Participatory Practice

PARTICIPATORY PRACTICE Community-based Action for Transformative Change Second edition

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Margaret Ledwith and Jane Springett

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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK +44 (0)117 374 6645 bup-info@bristol.ac.uk Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4473-6007-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-4473-6008-7 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-6549-5 ePDF The right of Margaret Ledwith and Jane Springett to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For all children of the world; they deserve better. For Grace, in particular, as she flexes her wings to fly out into a world in urgent need of the gifts she brings. Knowing that she will continue my work brings me immense pride.

For Ian, whose love has been a constant companion and who has consistently supported my work in the world. It has truly been a shared journey.

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Contents

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List of figures and tables Glossary Acknowledgements

ix x xvii

Introduction: Our stories Jane’s story Margaret’s story Our joint story Note on terminology Note on icons

1 1 4 10 10 10

PART I A participatory paradigm 1

2

Participatory practice What is participation?

Theme 1: Participatory practice as social justice in action Theme 2: Participatory practice as a worldview Theme 3: Participatory practice as the embodiment of values and principles Theme 4: Participatory practice as a relational process Theme 5: Participatory practice as interdependence and interbeing Theme 6: Participatory practice as inner and outer transformation Theme 7: Participatory practice as living the questions and critical thinking Theme 8: Participatory practice as an ecological imperative Towards collective health and well-being through participatory practice What is to come in this book Troubled times Values lie at the heart of the matter We are living through an epoch in world history Critique of the political context is the catalyst for transformative practice Question contradictions!

Values change the way we see the world The British welfare state: a social justice revolution The Beveridge Report: a common good embedded in policy The invention of neoliberalism The year of the barricades that heralded an opportunity for change A missed opportunity v

13 16 18 19 21 23 25 28 30 31 33 34 37 37 38 40 40 41 41 43 44 46 48

Participatory Practice

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3

4

Explore the question ‘Who gets to eat?’

Big electoral change from Right to Left (or so we thought) A decade of ‘austerity’ Britain At last, a critical analysis from a human rights perspective!

Values, critical consciousness and change How did they pull it off?

Whose lives matter?

What do we care about? What are our values?

Kindness and kinship: a different lens for a decent future

50 51 52 54 56 56 58 60 62

The participatory worldview The Western mind Indigenous ways of knowing The medicine wheel Ecological and complex systems as participatory thinking Western participatory worldviews: ecological ways of thinking Characteristics of a living system that help us to think participatively The Relational: cooperation, co-evolution and co-creation/co-production Consciousness, the self and the spiritual Putting it all together: reframing our view of the world to change our practice So, what does thinking participatively really mean for our practice?

65 66 73 74 78 78 79 82 84 88

Participatory practice in a non-participatory world Participatory practice over the last decade Participatory practice in the arts Community arts in health as a case study Participatory practice in health research Participatory practice in local government Participatory practice in food and resource management systems Reflections on participatory practice in a non-participatory world The embodiment of values

90 91 91 95 100 103 109 117 119 119

PART II Participatory praxis 5

Storytelling praxis The relevance of story to participatory practice The personal is political The importance of voicing values The use of story to critique the dominant narrative Counternarratives Be curious!

Emancipatory action research as a unity of praxis Change the story!

Listening from the heart

vi

125 125 126 127 128 129 132 133 136 137

Contents

Slowing the mind and reaching inside to the spirit Imagination in the art of storytelling Imagination in the art of poetry ‘Transformation of silence into language and action’

140 141 143 144

The role of dialogue So, what is dialogue?

Going deeper: deconstructing the essence of dialogue Creating a collective identity Creating the conditions for dialogue: understanding your context and preparing people The conditions for dialogue: circle as a safe dialogical space Creating dialogical/rhetorical/communicative spaces: some examples from practice Dialogue and social change The dynamic of dialogue as a key to transformation

147 148 152 156 157

7

Critical reflection and reflexivity Being critical Understanding reflection as the key to learning and transformation Opening up space for reflection in a non-participatory world Towards critical reflexivity Becoming critically reflexive: drawing on critical theorists Reflecting on power Antonio Gramsci Jürgen Habermas Pierre Bourdieu Michel Foucault Moving critique further Taking critical reflection forward

169 170 171 174 175 177 178 178 182 182 185 187 192

8

Transformative practice How to make participatory practice transformative What sort of world do we want to live in?

Paulo Freire and transformative practice Values are the bedrock of change Radical empathy Empathy in action Getting familiar with Freire Digging deeper into Freire Extending Freire into intersectionality Acting on Freire

195 195 198 199 199 201 204 208 209 218 220

9

Becoming whole Crisis is a chance for change Critique is essential for change

223 223 224

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6

vii

160 162 166 168

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Participatory Practice

Storytelling is great at raising questions Digging deeper A participatory ideology A counternarrative of change A participatory paradigm shift An ecological framework for a participatory worldview From Ego to Eco Paradigm wars The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report 2021 Neoliberal paradigm vs an indigenous paradigm Practising participatory values Gramsci: the old is dying and the new cannot be born Gramsci and feminism Freire and intersectionality: reconceptualising power Education for critical consciousness Storytelling as problematising Critical connections in participatory practice Participatory action research as a unity of praxis Ideas are the basis of change – but are we asking the right questions?

Changing love of POWER to the power of LOVE! Notes References Index

225 226 229 230 231 232 232 233 236 237 240 242 243 246 248 249 250 252 254 256 259 261 279

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List of figures and tables

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Figures

1.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

4.1 6.1 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2

The themes in this book The medicine wheel Building our community connections Self-care medicine wheel An integrative model of our experience of the world through a participative lens Participatory practice in a non-participatory world Broadcast vs Gathering The process of transformation through presencing Gaventa’s Power Cube Three pivotal connections in transformative practice Freirean dialogue Skywoman The PAR model

Tables

3.1 6.1 7.1

Different ways of seeing the world The fundamentals of the dialogue process Becoming critical in thought and action

ix

16 75 77 77 90 92 150 173 191 196 217 238 253

74 158 176

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Glossary Action/reflection: the foundation of community development praxis, where our knowledge base is developed through reflection on action, and our subsequent action is informed by this analysis – hence theory in action and action from theory.

Alienation: a state of bring socially fragmented and disconnected from the whole. Power asserted over people results in a loss of personal control over life circumstances, a disconnection from society, and condemnation to the margins that dehumanises, resulting in the erosion of belonging.

Austerity: under neoliberal governments, ‘austerity’ is the political imposition of policies that have no apparent benefit other than to punish vulnerable social groups for their own poverty by cutting funding for housing, education, health, work and welfare, privatising public ownership, at the same time as giving tax cuts to and allowing tax avoidance for the rich. Throughout this book we often use inverted commas to denote that unnecessary, punitive ‘austerity’ measures have been imposed on the poor since the financial crisis of 2007–08 at the same time as the rich have got richer.

Banking education: this is Freire’s term for the traditional approach to education in which a powerful teacher pours dominant knowledge into the unquestioning minds of passive learners, reinforcing dominant power interests.

It is an approach to education which is controlling, which is why Freire also refers to it as ‘domesticating’. Changing this system is the aim of the knowledge democracy movement so that subordinated knowledges are recognised and claimed as legitimate.

Civil society: in Gramscian theory, civil society is the site in which the dominant ideas of the ruling class invade our minds persuading us that their way of seeing the world is common sense. The institutions of civil society which engage us in life – the family, media, schools, religious organisations, community groups, and so forth – play a role in getting us to consent to ideas that favour the already privileged in society. It is also the site for grassroots action for change.

Codifications: in Freirean pedagogy, these are representations of familiar local situations that capture life experience in photographs, drawings, drama, story, poetry, music and so on, in order to ‘see’ a situation decontextualised from reality more critically as the focus for dialogue.

Colonisation: the process by which one group of people dominates another to control and exploit for its own gain. The term has often been used to cover European colonisation of territories but is also used to describe other dominations in the past, and on-going.

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Glossary

Common inheritance: every last one of us is indebted to those who have gone before us, and the natural world, for the advantages we are born into.

From roads to fresh water, to hospitals and to developments in art, literature and science, the bedrock of all this is the biosphere that makes all else possible – energy, minerals, rivers, oceans, soil, plants, animals and the climate. We are but one small part and have no given entitlement. We have responsibility for reparation of the wrongs of the past and present – slavery, xenophobia, misogyny, racism and environmental degradation – all exploitations which live on through inheritance to continue to privilege some at the expense of others.

Common sense: dominant narratives are told with authority and repeated through the media until they become accepted as a form of common sense that is not challenged as nonsense! In this way, political strategies, such as ‘austerity’, designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, are accepted as inevitable, with the result that foodbanks become the order of the day in rich countries and social inequalities widen to push the poor towards destitution.

Commons, the: resources, natural or cultural, held collectively by groups of people for individual and collective benefit. Originally applied to land in the medieval period in Europe but now applies to all sorts of different resources. We mean a wider concept of the commons, a sense of collective ownership of the outcomes of progress, including of knowledge and action. Under neoliberalism much of the commons has been privatised and sold for profit when it belonged to the people, so was not for sale.

Communicative space: where time is put aside and a safe space is held so people can talk to one another freely and intentionally, listening and talking in equal proportions.

Conscientisation: translated from the Portuguese conscientização, Freire used this concept for the process of becoming critically aware of the structural forces of power which shape people’s lives as the basis for critical action for change.

Counternarratives: compelling stories that inspire hope and possibility for a different social reality based on values of equality, cooperation and connection running counter to the dominant narratives that justify inequality, competition and alienation.

Critical alliance: strategic alliances across difference, which are built on the collective strength of diversity in mutual collective action for social justice.

Critical analysis: refers to the theories and conceptual tools with which to analyse practice so that the contradictions we live by and accept as common sense get exposed and subsequent action is targeted at the source, not the symptoms, of oppression and therefore has the potential to bring about transformative change for social justice.

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Participatory Practice

Critical consciousness: Freire’s third level of consciousness (after ‘magical’ and ‘naive’), indicating a level of insight at which people recognise oppression as a structural problem rather than as an individual failing. Critical consciousness is reached when life situations are connected with socio-economic contradictions, such as seeing hungry children in a rich society as a political contradiction rather than as a personal pathology.

Critical pedagogy: refers to that type of learning based on a mutual search rooted in a ‘profound love for the world and for people’ (Freire, 2018: 89). It is a democratic process of education that encourages critical consciousness as the basis of transformative collective action.

Cultural invasion: is a Freirean concept which captures the way that the values, beliefs, ideology, cultural norms and practices of a dominant culture are superimposed on the culture of those it oppresses. It links to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

Culture circle: Freire’s term for what we would call a community group, which provides the context for mutual, critical dialogue of equals intent on questioning life’s contradictions in order to act collectively for change.

Culture of silence: Freire used this concept to capture the dehumanisation, apathy and disaffection that silence people into accepting their alienation. His challenge was to release their innate energy by teaching people to question lived reality, exposing the contradictions we live by.

Decolonisation: analysis and action which seek to expose the effect of colonisation, for example, slavery, ethnic cleansing and the suppression of indigenous groups.

Degeneration: where a place, ecosystem or a community declines due to the taking away of energy and resources.

Dehumanisation: people are robbed of the right to be fully human when they are stigmatised as worthless, incapable objects. Freire saw dehumanisation as an act of violence; his prime concern was humanisation – how to restore people’s right to be fully human subjects in the world.

Democratic fascism: refers to the current extreme Far Right populist movement founded on old political and social values of violence, patriarchy, xenophobia and racism, wrapped up in a politics of hatred of ethnic minorities, women, the disabled, gay, refugees … and all advocates of equality and social/environmental justice – intellectual activists, the judiciary, feminists, anti-racists, anti-poverty activists (see Imogen Tyler’s 2017 blogpost discussed on p 133).

Dialogue: in Freirean pedagogy, is a mutual, respectful communication between people engaging the heart and mind, the intellect and emotions, which Freire saw as the basis of praxis.

xii

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Glossary

Dichotomous thought: refers to a binary, either/or way of seeing the world that defines one thing in relation to its opposite, with a subject/object power implicit in the relationship, for example, working class/middle class, male/female, White/Black. This is a limited understanding of power relations, which hides more than it reveals. Intersectionality challenges current thinking to embrace the complexity of interconnected oppressions as one mutually reinforcing system of domination.

Difference: is shorthand for the wide range of social differences that create our identities, and which are related to the process of discrimination, for example, ‘race’, class, gender, faith, ethnicity, age, sexuality, ‘dis’ability and so forth.

Discrimination: refers to the process by which people are disadvantaged by their social identity and therefore given unequal access to rights, resources, opportunities and power (Thompson, 2020).

Diversity: a rich multidimensional community which honours difference and benefits from the richness.

Dualism: is the idea that the mind and the body are two separate things and not connected.

Ecosystem: a collection of communities of both living and non-living things that are connected and which interact with each other and their environment.

Ego-system: where the system is directed towards enhancing individual egos through competition and the accumulation of monetary wealth.

Empowerment: people have their dignity and self-respect restored through empowerment, which is the consequence of critical consciousness: the understanding that life chances are prescribed by structural discrimination, an insight which brings with it the freedom to take action to bring about change for social justice. Empowerment is not fully achieved unless it becomes a collective process.

Environmental justice: calls for action to redress exploitation of the environment by capitalism which is destroying biodiversity and causing climate change, endangered species, pollution and degradation of land and water resources. The impact is experienced disproportionately by already disadvantaged communities and poorer nations, and so is inextricably linked to social justice.

Epistemology: ways of seeing and making sense of the world.

False consciousness: refers to the unquestioning view of the world in which subordinate groups accept their reality in passive and fatalistic ways, leaving the power and privilege of dominant groups unchallenged.

False generosity: Freire saw this in empty gestures that give illusions of equality without changing structural discrimination. He saw charity, benevolence and tokenism as forms of violence that perpetuate poverty for the masses.

Feedback loops: the flow of energy within a system that comes from the connection between things. Such flows can either dampen change or encourage it.

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Feminism: feminist theory in community development places patriarchy as an all-consuming oppressive force, a system operating in an intersectional way over boundaries of class, ‘race’ and other oppressions to maintain domination of the privileged and powerful. Feminist theory, committed to the flourishing of everyone and everything, seeks to inform action for change for a diverse and biodiverse world where peace, cooperation, participation and sustainability are the imperatives to change the essentially exploitative system created by capitalism.

Framing: the gaze or the viewer with which you look at reality, ‘framing’ can be a theoretical perspective or socialised perception.

Generative theme: an issue that repeatedly crops up in the stories people tell about their lives. Freire referred to it as generative because its relevance generates an energy for action for change out of the hopelessness that is often a result of alienation.

Globalisation: refers to the acceleration of neoliberal capitalism’s global reach by the most powerful systems in the West, not only exploiting the most vulnerable people and environments in the world for economic gain, but also invading other cultures with a Western ideology which reproduces discrimination on a complex global level within and between countries.

Hegemony: conceptualises the ways in which one class maintains dominance over the rest of society by a subtle system of coercion and consent. Coercion is maintained through the law, the police and the armed forces, and through a parallel but mutual process of ideological persuasion. Gramsci’s important contribution gives insight into the way that our minds are colonised by dominant ideas through the institutions of civil society – the family, religious organisations, schools and so on – persuading us to consent to our lot in life.

Intersectionality: the way that power relations of ‘race’, class, gender and all other differences overlap and intertwine as a complex whole to benefit the interests of White, patriarchal supremacy. Intersectionality is a flexible analytic tool that emerged from Black women’s wisdom to deepen knowledge of power by connecting the overlapping, intertwining, mutually reinforcing complexities of social inequality, power and discrimination to reveal one overriding system of mutually reinforcing oppressions, operating in diverse contexts, at diverse levels.

Knowledge democracy: seeks to re-claim multiple epistemologies and ontologies subsumed under the weight of a dominant truth as a legitimate right, and key to the process of diversity and inclusion. This places cognitive justice as inextricably connected to social justice and environmental justice.

Liberating education: Freire’s vision was the transformation of humanity to a participatory democracy founded on diversity and biodiversity, achieved by dispelling false consciousness for critical consciousness simply by teaching people to question. This frees people to see discrimination for what it is and to act collectively for change. This process of liberating education is action for freedom, and runs counter to domesticating or banking education.

Love: a multidimensional consciousness that accepts others just as they are.

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Glossary

Magical consciousness: is Freire’s concept of a fatalistic, disempowered and passive way of seeing the world.

Naive consciousness: is Freire’s concept of partial empowerment that relates to the symptoms of oppression, engaging with single issues rather than the underlying roots of injustice.

Neoliberalism: refers to a free market non-interventionist ideology based on profit, individualism, competition, privatisation and the deregulation of trade and finance.

Neoliberal capitalism: refers to the accelerating system of modern capitalism that operates from a profit-over-people-and-planet imperative and has taken on global proportions.

Ontology: ways of being and acting in the world.

Oppression: is the outcome of discrimination. While categories of discrimination can be seen as class, ‘race’, gender, ethnicity, and so forth, the forms of oppression which result are classism, racism, sexism, xenophobia and so forth, which are now seen in intersectional terms as a complex overlapping net of oppressions which act in the interests of the dominance of White, patriarchal supremacy.

Participation: true participation is achieved in community development through the empowerment of people to engage in collective action for justice and democracy from a critical perspective. Social change comes from bottom-up grassroots action, not top down.

Participatory democracy: people directly and actively participate in decisionmaking through deliberation and dialogue. Participatory democracy is seen as a more authentic form of democracy.

Praxis: a unity of theory and practice, which, in community development, involves theory generated in action, the link between knowledge and power through critical consciousness which leads to critical action.

Prejudice: can be seen as the expression of discrimination at a personal level in overt or covert ways, and involves judgemental attitudes which are based on stereotyping and resist reason or evidence (Thompson, 2020).

Presencing: being in a situation or with a person, without judgement and paying full attention to the moment.

Problematising: the essence of Freirean pedagogy; people are encouraged to ask thought-provoking questions and ‘to question answers rather than merely to answer questions’ (Shor, 1993: 26). This calls for strong democratic values as the basis of a mutual, transformative learning context where educators expect to be co-learners.

Radical community development: is committed to the role of community development in contributing to transformative change for social, cognitive and environmental justice, and develops analysis which moves beyond local symptoms to structural causes of oppression, and action which moves from local to global.

Regeneration: the development of a place, community or landscape through enhancement so that it flourishes economically, ecologically and spiritually.

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Salutogenesis: the creation and promotion of health rather than the prevention of disease.

Social justice: for radical community development, social justice aims to create equal worth, equal rights, opportunities for all and the elimination of inequalities reinforced by poverty (Commission for Social Justice, 1994). Today we know that we cannot achieve social justice without environmental justice and without knowledge democracy; all oppressions are interlinked, to solve one, we need to solve all.

Stigma politics: based on social abjection theory, explains the way that the state targets some social groups as disgusting and unworthy, reinforced by the media and normalised in everyday conversations. The powerful are represented as worthy, deserving subjects; the disempowered as unworthy, undeserving objects.

The one reinforces the other, justifying social divisions of poverty and privilege.

Systems thinking: the idea that everything is connected and there is an energetic relationship between things. Thus, all is relational and it is the connections that should be the focus not the things.

TINA, or ‘There is no alternative’: the mantra of Margaret Thatcher and rally cry of neoliberalism designed to persuade us to accept that this broken capitalist system is the only choice we have.

White privilege: refers to an invisible, assumed entitlement of Whiteness as superior. It calls on us to engage with intersections of ‘race’, class, gender and all other discriminations, including environmental degradation, in order to understand, challenge and change Whiteness as a political ideology that acts in the interests of the privileged.

Worldview: a set of attitudes, beliefs and values that are held by a society or an individual about how the world is and should be.

xvi

Acknowledgements

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Acknowledgements: Margaret Giving birth to ideas involves teamwork. My gratitude goes to the multitude of thinkers and activists who have inspired me and provided a foundation for the development of my lifework. At this point, I could list many but, in particular, I thank Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci for plunging me into critical consciousness when I was on a quest to understand power. I am indebted to Black feminists, including my late friend and colleague Paula Asgill and many others who challenged the limitations of us White feminists and paved the way forward with intersectional feminism, Patricia Hill Collins and many more; and to my contemporary thinkers, a host of whom contribute to both the critique of this crumbling social order and the construction of a long-overdue counternarrative to replace it: Imogen Tyler, Kate Raworth, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Annie Lowrey, Danny Dorling, Rutger Bregman, George Monbiot, Andrew Sayer, and many others honoured within the pages of this book. The process is symbiotic: its integrity is embedded in the lived experience of those in community – my Vietnamese mothers and Wendy, Celia, Mary, Paul, plus so many more who welcomed me into their lives – they are woven into the ideas I develop; its purpose is invested in those who act on these ideas to create a better world for generations yet to come.

I have a wonderful team gathered round me, supporting me in my work: Steve, whose love, interest and political commitment nurture the fire in my soul, the fury and indignation that rises up against social injustice, violations of human rights, degradation of the planet; Grace, whose engagement with my ideas is a pure joy, reaffirming that our future lies in this upcoming generation which is far more outraged by the greed and recklessness that has come to mark our generation, and who will join with others to clear up the mess we are in for the sake of those who follow in her footsteps: Seb, Flo and Beau, and all children of the world. In getting our word into the world to speak our truth to power, my grateful thanks to Sarah Bird, whose enthusiasm for our work fuels me to be my best; to Jo Morton, whose interest in our ideas and dedicated attention to detail present the text in its most readable and exciting form; to Ruth Wallace for her fine-tuning; to Emma Cook for her behind-the-scenes hard work; to Angela Gage for her marketing skills; and to the wonderful team behind them who lift the book into the world. To this vast team and more, thank you!

Acknowledgements: Jane This book was written in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty 6 territory, the territory of the Papaschase, and the homeland of the Métis Nation, xvii

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Participatory Practice

at the crossing place for many peoples and settlers. I honour the land that supported me and the wisdom of both the indigenous communities of Canada and the settlers for which I will be forever grateful. I particularly want to thank the women I met through the Inside Outsider leadership course in 2012 and the monthly Ginger Saloons which provide me with solace and spiritual support while facing the challenge of an academic life. I learnt so much from you all.

You will know who you are, too numerous to mention here. That journey led me to Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea’s The Circle Way. It was like coming home, thank you; it was privilege to sit in circle with you. Finally, I would like to thank my students at the University of Alberta from whom I have learnt far more than I have taught. Canada is a truly optimistic multicultural country and while the deep-seated problems inherited from the impact of colonialism continue to reverberate, the students with their creativity and thoughtfulness give me hope for the future, both for that country and the planet.

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Introduction: Our stories This second edition of our book was written slightly differently from the first.

Both are the product of a shared journey, influenced by the experiences of two very different lives. In this, as in the first, edition we have approached the task in the spirit of the book itself, founding our approach on dialogue, on mutuality and respect for each other’s ideas, and on an openness to a dialectical challenge, locating dissent as central to knowledge creation within a frame of ‘connected knowing’ (Belenky et al, 1997). The original book was the product of an organic, transformative process for us, a process that continued afterwards. When we were approached by Policy Press to produce a second edition we were both in very different places, geographically and temporally. This, together with the pandemic during which we were writing, posed a challenge to our previous way of working. The result is a book that reflects our two voices and our experiences since the first edition.

In the book itself, we emphasise the use of story as a way of anchoring the process of change in lived experience. True to this approach, we share aspects of our own stories with you here. A participatory approach calls for us to acknowledge the ways in which our own life experiences have shaped the ideas that we share with you, and these vignettes give you insight into critical moments that have influenced our theory and practice over the years.

We met in 1992 and became firm friends, who recognised our shared values long before we recognised shared academic interests. That recognition surfaced in 1996, when we both attended one of the participatory action research conferences at Stroud organised by Peter Reason and Judi Marshall. It was a coming together of the personal and professional at an event that aimed to do just that: understand life as a connected form of knowing.

Jane’s story When I met Margaret, I had already moved my focus from geography to health promotion, and through the latter had become attracted to the ideas of Paulo Freire, introduced to me by Nina Wallerstein at a chance meeting at the University of Liverpool. Nina, who is now a professor at the University of New Mexico, had been using Freirean approaches in her work with marginalised young people in New Mexico as well as in her previous work in South America. This approach to popular education resonated through my work as a part-time tutor with The Open University, helping me to gain much greater practical understanding of how adults learn to be questioning and confident. Over the years, both in my work with The Open University and elsewhere, I saw people blossom when they gradually gained insight into new ideas about themselves in their world.

