. But there's a lot of things that we don't know yet about hydrogen. They always say hydrogen is sort of, it won't, we won't run out of it, but there is still scarcity because it takes energy to produce it. So there's lots of questions, where are we going to produce this renewable energy? Perhaps it's going to be produced in Northern Africa, where there's a lot of sun, possibly with solar energy, you could produce hydrogen and then that could be shipped to the UK, Ireland so we can use it to produce steel. There's lots of questions around this, so we think this is an important issue to look into further. And Jonathan, what's your next step, Greenhouse? Well, we're currently working on a report which is looking at transport infrastructure and infrastructure in general and how it's the development of infrastructure, which quite often is that which enables this trade to happen. There is a market driver or economic driver of comparative advantage that separates where is the cheapest place to employ workers, where materials come from, how big a scale you have a factory and where the markets are, which is causing separation and globalization, but also there is a government role in this, that governments are planning and building infrastructure, whether it be ports or airports or roads, which is making this transfer happen. And what we found in our initial research, just this last month is that overall in the UK of the last 18 years, while transport emissions have fallen slightly, what's gone up is the emissions of trucks and the emissions of planes. So currently what's happening is that it's global transport, it's global trade that is actually holding back the climate emergency. So we've now got a year's delay. We were going to have a climate conference in Glasgow this year. Now that's been put back to next year. So we have another year really to highlight how these hard to reach sectors, how industry, how infrastructure, how trade really need to change. I mean, you talked, you asked before about enablers, what are the positives? Well, we're really in this looking to change the overall structure and culture of our society and our economy into a place where we use less product and it lasts for longer. But for that, we've got to move away from a consumer-based culture where the aim is to maximize how much product we flow through our system, how cheaply we can produce it in both people and planetary terms. And as we all know, that the costs are externalised and they'll be borne by our future generations. Well, brilliant. Thanks for joining us, Bram and Jonathan. It's really interesting, very complimentary. And good luck to you. We'll stay in touch. Thank you. So in our paper, A Question of Scale, we focused on one of the more holistic approaches to economics with Carol Power from the Centre for Corporate Studies in UCC. So welcome, Carol. So, donut economics from Kate Robert. Can you give us an introduction to donut economics? What is it exactly? Well, donut economics is a concept that was developed by Kate Rayworth, who is a UK economist. And she developed the concept while she was working with Oxfam around 2011-2012. And having studied economics at university, she had hoped that that would equip her with the knowledge and skills that she needed to tackle some of the major challenges facing the world, environmental and social. But she had become so much disillusioned with economics and its emphasis on conventional growth models, emphasising the need for a constant increase in GDP as a measure of success. So she began to think about, if we put human development at the centre of development, how would that look? If we draw that out, how would it look? And what she came up with was a donut shape. So she describes it as the only type of donut probably, that's actually good for us. So if you can picture in your mind's eye a donut, so the type with a hole in the middle. So the idea for human development is to get everyone into the donut, into the substance of the donut. So we have an inner ring and an outer ring. The inner ring is the social foundation. And that provides the very basics that we need, water, nutritious food, decent housing, decent income and work opportunities, through to what's needed for social justice. So things like social equity, gender equality and political voice. So we need a solid social foundation to support people, to stay in the donut. And when there's a shortfall in any of those aspects, and of course we know that, for instance, it tends to be, deprivation tends to be multidimensional. So if we have somebody who is unable to make a decent living, then they're also likely to experience deprivation and inequality in relation to health and education and so on. And then they're more likely to fall out of that safety net. So in that case where the social foundation weakens, the individuals or communities fall into that hole in the donut. So they essentially fall out of the donut. And then in the outer ring of the donut, we have the ecological ceiling. So we need to achieve development that meets the needs of humanity without breaching that ecological ceiling. And when we overshoot planetary boundaries, so when we increase greenhouse gas emissions, when we pollute the air, when we pollute the water, then we're breaching those planetary boundaries. And that's where we end up in trouble, where we have issues now, of course, like climate change, like lots of biodiversity and so on. And so essentially we want to keep everyone in the donut supported by that social foundation and the ecological