Convivial Conservation
The front page of the official Convivial Conservation page reads:
"Convivial (literally: ‘living with’) conservation offers a new and integrated approach to understanding and practicing environmental conservation. It is a Whole Earth vision that responds to the major ecological, social and political-economic challenges facing people and biodiversity in the 21st century. ..."
"Convivial conservation is inspired by many collectives and individuals doing conservation differently and holistically. Several research projects are ongoing to learn from their practices and to support them by providing a vision that unites different struggles in pursuit of a socially and ecologically just conservation. The idea is to build on promising examples to develop a general conservation model embodying more convivial principles both within these sites and elsewhere."[1]
Foundation
In 1973, in his influential book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich formulated an explicit vision of a convivial society, i.e., one built on ‘individual freedom realized in personal interdependence’. Alongside survival and the control of work as key conditions for conviviality, Illich names justice, which is commonly ‘debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares’, but in fact needs to be both distributive and participatory. Rather than equality being in the possession of industrial goods, justice to Illich emphasizes participation in decision-making and creating new images of the future that are not contingent on another person’s enforced labor, learning or consumption.[2]
Conviviality, which Illich sees explicitly as the opposite of industrial productivity, is ‘autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the persons with their environment’. The only limit on freedom is to guarantee another’s equal freedoms. It is important to note, however, that freedom for Illich is not understood as maximally free markets in the sense of laissez-faire-economics, but as freedom in responsible interdependence. His thinking rejects ‘tools’ (understood as all instruments and mechanisms of material and consultative production) being hijacked by elites and experts to reinforce hierarchies and decision-making by the few. Instead, Illich emphasizes the significance of broad-based participatory processes: for safeguarding individuals’ access to communal tools, and for reaching social agreements. In short, conviviality is a passionate appeal not to cede control of society to the few, but to encourage the many to reach agreements that enhance individual freedom cognizant of interdependencies between people, but also with the environment and planetary limits. To Illich, this convivial vision was not only a line of thinking, but a vocation. It incorporated inclusive, broad-based decision-making, justice considering all human and environmental interdependencies, and curtailed resource consumption by the rich. This strength of conviction may account for why his ideas inspire scholars to this day, to build transformative visions.[3]