Updating the Grassroots to Global Assembly process

1. What we’ve been doing: Enabling people to recognise the potential in this crisis.

This molten moment is not a time for anything less than transformative change, but - paradoxically - to achieve that we need to (a) work both deep within and utterly outside the system as it is, while (b) developing decolonising empathy-pathways out of the trauma of the colonising win-lose world, to regenerate a world where my well-being is recognised as depending entirely on ensuring, not denying, your well-being.

a. Transformation happens by working from both within and outside the system:

XR Scotland’s campaign secured legislation mandating a Scottish Climate Citizens Assembly, which is due to meet November 2020 to March 2021. XR have been on the Government’s stewarding group shaping the assembly, and succeeded in ensuring it is being asked to address a substantive question “How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in a fair and effective way?”. However, although we believed the civil servants involved had agreed that the Assembly would be able to evaluate the level of crisis we are in and the level of transformation required to respond to it, gradually they seemed to revert to the more superficial sectoral emissions reduction approach of the UK assembly. In the end XR Scotland withdrew from the Stewarding Group, and withdrew our approval of this asembly as being an adequate response to the crisis we face. Although it is considering a systems change question, it is not being set up in a way that will really enable assembly members to hear from a range of contrasting (rather than simply status quo) voices. You can read about our reasoning in more depth here. However we have learnt a huge amount from engaging within the system, not only about why Governments may be incapable of holding processes that may require their transformation, but also about how such transformations can best happen.

b. Transformation requires empathy-pathways out of the trauma of colonisation:

We are completing the first of a 4-stage grassroots to global assembly process. This engaged listening project has involved people reaching out to others not like them, asking 3 key questions about (i) what are the key challenges in their world, (ii) why are they happening, and (iii) how could we tackle them? It became clear that people experience themselves as caring individuals but also as damaging cogs in a political, economic and cultural system that persuades us we are powerless to change it to one that can ensure everyone’s wellbeing.

2. What we hope to do next

(why, when and where)

a. Working outwards from within the system

– a wave of peoples assemblies

why? enable system transformation; when? Dec 2020 to Nov 2021; where? Scotland

Learning from the engaged listening process and from our engagement with the Scottish Climate Citizens Assembly, we aim to bring together ground-breaking frontline experience of the climate and related crises, and kicking off, from the ground up, peoples assemblies across Scotland that can feed into, and amplify this process

There is a deep need for such new deliberative democratic processes that can inspire people to put in the hard graft to transform our world by recognise what is possible. Across Europe the political system is increasingly captured, and any social democratic or centre ground governing parties are likely to fast lose their hold since they are so out of tune with a system that legally obliges corporations to put shareholder profit above planetary or personal well- being. A system that now has at its finger tips methods of ‘social’ media manipulation that can intensify that process by distracting, demotivating and fomenting division. We have a context here in Scotland where the political and cultural climate can still – for this moment anyway – enable us to model the transformation we all need.

WHAT? We are seeking to hold peoples assemblies, informed by frontline experience (online or in person), to build society-wide pressure on parties and candidates to adopt the assembly’s recommendations ahead of the May 2021 Scottish Parliamentary elections. If we succeed, this means that COP26 can be happening in a country modelling the path out of the crisis.

b. Working inwards from outside the system

– de-traumatising politics

why? model a de-traumatised politics; when? Sept 2020-Nov 2021; where? Scotland

It is abundantly clear from (i) the interviews we have conducted, (ii) our experience of interfacing with power, (ii) the ‘Coming Down to Earth - conflict resolution’ 5-week 3,000- participants online conference Eva recently co-facilitated, and from (iv) the indigenous peoples in Africa and Canada Justin works with, that to resist participating in colonising power structures requires recognising just how far removed from their humanity, how traumatised, those in positions of power have to be to reach those positions. We have written about this in a piece titled ‘Politics, Trauma and Empathy’.

Progressive social movements seek to change power structures, while often perpetuating them within themselves. It is extremely hard to transform toxic power relations. To become powerful enough to transform them often means having already become them, and not becoming them is often because we have relinquished the battle and so left them in place. For example, Extinction Rebellion has had a welcome focus on ‘regeneration’ (self-care). At the same time, XRUK has had toxic power issues, with a struggle between those focused on antagonising others in order to drive the climate emergency up society’s agenda, and those trying to build bridges of care to those suffering impacts of the system driving the crisis.

Within our social and political systems there’s a vortex of unacknowledged personal trauma combined with a hereditary system of domination which, turbo charged by the neoliberal agenda over the past 40 years, is now running close to costing us everything. Those at the apex of our systems of power are often amongst those of us most seriously traumatised.

To resist dominant structures successfully (without becoming them oneself), requires developing and using ‘empathy-pathways’ to split the trauma atom. What does this mean? Empathy is love translated into the social sphere. Many of us easily feel the joys and pains of those closest to us, but empathy allows us to feel for those outside of our group, for those we have never met, for those of other species and for the planet as a living system.

(i) We aim to develop a methodology for participants in the peoples’ assembly process above, to identify and disentangle the ways in which domination-trauma pervades our personal, political, economic and cultural experience. This helps us to stop reacting in ways that bind us to that we are reacting against. Instead, through developing our empathy, we can build our own creativity, reach out to build alliances, and defuse dominating processes.

(ii) We aim to run a ‘Reworlding: de-traumatising politics’ (May 2021) online conference to further develop the methodology of a politics structured to engage with the strengths and weaknesses of what it is to be human. We aim to challenge and deepen the deliberative turn in democracy, developing structures and processes to take into account and mitigate for a politics driven by trauma, thereby facilitating empathy- pathways from cognitive biases and power psychosis to self-reflexivity and mutuality.

And after that? We will continue to build towards a Global Citizens Assembly with the power to make the decisions the world needs, ones our current system is incapable of.