ceiling. Okay, Carol, it's a very interesting concept. It covers the socio-ecological parameters of what's crucial in the world right now. But can you give us any practical examples where it's translated into action? Okay, so as you say, it's an interesting theory, but it's more than just a theory. So there is real progress in turning this from a radical concept into transformative action. So the Donut Economics Action Lab has been set up to achieve this. And it's essentially an action lab experimenting with ways of translating the donut into reality. The Donut Economic Action Lab, our deal for short, works with communities, with local government and administration, with businesses, and a whole range of actors who are inspired by the idea of donut economics. And in September of this year, they launched an online community platform where people who are interested in donut economics and working on making the Donut Reality in their communities and their cities can share insights and experiences and the tools that they have developed to translate the concept of donut economics into reality. And in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges and social challenges, and even now in the context of the economic impact of COVID-19, donut economics can really provide a framework to develop resilience of regions and of cities. And this has been embraced in recent years by Portland and Philadelphia and the U.S. And most recently in Europe and in Amsterdam where they've embraced the concept of donut economics. And donut economics provides a framework for us to think about and to pose questions like, how can our city or our community or our region become a thriving place? So we're not focused on economic growth, we're focused on thriving, thriving people who can flourish in a community that respects the wellbeing of all people and the health of the planet. And so to translate that into reality, we have the idea of a city portrait. And of course, at the moment, the Donut Economics Action Lab in conjunction with other organizations and movements like Thriving Cities has tended to focus on scaling down to the city level. But in time, I'm sure, and through the deal platform as well, we'll see how it can be scaled down to regional level or to community level and local level. But essentially, the city self portrait provides a framework for looking at the city through four lenses, so the local and the global and the social and the ecological. So in terms of a city trying to build a self portrait of itself, it means involving citizens, it means involving local organizations working with local government as well and to ask questions like, what would it mean for the people of our area, of our locality, of our city to thrive based on their own visions and values? And so it's very much a partnership approach, grassroots organizations and the involvement of citizens is really central to this. What would the good life look like in terms of, how can we provide affordable housing? How can we build strong community networks and social capital? How can we support health and wellbeing in the city or the region? What kind of transport networks do we provide to enhance connectivity? And then what would it mean for the city to thrive within its natural habitat? So that's the ecological lens. So how could our city's landscapes be designed to sequester carbon? The built environment, how can we foster biodiversity? Can we incorporate things like green roofs on commercial buildings? Can we install solar panels on houses to harness the power of solar energy? And then of course, local aspirations also have to be set in the context of global responsibility. And the doughnut really helps us to see ourselves as global citizens. And so every day from, we're all linked into a global system, from breakfast cereal or the tea coffee that we have at breakfast in the morning to the shirt we put on, we're linked into long global supply chains. And we need to think about issues like, what would it take for our city or our community to respect the wellbeing of people worldwide? And often that will involve thinking about the working conditions of people involved in those supply chains that manufacture the products that we use every day. And what would it mean for the city to respect the whole planet? So to use the Earth's resources in a responsible way and to treat our environment with respect by minimizing pollution, minimizing greenhouse gas emissions and developing a regenerative economy where we can, for instance, recycle waste to produce energy and those kind of things that we can generate a more regenerative economy. Yeah. Grace, Carl, this is a fantastic summary of Donut Economics and you can read about it in the paper, A Question of Scale. Okay, we're now joined by Sean McCabe and Sinead Mercer to look at the concepts of a just transition and community wealth building. Sinead's a consultant on climate law and policy with specific focus on just transition and human rights approaches. And Sean has worked as a policy officer with the Mary Robbins Foundation and he's currently developing a work stream on just transition with task, the think tank for action and social change. You're very welcome to our podcasts, Sinead and Sean. So Sinead, first up, in the context of the climate emergency, this idea of a just transition has emerged. So can you explain what a genuinely just transition actually means? And so the phrase just transition, I suppose it's been popularized because it's been included in the preamble of the Paris Agreement. So