{"id":13598,"date":"2015-10-20T06:38:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-20T11:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13598"},"modified":"2015-10-20T06:38:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T11:38:00","slug":"the-benefits-of-localism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13598","title":{"rendered":"The Benefits of Localism"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2015-10-20\/the-benefits-of-localism\" target=\"_blank\">The Benefits of Localism<\/a><\/b><\/h3>\n<p><b>Could you talk about your background and how you became involved in the \u201cbuy local\u201d movement?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Since 1982, after completing Stanford Law School, I\u2019ve 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\u00a0<i>Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy<\/i>, 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\u2019 war through Nicaraguan sister cities. \u00a0With support of the Kellogg National Leadership Program, I began to see how these municipal tools could promote North-South development cooperation.\u00a0 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\u00a0<i>Towards a Global Village<\/i>\u00a0(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. \u00a0That led me to start thinking about community economics.<\/p>\n<p>This was also around the time that I moved from San Francisco to Washington, and began working at the Institute for Policy Studies\u2014first as a visiting fellow, then as a paid fellow, and then as director for six years. During this time, I wrote\u00a0<i>Going Local (<\/i>Free Press, 1998), the first of four books on localization.\u00a0\u00a0<i>Going Local<\/i>\u00a0laid out a theory of local economics.\u00a0 The next book,\u00a0<i>The Small-Mart Revolution<\/i>\u00a0(Berrett-Koehler, 2006) showed how local businesses were competing successfully against global corporations. \u00a0I then concluded that the most difficult challenge local businesses faced was getting needed capital, so my next book,\u00a0<i>Local Dollars, Local Sense<\/i>\u00a0(Chelsea Green, 2006) focused on local investment.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Benefits of Localism Could you talk about your background and how you became involved in the \u201cbuy local\u201d movement? Since 1982, after completing Stanford Law School, I\u2019ve 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10007,9952,1134,10006,9597],"class_list":["post-13598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-community-wealth","tag-local-community","tag-local-economy","tag-localism","tag-michael-shuman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13599,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13598\/revisions\/13599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}