A Localism Manifesto

Version 1.0

Starting next week, The Main Street Journal will start publishing a new weekly edition called “Decent Tuesdays.” It will be written and edited by Paul Spinrad, whose credentials include Wired and Make magazines, and who played an important role in rallying support behind the JOBS Act of 2012, legalizing crowdfunding.

The “decent” part refers to both decency and decentralization. If you believe in localization, as Paul and I do, then it’s time to figure out how to reorganize our increasingly centralized and dysfunctional political and economic systems. Decent Tuesdays will bring you articles, ideas, and interviews with provocative thinking about decentralization.

To understand my own views on decentralization, read this paper I wrote for The Next System Project nine years ago. It’s called “A Million Utopias,” and I argue for giving every community—left, right, and center—more freedom to craft their own policies without central government interference. Nearly a century ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote about the importance of 50 state laboratories for democracy through federalism. I would prefer we think about the 36,000 laboratories in our cities, towns, and villages.

I’ve tried to distill the ideas from that paper into the “Localism Manifesto” below. I hope you enjoy it—and welcome your feedback. It’s a work in progress.

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A Localism Manifesto

Planet Earth is experiencing a five-alarm emergency, yet our political systems are paralyzed and incapable of responding. Unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, and other climate disasters are overwhelming us. Inequality is at a historic high, with 3,000 billionaires shaping our political systems and civil societies. Our once open and vibrant democracies are mutating into dictatorships. Our economies, which were remarkably stable after World War II, continually careen between uncontrolled inflation and unemployment. The list of seemingly insoluble national and global problems is growing.

But we also believe there is a clear path forward that has received little attention. And that solution is localism: a commitment to place, supported through the decentralization of power, action, and our economies.

Around the world are exciting examples of localism’s success: communities increasingly able to feed themselves through greenhouses, vertical growing, and food sovereignty programs; urban organizations solving homelessness through tiny houses and community land trusts; cooperatives, nonprofits, and B Corps removing the walls between managers and workers; neighborhoods using cutting edge technologies to be self-reliant in energy and water. Localism is about accelerating the start-up, maturity, and spreading of these kinds of projects worldwide.

We believe that localism can not only provide a powerful new framework for solving our most pressing problems. It’s also a philosophy that offers a radically hopeful politics and opens new possibilities for cracking our calcified political systems, collaborating across ideological lines.

Localism is not utopian. It describes the reality of power for most of human history. And it can be seen today—however imperfectly—in the federalist structures of countries like Canada, Germany, and the United States. Perhaps the closest living example of localism is Switzerland, where the national government is so minor that almost no one can name its President, and yet the country ranks at the top of global rankings of economic, social, and environmental performance.

What Is Localism?

Localism is fundamentally about our power in place. We all have it, whether we exercise it or not. It rests on four principles:

Principle #1 – The Imperative of Action

Localism means that if we discover a problem in our backyard, we address it immediately and locally. We don’t wait for permission, assistance, or money from higher levels of government, and we don’t waste time pointing fingers at others. Localists are fundamentally solutions-oriented.

If we can’t solve the problem on our own, we solve as much of it as we can and recruit other jurisdictions—both neighboring communities and high levels of government—to work with us.

The goal is not to go it alone, but to favor mindful action over inattention. Act, experiment, learn, try again. The operable phrase is not NIMBY (“not in my backyard!”), but BIMBY (“begin in my backyard!”).

By solving as much of any problem as we can locally, we maximize our power and minimize the burdens on higher levels of government. The less they have to do, the greater their chance of success.

Principle #2 – Subsidiarity

Localists insist that power be held primarily at the local level, with states holding less power, countries less still, and global institutions the least amount. By power, we mean the power collectively to tax, regulate, and administer projects. Political scientists call this structure subsidiarity. The logic of localism suggests that local governments in most countries should have significantly stronger powers of taxation, regulation, and spending than they have today.

Only when there is a strong consensus that power must be exerted at a higher level—perhaps because local solutions are unworkable, unfair, or inefficient—should power move up. Absent a good reason to go higher, the presumption is always that power should remain local.

Localism doesn’t mean that any community’s choices are acceptable, no matter how cruel, foolish, or insensitive. It just places a higher burden on the central government before it thwarts local action. Greater levels of consensus should be required for power to move upwards.