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Participatory Practice

At first glance, a move between geography and health promotion might appear strange and disconnected. Yet the two are more closely linked than it appears on the surface – many of the ideas in this book were first introduced to me as an undergraduate geography student, and they have resurfaced time and again in different contexts. It was during my time as an undergraduate that I became aware of ecology and our place in it. We debated ‘A blueprint for survival’, published by The Ecologist (1972), the first time the environment and our impact on it reached a wider audience. Inspired into action, we collected and dumped non-returnable bottles on Schweppes’ factory doorstep.

It is easy to think back and identify crucial turning points in one’s life that at the time seemed to have no great significance. One such turning point found me sitting in a lecture theatre at the first Healthy Cities conference in Liverpool in 1987 thinking, as I was listening to the various plenary speakers, “But this is urban geography!”. A chance conversation over coffee with a colleague had brought me here. He talked about his partner, a landscape architect working with a community in Vauxhall, Liverpool. That community, which came to be known as the Eldonians, was hailed for its community action in rejecting the city council’s plans for regeneration. Instead, they developed their own Eldonian village in partnership with community architects. Here was my first taste of participation and both my heart and my head wanted to know more. Healthy Cities was and is an initiative spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office in Europe aiming to engage local government in health and well-being. In order to create healthy communities, it is important to see health and well-being as influenced by a range of dimensions. This notion of ‘healthy cities’ struck a chord, not only because the approach emphasised the need for an interrelationship between humans and their social and physical environment, but because it acknowledged that without peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice and equity, human flourishing is just not possible. These ideas resonated with me as a human ecologist, a geographer for whom notions of the interrelationship between humans and their environment is core. It was an understanding that was second nature to me: notions of reciprocal maintenance, caring for each other, our communities and the natural environment, and central was the empowerment of communities and individuals to take control of their lives. The Healthy Cities/Health for All movement, whose origins lay in an opposition to the Thatcherite policies of the 1980s that denied the existence of health inequalities, attracted me. Albeit often described as a social movement in bureaucratic clothing (Stevenson and Burke, 1991), it was at this time starting to roll in the UK, and I rolled with it, so starting my journey from pure theory to an integration of theory and practice, and from geography to health promotion.

Having been drawn to new approaches to inquiry, intellectually engaging with the ideas of John Heron, John Rowan and Peter Reason in the 1980s, the experience of putting these ground-breaking ideas into action followed later. I was working with a local community worker on an outer estate in Liverpool to 2

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Introduction: Our stories

pioneer a participatory approach to evaluation across a whole range of initiatives in one neighbourhood. It was agreed that the community worker would train local people in research skills to enable them to do their own evaluation. He began by asking them to think about how they would celebrate their success in a year’s time. By making the experience relevant to them, he released passion, energy and enthusiasm. This, in turn, was transmitted beyond the boundaries of the room, with the result that even more people turned up to the next meeting.

The reference to heart and head is important here: passion as well as intellect need to be integrated. I remember visiting a health centre for Native Americans in downtown Berkeley, California. A peripatetic ‘medicine man’ happened to be visiting that day and agreed to meet us. He talked about health problems involving drug and alcohol abuse faced by Native Americans in relation to spiritual health, and the importance of a holistic approach to life. Taking a book, he placed it laterally level with his throat. The trouble with Western society, he said, is that the head is cut off, like this, from the heart. I can still see that picture in my mind’s eye. It made so much sense in relation to health promotion. Here was a principles- and values-based approach to practice which encapsulated not only notions of ecology, but also notions of wholeness. This was a concept of health that had been with me since my childhood, and which, as I was starting to discover, underpinned other worldviews.

At around the same time as I started to change my focus, I also started to seek changes in myself. I grew up into a shy and sensitive young adult, whose fear of people led me into the world of academia. From here, personal circumstances then jettisoned me into a world on the fringes of life, on boats on the canals and in the docks in different parts of England. Here, living off the land with very little money, estranged from my family because my mother did not approve, had a profound effect on my attitudes to the material and the social.

I started questioning reality and my place in it, and increasingly became selfreflective, more self-aware. Just as the health promotion movement enticed me out of my academic ivory tower, personal life experiences were drawing me into an inner journey, along The Road Less Travelled (Peck, 2002). Indeed, it was a colleague giving me that book that started the process off. It was at this juxtaposition, between a movement of increasing inner and outer awareness, that my path crossed with Margaret’s. We met at the same series of spiritual development workshops. The reflective process involved working in groups and pairs, and we only found ourselves together once, towards the end, during a workshop focused on shamanic practices. In this exercise we were asked to try a self-managed shamanic inner journey encouraged by drumming. Our partner’s role was to record the journey as we described it during the process of deep self-reflection. In this way, I recorded Margaret’s story of her journey and she recorded mine. And so began our story.

Much has happened both personally and politically since this time in the early 1990s. When we wrote the first book I was living and working in Sweden taking forward participatory action research. I returned to the UK in 2009 but 3

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Participatory Practice

the crash of 2008 was beginning to have its impact and cuts were taking place in Higher Education. When I was headhunted for a post in Canada, I took the opportunity. Canada is a relatively more equal society than the UK, but it does display all the markings of the downsides of contemporary neoliberalism and a colonial inheritance. Social class is less dominant as a vehicle for oppression but the legacy of the colonial past is everywhere and raised my awareness of those issues.

Here, however I have been blessed with connections with many practitioners locally, working with rich multicultural communities and exposed to indigenous knowledge, both of which have shaped my understanding of participatory practice from a different perspective. My experience here has deepened my knowledge and strengthened my practice in a way I could not have foreseen. The values and principles underpinning community-based practice that attracted me to health promotion are shared by others engaged in many different contexts. What connects us are those deeply held values and principles that provide not just a foundation for practice, but a foundation for life – values of respect, trust, dignity, mutuality, reciprocity. This book reaffirms those values that drew the two of us together, which are shared by those who seek social justice. The aim is to reinvigorate community and connection to new levels by putting participatory practice at the centre of all that we do, to promote the well-being of all.

Margaret’s story I began life as the daughter of Grace Constance: when I became the grandmother of Grace it felt like the wheels had turned full circle. Reflecting back on those austere but optimistic post-World War II years, life welcomed me into the bosom of a loving extended family headed by adoring grandparents and surrounded by a stable community. So much of my sense of self was formed in that Birmingham suburb, nestling at the bottom of the steep hill that led to Erdington Parish Church, a church that witnessed all our family births, marriages and deaths. I can still name our neighbours and local shopkeepers, can still picture Mr Shute, the chemist, in the High Street, who would make up a ‘cough bottle’ when I was ‘chesty’. Opposite was Dr Treadwell’s home and surgery, Coton Cottage, tucked behind a little picket fence. He was the doctor who nursed me through polio when my mother was too scared to hear the word, let alone allow me to go to hospital. The village green at the other end of the High Street, where I stood to attention in my new Girl Guide uniform on Sunday mornings for church parade, had the Victorian public library and baths to one side, and Wrenson’s, the local grocers, to the other, the delivery boy’s bicycle propped up against the wall outside. All these remain symbols of my early stability.

I did not know the meaning of schooling as hegemonic at the time, but this concept has retrospectively been key to my experience of schooling as a child, and to triggering my critical consciousness as a teacher in young adulthood. Picture 1972, with me in the frame, a newly qualified classroom teacher, nervously contemplating a class of 36 eight- to ten-year-olds, looking out across a sea of 4

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Introduction: Our stories

faces eagerly weighing me up. The school building was Victorian, with classrooms leading off a central hall. Inside, the classrooms had fixed desks, and windows were set too high for anyone under six feet tall to see a world outside. On first examination, the only resources available to me were geography textbooks, 20 years out of date. These were stacked in enormous cupboards that flanked the long wall opposite the windows. As the days went on, I was perturbed by what I saw acted out before my eyes. Three years of teacher training had reinforced over and over again that politics should be kept out of schools; classrooms were apolitical spaces.

What I witnessed, of course, was hegemony in action: power acted out in this microcosm of wider society, and relations of ‘race’, class and gender reinforced. I did not know what hegemony meant at the time, but very simply it refers to the way that dominant ideas resist change, in this case by classrooms acting as places where children get silenced and learn their ranked status in the world according to the status quo. In the culture of the staff room, I listened to pronouncements that diminished the life chances of young children, just as I had experienced as a child.

I had no analysis to give me any understanding of how to make an intervention in this process of disempowerment; I just knew that it was profoundly wrong.

From the primary classroom, my search for insight and understanding led me in a number of directions, from adult literacy to educational psychology. In the early 1980s, I worked with Vietnamese refugees, those known as the ‘boat people’, who risked death and abandonment on the South China Sea to escape tyranny in their own country, only to find a different kind of tyranny in the West. As I listened to their stories of separation from children, of giving birth on the high seas on rusty old landing craft that offered no dignity and no protection, of facing death as ship after ship from the West abandoned them to starvation and dehydration, we held each other for comfort; we became friends in our common humanity, as they taught me more than I could ever teach them. I began to realise that my quest for critical insight was out there in the real world, in community, where everyday lives are shaped. That was the point at which I chose to study for a Master’s degree in Community Education and Development at the University of Edinburgh, and it proved to be the context in which my search for a critical analysis of power was realised. David Alexander, with great passion, introduced me to the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who was imprisoned and died under Mussolini in the rise of Italian fascism simply for teaching people to think, and Paulo Freire, the Brazilian adult educator, who was imprisoned and exiled for teaching people to read and to question. Such is the power of ideas! As I read about Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and began understand his analysis of the way that power is threaded through our everyday lives from our time of birth, it became so obvious, it was hard to believe that I had not spotted it myself.

But the way we are taught to see the world powerfully permeates the essence of our being and influences the way we act in the world. Gramsci felt that false consciousness is so pervasive that it takes external intervention from ‘traditional intellectuals’, as he called them, to act as a catalyst in the process of demystifying power. My experience was certainly testament to that.

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Participatory Practice

The political context of the time saw the New Right in ascendance. Thatcherism took hold, poverty escalated and my life became one of street activism. The miners’ strike of 1984–85 brought support from broad-based alliances all over the world as we witnessed hegemony at work: while the power of persuasion was asserted through control of the media, convincing the country at large that the miners were undermining the very moral fabric of society, freedom of movement from mining communities was blocked by the police who were, cleverly, drafted in from other parts of the country to avoid mixed loyalties. The women of the mining communities took immediate action, to the shock of Margaret Thatcher who had expected that she could appeal to them to force the miners back to work. Women Against Pit Closures became their organised action as they rose up in support of their families and communities, threatened in their survival by starvation tactics.

Initially they set up soup kitchens to feed families whose benefits had been cut.

Many of these women had never been outside their mining communities, built round the pithead to serve the interests of the industry; their role was one of unpaid labour. Their outrage at the burgeoning threat of the government’s desire to dismantle the last large union of organised workers gave them the confidence to give public talks all over the country and abroad, seeking support. Alliances across difference emerged, and at many demonstrations coachloads of supporters would swell the numbers. This was the heyday of new social movements, and women, LGBTQ groups, greens and others stood together against injustice. This was the stamping ground of my political activism.

Participatory democracy in Nicaragua captured the hearts of those who stood for a just and peaceful world. The Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign was central to my life. In Nicaragua, in 1985, living with the people of Puerto Cabezas, in particular, helped me to experience participatory democracy in action. Under the Sandinistas, advised by Paulo Freire, literacy and health campaigns swept the country, led by young people, filling hearts with hope. As part of a twinning campaign between Manchester and Puerto Cabezas, we organised for John McDonald, the outstanding health educator, to go to Puerto Cabezas to develop a health centre. He wrote saying, ‘How could you do this to me?’ Even for someone like John, with many years’ experience in Africa, Puerto Cabezas was at the edge of the world – all those who could get out had left, and the town was under constant threat. Frequent attacks were made by sea from Honduras, and overland routes were landmined by the Contra. It did not stop those of us whose vision of a democratic future lived in the hope of Nicaraguan success.

Yet this little country, striving to achieve true participation, was perceived as such a threat to the US that sonic booms were heard every day over Managua, creating fear in the minds of everyone. On a bus trip to Bluefields, we were almost swept up into a Contra raid – attacks like this were commonplace. The Contra, trained in terrorist tactics in Florida, would descend from the cover of the rainforests of the interior and abduct local women, rape children in front of their fathers, cut off the fingers of husbands and force wives to drink the blood.

It was terrifying for someone like me who had had such a sheltered upbringing.

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Introduction: Our stories

We supported: workshops for the many permanently ‘dis’abled in conflict: the twinning of Nicaraguan schools with schools in Manchester; the setting-up of women’s sewing projects sponsored by Manchester women’s groups; and a resident community artist to capture the lived experience of local people in community wall murals. Nicaragua inspired hope in all of us that a harmonious and just way of life, founded on participatory democracy, was possible. In relation to becoming critical through border crossing (Giroux, 2005; Giroux and McLaren, 1996), this was a transformative experience for me. I saw life from an altered perspective.

Recently, in Katharine McMahon’s novel The Rose of Sebastopol, I read, ‘What good is their reference out here? Can’t you see? We are in a different place, where we have to think differently and find ourselves a new way of being’ (2007: 218). Just as Mariella was faced with this stark fact by her lady’s maid, Nora, in the Crimean War, I quickly learnt the meaning of changed thinking leading to changed doing. One particularly critical encounter was when we were invited to meet the head of the army battalion defending the northern region, a dangerous area bordering onto Honduras. He willingly agreed to talk to our little group about the struggles they faced on a daily basis, but then took my breath away: “We send money to support your miners’ strike. Tell me how you have used this struggle as a way to true democracy.” In the face of the courage shown by the Nicaraguans, how could I explain that the false consciousness fostered by dominant hegemony had persuaded popular opinion against the miners, who were seen as undermining, rather than acting for, democracy?

Back home, I was very involved in the women’s movement. We were active in our local groups, reflecting on our lived experience, building practical theory from grassroots action. It was visible and powerful. We organised Greenham support groups to maintain the women’s peace action. It was a time of organised activism: we marched the streets carrying banners to say who we represented – Quakers, LGBTQ groups, civil rights activists – all joining together as one, singing, “Free Nelson Mandela!”. We joined with the anti-deportation campaigns of the civil rights workers. We loaded lorries full of supplies for War on Want, supported Médecins Sans Frontières, the list went on. It was a time of inspiration and hope.

In this period, I first worked in Old Trafford and Moss Side in Manchester, with multicultural inner-city communities, then with the people of Hattersley, a Manchester ‘overspill’ or ‘peripheral’ estate invented to house people from ‘slum clearance’ areas of inner-city Manchester, built on damp land that was no good for farming, on the foothills of the Pennines in North West England. My newfound praxis, a unity of critical reflection and transformative action, gave me a lens through which to see power acted out in everyday lives, in tangible ways before my very eyes. This not only helped me to understand life on the margins, but it gave me insight into who was destined to occupy this space outside the mainstream. I began to understand the way that poverty is a tool that reinforces discrimination, and that the process is not indiscriminate, but targets very specific social groups.

From experience, I began to understand that knowledge is power, and that ideas sold as ‘common sense’ make no sense whatsoever but are internalised and obscure 7

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Participatory Practice

the blatant contradictions that we live by in the West. Theories of power gave me conceptual tools to see and understand the world in more critical ways. The theories on their own in the academy would have remained academic, but they came alive in my practice in the community, building knowledge in action from lived experience, a living praxis.

I hit a point of dissonance in the theory/practice divide when I decided that my practice would evolve more critically if I developed it within a PhD framework working with the internationally respected adult educator Ralph Ruddock. I struggled to make sense of research methodologies that attempted to decontextualise the lives of the people with whom I worked until my colleague, Paul Jones, handed me a copy of Reason and Rowan’s Human Inquiry (1981). This was another critical moment in my politicisation. I read: ‘this book is about human inquiry … about people exploring and making sense of human action and experience … ways of going about research which [offer] alternatives to orthodox approaches, alternatives which … do justice to the humanness of all those involved in the research endeavour’ (1981: xi; emphasis in original), and my eyes lit up. This revolutionary book, the product of new paradigm researchers’ action for change, was transformative in my thinking. It gave me insight into participatory action research as a liberating practice, and profoundly influenced my approach to knowledge creation in everyday life.

The approaches to research I discovered here were consonant with the value base of community development practice, and offered an integrated praxis, a way of building knowledge in action and acting on that knowledge. A basic model that has stayed with me ever since this time is Rowan’s cycle model, which offers a structure for integrating theory and practice as an ongoing dialectical cycle of action and knowledge generation (Rowan, 1981: 98).

In 1992, when I met Jane, I had just made a move from grassroots community development practice into the academy. I faltered on the interview day, questioning the relevance of moving to such a cloistered context after being at the heart of community life for so many years. In my mind’s eye, I could see myself sitting in Mottram Churchyard, having a picnic lunch with Paul. Our partnership was so good for so long, and we thrived on the challenges of Hattersley life, “Could there ever be life after Hattersley?”, we asked ourselves. But, life moves on, and my challenge was to locate myself where I could make most difference to the process of change, to keep community development critical, to give it the label ‘radical community development’ simply to emphasise its unequivocal commitment to social justice. In my new role as a community work educator, my life was woven together with Paula Asgill, a woman of Jamaican heritage, who became my close friend and colleague. Through shared experience, we became aware of differences in our lived realities as two women, divided by racism. We worked together on research into critical alliances between Black and White women in order to gain deeper insight into the process of sustaining alliances for change, and I began to touch at the edges of White power as it manifests itself in daily encounters. She died at the age of 47, 14 years later; racism snuffed out the candle burning in her soul.

8

Introduction: Our stories

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During this period, a young student came bursting into my office, waving a call for papers for the ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ conference in Omaha in 1995.

He had been excited by my passion for the work of Freire, and was urging me to submit a paper. I did, and I found myself beginning a long connection with what is now known as the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed organisation.

In 1996, Doug Paterson from the University of Nebraska at Omaha invited Paulo Freire and Nita, his wife since 1988, who continues to support his work today, and Augusto Boal to the conference, where it was my great pleasure to meet them just a few months before Freire’s death. This was the context for my engagement with such radical educators as Ira Shor, Peter McLaren, Antonia Darder, Peter Mayo, Michelle Fine, Maxine Green, Chris Cavanagh and many others significant in the critical pedagogy movement.

I wrote that 12 years ago! In that short space of time, the global political context has changed beyond recognition. Neoliberalism was invented by a small group of men in the Swiss village of Mont Pelerin in 1947. The intention was to come up with a story to counter the socialism of the post-war consensus on welfare expressed in the British welfare state. Neoliberalism was a dubious idea. But an opportunity appeared when Margaret Thatcher stepped into an interregnum several decades later, championing the idea with great gusto, selling to it to Ronald Reagan … and from there it spread like wildfire. This extremely strange idea changed the world into a place driven by the excess and greed of the rich.

Its compelling story mesmerised people into a coma of inaction, unable to see power for what it is and therefore grappling with injustices in a fragmented and incomplete way, engaging with the surface symptoms of injustice, failing to get to grips with intersectional power.

Founded on profit as the indicator of progress, its inevitable consequences have been extreme inequalities within and between countries that privilege the rich at the expense of the poor. Environmental degradation and human destitution are markers of the ‘success’ of that story as the super-rich of the world transcend all cultures in their common interests to avoid fair taxation and to live lives beyond the capacity of the ecosystem. These are the social and environmental justice preoccupations that have driven the writing I do and the talks I give as time runs short. Now we face multiple crises of immense proportions, all related to excess and consumerism. This book is an attempt to put inequality and environmental degradation at the heart of all our conversations and develop a wisdom that is an integrated whole. Interconnected thought is much more akin to women’s intuitive ways of knowing and indigenous thought, embracing the soul, the Universe and everything that constitutes life on Earth as a mutual ecosystem. This exposes neoliberalism as driven by the interests of patriarchy and profit at the expense of the rest. Imagine replacing economic growth and profit with human kindness and friendship, a world reconnected by empathy. The neuroscientific evidence that we have an empathy circuit in our brains places this idea firmly on the table as not only possible but necessary for humans to survive and flourish. This would 9

Participatory Practice

place us in the ecosystem taking responsibility for each other, those we know and strangers, as part of the family of humanity, caring for the planet that’s our home – all interdependent. On a personal level, I am now grandmother to Seb, Flo and Beau, as well as Grace, and that role fills me with love, connecting me to all children of the world, as my own, all part of the family of humanity, the family of life on Earth which carries responsibilities for decisions that ensure the wellbeing of seven generations to come.

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Our joint story Now, 30 years after we first met, this book has been influenced by all these significant experiences in our lives. Our inspiration for writing it comes from a shared commitment to a participatory worldview as a way of life predicated on peace, cooperation, social justice, diversity and sustainability. Here we present you with the results of the process we have shared, and the ideas that have emerged from that dialectical engagement, in the belief that participatory practice is the path to participatory democracy. In what follows, Chapter 1 provides you with an overview of our ideas. At the end of that chapter, we provide a chapter summary to act as guide to the book as a whole and the interweaving of our thought processes as we came together again 12 years after the first edition.

Note on terminology Throughout, we have used ‘race’ and ‘dis’ability to emphasise the socially constructed nature of these concepts, and White and Black to indicate the political nature of these broad categories.

Note on icons Look out for these icons as you read through the book: Key point

Reflective question

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Story

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PART I

A participatory paradigm

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1 Participatory practice Jane Springett

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To be denied the capacity for potentially successful participation is to be denied one’s humanity. (Doyal and Gough, 1991: 184) ‘May you live in interesting times’ goes the old Chinese saying, and certainly that has been the case for us all recently. During the last 40 years, we have seen an increase in inequality in health and well-being, with wealth and power being concentrated in the hands of the few and, most seriously, an assault on nature in such a way as to undermine the very existence of life, including that of humanity itself. At the same time, we have seen rising demands for social justice with the emergence of movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, reflecting a general rise in citizen organising supported by the internet. Former colonising powers are being asked to face up to their past, but at the same time, social cohesion seems to be breaking down as people become polarised, angry and frustrated, whipped up by those whose aims are to retain power for themselves, rather than for the many, through creating division. Add a pandemic to the mix and we were able to see the cleavages in technicolour and the contrasts highlighted by the differential impact of the virus on population groups, alongside excess profiting by already privileged individuals and corporations, but at the same time, an outpouring of self-organised care and support by communities and people for each other. Historically, humanity has been here before, wealth has been accumulated in the hands of corrupt tyrants, division has been fomented by dictators and civilisations have collapsed due to ecological disaster and disease.

However, it is the global scale at which this happening that is so unprecedented, and for those who live in the privileged West, it seems that the advances made in the middle of the last century with regard to social justice are slipping away.

We appear to be at a point of no return. For the last 300 years we have developed institutions and systems that have been increasingly based on the story of selfish ‘man’, and those institutions that have been created reflect that dominant story, reinforced by a particular interpretation of economics – the ‘free market’; also of science – Newtonian; and, finally, of religion – man is sinful, all based on the notion that humans are basically selfish. As Europeans colonised the world, this story went with them and this Western mindset was imposed on others, taking away what had previously been shared and appropriating the collective into private ownership. Increasingly, power has been concentrated in the hands of 13

Participatory Practice

the few: largely sociopaths who, as they acquired power and wealth, felt less and less connected to humanity (Bregman, 2020: 204), while encouraging those they dominate not to trust one another. Such is the pervasive mindset that appears to be co-creating the future at this moment in time.

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Another world is not only possible; she is already on her way. On quiet days I can hear her breathing. (Attributed to Arundhati Roy and posted on www.ThisSpaceshipEarth.org on 29 March 2019) This book is about how to co-create that future. A future that is different from the one we seem to be heading towards. It is about how to change the way we think about our relationships between one another – and also between ourselves and the natural world – and, therefore, the way we act in the world with others.

It aims to make visible and encourage an alternative view of humanity, one that builds on the reality of human being. A reality that is based on kindness, love, empathy, connection and cooperation. The focus is on community transformation through participatory practice, which we see as the bedrock of moving forward to create systems and communities in which all our needs are met, for the many, not the few. How do we enhance diversity and connection, not by some constraining top-down authority but grounded in a participatory democracy? How do we acknowledge how we value each other, and how do we regenerate society and move from damage to wholeness? We create this alternative future by living with intention and visualising a different reality from the one we are seeing. Through raising our consciousness to a new level of awareness and understanding and, in doing so, coming to act in the world in a different way, we can bring into being that alternative future. To draw on a well-worn phrase: we have to be the change we want to see in the world.

