Grassroots Innovations
= community-led solutions for sustainability
Description
Grassroots Innovations Assembly:
What are Grassroots Innovations?
"Our innovations grow from ancestral knowledge. Innovation does not have to be new, it may be something which worked and was forgotten or erased. What is common in one place, or at one time, is an innovation in another context.
Our innovations solve real problems. An innovation starts with users’ needs, often the need to adapt to a changing environment.
Our innovations come from the grassroots and are tested in the grassroots. They are local solutions to local problems that rely on the resources we have at our disposal and the generational knowledge of agroecological farmers. Even GMO seeds require an ancestral peasant-created seed to modify. They are a result of farmers’ inherent experimentation that is a necessity just to survive. There has never been stability, or a “way it's always been.”
Our innovations encompass the complexity of agroecology, including the social, political and ecological dimensions. Our innovations address ecosystem health and the wellbeing of our communities, not only food production. Our innovations may be mechanical, technological, or social; they may be a method rather than an object or artifact. We may innovate the innovation process itself.
Community governance and feedback systems determine the success of our innovations and make sure they do not create new problems. We recognize that governance requires increasing our communities’ capacity to critically discuss technology.
We discussed many innovation questions that agroecological farmers must tackle. How do we farm without fossil fuels? Without plastic? How do we survive the effects of climate change? How do we make tools accessible to all bodies? How do we advocate for our needs as smallholder farmers? How do we ethically engage with digital tools for our own empowerment?"
Characteristics
of grassroots innovations, by the Grassroots Innovations Assembly:
"Grassroots innovations for agroecology sustain autonomy and create independence from extractive economies.
Autonomy does not mean individualism, but a choice of who we want to work with and how, within a strong network of resilient farms and territories. Autonomy is built into the way we innovate using horizontal and bottom-up innovation that is always evolving in response to feedback.
Grassroots innovation empowers us to create our own solutions, whereas capitalism teaches us to be passive, waiting for a solution to be sold to us.
Grassroots innovations come from peasants, whereas capitalism tells us that innovations come from academics, trained scientists, and engineers.
Grassroots innovation trains farmers to be artists, engineers, organizers, and scientists, whereas capitalist economies turn food producers into consumers that purchase seeds, tools and chemicals.
Grassroots innovations are simple tools to do complex t simp whereas capitalism sells us complex and difficult to repair tools to do simple tasks.
Grassroots innovations are driven by shared values, whereas top-down innovation is driven by profits.
Innovation provides a common ground for our movements for autonomy to expand. For Tzoumakers, their makerspace is becoming a hub for a multisectoral cooperative. Fabriek Paysan shared that conservative farmers “talk really easy with us because we talk only machinery or innovation...Once we say that we are some activism in climate change they say, ah 'but I thought that all the climate activists were against us.” And once we begin to talk and we say no we are not against you, we are against the system and…they begin to understand everything.”
Collaboration principles
Grassroots Innovations Assembly:
"We also discussed general principles we follow, regardless of what specific methods are used:
- Always start with problems that farmers raise
- Before making something new, assess existing solutions
- Facilitate collaboration between peasants, technologists, and researchers
- Where we meet matters. Host events in community spaces (farms, schools, churches),
not institutional spaces
- Use knowledge sharing (horizontal) not communication (unidirectional)
- Documenting processes and products is necessary for results to matter and to create
inspiration, replication and adaptation.
- Use digital tools, don’t focus on digital tools as a goal
- Give space for individuals with disruptive ideas
- Base innovations in traditional knowledge."
More Information
- news and updates from a series of research projects on grassroots innovations, based at the University of East Anglia and University of Sussex, http://grassrootsinnovations.org/
- Introducing Grassroots Innovations for Sustainable Development. Here we explain what Grassroots Innovations are and why they’re important, and present the key arguments of our Environmental Politics article (Summer 2010) [1]