Localization

The Anath Foundation is encouraging governing bodies to become more localized. The local product or service should be modified to fit the community’s expectations. When the needs of local customers are addressed, reliance on the global supply chain is reduced. The supply chain disruption will eventually lead to a more sustainable environment, where things are created locally and food is grown on the premises.

Localization refers to the manufacture of goods closer to end consumers in order to lessen globalization’s environmental and other external costs.

Re-localization is a method for constructing communities based on local food, energy, and product production, as well as local currency, government, and culture development. The basic aims of re-localization are to promote community energy security, local economy, and environmental and social equality.

Localization may also be thought of as a reduction in the distance between the site of production and the point of use or consumption.

There are four primary domains in which localization may occur:

1. low-cost / environmentally friendly building, 

2. agricultural production within 100 miles, 

1. low-cost / environmentally friendly building, 

4. community governance/capacity development.

In his essay, Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles, Kevin Carson takes on the topic of localization, specifically the economic advantages of localization.

Economic decentralization would make towns less subject to economic blackmail, as opposed to the existing trend, in which huge firms use the potential of a new store or factory to incite a corporate welfare bidding war among municipalities. It would be far more difficult to pack up and relocate if the average manufacturing business was a plant with a few dozen people or less serving a local market, rather than a massive oligopoly firm serving a national market and pushing a product promoted around national brand recognition. This is especially relevant considering the impact that eliminating transportation subsidies would have on a long-distance distribution business model.

Communities that are colonized by huge, absentee-owned firms are far healthier economically than the ones that are colonized by locally-owned small businesses. A 1947 study in California, for example, contrasted two communities: one with small farms and the other with a few huge agricultural companies. There were more parks, more businesses, and more civic, social, and recreational groups in the tiny farming village.

Additionally, it would significantly boost labor’s bargaining strength. Since the development of the industrial system and large-scale wage employment, capital has relied on its capacity to externalize many of its reproduction tasks to non-monetized informal and home economies, as well as organic social structures such as the family that were outside the deals.

Scroll to Top