From the article, Imagining Transformation: Change Agent Narratives of Sustainable Futures, by ChrisRiedy and SandraWaddock,
Deliberate transformation for sustainable futures requires new social imaginaries that collectively envision futures beyond the dominance of neoliberal capitalism. We looked for these imaginaries by surveying change makers working on system transformation and ecological issues. Drawing on a conceptual framework that connects social imaginaries, stories and memes, our research asked: what are the memes and stories that proponents of transformation use to describe desirable futures? And, how likely are social imaginaries derived from these memes and stories to guide deliberate transformation? Collectively, the 72 survey respondents … identified three simple plot devices for moving from a problematic present to their desired future – crisis, ‘waking up’ and collective action through social movements. Overall, social imaginaries formed from these stories and ideas are contested and currently lack the plausibility and tangibility to challenge neoliberal capitalism. Transformative social imaginaries could grow from these ideas if change agents nurture shared visions of desirable futures, explore real practices that support awakening and create tangible stories to guide collective action by ‘all of us’.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016328722001100
Bank of Nature is being imagined as a deliberate transformation for a sustainable future. It requires a new social imaginary, and real practices that support awakening.
Perhaps a social imaginary told as a movement from crisis, through awakening to collective action will also help us address the problem of jargon.
In a recent thread on Facebook, I offered the following proposal for taking action on climate inaction.
I propose a different plan.
Set Fiduciary Money (Pensions & Endowments) free from Financialization (speculation on securities prices) and The Growth Imperative of Neoliberalism.
Use Fiduciary Money set free from Financialization to fund a Department of Climate Science to design a strategy for setting politics and public discourse free from Dark Money Corporate Capture and for Commissioning new earth-interactive energy technologies sized and timed to the Decommissioning of existing energy extraction from hydrocarbons at the scale of climate in the time of climate, as Earthlings sharing one global climate system.
Fiduciary-finance a new Department of Climate Justice to execute the strategy in collaboration with Government set free from Corporate Capture and Industry set free from The Growth Imperative.
A very supportive response observed,
I am open to your ideas but the jargon is insurmountable. We need 30 slides in a Google Doc that decodes into laymen's terms and concepts with simple models describing the current system and your proposals. If we can be convinced, your ideas will spread around the world like a wildfire.
The problem is, there are not “30 slides…with simple models” that can decode my “jargon” “into laymen’s terms”.
The work is necessary, but the method needs to be more innovative.
After giving this much thought, I am arrived at the view that the problem of jargon - a common criticism of the Bank of Nature story - is really a problem of what linguistic scientist George Lakoff calls words without frames.
“Words are defined relative to frames, … Words themselves are not frames. …If the hearer has no such frames, then you have to choose your words carefully to build up those frames.”
George Lakoff
Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment
Environmental Communication
Vol. 4, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 70-81
Too often the hearer of the Bank of Nature story does not have the frames we need for the words we use to convey to others the meaning that those words have to us.
Instead, jargon.
Consider, for example, this comment from a person associated with Extinction Rebellion:
“I can’t tell if Ian and Tim are bonkers, or geniuses with communication issues…”
Reluctant to be guilty of being bonkers, we choose communication issues!
And our current working hypothesis is that our communication issues are really a need to build up a frame of reference within which the words that describe the work of Bank of Nature will be heard and understood within a frame of shared meaning.
And we are exploring social imaginaries as a practice that might support the building up of those frames.
The moments in our imaginary are Crisis, Awakening and Collective Action where:
The Crisis is inaction on climate. Nature is a bank. Climate is an eviction notice. We owe an energy debt to Nature that is seriously past due. We must pay up, or else! How are we going to do that?
The Awakening is Money. Money for Finance. And within Finance, Fiduciary Money. Here, we encounter jargon: words without frames. Finance is jargon. Fiduciary is jargon. Fiduciary Money is jargon. There are other words that will also be received as jargon: Neoliberalism; Financialization; securitization; speculation; Assets; Asset Management; Asset Owners; Asset Allocation; market movements; negotiation; the acronyms: NPV, NAV, GDP; Public Equities; Debt; Private Equity; Derivatives; Hedge Funds. What else?
Pretty much the entire lexicon of Modern Finance is jargon, meaningful only to experts who use that jargon to keep the non-experts out. A weapon of monopolization, exclusion and elitism. Non-accountability. If we don’t understand what they are saying, how can we hold them to account for what they are doing?
And, to give birth to Bank of Nature, we actually need to add more technical terms to the lexicon of Finance.
But unlike the experts in Neoliberal Financialization, who want to keep their technical terms unclear, imprecise, ambiguous and difficult to learn the meaning of. Jargon. We want our technical terms, and those already in use, to be made clear, precise and easily understood within a shared frame by any reasonable person who cares enough to take the time to adopt the frame, learn their meaning, and develop some proficiency in their use.
Words after all, are social constructs. And like every social construct, to use them socially, we all have to do some work to agree a shared framing and meaning.
Our most important new word is actually one adjective: Fiduciary. We apply this adjective to many nouns: Finance; Duty; Money; Ownership; Purpose; Powers; Minimums; Prudence and Loyalty.
