Empowerment in an ecovillage: unveiling the role of power relations in social practices Luiz Guilherme Mafle Ferreira Duarte, Marlyne Sahakian & João Leite Ferreira Neto Community Development
Published online May 2021
DOI: 10.1080/15575330.2021.1923045
Abstract
Living in an ecovillage requires that people reinvent everyday practices. It involves new forms of production, consumption, social organization, and subjective constitution, aiming toward the normative goal of achieving greater ‘sustainability.’ Based on ethnographic research in Western Switzerland, this paper focuses on uncovering the nexus of power relations, social practices, and empowerment in daily life in an ecovillage. We find that power relations and social practices are intertwined, leading to different outcomes regarding empowerment. Procedures, understandings, and forms of engagement constitute social practices; however, power relations can either cause or constrain the rearrangement of practices towards different forms of individual and community empowerment, whereby some practices ‘orchestrate’ others.
Keywords: ecovillages, social practices, power relations, empowerment
Introduction
The study of the consumption patterns and practices of everyday people in relation to the normative goal of achieving greater ‘sustainability’ is a growing field of inquiry. We understand sustainability in its social dimension, as privileging social cohesion and decreasing inequalities, and in its environmental dimension, as decreasing negative environmental
impacts, including climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Designing, building, and living in ecovillages is an interesting field of study regarding this theme, as it implies the
development and reinvention of social practices, involving new forms of production, consumption, and social organization.
Ecovillages, as models of intentional communities, aim to achieve changes in practices toward sustainability in different and interrelated social, cultural, ecological, and economic activities (GEN, 2020). Ecovillages aim to integrate all dimensions of sustainability in a whole system approach, towards restoring and regenerating social and natural environments.
In this paper, and based on research conducted in Western Switzerland, we study social sus- tainability in an ecovillage, uncovering the role of power relations in social practices and their influences over the community- and individual-level empowerment. Pigg (2002) stated that empowerment could be studied on three levels: individual, which focuses on self-develop- ment; mutual, which aims at interpersonal relationships; and social, which sheds light on col- lective social action. Because of the approach used in this research, we will limit our analyses to individual and mutual empowerment, and related practices.
Research on social relationships and individual improvement in ecovillages has advanced in recent years, as key themes. Some studies have analyzed how people in ecovillages develop practices such as self-knowledge (Roysen & Mertens, 2016), conflict solving, and decision-making (Chitawere, 2017). Others focus on describing daily practices, such as work (Burke & Arjona, 2013) or food consumption (Brombin, 2015), without
addressing the power relations embedded within them. ‘Power relations’ are understood in the Foucauldian tradition (Foucault, 1983) as a way to analyze how people or institutions
approach governing behavior. How to bring together an understanding of power in relation to social practice theory is a growing field of inquiry (Bertho, Sahakian & Naef, 2020; Denegri- Knott, Nixon, & Abraham, 2018; Watson 2012). Community development scholars have
studied power dynamics (Ayres, 2012; Hyman, Higdon & Martin, 2001), but there is a gap in the literature on the theme of power relations experienced in the daily life of ecovillages, and the role power plays both in social practices, and in individual and collective empowerment – which this paper contributes to.
The paper is organized as follows: in section two, we explain the theoretical
framework and the method used for this research. In section three, we present the structure of the ecovillage. In section four, we analyze the collected data, to then end with our
conclusions, showing how power relations can either cause or the constrain the rearrangement of practices towards different forms of individual and community empowerment.
Approaches and methods
This paper puts forward a conceptual framework and methodological approach for researching power relations in practices that take place in ecovillages, and how power relations affect individual and community empowerment. Below, we detail the conceptual background, followed by the research design and the methods piloted in this study.
Empowerment, social practices, and power relations
We understand empowerment as the ability and the authority for people to make choices that affect their lives (Pigg, 2002). One dimension is based on resources, both at the individual (skills and attitudes) and social level (a network of relationships). Another dimension is that of agency, understood as: “…the ability people have to define their goals and objectives and act upon them” (Pigg, 2002, p. 110). To understand how empowerment
manifests itself in an ecovillage, we dialogue with two other concepts: social practices and power relations, through an ethnographic study.
