For the first edition of our interview series with Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) members, we spoke with Professor Peter North about his work and his involvement in SE4Ces. We explore his vision of the social economy in Europe, the role of education in progressing that, and his views from what he calls the currently benighted “Austerity-Brexit-Covid Island”.
What does that mean? Keep reading!
As an SAC member, Pete advises and supports project partners towards the creation of a new master’s programme on the social economy. We managed to take a quick online coffee break for this interview. Our conversation starts with a review of his short biography on the project’s website. From it we read: “Peter North is Professor of Alternative Economies in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool. Peter is bringing expertise on community development especially through processes of policy formation and partnership working between the public, private, and community sectors around strategies for local economic development, as well as on the social and solidarity economies as tools for constructing and rethinking alternative geographies of money, entrepreneurship, and livelihoods.”
Does this summarize your work well?
It summarizes my work well. I have been doing this for 30 years now. Back in the 1980s I was a civil servant working for the UK government on urban policy and that was where I first encountered the social economy – I went on to study it for my PhD and have followed it ever since. At times I have been interested in how a supportive government can help develop the social economy. Under the current UK government, I am more interested in the autonomous social and solidarity economy in a critical, antagonistic, and even slightly militant approach. If you take the longue durée of my research career, then yes, this summary works.
What convinced you to partake in SE4Ces?
For some time, when I have been talking to colleagues in Europe that work on social and solidarity economies, I realized how neoliberal Britain is. Brits have a very particular way of looking at the social economy: as social businesses working to use business skills to ‘do good’.
I have been interested in finding out what is going on in other places in both social democratic environments like northern Europe, the Netherlands where there’s a strong state that’s looking to include people, like France and Spain where there’s a strong communist tradition, and places like southern Europe where austerity has hit hard and you are getting reactions to that. I've been to Paris, Rome, Thessaloniki, and Barcelona with an interest in interacting with Europeans. We Brits have so much to learn, and perhaps something to give as well.
So, it is also about the opportunity to exchange and to meet new people from the European continent?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm very aware that I've tended to paddle my own canoe in my research career. This is the first time I have been involved in a big European project and it's very interesting to see how it's done. Not to mention all the new people we meet and in doing so hopefully a chance to build future research collaborations.
The bulk of your research involves the rethinking of existing societal structures in various fields. Where does your interest in these topics come from? And what sort of rethinking do you suggest?
That is a good way of putting it, but it is not the language I would use. I work with social movement and diverse economies theories so I see the world out there as presenting political opportunities and barriers. I don’t think you can really rethink structures because structures are created through struggle from below. Elites want to keep things as they are and people from below want to change that. You could say it invokes battle from below. John Holloway in his book “Crack Capitalism”, talks about developing our ability to do things better. He talks about combining the shout ‘against’ what is wrong with developing our ability ‘to’ do better. I am interested in helping to create something from below rather than reinforce structures. It’s a work in progress.
As a matter of fact, that's why I'm part of the Community Economies Institute with Katherine Gibson (SE4Ces Scientific Advisory Council member) and other great folks. I'm interested in spending my time working on better ways to live, especially given climate change, austerity in the UK, neoliberalism, and Brexit. I don't think I want to spend my time retheorizing structures because I think structures are all made too much. I'm more interested in spending time thinking of ways that we can look at the world and see how we can do better and learn from other practices.
Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the future when it comes to rebuilding back better in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate change crisis?
I think in the early days of the pandemic, there was a lot of hope that this might be, as Arundhati Roy put it “a portal to a better world”. A lot of things stopped because of the Covid pandemic, and I think we realized that many of the things we were doing – like fast consumerism-, we didn't need to do. The world slowed down and we went for walks in the parks and smelt better air. In this regard, I had the luck to live right by the River Mersey.
I don't know what it's like in different places, but in Britain, it's turned out to be a more pessimistic story, unfortunately. A lot of people are looking to return to ‘what was’, rather than to build something better. Those with a different view of how we want to live are still doing that, but I think we've still got to keep convincing people to think in different ways. In Britain, we are slipping back to the old neoliberal way of doing things, which is very, very disappointing.
“If we get good, solid experience on how to do things as part of this project then I could say to the people of Liverpool look: there are different ways of doing things, and they work.”
