3.8 Ensuring praxeological coherence with the help of subversive innovation

Existence is essentially dialectical movement, meaning the material conditions for production and reproduction of matter or life are constantly evolving and being transformed. No matter the framework, there is a kind of wear caused as much by the passage of time as by its evolutionary enrollment in a material space. It is therefore important to see, through and with experimentation and institutional adaptation, how it might be possible to face constant transformations of context and conjecture without losing the coherence and cohesion of the big picture proposal.

We will need to demonstrate that other lifestyles are feasible and legitimate. We will need to pave the way to a new world that must be much more than the sum of many “small, nice anecdotal experiences.” This will require new coordination modalities in order to ensure ‘coherence’ and ‘cohesion’ between visions and experiments.

Experiments, initiatives and proposals pertaining to transport, food supply, energy, habitat and recycling, for example, are more and more present all over the world. Anchored mostly in individual territories and mobilizing local populations, they support learning, reproducibility and universalization. They allow us to concretely identify regulatory, cultural, political, technological, financial or governing roadblocks and to propose solutions to remove and scale them. The social and solidarity economy often carries initiatives like these : collective decision-making and property are conducive to innovation, experimentation, deliberation and learning. These initiatives are often supported by municipalities, the first level of government confronted with climate change and the challenges of a socio-ecological transition.

In short, we are not starting from scratch ; far from it. Connecting these experiments is a condition of their universalization and of cross-discipline learning.