Hello,
My name is Diana Leafe Christian. I'm an ecovillage researcher (informal and anecdotal, not academic) and advocate of various aspects of ecovillages and intentional communities. Permies.com asked me to come in this coming week for some posts. Thank you! I'll start off by describing why my own ecovillage, Earthaven in North Carolina, recently changed its decision-making method.
Increasing numbers of Earthaven members over the last several years (including me) have been dissatisfied with our consensus decision-making method. So in October, 2012 we agreed to modify our consensus process. For 18 years we used consensus-with-unanimity, which requires 100 percent agreement (not counting stand-asides) to pass a proposal. We also had no recourse if someone blocked — no criteria for what constituted a valid block against which blocks could be tested, nor a requirement that blockers meet with proposal advocates to draft a new proposal to replace the blocked one.
The power of individual Earthaven members to block with no recourse — meaning anyone could block anytime for any reason, and thus effectively destroy ideas or projects that most other members wanted — was the primary source of concern for many of us. So some began to find out what experienced community-based consensus trainers are currently advocating, and learn about innovative decision-making methods in other communities. I wrote a series of articles about the topic in
Communities magazine in 2012, and several community-based consensus trainers wrote articles too.
“Blocking potentially gives tremendous power to one or a few individuals, and the only way for that to function successfully is with a check and balance,” advises community-based consensus trainer Tree Bressen
(Communities, Summer, 2012). “ . . . in order for consensus to function well there must be a robust response to bad blocks.”
She and other community-based consensus trainers advocate a limited number of blocks in one’s
lifetime.
Community-based cnsensus trainer Caroline Estes (Alpha Farm in Oregon) recommends only three to four blocks in a lifetime. She says that in her 50+ years of facilitating she has seen legitimate blocks less than a dozen times.
Community-based consensus trainer Bea Briggs, author of
Introduction to Consensus (Huehuecoyotl Ecovillage in Mexico), recommends only three to six blocks in a lifetime. She says that her 20+ years of facilitating she has seen only one legitimate block. “I understand your concerns about consensus and appreciate the on-going discussion,” she recently emailed. “I also no longer am a ‘consensus evangelist,’ for many of the reasons you mention in your articles.”
Tree Bressen suggests community members remind each other, “If you’ve blocked consensus half a dozen times for all the groups you’ve been a member of, you’ve used up your lifetime quota,”
(Communities, Fall, 2012 issue). “In my
experience,” she adds, “every successful consensus system . . . restricts blocking power in order to guard against tyranny of the minority.”
“Our meetings are a dysfunctional nightmare,” wrote Cecil, a member of another North Carolina community in a Letter to the Editor
(Communities, Fall 2012). “Founded in love, trust, and generosity . . . we now have paranoia, suspicion, and fear, thanks to what I had also begun calling ‘dictatorship of the minority’.”
“Two problems became visible during our 25 years of using consensus,” the members of Kommune Niederkaufungen in Germany state in their article about their new decision-making process. “When no consensus could be reached . . . one person, through the veto, was given power over the whole group. . . . (Therefore) some individuals withdrew from the decision-making process.”
These concerns resonated with many Earthaven members too.
I'll write more about this in the next post, “How Some Other Ecovillages Changed to ‘Check and Balance’ Decision-Making Methods”
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