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5. Transition Money

Currency projects are some of the most iconic initiatives to spring up as part of the moving of Transition: the Totnes Pound, the Lewes Pound, the Brixton and Bristol Pounds being the most significant currency offshoots of local Transition initiatives. These have also played a key role in popularising the practice of experimentation with currencies, at least in the UK, even though dabbling in complementary currencies and alternative trading schemes has a long history that pre-dates the inception of Transition.1

However, the same could equally be said of permaculture, which pre-existed Transition, and for the milieu of ‘inner work’ in which particular discursive and bodily orientations have been cultivated long before finding expression in the moving of Transition. As for these two previous examples, then, the question is not so much one of copyright. Instead, my interest is more in how Transition draws currency experimentation in the folds of its evolving profile, articulating currency schemes as a further ingress point into its moving. In the previous two chapters, therefore, I tried to illustrate how Transition lowers the threshold required to gain familiarity with permacultural ways of seeing, and with practices of relating that have been the object of experimentation in the milieu of ‘inner work’. In a similar spirit, this chapter looks at alternative money not just in its working as money – although some background on this will be necessary – but also at the role it fulfils in relation to the specification of Transition across a range of experiential possibilities. The question I want to try and elucidate, in other words, is how do currency experiments relate not just to a history of currency experimentation, but also to the process of intensification that breathes life into the unfolding of Transition, whereby differences multiply, while remaining continuous with the moving of Transition as a whole.

My interest is then to look at how experimentation with currencies makes its ingress within Transition, and of how particular forms of currency experimentation serve different purposes – depending on the possibilities for engagement they offer – and therefore negotiate different types of fit inside the process of self-specification through which Transition appears.

Now, experimentation with currency and trading systems within Transition has its most recent antecedent in the wave of currency activism that was started in Canada in the 1980s, through the promotion of the network of LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) schemes. At the same time, LETS are not just taken up ‘as is’ inside Transition, but they appear instead as a reference point that enables its ongoing differentiation and transformation.

In the Transition Handbook, for instance, Hopkins introduces the idea of a Transition currency precisely as a variation on the experience of the LETS, which becomes the term of reference for that experiment:

LETS schemes (Local Exchange Trading Systems) are not really up to the job of economic relocalisation. While they have an essential role to play, they tend to have a limited lifespan, and rarely make the step into being of much use to local businesses. Given the scale of the challenge presented by peak oil, and the degree of urgency in the rebuilding of local resilient infrastructure, likened by some to a ‘wartime mobilisation’, we felt Totnes needed more than LETS.2

Transition currencies, as the quote above suggests, hold the promise of broader circulation and greater durability than a LETS scheme and, therefore, become the object through which alternative modes of engaging with currency and exchange can be made more widely accessible in the moving of Transition.

LETS and local currencies

Before advancing further, however, it is important to signpost a few essential concepts and differences between a LETS scheme and a complementary currency. This is to ensure that readers are not bogged down in technicality, and can instead follow this chapter, keeping their eyes on the differentiation through which the self-specification of Transition unfolds, as it runs through currency experiments.

A LETS scheme can be thought of as an ‘exchange ring’.3 What this means is that a group of individuals get together, and elect to provide each other credits (which we may think of as tokens) to be spent on services that can be provisioned within the circle of participants. Participants would therefore list their skills, which they may subsequently be called upon to offer others who may present them with a LETS token (which can be either a physical token, a recording in a clearing system like an Excel sheet held by the LETS organiser, or for a more tech-savvy version, in an online clearing platform). Each individual starts off with a certain amount of credits (these are the result of the initial act of collective will, whereby each participant makes him-/herself available to others, in return for others making themselves available to him or her to offer any services they may be willing to provide). After this initial round to get the ‘exchange ring’ started, individuals spend and earn further credits, so as to keep the cycle going. What is distinctive about a LETS scheme is that, through an act of mutual credit, individuals create new purchasing power, which is expendable inside that particular exchange circle.

