| Making Vegetables Visible: Insights from Mindanao Increasing small-scale vegetable production is a key target for growing a more sustainable food system. At first glance, meeting this target seems straightforward. On closer inspection, particularly in contexts experiencing the on-going effects of climate uncertainty and economic uncertainty, it can be hard to achieve. Community education has a vital role to play.
This monograph outlines community education best practice principles for promoting and supporting small- scale vegetable production, marketing and consumption, based on a study conducted in Mindanao, The Philippines. It generates local insights for wider application. The monograph assembles a toolbox of replicable, and adaptable ideas and methods. The toolbox is of value to end users around the world seeking to grow more sustainable food systems. |
| A Community Economies perspective for ethical community development Community Economy theory has gained much traction over the past two decades as a language politics and an ethical tool kit for researchers and practitioners in the field of community development. This chapter examines Community Economy approaches to development using two empirical examples from quite different contexts that highlight key ethical concerns. In the two empirical examples we show how communities can move towards surviving well collectively by mapping their existing diverse economic practices and relationships, and how people can shift from focusing on their individual survival to collective survival. We use the Community Economy approach to suggest that ethical questions are best negotiated through relationships and in specific contexts, rather than adopting an individualist or universal prescription of what ethics is, or should be in any given context. 
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| Community economies in Monsoon Asia: Keywords and key reflections The paper has been collaboratively written with co‐researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post‐development agenda.This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place‐based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William’s cultural analysis of keywords into a non‐western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. For Open Access, click here. |
| Community economies in Southeast Asia: a hidden economic geography Researchers have long recognized practices of mutual aid, reciprocity and sharing as prevalent features of everyday community life in Southeast Asia. Such practices are often represented as persistent vestiges of pre-capitalist societies and variously categorized as aspects of 'informal economies,' 'patron-client' relations or 'social capital.' In debates about capitalist development these 'relict' practices are seen as standing in the way of modern economic growth, as something to be overcome or enrolled into the mechanics of transition to market capitalism - that is, they are harnessed into a narrative of either decline or transcendence. However, such a framing obscures the valuable role mutual aid, reciprocity and sharing may have played in shaping responses to social, economic, political and environmental threats over the long duree. It is clear that these practices contribute to local social safety nets and act to support households in the event of misfortune or calamity, even today (Ong and Curato 2015). While they may be ill fitted to capitalist development trajectories, they are well suited as survival strategies and may potentially contribute to development trajectories more suited to life in the Anthropocene, the age we have entered in which human systems have become a geological force capable of destabilizing earth systems (Steffen et al. 2015). This chapter outlines an intellectual framing that situates mutual aid, reciprocity, sharing and other 'community economic practices' within a diverse economy in which the trajectory of change is not dominated by the capitalist development narrative but is up for negotiation. 
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| Re-embedding Economies in Ecologies: Resilience Building in More than Human Communities The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed many of the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. In this paper we argue that a first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating the longstanding social and ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. Our capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by economic science which encloses ecological space within more and more delimited confines. Our task is thus to cultivate new sensibilities that will enable us to enact resilience in both our thinking and practice. The theoretical argument of this paper will be illustrated drawing on examples from a research project on strengthening economic resilience in Monsoon Asia. We explore how people and environments have co-produced ways of living with severe climatic disturbance. While longstanding infrastructural assemblages have been devalued or destroyed by modernization, key elements of these assemblages are now the subject of much interest. Bamboo, a building material central to survival in Monsoon Asia, has been dismissed as a viable element of modern Asia’s built environment. But this is changing as the properties of bamboo are re-evaluated. When humans are resituated within the vegetative assemblages that have supported life in Asia over the long durée we can begin to explore the ethical practices of bamboo and the ecological actions of humans that might co-produce more resilient and liveable futures. |
| Growing Community Food Economies in the Philippines, excerpt 2 Introduction to a PhD thesis project about collective ethical economic action for a climate and resource changing world. It includes diverse economy food stories from the Philippines and from my home in the NSW Southern Tablelands of Australia, as well as a thesis outline. |
| Growing Community Food Economies in the Philippines, excerpt 1 'Growing Community Food Economies in the Philippines' is a PhD thesis about collective ethical economic action. It draws on empirical cases of regional food projects in Manila and Mindanao and examines possible post-capitalist economic growth trajectories in the Philippines context. This project also examines collective methods. Drawing on actor network theory and hybrid collective thinking it empirically demonstrates 'hybrid collective world making', foregrounding the role various human and nonhuman actors (e.g. typhoons, river systems and digital media) play in shaping food and economic futures.
Excerpt 1 is a thesis chapter about community economies thinking and practice and growing community food economies in the Philippines through hybrid collective methods. |
| Moving from 'Matters of Fact’ to 'Matters of Concern" in Order to Grow Economic Food Futures in the Anthropocene This paper argues that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene. It proposes a new mode of critical inquiry by centering on three broad research matters of concern: (1) gathering and assembling economic diversity (2) human actancy and (3) nonhuman actancy. |
| Cultivating Hybrid Collectives: Research Methods for Enacting Community Food Economies in Australia and the Philippines In this paper authors Cameron, Gibson and Hill discuss two research projects in Australia and the Philippines in which we have cultivated hybrid collectives of academic researchers, lay researchers and various nonhuman others with the intention of enacting community food economies. We feature three critical interactions in the 'hybrid collective research method': gathering, reassembling and translating. We argue that in a climate changing world, the hybrid collective method fosters opportunities for a range of human and nonhuman participants to act in concert to build community food economies. |
| Food's Cultural Geographies: Texture, Creativity, and Publics This chapter is about emerging cultural geographies of food. It is the result of a collaborative blog‐to‐paper process that led to an experimental, fragmented, dialogic text. Food is often researched precisely because it can help to vividly animate tensions between the small and intimate realms of embodiment, domesticity, and “ordinary affect” and the more sweeping terrain of global political economy, sustainability, and the vitality of “nature”. Food's cultural geographies, like cultural geography more broadly, can be “best characterised by powerful senses of texture, creativity and public engagement”. The explosion of academic interest in food geographies is a mirror to the explosion of public interest in, and public discourse about, all kinds of food matters. 
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| A Helping Hand and Many Green Thumbs This paper reveals how ethical economic decision making in a government-led local food project in the Philippines is generating social surplus, creating and sustaining commons and building a community-based food economy. |
| From Calamity to Community Enterprise This paper highlights social enterprise development as a post-disaster livelihood re-building strategy that has the potential to build resilience and foster disaster preparedness in local communities. |
| Opportunities for Ondoy: From Calamity to Community Enterprise Work in progress paper about social enterprise clustering as a local economic development and livelihood (re)building strategy in Manila in the Philippines. |
| Cultivating Citizen-Subjects Through Collective praxis: Organised Gardening Projects in Australia and the Philippines In this chapter we discuss empirical evidence of communal gardening projects through a 'realist governmentality' approach. |
| Diverse Economies in Place: A Study of Economic Subjects and Practices in the Wingecarribee Shire of New South Wales This thesis empirically grounds the diverse economies framework and is an early contribution to post-capitalist thought. Specifically the thesis maps the diverse economic practices of various subjects in the Wingecarribee Shire, a local government area on the rural urban fringe of Sydney, Australia. It challenges a capitalocentric view of the economy instead presenting a diverse regional economic landscape with implications for local government planning. |
