Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change - A sympathetic critique

This paper critically but sympathetically examines eco-localisation as a response to ‘peak oil’ and to reduce the emission of CO₂ to avoid dangerous climate change. Rather than seeing the politics of climate change and peak oil as in some way ‘post-political’, the paper argues that protagonists of localised economies are developing radical new conceptions of livelihood and economy that directly cut against the logic of growth-based capitalist economic strategies and elite conceptualisations of economic development. Building on development theory, the paper develops a conceptualisation of ‘immanent’ and ‘intentional’ localisation, with the former a simple move by businesses of economic activities that have high transport costs closer to their markets. Advocates of intentional localisation are working more pro actively at grassroots level to develop local solutions to peak oil and climate change based on developing less resource-intensive yet enjoyable and fulfilling livelihoods in more localised economies. In discussing the contested nature of localisation, the paper engages with critiques of eco-localisation from neoliberal advocates and from the left, before concluding that localisation should be seen more as a different calculation of where economic activities would be located, which aims to reduce oil consumption and CO₂ emissions, rather than a call for autarky. The paper concludes by arguing that analyses of the scale of economic networks need to pay more attention of the materiality of oil consumption and CO₂ emissions, and that scales cannot be seen as socially constructed.