This is a crucial difference from a complementary currency, which follows instead the ‘voucher’ system. In this case, a currency is issued in exchange for the national currency. This means that – rather than the value of the local currency being backed by the services that can be exchanged in a restricted exchange circle, as in the case of a LETS – the complementary currency is backed by a currency with wider circulation so that, effectively, it derives its value from the potential exchanges it can feed into and that can be undertaken in the national currency network as well.4 For this very reason, of being issued in exchange for, say, pound sterling, and unlike a LETS scheme, local currencies do not really create new purchasing power, because they simply ‘translate’ purchasing power denominated in a national currency into purchasing power denominated into a local currency. Therefore, the sort of mechanism in place is simply one that adds ‘stickiness’ to money. In the sense that it tries to restrict its circulation to a particular area, without it leaking away, so that wealth produced in a given area keeps circulating to fuel local exchanges and, at least in theory, multiplying opportunities for the production and exchange of local goods. The degree to which this stickiness can be enforced, however, is still limited. This is because, from a technical point of view, a local and complementary currency is a voucher that needs to remain redeemable in the national currency, so that money converted in, say, Totnes Pounds, can be converted back into pound sterling. The incentive to stick to the local currency to fuel the local economy comes more from personal commitment to participate in an alternative currency network, than from any formal, law-like mechanisms that would discourage conversion back into a local currency.

To further summarise: at its simplest the difference between a LETS scheme and a complementary currency lies in the creation of additional purchasing power. LETS members can spend all of their income in, say, pound sterling, plus their income in LETS credits, and the two add up. In a local currency scheme, instead, participants choose to transform – or, to use a sociologically more informed term, ‘earmark’5 – a particular amount of their earnings in national currency for conversion into a local currency, and then may decide to ring-fence that area of their spending, so as to keep it confined to a more localised circulation than it would experience in the national denomination.6

Therefore, a LETS scheme not only facilitates local exchanges, but it also injects new money in the local economy. On the other hand, the voucher model of a local and complementary currency does not achieve as much, as it simply adds stickiness to already existing purchasing power, whilst affording a wider choice as to what exchanges can be undertaken compared to a LETS scheme, as a local currency typically involves substantial numbers of participating businesses. On the contrary, a LETS scheme is often limited in its variety by the need for LETS members to be in small enough numbers to know what skills are on offer, and by whom.7 This creates problems about the diversity of what can be purchased with a LETS token, such that LETS schemes have sometimes been caricatured as alternative currencies for aromatherapists or as resulting in everyone walking each other’s dogs.8 Furthermore, LETS schemes can lead to a strong administrative burden, due to the need for a clearing house to record changes in people’s credit accounts (although this critique holds less ground today, when online platforms that automate the recording of transactions have been developed9) as well as for ensuring that the credits are continually spent in circulation and do not accumulate.10 In this last case in particular, there can be instances where some people overspend but do not offer any service, and therefore eventually drop out of the circle and others over-accumulate. In a situation of this sort, a few people end up having tokens to spend, while others end up not offering any services, and dropping out after having spent their initial credit. Last, but important for the point I will be making below, LETS schemes require people to be somewhat like-minded, and – as suggested by Peter North11 – this is in fact the ideal condition to set up a LETS scheme, while at the same time a barrier to it being more inclusive. Indeed, a LETS scheme becoming too inclusive has been described precisely as one of the challenges to their lasting longevity.12

Alternative currencies and Transition

These critiques are, probably, some of those that Rob Hopkins must have had in mind when he commented on LETS in the earlier quote from the Transition Handbook. That critique has, however, been rejected as somewhat draconian by LETSlink UK, an organisation that aims to support and nurture LETS schemes in Britain. Due to technological advances, LETS systems are much more viable today than they were in the 1980s, and – if Rob Hopkins’s text is read as a dismissal of LETS – this could well amount to an unfair qualification.13 Worse, if perceived as a ‘snubbing’ of LETS, it could even lend credit to a view of Transition as potentially predatory: a movement that stifles and obscures pre-existing shoots of social innovation.14

As a way out of this impasse, it is helpful to keep in mind that there may be greater nuance involved in this matter than the two positions (and the suggestion of colonialism) reported so far give away. My suggestion is that different forms of experimentation achieve a different fit within Transition, depending on the types of experiences they afford and the sort of possibilities they institute, for the purpose of crafting openings into the wider milieu of Transition.