As a heuristic device, we considered social practices in an ecovillage as units of analysis where power relations and empowerment play out. Social practices are the
interconnection of elements, such as knowledge, emotions, and instruments, which constitute
“a routinized type of behavior2 (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). Following Warde (2005), we use the notion of practices as performances. In Warde’s (2005) interpretation, practices are made up of: (1) understanding; (2) procedures; and (3) engagements, building on Schatzki's
argument (1996):
To say that the doings and sayings forming a practice constitute a nexus is to say that they are linked in certain ways. Three major avenues of linkage are involved: (1) through understandings, for example, of what to say and do; (2) through explicit rules, principles, precepts and instructions; and (3) through what I will call 'teleoaffective' structures embracing ends, projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions, and moods (Schatzki, 1996, p. 89).
Warde (2014) discusses that practices contain constant change possibilities because of the dynamic relationship between elements of practices. Thus, as we will see through the study of an ecovillage, power is one element that can constrain or make possible the transformation of practices.
According to Foucault (1983), power relations are an attempt to conduct the behavior of others – are act upon others’ actions – structuring a possible field of action, creating opportunities to accomplish intended goals, and following determined ways. For example, establishing rules and structuring how daily practices play out is an exercise in power. The study of power relations in an ecovillage was relevant towards analyzing how practices unfold in terms of social sustainability, but it was not enough. We wanted to comprehend forms of
engagement in practices by individuals, towards ascertaining how the ecovillagers relate among themselves and with the community. Power can constrain actions, promoting submissive relationships (Foucault, 1987) or it can empower individuals, improving their abilities to define and direct their objectives and actions. Denigri-Knot and colleagues (2018), when analyzing the regime of practices in an ecological community, conclude that practices produce different subjectivities, in other words, different relationships of each individual with him- or her-self, and with others. The subjectivation politic is inseparable from the work that individual and collective subjects do on themselves, in a specific context (Ferreira Neto, 2017) – for example in the context of ecovillages, with their particular material and normative settings.
Practices are means to ‘conduct’ the actions of individuals, and a possibility for the practitioners to work on themselves, simultaneously transforming practices and others (Foucault, 2000). In this sense, practices have the same characteristics of power relations (Foucault, 1983). For Watson (2012) power is intrinsic to practices’ performance, as one of their effects and not as something external to them; power is not an entity in and of itself but manifests itself “in moments of human action and doing” (p. 171). On how empowerment plays out in practices, Toomey (2011) analyzes in what way horizontal or vertical
relationships between leaders and practitioners bring about different outcomes, promoting more or less participation in the community process, respectively. These dynamics are central to our understanding of empowerment.Our conceptual framework thus allows us to analyze how empowerment, practices, and power relations relate to each other, by studying everyday life in an ecovillage: practices and power relations are intertwined, resulting in the privileging of some forms of empowerment over others.
Research design
Data collection took place in an ecovillage situated in Western Switzerland. The research involved a six-month ethnographic study (October 2018 to March 2019), accessing documents (ecovillage contracts, stipulating residents’ commitments, and a book about the ecovillage history written by the ecovillage founders) and conducting 16 in-depth interviews with ecovillage residents. We studied the following set of practices, wherein power relations were manifest: consuming food (buying, cooking, and eating); cleaning; gardening; and decision-making. As our interlocutors were not keen on being recorded, all interviews were captured in extensive notes, taken in French. The interview notes were translated into English by the authors. The data was deductively coded along three axes: (1) understanding; (2) procedures; and (3) engagements, based on Warde's definition of social practices. The authors shared the research findings with the participants for their feedback.
