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| My interactive Fish 4 Ever installation. Not all tinned fish is the same. We *can* support better choices. This *is* a hill I will die on. |
Here at Ecoville, we've entered another phase of skirmishes in our very protracted food wars. Will there be a peace treaty at the end of this one? I don't know. Right now I doubt it, but for a while I thought there might be. Lines on the map seemed to be shifting, fading even, although they had never officially been redrawn or erased.
Don't call it a war, people said. It puts us into opposing camps and it's not "helpful". Let things take their course. And... I can see why they would say that. I know that a lot of my neighbours find conflict difficult and would rather not get into it. I don't personally love it. I don't seek it out. I don't manufacture it. And it's very tiring, having it out with people, and can detract from all the things we could be doing together to make the world a better place. Something something more in common. I know.
But.
When we created our policies and guidelines, many of which have been around in various forms for over 15 years now, they were not permissive. They were not emergent. They did not leave space for things to take their course. There were a lot of very specific requirements and restrictions on everything from pets to parking to planting.
The ol' cohousing literature, such as it is, is clear that intentional communities need to have a vision, values, supporting policies and an agreed decision-making process. I think we were all broadly ok with that initially -- but a missing piece was "how do we examine these if we feel they are not serving us well as a community?" We've proved to be bad at that. I have my thoughts about why, which are essentially that some people saw moving in as the end of a process: this is who we are, and this is how we live. I've heard the phrase "this is what we did all this work for" more than once. And it was a lot of work, I have some sympathy for that position, though it has eroded over the years. I also have some sympathy with the position that if you're new, you should spend your first year or so listening and learning -- a bit like when you move into a house with a garden in the middle of winter. You just don't know what's going on under the soil till you've experienced a full growing season. But although we joined the community several years after it had been created, we did move into the very first house to be released, coming up 14 years ago now. You can't be the new girl forever. I mean, I've got medals at this point.
And no one can say I don't put the hours in. I recently went on a course called Working Effectively With Community Conflict - led by someone who has written some of that literature and applied and refined her thinking over many decades of community living. There were aspects of it that I didn't fully agree with (which I may dig into at some point) but I stuck with it for the full 21 hours, and something really resonated with me.
Essentially, she posits, there are three kinds of conflict that arise in communities like ours. There's interpersonal conflict -- the kind you get everywhere when people don't like each other or don't agree. You can deal with that or not, and whether you do might depend on how much it affects other people and how much anyone cares. Then there's structural conflict -- deeper issues which may manifest as interpersonal conflict but in fact come about because of the lack of a clear vision, values, supporting policies and decision making process (I expected these), but also lack of clear "red lines" (things which are never up for discussion - these can be in your vision and values but they need to be super explicit), a transparent membership process, and effective accountability mechanisms - what happens if people don't do what they're supposed to, or do what they're not supposed to?
The third kind is what she calls "especially challenging behaviours", and it's when individuals are persistently disruptive (or worse) and refuse to engage with any of the processes that need to be in place to keep the ship on an even keel.
Well. I love a framework, and I (mostly) really enjoyed engaging with this one. A long time ago now I learnt the phrase "governance drift". It's similar to another phrase I learnt even longer ago, which is "implementation gap". Your implementation gap is when you design a law, a policy, or a piece of legislation, but then fail to create an effective enforcement environment, so people or bodies that choose to ignore or even violate it simply can. Post-apartheid South Africa, for example, created a constitution that absolutely enshrined the rights of women and girls not to be subjected to gender-based violence. As of 2025, fifteen girls and women in South Africa die as a result of GBV every single day. It's not that the laws aren't there, it's that they are broken with impunity. How things are implemented matters.
Your governance drift starts in a slightly different place. You can collectively agree a set of policies, as we did, and set off with a high degree of compliance with them. You might not like all of them, but you put the hours in, or you arrived into that situation, and you believe that was the best that could be done at the time, and you accept that. You roll with it.
But that only takes you so far -- and over time those policies can become structural rather than cultural, and seen as constraining rather than enabling. Circumstances change, people change, the world around us changes. And if you can't address that, can't find a way to put more of those hours in, then gradually, people just stop adhering to things that they can't see the point of, or that they find actively harmful to the community they are living in. Not everyone feels that way, but you've collectively lost the faith in the process, so the policies remain, but they are cold and dead, not warm and living, and you drift away from them, either by omission (not doing a thing you said you would do) or commission (doing a thing you said you wouldn't do).
That's where we've been (in my view) for a long time. And it's not the worst place to be - most of us are community minded people, we consider the impact of our actions on others and adjust them accordingly. But it's created fertile spaces for double standards, for interpersonal conflict which is actually structural, and for especially challenging behaviours that are harder than they should be to respond to.
There have been some energy shifts over the last year or so - which I see as coming from an "all you need is love" theory of change. Instead of addressing the governance drift, or the areas of conflict, which would be hard and unpleasant, let's focus on celebrating ourselves and doing stuff together.
It's not been unsuccessful - we've had four "community weekends" where there have been activities and conversations and meals and work parties and informal gatherings of all kinds. I left town for the first one (on which more shortly) but I've participated in and made contributions to the others. They're good. I appreciate the efforts people put in to making them happen.
