Local Initiatives
Asynchronous Session
Community Choice Aggregation and the Grassroots View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ry Brennan
Community choice aggregation (CCA) is an energy policy growing in popularity across the United States that shifts decision-making power over energy procurement from centralized investor-owned utilities to locally controlled public agencies. As mechanisms for local control, CCAs present opportunities to decentralize both (1) hard energy infrastructures through locally-situated, bio- and technoregionally responsive energy systems, and (2) soft energy infrastructures through local, democratic control over energy questions. However, four years of ethnographic field work studying CCAs in California have shown that within the CCA movement, a dominant strategy of centralization has emerged that undermines this CCA doctrine and its grassroots proponents. They have centralized their hard infrastructures by pursuing ecocidal and sociotechnically conservative megaprojects rather than local, small-scale, antifragile energy systems; they have centralized soft infrastructures by territorially expanding and federating into ‘super’-CCAs, buffering public involvement and forcing grassroots advocates to chase between local and central entities to make demands. In this paper, I use anarchist, democratic, organization, and systems theories to answer, How do tendencies dominant in CCA operations undermine CCA doctrine? My findings illustrate that CCAs recreate centralization by failing to challenge an economic paradigm oriented toward securing high return-on-investments through the sale of cheap and abundant energy. This paradigm encourages two major tendencies of state-capital formations: (1) bureaucratic management that protects the organization’s technical core by buffering uninvited publics and (2) financial strategies designed to achieve economies of scale. To counter this trend, I recommend strategies designed to support grassroots advocates.
Megadrought in La Ligua and Petorca Basins and the Aspiration of Water Safety: Sociohistorical Lessons of Communal Resilience and Resistance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session María Otero Auristondo
The Mega Drought that Chile has experienced in the last decade has increased the sense of socioenvironmental conflicts, mainly due to the unequal access to water in rural areas of its central valleys. Recent studies have analysed the combined effect of changes in climate and consumption of water in basins affected by drought. Yet, studies regarding current or historical responses from communities exposed to droughts are still not sufficiently explored aspects. The case of the basins of the La Ligua and Petorca rivers offer an important case study because the analysis of their communities’ behavioural adaptations to drought-prone conditions could indicate resilient responses in the face of hydric conflicts. Such behaviours, in the long run, have the potential to reveal Chilean social clues for the adaptation to processes such as Climate Change. This research is based in mix methods, where interviews and geographic information systems are the principal collection and analysis methods. It is expected to facilitate the identification of a particular form of resilience associated to droughts, which could also contribute to redesign public policies regarding national management of risk due to drought, now, centred in and from the Chilean territories.
Featured A Localized Sustainable Security Discussion on the Community Participation of Women in the Barobbob Watershed of Nueva Vizcaya: Analysis on the Economic Empowerment Interventions View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin John Maddela
Women's equality and empowerment are international development priorities, but even at the local level, they are difficult to achieve. The study provides a development framework and master plan for leveraging various resource institutions in order to empower local women in the Barobbob Watershed Community in Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines. The value of rural communities is highlighted in this action research in an attempt to discover the potential of rural community empowerment and development. Furthermore, the theoretical and conceptual discussion of localizing SDGs with the concepts of co-production and using lenses of seeing women as potential dividends, producers, and partners to empowering local economies and their communities would change the landscape of governance and culture in places like the rural area of Barobbob Watershed Commuity. The means of institutionalization are not far from grasp using the Institutional Analysis Development Framework, as the paper encapsulated feasible coordination and collaboration among multi-stakeholders in an agenda that would not only benefit the end of the various development initiators, but would solely and jointly focus on addressing the goal of empowerment among women. A matrix covering various feasible interventions would provide a picture of practical and tangible solutions aimed at tapping women, empowering them, and giving them a voice and economic opportunities.
A Stocktake of Circular Economy Progress and Strategy in the Pacific SIDS: An Evolutionary Governance Analysis of Three Nations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Litia Vea Simpson
Current efforts by the Pacific SIDS towards SDGs and the climate target (NDC) are embedded in the old linear economic paradigm of “take-make-dispose”. Circular economy (CE) is a systems approach to sustainability that is increasingly applied in the global north, and has seen exponential growth in academic literature in OECD countries. Amidst this, our understanding of CE practices or progress in Pacific SIDS is limited. This study contributes in this gap by identifying baseline initiatives, and strategies advancing CE in Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands. The CE diagram from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, formed the framework for characterising CE initiatives and strategies. Mixed-methods methodology was utilised. National material input data were gathered, and allocated through a Sankey diagram according to their CE trajectories and destinations. CE initiatives and strategies were elicited from publicly available institutional and organisational reports. The same data were subsequently analysed for CE governance as a function of the interaction between material-economic factors, discourse, actors and institutions. The findings revealed that there are CE activities occurring in varying degrees in the three SIDS. The choice, inter alia, of ocean management (OM) policies, revealed the use of ingrained cultural path dependencies and environmental knowledge, secured material economic opportunities and strengthened self-determination. It also exposed how selecting an alternative OM regime can divide vulnerable communities while building new actor-institutions and dependencies with the potential to erode community resilience and impoverish residents. Pacific SIDS’s insights provide geographically effective and efficient approach to the SDGs and the NDCs.