This requires a re-framing of the potentially endless debate about whether LETS or local currencies are more ‘effective’. Most of the time, LETS and complementary currencies are set against one another within a ‘policy’ framework, whereby a comparison is staged to understand which scheme seems to have the greatest potential to ‘scale up’, so as to bring into being a more sustainable local economy. This seems to be the tenor of the discussion between Hopkins’s criticism of LETS and the response by LETSlink UK, both being positions in a debate as to whether LETS can scale up or not.

This approach to understanding local currency experiments, it is submitted, is too restrictive, as it looks at them instrumentally and, in so doing, fails to consider the actual terms of engagement with either type of scheme: how it looks – not as a means to a future end – but as a real object or set of arrangements that can be reckoned with and depended on in going about one’s everyday routines. What, in other words, is required for either scheme to entangle people in its workings? How does one ‘meet’ a LETS scheme, as opposed to a local currency? This is the question I want to address, with a view to get a better understanding of what qualities either line of experimentation amplifies in the moving of Transition.

This question is more telling in that it brings to the fore the problem of ensuring that people ‘take up’ a new attachment, and that this attachment draws them into a set of related questions that can slowly erode and reshuffle ossified routines, and orient them towards new possibilities for ‘activating’ themselves into the mesh of Transition offerings.

In this sense, Peter North’s book in the Green Books series of Transition manuals – Local Money15 – ushers a much more inclusive approach to currency experimentation. In the book, interestingly, he pinpoints a number of relevant considerations that ought to determine whether to work towards establishing a LETS scheme or a local currency as part of an engagement in Transition.

For instance, North connects LETS to Transition for their ability to allow people to experience themselves once again as makers, as participants in a ‘great reskilling’, whereby individuals can begin to engage as producers and providers of goods and services.16 In the peak oil narrative of Transition (which is still the overarching theme of North’s book), a reskilling of this sort would be needed for communities to be less reliant on outside provided services. Alongside the sharing of skills, however, North equally indicates that some of the motivations for engaging in LETS can be to meet like-minded people, as well as to experience a sense of community by attending to shared pursuits. For this reason, he advises the setting up of LETS as a project that can best engage a pre-existing community of ‘green-minded, quite self starting and alternative people’.17

As a set of socio-material arrangements, LETS schemes seem to work best in relatively small groups, and they become harder to manage as the group gets bigger. For this reason, it is not surprising that North also notes the presence of considerable overlap between participants in LETS schemes and members of Transition initiatives, as though they already share a common milieu of attachments and commitments.18 Most LETS schemes ‘started from already established groups who wanted to trade with each other: members of community and environmental organisations, churches, people interested in alternative therapies and wholesome food and the like, and people interested in building local ecological alternatives. In other words they are just the sort of people that are most easily drawn into a Transition Initiative’.19

LETS appears to offer an opportunity to signpost the unfolding of Transition through a concrete, tangible project; an early win that ‘manifest[s] the energy in the community’,20 but it is also understood to be just a ‘useful first step’.21 As a review of LETS schemes in the UK reported as early as 1995, it is not uncommon that these tend to stick, at least initially, in the plethora of environmentally conscious groups.22 This remark goes a long way in explaining the very limitation of LETS to draw in participants who might not share these traits and might be unfamiliar with a system of this sort, or who might not already be on a path to challenge their status as consumers by, for instance, wanting to take part in a LETS scheme as providers of services. As reported by Williams, one of the barriers to joining a scheme of this sort entails precisely whether prospective participants ‘view themselves as having anything to offer and whether there is anything worth their while requesting’.23

