Economic Democracy with Pat Conaty
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2016
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pat is a fellow Californian living in the U.K. He has worked with the New Economic Foundation since 1987 and is also a research associate of Co-operatives UK. Pat's work focuses on reclaiming money, land, and labor. We spoke about various forms of co-operative economic democracy, including community land trusts for housing, social co-operatives for care services, and ecological co-operatives for green energy and local food systems. Pat is a world leader in advocating on behalf of the commons and putting New Economics into practice.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, oh, oh, oh, Hello and |
| 0:25.0 | welcome you are listening to an upstream interview which is part of the Economics for Transition Project. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm Dela Duncan and today we're in conversation with Pat Connery, a research associate of Cooperatives UK, |
| 0:36.7 | a fellow of the New Economics Foundation, and the co-author of the Resilience Imperative, |
| 0:43.6 | Cooperative Transitions to a Steady State Economy. |
| 0:50.4 | Thanks for joining me, Pat. |
| 0:52.4 | Nice to be here. |
| 0:54.0 | So let's just start with if you could tell us a little bit more about your background and what are some of the main themes that you work with? |
| 1:01.0 | Basically my work is in relationship to sector development. |
| 1:06.1 | So I take the ideas of cooperative economics |
| 1:10.9 | and ecological economics, and I try to apply them to real problems like the |
| 1:15.0 | affordable housing crisis or the way that banks are set up and structured doing some projects at the moment's own. and system for the economy to develop innovation. I've been doing that for a number of years. |
| 1:35.8 | I mean, spent about 15 years working on community land trust development, for example, in the UK, |
| 1:41.0 | and that's been quite successful and now working on community health |
| 1:46.0 | in a quite focused way. So what brought you to do this type of work? What was the |
| 1:52.4 | inspiration or what was what's I think well I think I've been |
| 1:57.2 | involved with new economics and ecological economics since the late 1980s and |
| 2:02.2 | before that that involved in cooperative economic |
| 2:06.3 | thinking and so as problems got worse particularly in the 90s and the debt problems got you know worse and worse and worse. |
| 2:17.0 | I became I had worked actually for a long time in legal services tackling problems with debt and homelessness and |
| 2:26.2 | we set up a number of services in the UK like national deadline, business deadline, legal |
| 2:30.6 | services for people with debt. And then I got to say, well, you know, what is the source of this problem? |
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