Principle #3 – Partnership

Localism does not necessarily mean going it alone. It can also mean finding partners to serve local needs. Sometimes that’s higher levels of government—the region or the state—but increasingly, it’s other communities around the world struggling with similar challenges. Responsible localists look everywhere for solutions and insights.

Principle #4 – Tolerance

Localism means live and let live. Localists appreciate that every community is different, with different values, ideas, and traditions. When appropriately empowered, every community will make different choices. In a world where your community is allowed to move closer to its ideals, other communities may choose to move further away. A localist world is one where we learn to tolerate choices made by other communities we despise, as long as they respect basic human rights.

Localists are not powerless to express their dissatisfaction with other communities. They can protest and lobby. They can create partnerships with beleaguered allies in those communities. They can divest, boycott, or avoid economic interests in these communities. But ultimately, the decision about how to organize a community is primarily the responsibility of its residents.

Localism shifts our political purposes. Instead of striving to grab central power and impose one solution on all communities, we strive to create frameworks that allow communities to make different choices that we all can live with. This is a fundamentally different kind of political project—one that will disappoint and frustrate the total victories sought by the left and right today.

Why Localism?

The cornerstone of localism is a belief that neighbors are the best stewards of their own well-being. Communities have a better sense of their own needs and interests than distant politicians, and are best able to organize a meaningful, participatory democracy. They have natural incentives for managing their resources, as many Native American cultures demonstrate, for seven or more generations.

Because local leaders have closer and more personal relationships with their constituents, they are more inclined to approach problems pragmatically, build coalitions, and get things done. The level of trust in state and local leaders in the United States, for example, is significantly higher than trust in national leaders.

The leaders of central governments, less tethered to the responsibilities of governance and less connected to the impacts of their policies, are more inclined to ideology, posturing, and polarization. And we worry especially about leaders of countries with tens or hundreds of millions of people being fundamentally unable to understand, process, reflect, and act effectively to address local problems.

We know that local leaders are not perfect stewards. They are no less human than national leaders and are as susceptible to greed, corruption, and stupidity. That’s why local governments must operate in a larger political system with checks and balances. Communities that behave irresponsibly—who dump pollution into the global environment, who violate the rights of their minority residents, who launch wars—should be held to account.

Among the basic yardsticks of accountability are these:

• Is a community respecting its territorial boundaries with neighboring communities?

• Is a community operating its economy so that it can meet the basic needs of its citizens?

• Is a community operating sustainably within its resource base?

• Is a community giving all its members, including the young, the old, the disabled, and minorities, equal rights and dignity?

When a community can answer all these questions with a firm “YES,” there is little justification for any higher authority to infringe on local autonomy.

We appreciate that localism means that different communities will answer these questions differently. But we are confident that a world with hundreds of thousands of lively experiments is more likely to generate real solutions.

Here are some basic propositions of the potential power of localism, reinforced by logic, history, and common sense:

• A world of relatively self-reliant communities will be one where few communities are inclined to go to war to meet their basic needs.

• A world of communities that each operate sustainably within their natural resource base will be a sustainable world.

• A world of expanding, successful community-based economic models will be one that is more likely to provide the jobs and income required by the world’s eight billion people.

• A world of communities with healthy democracies will help identify, marginalize, and resolve threats to democracy sooner.

Take the example of indoor, vertical farms. If one community in a cold, northern climate can perfect the technologies for growing enough food indoors to feed its residents cost-effectively, the bases for success—the technologies, the growing structures, the planting regimens, the business design—can be shared with other communities worldwide. The more communities there are collectively working on this challenge and sharing their innovations—without impeding the spread of information with secrecy, trademarks, and licenses—the faster the world will be able to feed itself.

The same is true for climate solutions. While we should welcome the role of national governments pushing one another to act in COP meetings, we should not expect this to be the locus of innovation or progress. Rather, it will come from communities—ramping up their economic efficiency standards, deploying more cost-effective solar and electrical storage technologies, decarbonizing their goods and services—and sharing these innovations as rapidly as possible. It may be more important not to mobilize national assistance for these initiatives than to make sure national governments do not get in the way.

We should see the world as a million community laboratories, where all kinds of problems—environmental, economic, social, and political—can be addressed in small, practical, meaningful ways.