For us, social justice goes hand in hand with ecological balance, and so we will be drawing not only on critical theory and community development thinkers such as Gramsci and Freire, but also on ecology for creating a road map towards a participatory consciousness and consequently participatory practice. We are not offering a toolbox for, as Bateson (1972) argued, ‘the map is not the territory’, but rather bringing to the fore a way of thinking about reality and, thus, a way of acting in the world. Our purpose in this book is to take you on a journey that transforms your thinking about participation. Our aim is that, in turn, this will transform your practice in the world. We believe that in becoming more critical of our thinking, our perceptions of the world around us change. In other words, becoming critical, developing a questioning approach to practice, challenges the taken-for-grantedness of everyday life. Attitudes that have been sold to us as ‘common sense’ no longer make any sense at all, and we begin to see beneath the surface-level symptoms that often distract practice to discover, in turn, an interconnected network of power relations that create inequalities.

This is a hopeful and inspiring process. In that process, we become more aware that change is possible, and how it can be achieved.

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Participatory practice

On the journey, we will provide many examples of how participatory practice has been applied so far, in all its flaws, in the real world. These green shoots or seeds for change help to show what is possible. When we seek to regenerate a garden, we often have to clear the land. To do so we need to know what to keep and what to discard. We can then plan what we want to plant. But deciding where to plant or put our seeds is not enough, the soil needs tending to. In the last 50 years, it was thought that this was best achieved through tilling the soil and applying fertiliser and pesticides, but that is the worst thing you can do. You need to replenish the soil with mulch and compost which you lay on the surface. Then the myriads of insects and bacteria can participate in the process of improving the soil, to create an environment that is rich in humus and nutrients. In time the plants with their roots, flowers, seeds and fruits themselves contribute to the soil and gradually the system comes into balance. Underpinning the process of regeneration is a set of natural principles without which the seeds for growth would not flourish. Such a natural area is complex, there is much hidden; indeed, only now, for example, are we beginning to know that trees talk to one another, that fungi help to transmit nutrients from one plant to another. So, too, is the way current society operates. Much is hidden and complex.

Moreover, there is a great deal of difference between a garden that someone else has planned and executed than one that you have created yourself. When you create a garden yourself you no longer see it as an object but you are in a relationship with the plants and soil by the mere process of co-creation with nature and as a participant in the ecosystem. This is the essence of participatory practice. In this chapter, we will introduce you to some of the key themes that are interwoven throughout the book and that make up a participatory practice ecosystem. In doing so we will be creating a counternarrative to the one that is currently dominant, one that reflects and creates a different interconnected reality. These themes are the seeds for change, which in Figure 1.1 we present as the petals of a flower around its calyx, becoming whole. Each of the petals (or themes) contains some aspects of the other petals, and together they all contribute to the whole, the flower.

By the end of the book, as we develop these themes, the seeds will have become more recognisable plants, which you will be able to use to co-create, with others, your own garden, your own participatory practice. Before we explore those themes, we invite you to think about what participation actually is.

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Participatory Practice

Figure 1.1: The themes in this book

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Health and well-being for all Participatory Practice as social justice Participatory Practice as a worldview Participatory Practice as the embodiment of values and principles Participatory Practice as a relational process Participatory Practice as interdependence and interbeing Participatory Practice as inner and outer transformation Participatory Practice as living the questions and critical thinking Participatory Practice as an ecological imperative

What is participation?

We elicit what is ‘out there’ in continuous acts of participation.

Participation is the essence not only in our cognitive acts but also in our social activities and endeavours. Tell me what you participate in and I will tell you who you are; and what the meaning of your life is. We become that in which we participate. As we participate so we become. (Skolimowski, 2001) Participation is fundamental to the nature of our being, an ontological given. (Reason and Bradbury, 2001: 8)

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Participation is about co-labouring for change, co-creating knowledge and co-creating the future. It is also a way of being that requires some humility and openness to others. Moreover, it is about acknowledging that we are all participants in nature. As many indigenous people of Canada and elsewhere will tell us, we are not separate from the environment but intimately connected to it. Our future is inextricably tied up with it and with each other (Gadgil et al, 2021). So, participation is about connection and relationship. Participation means recognising how everything we do is entangled with others, including the natural world (Barad, 2017).

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Participation is both an existential idea and a reality.

Several tools have been created to ‘measure’ participation. The earliest is based on the work of Arnstein (1969), in the form of a ladder of participation. Arnstein originally developed this ladder to explore different aspects of citizen power to distinguish between real power and an ‘empty ritual of participation’. Her ladder of diverse citizen participation and therefore power ranged from non-participation (manipulation, therapy), to tokenism (informing, consultation, placation), to citizen power (partnership, delegated power, citizen power). But the implications of this first and other subsequent attempts at exploring participation tend to be concerned with a hierarchy, whereas others see it as a continuum such as from going from ‘light’ to ‘intense’ or from ‘pragmatic’ to ‘emancipatory’ participation (Cornwall, 2008). Such frameworks and tools are useful in helping you to become aware of the widespread tendency to believe that participation has taken place when a group is consulted. However, without an in-depth examination of power per se and critical reflexivity, such inauthentic or pseudo-participation will remain unchallenged.

To be really authentic, participation has to be embodied. You cannot talk about participation and then engage with communities as if all you really want is for them to agree to your initial idea, or without being in relationship. There has to be parity in decision-making, in developing understanding and sense-making together, ultimately acting together through a collaborative iterative process. In that process of discovery, all are considered equal and deserving respect whatever their circumstances. Participation is grounded in participatory democracy; it begins in everyday life and is reflected in the stories we tell ourselves and each other. However, participation is also a way of life, a way of seeing the world and a way of being in the world (see Chapter 3). We say this to emphasise that it is not simply an approach to working in community; it has far-reaching implications for practice when the thinking behind it is more fully understood. Underpinning participation is a philosophy that is founded on principles of peace, justice and equality, a profound belief in the worth of everyone and the sanctity of the natural world. It is, in essence, a world that runs counter to the top-down, competitive values of the contemporary Western worldview. Seeing our world in a much more connected and cooperative way profoundly influences how we act.

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Social change begins with reframing and that reframing of a new way of being starts when we begin to surface our hidden and not-so-hidden frames through a critical inquiry process.

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Participation therefore empowers people to take action through the telling of their stories, engaging in quality dialogue and deliberation about those stories and their meaning. Through critical reflection and questioning we change the way we see the world and consequently how we act in it. From those new frames and actions, we create the future.

So, having introduced participation, as we see it in this book, we will now explore the themes that we believe make up true participatory practice.

Theme 1: Participatory practice as social justice in action The most general meaning of justice is parity of participation.

According to this radical-democratic interpretation of the principle of equal moral worth, justice requires social arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life. Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalised obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction.

(Fraser, 2009: 16) According to Nancy Fraser (2009), participatory parity is the backbone of social justice. It is not only about deciding together rather than one person or another deciding and others agreeing, but it is also about having structures and decisionmaking rules that encourage such involvement. Any participatory practice also involves engaging in an exploration of the bigger political issues and the underlying reasons for the day-to-day issues people face. It is through an analysis of prevailing social norms and assumptions that we start the process of transformation and contribute to pushing back the tide of neoliberalism (see Chapter 2 for more detail) that has created the current brain-fog concerning the collective and the essential goodness of human beings. By coming together and encouraging critical questioning of the status quo, we can together start to unpick the roots of injustice, making sure that all those affected by injustices have a say in resolving them.

‘Nothing about us without us’ became the slogan of the ‘dis’ability movement in the 1990s, but it applies to all those affected by social injustice.

To generate knowledge about persons without their full participation in deciding how to generate it, is to misrepresent their personhood and to abuse by neglect their capacity for autonomous intentionally.

It is fundamentally unethical. (Heron, 1996: 21) ‘The worst thing about living in poverty is the way it gives others permission to treat you – as if you don’t matter, as if your opinions 18

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don’t count, as if you have nothing to contribute.’ (Participant at Forum on Poverty, Scotland, 2006) To return to Fraser, she argues we must change the deep grammar of contemporary forms of injustice. Existing critical theories can help the process of questioning (see Chapters 7 and 8 for examples of these), but by engaging directly in the entangled processes of knowing and being in everyday life, the process of critical questioning can take place immersed within the process of participatory practice.

By engaging in this way, we do not fall into the trap of critique from the outside, at a distance, like traditional social science, but raise questions from within the realities of daily life. This is what Barad (2014) calls ‘defractive practice’, opening things up like opening up soil to aerate it and encourage new light to come in, while viewing the roots that are interconnected with the whole. In doing so we also have to address the underlying worldview of how we relate to one another (see also Theme 4).

Justice, thus, is not morality, but a responsive ethical relationality with the other, and about reworking our relationships with each other

Social justice cannot be achieved unless it is grounded in a truly participatory democracy, one in which every voice is heard. We need to return to the original source of the word. In Greek, demos means people and kratos means power. So, as participatory practice is social justice as an embodied act, that embodied act also requires a reimagining of democracy, one that nurtures our relationship with each other and nurtures each other’s spirit. This is an act against widespread epistemic injustice, the silencing of voices on the margins. It is also an act of challenging the status quo of single-issue tokenism, which is so pervasive in contemporary society, serving to divide us rather than bring us together.

Theme 2: Participatory practice as a worldview Why would anyone bother to articulate a theory of knowledge of her beliefs, if the ground for those beliefs were not challenged? (Harding, 1990: 87) Our behaviours, our habits and our actions in the world, consciously or unconsciously, reflect the frames through which we view the world. If we believe ‘there is no such thing as society’ we will act as if there is no society, and if we collectively think that way, we will co-create a world whereby society does not exist, with everyone isolated, disconnected and mentally ill. As Wahl (2016) argues, the mental models and worldviews we employ act as organising ideas that help to structure what we see and pay attention to. A pervasive concept that has dominated economic and scientific thinking since the 18th century is the notion of separation, whether it is mind from body, matter from spirit, or humans from 19

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nature. This dominant worldview is so hegemonic in contemporary society that it is assumed to be the most accurate view of reality and is one that has been imposed on those countries colonised by Europeans. An alternative worldview is a participatory one that takes us beyond this illusion of separateness. It is one shared by many indigenous people in those same colonised countries and found in the ancient myths and legends of the European countries themselves. Opening up to this alternative ‘reality’ changes your perception of the world and how you act in it. As you will see when we bring in the ideas of ecological and system thinking later, at the core of participatory consciousness is the understanding that all life is a circle. It is not the linear cause-effect model of the world, which currently dominates. Instead, a participatory worldview gives us a different lens or frame through which to view the world, providing a different picture of what we see and do not see. For example, it sees our world as one that seeks balance and one in which we engage with our environment and each other with our hearts, not just with our minds alone. Most of all it is one where there are no dualistic opposites; rather, it is about interconnection and wholeness. In many ways we instinctively know this, but socialisation and institutional structures, trauma and life circumstances have distorted our perceptions, clouding our minds and preventing us from connecting with our hearts. By changing our awareness, bringing what has hitherto been unconscious to the surface through critical questioning (see Chapter 7), we can start the process of awakening and hence transformation.

At this moment in time humanity is facing a terminal crisis of an outdated worldview. We argue in this book for an alternative participatory worldview with its emphasis on complexity and connection; one where spirit, consciousness and matter are inextricably linked. Further, we argue that you cannot truly engage in participatory practice unless you also adopt the lens of participatory consciousness (see Chapter 4). Focusing on separation, for example, also justifies competition, whereas focusing on connection leads to cooperation and an emphasis on the process of relating rather than one of ‘putting one over’ on the other. ‘Cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world, but rather the act of bringing forth a world through the processes of living as relating’, according to Maturana and Varela (1987). These biologists also suggest that we have to realise that the ‘world-as-we-know-it’ emerges out of the way we relate to each other and the wider natural process. Drawing on Biology of Love by Maturana and Verden-Zöller (1996), Wahl (2016: 34) writes: Is our ability to love what makes humanity worth sustaining? We are not the pinnacle of evolution but participants in its processes – conscious participants capable of self-reflection. We are only just beginning to understand consciousness and in the process are becoming aware of our intimate communion and entanglement with all there is. Every living being reflects the whole, the evolving and transforming universe, back onto itself in its own unique way.

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However, it is not easy to view the world in this different way. The hegemonic colonisation by the outdated worldview of our minds is reinforced on a daily basis in the stories we tell ourselves and those that others tell us, whether heard in the media or from our peers. The alternative voices required to bring about change must shout louder and more consistently to be heard above the cacophony we are subjected to.

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A participatory consciousness underpinned by love creates the lens that is needed to create the change we want to see in the world and helps us to be that change with others.

Theme 3: Participatory practice as the embodiment of values and principles Take away love and our earth is a tomb. (Browning, 1855) If we are to succeed in co-creating new social realities, we cannot choose between love and power, we must choose both. (Kahane, 2010) We know that it is important when working with community groups to spend some time agreeing on the rules of engagement, often called ground rules. In more formal workshops these are usually posted on the wall, and when someone strays from those ground rules a member of the group will often refer to that wall chart, pointing out gently what has been agreed. None of us is perfect, so occasionally any of us might forget what has been agreed or fall back into habitual practices that deviate from those agreed. However, the collective agreement holds sway because if the process has been truly participatory – that is, there has been participatory parity in decision-making – the rules are owned. Those ‘rules’ will be based on agreed values and principles. They are embedded in the values of those who shape their practice and act as a social bond between people. In the more informal setting, a community group dialogue as a general discussion of values is a useful starting point.

The values and principles of empathy, compassion, kindness, mutual respect, dignity, diversity, including honouring all ways of knowing, are fundamental to participatory practice.

The principles of participatory practice form the basis of the most important value of all: love. This is not being ‘Pollyannish’ in perspective; rather, we are brain-wired to love, as current neuroscience developments show us, just as we are wired to collaborate. We are not talking about love in the romantic sense but the wider concept of love which the Greeks differentiated by seven different words,1 one of which, agápe, reflects Freire’s (1972) love of all humanity. Embarrassment with talking about love is a reflection both of the way contemporary language reinforces 21

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the current Western mindset of duality and also of how love and its associate, care, are devalued in Western society and institutions. Love and care are not acknowledged for their contribution to society, either as a skill to be paid for appropriately, or for their central role in maintaining social cohesion and connection.

If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.

(Thich Nhat Hanh, 2014: 1) To love is to act towards another from the heart and not just the mind. This is no mean task, given the Western pathology of cynicism. It is a skill that has to be developed. As the Marxist and philosopher Eric Fromm argues, this type of love requires deliberate practice, just like any other skill. In his book, The Art of Loving, he argues that love demands both knowledge and effort (Fromm, 2000). We only become masters in the art of love, when both the theory and the practice are blended into one. This holds true, of course, for anything: for music, for medicine, for carpentry – and also for love. Here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art. Despite the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important: success, prestige, money, power – almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.

As a consequence, we become immune to the suffering of others, and walk on by, passing shop doorways, foodbanks, hungry children, blaming them for their own suffering. Fromm (2000) goes on to explore the misconceptions and cultural falsehoods keeping us from mastering this supreme human skill, outlining both its theory and its practice with extraordinary insight into the complexities of the human heart. Love, in the widest meaning of the word, is not something that can be measured but can only be experienced.

Transformation implies a move from the love of power to the power of love.

Our values dictate how we see the world. Participatory practice requires us not only to keep these values to the forefront intellectually but also to embody them in the way we act. This requires a radical approach to kindness, one that reaches across divides and seeks healing, one that holds the space for dialogue, that listens 22

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to stories with deep attention and with the ethics of care. It means focusing on how we relate to one another, how we act towards one another, how we care for one another, create a feeling of safety and trust, and welcome each other’s perspectives. It is about deep listening and seeking understanding. Since, when we talk, the words we use can potentially be divisive, we need to be careful of how we communicate our thoughts and feelings and also of how we convey our values through our actions. These values run counter to current trends whereby those who hold power try to create a required distance between people through encouraging anger and division, fear and culture wars. However, by embodying and acting with the intention of holding these values, we model and co-create an alternative way of being. Of course, cultural norms about how to enact and talk about love will vary in different societies and groups, and thus in how the value of love might manifest, whatever the context. Nonetheless, the intention in participatory practice is always the same, to move the value norm from the love of power to the power of love.

Theme 4: Participatory practice as a relational process Transformational culture work is always relational; it is not transactional.

Real diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging work is not about a checklist. It is about relationships. (Aiko Bethea, 20202) … this is participative universe, nothing lives alone. Everything comes into form because of relationship… Even reality is created through our participation on relationships. We chose what we notice; we relate to certain things and not others. Through these chosen relationships we co-create the world. (Wheatley, 1999, quoted in Wahl, 2016: 143) As already alluded to, participatory practice is a relational process. The dominant story that puts economics and consumption at its centre creates a particular type of relationship, and it is an unequal one. Indeed, as we have argued, there is no value put on caring, equal, reciprocal relationships at all, despite the fact that they are the glue that keeps things functioning and sustains social cohesion. Society is currently structured to downgrade relationships and prioritise the material, or ‘things’. It also promulgates the primacy of competition over collaboration. This is both a misleading mindset and an unsustainable ‘reality’. The richness of our lives is determined by the quality of our relationships, both between ourselves and with the environment around us. But this is barely acknowledged in some areas. Take scientific papers in the so-called health sciences, for example: they are stripped of the relationships at the centre of the healthcare process. Yet, as we know from our experience of the recent pandemic, a hug, a smile, a pleasant word from another person is fundamental to our well-being, as is our relationship with nature. Participatory practice is a manifestation of the relational: co-creation, 23

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co-learning and critical pedagogy. It promotes genuine authentic relationships and represents the strong link between individual responsibility for ourselves, for each other and community well-being.

Participatory practice in cameo The Multicultural Health Brokers Cooperative (MCHB) works with, among others, immigrant and refugee families suffering domestic violence in Edmonton,

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Canada. Working with the many different cultures that make up the diasporas that have come to Canada, health brokers act as cultural brokers with the many service organisations supporting families in the city. Because they are from the communities they serve, they can work with families in a way that reflects cultural norms, and they do so through participatory practice. Within the African communities the dominant cultural norm of the concept of family differs from the Western norm. So, the MCHB practices when working with this group are grounded in the collectivist cultures of that region, whereby the family is highly valued. The practices that are adopted aim to encourage family safety and harmony. They also address the need to be respectful and flexible when developing relationships.

In working with families, presence is integral in establishing and maintaining relationships. However, they also adapt their practice to be culturally sensitive to individual interpretations of family customs in terms of the role of husband and wife, while encouraging the valued collective decision-making by the extended family and mediation through elders within the community that is the social norm. It is a delicate path to tread given that social norms in the host community of Canada as to the role of men and women are often different.

Participatory practice is embedded in the cultural brokers’ way of working and grounded in a collectivist culture. In every encounter it is considered important to create a sense of self-worth with appropriate validation so that families and individuals feel listened to. Their entire approach is non-hierarchical, in which learning from each other’s lived experience is seen as contributing to collective wisdom. Whatever community-based initiatives – whether research projects, intervention programmes or community development projects – the MCHB are involved in, including those addressing family violence, all are considered to be interconnected and part of the overall work towards a common end goal: helping immigrant and refugee communities attain optimal health and well-being for 24

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their families and their communities and addressing inequities experienced by communities.

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Source: Based on Zulla (2021)

Relational processes shape who we are as individuals and how we can be in this world. We are constantly constructing the sense of ourselves and others through the social and cultural practices in which we participate. Sociocultural environments shape how individuals relate to each other and how they affirm each other. Through relational processes, self-conceptions are stabilised, threatened, or opened up to new ways of being. This is why dialogue and opportunities to create what Kemmis (2008) drawing on Habermas (1984; 1987) calls ‘communicative spaces’ are so key to participatory practice (see Chapter 6). Hearing each other’s stories, and entering into dialogue about what we hear, reshapes our meaningmaking as we co-create meaning, understanding and knowledge together. This, in turn, changes the way we act towards each other and the world.

But that dialogue will not take place if there is no trust between people.

Participatory practice therefore seeks to create relationships based on trust and reciprocity. Only when we have created trust and deep listening can we then start to expose and transform power relationships. In doing so, our aim eventually is to move from power over to power with. Moreover, the power one experiences in such a relational process is not the limited conception of power we are presented with in the press and other media, rather it is the power of the life force in all living things.

Theme 5: Participatory practice as interdependence and interbeing In a participatory worldview, the individual gains knowledge to grow and connect within society and with the natural world. The aim is to pursue a shared vision of thriving together, while being sensitive to the uniqueness of place and local culture. Out of this process emerge the types of community-level collaboration that regenerate the social capital that has been so depleted in our society. Through our participation in relationships we become part of a dynamic whole within which we both define ourselves and create our reality and, in seeing this, we can start to reframe the narrative of separation to one of interbeing (Wahl, 2016).

With this new frame, or way of seeing the world, our perceptions as to the value of the commons begin to change. By ‘commons’ we mean not just the common land enclosed against the wishes of local people in the later medieval and early industrial period. Nor do we mean its current manifestation in the appropriation of public land and public capital for private use in the form of selling off publicly owned property such as water, or town squares and spaces in shopping centres.

We mean a wider concept of the commons, a sense of collective ownership of outcomes, of knowledge, of action. There are signs that such an alternative is 25

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re-emerging in virtual reality, with examples such as Wikipedia, crowdsourcing, open-source software, and no doubt many others by the time this book is published. This recognition of the importance of our interdependence is driving a whole plethora of social innovations in which people are reorganising themselves and creating common value together. This goes beyond the passive involvement generated, for example, by YouTube, where you share information but do not work together towards a common object or share common property. The rules of participation of these new shared enterprises are established so as to negate any potential predators looking to buy out or dominate (Bauwens and Ramos, 2018).

Thus, creating is an alternative economic relationship to the current dominant corporate enterprise.

Can you think of other examples of such shared enterprises?

But recognition of interdependence goes beyond this, if you think about it in ecosystem terms (see below). It involves recognising that our actions collectively shape the world. Language around the narrative of ‘public’ is important here, particularly in relation to the idea of the collective. By using the word ‘public’, we buy into an old discourse which is embedded in the dualism of public versus private. It is also a word fraught with ambiguity. Who are ‘the public’? Given that in the age of the internet so much private information becomes ‘public’, what ‘public’ means is fuzzy and easily appropriated. Take, for instance, the use in the UK of the words ‘public schools’. These are actually private schools that educate the elite and wealthy and are the seedbed of class inequality. This is an extreme example, but more generally the use of the word ‘public’ hides and muddies the collective and social element. It is a great example of how neoliberalism controls thought patterns. By reimagining the commons and acknowledging our interdependence we can transform the notion of ‘public’ and substitute the word ‘collective’, which highlights that interdependence where no one individual is entitled and we all have responsibilities to one another.

We need to constantly ask ourselves, to what extent are we framing the problems we are seeking to address and proposing a solution informed by the narrative of separation, and how much are we looking from the perspective of interbeing?

To reiterate, we are all interconnected and interdependent. Any action we take individually and collectively has an effect on other people. Nowhere is this clearer than in a pandemic, although, for some, this is difficult to grasp.

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How a virus spread because of interconnections: the example of a wedding in Maine, US, on 7 August 2020 It was attended by 55 people in a hotel. The bride and groom came from California.

One of the guests had COVID-19. Over the next 38 days the virus spread to 177 other people because social distancing and masking was not attended to.

27 of the 55 got Covid plus a staff member from the hotel, another patron unconnected who was staying there and a vendor. One person of the group also attended a school meeting which infected two school staff members, another BUP Copyright Material: Individual use only. Not for resale.

visited a parent in a long-term care facility which infected a health worker who carried on working and spread the virus in that facility 100 miles away. Another visited a prison 200 miles away and infected 82 people.

Source: Mahale et al (2020)

This idea of interconnection – collective participation in the whole, and that whatever action we take has collective consequences – goes beyond the wellknown idea of butterfly’s wings leading to a storm somewhere else in the world.

Everything is a product of our interbeing and how that manifests collectively.

