Spring – a social and political invitation

It’s Winter in our world: harsh, unforgiving. Will it ever end? Yet Spring is coming: the seeds are sown, and green shoots are appearing.

Our work right now is to prepare for blossom. See what needs to be cleared away and composted. What – and who – needs more space to grow. Then, what kinds of structures need to be built, to ensure that early buds are not killed by poor conditions. Imagine energy and beauty.

What is this Winter like? 

Every day, we face powerful forces – financial and corporate, media culture and party politics – constantly acting in their own interests, exploiting the majority in mind and body. 

This causes us to be alienated from our public space. We are driven inwards and backwards – clinging to all we are familiar with – while our relationship with the wider world (and the fate of the planet) becomes disrupted.

Every day, too many of us work in jobs that are largely meaningless: cogs in a machine we barely understand and rarely own. We’re paid too little to cope with rising prices and debts. And we compensate with purchases that don’t satisfy us, even addict us.

Like hamsters on wheels, we’re running ever faster to keep up with demands, but going nowhere. What are we doing with our precious time on this earth? 

Meanwhile, we stand before a rising tide of dangers. Whether it’s the alarming real-time evidence of a warming planet beginning to impact on our doorsteps.

Or the replacement of human skills by artificial intelligence and robots—taking over our creative tasks as well as our boring, routine ones. 

Or, suddenly, the prospect of war coming to our own shores. The outcome of giant regimes playing games amongst themselves, where we are spectators—or pawns. 

All this threatens our mental health, wears out our spirits. We need light and warmth in our lives, to even get ourselves up in the morning. In such a cold, hard, demanding environment, where can we find it? 

What is Spring?

Spring is at once a sensibility and a politics. A way of seeing, being, and acting in the world—one that directly responds to all of this fragility. In the midst of the wider breakdown, it pays careful attention to both physical and emotional needs. 

Spring is rooted in our work with The Alternative Global. Since its founding on March 1st, 2017, our commitment has been to look outside the mainstream for news of how people are responding to our multiple crises. We discovered a deep well of human ingenuity and vitality for regeneration, which we have been reporting and connecting up in the Daily Alternative blog for over seven years.

Spring holds that given enough time and space, we humans – in our full diversity – are enough to meet the demands of our own lives and societies. And not just to fix what’s broken, but to envision something far better—then build it. 

The Spring mindset teaches us how to nurture the growth of fragile things by creating containers – buds, pupas, nests – for seeds to start growing healthily. And then become part of a wider system of flourishing.

The metaphor easily extends to us: we require the support of active communities and places to gather and build trust. And we need more time to develop the delicate strands of our own agency. So we can take a meaningful part in co-creating the future.

Democratic innovation has always been a strong theme here. We’ve identified new methods of participation, new ways to harvest citizen action. Spring is a new political system taking shape.

These are the fields we are ploughing:

• The offer of real power to shape outcomes in the places we live

• Processes and practices that answer our emotional needs through better relationships to each other and the planet 

• Re-imagining the future with technology as our friend
• How this adds up to a new politics in Scotland

1) Spring recognises the need to answer our sense of powerlessness with experiences of real power, exercised in the places we live, within our communities 

What might that mean when our material resources are so stretched? We need to look at the conditions in which new kinds of economy can arise organically.

None of us simply live locally anymore: we live cosmolocally. Meaning, with the technological freedom to access worlds of ideas, practices, even blueprints without leaving our homes or locality. 

So our agency will be as much about generating new stories about ourselves – our soft power – that give us the confidence and permission to innovate.

A Spring culture will show that our ingenuity can be collectively nurtured – we can build community wealth under our feet. 

There is much evidence of this in practice, See initiatives in Plymouth, Hull,  and Frome, where people turn to each other for the answer to their questions. These are communities that generate their own projects, asking the council to fund them or connect them to resources. Some of it social enterprise, some of it wholly community-owned.