I'm sure your listeners would understand what that was kind of signed by 192 countries. And what they agreed was that when the countries are cutting their carbon emissions, they will do so in a manner that won't harm the decent work and conditions of workers. And it would also kind of be in line with kind of the right development as well. So, but it also has kind of much longer history as well. It's basically that you don't leave people behind when you are moving or transitioning to a new economy or a new way of kind of economic organizing. And the Paris Agreement is very much tied to the agreement around the Sustainable Development Goals as well at the end of 2030. They're both kind of seen as Ficha, Fucha, Askega, but tied together. So this idea that you leave no one behind, that you reach the most vulnerable first. So just transition is very much in that same vein. And it comes from a history of kind of labor organizing, organizing, particularly in the United States similar to Tony Mazaki. So he was a leader of a trade union leader who worked to ensure that the peace movement or the anti-nuclear movement didn't mean that kind of people who worked in nuclear power plants were kind of just kind of discarded, but that they were actually retrained and upskilled and benefited from similar to what happened in World War II when soldiers returned, that they got free education at the university level. Now, unfortunately, I think that was reserved for white people, but that a more kind of social justice slant would be taken on climate action and workers, environmentalists and public health specialists would work together. And that's very much in the vein of the Paris Agreement as well. I'm sure Sean, who I think was there, will tell you more about that, that human rights and climate action should be very much tied together and action taken together. So the donor economics that you were discussing just there should be underpinned by human rights. So the upper limits obviously should be in terms of like planetary boundaries, but they're also human boundaries and human endurance that should be kind of considered that we don't leave people behind, that we don't accept the violation of human rights if we are taking like forestry plantations or offsetting or other actions like that. Yeah, it is well done. Just in practical terms on a regional level, could you give us an example of what that might mean in, for example, energy? Yeah, so a good example, kind of a worldwide best practice example, now it has its flaws obviously, but will be the Ruhr Valley in Germany. So what happened there was that it took around 60 years to transition that economy from heavily coal and steel reliant, very industrialized, quite polluted area. There were very little other opportunities. In fact, Bismarck was loath to allow a university to set up in the region because he feared what would happen if working class sons and daughters would be well educated. But it became, it transitioned over 60 years after the phase out of hard coal mining in Germany. Once subsidies were removed, it became uneconomic. So they transitioned the region very quite well actually into renewable technology, also kind of, also because the area was so polluted, there was quite a high kind of very good paying conditions in say environmental law specialists or ecological specialists who specialize in polluted regions. So that kind of transition took a long time. But how it was done through a series of different measures which I cover in the National Economic and Social Council's report, four case studies lessons for Ireland. And I also highly recommend reading Nesq's report in general as well on just transition, which was recommended by the president, which was amazing. But what they kind of recommend is that social dialogue is really number one. So this idea that you engage everybody around the table which you would know from community wealth building which we would know from environmental law which generally always prioritizes public participation. The environment can't speak for itself. So you ensure that those closest to the environment or who rely on that environment speak strongest in a pool when you're dealing with transition. So the same principles apply. You generally should have trade unions, workers, communities, the company and also local government and government around the table to discuss what will happen to the region, what will happen to the workers. And they did this through a series of cold run day. I apologize for my pronunciation there but what they basically were was that the local government, the national government and trade unions and the coal companies themselves sat around a table, rolled up sleeves and hashed out an agreement in terms of redundancies that pensions will be cared for, that people will be redeployed, that no one would just be fired or let go. And there's examples in other countries such as Hazelwood Power Plant which closed down in Australia in quite recently around 2016 and that was kind of an example of a bad practice transition where the coal company at the issue there, Angers which was a French multinational didn't really let anybody know what they had planned for the region. They gave around five months notice. The region had already suffered from a 45-day fire in the coal mine due to lack of health and safety measures and the community was basically left to fend for itself and it was very lucky in that they had a quite good labor government at the time in Victoria who stepped in and took up kind of plans that