For example, if there is greater inequality in society people trust one another less. This, in turn, has an impact on overall levels of ill health because of the stress created. It is no coincidence that the Scandinavian countries, who have more equal societies, have the highest levels of average life expectancy. When more people live in poverty, there is a greater level of crime. Greater inequality has economic repercussions, too, as the more equal a society is the higher the standard measure of economic health, GDP per capita.

The butterfly wings analogy points, however, to deep interconnection between humans and nature, and the repercussions of that relationship globally. The climate crisis has highlighted this in recent years but there have been many other examples. For years, acid rain as a consequence of industrial pollution in the UK was shown to have damaged pine trees in Scandinavia. we are able to see ourselves and our immanent value as related to and connected to others – family, community, the world, those behind and those yet to come. Through embracing this world view, each individual becomes intensely aware of personal accountability for the welfare of others. (Graveline, 1998) As this quote from a member of the Cree in Canada points out, the cultural system of Canadian indigenous systems recognises the interconnection between the individual and the collective and the collective and nature. In many such 27

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indigenous systems, the individual is only knowable as a member of a specified community, and communities are only recognisable through their constituents.

This flows through not just previous generations, but generations to come, and through nature itself. According to Paula Gunn Allen (1986: 67), another indigenous writer, this perception of co-creation actively discourages people from setting themselves up as tyrants or dictators, in other words as ‘entitled’. This, of course, is not always the case. Nonetheless, many such indigenous communities are currently regarded by numerous people as backward and needing to ‘be developed’. However, the destruction of their lifestyle and livelihood means the destruction of potential plants to obviate pests and diseases globally, as such indigenous and traditional communities actually manage 95 per cent of the world’s genetic natural resources, which in turn are important to human survival in the long term (IPBES, 2019).

Theme 6: Participatory practice as inner and outer transformation We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the outside world would also change. As man [sic] changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do. (Accredited to Gandhi) Winter (2011) argues that the transformation of political and economic institutions necessitates the transformation of individual self-awareness. Otherwise, any transformation of institutions will disintegrate into the old forms because they are a product of the motives, interpretations, feelings and aspirations of people who remain stuck in old ways of being and thinking. Thus, former communist countries, he argues, came to reflect centuries of thinking and aspirations embedded in their culture despite economic reform. In the Soviet Union, the culture continued to reflect ways of being found in Russian Tsarist history, with a single dominant dictator and a secret police agency. Despite Mao’s attempt through the Cultural Revolution to break the cycle of history in China, it did not upset cultural norms around the family which re-emerged afterwards. For real transformation to take place, we also need to address what Winter calls ‘our ethical being’ and be constantly self-reflective of our knowledge, our awareness of where it comes from and what motivates us. He argues that in order to challenge prevailing structures and processes we must understand how the nature of their operations are effectively disguised. The processes of distraction and concealment permit systemic injustice to continue or to be transmogrified into an issue involving a few individual corrupt people. Surfacing and making visible the systemic injustice requires a raising of awareness, and an awakening, at a mass level.

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Participatory practice

That inner work, in a participatory paradigm, takes place when we engage with others, not just through individual inner contemplation, because existence is interactional. Being in this world, constructing reality, creating meaning, and shaping one’s destiny are all tasks that involve participation. We become more aware (that is, we learn) through interaction with others and with the world.

This generates an inner transformation that proceeds from not only an increased awareness but also a sense of agency. That sense of agency is both individual and collective. Once you engage with others, whatever their background, around common experience you feel connected on an equal level. This, in turn, gives you a sense of value and the power to act. Such experiential knowing enables individuals to connect with each other through their emotions and their embodied experiences (that is, their presence). This connection between individuals is not solely a cognitive experience but a phenomenological experience in which the mind and being are whole.

Storytelling either verbally or through art is a means through which this process can take place (see Chapter 5). In listening to and telling our stories we learn in relationship. In this way we can connect our felt experience (that is, experiential knowing) to the felt experience and the emotions of others and these are then all brought to group awareness. This enables us to gain awareness of each other’s worldviews and, in particular, our felt experiences. Through this awareness, we develop empathy for each other. As we share experiential and expressive ways of knowing with each other through imaginal forms, we start to engage in wholeperson dialogues. We grow a deep sensitivity towards how others are experiencing and conceptualising reality, and we begin to develop a shared validation of reality and co-create knowledge.

In highly populous societies, engaging in such a process has largely been neglected. One of the ironies of both charities and the welfare state is that both have emerged in societies where populations are too large and dispersed for givers and receivers to know each other. The result is that such societies face the challenge of persuading the wealthy and those just getting by that aiding the less fortunate is both their obligation and a matter of shared interest. We would argue that the solution comes through a participatory approach to raising awareness and through the consequential inner transformation, empowerment and emancipation.

As Freire argued, oppressed people can become more empowered by learning about social inequality through the process of conscientisation, encouraging others by helping them to feel confident about achieving social equality (inspiring) and finally encouraging them to take action (liberating).

This has both an individual component, developing power from within, as well as a collective component, that is, working with politicised power with others to generate the power to bring about change. It can also generate resistance and recalcitrance and thus opposition to changes generated top down by others.

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Theme 7: Participatory practice as living the questions and critical thinking Some believe that the notion of education for emancipation is utopian … [T]his sort of ‘realism’ breeds acceptance of social evils.

It offers docility and compliance with the powers-that-be. (Kemmis, 2006: 463)

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Critical theory has no special influence on its side, except for a concern for the abolition of social justice…. Its own nature … turns it towards a changing of history and the establishment of justice. (Horkheimer, cited in Kemmis, 2008: 125) It will have become clear by now that participatory practice is not a method, a tool or a technique, it is a process that flows directly from a worldview and underlying values and principles. There are no prescribed outcomes or goals but, as you engage in the process, things unfold and emerge. That emergence and the consequential transformation will not happen without questioning the takenfor-granteds – what Freire (1972) and Gramsci (1971) call ‘false consciousness’ – or an analysis of power. While children are full of questions as they engage with the world, as soon as they go to school, their ability to question diminishes (Berger, 2014); yet it is through questioning that we inquire about the world.

We have a tendency not question things in our daily lives but, as Freire (1972) has shown, critical questioning of things we take for granted starts the process of conscientisation and the power to act.

Critical theory can help with the process of critical questioning (see Chapter 7).

In critical theory being critical means inquiring whether and how the status quo is leading to situations that are inhuman, alienating, unjust and irrational.

Such theory helps us to question what we think is reality. However, it is only one form of knowing, and needs to be combined with other ways of knowing that can intertwine with practice and experience, helping social change as we inquire into it. This is the notion of praxis, the idea that we generate knowledge and understanding through our efforts to transform the world. In this way, we use theory not as an expert outsider but dissecting it within the moment and within the context. Through sitting with the questions and in different ways exploring the unarticulated frames and assumptions that are held, we can surface the power relations and the social injustices that lie underneath and hidden. Bregman (2020) in his book Humankind discusses how power corrupts and how powerful people feel less connected to others, because power makes you feel superior. Not having power, we know, has the opposite effect. People who consistently are oppressed and have their power taken away from them often lack confidence, hesitate to offer an opinion and underestimate their own intelligence, and are therefore less likely to strike back. This creates a ‘culture of silence’ (Freire, 1972). Hence, the importance of asking questions to help 30

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people to understand and surface their innate knowledge, while at same time valuing that knowledge.

The starting point of living the questions is again the everyday stories we tell ourselves. People’s lived experience is both explained and questioned as they recount their experience to others. Telling our story is a meaning-making process and so is the dialogue that will follow it. One of the most illuminating questions we can ask each other is ‘Why?’. In the film Misbehaviour, which is set in 1970, the main character is asked in an interview for a university why Britain had not had a revolution: her reply was: “A better question is why no revolution in Britain has been successful.” We are not given the answer but when we sit with the question, the spiral of understanding begins to unfold. There is some merit in sitting with questions and not necessarily knowing the answers. This encourages an openness to alternatives. As we spiral in and out with the questions, we start to see the bigger picture. The writer Myss (2019) often uses a high-rise apartment block as a metaphor. When we are on the ground floor, we can hear the traffic but, as we rise further up the building, people and vehicles become smaller and the noise decreases. From up here we can see the bigger picture and start to understand the wider structures that impact on our daily lives. This creates a more holistic and less splintered thinking and perspective. This is why Freirean pedagogy is a key element within this book. Its power lies in how it encourages people to question.

Such expansion of the mind is what traditional teaching practices of indigenous cultures encourage by using all forms of knowing, including ritual storytelling, dreams and altered states of consciousness. By engaging the right brain, you are tapping into a wealth of knowledge beyond the rational. In the Cree tradition of transformative practice, for example, healing takes place only when unconscious conflict and resistance is brought to a conscious level. Once we are conscious of them they can be worked with. As with feminist consciousness raising (hooks, 1990), the process begins with airing our feelings, perceptions and personal reactions. This then leads to discovering that those feelings, perceptions and personal reactions are socially constructed. Thus, moving from surface phenomenon immediately related to the present, we move into the depths of pain, anger and bitterness related to the past and then outwards to a utopia we can aspire to (Hart, 2000). This is a large undertaking, as what is required is an overcoming of what Graveline (1998) calls the ‘cage of oppression’, which is not a singular experience but an ongoing set of social relations. Knowing how one experiences those relationships on an everyday basis is a group process and through the co-creation of such grassroots knowledge new social movements are born.

Theme 8: Participatory practice as an ecological imperative Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.

(Hildegard of Bingen, 1982) 31

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Plotkin (2008), in his book Nature and the Human Soul, argues that being truly human is only possible in relationship with the natural world. The dehumanising effect of contemporary power dynamics, with its emphasis on separation, also separates us from nature. Under Western-derived religious doctrine, nature is there for humans to exploit and own. However, many indigenous knowledge systems argue that all things have inherent value, that there are cycles of growth and change in nature. In ancient and indigenous societies these cycles were and are marked by rituals that honour them. In Celtic culture, for example, the seasons are marked by the festivals Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasa. In some countries in Europe similar festivals are integrated into the system of holidays.

For example, in Sweden Walpurgis night (30 April), which celebrates the end of winter, and Midsummer are both still celebrated with festivals and collective rituals. Yet in the UK and its former colonies, the seasons are generally ignored, and for holidays, with the exception of Christmas and Easter (themselves the Christian appropriation of so-called pagan festivals), any connection to nature has been replaced by commercially driven ‘bank holidays’. So, there are no longer any reminders that, just as we are inextricably connected by the web of common humanity, we are woven into all forms of life on Earth: we participate in the ecosystem.

Recognising that we are a part of an ecosystem, held in fragile balance, is the final theme of this book. The concept of the ecosystem helps us understand that by harming anyone or anything we are violating our interdependence, and so endangering the well-being of the whole. Ecosystems are constantly trying to keep balance. Thus, if we upset the balance too far, as James Lovelock (1995) argued, this could mean the extinction of humanity itself. In some ways, thinking about our connection with nature and humanity as a whole using an ecosystems lens is the modern equivalent to older indigenous ways of knowing: that we are participants in nature, not external to it. The notion of separation from nature has been nurtured not just by modern industrialisation but also through the idea of dualism, the belief that humans are separate from nature and mind from matter.

Dewey (1925a) argued that under a dualistic perspective experience is dismissed as irrational and that nature becomes defined as separate from experience. For Dewey, knowledge is derived from embodied intelligence, not from mind alone.

So, decontextualising humanity from the natural world creates internally alienated selves, as well as ecological problems (Heron, 1992).

In seeing ourselves as part of, not set apart from, the ecosystem, we act differently. We become aware of how our actions on the world can have an impact elsewhere in the system – what Capra (1996) calls ‘the web of life’. In his book of the same name, Capra describes some of the salient characteristics of the organisation of ecosystems that, he argues, it is necessary to understand in order to develop sustainable human communities. These include, first of all, interdependence, which is how the behaviour and success of one person is tied up with the behaviour and success of everyone else. Secondly, there is the cyclical nature of ecological processes that consist of exchanges of energy and resources 32

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which are, in turn, sustained by the third characteristic of ecosystems: cooperation, partnership and co-evolution.

These latter characteristics appear somewhat at odds with the notions contained in Neo-Darwinism’s focus on the survival of the fittest, where the emphasis is on competition and profit that underpins the free market forces of globalisation.

By contrast, cooperation, partnership and co-evolution are processes of integration and connection necessary for a flourishing world. These processes are further sustained by the characteristics of diversity and flexibility that enable ecosystems and communities to survive and adapt to change. Ecosystems are always in constant flux but there are certain limits to change beyond which the whole system will collapse. The aim is to reduce the long-term stress in the system: maximising a single variable will eventually lead to the destruction of the system as a whole; optimising all variables will create a dynamic balance between order and freedom, stability and change. This means accepting that contradictions within communities are signs of diversity and viability. However, this can exist only where there are strong and complex patterns of interconnections. A healthy community needs members who are aware of the need for interconnectedness, so that information and ideas flow freely through the networks to create a flourishing whole. Rather than a naïve notion of social capital that assumes homogeneity in community, it calls for an understanding that communities are contested spaces that flourish when practical strategies knit them together as part of a diverse, cooperative, interconnected whole.

Towards collective health and well-being through participatory practice The world will be different only if we live differently. (Maturana and Varela, 1987: 245) The overall aim of participatory practice is to promote a flourishing community that thrives in terms of health and well-being. This is the calyx of the flower whose petals we have unfurled in this chapter. Health and well-being are a matter of balance. The word ‘health’ itself means, in Anglo-Saxon, to make whole. To promote a flourishing community that thrives in terms of health and well-being we need a process of salutogenesis, that is, a process that revolves around making whole (Wahl, 2016: 143). Historically – at least for the last 200 years – Western society has viewed health as something that can be fixed, to be treated piecemeal.

The body is separated from the mind, and the body is composed of parts, each of which is treated in isolation of the other, entirely material with no reference to the spirit or the unseen and unmeasurable. Moreover, an individual’s health is treated as if they are independent of the society of which they are a part, although, in the last 30 years, the idea of the social determinants of health has now much more traction and is well researched (WHO, 2008). However, while there is much known about the relationship between the health of a society and the health of 33

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the individuals and groups within it, much less action has been taken to reduce inequalities and address the underlying structural issues that create imbalance.

That imbalance is everywhere: pollution is an imbalance between dirty air and the ability of nature to process it. Unemployment is an imbalance between those in work and those who are left out. Poverty is an imbalance between those who accumulate material wealth at the expense of others and those who suffer as a result. These are just a few examples; there are many others. Inequality is imbalance. Social injustice is imbalance. Our world, our system – ecological and social – is out of balance and unhealthy. So, how do we co-create a balance ‘wholistically’? How do we become whole?

As we have argued earlier, each theme we have presented in this chapter has within it elements of the others because they are all interconnected, as we are all interconnected. Together they are essential for collective health and well-being, emotionally, psychologically, materially and spiritually. Thus ‘the whole of which comes forth within all of its parts and the parts find their significance and identity in belonging to the whole’ (Wahl, 2016: 93). In the following chapters we dive deeper into participatory practice as community-based action for the transformative change which we believe is possible to co-create.

What is to come in this book The ideas in this book are complex. This stems in part from the interconnections between the elements and themes we have introduced you to in this chapter and which we will examine in greater depth in the chapters to come. But it is also complex because we are using linear text to describe an experiential phenomenon that stems from a way of thinking about wholeness. At the beginning of this chapter, we used the metaphor of the garden. But as you continue to read this book, we want you to think also about a tapestry. Tapestry has been made for thousands of years. It is a piece of work that involves a warp and weft being woven together to form a pattern. The strands highlighted in this chapter are woven into the chapters that follow and only when you have read the whole will you see the pattern in all its glory.

The book comes in two parts. In the first part of the book, we look at the bigger picture. After introducing you to the ideas that are woven into the book, in Chapter 2 we start by taking a critical look, using the UK as a case study, at a world that has been created as the result of a focus on individualism and in which the common or collective has been diminished through the effects of neoliberalism and ‘austerity’. We demonstrate how these current challenges are rooted in a narrative that has created an unjust and ecologically devastated world.

In Chapter 3 we explore the alternative, participatory consciousness in an ecological context, as a different narrative and worldview, revisiting the ancient wisdom still conserved by many indigenous populations and integrating it with alternative views of science and society. In Chapter 4 we explore current approaches to participatory practice and how they have evolved over the last ten 34

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to twenty years. In doing so, we highlight the challenges the many initiatives have faced working against the backdrop of a non-participatory world and the issues raised in Chapter 2.

In the second part of the book, we start to dig deeper into what participatory practice actually entails. In Chapter 5 we explore the use of story, both at a metalevel, in terms of the hegemonic narrative that has been promulgated over the last 50 years, and at the local level, looking at the power of story as a way to unlock people’s imagination and help them to explore their own experience. In Chapter 6 we dive deep into the process of dialogue that follows the telling of stories. This is a process of knowledge creation as people start to co-create meaning together.

This process can raise emotional responses and also conflict, but both are integral to the process of transformation. In Chapter 7 we unpick the role of critical reflection in teaching to question, furthering the process of raising awareness and conscientisation. In Chapter 8 we unpick what transformation means and looks like as the result of these participatory practices. Finally, in Chapter 9 we look to the future and how we can co-create hope, wholeness and a practical utopia through connecting on a wider scale beyond the local to the global.

Throughout the book, as we take you on this journey into participatory practice, we will provide you with some examples from the literature and from our own practice. Each chapter has been written by one of us and so your guide at different stages of the journey will vary.3 The final destination is up to you, but our aim is to lead you to what Macy and Johnstone (2012) call ‘Active Hope’.

Peter McLaren, in a discussion of disutopia, states that ‘our internal and external worlds seem to have been split apart’, a disconnection he links to the process of disutopia as ‘not just the temporary absence of Utopia, but the political celebration of the end of social dreams’ (Dinerstein and Leary, cited in McLaren, 2000: xxv).

We want to offer you an insight into a participatory approach to practice that restores hope from hopelessness, connects the unhappy times that we live in to the fractured state of our external world, and situates critical agency as a form of autonomous being in the world that leads to action for transformation. Think of it as a practical utopia: a way of shaping a better world impassioned by outrage over the injustices that we have created in the present. This releases the energy of possibility. From our disenchantment with what is, we become enchanted with what might be.

Participatory practice is the future without which there will be no future. It means not paying lip-service to participation but a total regenerative transformation underpinned by the values of love.

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2 Troubled times

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Margaret Ledwith

The universal is in the particular.… We are all part of one another, interconnected beyond the separations made by the mind. (Quinney, 1998: xi) We are all interconnected, inextricably part of life on Earth. We need each other to survive, and we need the planet, which is our home, to be healthy and in balance.

A world in balance is the way forward for people and the planet to flourish. By this I mean we are part of an ecosystem that is in self-adjusting balance – until it is taken to its extremes. Neoliberal capitalism has exploited inequality to an unsustainable extreme and environmental degradation beyond levels of recovery – unless we change our ideology now. In this book, we challenge the idea that the strong and ruthless rule the world. Even Darwin, who is associated with the idea of survival of the fittest, was impressed with the kindness and cooperation he witnessed in nature and wrote that the communities with the kindest people would flourish best (Hare and Woods, 2020). Lead from a kind heart and cooperation flourishes. These ideas form the bedrock of this book.

Values lie at the heart of the matter The world we create is founded on the values we live by. It is those values that shape the way we see the world, the policies that get embedded into law, and the way we act towards each other and the environment. This creates a mutually reinforcing system, but it is the values we choose to adopt that frame the lens through which we see the world and which influence the way we act in the world. Values lie at the heart of the matter!

Our concern is that social inequalities and the destruction of biodiversity have fractured the health and well-being of the web of common humanity at the heart of participatory practice as well the survival of the planet that is our home. Accepting the idea that we are all inextricably interconnected in an ecosystem challenges the concept of individualism at the heart of neoliberal politics. Individualism casts mutual responsibility to the winds, elevating the self above the collective, encouraging decisions that are about self-gratification and irresponsibility. Seeing life on Earth as an interconnected whole brings mutual responsibility for human and planetary flourishing to the fore. It faces each of 37

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us with a role to play in creating a happy society on a healthy planet. In order to deal with this responsibility, the first step is to understand how the current human and environmental crises have been allowed to develop, escalating in such a short space of time, unconstrained.

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We are living through an epoch in world history We are at a pivotal point in the history of the world. A world in crisis brings an opportunity for change. This bigger picture shapes our place in the ecosystem and shines a light on the reality of local lives at the sharp end, a world in which people have been dehumanised, swept to the brink of survival into wastelands of poverty and destitution, on an angry planet that is not just murmuring its displeasure but screaming as it spirals out of kilter. Despite the warnings, we continue to suffer from a total breakdown of imagination, an inability to focus on the evidence before our eyes. What comes to mind as I say this is not only the images of the planet on fire in 2019 – Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Canada, Greenland, Spain and India burning out of control (Vasilieva, 2019) – but also the normalisation of foodbanks, child poverty, homelessness, depression, suicide and other symptoms of unwell, unsustainable, unequal societies that face us in our everyday lives. Across the planet, in countries rich and poor, shop doorways are turned into homes for the homeless, tents appear for shelter in the most unlikely places, donations for foodbanks are parked in supermarkets, refugees are cast adrift on dangerous seas … and we walk on by, failing to focus and failing to question why we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that this is normal, that there is no alternative, or TINA as it has come to be known.

As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, in April 2021, as I write this, I sit here in my 14th month of social isolation, at the height of a coronavirus pandemic, a virus previously unknown to humanity, sinister, unseen, capable of killing swathes of the world’s population. This has done more than anything else to expose the grim reality of neoliberal politics, illuminating the full consequences of its greed and ruthlessness. I live in the North West region of England, an area systematically drained of its assets by the power base in the South East, creating enormous inequalities and rendering it vulnerable to the highest COVID-19 death toll in the country. I have witnessed my homeland, not only stripped of the quality of its infrastructure, but stripped of hope and dignity as wind-blown plastic waves alarmingly from the branches of trees and people walk by with heads bowed, surviving. This is the story of the short life of neoliberal politics from my experience, but it is the same story, to a greater or lesser degree, in most countries of the world.

In the UK, neoliberal ‘austerity’ politics has plundered the public sector infrastructure of its support for a common good, systematically privatising its resources into the pockets of the rich. One of the greatest contradictions of this global pandemic is that it exposes the reliance of a population on the National 38

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Health Service (NHS), as all the doctors, nurses and ancillary workers, many of them immigrants or Black, are called on to put themselves on the frontline of risk at a time when the NHS has been stripped of its capacity by unjustifiable ‘austerity’ measures.

Let me tell you a well-kept secret …

Not many people realise that, in 2016, a government war game called Exercise Cygnus, the sort often carried out to assess how prepared we are in the event of BUP Copyright Material: Individual use only. Not for resale.

risk, revealed that more personal protective equipment (PPE) was urgently needed for those working on the front line – and that includes those who keep the country going, like delivery drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers and shopkeepers, as well as hospital workers. In hospitals, much greater capacity for intensive care was needed to save lives, and in the country overall much more capacity was needed in the care system. This was known by the UK government, but they still continued with their punitive, unnecessary ‘austerity’ measures… As a consequence, one of the highest death rates in the world has been experienced by the UK. Source: Booth and Sample (2021)

The struggle to get through this crisis is proportionate to the stripping of public assets, and this must be called out. As Mazzucato (2019) says, it is impossible to strip back the assets of public institutions and expect that a sudden injection of cash will restore their capacity. In relation to the NHS in crisis, the loss of years of investment in medical science, the depletion of nurses and doctors compounded by anti-immigrant, radical-right populism, the lack of life-saving ventilators, of PPE … all of this illuminates in sharp relief the social evils of a politics of greed. Within this perspective comes the awareness that the rich are the source of the problem (Sayer, 2016). It is the workers at ground level who keep us going, health workers, care workers, bus drivers, shop workers, delivery drivers, refuse collectors … those who have been kept poor in a precariat economy while the rich have increased their riches opportunistically.

These introductory thoughts pave the way for my unequivocal challenge: social and environmental justice are intertwined, all part of the same problem, and we simply cannot claim to practise either without a critique of the political times that construct personal lives and frame local, grassroots participatory practice.