The Practices of Localism

The principles of localism can be applied in almost every policy domain, but the most important test is the economy. Can more localized economies better serve the basic needs of their citizens? We believe there is an overwhelming body of evidence that says the answer is “yes.”

It’s easy to caricature a local economy as detached, autarkic, and backward. But a smart local economy is globally engaged, free-trading, and economically dynamic. Here are, in our view, ten principles that define successful local economies:

(1) Local Ownership – A community’s residents should strive to own locally as much of their economy as possible. Through local ownership, we have the best opportunity of controlling our own destiny, of making decisions that are genuinely in the interests of our neighbors. There is vast evidence that communities with high levels of local ownership have higher levels of social stability, political engagement, and volunteerism. Local ownership also means more local purchasing, which maximizes the “multiplier effect” with greater income, wealth, and jobs. They have greater latitude to make sound adjustments in times of crisis.

(2) Local Investment – The flip side of local ownership is local investment—you cannot have one without the other. Too much of our savings—for retirement, education, and medical needs—is placed in publicly traded companies that are least connected to community well-being. The alternative is to invest in local businesses, projects, and people. And while many tools for doing this already exist, we must change policies and practices to make local investment cheaper and easier.

(3) Self-Reliance – Whatever the benefits of trade—and there are many—they must be weighed against the dangers of dependence. A community that is self-reliant in the basics—such as food, energy, water, housing, and education—is more able to trade from a position of strength. It is also better able to meet the needs of its citizens and be resilient during periods of national, regional, or global crisis.

(4) Placemaking – Every community has the potential for greatness by tapping the deep roots of place. In local music, art, storytelling, and traditions, there is the local cultural DNA, often of multiple cultures with complex histories, which attracts visitors and brings residents into public spaces. Every community should find its points of pride and incorporate them into the local businesses and infrastructure.

(5) Participatory Democracy – Every community should strive to engage as many residents as possible in its public choices around laws, regulations, taxes, and spending priorities. While structures of democracy are varied, they should be designed to minimize the inherent unfairness of giving more power to those with wealth.

(6) Human Scale – Just as small scale is essential for the world of communities to thrive, so must businesses and institutions within communities be limited to a human scale. All monopolies, even local monopolies, should be distrusted and broken up or run as regulated public utilities, so that markets and politics empower all residents. So should obsolete remnants of centralized power within our countries.

(7) Regeneration – A community must operate within its annual “income” of renewable resources, such as water, energy, plants, and animals. It must operate its economy circularly, converting as much waste as possible into “food” for positive activities. It must minimize and eliminate any toxic pollutants. And it must apply these principles and tools to repair and bring back to life already damaged ecosystems

(8) Worker Fairness – For both moral and practical reasons, workplaces should be designed to be as humane as possible, with fair wages and benefits.

(9) Entrepreneurship – Achieving the goals above requires an entrepreneurial ecosystem that fully taps the community’s creativity for new businesses and projects. Entrepreneurs should be able to find within the community the capital, training, and support they need to succeed. And the universe of entrepreneurship should include not just the people typically seen as “the best and the brightest,” but also the old, the young, women, minorities, and people with disabilities.

(10) Connectivity – Communities are practicing the above in literally millions of different ways. The key for any community that wishes to make progress in these areas is to find and partner with the best practitioners in the world. Too many urgent global crises are pressing to waste any time with “reinventing the wheel.” Wherever possible, communities must leapfrog ahead rapidly based on one another’s successes.

It’s worth underscoring that the ten points above are principles, not prescriptions. Local ownership of business, for example, can be accomplished through family ownership, local stock companies, cooperatives, nonprofits, public enterprises, and other forms. Worker fairness can be accomplished through worker ownership, unions, or local laws. Entrepreneurship can be supported through education, technical assistance, partnerships, capital, incubators, and other tools. The strength of localism is that we can develop a million ways of meeting the principles.

The Fears of Decentralist Injustices

Skeptics of localism are right to point out the obvious concerns: Some communities will inflict terrible injustices on their residents, often disempowering minorities who are discriminated against because of their race, ethnic origins, gender, sexual preferences, or religious beliefs. Some communities will dump pollution, crime, or underpriced goods on neighboring communities. Some localist leaders are incompetent, insane, or criminal. And some necessary policies—like a response to a global pandemic—cannot possibly be effective without central coordination.