the local community had developed with local businesses and local trade unions. So that was an example of where kind of the government and the national government and the coal company had kind of been very laissez-faire. They'd left it to kind of develop in its own market-based kind of manner but luckily there was a community there that was quite proactive and had worked at a local level to develop different ideas for the region with academics, trade unions and local businesses. Other kind of best practice kind of recommendations besides social dialogue would be examining what the region itself is good at. So Gordon Amona, for example, and the Midlands and just like the Ruhr Valley, you had kind of very decent pay and conditions in that region, very highly skilled workers and very great sense of pride, great sense of heritage and the approach that they took was that they realized that attracting in businesses or multinationals was not going to kind of result in long-term work because these were highly skilled people. They weren't going to kind of settle for maybe call centers. That wasn't going to build in the region which is partly what happened in the north of England. But what they did instead was that they kind of conducted skills audits and audits of the region and looked at well, where are our skills? What can our region do best? And that's where they came up with this highly skilled technical class of lawyers, environmental specialists, ecologists, tourism experts. It's now UNESCO World Heritage Site, the mine. And that was built because they realized that the highly polluted region actually had developed this highly specialized class who knew how to stop pollution or how to improve polluted areas. So that's another kind of example that you recognize that these people are, I suppose, going back to that point that people aren't waste or people aren't resources to just extract from but can be very easily redeployed and are quite innovative as individuals. We all are, I suppose, very creative beings and to harness that creativity to develop a new idea for the region. Yeah. Yes. Okay, great. And it's very pertinent of course now that we're in the midlands here in Ireland and we will have lots of these issues that the Rural Valley had for decades to deal with. So over to you, Davie. So we're going to introduce Sean. Sean, I am delighted you're joining us now to bring in a little bit of the context of the new paper that you've just written and it's been published by TASC called the People's Transition Community-led Development for Climate Justice. Fantastic work, Sean. I love the first line. I'm just going to read it out. It's almost a haiko. If climate action is to be fast, it must be fair. If it's to be enduring, it must be inclusive. If it is to benefit from widespread public support, it must share benefits and burdens equitably and fairly. Fantastic. So Sean, well done on that. And what might be the next, Davie? It's from your report for strengthening our local economies and ensuring regional resilience. I suppose there's a few. The report itself is mostly looking at participative approaches. There's incredible, you know them yourselves. You are one yourself, you know, members of EcoLease and other organizations around the world doing incredible stuff on local community-led development. And the challenge is really bringing the power dynamic to something more balanced between those community-led initiatives and what we're facing into, which is maybe the corporate or multinational corporation agenda around climate change. So what we look at in the report is the capabilities approach that Amartya Sen would have pioneered and asked how capable our communities of participating in the types of processes that Shanae mentions there. I was talking to a friend who works with a development company in the inner city here who had a survey to fill out recently for the government. His community had to do it. He said he had to do about 100 favors just to get the survey filled out. And I think that's a familiar feeling to people who are trying to work in the empowerment of communities is that people, there's a lack of trust. People don't necessarily see that in responding to these types of surveys or the laissez-faire sort of participation approaches that we have currently. And communities don't see tangible benefits returned to them. The reason being is that power doesn't get transferred through their participation. So if we want to actually see climate action being different or sustainable development being different, there has to be resources put behind these participative approaches. There has to be resources put behind the outcome of the participative approaches, which is addressing the needs and wants of communities true climate action. So that's what we were trying to get to was, A, you have to ensure that people can participate. B, you have to listen to them and make sure that you understand what they need and want. And then C, once you understand that, you have to put the money behind addressing that true sustainable development, true development. It doesn't worsen our environmental issues. And one of the things you do in the paper is introduce community wealth billing as local wealth billing. And you've written about this before in that article for Carnegie where we take that Preston model and we expand it into regions. Is there a way that you can quickly introduce what community wealth billing is? Where it's in our paper, of course, but just for the listeners? Yes, certainly. I guess put simply, it's