About Leigh Davis
Leigh has written 35 articles so far, you can find them below.

New Financial Architecture for Sustainability

April 2002

Earth Summit Ireland (ESI) is the umbrella body of Irish environmental NGOs preparing for the Rio +10 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. We write to express concern at positions taken by the EU during PrepCom III in New York. Our understanding of the EU position was that it favoured the inclusion of targets, timeframes, mechanisms and processes related to Sustainable Development objectives in the final Johannesburg agreement which after all, were agreed at Rio 10 years ago. Therefore we are concerned that the text currently being discussed is very weak in this regard. In response to …

Ben Whelan reviews Economics For The Common Good by Mark A. Lutz

PDF version

from individualistic to social economics
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BEN WHELAN

Economics for the Common Good

Mark A. Lutz
Routledge, London, 1998
ISBN: 0415143136, £18.99 in UK

What do Gandhi, Herman Daly and the author of Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, have in common? All three tried (or in Daly’s case, is trying) to move economic thought away from the dehumanised, mathematical, and amoral stance that has formed the basis of conventional economics since the Industrial Revolution. They are consequently qualified to be called social or humanistic economists, the terms now used to describe thinkers who place human – and …

The Barataria Project

In May of 1999 the Feasta committee travelled to Soesterberg in Holland for a conference hosted by the EU funded Barataria project in which Feasta’s Richard Douthwaite acted as consultant.

Barataria is called after the imaginary island of Barataria which Silvio Gesell, the radical 1930s economist and progenitor of the alternative currencies movement, invented in his seminal book Die Wunderinsei. The focus of the project is to devise ways of including local businesses in community exchange networks in order to increase their economic impact in depressed areas.

Feasta members enjoyed presentations from Bernard Lietaer and the four participant projects: the …