Making Time: Exploring the emergent times of alternative economies

The central question that motivates this project is, 'What is the time of a sustainable economy?' That is, if industrial capitalism is often linked with clock time, and late capitalism with a speeded up, 24/7 networked time, is it the case that attempts to build new alternative economies could be understood as making a new time?

In a context where any hope of a speedy recovery from the 2008 economic crisis is increasingly untenable, there has been an explosion of interest around alternatives to the neoliberal capitalist model. Focusing on the potential of collaborative relationships, rather than ones based on competition, proponents of the new economics are exploring gift economies, the potential of the peer-to-peer paradigm, shared consumption, crowd-funding and rediscovering cooperative models. Importantly, much of this work draws on historical models for inspiration and thus provides an important example of the Care for the Future theme's focus on 'thinking forward through the past'. There are also indications that this re-valuing of the past links into broader shifts in senses of time. This includes an interest in the Slow movement (including Slow Food, Slow Cities, Slow Science and Slow Money), but can also been seen in shifts in thinking about social interventions in terms of non-linear models of change, such as can be seen in the Transition Towns movement.

In order to explore whether this issue has the potential to develop into a larger research project, the project team will be producing a variety of resources that will help set out the key issues at stake when thinking about time and alternative economies. This will include producing a number of case studies, developing an interview series and exploring the potential of archived material to shed light on current attempts to shift dominant economic and temporal structures. As part of this we are also interested in exploring the range of methods that might be available for studying the often implicit conceptualisations of time that guide social actors. In the interests of engaging a broad range of people concerned with these issues, we will make all our materials available on our project website where possible. We will also hold three events around issues raised in the project.

Finally, although the issue at the heart of this project is only just emerging, it has already succeeded in bringing together a number of highly influential project partners, including: Cooperatives UK, the New Economics Foundation, the Transition Network and the Permaculture Association; as well as leading academics in the area of sustainable economics, including Katherine Gibson (J.K. Gibson-Graham) and Molly Scott-Cato; and the environmental humanities, including Deborah Bird Rose and Nigel Clark.

As this is an application for an exploratory project, we are in an early stage of development and cannot yet fully articulate who might be the beneficiaries for this research and how they might benefit. Instead, the project has been designed so that one of its outputs will be an evidence based account of potential beneficiaries and benefits. At the outset of the project, however, there are a number of factors that suggest that there is a wide interest from outside of academia in seeing where the project might lead. This can be seen particularly in the makeup of our advisory board, which includes John Goodman, Head of Policy and the Regions for Cooperatives UK and Anna Coote, Head of Social Policy for the New Economics Foundation, as well as project leaders within the Transition Network and the Permaculture Association. As they suggest in their letters of support, the project promises a variety of benefits including bringing a fresh approach to issues that are of central concern, as well as wider benefits from being part of the research process itself and thus building new links to university researchers. Coote in particular has highlighted the importance of time for thinking through economic alternatives, stating in a recent Guardian article that "the more I think about it the more I am convinced that time is the thing. How we use time - and how we can use it differently". The project thus promises to feed into the policy agendas of nef in particular, who have already made a number of temporally inflected interventions into employment policy through their call for the 21 hour week and the linked appeal for national gardening leave. Indeed, in a report on the launch of their 21 hours project, Coote expresses surprise at the range and volume of interest in the project, suggesting that concerns about working hours, and the lack of ability to make time for the things many care about are widely felt in the public more generally. Importantly, interventions into working hours, for example, have the potential to address a wide number of issues at the same time, including allowing more time for cultural participation, a fairer distribution of economic benefits, less impact on the environment and improved health and wellbeing.

As part of developing this project, the PI also hosted discussions on time and sustainable livelihoods at the recent Transition Network conference and at a national meeting on collaborative facilitation techniques (WOSonOS). These meetings gave further insights into the potential beneficiaries and benefits of this research. Attendees at these discussions included those employed by arts organisations, business consultants, students and eco-homes experts to name a few. Here the central concern was around how to develop a more relaxed and generous experience of time in a world where being overworked is often the norm. Interestingly this concern over how to carve out a different experience of time has also been a recurring topic at events organised by the AHRC funded Temporal Belongings network which explores the links between time and community. However, both discussions also raised issues that will need to be kept in mind going forward. That is while the issue spoke to a wide variety of people, there were also others who dismissed it outright as being too academic. As the PI has noted previously, 'time' is generally understood to be something that is both basic common sense (e.g. in relation to the clock), as well as one of the most obscure metaphysical problems encountered in the course of our lives. However, we have found that the process of developing new networks and non-technical resources (as is the case with the Temporal Belongings project) has helped to develop ways of talking about time that are less alienating and we hope to take these insights and resources forward into this new project.