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Critique of the political context is the catalyst for transformative practice

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Quite simply, we cannot understand how to act for social or environmental justice without contextualising people in time and place. This is a precursor to understanding the nature of oppression in order to identify practice interventions which then link from local projects to global movements for transformative change. Anything else does no more than scratch the surface, engaging with symptoms of injustice but leaving the root causes of inequality and environmental degradation to continue unabated. So, this chapter is a quest to trigger your imagination, using story to illuminate the contradictions we live by and accept as normal, but which are far from normal!

Here’s a transformative thought: read this chapter through the lens of critical kindness seeing empathy, compassion, caring, cooperation, community and connection not only as an alternative way of being but as the focus of policy decisions …

Question contradictions!

In order to deepen understanding of the ways in which people are persuaded to see the world differently, I will explore the changes we have lived through in recent history, and I will do this through the use of story.

Storytelling invites curiosity and excites the imagination. Story has the power to change the course of history. This chapter examines the nature of dominant ideologies and the impact they have on people and the environment. Power, threaded through dominant stories we are told, reaches from the top down into local communities as a real truth, one that influences the way we make sense of life, the values we live by and the way we act in the world.

Participatory practitioners begin their quest for social and environmental justice by critiquing the political context in which practice takes place, naming the values people want to live by, creating a counternarrative of connection, of wholeness, oneness to replace the alienated, disconnected and fragmented approach to life on Earth that we have created.

In this sense, story lends itself to Freirean problematising, a way of seeing critical connections by decontextualising local issues from lived reality and presenting them to a dialogue group in a different form – say, a photo, story or film – one that highlights contradictions that are taken for granted, accepted unquestioningly in everyday life. After reading this chapter, you will no longer be able to walk past shop doorways filled with sleeping bags and begging bowls or to see flooding 40

Troubled times

as a random occurrence without questioning why we have chosen to let this happen. Read on!

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Values change the way we see the world The past is in the present, so looking back opens our eyes to how we got to where we are. Knowing how we got here helps us to steer society towards a better future. It is precisely why I will take a critical look at where we have come from in order to change the trajectory of where we are heading! This past–present–future dimension is vital. We live in the in-between, making sense of the present by revisiting the past. And, it is this more focused view of the here and now that enables us to see differently in order to understand how to change our future for the better.

Imagine the world we want to live in as the basis of a counternarrative …

Imagination is key in the process of change. We cannot dismantle the dominant narrative without having a story to replace it, a counternarrative of connection, one that reflects a kinder, gentler, more sustainable future in which humans and the planet flourish. In order to start this process, I will wind back history to World War II.

The British welfare state: a social justice revolution Between 1939 and 1945, a brutal and destructive war raged across the world. In Britain, ‘The population was facing daunting psychological, social and economic challenges and was desperate for change’ (Ballatt et al, 2020: 1).

A story of the way that changing values changes lived reality …

Life in Britain during World War II was grim. Violence, destruction and fear permeated everyday lives. My mother was 10 at the outbreak of war so her young life was about community, compassion, pulling together. The context of my early years was dereliction: dangerous bombsites provided playgrounds for children, grimy industrial buildings reached skywards with their insides exposed, halfcrumbled houses gave glimpses of flowered wallpaper, a life that used to be… All this punctuated the post-war landscape. Most of all, I remember it as colourless, dull, monochrome. Food was rationed and life was a struggle, even though the fear and violence of war was over, grief, loss and the rebuilding of lives and communities was very present.

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What I didn’t know as a little girl growing up amid the remnants of the atrocities of war was that new ideas had come out of the violence and destruction. War had called for cooperation. Stripped of humanity, people pulled together, cared about each other in the struggle to survive. This gave birth to general consensus on a common good, the desire for a society in which everyone could feel connected; we could call it a politics of belonging in which the well-being of all was a shared responsibility, one based on cooperation and connection. This is the mark of a true civilisation, a commitment to everyone’s right to benefit from wealth and progress, agreement that we have a common right to mutually flourish and play a participatory role in society. People started to see differently; values changed and formed the basis of policies that had never been known before. The post-war British welfare state took responsibility for education, health, housing, employment and social security. It was a world people never dreamed possible, and we all flourished!

This is the world I was born into and took for granted. I had no memory of the two world wars and a global economic Depression that had gone before. I didn’t experience the fear, destruction and deprivation, even though I was entertained by family stories of my grandfather’s antics as an ARP (air raid precautions) warden, checking that the blackout was observed, marching through the streets making sure no chinks of light peeped through to offer targets to passing bombers. Closer to home, my father was absent from my life for four years in Burma on post-war army peacekeeping missions, and he came home a stranger. I was raised in my early years by the love and fortitude of my maternal grandmother, a powerhouse of the family and community, while my teenage mother, forced to leave sixth form, went to work in the Tax Office. My community was defined by war, but I grew up feeling the post-War hope that anything was possible, that opportunities were endless, that jobs were abundant and that choices were mine to make. Optimism was in the air, and much of this was due to the independence claimed by women in the war years, the good times created by the political will that brought about a radical welfare state, and the burgeoning youth culture that exploded through the ’50s and ’60s.

The reality of the common good was that education became free for everyone, health care was available for all (and developed into the most impressive national health service in the world), a programme of excellent-quality council housing grew across the country, employment conditions were protected by unionisation and workers’ rights, and a social security system ensured that there was a safety net for hard times. It was an everyday utopia unknown before!

What none of us realised was just how easily this could change!

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The Beveridge Report: a common good embedded in policy After the hardship and destruction of two world wars, separated by a global Depression, people were ready for change. The 1941 wartime coalition government established an interdepartmental committee to look at health, social insurance and allied services as a way of keeping hope alive and the spirit strong.

The report was written by William Beveridge and heralded the most revolutionary changes for the common good imaginable. It became a milestone in British history, known ever after as the Beveridge Report (1942). Recommendations were made for a ‘cradle-to-grave’ welfare state which provided for the health and well-being of everyone, the ‘five giants’ of which were: social security; a national health service; free education (including free school meals and milk); good-quality council housing; and the promise of full employment with decent pay and conditions. This was a revolutionary ideology that transformed the lives of British people. All this came about because of a change in the way society was seen, a freedom from oppression to accept a collective, cooperative responsibility for the well-being of all, a common good. The Labour Party led by Clement Attlee was elected into office at the end of the war in 1945 on the welfare state platform and met their promise of delivering these transformative changes. This was a major landmark in social justice thought and action.

[Post-war Britain] emerging from a long, bloody and destructive war … was desperate for change … the new laws were a paradigm shift: a radical change in the funding and organisation of health and social care and the support of those in need. (Ballatt et al, 2020: 1) This was the political formalising of a radical new approach to welfare, an inclusive society, a radical act of kindness to care for each other by sharing ‘the risks of accident and illness, of unemployment, disability, dependency and poverty’ (Ballatt et al, 2020: 1). The costs of the war had been high, but the strength of the commitment was enormous, more a statement that we had become conscious that we needed each other. In much the same way, the COVID-19 pandemic is witnessing acts of kindness and connection in times of severe disconnection – a move towards values of kinship, community, cooperation.

Critique is essential for deepening democracy, and there have been retrospective critiques of the Beveridge report, notably its emphasis on class, that it ‘hid the giants Racism and Sexism, and the fights against them, behind statues to the Nation and the White Family’ (Williams, 1989: 162). Ironically, this was at a time when the ‘armies’ of women who stepped out of their roles as homemakers to play such a significant role in the ‘war effort’ were ‘persuaded’ back into the unpaid labour of home and family so as to leave the workplace free for ‘returning heroes’ – by both moral and legal means! In fact, although women over 21 got the vote in 1928, it was not until 1964 that the marriage bar preventing married women working in certain professions was ended by law, and not until 1975 that 43

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a woman could legally own a bank account or take out a mortgage in her own name without a male guarantor.

How do values influence people and change lives? Here is a thought from Will Hutton: The good society is one in which, through argument and deliberation, we create law and justice as a moral system enshrining human dignity and accept mutual responsibilities – and then live by its injunctions across the board. (Hutton, 2015: 44)

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Let’s hold this in mind as we explore a paradigm shift.

The invention of neoliberalism During those post-war years, when the welfare state was addressing the common good, there was a plot going on. It was as simple as that! A group of men decided to promote a very different way of seeing the world to counter the socialism of the welfare state, and the seeds of this idea led to a very different way of being in the world. I want to pay attention to this; it gives a clue as to just how easy it is to influence people to change their minds – and it emphasises the importance of critiquing democracy through the lens of values. Social justice values provide a system of checks and balances which deepen, not weaken, democracy.

A political story of corruption on the part of the rich …

In 1947, hidden away in the little village of Mont Pelerin in Switzerland, a group of 40 men plotted a very different story based on very different values: one that would replace cooperation and compassion with competition and exploitation.

They became known as the Mont Pelerin Society and their ideology became known as neoliberalism, and it was an extremely strange idea indeed. In fact, it was so strange that they knew better than to put it into the public domain until the time was right. People had always been told that the market served society. How could a small group of men convince the world that profit comes before people and the planet? It was the antithesis of the welfare state! Nevertheless, they gave it a go, prepared to wait for the right opportunity before going public. What an enormous challenge to convince people to see life upside down: the market ruling people, the rich deserving even more riches, and the poor and the planet paying for this greed and excess!

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Despite a global economic recession which brought a crisis in welfare spending in 1973, the equal society created by the values of the welfare state continued along its social justice path. Not many people realise that equality peaked in 1978, when Britain was the second most equal country to Sweden in Europe (Dorling, 2018b). It was a wonderful achievement and opened up many possibilities for a society that could be inclusive and happy. But, in 1979, the Mont Pelerin Society’s ‘Big Chance’ appeared. Margaret Thatcher entered the political stage as Conservative prime minister, and this was to be a defining moment in British and

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world history.

She really liked the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society and their story of individualism. The key plot was the free market, uncontrolled and driven by profit.

She came up with popular slogans, repeated over and over again until they got inside people’s heads: ‘there’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’, ‘it’s good to be greedy’, ‘profit comes before people’, ‘the rich need to get richer and the poor need to tighten their belts’, ‘wealth will trickle down’! Nothing trickled!

This story was the first Big Lie! The rich got even richer (and much more greedy) and the poor were dismissed as work-shy welfare scroungers! Make people poorer and pillage the Earth in the name of profit was the moral of the story. ‘There is no alternative’, we were told, and it was such a compelling story, we all shut up and just got on with it. Community ties were weakened and individualism was the order of the day.

Two years later, in 1981, Ronald Reagan became President of the US. He liked this story, too. Thatcher and Reagan became pals, but, more importantly, together they became the most powerful leaders in the Western world. It was such a good story, it went viral. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank joined in, and others, like Pinochet in Chile, also wanted to be part of it. We began to see global structural adjustment programmes emerge, with the IMF creating a debt trap by forcing poor countries to pay back loans. This, of course, made the poorest of the world suffer dreadfully. But it made the rich richer than ever, justified as the deserving rich and the undeserving poor. This, of course was another Big Lie. Profit gets generated by workers at ground level, but it is projected upwards into the pockets of the privileged. Inequality within and between countries soared.

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And so, the process of neoliberal globalisation took hold. Before too long, a global super-rich appeared. Strangely, they had more in common with each other than with their own cultures. They were full of ideas about social status, and bought lots of really expensive stuff to show us all how very important they were. Consumerism was born! Not only did this create enormous social divisions, but it polluted the Earth with throwaway consumption!

The well-kept secret, though, is that people are not naturally selfish – this is another Big Lie. We have an empathy circuit in our brains, and to be more fully

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human, we need to be connected in community and society; we have a natural propensity to be compassionate and caring, and to cooperate with each other rather than compete! The trouble is that sometimes people don’t tell the truth and the story they tell leads to a different reality, a reality that is quite the opposite to the one we need in order to thrive!

The year of the barricades that heralded an opportunity for change 1968 was a critical juncture in world history. Social unrest sought change, and popular protest reverberated around the world. It was a year of rebellion in the form of race riots, student demonstrations, civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam protests, which also witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was a time of the emergence of new ideas which prompted new social movements. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks both became available in English in the early 1970s, profoundly influencing people’s understanding of power and oppression. … Inspired by new thinking, grassroots movements erupted during the 1970s and 1980s, generating theory from lived experience – second-wave feminism, anti-racism, greens, LGBTQ rights, ‘dis’ability rights … – and street protests abounded.

Ideas and action are a symbiotic unity, a unity of praxis. Neither is much use without the other!

The way we make sense of the world has a direct impact on our being, how we behave towards each other and towards the planet. Ideas and action as a symbiotic unity, straddling the divide between theory and practice, constitute a unity of praxis.

This is the foundation of Paulo Freire’s education for critical consciousness. Freire developed his critical praxis by listening to the stories people told about their lived reality in the favelas. He heard the consequences of structural discrimination in their stories, how power reaches into personal lives to privilege some and punish others.

Practice for social justice begins by listening from the heart to people’s everyday 46

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stories. Theory in action emerges from the stories we tell simply by questioning life’s unacceptable contradictions. This was the foundation of second-wave feminism and Black feminism: women meeting in local groups sharing their lived experience, identifying the contradictions we live by. Participatory practice is a bottom-up process, starting in people’s lives in community, questioning everyday experience by contextualising it in its bigger political context, recognising that surface-level symptoms of oppression are connected to structures of discrimination that are woven through society at every level to such an extent that they are accepted as normal and natural.

Freire’s vision was the transformation of humanity to a state of mutual and cooperative participatory democracy through a process of liberating education, developing critical consciousness which leads to collective action for social change.

A personal story of Freire in action …

As a grassroots community worker in the 1980s, I listened to Freire on the streets of Manchester. It brought his ideas to life for me. I learnt what his concepts looked like in reality, expressed in people’s everyday stories. And, it opened my mind to the way that injustice is woven into the structures of society. I began to see that the answers to understanding political power and social change are all around us, in the stories people tell about their lives!

This is the beginning of critical consciousness, the questioning of life’s everyday contradictions starts people seeing things differently and thinking more critically.

Collective action for change grows from these small beginnings into global movements, all informed by understanding how power acts in the interests of the privileged.

In the 1980s, as activists, we took on international issues of freedom. I travelled out to Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, with the twinning agreement from Manchester City Council and witnessed the transformative power of Freirean approaches to literacy and health. The Sandinista Government, following their revolution, invited Paulo Freire to advise them on transforming the terrible levels of illiteracy and poor health their people were suffering. We connected local projects with Manchester community projects in alliances of mutual support.

In Manchester, we took to the streets to voice our dissent: “Free Nelson Mandela”, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out”. Christy Moore’s ‘Hey! Ronnie Reagan’ was sung with great gusto as we proudly marched in solidarity: “Hey Ronnie Reagan, 47

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I’m black and I’m pagan, I’m gay and I’m left and I’m free, I’m a non-fundamentalist environmentalist, Please don’t bother me.” And one of the finest examples of alliances of solidarity was during Thatcher’s vicious attack on the National Union of Mineworkers as the largest surviving organised labour union, and it almost brought her down: “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners”, “Black People Support the Miners”, “Women Support the Miners” …

Manchester’s imposing Victorian town hall opened its doors and offered a critical communicative space for the people. We organised collectively from local groups

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to international movements, meeting in identity groups, forming theory from experience, rising up to become politically conscious and determined to change the world. It was the time of new social movements: women, Black, ‘dis’ability, LGBTQ, greens and peace protesters across the world rose in solidarity to strike out for social change around identity and culture, adding ‘White’ feminist thought and Black women’s wisdom on intersectionality to the class struggle. We had a hard time making sense of it all. We needed the security of compartments, fixed boundaries rather than these new intersecting, overlapping, overlaying, fluid complexities that defined an issue in relation to its opposite. This left us stuck when we considered ‘White’ women’s experience in relation to Black women’s or ‘dis’abled people’s, or sexual preference … let alone dealing with environmental issues and class. We often found ourselves ranking each other in terms of multiple, disjointed oppressions or even locking horns or running away from the pain of it all, as we did when we tried to form alliances around women’s action, Black and ‘White’, or where it intersected with class. We didn’t have the benefit of today’s insights into ‘White’ privilege and the role of stigma as a neoliberal class project within the complexity of intersectionality … but just as Paulo Freire transformed our understanding, we paved the way for these ideas to evolve.

A missed opportunity Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Conservative Party in the UK from 1979 to 1990, and, during that short period of time, the face of the UK changed beyond recognition. The previous decade, 1968 to 1978, had been pivotal. Society was at its most equal. As Danny Dorling (2018b: 32) points out, this was a moment when we could have chosen to go down a different route, making different decisions based on values that reflect human and environmental flourishing, such as creating a sovereign wealth fund for future generations based on oil like Norway, or we could have been leaders in science and technology like Finland, 48

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or could have been as environmentally conscious as the Danes. But, no, we allowed different choices to be made by the Thatcher government that led us to slide abruptly from being the second most equal country in Europe in 1978, when we had good comprehensive schools, good housing, full employment and a rapidly diminishing deference to the class system, to being the most unequal country in Europe by 2015 (Dorling, 2018b). Caught like rabbits in the headlights, spellbound, we were unable to come up with a critique or a counternarrative to the Thatcher proposal. Grace Blakeley refers to the powerful capitalist narratives laden with emotive language – freedom, creativity, dynamism – with the promise that working people would have more power over their lives (Blakeley, 2021: 49).

The reality has been a concentration of power and wealth into the hands of the few defined by very different terms – inequality, corruption, crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these trends, delivering super-corporations like Amazon monopoly shares over the retail sector and extraordinary profits, with Jeff Bezos’ wealth growing by $75 billion in 2020 alone. (Blakeley, 2021: 49) There is a need to understand the nature of neoliberalism more fully. Slobodian challenges the story of the ‘new’ right, posturing to the poor by claiming to believe in the people, nationhood and culture while at the same time reaping the harvest of the injustices of poverty, inequality and discrimination that they planted in the first place. The market fundamentalism that defines neoliberal capitalism is evident in right-wing populist politics from the US to the UK to Austria as ‘mutant strains of neoliberalism’ (Slobodian, 2021: 67).

What we have witnessed in the last few years is not so much the clash of opposites as the public surfacing of a long-simmering dispute in the capitalist camp about what is necessary to keep the free market alive.

As irony would have it, the conflict that split the so-called globalists from the populists erupted first in the 1990s – at the very moment when many claimed that neoliberal ideas had conquered the world.

(Slobodian, 2021: 67) Slobodian’s point is that history is now revealing not global capitalism beyond the nation state, but that new right populist politics is simply a front to cover the same neoliberal ideology that Hayek, who remains an icon on both sides of the neoliberal/populist divide, still promotes. The nation state is being rethought to restrict democracy in order to protect competition – in other words it is a project to save capitalism and exploit national and global economic inequality.

The dominant narrative of caring for people, nationhood and cultural identity belies the harsh reality of neoliberal ideology across the world.

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Explore the question ‘Who gets to eat?’

Addressing the problem of creating a food system where everyone gets to eat, Hazel Healy (2021) outlines 10 steps to end world hunger, summarised in the following:

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10 steps to end world hunger 1. Put food before trade: change global trade regulations – end the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and bring civil society to the table.

2. Curtail corporations – and end impunity: famine, malnutrition and hunger are political choices, make them punishable crimes.

3. Redistribute riches: distribute wealth fairly and repay historical debts for slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, and so on.

4. Rights to land, seas – and better pay: recognise indigenous rights and customary rights to pastures, forests and fisheries as well as women’s rights – women are crucial in preventing hunger and malnutrition in families.

5. Smaller, fairer, slower trade: local markets and short supply chains privilege suppliers from indigenous and traditional communities, plus urban farming and fair trade cooperatives.

6. Free lunch – or funds to buy it: social safety nets must be extended and based on entitlement – not charity!

7. Balance with nature’s systems: slash carbon emissions to balance ecosystems and fund alternatives to industrial scale agriculture.

8. Incentivize good food: target unhealthy food and drink and redirect subsidies to reduce the price of healthy diets.

9. Eat ethical: consumer power as wealthy societies move to ethical, organic and vegetarian diets needs sourcing with public data tools that check sustainability claims.

10. Organize: civil society needs to build critical alliances between consumers, workers and producers to forge more democratic food politics the world over.

See further Healy (2021).

Each one of these points diametrically opposes the fundamental aims of neoliberal ideology and the policies that emerge from it.

The reality is that we are living with a worldview that is killing humanity and the planet, and until we realise the flawed and unjust thinking behind it, the world will face increasing crises. The symptoms of violence and division will get bigger and will continue to be normalised – images of people homeless and destitute in shop doorways, seen as responsible for their own poverty in rich countries, with 50

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hungry children dismissed as coming from families of welfare scroungers; the building of walls to keep immigrants out; terrified Afghan families passing their babies to the Canadian airforce as they are refused asylum … the list is endless, and is getting bigger.

‘We need more people who can see “the big picture”’, calls Al Aynsley-Green (2019: 230) in relation to ‘the British betrayal of childhood’. With some of the worst outcomes for health, education, social care, youth justice and poverty, the UK is at the same time among the richest countries of the world. But we need to see beyond this to the global picture in order to understand the lack of connection, empathy and compassion of neoliberal capitalism that breeds hatred, violence and destruction in relation to all humanity and the environment. Neoliberal capitalism is a toxic global problem that has polluted life on Earth.

Meanwhile, as Bregman (2018) says, we still seem to be in a coma, lacking the ability to understand what is happening, let alone the imagination to see a new world order to replace the devastation of neoliberal politics. And there are many ideas in action across the world based on Universal Basic Income, participatory budgeting and the like that could set the ball rolling in your community immediately. Environmental degradation and poverty violate human rights, so we need to think harder and act quickly! It is the rich who are the problem, not the poor (Sayer, 2016).

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.

(Mandela, 2005)

Big electoral change from Right to Left (or so we thought) The landslide election of the Blair government in 1997 filled those of us committed to social justice with hope and optimism. The promise, both personal and political, on the part of Tony Blair, Labour leader and newly elected prime minister, was to end child poverty.

The reality is that it was the dawning of the centre-ground politics of New Labour: neither Left nor Right, but all on the same side, the age of partnership with no dialectical tension. It was a pandering to the rich and a betrayal of the poor that was not clear in the beginning. At Toynbee Hall, in March 1999, Tony Blair delivered his speech on the legacy of Beveridge’s welfare state, the hiatus of which was his personal and political commitment to end child poverty within 20 years. After the long Thatcher years when ‘poverty’ was eliminated from political debate, this sounded revolutionary. A raft of policies appeared on child poverty, unemployment, neighbourhood deprivation and inequalities in health and educational achievement. Optimism soared! But Blair’s principles were flawed. He was playing his cards in favour of the privileged, not the poor, and this started to show. Owen Jones (2016: 100) accuses him of taking working-class voters for granted. Optimism started to fade and disillusionment set in. He was 51

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Participatory Practice

more interested in children as future workers than in happy, healthy childhoods, saying that we do not lift the poor ‘by hammering the people who are successful’!

(Sayer, 2016: 164).

Blair was a warmonger. He allied with then president George W. Bush on the US’s ‘war on terror’ to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, despite widespread public dissent. In fact, during his first five years, he took British troops into battle five times, more than any other prime minister in British history. This was to be his downfall, but his legacy remains that, on Tony Blair’s watch, ‘the top 1% carried on taking more and more each year as compared to the year before, just as fast as they had done during the Thatcher years’ (Dorling, 2018a: 18).

The naivety of New Labour under Tony Blair (1997–2007) was based on a belief that neoliberalism could bring about the end of class, a new classless society, based on meritocracy. This completely missed the point: ‘neoliberalism is itself a class project: an ideology which aims to restore and consolidate class power, under the veil of the rhetoric of individualism, choice, freedom, mobility and national security’ (Tyler: 2013: 7). This decoupling of class inequalities directly led to the abjectification of the ‘chav’ so firmly stitched into media ridicule by comedians David Walliams and Matt Lucas with their representation of Vicky Pollard as a feckless, irresponsible, ignorant, teenage mother to be both feared and ridiculed. Tony Blair, far from his promise, brought in a new political formula in the name of socialism: ‘a neoliberal perceptual frame through which to perceive “the masses” as an underclass of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose’ (Blair, 1997, cited in Tyler, 2013: 176). No wonder Margaret Thatcher described Tony Blair as her biggest success!

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the action of human beings.