Meantime, this from Lesley Riddoch’s book Thrive:

Scotland has quietly become the community-buyout capital of Europe. Right now, thousands of Scottish citizens in hundreds of buyouts are running everything from islands and schools to hydro-electric dams and petrol pumps, affordable housing, restaurants, and creches. They’re doing it without experience, formal structures, overseers, outsiders, or clipboards. They’ve transformed the shape of land ownership so that 70 percent of folk on the Western Isles now live on community-owned land. And these super-capable people are running assets that councils, churches, lairds, and charities could not—profitably and sustainably.

In fact, there is a whole directory of these kinds of community agency networks (CANs) starting up all over these islands and globally. They tend to take shape at various stages of people coming together, in the face of division or social deterioration.

There’s the more familiar CANs – such as Transition Towns, Ecovillages and co-operatives. And the less familiar – neighbourhood and mutual aid networks, many of which kicked off during Covid. More recently, whole bio-regions are beginning to self-organise this way. Aligning the needs of the people, with the resources of the place they live in, aware of their joint impact on the planet.

Our steady observation reveals that a new economics is slowly emerging from different parts of the globe. It has elements of permaculture, circular economy, caring and commoning (including peer-to-peer), and respecting the boundaries of doughnut economics. An umbrella term more and more people are beginning to use globally is ecocivilisation. (These hotlinks point to resources on the Alternative Global website). 

However, this is not an economy the mainstream can ‘switch to’, without more prefiguring and prototyping locally. The work of the CANs regenerates the economy from within, reconnecting it directly to the people’s needs and offerings. 

Of course, the goal of fruitful community participation is not an easy win: it takes graft. New forms of deliberating, participating and envisioning are being tested daily. Empathy circles, anti-debates, world cafes, constellations – if you haven’t heard of them, check them out.

See what Pol.is – an AI-enhanced deliberation technology – has achieved in Sheffield, Leicester and elsewhere, since it enabled a democratic revolution in Taiwan. Or how preparations for the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony transformed the neighbourhood community in Southwark London.

2) Spring recognises that the journey to self-empowerment answers deep emotional needs

We’re at a moment when many sinister forces are targeting our vulnerability in times of multiple crises. They aim to harness and manipulate our natural yearnings for better (or greater) times. Making promises they can’t keep to get followers and votes.

The appeal of far-right populists like Farage, Trump/Musk and Orban will not be lessened by liberal-left political establishments “talking at” those who live in precarious circumstances. 

Complex communities need access to artful, emotionally-literate methods of coming together, in order to generate trust and belonging. As well as status, autonomy, meaning and purpose… all essential to our mental health.

When we learn together how our personal security is directly linked to the health of the planet, it encourages more creative food and energy projects.

The tools and methods for this are available. (See The Alternative Global’s collaboratory process that amplified a citizen action network (CAN) in Plymouth.) Here is where concrete proposals for game-changing initiatives arise. 

3) Spring is about resetting our attitudes to the future

The term spring points towards both the natural and the mechanical; a blooming garden and a coiled wire; a verb and a noun.

This feels appropriate to the contending visions of the future we’re often asked to contemplate. On one side, a finite planet— whose natural limits are being breached, with potentially disastrous consequences. 

On the other, a world where artificial intelligence and biotechnology seem to offer us unlimited powers, to both simulate and shape reality (again, with often apocalyptic downsides). 

Can’t we integrate these two visions of the future? Can’t we apply our radical technologies to the task of living lightly and regeneratively on the earth? Yes, we can – and there are already breakthroughs in method and practice being explored by communities across these islands. 

For example biomimicry, where the regenerative designs of the natural world are being copied by agriculturalists and urban planners. Or permaculture, now a worldwide movement of people operating through horizontal networks, sharing information about social and planetary health.

But if we want to accelerate these spaces of experimentation, we need to invest more of our resources – especially time and attention. If we want more people involved, beyond the much-respected usual suspects, we have to imagine a new space beyond civil society as it identifies itself today.

It should be a space that is co-owned by the people so that they can feel the value of their own investment of love and care. Coming together for future flourishing has to be developed as something that attracts energy and joy. A space that goes beyond problem solving,  towards  ‘worlding’ the future. An experience we want more of every time.

There is a very useful concept and practice that comes from the Czech rebels of the 70s and 80s – that of the “parallel polis”. At the time it was an underground zone, where people turned to each other and built mutual networks of production, care and creativity, right beneath the noses of the then Communist regime. 

