Global Tapestry of Alternatives

Description

Ashish Kohtari et al.:

"the past two decades have witnessed the emergence of an immense variety of radical alternatives to this dominant regime and to its roots in capitalist, patriarchal, racist, statist, and anthropocentric forces. These range from initiatives in specific sectors such as sustainable and holistic agriculture, community led water/energy/food sovereignty, solidarity and sharing economy, worker control of production facilities, resource/knowledge commons, and inter-ethnic peace and harmony, to more holistic or rounded transformations such as those being attempted by the Zapatista and the Kurds in Rojava, to the revival of ancient traditions or the emergence of new worldviews that re-establish humanity’s place within nature and the values of human dignity, equality and the respect of history.

The Global Tapestry of Alternatives is an initiative seeking to create solidarity networks and strategic alliance amongst all these alternatives on local, regional and global levels. It starts in the local interaction among alternatives, to gradually organize forms of agreement at the regional, national and global scale, through diverse and light structures, defined in each space, horizontal, democratic, inclusive and non-centralized, using diverse local languages and other ways of communicating. The initiative has no central structure or control mechanisms. It spreads step by step as an ever-expanding, complex set of tapestries, constructed by already existing communal or collective webs, organized as alternatives to the dominant regimes, each of them autonomously weaving itself with other such webs.

It organizes mechanisms of interaction between those regional and national structures and with the societies, in which they exist, in diverse languages and different means, promoting periodically regional, national and global encounters, when the conditions allow for them, as well as close and synergistic linkages with existing organizations, like the World Social Forum. The Global Tapestry of Alternatives is about creating spaces of collaboration and exchange." (http://ashishkothari51.blogspot.com/2019/01/global-tapestry-of-alternatives.html)