To all these skeptics, we say, yes, but…

Stronger governance at the local level does not mean no governance at higher levels. Chaos is not our goal. Subsidiarity assumes that some challenges cannot be addressed exclusively at the local level—and must be taken care of at the state, national, or global levels. A presumption against limiting the freedom of communities does not mean local power is unlimited. The concerns above—and many others—suggest areas where this presumption can and should yield to a consensual decision about centralizing power.

A good example of this is the protection of minority rights. Most localists favor state, national, and global protections against racial or religious discrimination, whether through legislation or constitutions. But where there is no consensus at, say, the national level—perhaps to protect the “right” of teenagers to vote—localities should be permitted to experiment with the voting age.

What constitutes such a consensus? While we are reluctant to give a mathematical answer, it probably means more than 51% of the voters. Many countries have provisions that require supermajorities for very important decisions—maybe 60% or two-thirds—and that, for us, is the threshold that should be required for overriding local decisions.

This debate about the right allocation of local power is often misframed as an abstract debate about how to assemble a country from scratch. That ship sailed centuries ago, starting with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The laws, rights, and practices are already in place worldwide, and except in a few notable places like Switzerland, they are constructed around a powerful central state. The real debate in the 21^st Century is how to shift power back down to communities gradually and mindfully. Our belief is that smart countries will find many areas where greater local action is sensible and begin shifting their laws accordingly.

For example, just allowing local governments to set their own taxes—perhaps testing creative new taxes like those on carbon or pollution—will enable them to choose the appropriate size of the local public sector. That would be a huge step. Or giving local governments broad discretion on whether to procure local goods opens up new strategies for local economic development. Or enabling citizens to create community investment funds without national securities law filings. Countries should encourage suggestions for devolution, and, if they are nervous, they can call these programs “experimental.”

Those who hold centralized power now, of course, can be expected to resist these changes. That’s natural—change is difficult. But localists insist that if we wish to fix pressing global problems that have become intractable, we need millions more experiments, and we need a new system of politics that reduces increasingly dangerous polarization.

How Localism Can Depolarize Politics

Every democracy today is experiencing sharp polarization, where a growing number of voters fear that “a win” by the other side could destroy their way of life. Large political parties, which once mediated these differences and provided assurance that the system was more important than any given election, have now splintered into more specialized and extremist parties. And this level of national polarization has now increasingly infected local politics. We are especially concerned about the growth of nationalist, religious, and fascist parties that would expand state powers to oppress various minorities, like immigrants, whom they disfavor.

Localism, we believe, provides an important way of channeling the steam in these movements constructively. Empowering and encouraging localities to experiment with different policies—and insulating those experiments from being quashed by those at the top—provides positive alternatives to increasingly angry and radicalized voters. Your way of life may be threatened at the top, but rest assured, there are safe spaces at the bottom where you can construct a better way of life. Enlist yourself in the service of local experiments that excite you. To be sure, there are always people who want to tear things apart, but they are a tiny minority that can and should be isolated.

The unfortunate truth is that we are all responsible for this dangerous polarization. Every time we celebrate the defeat of our political opponents, we sow the seeds of an incendiary counterreaction. Instead, we should help our opponents find localities where they can test and live out their ideas. And maybe those of us who were once resolutely opposed may learn a few things from these experiments.

An example of these dynamics is universal health care in the United States. Under President Obama, Congress narrowly approved a universal health care system—without a single vote from the other political party, the Republicans. And for the decade following its passage, pitched battles were waged by the Republicans—all unsuccessful—to reverse the vote. Their opposition also blocked simple fixes to the existing law that could remedy its shortcomings. An alternative scenario might have been for the national government to provide equal resources to the states to test different health care alternatives. Conservative states like Alabama might embrace medical savings accounts, while liberal states like Vermont might try to implement state-wide “single payer.” This is how the Canadian national health system evolved—from the bottom up.

National policymakers should think creatively about how they can unleash different approaches at the local level rather than how they can squash those approaches they dislike. One salutary benefit of this approach is that it brings ideologically divergent parties together to come to a reasonable compromise on how their local adherents can thrive.