about the plural ownership of local economies. And it can be done in numerous different ways that I suppose was pioneered in Cleveland, Ohio, the Democracy Collaborative over there in the early part of the new millennium. And more recently, then, less in the UK have taken it up. And I think there's 11 cities in the UK now who are pioneering different versions of community. Wealth building or local wealth building with Preston being the most famous. I think at its heart, well, there's a number of things, number of elements. There's obviously progressive procurement, true, what are called anchor institutions, which is a really interesting concept and something that works well in cities where you have municipally owned operations. One thing I've been thinking a lot about here is say, in Dublin, we have so many universities chock full of students looking for fresh produce and you have then growers in the North County Dublin who are struggling to make a living at times. So if you were able to connect just in that case, have universities ensured that all of their local, all their produce is procured locally, it would have a very significant influence on the livelihoods of local farmers. But there's others too, there's looking at supply chains for things like building projects that are municipally run or getting companies on site. But the reason it's mostly municipals is the sense of place is important. And so you need, if you were to have a company or a private enterprise doing it, they would have to have some sort of sense of commitment to local communities and not a sort of a true way commitment that maybe you might see from the larger multinationals. And Sean, although the model is best known in Cleveland and Preston, do you think it's easy enough to scale that into a regional approach? I don't know about regional. I think it's very important to keep it local. The challenge is that you don't have as many anchor institutions in rural areas. So, and I think that's where the drive to make it a regional model comes in. What I'm trying to recommend in the report, I don't go into it in great detail because it's quite difficult to extrapolate is we have the largest, possibly the largest public procurement in history or the largest public investment in history en route in our efforts to avoid climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse. How we tailor that investment, how we consider the spend, like say the retrofitting of houses across Ireland. If we broke those up into 26, if the Irish government decided to break those up into 26 contracts, one for each county and enable the retrofitting cooperative to start in each county. There's jobs in that, there's opportunity. Similarly, the equipment that will be used for the retrofitting, making sure that we, that money is directed towards local cooperatives or local community businesses like to which Plunkett and the UK support. So that's what I would see. I don't think scaling it into a regional approach will be difficult. I think we still need to keep it localized. But I think that we could view climate action as a temporary anchor institution, something that could catalyze the creation of community businesses, which then maybe once the process of climate adaptation or climate mitigation has passed, they will have the institutional knowledge to capabilities, the capacity to do other things. Brilliant, Sean. Well, that's a great insight. And I recommend everyone looking at that paper, The People's Transition. You can find it on the task website. And thank you both, Sinead and Sean, for joining us here in the Question of Scale podcast. Thank you. So we're now going to explore a historical perspective on cooperatives in Ireland. And we're joined by Tommy Simpson, who is one of the initiators of the Green Foundation Ireland, who are partners in this Question of Scale project. And I first met Tommy over 20 years ago when we're both members of the coordinating body of the Dublin Food Co-op. He's been a trade unionist and a professional trainer for over 30 years, specializing in sustainable enterprise. So welcome, Tommy. Tommy, co-operative approach has a rich tradition in Ireland, especially in the agricultural sector. But a more community co-operative approach was embraced in Donegal by McGuire in the fifties. What do you think we can learn from his work today and in strengthening our regional resilience? Well, I think we can learn a hell of a lot because Father James MacDar was a revolutionary man, really. And he, in fact, he called himself on the late, late show, a Christian communist, which is probably a bit of an oxymoron. But that's what he, and he was, he had worked in London during the war. He, and then came back to Donegal. He was a Donegal man. And he was, first of all, on Tory Island. And then he was appointed the Paris priest of Glenn Cullum Kill. But he was a, he had a very far-sighted guy. He had known about the course, the previous cooperative efforts in agriculture, particularly the work of Horace Plunkett and the work of A.E. Russell in establishing the farmers' co-ops. As you know, all of the, a lot of the smaller dairies and farmers' co-ops were started in the 20s and 30s where farmers put their meager funds into setting up their own creameries, which sadly, a lot of them are now closed and have been taken over by giants like Larry Goodman or whatever, and then closed down. So he was promoting that tradition, to continue that tradition in this very remote area of Donegal, which I don't know whether anybody knows Glenn Cullum