(Mandela, 2005)

A decade of ‘austerity’ Britain The general election of 2010 brought an inconclusive result. The ‘Big Society’ was the platform on which David Cameron ran for office and became the driver of the coalition between the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats. The ‘small state’, so we were told, was about handing over power to communities and local people, an act of participatory democracy and community empowerment.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. This was a smokescreen for ‘austerity’ measures, absolving state responsibilities for the poorest in society by making the poor responsible for their own poverty while dismantling public sector provision. It was a pincer movement. Political persuasion was applied, Gramsci-style. David Cameron was an ‘enthusiastic purveyor of the austerity narrative’ (O’Hara, 2020: 138). This independently wealthy, public school educated, White, male Oxford University graduate used a ‘toxic narrative’ based on ‘“troubled” families who were the dangerous zombie vanguard of an out-of52

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Troubled times

control “intergenerational” poverty and welfare “dependency” epidemic’ (O’Hara, 2020: 137) to create hatred and fear in the minds of the general public. This convincing rhetoric was based around ‘welfare scroungers’, making a lifestyle choice to live on benefits, ripping off hard-working families who pay taxes, and bleeding the economy dry. ‘None of this was borne out by the facts – none’ (O’Hara, 2020: 138). The result has been a disaster for everyone, rich and poor alike. By 2015, the UK was the most unequal country in Europe, and there are no winners in divided countries.

This sets the scene for a discussion on ‘austerity’, the antithesis of social justice! Imogen Tyler talks about austerity as ‘a twenty-first-century enclosure movement’ (Tyler, 2020: 170). I think that captures the essence of the concept perfectly. ‘Austerity’ was not an economic necessity, it was a political choice to serve the interests of the rich by robbing the poor of the welfare commons, the infrastructure of public goods and services that had been the mainstay of society since the implementation of the welfare state. In 2010, the most savage attack on public goods began: … the rapid closure of local hospitals and clinics, public libraries, local museums, post offices, children’s nurseries, community and youth centres, day-centres and residential care homes for disabled people and pensioners, and the enclosure of common land, including parks and playing fields. The amount of services, facilities, buildings and land once held in common by local communities, now sold by cashstrapped local authorities to developers, or simply abandoned to decay, is staggering. (Tyler, 2020: 170) Generations of public sector knowledge and expertise as well as buildings, facilities and land have been contracted out from the public to the profit sector in a system of fragmented, precarious organisations, with the voluntary sector trying to protect those worst hit with street provision, homeless shelters, foodbanks, breakfast clubs for the swathes of poor children who go to school hungry, and so on and so on. The public sector was never the right of the government to sell: it belonged to the people.

Austerity is nothing less than a government-orchestrated programme of theft. (Tyler, 2020: 170) Exploring this concept of the commons further, Sayer’s (2016) analysis is critical and tackles the misconception of individualism. We do nothing on our own; we are part of a whole. That whole includes the past and the present, determining whether or not we meet our responsibility to hand over the world in better condition for next generations to inherit. We are always immensely indebted to previous generations; what we inherit provides a platform for what we are able to develop, including the natural resources that the Earth offers us. So, our common 53

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Participatory Practice

inheritance spans accumulated experience, intelligence, inventions, investments and hard work, together with environmental assets – energy, minerals, rivers, oceans, soil, flora and fauna and climate. We should never take for this for granted, ‘no one has the right to more of the earth’s resources … than the total of those resources divided by the world’s population’ (Sayer, 2016: 341).

The concept of the commons extends from what we take for granted in our everyday lives, like roads, waste disposal and public transport to the riches of the arts, past and present, to advances in science, past and present. Inequalities in the development of the commons privilege the powerful over the less powerful, often leading to slavery and exploitation. As a global phenomenon, neoliberal capitalism exploits poorer people within rich countries, making societies more and more unequal, at the same time as exploiting poorer countries, keeping countries unequal. The result is a divided world. These points certainly challenge any dialogue that centres on the ‘Because I deserve it’ narrative of individualism.

‘The commons are our collective heritage, our common wealth, our collective knowledge and our traditions of sharing in society’ (Standing, 2019: 349).

David Cameron claimed his ‘Big Society’ was about participatory democracy and community empowerment. This is not true! It was an exercise in making the poor responsible for their own poverty. Thatcher’s ‘care in the community’ and Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ need to be critiqued for ‘community engagement [being] used as an excuse for social dumping’ (Monbiot, 2017: 81). The small state simply absolved itself of responsibility for protecting democracy by ensuring fair distribution of resources, maintenance of human rights and a balance of power between the powerful and powerless, using ‘austerity’ as a smokescreen for robbing the poor to pay the rich, with dire consequences. This was the final dismantling of the values that informed the welfare state. Philip Alston revealed the shameful state of British poverty to the world, so let’s see what he had to say.

At last, a critical analysis from a human rights perspective!

Philip Alston, the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, came on a mission to investigate Austerity Britain in November 2018 and did not hold back on speaking truth to power.

A story of speaking truth to power …

Once upon a time in Austerity Britain a visitor from Australia spent a fortnight travelling round UK communities, listening very carefully to the stories people told about their everyday lives. He just happened to be not only a human rights lawyer, but the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. In the fifthrichest country in the world, he witnessed with his own eyes such extremes of 54

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poverty and destitution … long queues for foodbanks, people sleeping rough on the streets, the sense of deep despair and hopelessness, loneliness and isolation … he was shocked! A situation so bad, a government minister for suicide has been appointed. Local authority budgets so dramatically cut by government policies that safety nets for poor communities have been destroyed, with libraries, youth and community centres, public spaces, parks and recreation centres closed or sold off … But worst of all are the cuts in social security and related policies that have targeted the poor, women, minority ethnic groups, children, single parents, asylum seekers and people with disabilities, violating human rights agreements in relation BUP Copyright Material: Individual use only. Not for resale.

to women, children, disabled people and economic and human rights.

Alston was so shocked by all of this, he shamed UK poverty as a political choice, not an economic necessity, and accused the government of being out of touch with reality. Everyone with their eyes open can see the suffering, it’s all around you, and this could easily have been avoided had there been the political will. Just one player stubbornly refuses to see the situation for what it is, and that’s the government!

For almost one in every two children to be poor in the fifth-richest country is not just a disgrace, it’s a social calamity and an economic disaster rolled into one! A government spokesperson said in response, he’s got it wrong, and so everything carried on just the same …

The UN Rapporteur’s remit is to investigate countries with the extremely high levels of deprivation associated with developing nations, but the US and Britain are ‘outlier nations on poverty and treatment of the poor’ (O’Hara, 2020: 9).

Both use the neoliberal stigma narrative of ‘welfare scroungers’ to justify extreme inequalities, portraying the rich as hard-working and deserving and the poor as feckless, lazy and irresponsible wasters to justify radical changes in the value system, at variance with the common good. At the time of Philip Alston’s visit, the UK was in chaos with the all-consuming Brexit fervour that raged long and hard at the expense of any form of sensible government. Alston managed to penetrate the raging Brexit madness by speaking truth to power, naming and shaming UK poverty as a political choice. He accused the government of a ‘complete disconnect’ with the reality of the impact of poverty on people’s lives, saying, ‘Austerity could easily have spared the poor, if the political will had existed to do so.’ Alston’s 42-page report (Alston, 2018) was presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva with an accusation that austerity measures in the UK had violated UN human rights agreements in relation to women, children, disabled people, and economic and human rights. He critiqued government policies that have made deliberate choices to divert 55

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resources from the poor to the rich, underlining the decision to hand tax cuts to the rich in the November 2018 Budget rather than easing the suffering of poverty for millions.

Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times – times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation – that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils. (Mandela, 2005)

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Values, critical consciousness and change My juxtaposition of the stories of the welfare state and the neoliberal state highlight the way that different values have different outcomes. Values of collectivism, a common good, connection, kindness, caring, compassion, cooperation and community were considered good and worthwhile after World War II. They led to the welfare state, but were abandoned for a neoliberal project which appeared out of the blue promoting values of competition, alienation, individualism, personal greed, profit above people and planet, privatisation and privilege for the rich.

[Values] represent the importance we place on fundamental ways of being, offering a guide to what we consider to be good and worthwhile. (Monbiot, 2017: 7) Who would have believed that it was possible to influence people’s democratic voting rights to accept a dramatically different political ideology instantly? This is the power of false consciousness. Substituting cooperation with competition has led to outcomes that have plunged society into crisis. Unnecessary ‘austerity’ measures, imposed on Britain since 2010, have created immense suffering for the poor, stalling life expectancy in England – something that ‘has not happened since at least 1910’ – with life expectancy for women falling in the most deprived areas, and these foreshortened lives more likely to be lived in ill-health (Marmot et al, 2020a: 3). This is a violation of human rights, and a warning sign of a society in decline. What a strange anomaly this is for the fifth-richest nation in the world, so my purpose is to trace how, in such a short space of time, the radical, transformative changes that brought about a flourishing welfare state could be so dramatically reversed. This understanding is essential for social justice practitioners.

As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality exist in our world, none of us can truly rest. (Mandela, 2005)

How did they pull it off?

Understanding the answer to this question calls for insight into the austerity state’s use of stigma. Public shaming rituals have been revisited in the 21st century.

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Stigma permeates everything about life today, using humiliating acts of violence to dominate, dispossess and exploit, in the name of profit, and it is all pulled off by the intensely clever insight into how to gain popular consent. This links to the work of Gramsci: ideological persuasion achieves popular consent, telling stories that shame, denigrate, humiliate and dehumanise. If you tell these stories, such as that of the ‘welfare scrounger’, convincingly enough and they are then echoed and reinforced by the media, they penetrate people’s minds and get accepted as ‘common sense’. Portrayed as worthless, confidence is eroded, hope is destroyed and people become convinced that they really are responsible for their own poverty, not seeing that they are being discriminated against by the forces of power and privilege. This gives the go ahead for policies that punish and shame, policies that put a price on human lives based on class, ‘race’ and gender to reinforce the power and importance of White male supremacy. … welfare stigma changed the ways in which the public made evaluative judgments about inequality, welfare, poverty and need. … stigma was crafted to tutor the public into believing that people living in poverty had chosen their fates, and how the disenfranchisement and distress which have followed in the wake of cuts to social provision were deserved: a consequence of people’s poor behaviours, indiscipline and shamelessness. (Tyler, 2020: 28) Tyler’s purpose is to make stigma a more useful concept for understanding the subtlety of power in the struggle for freedom, most particularly extending an analysis of neoliberal capitalism into the complex web of intersectional inequalities it creates, for example, people who are poor, female, Black, immigrants, Travellers, in any combination, in any context and at all levels from local to global. This is a valuable extension of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.

To understand stigma as ideological persuasion in action, take a look at George Osborne, the ‘austerity chancellor’ after the 2010 general election, who promised a revolutionary welfare reform. What he had in mind was based on no evidence at all. He used stigma to justify a change of values, telling lies about millions of people idling their lives away on unemployment welfare benefits, abusing the system, wanting something for nothing… painting a picture of a shameful dependency culture that needed workfare to force them to work, rather than welfare. This heralded a punitive change in values from those of the welfare state to what has become the dehumanisation of the poor as the scourge of modern society, reducing swathes of human life to social detritus. As a result, the UK has sunk to the bottom of the equality league tables in Europe, all achieved by ‘an extraordinary political and media propaganda campaign which sought to manufacture public consent for austerity by stigmatising those in receipt of relief ’ (Tyler, 2020: 5).

Tyler’s contribution is a profound addition to the intersectional analysis of power needed for social justice practice. Gramsci extended the traditional Marxist 57

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analysis of hegemony, the way that a dominant social group asserts control over the masses by coercion. Coercion works through the law, the courts, the police and armed forces. Gramsci developed the concept of ideological persuasion working in parallel with coercion to get inside people’s minds, influencing them to consent to the dominant power, persuading people that the dominant story is the real truth, or common sense. Of course, it makes no sense at all, but without the tools to dismantle this paradoxical truth, subordinated groups start acting out contradictions that are often against their own best interests. Tyler (2020: 8) extends Gramsci’s profound analysis by ‘disrupting’ the taming of stigma to expose it as a form of violent power entangled in capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, both in the past and in the present.

Whose lives matter?

One blatant example, imprinted on my brain, of wasted lives treated with impunity as human detritus is that of the floodwaters of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The story of Hurricane Katrina…

The images that shocked the world were not those of the force of a hurricane, but that of human inhumanity: largely Black, mostly female, overwhelmingly poor and often children or older people … some desperately calling for help to the rest of the world, for others it was too late, dead and abandoned, floating in the floodwaters while the rest of the USA carried on with business as usual.

The Bush government knew the storm risks from Hurricane Katrina, knew that the flood defences could not withstand a Category 5 hurricane, but refused to fund the upgrading requested with their logic of market forces. The $500m was not forthcoming, and over 1,800 people died, with a million made homeless. Ironically, $23bn of property damage, far more than the cost of reinforcing the storm defences, was sustained.

Source: Mason (2019: 164–5)

We were warned by Henry Giroux of this politics of disposability on the part of the neoliberal state (Giroux, 2006). We should have heeded the warning! As neoliberal politics has globalised and entrenched, the atrocities have worsened.

People’s value is now unashamedly differentialised along lines of discrimination.

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The story of the Windrush Scandal …

In 1948, the MV Empire Windrush docked in London with workers from the Caribbean actively recruited by the British government to rebuild post-war Britain. Many of them had fought for Britain in World War II and felt proud to be part of the British empire. This heralded a large-scale immigration programme from 1948 to 1971. Their free movement ended with the 1971 Immigration Act which called for a work permit and a parent/grandparent born in the UK, but Commonwealth citizens already here were given the right to remain. Not only did Enoch Powell BUP Copyright Material: Individual use only. Not for resale.

shame Britain politically with his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, but what’s now become known as the ‘Windrush Scandal’ unfolded in the spring of 2018, exposing the Conservative Brexit Government’s disgraceful, dehumanising plan to keep aliens out, under the leadership of Theresa May. Generations of families who have the legal right to citizenship have been denied passports, lost jobs, been refused the right to re-enter Britain, refused health care, social care and welfare benefits because the government had cleverly destroyed their legal documentation that provided evidence of residence, thereby making them illegal citizens.

Source: Gentleman (2019)

This paved the way for a ‘hostile’ approach to all immigration applications, setting targets, success measured by deportation (Ballat, 2020: 172–3). ‘The list of regulatory failures under neoliberalism is long and global’ (Mason, 2019: 165), and there is no better example of this than the Grenfell Tower Disaster.

The story of the Grenfell Tower nightmare …

Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey council housing apartment block, was ablaze, with people jumping from it in desperation floating down as the world watched. It was just after 1 am on 14 June 2017 when a fire broke out on the fourth floor and it took just 15 minutes to turn the entire building into a blazing inferno. This was public housing owned by Kensington and Chelsea London Borough, Britain’s richest and most neoliberal local council, an important point to bear in mind (Mason, 2019). The extremely rich and the extremely poor live here, side by side.

The councillors who made decisions about the housing for the poor are among the privileged who have benefited from neoliberal policies and who have no empathy with

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their poor neighbours, but plenty of stigma stereotypes in their heads. Seventyone people died and all that was left was enormous grief, trauma and tons of ash.

Later it emerged that the fire spread due to council decisions to clad the building in cheap, unsafe, flammable material, putting the lives of everyone who lived there at risk. More than that, it was estimated that over a hundred buildings in Britain had been clad in similar material to Grenfell, violating basic fire safety regulations (Ledwith, 2020). ‘The Grenfell disaster was caused by the lack of regard that the rich councillors of Kensington and Chelsea had for their poorer neighbours’ (Dorling,

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2018a: 87).

Stories such as these illuminate the starkness of the change in values, not only threatening the very nature of democracy, but questioning the moral compass of governments that sanction the abuse of human rights in rich countries where poverty is a political choice, not an economic necessity.

Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. (Mandela, 2005)

What do we care about? What are our values?

The dominant way of seeing the world is constructed by the powerful, but it has a massive impact on everyday lives in community. Ideas influence public attitudes and, subsequently, social policy in the interplay of power and disempowerment.

Understanding how this happens is the basis of effective participatory practice interventions. Individualism does not encourage a way of life that takes a collective responsibility for the well-being of all. It is more likely to justify why some people are privileged while others are in poverty. Consumerism, driven by market forces, has justified levels of exploitation and greed that increase social divisions and deplete natural resources, with the consequence that life on Earth is adrift from the ecosystem on which it relies. Biodiversity and cooperation are concepts based on respect and reverence for the Earth and all humanity. This perspective comes from an awareness that there is a balance to life on Earth, that we are all part of a complex ecosystem that can only flourish in its interconnectedness.

The New Economics Foundation (NEF),1 which works with people at grassroots, and campaigns and produces research for political change at the top – a vital connection for participatory practitioners – calls for a new economy based on: 1. A new social settlement: A new social settlement will ensure people are paid well, have more time off to spend with their families, have access to affordable housing, know there is a decent safety net if they need one, and are provided with a high level of care throughout their lives.

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2. A Green New Deal: The Green New Deal is a plan is for government-led investment to reduce the carbon we emit and massively boost nature, while creating good, unionised jobs. These jobs should be targeted in parts of the UK that have most lost out over the past 40 years. A decade ago, NEF was part of the visionary group that proposed a Green New Deal and it is now part of a growing movement reviving this concept.

3. The democratic economy: We need to devolve state power and transform ownership of the economy.

The thinking behind this is that our existing economic system is failing us so badly.

Based on corrupt, flawed thinking, it was designed to benefit the privileged at the expense of the poor by pioneering a free-market principle based on profit at any price. There is an urgent need for change. The New Economics Foundation questions reviving the welfare state because its reliance on state ownership does not fit with the current demand for devolved local power. A new social settlement and a Green New Deal will not succeed unless there is an active, decentralised state, new forms of democratic ownership, an ideological change to cooperation and collaboration, and policies explicitly designed for the participation of those who are affected by them. This is refreshing, radical thinking that calls for distinct change for a new political ideology.

Addressing similar issues in her ground-breaking work, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-century Economist, Kate Raworth engages intersectionally with the social and ecological crises of our times to construct a new economic story, one of a world in self-righting balance. It is a counternarrative, a new vision which asks new questions, putting the economy in context to ‘create human prosperity in a flourishing web of life, so that we can thrive in balance’ (Raworth, 2018: 287).

The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a simple visualisation of the dual conditions – social and ecological – that underpin collective human well-being. The social foundation demarks the Doughnut’s inner boundary and sets out the basics of life on which no one should be left falling short. The ecological ceiling demarks the Doughnut’s outer boundary, beyond which humanity’s pressure on Earth’s life-giving systems is in dangerous overshoot. Between the two sets of boundaries lies the ecologically safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive. (Raworth, 2018: 295) The Doughnut Model is a highly sophisticated tool founded on both social justice and environmental justice theory, a model that inspires hope with the enormous potential to remedy the crises created by the politics of the past 40 years (see also Ledwith, 2020: 66). In the model of a doughnut, Raworth visually captures the safe parameters for human and environmental flourishing in detail. We have the ideas, the experience, the technology – what is lacking is the political will!

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Meanwhile, the UN highlights the global emergency: ‘there is a decade left to stop irreversible damage from climate change, to protect the climate for future generations according to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ (UN General Assembly, 2019).

The irony is that both human suffering and environmental destruction are neither natural nor necessary; they are human-generated. We have more than enough for everyone to live without hunger, with need but not greed. The problem is that we are choosing consumerism, a system that favours the greed of the privileged at the expense of the poor and the environment. The argument for economic growth as the route to ending poverty is not only a futile defence of capitalism, but is a trajectory that is killing the planet itself. The time for connected ideas is urgent: What we urgently need is an economy that replaces the universal of profit with a universal of care for both each other and the natural world which keeps us alive. (Swift, 2020: 26)

Kindness and kinship: a different lens for a decent future Values change life on Earth! Not only do they frame the way we see the world, but also they influence how we behave towards each other and how we treat the environment. Tracing a timeline from World War II to the present day illuminates the ways in which changing the values has changed the world. From a post-war commitment to the common good based on a natural propensity for people to be kind, caring and cooperative, the British welfare state was born. But within a few decades a dramatic change in values, driven by Margaret Thatcher, planted the seeds of a global neoliberal revolution, one that has now reached world crises of catastrophic proportions.

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. (Gramsci, 1971, quoted in Hoare and Nowell-Smith: 276) We find ourselves in that ‘interregnum’, the gap referred to by Gramsci where the current global social order is dying but the new has yet to be born. It is a space in which morbid symptoms erupt in the form of political, social and economic contradictions culminating in crises that cannot be solved by the existing social order. Consider just some: the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008; the rise of extreme right movements in Europe and the US; populist politics in the form of Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil; the environmental crisis; the world hunger crisis; the crisis of misogyny as violence against women and girls escalates the world over; the crisis of structural racism; and the rise of xenophobia as millions of displaced refugees seek sanctuary from climate change, war and poverty … And, on top of all this, as this book 62

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Troubled times

goes to press, not only Europe but the world has been thrown into crisis as Putin rages a savage war on Ukraine that constitutes a crime against humanity.

Using the benefit of hindsight, let’s glance back at the UK to discover how changes in values have steered it from having the second most equal society in Europe to being the most unequal (Dorling, 2020). The key to understanding how such a dramatic change has been achieved lies in the use of stigma (Tyler, 2013, 2020). Constantly repeated stories of the poor and vulnerable as welfare scroungers, the detritus of society, have permeated the popular imagination as a ‘real truth’, endorsing punitive policies that have punished the poor and privileged the rich, dismantling the welfare state and privatising the commons (Standing, 2019). The exciting part of this awareness is that a counternarrative of kindness and connection, so much more part of the human condition than alienation and selfishness, could bring about a counter-revolution for the better.

What constitutes a good society? What are our responsibilities and obligations to one another? After more than four decades of a dominant ideology driven by individualism, how do we begin to reconnect with each other through kinship, community and the common good? The last vestiges of a social contract are evaporating: instead, we no longer have means-tested benefits, more a punitive system of stigma-tested poor relief! But life is risky for everyone: family breakdown, unemployment, poor health, ‘dis’ability, age, mental illness … ‘A good society recognises these risks and insists they should be shared and insured against in an agreed system of collective insurance’ (Hutton, 2015: 45). In other words, the risks of being alive and part of a society call for a social contract that underwrites those risks. That is social justice.

Imagine a society based on the common good, in which our common humanity is the focus for everything we do. Intelligent Kindness (Ballatt et al, 2020) changed my thinking. Ideas do this. They grow and evolve. Kindness is much more than a rather weak, wishy-washy emotion; it is part of the essence of our being, a concept with ancient roots that link to kinship, meaning that we are of a kind, connected across time and space, interdependent, with responsibilities to each other …

Kindness is kinship felt and expressed … it emerges from a sense of common humanity, promotes sharing, effort on others’ behalf, sacrifice for the good of the other. (Ballatt et al, 2020: 10) This extends beyond personal relationships in family and community to other cultures, countries and continents. Being kind is a way of life that embraces the entire human family. ‘It is the “glue” of cooperation’ (Ballatt et al, 2020: 16). A radical, transformative concept, it offers a lens on the world framed by compassion, caring, reciprocity, mutuality, equality … Imagine how the world would be if kindness was our greatest priority! … every living creature has its own variety of genius, and everyone is born into this world with a mind brilliantly capable of solving the 63

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problems relevant to their survival … Our lives should be measured not by how many enemies we have conquered but how many friends we have made. That is the secret to our survival. (Hare and Woods, 2020: 196)

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3 The participatory worldview

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Jane Springett

The human being is essentially a holistic being who lives in integrated totalities. When the human being is forced to lead a fragmented life, he/she shrinks, is frustrated, diminished. (Skolimowski, 1994: 91) In Chapter 2 we began to explore some of the neoliberal thinking that underpins the structures and institutions that dominate current ways of relating economically, socially and politically, and how current trends seem to be reinforcing that dominance and resisting change towards an alternative way of being. Certainly, our democratic institutions, organisational structures and educational practices have continued to remain resilient to the changes that new forms of thinking imply.

Indeed, many people appear to have become further entrenched in old thought processes and institutions have become even more alienating. There are, however, also signs of change suggesting that as the old order resists, there are green shoots of possibility. Central to that change is a shift in perspective and consciousness towards a radically different set of worldviews based on a participatory mindset.

In this chapter, we take a deep dive into this alternative way of viewing the world and invite you to think about what this means in terms of the way we act in the world. In other words, what does seeing the world from an integrative or participatory perspective imply for our practice?