Each of these words acquires a very specific meaning when characterized as fiduciary:
Fiduciary Finance;
Fiduciary Duty;
Fiduciary Money;
Fiduciary Ownership;
Fiduciary Purpose;
Fiduciary Powers;
Fiduciary Minimums:
Fiduciary Prudence and Loyalty.
None of these words have meaning within the prevailing jargon of Modern Finance.
Nonetheless, they are the primary building blocks of Bank of Nature. Their meaning takes time and effort to learn. But once learned, that meaning becomes powerfully empowering to anyone who wants to see action taken on climate inaction, and a new economy for the 21st Century, more generally.
As Ian is fond of saying, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”
Our challenge is getting you to see it in the first place.
That’s our Awakening.
The Collective Action is a new 21st Century Citizenship of participation in social decision making through Fiduciary Finance; of Reasonable People of Relevant Knowledge and Experience, self-selected from the general population of everyday people living our everyday lives, each making our own individual contributions to local community engagement in globally curated conversations that shape the evolving legal standards of Fiduciary Prudence and Loyalty that is the Fiduciary Duty of the Fiduciary Owners of Fiduciary Money
Do we have the right economy?
Is this where we want the money to be going?
WHO can and should the Fiduciary Owners of Fiduciary Money be negotiating WITH?
WHAT can and should they be negotiating FOR?
Negotiation.
That’s the pivotal word that changes everything. About Finance. About Money. About Enterprise and the Economy. About Humanity keeping ourselves in good standing with Nature. And our Future. And each other. And ourselves.
So let’s start there.
By negotiation we mean conversation between two people that leads to agreement on actions to be taken in the future. In the context of Fiduciary Finance, we mostly mean negotiation towards contractual agreements. Private laws that create rights and responsibilities between the parties to the contract, or sometimes for the benefit of others who are not direct parties to the negotiation or the agreement.
The rights and responsibilities in this case relate to money, and its use. And the sharing of cash flows generated through the use of money by enterprise engaged in commerce. And control over those cash flows.
This is maybe the first frame that needs to be built up, the story of how money moves through the economy, from us - you, me and all of us - into finance, and through finance into enterprise and through enterprise into the economy and through the economy back to us, where the cycle repeats as times change, and humanity evolves prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes, through inquiry and insight, technology and enterprise, finance, government and civil society norms and narratives, making new choices more popular as better fit to changing times, while letting previously popular choices fade into history, as a good fit at an earlier time.
This is perhaps the right first step in a new social movement towards an economy that keeps Humanity in good standing with Nature, the Future, ourselves and each other.
A social movement being started by Bank of Nature.
As one who often writes comments and short articles about money and macroeconomics, I too have difficulty in finding the best word that is clear and easy to understand about a particular matter. It might seem from this article that what we need is an extended language for technical matters of each kind, but I feel this is asking for a bit too much! Instead, and it is actually what I mostly achieve, is to search and determine the best expression for the matter from what words are already available. English has a great many similar words compared to some other languages, so with perseverance this task should not be as difficult as it first appears.
I became frustrated with our country's way of government many years ago, but it was more recently that I realized that the root of it was due to how political parties put emphasis on their success in getting into power and becoming the ones in charge of the managing and policies, and that these parties take less concern about the right policies to take, regardless of what party is presenting them. We take an intuitive attitude to politics whereas we should be taking a more logical and technical approach to what is good government.
I find that there are at least two attitudes to this situation. The most basic one is through making a proper study so as to better understand how our social system of macroeconomics really works. In one of my other articles on this website, I have tried to show that this past difficult and confusing subject can be much better understood through the use of making better and more exact definitions and then logically applying their relationships in a model of the'Big Picture" to really determine how it all works. (see my "making macroeconomics a true science").
The second attitude is a lot more difficult to describe because it appears to be political although it was and is actually meant to be non-political, and it provides some important ideas about what is wrong with our existing ways for the provision of equal opportunities. It necessarily describes how to properly share the benefits that arries from them. Unlike Socialism, it is not the produce that is suggested as being more uniformally shared but the opportunities to produce that should be the target.
This problem becomes political because some of these opportunities are monopolized and to introduce a change to the way such monopolies are limited by law is a particularly big deal! What we need is to replace the taxation of our labour and purchasing opportunities (and other taxes too like capital gains), with a revenue being collected for access rights to ll of our natural resources. This may seem to be relatively mild when we think of farming, but when most of the gain from the privitization and holding of these rights is in places where the population density (a natural phenomena) has resulted in the urbal productive power of the land being several hundreds of times more than that of the rural sites, which are of much greater size.
This proposal was first formally describer by Henry George, an US economist, in his classic book "Progress and Poverty" in 1879. This book is still in print after having sold more than 3 million copies. George proposed the introduction of a Single Tax on land values.
As should be obvious there would be great opposion to this ethical policy by the land-owners hemselves, who regarded their sites as if they were investments in urable capital goods. George and later writers show that the natural resources including useful sites of land are not capital but he results of both nature and our natural tendency to grow small settlements into mighty cities. This effect on the production power is also the result of our natural tendency to create societies and communities.
He claimed that ethically their products should be fairly shared between the workers (as wages), the providers of durable good (as interest on investments) and as the return for access rights to sites of land (as the ground rent). It was this last item that he proposed to be the so called Single Tax on Land.