Kill, but if you, you have to, first of all, get to killy banks from them. And then it's over the mountains into this very remote park, True Kill Car. So MacDyre had this idea of stopping emigration. Donegal had a long, long history of emigration to Scotland and England in particular, and all over the world, of course, but particularly the relationship with Scotland. And he said, we should introduce our own industries to promote local jobs. And he did that. He started off with different scale. Now there was a Gailtor-Aaron project started in 1955, a knitting cooperative, which MacDyre enhanced. And then he decided, we need to have a vegetable growing cooperative. So he tried to get the farmers, now farmers were reluctant to give at least their land for the vegetable growing, but he did persuade them and got a vegetable factory up and running, which has now been transformed into a fish processing factory. As you know, Donegal is probably is the biggest fishing port in Ireland. And that's still going. And I think there's about 110 people employed in that to this very day. So MacDyre had also got the idea of developing tourism projects. So he started up the folk village, which still exists. And it has about 40,000 visitors up till the COVID situation, 40,000 visitors a year in the folk village in Glen Cullum Kill. And also he got built, they built a lot of these holiday chalets in Glen Cullum Kill and took over the local hotel and set up the Glen Bay Hotel in Glen Cullum Kill. So, I mean, he was very fast. And he also started a fishing cooperative and promoting these. And he also started a house-building cooperative and built some houses in that area for returning immigrants who are coming back from Scotland and the UK in general. So he was very, very revolutionary man. Tommy, did MacDyre know what was going on in Mondragon? I mean, it was a similar time. He was also a priest. Did he have any, do you know, if he had any recollection or was inspired at all by what was happening in the Basque country? I don't really know whether he knew what was happening. As you say, that was also started by a priest. No, I don't think he did in that sense. Because I met MacDyre twice myself in the 70s and I found him very inspiring, although he was regarded as quite authoritarian in this approach, which a lot of priests were at the time. But I mean, there's been various studies done. I mean, some of the civil servants who he was looking for grants and supports to set up his various cooperatives, they were very suspicious of him because they actually said that it's in the records that they were afraid that his cooperative was very successful and was getting subsidies for rural areas that other rural areas would try to copy what MacDyre was doing. And then they would also be requiring subsidies. So I mean, these notes have been discovered more recently in the archives, but he was quite a revolutionary man at the time. Just to finish then, Tommy, what do you think we might learn from his work? Is there any lessons for today and where we're at today, especially in this notion that we're trying to look at being more resilient in our regions? Yes, I think that the book by Lee McGinley, which was on MacDyre's anniversary about 10 years ago, I think that Lee McGinley from Glen Column Kill, who you've spoken to, is very, very good. And he calls the book a revolution on their hands. Basically, he's saying that post the 2008 crash that this example of MacDyre could be spread across the whole country and elsewhere, especially, and now with the emphasis on purchasing locally, local production for local needs, which is what MacDyre was trying to promote. And in a way, it's the Mondragon example that you mentioned is more of an industrial one, but at the same time, he was encouraging local industries as well. So I think the work of Horace Plunkett and Russell and what was it, has been forgotten. A lot of the philosophy of this cooperative endeavor has been forgotten, and it needs to be reactivated and pushed very strongly. Absolutely, and that's what we're trying to do through this project, The Question of Scale. Tommy, thanks for being a partner in that project and the work that you're doing. Thank you, Tommy Simpson. So in this final section, we're going to focus on emerging initiatives in the cooperative movement. So we've heard about co-ops and co-ops have been around for decades, but there's some new exciting co-ops emerging in more recent years, which have taken on board some aspects of peer-to-peer community and digital technologies and also deal with the labor market as it is, and might have some interesting things to say about how we can make regions more resilient. So first of all, I'm going to talk to Ifa Hammond. So Ifa is the manager of the Dublin Food Co-op. So Ifa, can you tell us a little bit about the Dublin Food Co-op, but also then tell us about what you see the role for co-ops might be in strengthening local economies and engaging in communities? I can indeed. Okay, so Dublin Food Co-op is a member's consumer co-op. And basically what that means is we are a community of members. We've come together and we make the decisions about how our co-op moves and what direction it goes in. Our co-op is a retail co-op. So we have a shop based in Kilimanum, and we also have recently just launched an e-commerce shop as well, where we sell goods from our shop online. And over the next year, that's something that we're planning to expand. So yeah, we started off in 1983, started out as a buying club, with a small group of