In doing so we will be inviting you to look at the deep-seated roots of the dominant way of viewing the world, at least here in the West. A worldview is a belief set which groups hold consciously and unconsciously about their place in the world, and how the world works. Because this consciousness is collectivised beyond the individual, it is also socially and historically constructed. As such, it affects how people relate to each other and to the environment of which they are part. It also affects the consequential power structures that have evolved to maintain it. It pervades the stories about the world we tell ourselves.

How you think the world operates and your place in it also influence how you act in the world to change it.

So, to engage in participatory practice, we need to hold a worldview – or story about the world that is different from that which currently dominates. It also requires a critical awareness of how the dominant worldview continues to pervade 65

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our own ways of thinking and doing and shapes our meaning-making and action.

We can only then start to integrate different ways of knowing that will serve to help create a more integrated world.

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The separation of theory and practice is false; they are not opposites but two sides of the same coin. We cannot act wisely without making sense of the world and making sense of the world is in itself a profoundly practical action that informs our reality. (Wahl, 2016: 20) As we make the deep dive into exploring the underlying mindset that needs to change and the reconfiguration that is needed before we can be embodied participatory practitioners, bear the above quote in mind. As Skolimowski (1994) argues, the nature of our mind is the nature of our knowledge and the nature of our reality. In other words, ontology, a theory of being, and epistemology, a theory of knowledge, are intimately related. We are socialised into a particular mindset which creates a particular form. Hitherto, that mindset has been largely a monological approach to the world. What is needed is a multidimensional one.

So, let us start by unpicking our old ways of thinking before we take on new ways of thinking and a more participatory mindset.

The Western mind Man [sic] faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe. And he faces the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view – ie in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomised, soulless and self-destructive. The crisis of modern man is essentially a masculine crisis. (Tarnas, 1991) Even those of us who think we have moved towards a participatory view of the world are often not aware of how Western ideological perspectives pervade the very essence of our existence. Beneath the forces of domination and subordination, alienation and fragmentation there is a worldview that came to dominate globally through European colonialism, but also through scientific development and patriarchy. This worldview has affected the way we view what knowledge is and how it is created, and also how we see ourselves in relationship to nature and each other. In both cases, the dominant worldview has been one of dualism, or opposites – of separation of mind from matter, subject from objects, parts from the whole – and a search for linear causality to develop simple solutions to problems.

The above quote comes from The Passion of the Western Mind (Tarnas, 1991), which traced the development over the last 300 years of this approach to making sense of the world and its implications. While the mechanistic reductionist methodology of science and the associated continuing separation of knowledge 66

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The participatory worldview

into specialisations did lead to an explosion of technological innovation, it also came to be seen as the only legitimate way of generating knowledge about the world, against which all other forms of knowledge generation were to be assessed and found wanting. Although often branded as Newtonian and Cartesian ways of thinking, there are philosophical connections that are innately European and go back to Plato and Aristotle, among others. Philosophers in other civilisations, in India, Japan or China, and indigenous groups in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere developed other systems of thought. It is important to recognise that certain aspects of contemporary scientific thought and social theory are embedded in Western European culture and have been imposed through colonialism. This is not to say such thinking is wrong: it is an extremely useful tool or frame, if used with awareness. For example, in understanding poverty we need statistics, and in understanding the causes of problems we need systematic analysis. Our argument here is that such a view has come to dominate our systems as part of a grand narrative, creating a worldview that is fundamentally unbalanced: an unbalancing that is reinforced by neoliberalism, as discussed in Chapter 2.

What are the elements of the inherent dualism that are so embedded in mainstream ways of thinking?

So-called objectivity and the downgrading of emotion and experience We lost the Poetry of the Earth under the illusion that the sciences, in describing to us the physical functioning of the natural world, were revealing to us the true reality of things… We have lost the dream world, the mythic world, the sacred world, the spirit world. Ultimately, we lost the vast world of meaning without which humans become unbearable, even to themselves. (Berry, 1988) One element is the notion that reality can ultimately be explained in terms of basic laws, discovered only through precise measurement. In other words, there are objective facts about the world that do not depend on interpretation, and it is through improved forms of measurement we will reveal real ‘truth’. Moreover, that ‘truth’ can only be revealed if the observer of the ‘facts’ is detached from nature and the object of interest. The difficulty with taking this approach, however, is that you also strip away the essential nature of things and their meaning. It fails to acknowledge humans as whole beings that not only think but also feel, and who need to experience meaning. Damasio (1994) was one of the first neuroscientists to demonstrate that those who have no emotion act irrationally and that emotional engagement is essential to how human beings make decisions and live in the world. For the fundamentalist scientist, however, any way of understanding reality other than through ‘objective’ science is dismissed as ‘magic’ or ‘biased’ (for example Dawkins, 1976). Indeed, there are cases where the assumption is 67

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made that the objects of mathematically formulated physical laws are more real than the phenomena they are describing. In other words, the abstract models for the supposedly hidden reality behind experienced phenomena take on a higher ontological status than the experiences themselves.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in many parts of the world the general population are alienated from science when their emotions and experiences are dismissed as irrelevant, and are attracted to populist leaders who play on those previously unacknowledged emotions. However, the discounting of emotion and experience has long been a concern. Dewey argued that to really understand nature we need to look at the world in an integrative way, combining different perspectives and knowledge, including science (Dewey, 1925b). For Dewey, knowledge is derived from embodied intelligence, not from the mind alone.

How do you balance measurement with experience and feeling?

Separateness and parts Most of us live in a society where there is an emphasis on the individual. This is reinforced by dominant economic discourse and also arises from the inherited belief that humans are separate from nature, often referred to as dualism. But is this an illusion?

Think of a time when you have felt ‘at one’ with the world. It may be laughing with friends, being in a soccer crowd when your team scores a goal, singing in a choir, watching a glorious sunset while in nature or that occasional time when you meditate where you seem to dissolve. Often these moments are fleeting but it is as if our consciousness has recognised we are all connected with each other and our environment. We are relational beings, psychologically, spiritually and socially. It is the human need to connect with each other that underpins the popularity of social media, social connection is as important for health and well-being as lifestyle choices, while the physiological and psychological benefits of being in nature are now well attested. It is not just an experience of the mind but of our whole being.

The notion of separation in dualistic thinking manifests itself in several ways. First, there is the idea that the mind is separate from the body. This has historically been the main driver of medical science with its emphasis on the physical and the downgrading of the emotional and psychological. Arising out of the notion of separateness and objectivity there is also the tendency to focus on analysing problems by drilling down into the minutiae of particular knowledge areas. Many institutions, such as universities, are still very much structured to encourage specialisation into discrete areas of knowledge. So is the case with 68

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The participatory worldview

medical science. How often has a medical problem been exacerbated as you are shifted from one specialist to another because your illness is chronic and not restricted to one organ? While breaking down a problem scientifically or otherwise into smaller and smaller components to understand its nature is useful, such a culturally dominant worldview fails to identify what Capra (1996) calls the hidden connections between things.

Nor does this fragmentation make sense physiologically. As Pert (1999) has shown, peptides, the biochemical manifestation of emotions, are not just found in the brain – all bodily functions are emotionally connected. More recently, it has been recognised that our emotions are influenced by our gut’s micro-organisms.

Cognition, or our understanding of the world, is a phenomenon throughout the body, operating through a system that integrates mental, emotional and biological activities. This has been recognised by non-Western healing systems. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the dominant Western medical model has meant that those who can afford it have sought these alternative, more holistic modalities of healing outside state-funded health care. Two of these modalities, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, have their roots in Eastern philosophy and are based on observations over many centuries. Others have their roots in indigenous knowledge and often inherited women’s wisdom that was denigrated by the patriarchy during the early years of modern medicine in Western societies. Intrinsic in all is the notion that you cannot heal the part without consideration of how it is connected to the whole. A visit to a qualified practitioner in any of these modalities will involve questions relating to a person’s symptoms, including those other than physical.

Diseases, within this view, are seen as dis‘ease’, or lack of balance, so physical symptoms may be reflecting emotional or psychological imbalance.

Although Western medical science is changing, albeit slowly, so pervasive is the medical model of health in Western society that it underpins several assumptions held by different professional groups, their responsibilities, how they behave towards one another and their expectations. In community settings, it has often been a real uphill struggle to persuade those working in a community that health is more than medical care, and just as central to community development as it is to the so-called ‘health’ sector. Similarly, it is difficult to persuade health professionals that they do not hold the remit for all health work. Medical hegemony (ScottSamuel and Springett, 2007) pervades all government documents, research and project funding. Until recently, projects directed at promoting health and well-being had to demonstrate that they were directed at heart disease, diabetes, specific cancers or suicide or that they focused on an individual lifestyle factor such as smoking, physical activity or weight control, or lifestyle diseases such as obesity or alcoholism. Where well-being was considered, it was differentiated as mental health promotion, tying it closely to mental illness.

This dominant approach to the promotion of health does not pay real attention to the complexity inherent in how people negotiate their everyday lives. It also objectifies people into categories such as class, socio-economic, gender or ethnic groups, labelling them as members of target groups, ignoring the relational aspects 69

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Participatory Practice

of their lives and therefore decontextualising so-called ‘health-related behaviours’ from everyday life. Instead, the different elements of lifestyle are separated out rather than seen as real issues that face people in their lives, with physical health as part of a larger whole of well-being and community, and ordinary people as thinking, feeling beings. The downgrading of the emotive, value-based aspects of thinking processes is perpetuated by privileging the rational and ignoring the meaning systems people share as a result of sharing the same social world (Bolam et al, 2003). In fact, the failure to understand and value different knowledge systems and cultures in a broader context has led to the differential impact of public health interventions, increasing the very health inequalities that they are trying to address. Yet practices that create health and well-being are embedded in a co-creation process involving both the individual and the collective. This is often revealed in people’s ‘knowledgeable narratives’ (Popay et al, 2003).

Consequences Interventions in the context of health promotion that ignore the everyday reality of people’s lives litter public health history. A classic example is smoking cessation. In the late 20th century getting people to give up smoking became the focus of government policy. Evidence-based interventions were the prerequisite for local funding but these were based on the so-called ‘gold standard’ for those which had been tested through randomised controlled trials, leading to a list of cost-effective options including counselling by a GP and nicotine patches. Actual implementation was less successful in poor communities because interventions failed to take into account why people smoked and, in some ports, the availability of cheap black-market cigarettes. The more successful programmes involved peer support from volunteers who had themselves given up smoking and to whom people could relate, rather than a White middleclass professional who ‘talked posh’. Subsequently, a number of places have involved local people as health champions, engaging them in ways to adopt healthy lifestyle practices, despite contexts that act against them. (See https://www.altogetherbetter. org.uk; Atkinson et al, 2020.)

We are using health as an illustration, but there are similar examples in other areas, such as transport, housing and regeneration, where a particular perspective dominates and where the part is not seen as connected to the whole. Many social and community interventions treat a particular issue as an isolated phenomenon, acting on an isolated individual, operating in vacuum. Moreover, when ‘evidence’ is being collected to measure its impact, data collection is restricted to the isolated phenomenon. If there are consequences beyond the immediate intervention – the ripple effect (Trickett, 2019) – these are rarely picked up.

Dualistic thinking around how we should act in the world also creates the notion that scientific knowledge or evidence is something created separately 70

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and is then ‘translated’ or ‘transferred’ into practice. Underlying these debates on evidence into practice or research translation is a failure to realise that the evidence that is being transferred into practice is only partial; real understanding can only come from an interactive process of engagement with practical reality, involving what Polanyi (1958) calls ‘subsidiary awareness’. This is intuitive, or first-order, perceptual knowing. Instead of seeing the world as something out there, we need to view ourselves as embodied participants of a greater whole, and thereby become more responsive. In other words, our inner and outer worlds are connected and cannot be treated as unrelated. This also puts a different spin on the issue of generality. The craving for generality in a traditional scientific sense, when applied to society, often leads to an imposition of general principles in inappropriate contexts: for example, we have tested this solution in Salford, UK, so we can apply this to the whole of Canada. This ignores the necessary variety of human experience in specific contexts. As we see later, diversity is important for the survival both of humanity and of the planet.

Human–nature relations According to neo-Darwinists, evolution is a product of fierce competition, with each species pitted against the others in a vicious battle to survive. A quite different perspective now accepted by mainstream science is called endosymbiotic theory. This theory proposes that important steps in our evolution have occurred through cooperation between species, even to the point of separate organisms joining together to create entirely new forms of life. (Macy and Johnstone, 2012: 98) One of the insidious effects of the idea of separatism has been that nature is seen as separate from humans and only there for the latter to exploit for their own use. In other words, the planet is there for us alone, a belief reinforced by many religions. As a result, ecology and nature are seen as something that can be taken from without consequences, a perception that has placed us in the current sustainability crisis. This is further reinforced by the encouragement of individualism and othering, as well as a sense of competition and scarcity.

This separation from nature and the primacy of competition are intimately related to the current climate crisis and to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

Both have brought into sharp relief how erroneous this worldview is and how such a perspective has created those crises. Under the dualist mindset, though, technological development, science and economics can deliver a more rational, efficient and productive life for all and solve all such problems. Yet the rules of classical economics go against the basic rules of long-term survival of the planet.

Land and nature are treated as a potential commodity for the market, a raw material for exploitation by capital, effectively validating a utilitarian approach to nature, which has led to an increasing detachment from nature reinforced across the planet by the history of colonialism. Nature is something out there 71

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to watch in an environmental documentary, not something of which we are a part, especially in highly urbanised society. Our place in the living world is also absent from many economic and social theories and the associated solutions to social problems. However, social justice is intimately tied up with environmental justice; they are not separate issues (Adebowale, 2008). The Doughnut Model of Economics (see p 195) goes some way to address this relationship.

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What other examples are there where economic thinking has changed to incorporate nature?

The dangers of mechanistic thinking In the 1970s cult book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig (1974) compares some organisations to a motorcycle and argues that they share systemic qualities in that they are sustained by structural relationships, even when they have lost their meaning and purpose. However, to tear down the organisation, like pulling apart a motorcycle, is to deal with the effects and not the causes when the real cause is the system of thinking. If you tear down an organisation but do not change the thinking, the patterns of thought that created it will repeat themselves. For the character in Pirsig’s novel, the separation of subject and object is an artificial interpretation imposed on reality that destroys its quality or essence. In the case of the motorcycle, this is embedded in the craft that created it: Man [sic] is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he [sic] the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists would say.

The quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man [sic] and his environment. He [sic] is a participant in the creation of all things. (Pirsig, 1974: 368)

Values, spirituality and consciousness There is no place in the Cartesian worldview for values or for spirituality and consciousness. Indeed, there is an innate dialectical relationship with spirituality.

Moreover, objectivity implies value-free, although that, in itself, is a value. Leaving everything to the invisible forces of the market implies a set of values that privilege the economy but in a particular way. Rarely are values discussed or questioned in political debate or, indeed, in many contexts. More often they are taken for granted or assumed. Similarly, spirituality is talked about in hushed voices and is rarely part of any mainstream conversation, along with moral values and meaning.

Religion and spirituality are also often conflated. Spirituality is a way of being that flows from a certain profound sense of heightened aliveness experienced 72

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by both the mind and the body at the same time, a deep sense of connection difficult to put into words. Religion, on the other hand, is an organised attempt to understand the spiritual experience, while the history of religion is one of patriarchy and the search for control.

Consider the following:

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1. To what extent are you comfortable with the idea of talking about spirituality and consciousness? If not, why?

2. What other manifestations of the hegemony of the Western mind and its influence on practice can you identify?

Indigenous ways of knowing “The Circle has healing power. In the Circle, we are all equal. When in the Circle No one is in front of you No one is behind you No one is above you No one is below you. The Sacred Circle is designed to create unity.” (Dave Chief, Oglala Lakota, quoted in Kovach, 2009: 35) A complete contrast to the dualistic and positivist-reductionist worldview outlined in the previous section are the worldviews held by many indigenous groups, despite large-scale historical cultural oppression, as well as cultural appropriation. Notwithstanding the complexity and great variation between different groups around the world, almost all indigenous knowledge systems consist of a complex interplay of knowledge, practice and belief, and all hold a participatory worldview. In some cases, aspects of these cultures have been incorporated into so-called New Age practices, often, but not always, without respect for ancient traditions and devoid of the original context. Despite great variation in indigenous knowledge globally, there are some universal elements in indigenous epistemology that can be distinguished. First, there is an ethic of non-dominant, respectful human–nature relationship, a sacred ecology (Berkes, 2017). There is a belief in immanence, that all things are of equal value because all things have unseen powers and energy, whether an animal, a rock or a human.

These powers can be seen in the changes of the seasons and of night and day.

These cycles of growth and change are marked by ceremonies to recognise the spirits of the seasons. Along with this is the idea that humans cannot predict and control nature. This all leads to a second element and that is the centrality of the spiritual in everything. Thirdly, indigenous ontology recognises the importance of balance and that ill health or discord is a product of lack of balance. Fourthly, respect and reciprocity between the inner and outer world, between individuals and the community, and between nature and humans is seen as fundamental.

This is tied up with the notion of interconnectedness. All things and all people, although we each have our own individual gifts, are dependent on and share in the growth and work of everything and everyone else. People thrive when 73

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there is a web of interconnectedness between the individual and community and between the community and nature. This, in turn, means that everything is relational and by attending to the relational we can attend to the whole. Thus, an individual is only knowable as a member of a recognised community, and communities are only recognised through their constituents. This connection includes our relationship to the land and where we are born and live.

These beliefs and ways of being have meant that indigenous groups have often come into conflict with Western views of knowledge creation. Generalisation in indigenous thinking, for example, only takes place at the level of values, while learning is achieved through experience, ceremony and storytelling (Graveline, 1998). For indigenous groups, knowledge is a blend of mind, practice, trusted authority, spiritual values and local social and cultural organisation: a knowledge space (Turnbull, 1997). Tying everything together is the primary focus on nurturing relationships, not only with each other but also with the past and the future, as well as with nature. It is through ceremony, talking circles, wisdom councils and generally taking time to be with people that is so core to indigenous ways. This is a hard lesson for those working with tribal communities but a necessary one. Relating comes before anything else.

Table 3.1 illustrates the differences between Western models and indigenous ways of seeing which Peat (1986) discussed in his book Blackfoot Physics some years ago.

Table 3.1: Different ways of seeing the world Western science

Indigenous science

Linear thought logic and structure

Being, experiencing relationship

Fragmentation, dualism

Connectedness

Material and concrete

Spirit and emergence

Fixed laws

Flux, change and transformation

Knowledge as something to be processed and accumulated

Coming to knowing through experience, watching and listening, ceremonies and songs, and entering the silence

Individual rights and justice

Obligations, dialogue and balance

Abstraction

Stuff of life

Source: Based on Peat (1986)

The medicine wheel A common – and the most widely recognised – symbol of indigenous ways of viewing the world is the medicine wheel, a circular symbol that encapsulates the essential holistic and participatory nature of this way of thinking (Bopp et al, 1985; Marsden, 2005).

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It is a perfectly balanced shape without a top or bottom, length or width. It represents constant movement and change. It also represents and symbolizes unity, peace, harmony and courage. It is a testimony of the human being’s ability to survive and to maintain balance. The ultimate goal is to strike a harmonious balance in life. The circular form of the Medicine Wheel shows the relationship of all things in a unity, a perfect form, and suggests the cyclical nature of all relationships and interactions. Everything in the universe is part of a single whole.

(From Teachings of the Medicine Wheel, Unit 2, Student Manual, Ontario Native Literacy Coalition, 2010: 3) The circle, therefore, acknowledges the connectedness of everything in life, such as the four seasons, the four stages of life and the four winds; and it represents the continuous cycle and relationship of the seen and unseen, the physical and spiritual, birth and death, and the daily sunrise and sunset (see Figure 3.1). The wheel is usually divided into four coloured quadrants. The colours can vary, but the symbolism and concepts remain similar. The wheel moves in a clockwise direction, with the teachings always beginning at the yellow, or eastern, quadrant.

Figure 3.1: The medicine wheel

Source: Graveline (1998: 14)

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The medicine wheel is used in different ways by different tribes and groups in North America. It is also interpreted in different ways. Some indigenous cultures use medicine wheels in prayer, in healing, in learning or in caring for the land and other sacred teachings. These teachings can be as diverse as the hundreds of indigenous cultures. Sometimes rather than being drawn as a picture or made into an artefact it is also represented in stone on the land or as a community garden.

Of all concepts contained in the teachings it is the importance of relationships that is crucial (see Figure 3.2). This is the idea that everything we do, every decision we make, affects our family and our community; it affects the air we breathe, the animals, the plants, the water, in some way each of us its totally dependent on everything else.

The Métis teacher and community organiser Fyre Jean Graveline has used the medicine wheel to develop a cross-cultural education course to engage students from all backgrounds in exploring oppression. In her wheel the East represents Knowing and Thinking, the Air; the South: Spirit and Culture, the Fire; the West: Relationships/ Emotions, Water; and finally the North: Doing and Acting, the Earth. The entire course is based on some core principles: (1) the principle of First Voice, which emphasises the importance of your own experience, with the implication that you should not talk about what you do not know from experience, (2) the principle of Storytelling, which is crucial for transmission of the Gifts of Cultures, through (3) the Talking Circle: the principle of speaking from the Heart and listening respectfully, and finally (4) the principle of Taking Action: that is, doing more than saying. These values and ways of being permeate the entire learning cycle.

In her book, Circle Works (1998), Graveline documents her experience and theirs, through their voices, of delivering the course to multicultural groups of students in Canada as she takes them through what she calls the four doors. The first door is Eastern door, where Eurocentric consciousness is challenged and where the question is asked: how do we know? How do we learn? The process unlocks the dimensions of White privilege. The second door is the South, which introduces the students to Talking Circles and other elements of aboriginal spirituality. The third door is the West and this focuses on learning to understand the self in relation through acknowledging all our relations.

The final door is in the North, where action for change based on experience is taken.

Graveline’s work illustrates how the wheel can be used in teaching about oppression. Another practical application is the ‘Self-care medicine wheel’ (Figure 3.3) developed by Elsipogtog Health and Wellness Centre staff as a guide during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elsewhere, through a process of participation and sharing, The First Nations Health Authority (2014) in British Columbia, Canada, came up with a reinterpretation of the medicine wheel to frame its long-term strategy for health.

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Source: Graveline (1998: 161)

AL

M

Wash your hands Go for a walk outside Practise social distancing Take a relaxing bath Do an at-home workout Eat a good meal and stay hydrated Get enough sleep

E

Read a book

L

Practise deep breathing Take a social media break Try a 10-minute meditation

Establish and stick to a routine Learn something new

Pray for your loved ones Make prayer ties Smudge

O

AL

Learn more about your culture Call an elder

TI

Be in nature

U

EM

Call a loved one Write a journal Find laughter – watch a funny movie List what you are grateful for Hold space for your feelings Listen to your O N favourite music A

IT

IC

TA

PH

YS

Figure 3.3: Self-care medicine wheel

N

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Figure 3.2: Building our community connections

SP

L

Source: Based on Elsipogtog Health and Wellness Self-Care Guidance

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Ecological and complex systems as participatory thinking

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It is my deep conviction that the only option is for something to change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience, in the actual attitude of man [sic] towards the world and his understanding of himself and his place in the overall order of existence. (Havel, 2007: 18) For those of us raised on a diet of Western ways of knowing it is difficult to grasp the true essence of indigenous knowledge. We will always be outsiders looking in, unable to have anything but an inkling of this way of being, as we do not engage in the everyday practice of ceremony handed down through generations of ancestors, and we do not have the wisdom of elders to turn to or even the spiritual nature of the language of a Maōri or Cree with which to express the holistic nature of knowing. We can only at best learn what we can within our limited resources and acknowledge how far we have been led away from the ancient wisdom of this way of being, knowing and acting by privileging Western science and European thought. So, it is to a Western interpretation of participatory ways of viewing the world that we now turn while learning from the wisdom of indigenous people as we attempt to decolonise ourselves as well as others. It is through the modern language of ecology that we may return to the indigenous worldview that we have lost.

We can be both the colonised and the coloniser. How aware are you of both, in yourself, others and society?