For this reason, I want to suggest in this chapter, Transition currencies provide a different opening through which people can be approached at the lowest possible point of contact: namely as consumers and users of money. In this lies the specific difference that Transition brings to currency activism, i.e. it introduces an awareness that the relationship between LETS and complementary currencies is not so much one to be settled once and for all in terms of strategic efficiency for achieving policy goals, but one that plays itself in terms of the ability of either scheme to entangle and include others, so as to ensure that the threshold of engagement remains low. This perspective affords a helpful orientation for navigating the continuum of options between the more close-knit LETS scheme and citywide currency projects. In other words, local and complementary currencies have the ability to disrupt otherwise habitual and unreflective patterns of spending, popularising some of the principles that are equally embodied in LETS schemes, to crowds that may come to them in the more depersonalised capacity of habitual users of pound sterling. North, who calls it ‘Garfinkeling’ from the name of a famous sociologist interested in probing ‘taken for granted’ expectations, explicitly acknowledges this disruption of unexamined routines.24 By entering in people’s lives through this door, it becomes possible to usher them into the possibilities for action already available to them as simple users of money, so that they may perhaps come to experience themselves as critical consumers and – more broadly – as participants in an economy that has only as much value as its members strive to keep putting into it.

Local and complementary currencies, and the language through which they are often justified and presented, affords an easy point of access towards experiences that can challenge the otherwise constraining capacity of being a consumer. Of course, currencies schemes also remain open to criticism for not doing enough – for example for not stirring up more than ethical consumerism – without engaging people as active producers and ‘reskillers’ in the same way that, say, a LETS scheme does. Another approach, however, is to stress instead the continuity between LETS and Transition currencies, looking at the orientation towards enabling increasingly less committed individuals – approached purely in their capacity as users of money – to become somehow entangled with the moving of Transition and, from there, set off on a journey across its folds. If LETS provide ways of giving visibility to the coming together of a community, but suffer as the commitment to engage in them dwindles as participant numbers grow and become less familiar with each other, local and complementary currencies address people at the lowest possible denominator, namely as spenders of money.

The Totnes Pound

It can be illustrative to dwell on the experience of the Totnes Pound. To begin with, Totnes already had one of the longest standing LETS schemes in the UK, which collapsed in 2006 for organisational reasons.25 The history of the Totnes Pound in a way forks from the experience of the Totnes LETS, with the Transition initiative seeking more forthrightly the participation of businesses.26 While some businesses (five in the mid-nineties according to Williams27) already participated in the Totnes LETS scheme, this is a long way from the 18 that were involved in the Totnes Pound from the first day,28 and the one hundred and twenty-seven that are listed to participate in it at the time of writing.29 It is also interesting to note how, for the purpose of enabling business recruitment, organisers ‘did not regularly get in discussions with the businesses about monetary systems or about peak oil’.30 Another point where the Pound forked from the LETS experience was in the seemingly ‘trivial’ aspect of naming the currency, with the Transition initiative aiming to call the local currency Pound, as opposed to the LETS unit of exchange that was called the Acorn. This was done to enhance the affinity of the new currency-object with money proper,31 and possibly to avoid cueing only the community of ‘green-minded’ people that LETS schemes would otherwise normally be directed to, at the risk of leaving out others who might not have had any idea about the possibility for experimentation embodied in something like an alternative currency.

Now, of course, the forking from the experience of LETS does not deny the fundamental relatedness with the LETS experience. Undoubtedly, the idea that LETS schemes embody is similar to that of a local currency: to create a localised circuit of exchange that prevents wealth leaks. What something like the Transition Pound was able to do, however, in comparison to the LETS, was to remove some of the barriers that stood in the way of engagement of the everyday user of money in a LETS scheme. These barriers are sidestepped when that consumer is approached through a variation in an object (money) that he or she is already accustomed to, as he/she goes about purchasing what he/she needs. In other words, the Totnes Pound offers an alternative attachment on which to rely for completing an activity – shopping – that is already ingrained in the life of the consumers it is directed to. If we imagined it as a dramatic performance, it would be akin to one carried out in the town square, where many people happen to pass already, rather than in a secluded theatre where people have to make their way to. While the latter audience might be more dedicated, the former one is open for ‘capture’ by noticing something new and different that may interest them into the ramifications of that particular performance.