friends, and now we've moved to quite a different model. We've got the shop in Kilimanum, and we've got 2,800 members currently. So obviously the way we operate has changed a lot, but we're still operating with the same co-op principles that we have since we started off. And I think in terms of how co-ops can support the local economies, I think you've got different co-op models, and I think that each one of those co-op models kind of does that in a different way. Obviously we're a retail co-op, so in terms of how we interact with the local economies, is a big part of that is how we deal with air suppliers. So one of our main focuses, one of our main aims is to actually purchase as much as possible from local suppliers, Irish suppliers. So today in 2019, we spent around 490,000 with Irish suppliers, so we're ensuring that the actual money from within our community is actually staying within our local community as much as possible, and the Irish market as much as possible. There's other ways that we try and kind of do that within the community as well, business-to-business share, like selling goods to cafes and other shops, as well as trying to fit the whole to other social enterprises, other organizations, and supporting them in terms of, we've been going since 1983, so supporting other co-ops and other social enterprises as well, to actually get off the ground. We have supported a number of kind of co-ops to get up on their feet, the urban co-op in Limerick, just in terms of resources. They managed to actually be able to get all of their stuff delivered to DFC first, because they didn't actually have a premises at the start, so I think when that started off a couple of years ago, they actually got their stuff delivered, and then they drive down to Limerick. And then, I guess, on the effect within the local community, I think credit unions is something that's, they're not allowed to have thought of as co-operatives, because it's something that is, it's so much built into our community. I think there's around 320 or more credit unions in all of Ireland, but they play a huge part in our economy, and a lot of the funding that comes through co-operatives is spent within the local context. So I think that's a really important thing to think of when you're thinking about co-ops and the economy. And yeah. Can I just mention, did you integrate any new or innovative technologies as well in how you run what you do in Dublin Food Co-op with 2,800 members, only a small shopfront? It must be a bit of an undertaking. It is. I think innovative technology is interesting to look at, because we're actually just updating our point-to-sale system for the first time in, I think, about 15 years. And we were using like an open source point-to-sale, and now we're going down a different route. We're actually taking on the one that Urban Co-op and Limerick is using, and we've got a good resource sharing there. I think in terms of the web stuff that we're doing, we're just building that now. And what we've done so far in terms of kind of dealing with the membership, I think, yeah, we have a full of about 1,300 people each week through the shop. And I think we've had to adopt, I guess, two market demands. At one point, we were open three days a week. Now we're open seven days a week. Our technology hasn't changed so much so far, but it is something that we've been investing in really only in the past year. And I think that we're going to see the effects of that with the new e-commerce platform. It's the aim for next year with our community development program. Obviously, we launched our community development program last year, and we obviously with COVID, it's been very much impacted. It was all in-person training, socials, meet-ups and visits to other co-ops and other co-op firms, but now we have to look at a different way to actually create that learning space. So we're actually going to bring it online or we're going to launch that around March or April of next year. So we're looking into different types of LMSs to actually provide that training. And I think that's where it's going to be interesting for us to see how that developed. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, over to you, Debbie. Thanks for that, Eva. And I'm delighted to be joined as well by Sam Toland, who's a corporate advocate and solid network. And in the question of scale paper, we introduced the open food network as an example of platforms owned by their users. Sam, you've been involved in setting up the OFN in Ireland, the Open Food Network. Why is this approach seen as 21st century co-operative and why might it be important? Yeah, well, I suppose it's seen as 21st century in the context that it's a bit of an evolution on what we would traditionally think of as cooperatives in the 1800s and the 1900s. Having said that, you'll see as I describe the current, the values of 21st century cooperatives are very in line and the natural evolution of what came before. But I suppose the main kind of distinct differences or evolutions have been the kind of open multi-stakeholder nature of a lot of 21st century, like modern cooperatives. This idea of not just serving one narrow stakeholder interest against the rest, but it's actually bringing all the stakeholders in. Is that the solidarity approach? Yeah, like the term solidarity cooperative is used in places like Canada and France and they're decades ahead of Ireland and this, but we're starting to get there here in Ireland as well. Obviously, use of innovative technologies, open source software, things