Eco-village: Source of Social Change?

The contribution looks at eco-villages as a one of the more interesting (and holistic) responses to the contemporary crises from the environmentalism movement’s point of view. In this Period of Revitalization where changes in social paradigms are commencing and “mazeways” are being reformulated (Orr, 2003), these communities are “using local participatory processes to holistically integrate ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability in order to regenerate social and natural environments” (Global Ecovillage Network, gen.ecovillage.org). Besides developing, testing and using sustainable technologies, eco-villages have been experimenting with different social systems, explicitly developing complex community processes, including fostering common identities, promoting common values and emotional connections (also referred to as “spirituality”). In this manner, eco-villages present a special case where environmentalism and spirituality movements have been able to connect, overcome their distaste for organization and form local action groups that had stood the test of time and have been consistently becoming stronger and more elaborated. In the light of the theory of minority influence (Moscovici, 1969), we could consider eco-villages as one of the innovators within the process of the environmentalism paradigm shift and a source of continuous social change towards environmentally friendly lifestyle. In their innovation, they represent a specific place where environmental knowledge is re-elaborated and new social representations are shared. Leading from this premise an on-going research project is addressing eco-villages as practitioners of minority influence as well as special contexts of communities based on shared social representations of environmentalism and spirituality. Types of community-based knowledge, its processes of re-elaboration as well as communication flow (inside and outside these communities), and conflicts that are part of these processes are considered. The project draws together newspaper media analysis and an explorative ethnographic study of two eco-villages (one in Italy and one in Great Britain) with a triangulation of data (observation participation, questionnaires, focus groups/semi-structured interviews)