WHAT COULD HOLD US BACK?
Inevitably there are barriers to fully embracing localism and we felt it was important to address them in order to understand the scale of the task. One of the key obstacles we discussed was the tension between striving to be local whilst also driving impact at scale. Other tensions can and will occur between the community and company.
Communities must retain autonomy and companies need to be sensitive to the needs of the community and not impose solutions. The sheer scale and complexity of implementing local can be daunting without the leadership of key influencers and change makers eg Transparency for a global company is an ever increasing issue when it comes to supply chains at a local level and this will require persuasion and strong leadership to address. Eventually we came back to the original discussion on perceptions on what it means to be local.
We ended the roundtable, not with a conclusive answer but a series of questions that would enable us to extend our thinking and look for further solutions. What are the potential repercussions to localising part of the big, global system that we are collectively part of? Is it possible to go local without causing damage elsewhere? Maybe those questions are for a future Crowd event or maybe you can answer them?