The Network Project: PAPER

Building the Sustainable Society -
Workshop held on 16th September 2006
Report by Linda Kaucher

3. How to Overcome the Challenges

Network people
Network with alternative activists
Connect up the alternatives
Activists working across different areas to understand different angles
Building support networks
Network between groups who have done change work, have experience in different places, bringing resources to bear
Common ownership of ideas, not personal ownership
Network across the religious divide

Networking new knowledge
Build up ideas around issued ordinary people know (Trojan horse)
Use electronic media e.g. internet, networks and forums to stimulate ideas for change Invite public to debate popular issues -> increase public knowledge
Identify actual consequences and then alternatives e.g. home generation of electricity
Publicise effects of neoliberalism
Publicise the methods of neoliberalism
Audit effects of neo-liberal agenda
Start a program of education for sustainability for adults and children

Challenge old ideas
Construct a cohesive alternative ideology
Construct a critique of the ‘old left’
Challenge the neoliberal agenda
Be flexible
Use informal structures because formalised structures can be easily deconstructed by other forces

Be aware
Guerrilla tactics ­ we are dealing with a difficult ‘beast’
Do not be politically naïve ­ they are bastards
Tight networks
Be information security conscious

Put it into action
Develop co-operative projects

{Top of Page} Papers Conference