And I have some sympathy with the instincts behind the initiative, and behind many other thoughts and deeds. We deserve nice things. I actually think nice things are necessary. But they are not sufficient. If you never ever go there then you're just papering over the cracks, when you could have been rebuilding the wall.
My theory of change involves paying attention to the root causes of our governance drift, as that's where you identify what's stuck and why, and what we can potentially do about it. To me, they feel screamingly obvious, and I'd prefer to get right into it to see if I'm right, and if I'm not, what they are, and either way, how do we address them. This could include deciding not to address them, but that would be an active choice. This is not that. But I have also learnt that most people find this approach jarring. Go softly, we say. Go slowly. And, ok.
But what I think many of us mean, is let's not think about this, except when a little bomb goes off. And then we clear up the debris and patch up the wounds, but we don't change the guard at the bomb factory. And my take on SOIL's community conflict framework leads me to think that we're losing even the potential ability to do that, which means we'll be less able to handle the fallout from the little bombs, and our already eroded trust will erode further. Boundaries matter. It's extraordinary to me to be in a situation where we could be co-creating them, and just letting that drift away.
The last time I wrote about this at length was 11 (eleven!!) years ago, and I went back to it before starting this, to see how much my perspective had changed, how different the vibes were, and whether this was a useful lens.
And honestly, given where I think we currently are, it made me feel really sad, and fairly convinced that the endless appreciative inquiry approach is at best a waste of energy and at worst something that is explicitly designed to keep us divided into good and bad citizens, where good means "don't make a fuss".
But there's something else in the mix for me now. Around that 2015 mark, after the very hot period of what is now a fairly cold war, someone said something along the lines of I'm really sick of all this silver tongued talk about fine dining. This was directed at me -- and like all the best insults, it stung. What I heard was "here I am, a simple worthy man, trying to live a simple worthy life in a simple worthy community with like minded folk, and this woman is trying to undermine everything about that with her clever weaselly words and fancy tastes."
I examined this REALLY HARD at the time, because that wasn't what I was trying to do. But what I didn't have at that point in my life was knowledge of my neurodivergence. Specifically, that I am autistic. I didn't know much about autism at all. I didn't know how it presents differently in women. I knew almost nothing of the challenges that many many autistic people have with food. Or that my own challenges with food, like many other aspects of my autistic presentation, are deeply untypical -- which is one of the reasons my diagnosis came so late -- but no less real. I described them pretty well back in 2015, but I didn't understand why I had them, or why I would genuinely rather not eat than eat a fair proportion of what had been presented to me as inclusive food in an inclusive space and if you don't participate, well that's you being selfish, Jo. Get over yourself.
Another thing I now know is that my use of language, my celebration of words and the joy I find in deploying them (even my need to deploy them), is also an autistic trait. It's called hyperverbalism, if it matters. Yet another facet of my autistic existence is justice hyperfocus. If I see that something isn't fair, I will work to make it fair, and if that fails I will ask a million questions about why we're ok with leaving injustice unaddressed, and if I don't get answers to those, I will create a sculpture out of fish tins, and write poems on blackboards, and eventually let another blog post escape containment even though I know lots of people would rather I didn't.
You can still ignore me. I'm used to it. But I won't stop, because if I stop I go pop.
And at some level -- at many levels -- I remain absolutely convinced that these are conversations we need to have. Without them, power abuses happen. The strong dominate the weak, and count on the fact that the weak won't protest. Minority voices go unheard and minority interests remain excluded. Our policies are supposed to protect us from that, and our decision making processes are supposed to ensure that those policies are not themselves exploited.
We have a situation at the moment that isn't about food. I'm calling it Chudgate*. There's a guy (it's pretty much always a guy, right?), who lived here with his partner and their kids. He had the funds to buy a second house here as a buy to let investment. This is something that could arguably be contravention of our lease, but nobody stopped it happening. The vendors wanted shot, and there he was with the money. But then he split up with that partner, and moved away, taking the car they had been sharing with him. That was an EV, and parked in the sweetest (as in most accessible for many of us) parking spot on the street, which has a charging point. As soon as he was gone, a shared car (not an EV, we didn't have the means to fund a shared EV) took over that space.
But then he decided he was moving back, and this involved bouncing his ex to house #2 and evicting the tenant (a low income single mother with a small child who thought she had a long term tenancy) in the process. This caused the closest thing to a how did we let this happen and can we make it stop? I have seen here, and I was briefly encouraged. It wouldn't have been easy, but we have a lease, we have articles of association, we have policies, we have processes. This guy told us he was leaving because he wasn't enjoying living in the community, and has given 0 indication that he is planning to do anything beyond occupy his house now he's back.
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| Someone pointed out the driver of the Chudmobile will never see this as Chudmobiles can literally drive over children without noticing |
Oh. Except he's arrived with a hybrid Jaecoo SUV. A fucking Temu Range Rover!! Which meets the needs of... HIM! And he's bounced the shared car right back out of that space, so he can HAVE IT BACK! That car has occupied the space released by the tenant he evicted, which is an accessible space which someone else was waiting patiently for. We don't have enough parking spaces to have one per house. That was an active choice: it's better for the planet and better for community (which is also better for the planet) if we share cars. But everyone's gotta play. Most of us have tried. Not this guy. He just does him. And we're letting that happen.