In fact, many current national challenges can be solved—or at least made more manageable—through localist solutions. Here are some examples:

• Demand-driven inflation can be tamed through an adjustable local consumption tax (the tax increases and decreases with inflation). Greater local ownership of housing and other assets can also reduce long-term inflation pressures.

• Supply disruptions, which have also caused inflation recently, can be remedied through greater local self-reliance, which reduces dependence on unreliable nonlocal supply chains.

• Housing shortages and chronic homelessness can be ameliorated through the local rethinking of zoning laws that impede new construction, and through the deployment of tiny homes, community land trusts, and housing cooperatives that keep more housing affordable.

• Carbon neutrality, which seems unreachable at the national level, can be reached at the local level through localist programs promoting energy efficiency, solar energy, food self-reliance, and the regreening of every available space, whether empty lots or rooftops.

• In a recession, localities permitted to run modest deficits can increase public spending (a classic Keynesian stimulus) or they can issue their own currency usable only at local businesses (a monetary stimulus).

• To alleviate poverty, a local government might provide guaranteed (low-wage) jobs in the service of community needs. Work teams might focus on placemaking projects.

Again, different communities will approach these national problems in different ways. Some will be smarter than others, and some will be executed more successfully.

Starting Places

Where might national governments begin ceding authority to support this vision of localization? Here are some of the starting places we favor:

• Investment Law – Deregulate local financial institutions that exclusively handle local securities, such as local banks, credit unions, stock exchanges, investment funds, and retirement funds.

• Taxation Law – Allow localities broader freedoms to tax people, businesses, and goods in their jurisdictions, as long as the taxes are applied equally to residents and non-residents.

• Regulatory Law – Give localities broad authority to regulate the environmental, workforce, governance, and community standards practices by businesses within their jurisdiction, provided that the laws apply equally to local and nonlocal competitors.

• Procurement Law – Allow local governments to selectively buy goods and services from local businesses whenever the hidden benefits of local purchasing (e.g., paying local taxes) exceed the hidden costs of nonlocal purchasing.

• Zoning Law – Give communities broader authority to set—or undo—land-use requirements, to encourage mixed-use, denser, more livable communities.

• Trade Law – Withdraw from any trade agreements, or amend any agreements, that have provisions to restrict the recommendations above.

This list is just suggestive of sectors ripe for devolution. We recommend it as a starting place because it suggests areas where left and right might easily find common ground. But by no means should it be the finishing place.

In fact, even in areas commonly believed to be impervious to devolution, we believe there are virtues to unlocking local creativity. In foreign policy, for example, there is a rich history of cities using a variety of powers—persuasion, education, lobbying, cultural ties, trade relations, aid, etc.—to influence other countries. Indeed, where countries fall short, cities have taken a leadership role—in imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa, for example, in the 1980s and 1990s. The absence of military powers at the local level (which we favor) means that cities participating in international affairs have to be more creative using nonviolent tools of influence.

Which suggests another piece of the localist vision…

An Alliance of Planetary-Minded Cities

Consistent with our principle of connectivity, localism means finding, partnering, and working with like-minded cities. Yes, one-to-one partnerships among cities are powerful, but entities with hundreds of thousands of municipal members are even more powerful. For more than three decades, for example, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) has spread state-of-the-art environmental protection technology and policies among its thousand municipal members. We need networks like this promoting local self-reliance, new local ownership models, and local democracy innovations.

We can imagine these networks maturing into powerful forces, lobbying recalcitrant national governments to yield more power to their communities; setting higher environmental and labor standards for the goods they exchange; entering into joint research and development projects; developing interlocal funds and currencies. Indeed, every part of the global system, whether the World Bank or the United Nations Development Program, could soon have localist counterparts. The world’s most important treaties may be those that do not involve nation-states, but key cities.

From Here to There

We appreciate that localists constitute a minority in every country in the world. Conventional political parties—left, right, and center—currently ignore or ridicule our views. We are then relegated to small projects in our communities that rarely seem to add up to global solutions.

Yet in sheer numbers, we represent millions of people—perhaps hundreds of millions. With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority. And we will begin to hold you accountable to the principles and practices laid out here. If current political parties do not incorporate our decentralist views, we will form our own.

We welcome the support and partnership of everyone, irrespective of party, politics, or place.

As the economist Kenneth Boulding once wrote: “Cities of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your slums, your poverty, and your military expendability.”