Hope in a Time of Collapse: Reflections from my 3rd P4NE gathering

This year I attended my third P4NE annual gathering in Lyon, France on October 1st and 2nd. Over 250 people committed to fundamentally transforming our economic system gathered under the title "Hope in a time of Collapse." The energy this year was definitely something to experience, a palpable possibility of the future.

As I listened to the conversations, keynote addresses, and corridor dialogues, two vital truths emerged with real clarity for me: (1) the new economy field cannot remain apolitical because building new economies is inherently a deeply political act, and (2) the underlying mindsets and narratives of separation and extraction governing our current economic system are not only outdated but are actively impeding our capacity to survive the current polycrisis.

Hope as a Political Act: Beyond Wishful Thinking

Joycelyn giving her opening keynote speech.

Joycelyn Longdon, in her incredible opening keynote speech, reframed hope not as passive optimism but as an active discipline - hope as a function of courage rather than privilege. She reminded us that collapse is not a future event but a present reality for many. "The slave trade was an apocalypse on its own," because "Black and brown bodies have been living in the end times for a long time."

In this context, hope becomes what poor brown and black people have historically needed to harness for survival—fighting in the face of loss, resisting the desecration of ancestors, tending to land and community despite the weight of systemic racial capitalist oppression. Longdon, an environmental justice technologist, grounds her work in this understanding, collaborating with local forest communities in Ghana to develop justice-led conservation technologies. Her message resonates with the growing recognition that true transformation requires democratizing ownership and building ecologically sustainable economic alternatives that benefit the 99%.

Confronting Narratives of Separation and the Politics of Class

Throughout the gathering, I repeatedly heard speakers identify the deep-seated mental models of separation - from each other and from nature; the inner narratives of extraction and domination over planet and people - as fundamental barriers to economic transformation. As Jo Swinson noted "we have internalised the separation from each other and from nature - we are not apart, but part of nature. We need to embrace the connections."

This mindset of separation is precisely the focus of my work with Learning 2 Unlearn. The stories we tell ourselves are extremely powerful and have the capacity to shape the future. The workshop session I facilitated on the boat deep-dived into exactly this idea of unlearning narratives around wealth and resource. Some prompt questions from my session that may be useful for you to reflect on as well:

• What does "wealth" mean in the economy you are trying to build, and how does it clash with the dominant narrative you are navigating today?

• What becomes possible for your work when you measure success by the quality of connections you make with people?

• Where does your inner narrative about "enoughness" need rewiring?

My boat workshop titled "Finding Fellow Travellers: Rewiring Narratives on the River"

Undoing racial capitalism and building regenerative future economies requires us getting back into right relations with the planet and with each other. The ability to recognize our humanity as an integral part of an interconnected web of life is fundamental to imagining a future without neoliberal capitalism.

This internal unlearning is a prerequisite for tackling one of the most provocative themes at this years' gathering: the politics of class. This often-taboo topic is one that new economy spaces frequently shy away from. The exclusions that come from class continue to plague our movement-building efforts, and the conversations highlighted how class society is upheld by unequal distribution of economic, cultural and social resources. The "working class" should be in the rooms where new economies are being imagined because "no one knows the needs of communities better than communities themselves." Investing in political education and skills training that provides working class people with the means to make change themselves is part of the core work of new economies.

Olivier de Schutter giving his keynote presentation

Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, gave a phenomenal keynote on "Eradicating Poverty: Reimagining development beyond growth." My main takeaway was that economic growth can no longer be the goal; it doesn't remove the social ills we have for so long believed the economy would resolve. He articulated four powerful challenges for us to consider:

1. The micro-economic challenge: the private enterprise (possibly resolved by promoting workplace democracy and the social/solidarity economy).

2. The macro-economic challenge: debt servicing and financing public services (possibly resolved by wealth taxation and innovative tools like Modern Monetary Theory).

3. The North-South challenge: breaking from an extractive and exploitative economy (possibly resolved by debt forgiveness and a new international division of labour).

4. The challenge of the imagination: (Answered by the question "what makes us happy?").

These challenges underscore that our work must span from the inner narrative to the global economic architecture.

Global inequalities and resource extraction form the urgent context for this work. Julia Steinberger noted something powerful that will stay with me for a long time: she said "Africa will just become the workforce of the world if we are not careful to avoid repeating colonial patterns of economic extraction." That the rest of the world is ageing while Africa will have most of the world's young people by 2050 is an urgent but invisible context for those of us wanting to build different economic systems.

Me in Aunty Ashanti mode during the conference.

Building Spiritual and Imaginative Infrastructure

Tariq Al-Olaimy brought a crucial dimension to the conversations in Lyon: the role of faith and spirit in economic transformation. He observed that "the left has forgotten spirit," while figures like Peter Thiel embark on speaking tours on "the anti-christ." This neglect of the sacred has left the new economy movement without the ethical, moral and spiritual guidance needed to counter the siren song of consumerism.

The ask was for us to reconnect economic thinking with spiritual wisdom. This resonates with the growing recognition within regenerative economics that we must shift "from optimization to balance," recognizing that the pandemic taught us that "efficiency isn't everything" and that resilience requires distributed capacity throughout the system.

This spiritual infrastructure must be paired with imagination infrastructure for the end of capitalism. As the old world dies, we need spaces to imagine and build the new, to bring shame back into discussions that deserve no platform, and to have the uncomfortable conversations that political correctness often shuts down.

Closing session statements

Thank you to the P4NE team, for once again holding a space where active hope can flourish. I am filled with gratitude and anticipation to witness how this community finds the courage to do the right thing, and I cannot wait to see how far the needle has moved when we next meet at next years annual gathering.