What role will the social and solidarity economy play in the coming years in your region?
I did write a policy brief on how we could do things differently for the people in Britain and Liverpool. People locally, in positions of influence and who read it, liked the ideas but didn't know what to do with them, particularly those from the most neoliberalized Social Economy Organizations. They were panicking that they would go under, and they quite rightly advocated for support to survive the crisis. They are still there, and hopefully, they will be encouraged to think about how to rebuild different in the future. If we get good, solid experience on how to do things as part of this project then I could say to the people of Liverpool look: there are different ways of doing things, and they work.
Also, if you look at the occupied factories in Argentina, the Brazilian social solidarity economy incubators, or the chantiers in Quebec, there are loads of experiences elsewhere out in the world. In Britain, people struggle to see beyond the standard concept, the sort of social enterprise model for using business skills to do good. It’s a narrow agenda that we need to challenge. You can’t import ideas wholesale from one place to another, but you can learn from different ways of doing things and adapt them to your local situation as you see fit.
What do you think could drive change again?
In Britain, I think a lot of progressive-minded people are still reeling from the failure of the Jeremy Corbyn project in 2019. So, I think many people have lost hope and have lost a vision. We need more convincing models from other places that work. Places where the public and private sector, universities, and community organizations are building the infrastructure of an economy that's more than just capitalistic. One that’s got profit-making businesses in it, but with a broad diversity of economic activities going on. In theory, we describe it as the “community” or “diverse economies” approach.
Here in Britain, lots of people think profitability, growth, and efficiency is all that matters. In their minds, it is the only thing that is ‘serious’. They don’t seem to understand broader conceptions such as the solidarity economy, alternatives to growth, diverse or doughnut economies. However, I think what we can offer from Britain is that we have lots of social enterprises that are very well-run, efficient, effective, profitable, and serious. They have a great track record and are very impressive. I am thinking of better models on how to run things effectively and how to get people with business mindsets to understand other ways you can run organizations. Essentially, we could help them think about different perspectives on what it is to have success beyond just “profit”.
“A lot of my students, they are entrepreneurial, and they want to be the good guys as well. They want to do something to avoid dangerous climate change and they're fed up with being told it's all about profit and efficiency and getting some capital - simple.”
…and the role of education in this picture?
The role of education is important here, and I think it's difficult in the U.K. because of our funding model. The very large student fees, the MBA model, and the way our business schools teach. I mean, I'm in geography and my students are up for these kinds of discussions because they're not looking to go into business. I think if we can get a broader conception of what we mean by organizing things that would be great. Martin Parker, another of the partners on this project, has written a lot about how management or business schools in the UK fail to take this agenda seriously enough and I think that’s right. A lot of my students are entrepreneurial, and they want to be the good guys as well. They want to do something to avoid dangerous climate change and that they're fed up with being told it's all about profit and efficiency and getting some capital - simple. They want to do the right thing. So, I think there's a big job to be done there.
What contributions do you hope SE4Ces can make to education about the social economy? Or what changes do you hope it will bring?
It depends on which country you're looking at.
I hope that some of the living labs that come to the U.K. will be able to get groups of scholars, students to come and start thinking about social solidarity economies and diverse economies. I hope the project brings new ways of thinking about social economy education, broader than the U.K. focus on “using business skills to do good”. Today it’s still about generating profits, thinking strategically, and marketing. You know, that’s what I think is problematic. It's a much broader conception of what it means to live ‘well’ in the Anthropocene that is what we need to think through. We need to make a big conceptual jump. There are still too many people on the other side of the barricades and that don’t find it convincing – yet. We need to change that.
What do you think could be big barriers to the success of the project?
Again, it depends where you are. I can only talk about the U.K. and the barriers we would have here are conceptual. Whether people would find alternative ways of thinking credible and concrete enough. Whether business schools would be interested in doing this, or whether it would be more likely to happen through the School for of Social Entrepreneurs, or some other social entrepreneur-focused NGO or university department (perhaps outside the business school).
