LETS in the earlier quote from the Transition Handbook. That critique has, however, been rejected as somewhat draconian by LETSlink UK, an organisation that aims to support and nurture LETS schemes in Britain. Due to technological advances, LETS systems are much more viable today than they were in the 1980s, and – if Rob Hopkins’s text is read as a dismissal of LETS – this could well amount to an unfair qualification.13 Worse, if perceived as a ‘snubbing’ of LETS, it could even lend credit to a view of Transition as potentially predatory: a movement that stifles and obscures pre-existing shoots of social innovation.14
As a way out of this impasse, it is helpful to keep in mind that there may be greater nuance involved in this matter than the two positions (and the suggestion of colonialism) reported so far give away. My suggestion is that different forms of experimentation achieve a different fit within Transition, depending on the types of experiences they afford and the sort of possibilities they institute, for the purpose of crafting openings into the wider milieu of Transition.
This requires a re-framing of the potentially endless debate about whether LETS or local currencies are more ‘effective’. Most of the time, LETS and complementary currencies are set against one another within a ‘policy’ framework, whereby a comparison is staged to understand which scheme seems to have the greatest potential to ‘scale up’, so as to bring into being a more sustainable local economy. This seems to be the tenor of the discussion between Hopkins’s criticism of LETS and the response by LETSlink UK, both being positions in a debate as to whether LETS can scale up or not.
This approach to understanding local currency experiments, it is submitted, is too restrictive, as it looks at them instrumentally and, in so doing, fails to consider the actual terms of engagement with either type of scheme: how it looks – not as a means to a future end – but as a real object or set of arrangements that can be reckoned with and depended on in going about one’s everyday routines. What, in other words, is required for either scheme to entangle people in its workings? How does one ‘meet’ a LETS scheme, as opposed to a local currency? This is the question I want to address, with a view to get a better understanding of what qualities either line of experimentation amplifies in the moving of Transition.
This question is more telling in that it brings to the fore the problem of ensuring that people ‘take up’ a new attachment, and that this attachment draws them into a set of related questions that can slowly erode and reshuffle ossified routines, and orient them towards new possibilities for ‘activating’ themselves into the mesh of Transition offerings.
In this sense, Peter North’s book in the Green Books series of Transition manuals – Local Money15 – ushers a much more inclusive approach to currency experimentation. In the book, interestingly, he pinpoints a number of relevant considerations that ought to determine whether to work towards establishing a LETS scheme or a local currency as part of an engagement in Transition.
For instance, North connects LETS to Transition for their ability to allow people to experience themselves once again as makers, as participants in a ‘great reskilling’, whereby individuals can begin to engage as producers and providers of goods and services.16 In the peak oil narrative of Transition (which is still the overarching theme of North’s book), a reskilling of this sort would be needed for communities to be less reliant on outside provided services. Alongside the sharing of skills, however, North equally indicates that some of the motivations for engaging in LETS can be to meet like-minded people, as well as to experience a sense of community by attending to shared pursuits. For this reason, he advises the setting up of LETS as a project that can best engage a pre-existing community of ‘green-minded, quite self starting and alternative people’.17
As a set of socio-material arrangements, LETS schemes seem to work best in relatively small groups, and they become harder to manage as the group gets bigger. For this reason, it is not surprising that North also notes the presence of considerable overlap between participants in LETS schemes and members of Transition initiatives, as though they already share a common milieu of attachments and commitments.18 Most LETS schemes ‘started from already established groups who wanted to trade with each other: members of community and environmental organisations, churches, people interested in alternative therapies and wholesome food and the like, and people interested in building local ecological alternatives. In other words they are just the sort of people that are most easily drawn into a Transition Initiative’.19
LETS appears to offer an opportunity to signpost the unfolding of Transition through a concrete, tangible project; an early win that ‘manifest[s] the energy in the community’,20 but it is also understood to be just a ‘useful first step’.21 As a review of LETS schemes in the UK reported as early as 1995, it is not uncommon that these tend to stick, at least initially, in the plethora of environmentally conscious groups.22 This remark goes a long way in explaining the very limitation of LETS to draw in participants who might not share these traits and might be unfamiliar with a system of this sort, or who might not already be on a path to challenge their status as consumers by, for instance, wanting to take part in a LETS scheme as providers of services. As reported by Williams, one of the barriers to joining a scheme of this sort entails precisely whether prospective participants ‘view themselves as having anything to offer and whether there is anything worth their while requesting’.23
For this reason, I want to suggest in this chapter, Transition currencies provide a different opening through which people can be approached at the lowest possible point of contact: namely as consumers and users of money. In this lies the specific difference that Transition brings to currency activism, i.e. it introduces an awareness that the relationship between LETS and complementary currencies is not so much one to be settled once and for all in terms of strategic efficiency for achieving policy goals, but one that plays itself in terms of the ability of either scheme to entangle and include others, so as to ensure that the threshold of engagement remains low. This perspective affords a helpful orientation for navigating the continuum of options between the more close-knit LETS scheme and citywide currency projects. In other words, local and complementary currencies have the ability to disrupt otherwise habitual and unreflective patterns of spending, popularising some of the principles that are equally embodied in LETS schemes, to crowds that may come to them in the more depersonalised capacity of habitual users of pound sterling. North, who calls it ‘Garfinkeling’ from the name of a famous sociologist interested in probing ‘taken for granted’ expectations, explicitly acknowledges this disruption of unexamined routines.24 By entering in people’s lives through this door, it becomes possible to usher them into the possibilities for action already available to them as simple users of money, so that they may perhaps come to experience themselves as critical consumers and – more broadly – as participants in an economy that has only as much value as its members strive to keep putting into it.
Local and complementary currencies, and the language through which they are often justified and presented, affords an easy point of access towards experiences that can challenge the otherwise constraining capacity of being a consumer. Of course, currencies schemes also remain open to criticism for not doing enough – for example for not stirring up more than ethical consumerism – without engaging people as active producers and ‘reskillers’ in the same way that, say, a LETS scheme does. Another approach, however, is to stress instead the continuity between LETS and Transition currencies, looking at the orientation towards enabling increasingly less committed individuals – approached purely in their capacity as users of money – to become somehow entangled with the moving of Transition and, from there, set off on a journey across its folds. If LETS provide ways of giving visibility to the coming together of a community, but suffer as the commitment to engage in them dwindles as participant numbers grow and become less familiar with each other, local and complementary currencies address people at the lowest possible denominator, namely as spenders of money.
The Totnes Pound
It can be illustrative to dwell on the experience of the Totnes Pound. To begin with, Totnes already had one of the longest standing LETS schemes in the UK, which collapsed in 2006 for organisational reasons.25 The history of the Totnes Pound in a way forks from the experience of the Totnes LETS, with the Transition initiative seeking more forthrightly the participation of businesses.26 While some businesses (five in the mid-nineties according to Williams27) already participated