Double Movement

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Summary: Here we examine what Karl Polanyi calls the double movement and assess its place within civil society in promoting World Sustainability.

Start with a preliminary assessment of Polanyi's Double Movement and Civil Society: Within society broad, spontaneous, mostly local, efforts to rescue environment and society from the disabling initiatives of globalization (the first movement) emerge from grass-roots origins to enable a just and sustainable world -- or at least promote the potential. The double movement is in flux but bears close watching. The double movement contributes two efforts strategic to building World Sustainability:

  1. The double movement counters the initiative of economic globalization, particularly the Washington Consensus.
  2. The double movement spontaneously initiates an authentic grass-roots dynamic from which, place by place and bit by bit, the potential for World Sustainability might emerge.

Please see my preliminary remarks about the double movement within the context of civil society.

The double movement is a subset of civil society organizations, but of particular and vital importance in promoting world sustainability. This is because there are literally millions of CSOs, but not all include an agenda of world sustainability. The test is the familiar Triple Bottom Line:

  1. Promotes social equity or remedies an inequity.
  2. Promotes authentic prosperity and builds real wealth: a capital asset, not a phantom financial accounting trick.
  3. Conserves or restores nature.

A great web site that exemplifies the double movement is the Goldman Prize, which is more for sustainability then for environmentalism. See the list of Goldman Prize winners for exemplary models of achieving sustainability through civil society and living the double movement.

Consider other examples of civil society, co-housing would meet this definition by providing affordable shelter, an intentional community, and human and ecological habitability worthy of participation within local areas. (I have never seen an environmentally reckless co-housing venture.) Co-housing is intensely enabling. Most likely, co-housing brings forth practical threefolding as well.


©Wayne Hayes, Ph.D. | Initialized: 6/15/2009 | Last Update: 11/11/2009