Global Change and its Local effects.

Clearly, we are rapidly entering into a very different kind of world that is still evolving under the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this change is not only a product of the pandemic, but of two other critical challenges. Together, the three will have profound effects at local levels:

• First and foremost is the existential threat to all life forms represented by the Global Climate Emergency. This is rapidly shifting socio-political expectations, expressed as demands for environmentally responsible goods and services from companies, and in growing environmental legislation and emissions regulations, particularly in respect to energy generation and transportation systems. Indeed, just four weeks after Making Futures 2021, the UK will host world governments in Glasgow to update the 2015 landmark Paris Climate Accord propelled by the change in US policy announced in April.  

• The decline of ‘neo-liberal’ free-market ideology that has dominated international trade and affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and in its place, the re-emergence of the nation state as guarantor of security, health and economy. This (re)turn to nation state actors has been accompanied by the rise of an inward-looking militant popularism, and the drift towards a new bipolar world of agonistic geo-politics as China becomes a globally hegemonic power.

• The evolving COVID-19 pandemic which has contributed to the demise of neo-liberal free-market ideology by closing down entire countries, disrupting global markets, and exposing frailties in many just-in-time supply chains, leading to a loss of confidence in aspects of the international trading system, often obliging governments to step into the space vacated by commercial actants.

The likely combined effects of these structural challenges means that, crucially, we will likely see fewer products being produced through complex global production and supply chains, while new industries will emerge that are more suited to regional/local production and consumption conditions, driven by government pledges to become carbon neutral by mid-century and allied to the re-emergence of state-led investment policies and initiatives, such as the US Green New Deal proposals, or the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan. Governments are likely, by and large, to re-boot socio-economic activity through cheap borrowing and redistributive taxation policies capable of underpinning public investment directed to local infrastructures and services in the manner of Green New Deal interventions that enhance resilience and accelerate the essential low-carbon ecological transition that must take place. 

These factors will lend more weight to regional actors, especially those who are organised and/or technologically enabled to produce at efficient economies of scale. But these deep changes will also likely stimulate a growth in markets for localised forms of neo-artisanal design-led making.

Cover image from The Colour of Water - How green is our dyeing process? - Charlotte Warren

Any reference to former institutions (notably Plymouth College of Art/PCA) remain unedited in past editions of the Making Futures Journal for historical accuracy.