The history of the Totnes Pound unfolds through four different emissions. The first one was a printout modelled on old local notes that used to circulate in Totnes in the early nineteenth century. These were simply given out by Rob Hopkins and accepted by various shops without any backing (although the amount of the issue was extremely small, only three-hundred pounds). In this regard, the first ‘Totnes Pound’ was similar in some ways to a LETS scheme, as it was not backed by national currency but rather relied on the availability of a circle of traders and buyers available to be engaged by the new paper token. On a second issue, more notes were printed, this time in exchange for national currency, and in a smaller format to allow these to fit better in tills. However, they were issued below parity, meaning that consumers could buy 1 pound worth of goods at participating shops, with the Totnes Pounds being redeemable in pound sterling for only 95 pence. This was an attempt to increase the stickiness of the local notes, ensuring that people would not redeem them so easily, so that they would remain in circulation. However, the unexpected outcome of one such move was to discourage participating businesses from enabling complete payments in Totnes Pounds, which would have meant, upon redemption in pound sterling, them taking a 5% hit on the sale price. As a consequence, business owners began allowing only a percentage of the purchase price to be fulfilled with Totnes Pounds.32 This was also caused by the fact that, the currency being embodied only in paper notes, limited trading (if any at all) could take place between businesses. Hence, money would accumulate with them and they would then have to redeem it in sterling, effectively turning the exchange rate in a discount given to consumers. This shortcoming stemming from below-parity issue led to the third emission, consisting of another one-pound note (the design of which was further revamped to give a more money-like look) issued at parity with pound sterling.

During the writing of this book, a new, fourth issue, took place. This time it involved multiple denominations, an accompanying website advertising participating shops and discounts available to users of the pound, as well as plans to develop an electronic currency. In fact, the Totnes Pound was earmarked as a recipient of funding aimed at rolling out electronic currency technology, in partnership with the Bristol Pound scheme.33

In between these successive emissions, the experience in Totnes sparked emulation around other Transition initiatives, the most far-reaching of which have occurred in Bristol and Brixton. In either of these cases, paper notes were accompanied by an electronic infrastructure enabling payments by text, as well as direct money transfers through a web interface. Moreover, in Bristol, all accounts are held by the local credit union, hence benefitting from deposit protection insurance through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Despite the larger scale, both of these initiatives are still relatively minute compared to the size of the urban economies they are embedded in.

To return to Totnes, it is interesting to notice how – until funding was secured through a partnership with the Bristol Pound – an electronic currency had not been planned for the fourth issue of the Totnes Pound, due to its excessive cost. Indeed, the issuing of local and complementary currencies poses real questions of resourcing. Since the costs of printing and setting up payment systems cannot be recouped from the backing that is received in exchange for the currency upon its issue (this has to be held in order to ensure redeemability), the printing and design of notes has to be self-funded. This is done typically through a mix of grants, donations as well as by sale of numbered sets of notes for the collector market.

In ‘official’ presentations of alternative currency schemes, the focus is often on how, through the use of an alternative currency, more localised trade can occur and, therefore, the local circuit of economic exchange becomes less dependent on sourcing from outside and consequently more resilient. This is how alternative currencies ‘fit’ into the inaugural narrative of Transition as a transition ‘away’ from the conditions that make peak oil and climate change a threat to the biosphere and to human communities (complementary currencies seek to tackle elongated supply chains, which remain practicable only in a world thoroughly dependent on fossil fuels).

This orientation towards addressing peak oil and climate change, however, seems to be only partially borne out in practice. Suffice it to mention the remarks by Longhurst, a researcher involved in the launching of the Totnes Pound, who regrets that the organising team that recruited businesses into the scheme was not more forthcoming about the goal of building local resilience as a response to peak oil.34 Instead, the Totnes Pound might have mainly been understood as ‘a way to promote the town or as a local loyalty scheme’.35 This ambivalence, I suggest, goes at the heart of the problem that Transition faces as it unfolds: of sustaining everyday experiences (such as spending money) through the discursive and material resources that compose an emerging Transition culture. Correlative to this is the challenge of nurturing a parallel appreciation of the experiential coherence and continuity existing between different Transition practices; something that can set in motion further realisations and lifestyle changes (in other words, making sure that people doing the spending can become sensitised to other concerns that animate the development of Transition, such as – in this particular case – peak oil and climate change). Hence the self-consciousness, that Longhurst puts into words, about the degree to which the Totnes Pound offers not just a way to bring money, and the exchanges it affords, into Transition, but also to cue the wider milieu of Transition through money and consumption choices. Widening engagement with currency fulfils the first prong; the second one demands that the awareness obtained through use of the Totnes Pound enable inroads into the wider moving of Transition, so as to elicit a more encompassing shift in cultural attachments. An instance of this occurring was the meeting mentioned earlier, held by the Totnes Pound organising group. At the end of that meeting, a discussion ensued about the process by which it had been chaired, in the light of the ‘mindful’ meeting techniques that are one of the distinctive qualities of Inner Transition: here was a transaction that sharpened the perception of Inner Transition as a site of cultural elaboration that commands attention across the different domains of activity enfolded in the Transition milieu, including currency experimentation.

