Redefining development: Voluntary simplicity and hope social movement

Séverine Deneulin and Ana Dinerstein

Centre for Development Studies

University of Bath

The problem

• Poverty reduction, economic growth and environmental sustainability.

• Capability approach as comparative evaluative framework but does not question economic model or provide an alternative.

• Need to engage with forms of social and political mobilization that challenge dominant values and practices, and provide something new.

The argument

• New forms of social movements have emerged which are unique: they contest power by trying to live another reality, create another world

• They embrace the principle of hope• They are creating another way of living• These mvts are not offering alternative forms

of development but alternatives to development

• We propose to name these new forms of social mvts ‘hope movements’.

Social movements and development• Old and ‘new’ social mvts: class/redistribution

and identity/recognition.• Social mvts are not mere ways of reducing

poverty: they question how society should be organized (limits of focus on evaluation).

• New forms of social movements have emerged which are unique: they contest power by trying to live a world ‘not-yet-become’

• We analyze two such movements: Zapatista and Live Simply

Live Simply• Loose gathering of people who strive to live

simpler and more sustainable lives as a protest against consumerism and materialism and its negative effects.

• Justice and human fulfilment dimensions

• Intentional communities.

• ‘New’ new social mvt: not redistribution, not recognition but to live something new. + new relationship to ‘development’

The principle of hope and ‘not-yet-become’(Bloch)

• The present contains already a future that has ‘not-yet-become’.

• Hope as anticipatory consciousness of the not-yet-become

• The ‘day-dreaming’ consciously anticipates the future, imagining another world that is more just (even if one doesn’t grasp fully what this just world is all about).

• Eschatological vision, a ‘beyond’ that has not-yet-become, which bears on this history alone.

The principle of hope (Christianity)

• Hope rests on the tension between what is already known and not yet experienced, but unlike Bloch’s hope principle, it is not utopian. This world ‘beyond’ has already been inaugurated.

• Hope is not about daydreaming but about fulfilling a reality already present. It is about showing what the world will be, but never in one’s life.

• Hope is different from aspiration or expectation.

Live Simply as hope movement

• Eschatological vision of a world more conducive to human dignity (opposition to consumerism and exploitation)

• ‘Utopian’ impulse: Not a strategy of opposition but construction; embrace of a world ‘not-yet-become’

• Not an alternative development (e.g. sustainable development) but alternative to development: question the idea of the ‘good life’ in ‘development’

• Autonomous praxis: changing the world without taking state power as the state is part of those dominant values that they intend to contest and alter. Autonomous space to live alternatives. Beyond the ‘policy’space