The Benefits of Localism
Could you talk about your background and how you became involved in the “buy local” movement?
Since 1982, after completing Stanford Law School, I’ve been trying to connect communities to the world. I spent my first ten years mobilizing cities to get involved in foreign policy through a nonprofit I started called the Center for Innovative Diplomacy. We published a Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, which went to thousands of local elected officials across the United States, and showed how cities were promoting peace through nuclear-free zones, fighting apartheid in South Africa through divestment campaigns, and opposing the Contras’ war through Nicaraguan sister cities. With support of the Kellogg National Leadership Program, I began to see how these municipal tools could promote North-South development cooperation. I then studied the work of a group based in the Hague called Towns and Development, and wrote an evaluation of their work in a book called Towards a Global Village (Pluto, 1994). I was generally very enthusiastic about the European city-to-city movement, except that I felt that their theory and practice around sustainable economics fell far short of their (and my) aspirations. That led me to start thinking about community economics.
This was also around the time that I moved from San Francisco to Washington, and began working at the Institute for Policy Studies—first as a visiting fellow, then as a paid fellow, and then as director for six years. During this time, I wrote Going Local (Free Press, 1998), the first of four books on localization. Going Local laid out a theory of local economics. The next book, The Small-Mart Revolution (Berrett-Koehler, 2006) showed how local businesses were competing successfully against global corporations. I then concluded that the most difficult challenge local businesses faced was getting needed capital, so my next book, Local Dollars, Local Sense (Chelsea Green, 2006) focused on local investment.
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