That, my friends, is governance drift in action. Got enough money? Got enough balls? Got enough Teflon? Do what the fuck you want.
I don't subscribe to this worldview. This is not why I am living here. I'm not an anarchist and I'm not a libertarian, because I've hung out around the edges of some of those spaces and haha who has the power? The same fuckers who always have - white guys with wealth. How dare you come around here claiming intersectional feminism? Fuck. Off.
Of course - while I am not a white guy, I am evidently white, clearly able to represent myself (even if I am regularly misread) and I know from what people tell me that I have power of my own, even as a shortarse menopausal woman who has only recently learnt about deadlifting and facial serums.
And as such, I think I have a degree of responsibility. I'm a clever girl. I could use that irresponsibly, but I try very hard not to. The accusations thrown at me that hurt me the most are the ones that assume I'm doing that, that I'm using my facility with words to engender an outcome that is focused on me. And - honestly - that would be so much easier (practically) than what I am actually trying to do, which is to get us to engage in restating / redefining how we live here and why, starting from a root causes analysis.
I know there are people who don't trust me. It's annoying, but I accept that they have their reasons. They are generally the same people I don't trust, and I know that I have my reasons.
So I try to engage with the initiatives that have community support. On the meals front, we've been in a six month "experimental period" for about three years now. The experimental period had its own rules but it also passively expired. And that, for me, is where it got juicy.
One of the activities that happened in the official experimental period was a policy MOT. We've done policy MOTs a few times - in an environment with well-functioning governance it would be a healthy process: look at the existing meals policy, assess if it's doing its job, identify what further action (if any) is needed. Keep the shizzle to the minimum necessary.
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| Actual footage of our Meals Policy as it went through its MOT. (I don't take credit for this joke but it's too good not to share.) |
Yeah, we MOT'd the Food Policy. It failed.
Did we engage with the details? Or did we run around flapping our arms and then have a lie down? (Clue: it wasn't the first one).
So there I was. This policy isn't in effect. We don't think it's fit for purpose. But we don't collectively have the capability / capacity / courage to address it. What happens now?
I did draw a distinction between omission and commission. I can defend it, but I acknowledge it. I organised something that (in a scientifically very minor and if you weren't paying attention, which most people aren't, undetectable) way was not permitted. I did it fairly out loud, in the sense that I offered it as an invitation to anyone who would like to be there, as part of a birthday celebration for my beloved.
I knew I was crossing a line - but I knew that multiple other lines have been crossed, in multiple other ways. We can't live in limbo forever, was my logic. This is a very low impact test case, was my logic. If there's going to be pushback, I'll at least get some intel on the reasons behind it, and that will be helpful, because I really don't understand why there should be, was my logic.
Short version: there was pushback. Only from one person, but it went via three different teams and my beloved himself. It's hard to explain why I held out on every one of those fronts. But I did. And it happened, and in its way it was a magical evening. Not for that person, and I feel bad about that. I wrote to them and said so, and that I was open to dialogue, and that still holds.
Our most "powerful" team - our directors - were one of the teams involved and when they made a statement (at the request of that one person), I challenged their decision to do that. My challenge was about 2500 words long, but was basically - why does this particular issue have weight for you? Was it because someone raised it at all? Should we all raise all of our issues to you? Is it about the person making the challenge? Is it to do with the nature of the challenge? Do we care more about birthday fish soup than SUVs and evictions?
Our directors have, entirely reasonably, tried to avoid being police - but here they were doing that. I felt policed. They pulled back from it, in writing so I feel better, but you know what, I still felt policed. I'm working on it, but essentially I am as much a member of this community as anyone else or you have to tell me that I'm not. That's what caused me to leave town for the first community weekend. I couldn't be there and feel acceptable, or accepted. So we went to Manchester, stayed in a hotel, had some absolutely fantastic Thai food, saw some incredible art, and generally shook shook shook it off.
It's not all of my neighbours who are like this, obviously. In fact it's hardly any. I think they have more power than they should, but they may well think the same about me. One of the reasons I did the conflict course was because I do recognise that for some people I'm part of the problem. You could actually pay me to go away, but it would need to be a sum commensurate with the profit made by people who bought their houses at a massive discount and sold them on at market rate. I might even put some of that sum towards funding a house that can be rented at an affordable rate to people who actually want to live here (there would be one condition: no shaming people for their food choices).
Because they *are* choices. And if you know me at all, you know I make my choices carefully, and I reassess them regularly. If I don't agree with you, it doesn't mean I haven't thought about it, and it doesn't mean I don't care about the world and everything in it.
Turns out one person's silver-tongued fine dining is another person's authentic expression in a world that is built for chuds. We may have had more in common than we thought, but I think that ship has sailed.
joella
* My sensitivity reader questioned my use of "chud" as he didn't know what it meant. I said it was a non sweary alternative to a word of the same length beginning with the same letter, but the Merriam-Webster definition is here.