Western participatory worldviews: ecological ways of thinking At the core of a participatory worldview is a wholistic understanding that is focused on the relational and ecological. More fundamentally it is about getting to grips with the idea that everything is connected. Thus, the mind is not separate from the body, as individuals we are not separate from others, and humanity is part of nature, not separate from it. We are all part of a world that is a living dynamic system and when you change anything within that system there are repercussions for all. Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves. During the early 20th century these ideas were being put forward by a number of writers working in the field of ecology and biology. Indeed, the terms ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystem’ were first coined in the 1920s and 1930s and finally emerged as an area of scientific study in the early 1950s. What came to be known as ‘deep ecology’ acknowledged that we are all part of, and participants in, a living ecosystem and therefore understanding the characteristics of that system and its dynamics is crucial (Capra and Luisi, 2014).

As the century progressed, the notion of an ecosystem also provided a different lens for looking at complex issues of society and the role of the community. It is 78

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this lens of the ecosystem – or living system, as it is sometimes called – that we can draw on to understand participatory thinking. When we start to look at the world in an ecosystems way, through a lens that sees the world in relationship to ourselves, new understandings and actions are generated. We also begin to move from a social reality based on outmoded models of thinking – what Scharmer and Kaufer (2013) call ego-system awareness – to one based on ecosystem awareness.

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Can you think of examples of ego-system thinking and ecosystem thinking?

Characteristics of a living system that help us to think participatively Everything comes into form because of relationship. We are constantly being called into relationship – to information, people, events, ideas and life. Even reality is created through our participation in relationships. We choose what we notice: we relate to certain things and ignore others. Through these chosen relationships, we co-create our world. If we are interested in effecting change, it is crucial to remember that we are working within the webs of relations not machines. (Wheatley, 1999) Interdependence A fundamental characteristic of ecological relationships is that the behaviour of one member of the community depends on the behaviour of many others.

Thus, the success of the whole community depends on the success of its individual members, while the success of the individual members depends on the community as a whole. To nourish a community means that you need to nourish relationships that create this interdependence. However, those relationships are not straightforward or linear. A small change introduced into an ecosystem can have a major effect. Small changes can spread out and be widened through ever-increasing, interdependent feedback loops, which may in time obscure the original source of the disturbance.

At the time of writing, we are in the middle of a global pandemic and governments are struggling to persuade people to self-isolate and socially distance to prevent the spread of the virus within the population at a rate that would outstrip the ability of society and the health services to cope with increased levels of sickness and deaths. The virus cannot spread without people coming into contact with other people. Some people are finding it difficult to understand why they should obey the requests; many only see the issue as a matter of taking risk themselves and judge (whether rightly or wrongly) that they are not likely to get the disease or are likely to experience only mild symptoms. However, this is a perfect lesson of our interdependence. Although you can ask people who 79

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are vulnerable to self-isolate for their own sakes, the spread of the virus generally within the community is dependent on others socially distancing to save the community as a whole. A mass lesson in interdependence is taking place. But it is not only interdependence between humans and communities, it is also a lesson of our innate interdependence with nature. We are not separate from nature, our survival depends on it and our living in harmony with nature.

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The cyclical nature of things A second characteristic of ecological processes is that they are cyclical. One organism’s waste becomes another organism’s food. Nothing is wasted and this cyclical process ensures the system is kept in balance and is therefore sustainable.

Feedback loops in an ecosystem are important for the provision of information to ensure that the system keeps in long-term balance. We can see now, within human communities, that sustainable patterns of consumption and production need to be cyclical too. Most businesses are not cyclical as they create enormous amounts of waste. However, in the current free market, the social and environmental costs of such production are treated as external variables in current accounting. Thus, not only is the environment treated as a free good, but so are the webs of social relations external to the companies concerned. The market, as a result, feeds back partial information concerning impact on the system as a whole, and this failure to add in the real external costs of pollution and exploitation of labour gives rise to the current crises of climate change and widening social divisions. Living systems continuously create and recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. They undergo continual structural change while preserving their web-like organisation, each sub-system nested in the wider system. Living systems are complex and in a state of constant adaptation to the environment.

Regeneration and degeneration Arising from the importance of feedback loops is the concept of regeneration and degeneration. A sustainable and healthy community is one that makes a positive contribution to the well-being and health of its individuals (Hancock, 1993; Cave et al, 2004). However, communities can be regenerative or degenerative (Bird, 2003; Wahl, 2016). Regenerative communities are communities where individuals have a sense of involvement, commitment, learning and change.

They actively encourage joyfulness, creativity, love and a sense of belonging, an understanding of the totality and a sense of wholeness. A core element is a sense of and the creation of meaning. Degenerative communities are those in which members experience lack of satisfaction, frustration, hatred and sorrow. Such degeneration is reinforced by actions within society that focus on instrumentality and consumption, and where emotions and feelings are not allowed to be expressed, resulting in stagnation and even decline. For complex systems to retain regenerative aspects there needs to be some form of friction and an input 80

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of new energy which causes a sense of disorder, otherwise they will reach a state of equilibrium and die (Prigogine, 1997). However, too much change can cause chaos. So, what is required is a combination of stability and change. Indeed, some systems thinkers argue that development occurs in complex adaptive systems, like communities, on the edge of chaos (Pascale et al, 2000). Stability comes from what is called corrective feedback: actions that constitute planned results aimed at fulfilling predetermined objectives. This is the common practice and also a common reaction, manifesting most often in bureaucratic responses to potential change. But it also requires something else: reinforced feedback. This type of feedback is unpredictable and will contain new information. Thus, healthy communities constantly operate through a set of contradictions and paradoxes that construct new information via two apparently opposing types of feedback, both necessary for maintaining dynamism. At its best, regeneration is about enabling living things to become themselves, to develop the full potential of communities to become more themselves and more able to contribute to the larger system of which they are part.

Emergence According to Capra and Luisi (2014), throughout the living world, the creativity of life expresses itself through the process of emergence. The phenomenon of emergence takes place at those critical points of instability mentioned previously which arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops.

Emergence results in the creation of novelty that is often qualitatively different from the phenomena out of which it emerged. The constant generation of novelty is a key property of all living systems. In a community, the event triggering the process of emergence may be an offhand comment, which may not even seem important to the person who made it but is meaningful to some people in that community. Because it is meaningful to them, they ‘choose to be disturbed’ and circulate the information rapidly through the community’s networks. As it circulates through various feedback loops, the information may get amplified and expanded, even to such an extent that the community can no longer absorb it in its present state. When that happens, a point of instability has been reached.

The system cannot integrate the new information into its existing order; it is forced to abandon some of its structures, behaviours or beliefs. The result is a state of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and doubt; and out of that chaotic state a new form of order, organised around a new meaning, emerges. The new order was not designed by any individual but emerged as a result of the community’s collective creativity.

This process of emergence involves several distinct stages. To begin with, there must be a certain openness within the community, a willingness to be disturbed, in order to set the process in motion; and there has to be an active network of communications with multiple feedback loops to amplify the triggering event.

The next stage is the point of instability, which may be experienced as tension, 81

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chaos, uncertainty or crisis. At this stage, the system may either break down/ degenerate, or it may break through to a new state of order, which is characterised by novelty and involves an experience of creativity that often feels like magic.

Since the process of emergence is thoroughly non-linear, involving multiple feedback loops, it cannot be fully analysed with our conventional, linear ways of reasoning, and hence we tend to experience it with a sense of mystery (Capra and Luisi, 2014). Wahl (2016) has shown how such an adaptive system works and how a system can cycle through different stages and the opportunities that this creates. However, we cannot direct a living system, we can only disturb it.

(Scharmer and Kaufer, 2013).

There have been some great examples of this in recent years such as the actions of the Extinction Rebellion and Occupy Movements in co-creating disruptive change. Can you think of others?

Diversity and flexibility These emergent processes are further sustained by the characteristics of diversity and flexibility that enable ecosystems and communities to survive and adapt to change. As discussed above ecosystems are always in constant flux but there are certain limits to change beyond which the whole system will collapse. The aim is to reduce the long-term stress in the system: maximising a single variable will eventually lead to the destruction of the system as a whole; optimising all variables will create a dynamic balance between order and freedom, stability and change. This means accepting that contradictions within communities are signs of diversity and viability. However, this can exist only where there are strong and complex patterns of interconnections. A healthy community needs members who are aware of the need for interconnectedness, so that information and ideas flow freely through the networks to create a flourishing whole. Rather than a naïve notion of social capital that assumes homogeneity in community, it calls for an understanding that communities are contested spaces that flourish when practical strategies knit them together as part of a diverse, cooperative, interconnected whole.

The Relational: cooperation, co-evolution and co-creation/ co‑production Everything that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the earth is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.

(Hildegard of Bingen, 1982: 41) One of the most pervasive ideas of Darwinism is the notion of competition and ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘ego-based thinking’. These ideas also reinforce current 82

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notions of patriarchy regarding masculinity and the nature of leadership. However, contrary to this popular narrative, research has demonstrated that the cyclical exchanges of energy and resources in the ecosystem are best sustained though cooperation, partnership and co-evolution all of which involve processes of integration and connection that are necessary for a flourishing world (Capra, 2003). Thus the system co-learns, co-creates and co-produces in what Wahl (2016) calls the processes that underpin interbeing.

In this co-learning there is potential for transformation, reaching across the diversity referred to earlier to create a common vision and collective meaning.

This brings us to another core feature of thinking participatively: the role of the relational and the collective. Life is essentially a network of relationships. By becoming aware of new interconnections and relationships, new questions can be asked about things we have hitherto not paid attention to. The participatory mind looks beyond events and superficial fixes to acknowledge the deeper structures and forces at play and does not allow boundaries – institutional, social or cultural – to limit thinking, but works so it can create those self-reinforcing loops or cycles of innovation that create regeneration through acting with others (Senge et al, 2005). This also means that through self-reflective consciousness (see the next section and also Chapter 7) we become conscious of how we are bringing forth a world together through how we experience and what we pay attention to (Wahl, 2016). The Goethean approach to science incorporates experience in this way: ‘The organising idea in cognition comes from the phenomenon itself, instead of from the self-assertive thinking of the scientist themselves. It is not imposed on nature but received from nature’ (Bortoft, 1996: 240; see also Haila and Dyke, 2006; Berkes, 2017). Indeed, some years ago, Bateson (1972) in his book Steps to the Ecology of Mind argued that the false reification of the self – the idea of a separate self rather than one emerging out of and sustained by relationships – is at the root of the current ecological crisis. He encouraged people to understand the world as one entirely made up of relationships, and how we continuously bring forth the world and ourselves through relationships, as we move from seeing the world as a collection of objects to experiencing the coming into being of perspectives and identity through the act of relating itself. Co-learning and the co-creation of knowledge in place through mutual learning and questioning are core to the notion of systems and also system transformation. It is about coming to know, coming to being through the interconnections and reciprocity between everything. Thus, understanding is not a representation of an independently existing world, but a continual bringing forth of the world through the process of living (Maturana and Varela, 1987). ‘Reality’ is only a reflection of how we look at it, and a particular ‘spiral of understanding’.

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Consciousness, the self and the spiritual A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He [sic] experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. (Einstein, 1950, cited in Calaprice, 2005: 206)

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While thinking in ecosystems terms helps us begin to understand how participatory our world is, it is not sufficient. The relational also includes our inner world and its relationship with the outer world, as well as our relationship with the intangible, that which we cannot see and measure. There is a dynamic relationship between the inner and outer. As Macy and Johnstone (2012) argue: The distinction often made between selfishness and altruism is misleading. It is based on a split between self and other, presenting us with a choice between helping ourselves (selfishness) and helping others (altruism). When we consider the connected self, we recognize this choice as nonsense. It is from our connected selves that much of what people most value in life emerges, including love, friendship, loyalty, trust, relationship, belonging, purpose, gratitude, spirituality, mutual aid, and meaning.

Our ideas, thoughts and visions of the future affect what kind of future emerges.

Our intentions become the way we contribute to the design of the world through our collective unconscious. This requires paying more attention to our intuition, our feelings, our perceptions and experiences: listening to our inner world to make more sense of our outer world. Heron (1996) calls this ‘in the presence of something’, a process of engaging all the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, experiencing it with attention and intention, like when you engage in mindfulness practice. As Scharmer and Kaufer (2013: 31) point out, the role of this inner knowing is rarely talked about by activists but is reflected in the way they speak truth to power: ‘They are connected to deep sources of knowing, sensing the future that wants to emerge.’ Senge et al (2005), in their book Presence, see such a participative experience as that point before which transformation takes place, and draw on the analogy of the experience as one of being ‘at one with nature’.

Such presencing does not just happen automatically but requires us to commit to paying attention to the underlying source of our actions in the world, our intentions and our habituated thought patterns.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) argued that the experience of perception is our presence in a single moment when things, truths, values are constituted for us. For him, perception is a nascent logo, it teaches us outside all dogmatism, and in his sense 84

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‘perception’ is knowledge being born. Such perception is holistic and almost pre-thought. Much of the time we do not engage in such a ‘perception’ of the world: perception in everyday life is second-order perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). In other words, we look at the world through a prism of habitually established meanings rather than engaging with the experience itself. However, when our experience creates meaning, this results in a more participative mode of experience and knowledge creation. Moreover, anything we experience is interrelational, interdependent and correlative. Indeed, as soon as we try to describe an experience in words, a linear exercise which in itself is an abstraction, we often lose its essence. Even when we tell a story, the telling in itself changes the perception of the experience, and is limited by the very nature of language.

This is why images are so powerful and account for the success of communicating through multi-sensory media, like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, to name but a few social media platforms.

Among the developments that have been part of new scientific thought in physics, ecology and neurobiology, and which have been taken up and developed in transpersonal psychology, deep ecology and soft mathematics, has been a reinterpretation of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the material/ natural world. These ideas find resonance with the work of Dewey (1925a), and Merleau-Ponty (1962), referred to earlier. Consciousness, it is argued, creates physical reality. So, although there is a widely held belief that there is a separation between inner and outer worlds, there is a growing body of thought that sees both as part of an underlying, unseen energy system, what Bohm (1996) has called the ‘implicate order’. When we start to think in these terms, we see how important patterns of thinking are in creating the world around us, and vice versa.

It also puts a new slant on the feminist adage that the personal is political. Within this view, any of us working with or in communities are co-creating realities through our thoughts and beliefs, conscious and unconscious. It requires us to be critically conscious: that is, not only to be self-aware but also to realise that in any transformation process we are part of that transformation and that it needs to proceed both within ourselves and in the outer world. Everyone thinks about changing humanity out there, but few think about changing themselves (Murphy, 1999). Thus, at any point in time, everyone, whatever their background, is engaged in an act of developing consciousness and in generating meaning. Furthermore, if we see this relationship between the inner and outer worlds as a complex energy system and therefore connected to the wider ecosystem, then we can see how the same characteristics of complex adaptive systems that we talked about earlier provide us with useful metaphors for understanding transformation and change.

In seeking to understand reality, the mind actively transforms reality. We are sentient beings, however, and thinking is only one of the many threads with which the tapestry of our sensitivities is woven. All the senses and the emotions are part of the process. Things become what our consciousness makes them.

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Participatory Practice

Our mind participates in the creation of our world and the nature of that process is important in determining outcomes. We make sense of reality by filtering it through our minds and our emotions, constantly processing and transforming what we experience, and in doing so, co-creating our reality. Skolimowski (1994) argues that our Western traditions have locked us into language, perception and thinking that creates a bias towards being rather than becoming. However, to understand the world is to understand this process of change, for every act of reality-making is an act of change, part of the process of transformation. Hence our emphasis on learning to question as a route to critical consciousness: by so doing, we create an upward spiral of understanding, just as in complex adaptive systems, this encourages regeneration within the system; in other words, learning and new information introduces a new energy. In this way, we expand consciousness and our world by shifting the inner place from which we operate (Peat, 2008).

Skolimowski (1994) talks about the need for a ‘yoga’ of transformation. He uses the word in the sense of a set of strategies and principles that one needs to follow to develop a new mindset. He argues that this is part of the methodology of participation.

The gift of transformation is one you give yourself at the end of the long and difficult journey that these principles imply. He identifies ten principles: 1. Become aware of your conditioning.

2. Become aware of deep assumptions which you are subconsciously upholding.

3. Become aware of the most important values that underlie the basic structure of your being and your thinking.

4. Become aware of how these assumptions and values guide and manipulate your behaviour, action and thinking.

5. Become aware of which of your assumptions and values are undesirable because they limit your horizons or arrest your growth. Each of these assumptions may be held at a subconscious level and, from there, may be controlling you.

6. Watch and observe instances of your actions and behaviour while they are manipulated by undesirable assumptions and values. Identify the causes and defects.

7. Articulate the alternative assumptions and values by which you would like to be guided and inspired.

8. Imagine the forms of behaviour, actions and thinking that would follow from these assumptions and values.

9. Deliberately try to bring about the forms of behaviour, thinking and action expressing the new assumptions. Implement these in everyday life and watch the process.

Repeat the process because practice is important.

10. Restructure your being in the image of these assumptions and thereby restructure your spiral of understanding.

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At first glance, the yoga of transformation would appear to be an individualistic process. In a participatory world, however, the old dualism between structure and agency, between self and society, no longer pertains. Community integration is as much about the integration of the self, as of the self with other. In order for the self to be integrated, you have to participate in the wider whole. As different perspectives on reality are shared through this process, then a wider reality is co-created. Different ways of knowing create different ways of understanding a particular phenomenon. We need to put the whole together to get the best picture.

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What has challenged you in the above?

Some of what we have talked about in this chapter may appear to readers to be far removed from the practical reality of working with communities. Perhaps what has been said seems largely metaphorical or even metaphysical. Yes, in practice, it is difficult to hold a vision of connection in the way described here and to act on that, at the same time as being in a dualistic world where the norm is to think and act in a separated way. Constant critical self-reflection is called for on the long journey to the active embodiment of participatory thinking – that is, its incorporation into the cells of our bodies so that it becomes as natural as eating and breathing. However, it does not require a total shift away from systematic and scientific thought or from sociological and political theory. Just as a mind without emotions is unbalanced and can lead to irrational acts (Damasio, 1994), the alternative is also true. It is all a matter of balance: that point at the edge of chaos where stability exists alongside change, where people’s stories exist alongside statistics and where emotions form part of any analysis. This is the point of paradox encapsulated so well by the symbol of the Tao, the yin and yang.

Nature and our relationship with it cannot be left out of the equation. Poverty, social justice and sustainability, the key themes in this book, cannot be treated as issues in isolation from nature. We are not just talking about relations between ourselves, but with the Universe. This means working with nature rather than on it, just as a participatory approach works with people rather than on them.

This means a vision of the world that encompasses heart and head, the soul and the spirit, whereby knowledge is acquired through a coming to knowing. This requires us to stand back from a surface reality to engage with a much deeper knowing in a search for underlying connections at different levels, including consciousness. In the same way, Chinese characters favour a sense of a fuller meaning, deeper than the literal (Ong, 1997), quite unlike the symbolism of the Western alphabet. This is what Heidegger (1963) calls ‘being in the world’, where the world around us is experienced as so much part of us that it is not viewed as an object. This consciousness is at the heart of indigenous knowing based on a world in common, which questions Western notions of personal ownership of land, sea and sky.

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Participatory Practice

Putting it all together: reframing our view of the world to change our practice

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Our cultural narrative shapes our individual experience of how we perceive and explain what is out there. Becoming more aware of this process is the first step towards what Einstein referred to as the new way of thinking that might help us to resolve the ‘problems’ created by the narrative of separation (the way of thinking that created these problems in the first place). I believe that the narrative of interbeing and participatory whole systems thinking will help us to transform and/or resolve many of these problems. (Wahl, 2016: 103) It will now also have become apparent to you that there is strong similarity between indigenous and many non-Western ways of knowing and the ideas that have developed in Deep Ecology. Ecological and ecosystem thinking looks at the relationships between phenomena rather than the parts. Restoring health, for example, is not about fixing a specific body part but about restoring the balance between the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social dimensions of a person’s life. The ecological paradigm fits with the notion, previously referred to, that the mind is not separate from the world; rather, that reality is always in subjective– objective relation. Thus, cognition is not a representation of an independently existing world, but a continual bringing forth of the world through the process of living (Maturana and Varela, 1987). As Gregory Bateson (1979) argues, we need to move our focus from seeing ‘things’ to seeing patterns, we are part of any field we study and, to understand the field, we must also reflect on ourselves as part of that world, what Capra (1996) calls the ‘web of life’. As participants in that living system, we need to cultivate the art of appropriate participation.

The ideas presented in this chapter are at their heart very simple. Everything is connected. However, we have conveyed those ideas largely through a propositional approach whereas, if we are true to the philosophy, you can only really engage with the ideas through a process of coming to know with all your experience – emotional, practical as well as cognitive. We urge you to explore other modes of knowledge creation to explore these ideas, such as poetry, art and human sculpture.

Challenge yourself: 1. Spend some time in nature without any technology, and experience how you feel before, during and after? Find a way to express those feelings through any medium you choose: art, sculpture, music …

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The participatory worldview

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2. Take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle. On one side of the paper draw a figure (which can be a stick person) that expresses how you are feeling at the moment. On the other side draw a figure representing how you would like to feel.

What small thought or action will move you from the figure on the first side to the one on the second?

We have suggested that Western science provides a useful but limited tool for understanding reality and needs to be integrated with embodied and other forms of knowledge to help us to make good deliberative interruptions that can change the world. Thinking in a participatory way is a different way of knowing; it alters our view of the world and leads to ways of being that are based on cooperation and a world in common. Ecological ways of knowing lie at the core of this worldview, and we can take metaphors from the natural world to understand communities and their relationships in a more dynamic way. We can also learn much from indigenous philosophy and ways of being. It is important, however, to remember Bateson’s (1972) reminder that these are maps, not the reality. They are frames that affect our understanding of the world and hence underpin how we take actions.

What are the frames through which you view the world?

Wilber et al (2008) provide a useful model to help us understand with our limited Western minds the different interrelated elements that we need to address at one and the same time in the process of expanding consciousness. There are echoes of the medicine wheel in its quadrant structure. Although largely rejected by academics, these ideas have been incorporated and applied to a variety of contexts, including recent work on integral cities by Marilyn Hamilton (2019) and by Beth Sanders in her book Nest Cities (Sanders, 2020a). The model has been applied to the adaptive cycle in systems in Wahl’s work on designing regenerative cultures, where he describes it as ‘the rhythmic dance between order and chaos, between stability and transformation as a fundamental pattern in complex living systems’ (Wahl, 2016: 107); see Figure 3.4. It is also found in the notion of spiral dynamics approaches to organisations, developed by Beck and Cowan (2014), and in relation to creating organisations for the next stage of human consciousness,

by Laloux (2014).

The integral map can make our experiences of participation more intelligible in ways that can guide wise action. Our individual and collective relating to the world actually brings forth the world we experience … [it] includes the dualism of the ‘out there’ of objective description and the ‘in here’ of subjective experience. (Wahl, 2016: 75)

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Figure 3.4: An integrative model of our experience of the world through a participative lens

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Subjective experience of thoughts, emotions, memories, states of mind, etc. Immediate sensations

Objectively observable behaviour of the material in space and time

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Socio-ecological

Intersubjectivity shared values, meanings, language, relationships and culture

Intersubjective patterns and processes (e.g. systems, networks, government, biophysical, environment)

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Source: Adapted from Wilber et al (2008) and Wahl (2016)

So, what does thinking participatively really mean for our practice?

Thinking participatively means focusing on process, while holding a vision and intention regarding the world we want to live in but not holding on to a specific outcome. It is about placing relationship at the centre of all we do. Relationships with each other and the living world are predicated on a set of values and principles that are about reciprocity, respect and caring. It is about being conscious that everything is connected both across and between levels, and that any action can have consequences elsewhere. It therefore means engaging in relational practices and creating spaces where people can hear their own voices and then see the larger system of which they are part. It is also about asking questions, and not just of others but of ourselves. In this way we can change the patterns of thinking that are the source of how we act in the world. But most of all it is about seeing ourselves as part of the living world regeneration.

The old ways of thinking are no longer adequate, and have left us with a world that is emotionally hollow, aesthetically meaningless and spiritually empty (Goodwin, 2007). In the next chapter, we explore examples of where people are increasingly engaging in participatory practice in a non-participatory world but, while in the past, they were finding resistance to change, there are now signs that participatory practice is breaking out everywhere.

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