Social capital, paradox and derailment doom loops

I’m trying to catch up a little, to roughly articulate where I have got to in the last few weeks. These notes are a discipline for me to test the coherence of my understanding and perhaps to help develop it. Today I also feel the need to get some thoughts down so that I can move on.

Having been re-introduced to Systems thinking, a few weeks ago I articulated my over-arching question as

“how, in Southampton, do we address the rise of fascism in an increasingly volatile world, and how do we address climate and nature breakdown in an increasingly divided society?”.

This reflects concerns around the cohesion of our communities and the observation that we cannot find ways to progress local transport policy, let alone the national and international transitions that we need to improve the health and wellbeing of people within the natural world. Underlying this is my own assumption that when people spend quality time together, we find ways of understanding our different perspectives. This can overcome the divisive narratives that appear to be on the rise and provide a strong foundation for community action (if)/when crisis strikes.

Based on this assumption, I’ve been toying with a project idea with the working title “Southampton Connected (wt¹)”. Something that is really important about this work is that it does not duplicate or detract from existing activity. Therefore, I have been thinking in terms of understanding and enhancing existing community links through existing organisations. However, I have noted tensions between organisations that may affect the potential to create strong links. One area of tension is around how to take action and how to be in actions, with there being disagreement about the use of chanting and the expression of fury. A recent preprint from Tobias Müller, Müller, n.d. discusses another dimension of these tensions.

A first action on this journey, is a film night for which the question above was rearticulated in the blurb: Hate and Heat How we resist social and climate collapse. This is a co-organised event intended to begin an exploration of strenthening links between the anti-racist and pro-environmental movements, something that I will return to. Before that, I will return to a concept that I touched on when talking about resilience, social capital and describe two other concepts that have felt pertinent recently, paradox and derailment doop loops.

Social capital

There is already a body of work, often in the form of case studies, around social capital and responses to crises. The assumption, that often plays out, is that having good social capital results in better outcomes for communities when they experience stress (e.g. Wambura, 2024, Ye & Aldrich, 2019). Yet there remain questions due to the nuances of different settings. For instance, Bennett et al. (2015) find that people with stronger formal networks (such as through work) appeared to be more protected from shocks and this was thought to be due to having access to a greater diversity of ideas (or perhaps other commodities) through the network. However, trust is lower in heterogeneous communities than it is in homogeneous communities, which can lead to poorer outcomes for community members (Aldrich, 2011).

This latter paper is particularly interesting and used a recognised typology of the connections that comprise social capital:

• bonding - connections between individuals such as through family and neighbours, often with low diversity across connections
• bridging - connecttions between individuals and different groups, such as through work or interest organisations resulting in higher diversity across connections
• linking - connections between individuals and others in a more powerful position, such as across explicit, formal or institutionalized power or authority gradients in society

The two findings that I think are worth considering and exploring in further work are:

1. communities with a habit of organising together respond much better when a crisis hits (they don’t wait for the state to intervene)
2. whilst connections to networks supports the recovery of connected individuals, those who are less well connected can fair worse than if there were poor connections across society

Paradox

I was fortunate to enjoy a writing cafe put on by the University of Southampton, which offers time and space apart to focus on any writing task. I had originally signed up to write a paper that has possibly emerged out of work I did earlier this year, but decided instead to try to better articulate my thoughts around Southampton Connected (wt¹). Using a structure provided by Southampton Collective to help develop funding applications, I developed a slightly different articulation of the above question as a systemic problem involving two layers, a community layer that is nested within a socio-political layer.

The socio-political layer manifests positive feedbacks between social and environmental breakdowns, each making the other harder to address:

Problem a: our information environment threatens social and climate/nature progress

In the community layer there are tensions between different organisations who have similar goals but underexplored differences in their approaches:

Problem b: disconnected perspectives can limit the ability of diverse social change movements to effectively collaborate

I’m not completely sold on either of these problem definitions, but they helped foreground the importance of tension between actors who would or could otherwise collaborate. This articulation led to a rough outline of phased work plan that begins with identifying the common and conflicting narratives of social change organisations, specifically local anti-racist and pro-environmental groups. Currently, these tensions are found in the narratives different groups use as well as how they take action, both of which can be exclusive of others. If an alternative approach could be found that holds these tensions as true, rather than either ignoring them or trying to work past them, we could have a powerful approach to joining our movements. Further, skills learned in holding tension could be applied in growing both movements more widely across the community and forging new connections within the community.

I have since found the embracing of tension refreshingly expressed in Gomez & Lueck, 2023. Also, in Varesco Kager et al., 2022, “Paradox Theory” describes how favouring one element of a tension over another worsens, rather than improves, the tension. They suggest that instead of seeing tensions as problems, “considering complex demands as paradoxes support better collaboration if … conflicting demands are held in dynamic equilibrium using a both/and approach”.

Derailment doom loops

The Hate and Heat film event is fast approaching and we are behind with organising and promotion. Having developed my understanding of the tensions/conflicts/paradoxes in narratives between movements since the event was fixed, it became clear that we needed to respond to, and critique, the films from a local perspective so that we can signpost existing and follow-on activity. Ideally, a local representative would speak to this. To put someone in this position safely requires an honest and complete discussion. However, since the film date was fixed my co-organiser has undergone the most dreadful series of life experiences and the city has experienced repeated protests from far right groups. These have prevented this discussion, and it feels like the local anti-racist movement in particular has needed to assume an emergency footing, a position that necessarily prioritises reaction over proaction. This is almost certainly the intention of the repeated far right mobilisation. It also resonanates with work arising from the climate movement about the risks of repeated crises curtailing the capacity of society to address and adapt to climate and nature breakdown, a so called derailment doop loop.

References

Aldrich, 2011. The Externalities of Strong Social Capital: Post-Tsunami Recovery in Southeast India. doi:10.1080/17448689.2011.553441

Bennett et al., 2015. Resilience in the face of post-election violence in Kenya: The mediating role of social networks on wellbeing among older people in the Korogocho informal settlement, Nairobi. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.01.033

Gomez & Lueck, 2023. To Embrace Tension or Recoil Away from It: Navigating Complex Collaborations in Cultural Rhetorics Work. doi:10.58680/ccc202332668

Müller, n.d. Political theories of climate temporality: Extinction Rebellion, emergency time and decolonial time. doi:10.1177/13691481251371543

Varesco Kager et al., 2022. Looking for Guidance? Five Principles for Leveraging Tensions in Corporate–Startup Collaboration. doi:10.1177/00218863221117850

Wambura, 2024. Building Resilient Communities: the Interplay between Climate Change and Social Capital. doi:10.30574/wjarr.2024.24.2.3491

Ye & Aldrich, 2019. Substitute or complement? How social capital, age and socioeconomic status interacted to impact mortality in Japan’s 3/11 tsunami. doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100403

1. working title ↩ ↩²