Another way in which something like the Totnes Pound has the potential to slowly challenge ‘taken for granted’ attachments and draw participants towards the wider set of commitments and concerns animating the journey of Transition, is by signposting a geography for ‘ethical trading’ on the high street. So, for instance, it is the case that participating businesses present a sign outside of their window that discloses their membership in the scheme. In the case of the Bristol Pound, this signposting was done for the first time with a Google Map that marks all the shops in Bristol that adhere to the scheme. This outward display, coupled with recruitment policies that try to involve only local businesses,36 effectively demarcates an ‘ethical trading space’. Engaging in that trading space can be the source of puzzlements (e.g. in terms of the food stores that do not feature in it, such as fast food chains and supermarkets) through which to nurture a critical consciousness – say about food production, seasonality and localisation – and a determination to address such concerns by exploring further ways to practice Transition.

In this sense, local and complementary currencies (apart from their theoretical presentation as tools to promote economic relocalisation, which may or may not be borne out in practice, given the relatively limited turnover of existing schemes) are very interesting tools for nurturing a Transition culture of consumption. By the denomination as ‘pounds’ and the ‘look and feel’ that makes them more like notes than like vouchers,37 local notes attempt to catch the attention of people who are engaged in the minimal capacity of users of money. The curiosity that this sparks, about the possibility that a local currency may even exist, is one of the factors that are orchestrated to encourage people to experiment. This is evident in the attitude that Totnes Pound organisers adopted to persuade some shops: asking them ‘Why not?’, given the complete parity with the pound sterling and the full backing. Green Books, the publisher of the Transition manuals, even used to include a Totnes Pound note in copies of the books they sent out for review. This was, once more, an interesting approach to using the pounds, which shows an implicit understanding of their importance as tools that can introduce a productive element of puzzlement in taken-for-granted routines.38

Upon accepting the initial invitation to use a local currency, the possibility exists that individuals become progressively more entangled across the spectrum of Transition activities. By beginning to navigate an ethical trading space, consumers are stealthily encouraged to experiment with new consumption choices and, through these, to begin developing new attachments. So, for instance, while the Bristol Pound has made an exception to its local sourcing policy for public transport, there are no gas stations that participate in the scheme (thereby encouraging a change in transport choices from private to public transport, which can spark an alternative experience of place and provide greater curiosity towards projects that are coherent with that experience). Similarly, in Totnes, there was a general agreement that the Happy Apple, an independent supermarket stocking local produce, would be a very welcome addition to the Totnes Pound network, whereas the local Morrison’s supermarket shouldn’t be allowed to join. Indeed, even if a currency does not enjoy much circulation, but purely through the act of ensuring that the exchange circuit where it is allowed is signposted and clear, certain consumption choices can be encouraged, while others discouraged and, in turn, new puzzlements and disquiets find their way in people’s lives, demanding a response that can spark a search and further engagement with the Transition milieu.

Therefore, local currencies are a way to tap into a realm of experience (the use of money) that is not self-evidently related to the issues that prompted the initiation of Transition’s moving like peak oil and climate change. At the same time, the local currency scheme avoids foregrounding the elements of disagreement, but meets users of money where they are, acting as a silent facilitator to a process of exploration that may lead to a reconsideration of ‘taken for granted’ routines, and even spark further engagement in Transition activities – beyond just shopping locally. In fact, as people are set on a path of critical reassessment of their consumption choices, it is difficult to know how far the experimentation and the readjustment of their material attachments and discursive self-understandings may take them.

