Book Reviews
Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization
By Jennifer Summer
ISBN: 978-0-802095-27-5 2007 188 pages University of Toronto Press
Reviewed by Elizabeth Beaton
University College of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada
Can we successfully challenge corporate globalisation and move toward a sustainable world society? In Sustainability and the Civil Commons Jennifer Sumner argues that we can do so - and do so now, because there is a world-wide ‘crisis of hegemony', and do so through the rural experience.
A vision of life-valued ‘globalisation from below' founds the book's theoretical construct. Calling on Gramsci's theory of hegemony, especially the model designed to break the hegemony over minds, and John McMurtry's alternative way of understanding the world through recognising ‘life values' versus ‘money values' (Unequal Freedoms: the Global Market as an Ethical System, 1998), Sumner explores a series of ideas enabling resistance to corporate globalisation, and analyses, comprehensively and in depth, the sustainability and civility inherent in good community development.
The rural experience is essential to her analysis. The plight of rural Canada is brought home, with shocking immediacy, in the view of Lawrence Solomon of the Urban Renaissance Institute (Toronto) - a view based on the ‘inevitability' of globalisation - that the assurance of government services to struggling rural communities renders them welfare dependent. But Sumner is optimistic about the potential for change. Her ‘rural reckoning', by analysing the harm caused by corporate globalization (the effects of agro-industrialisation, poverty and debt creation as well as downsizing, deregulation and privatization) lays the groundwork for a ‘theory' of resistance. She shows that a deep understanding of the problem is the beginning of the solution.
The concept that she develops takes its power from the many relatively powerless individuals and groups who share a belief in and struggle toward justice in its most holistic forms. She affirms ‘utopian' vision of rural sustainability as a positive, pragmatic goal attained through theory, strategy and action; and proposes that the civil commons inherent in the rural experience can turn around the neo-Darwinian perception of rural communities as unfit to survive.
Her consideration of rural communities in the age of globalisation re-invigorates profound concepts which have been worn out through indiscriminate use - most obviously, the concept ‘sustainable development', the numerous definitions of which often express the ‘money code of value' and explicitly promote corporate globalisation through their bureaucratic and managerial tone. Sumner suggests that a new understanding of it as built upon dialogue and counter-hegemony will lead to the construction and maintenance of the civil commons.
Civility, an oft-used word lately in the acrimony of Canadian politics, is more a matter of justice than of politeness. It is established by understanding rules and norms, and by using the justice inherent in these to give direction to a just society. Based in justice, civility is a necessary element in overturning an unjust society. For Sumner, it is an active strategy for change involving progress toward universal wellbeing and inhering in sustainable development. It is the missing link, the movement from the ‘is' to the ‘ought', exploring the difference between ‘life code' and ‘money-code'.
Arguing that the diversity of Canada's rural (including coastal) communities demands attention to place-related well-being, Sumner warns that the goal should be access to life goods (education, income support, social inclusion, work opportunities and networking), not merely economic growth. This is a warning against development based in extensive financial outlay that increases job opportunities: demeaning and poorly paid jobs do not contribute to community well-being.
A mild criticism is that the book's exploration of Canadian instances to illustrate its theories, strategies and processes is too cursory and superficial to effectively support its message of empowerment. Perhaps Sumner's wider study of the subject offers a fuller account. At any rate, the book's theoretical and strategic model for sustainable rural development and a civil commons opens the door for future micro-studies and action research to prove her point.
The prescription for sustainability and the civil commons may seem elusive to those still caught in the web of inevitability, and the reader will be forgiven for looking for a clear-cut recipe for over-turning corporate globalisation. Indeed, the truly enormous political and financial power of those who control globalisation is daunting. It is significant that civility - progress toward universal well-being - is the non-violent tool of resistance to such power. Sumner warns that the answers to the questions of resistance, and the solutions to the problems caused by corporate globalisation, will be found only in the process of fully understanding the problems, and then supporting and joining the strategies of individuals and organisations that move toward decent and just living. A tall order and a theoretical one, but Jennifer Sumner presents the theory in a clear and concise way, using rurality as the reference point for change.