Additionally, I think in the U.K., given student fees are so high, we need to think about how to fund students to come through a project like this. Britain is no longer in the European Union. We no longer have access to Horizon funding and the current government is not interested in this at all. Not even close. Their model is very much rekindling growth, building back more profitably. I can't see them buying this, but I could be wrong. If there are civil servants that are interested in this, I’d happily be proven wrong.
Fortunately, some people want to do something different, but I think they lack the skills to do it, and their confidence has been hit hard by what happened to the Jeremy Corbyn experience in 2019. You know, swathes of Labour MPs losing their seats to Tory MPs in the ‘left behind’ parts of Britain - that that's going to hit confidence, you know? And the current government has not got a clue. Perhaps the Labour Party will get its act together!
Are you active in any other projects related to SE4Ces?
Well, I've been very much involved in developing these kinds of ideas In Liverpool, we had a series of seminars called The Human Economy, where we were getting people together to talk about some of these ideas and how we could do things differently. But that has stalled.
I'm more interested intellectually now in what's happening in Poland. So that's the latest project I've bid for to get some funding to go over to talk to Polish leftists and greens to see how they conceptualize progressive change given their experience of state capitalism, communism, neoliberalism, and the current, you know, nationalistic populist government.
Additionally, I noticed there aren’t any participants from Central and Eastern European countries in the project. I think that this would be very interesting. Well, you know, it's just the world is very different there. The experience of communism still lasts. It hangs heavy. People have got very different positive views there. They care about the countryside, the climate and there are lots of young people that are very entrepreneurial.
What should we learn from them?
it's important to think about how the state supports the social economy and to understand political opportunity structures in different places. I believe it's important to think about enterprises and entrepreneurialism in different ways and not sort of see the social economy as separate
from entrepreneurialism. You know, in Italy and Spain and France and Greece, are all different.
Germany is very different from Finland, and Poland is very different from Hungary with regards to the social economy.
“After 1989 what the Poles were hoping to get was a ticket to Bonn, to Finland or Sweden, and what they actually got was a ticket to Chicago”
So, I feel that there is a need for a second project that includes the north and the east?
Yes! There was an interesting series of discussions I was involved in back in the nineties where people were looking at eastern Germany. I went out to Weimar for a conference about this. But I also remember being in Budapest. That was all very interesting. People I spoke to said they did not want to replace the rule of the (communist) party with the rule of the (impersonal, capitalist) market. Sadly, I think that is what they got – but it needn’t be all there is. People in Poland are thinking about this.
We should bring in the Finns: there is a very good book on this. It looks at diverse economies in Nordic social democracies where the state is looking after people, you know, in a serious way: “What would our economy look like if you had a universal basic income?”
What are you working on right now and what excites you about it? Why should we know about it?
Poland excites me. I'd mention that (laughs). It’s good to hear what’s going on in Poland, to get out there and treat nice beer in Polish pubs again and to talk to Poles about solidarity and self-management, social enterprise, and what communism did. So intellectually I find that very, very interesting.
And yes, I mean, I'm not doing any research in the Nordic social democracies at the moment, but what a dream that would be. Because that's what inspires the Polish leftists are the Nordic social democracies. You know, Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik says that after 1989 what the Poles were hoping to get was a ticket to Bonn, to Finland or Sweden, but what they actually got was a ticket to Chicago. (laughs)
I'm lucky not to be in business school where I can teach people that not looking to just get an MBA to make a lot of profit. I’m teaching geographers who are interested in avoiding dangerous climate change. They are all lovely students. It's nice to teach this kind of stuff to them.
“There was another Brit there and we looked across the room at each other and it made us realize how neoliberalized we were in our minds”
To wrap up the interview, a last message you would like to share?
(thinks) I remember I was in a meeting of another project in the politburo of the French Communist Party, listening to Europeans talking about how they thought about these issues. And there was another Brit there and we looked across the room at each other and it made us realize how neoliberalized we were in our minds. So, it's nice to be working with Europeans that have got broader conceptions of what could be that works for most. It's to work with Katherine Gibson, thinking of finding out more about the perspectives of Australians and New Zealanders or talking to Argentines and Brazilians about how they see things. In Britain you feel a bit like you’re stuck in an “Austerity-Brexit-Covid island so it's lovely to be able to get out of that and get some inspiration from other places.