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A recent chat about decentralisation in Tim Morgan’s blog

I said: In relation to Tim Morgan’s comment that “ It’s possible to picture a much more localised, less unequal and post-consumerist future, but there is no straightforward way of getting there.”

From the standpoint of localism, there is.

The mistake is assuming that the transition must begin with governments, political parties, or national economic systems. That is the top-down view, and it inevitably appears impossibly complicated because it attempts to redesign an entire nation before changing the lives of ordinary people.

Localism starts from the opposite direction. It begins with the individual, the family and the locality.

Mass unemployment in the formal economy will naturally force an increase in local resilience. More food will be grown locally. More goods and services will be exchanged locally. Skills will be shared. Small businesses will flourish because money circulates within the locality instead of leaking away. Woodlands, water, soils and biodiversity will be managed for long-term benefit rather than short-term profit. As each locality becomes stronger, dependence on distant supply chains will gradually decline.

None of this requires a revolution or a new political ideology. It requires thousands of practical decisions made by millions of people.

As economic contraction continues, the incentives naturally shift in this direction. Long supply chains become more expensive and less reliable. Energy becomes dearer. Employment becomes less secure. Under these conditions, local production is no longer a lifestyle choice, but the rational economic response.

The route is therefore remarkably straightforward. It is not easy, because it requires determination and cultural change. But it is simple.

Rather than asking, “How do we transform Britain?”, localism asks, “How do we make this locality more resilient this year?”

Multiply that question across thousands of localities, and a more localised, less unequal and post-consumerist society emerges naturally from the ground up.  It will be a natural evolution

The destination Tim Morgan describes indeed has a straightforward path. It simply starts at the bottom rather than at the top.

• raymonddeyoung on June 25, 2026 at 9:15 pmsaid: Well said Barry. I wonder if an insight from Kirpatrick Sale adds the notion that

raymonddeyoung on June 25, 2026 at 9:19 pmsaid:

… this decentralization doesn’t need to be started but rather is always present, hidden at the foundations of society and able to expand as needed?

Writer and social critic Kirkpatrick Sale (1980/2017) argues that a decentralist tradition is deeply rooted, ubiquitous, and continuous in human history. Our inclination toward local governance is contemporaneous with a centralizing, top-down tendency, with neither being a response to the other nor depending on the other for its existence or initiation.

The implications for contemporary localization are several: One, the decentralist tendency is, in effect, latent; it need not be created de novo. Two, should central governments fail to respond in a timely fashion to the urgency of climate disruption and biophysical limits, local self-organizing will occur quite naturally (or be found, in fact, to have been functioning all along, hidden in plain sight and ready to take up the space being vacated by centralizing tendencies). Three, at the same time, localizing is not reactionary; proponents need not wait for central failures. The world-wide local food movement is a case in point.

Notice that the premises of decentralization are consistent with the psychological version of adaptation: Humans are problem-solving creatures and creatures that adjust their behavior to fit circumstances (not, attempt to change circumstances to fit their sense-of-entitlement). We have an inherited inclination to thrive given our circumstances, and we do so no matter how dire those circumstances may seem to some.

Thus the inevitability of a transition to a lower level of social complexity (a premise of Tainter’s work, and shared here in these many posts) is likely to be met by self-organization at a decentralized, local level when centralized levels can only respond by adding more social complexity.

Sale, Kirkpatrick (1980) “Politics on a Human Scale.” In The Decentralist Tradition, Pp. 443-454. New York: Perigee Books.

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