These considerations are relevant to understand the fittingness of initiatives like the Pound or the REconomy project (ch. 6) in the moving of Transition as a whole. To the question that some scholars asked, whether ‘a movement that wants to aim for broad participation [ought to be] open to those that do not necessarily agree with everything associated with it’,39 it becomes easier to understand why Hopkins would express the view that the answer is ‘yes’.40 As a strategy for change, this involves the creation of spaces to meet people where they are, and ‘activate’ them to the possibility of developing new attachments that may shift the very position from which they develop their opinions, eliciting greater openness to the rest that Transition culture holds.

At the same time, a moving that spirals out to embrace and enable more experiences is constantly faced with the problem of fitting everything together,41 trying to ensure that any new opening relates to what’s there already, so as to prevent fragmentation that might break the movement’s wholeness, through irreversible forks in the path from which the relatedness-in-difference would become exceedingly difficult to perceive, and lead to the shedding of some part. This is how it is possible to understand Longhurst’s doubt as to whether a Totnes Pound that is understood purely as a loyalty scheme might not be reaching too far, without being sufficiently woven into and imbued by the other strands of Transition culture.42 On the other hand, the way into Transition might be more intricate than Longhurst suggests, and unfold less through explicit discursive agreements (e.g. about peak oil being a problem) than it might through piecemeal shifts in non-representational material and embodied attachments (such as looking through the shelves of a shop stocking local and seasonal produce, seeking to accommodate one’s desire for particular tastes with what’s on offer, and discovering new flavours). In fact, my suggestion is that questions like the one voiced by Longhurst should be understood as coessential to the moving of Transition as a live process: a moving that proliferates differences, and entangles these together by developing resources to express their relatedness as participant parts of an unfolding whole. This is akin to Goethe’s suggestion, for understanding the mutual relatedness of the different parts of a plant, of ‘train[ing] ourselves to bring [the different] manifestations [of the plant’s metamorphosis] into relationship in opposing directions, backward and forward. For we might equally well say that a stamen is a contracted petal, as that a petal is a stamen in a state of expansion’.43 Indeed, it is precisely by remaining sensitive to how the different practical trajectories enfolded in Transition become reciprocally relevant, that one can grasp the appearing of Transition as a moving, not a completed movement. This is an insight that evokes a process of continual self-differentiation across various domains of practice, alongside the unearthing of a mesh of cross-references between these (as was the case of Inner Transition being cued in the Totnes Pound meeting).

To conclude, in this chapter I have tried to outline how, even when it comes to experiences of an economic character woven into the moving of Transition, there is more than meets the eye. Local and complementary currencies, while a tool for relocalisation, can equally be understood as a technique for facilitating engagement with an unfolding material and discursive culture of Transition.44 In this light, particular attention has been devoted to the different possibilities offered respectively by currencies and LETS schemes. It has been suggested that the former make it easier to meet larger audiences in simpler capacities, due to the lower threshold of engagement in comparison with a LETS scheme (despite, of course, LETS schemes retaining a place in Transition culture, albeit with a slightly different purpose than perhaps to act as a direct invitation for wider constituencies).

Local and complementary currencies, in particular, are useful tools to nurture an interest in Transition by making it speak through the seemingly everyday act of consumption. They can serve as a tool for foregrounding possibilities that might have hitherto been hidden – in a manner not dissimilar to the practice of culture jamming45 – and facilitate a rethinking of one’s personal, everyday experience through the novelty of an attachment to the local currency (and the accompanying ‘ethical trading space’). In this sense, the Totnes Pound stands out as a Transition thing for its simultaneous relatedness to – and diversification of – the moving of Transition. On the one hand, in fact, engagement with a local currency can be a first step towards the discovery of additional Transition practices that may be encountered through the initial experience of buying in an ‘ethical trading space’. On the other hand, the currency scheme makes space within Transition for the seemingly routine act of consumption. In this way, it adds to the range of experiential possibilities that can be sustained within this evolving cultural milieu. However, this process of cultural differentiation comes packaged with the recurring challenge to ensure that every new experience ‘fits’ and is embedded into all the strands that animate this moving, so that the currency project can speak as yet another manifestation of a distinctively ‘Transition’ culture, and not secede into a self-standing loyalty scheme.