Today, this kind of parallel power structure can be built as a platform – social, cultural and technological. Ours is called Planet A (more here). But there are many others possible and available.

The role of the state here would be to enable: remaining at arm’s length but helping to create the conditions in which people might re-discover each other fruitfully. It would use labour-replacing tech to grant more days, and more economic security, to citizens (via shorter working weeks, basic incomes and services, and other regulatory measures). 

Also, state power could remove barriers to reclaiming empty buildings;  accelerate land reform; encourage councils to partner with participatory practices rather than lead them. 

(And because Scotland has a proportional system, a new party might even Spring up, to give people the chance to vote specifically for this new participatory system. Early days.)

All this so that we, the people, coming together across divides, can truly occupy our own futures. 

***

So what are the steps towards Spring? What can we do in Winter to make sure it arrives? Who does what?

To date, our work has been as systems convenors – meaning we’ve observed what’s emerging and joined up the dots, bringing unlike people together to collaborate. And then produced media content to share a new ‘true’ story at the Daily Alternative blog, now nearly eight years in.

But we are ready for new alliances that can bring to life a new political system, one we see possible–starting in Scotland. A new system that can serve the emergence of Spring across these islands: in concert with similar emergences globally.

To our mind, the first steps would be: 

1) Invite co-creators to Spring and host partner conversations on what the future might look like

2) map and connect community agency networks of all kinds

3) introduce new participation tools wherever a local group wants to host a collaboratory

Let’s keep asking ourselves: where are the green shoots that can be nurtured? Which communities are already self-determining, but could use new tools and narratives to help them become vibrant and strong enough to usher in previously unimagined futures?

These communities could as easily be a terrace of houses, brought into relationship by sharing vital work; a neighborhood coming together through Mutual Aid Networks; a town with a festival or market already developing its identity; or a bio-region becoming self-conscious around its rivers and food.

In 2025, during this current political Winter, the parallel polis is grounded in the active pursuit of relationships and friendships, and amplified by digitality, networks and computation. All of this can be crafted in ways that make power tangible to us. Helping us to develop our autonomy, self-determination and independence. 

***

This brings us, finally (and fourthly) to the Scottish context for Spring.

Centuries of constitutional debate have raged around the sovereignty of Scotland. At the very least, the outcome of this has been a heightened awareness of how power should be balanced, between the people and government.

In the last few decades, after the re-establishment of the Holyrood Parliament, there has been a clear (if occasionally faltering) connection between civil society and legislators/politicians in Scotland, around the topic of community empowerment. 

This has resulted in policies and laws which make access to land and assets relatively easier for communities and locales (though there’s still considerable distance to travel).

In this context, Spring would support as much distribution, even decentralisation, of power and resources within Scotland as possible. We’d advocate deploying some of the innovative, hybrid structures of democratic innovation we’ve referenced already. 

Without doubt, nation-state independence would accelerate Spring. But equally, Spring would accelerate independence. 

With the experience of “small-i independence” in their communities, more people will feel more confident to make (and sustain) the leap to the status of a nation-state. Not least because they have tangible ownership – both practically and imaginatively – of the future of their country. 

In the Scottish context, Spring implies a national society teeming with strong, purposeful communities, cosmolocal and worldly in attitude and practice. 

Circumstances may or may not throw up another plebiscite or electoral mandate for Scottish independence. 

Nevertheless, the authors of this piece believe its attainment will be better founded if a “parallel polis” takes shape. Where the very culture of self-organisation draws its strength from friendship and creativity, even as we face an indeterminate future. 

The practice of Spring means taking bold risks with those you share your streets, fields, enterprises and networks with, caring for each other and their next generations. 

No doubt many nations, regions and territories would be receptive to the message, mood and methods of Spring – cosmolocalism depends on that. Wintry conditions are far and wide. Our shared dilemmas are both permacrises and polycrises. 

Even so, we predict the very first blossoming of Spring will be here. Call it a Scottish Spring, perhaps. (Of course, with umbrellas to hand…) 

To become an active member of Spring – receiving our mailouts, and ready to meet up soon – please visit spring.site, and find the animated symbols. Then click…

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