like this. And obviously, in the case of OFN, you're talking about a digital platform cooperative. So the whole business model is absolutely really 100% digital technology. And that's obviously a huge departure from people's kind of typical understanding of a cooperative as their local shop or the local dairy. And then following on from that, a lot of modern cooperatives have taken on kind of agile, non-hierarchical kind of management and organizing structures, which again, like most cooperatives from the 1800s and 1900s were democratic, but they would have had a more 20th century kind of representative of democracy approach. And more modern cooperatives are, it's not easy, but they're trying to bring in more participative and flat structures. And do you see a need then for rule changes in our friendly societies or cooperatives to accommodate this sort of new agile or self-organizing or flatter structures? Yeah, well, I think you know the answer to that question, David, very much so. Yes, you know, the, as I kind of said before, you know, the current kind of idea within legislation of what a cooperative is, it's very ruse in that kind of 20th century kind of parliamentary democracy Westminster approach. And that doesn't map on very well to kind of modern ideas of distributing power and management. And like, you know, and it's not just, you know, ultra progressive people who want to go down that direction, you go to Silicon Valley or, you know, any startup world and even, you know, Toyota invented Canva and Agile management, you know? So, yeah, absolutely. We need a bit of an update, at least. And what do you think blocks this cooperative approach? I mean, we've been trying to identify the barriers or the blockers of this. Is it a mindset? Is it awareness? Is it education? Where do you see that sort of hurdle we need to go over? It's a lot of things. There isn't just one blocker, but I would definitely say that one of the biggest changes aside from, you know, the legislation changing would make a big difference, but it wouldn't fix it alone. You know, we could have the best legislation for cooperatives in the world and it wouldn't just automatically unlock all this amazing innovation. I think it's the state actually taking an active interest in the development of a more cooperative and social economy. And, you know, we don't have time to get into the role of the state in probably limiting the development of cooperatives in Ireland. I heard the end of Tommy's interview there where he was talking about how the department were afraid of it being too successful because people might want to replicate it, you know? And I think that's something that you do hear from time to time and there's plenty of stories we talk to people over the years of various departments of state thinking, gosh, we don't want people getting too much control over their own livelihoods or their own local communities. So I was actually just happened to be at the National Social Enterprise Conference today, which ran and co-ops were spoken about numerous occasions in the Lochmore community co-op, which is replicated. I think there's 12 similar community co-ops have started in recent years, you know? And seeing the way that the civil servants within that department were proactively taking on the mantle of social enterprise. Social enterprise makes sense. The government needs to support social enterprise. The social economy is an alternative to the kind of mainstream approach to national economies. That's what we need. That's what we need. The government and the state have a huge role to play in setting the ground rules. And if you look at what happens in local enterprise offices, enterprise Ireland, the reality is that the current investor orientated businesses are subsidized to a huge degree, whereas if you and I were to try and set up a co-op tomorrow, we'd be swimming upstream. So I think that's what needs to change. So maybe finally in leaving it here, if people are interested in our cooperative social solidarity approach, where do they learn more? Yeah, well, you can go to solicoop.ie at the minutes and you can find a link where there's a group of cooperators and others working in social solidarity economy trying to set up a network for people like us to provide mutual support and advice. And then there's a number of different development bodies that could put you in the direction of from ICAST to cooperative alternatives. And we change the government co-op, like we get a couple of emails every month, I'd say from different people looking to start up cooperatives and we provide what help we can, we signpost where we can. Okay, thanks Sam, thanks Ifa for joining our question of scale podcast and keep up the good work. Thank you. Thanks, Danny. So thanks to all our speakers. That was really inspiring. It was great to hear all of the different perspectives on how we can build resilience in regions. So you can watch out for the paper. It'll be on the GEF websites. It'll be on the Cultivate website. It'll be on the Green Foundation Ireland website. Listen out for further updates from us. Yeah, thanks everyone for joining us. Keep an eye on what we're doing. This is our first podcast from the We Create Center in Clark, Jordan. We hope to have many others. Just thanks again from the Green European Foundation for the support, for the collaboration of all the contributors to the paper and look out for that longer illustrated question of scale paper where we explore the social solidarity collaborative economy in Ireland. Thanks all.