The main approach used in this study was an ethnography, a process of doing research that studies people’s idea systems (knowledge, morals, values, emotions), documenting behaviors, events, and actions (Pelto, 2013). Desmond (2014) points out the need to consider the ethnographic object as “processes involving configurations of relations among different actors or institutions” (2014, p. 587). Ethnography enables researchers to “diagnos[e] power relations identify[ing] instances of accommodation and resistance at the micro-level” (Volo, 2009, p. 220), helping scholars understand how power circulates. Based on Foucault (1987) and as described above, we observed power, not as something that exists a priori, but as something that is constituted in action, through practices. Power is present in every human relationship. Taking this notion as a guide, we observed how power relations unfolded during the performance of practices, and how they created a chain of interaction between various practices.
While ethnography and interview notes represent important tools for describing practices and power relations, there are limits to this study: the presence of a researcher in an ecovillage can lead to changes in how everyday practices play out; the lack of interview recordings also means that transcripts could not be analyzed in detail. However, we remain convinced that the participant observations and in-depth interviews were effective towards gathering robust data, particularly given the length of the study – over a six-month period.
Ecovillage empirical context
The ecovillage is an intentional community located in a small city in the countryside in Western Switzerland coordinated by a cooperative. It is manifested in a four-story house, with 12 bedrooms, a permaculture garden, and some shared spaces such as two kitchens, an event room, and a laundry room. Five of the bedrooms have private kitchens. The community has easy access to public transport and city centers. There were sixteen residents at the time of this study, of which twelve were men. By the end of the observation period for this study, four residents had lived for more than six months in the house. The residents’ ages varied from 1 to 60 years old, with most between the ages of 20 and 40. During the observation period, most of the inhabitants were single. There were only two couples in the community, as well as a single mother with two children. Moreover, all of the adults had regular employment, as edu- cators, engineers, or architects, among other jobs.
The house was made possible through the cooperative structure, partially financed by private investors (20%) and a bank loan (80%). Each resident pays rent to use a bedroom and the common areas, and contributes financially to paying back the loan, paying for the salaries of some employees who work on site (such as a cook and technician), and paying for basic
household needs (electricity, water, cleaning, laundry, and food purchases, such as vegetables and spices).
The group became an official member of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) by fulfilling the prerequisites: 1) implementing solutions in at least one dimension of
sustainability (social, cultural, economic, ecologic); 2) having a population of at least eight inhabitants; and 3) having been in existence for at least two years (GEN, 2020). The
community served as a showcase for advertising a cooperative brand of eco-construction and community lifestyle. Before the ecovillage construction, the cooperative was a squat, a group who occupied abandoned buildings to live in a low-cost community. After a while, they decided to create their community based on ecological principles.
In the social contract, language is put forward that announces the ecovillage’s lifestyle as a new way to ‘save the planet’ based on changing people's attitudes – toward what is termed ‘happy degrowth’. Towards this aim, the inhabitants plan for community development based on group meetings, a quest for diversity (in attracting residents of different age, gender, profession, and nationality), and by making explicit a set of resident responsibilities toward the community. Alongside the concern about social sustainability was the concern for mutual empowerment (Pigg, 2002), focusing on interpersonal relationships: the enhancement of the residents’ relationships would strengthen the community as a whole. However, there was no investment in self and social empowerment, with a lack of practices aimed at self-
development in the ecovillage or group political engagements outside of the ecovillage, as exercised in other ecovillages (Brombin, 2015; Roysen & Mertens, 2016).
Anyone seeking to live at the ecovillage started out by renting a room. After a trial period ranging from 6 to 24 months, the resident, called ‘collective user member’, could become a lifelong community member, called ‘co-responsible’, if accepted by the other co- responsibles. However, to become a community member was not the same as becoming a
cooperative member, as the cooperative is broader than this ecovillage community, and has other ongoing projects besides this ecovillage. At the time of this study, the ecovillage had several collective user members, but only two cooperative members who actually lived in the house, who also are the only members to have achieved the status of co-responsible. These two co-responsibles were a couple and were among those who built the community from the start. Those who had this co-responsible status had to maintain compliance with the
cooperative’s rules and regulations and keep the ecovillage financially stable. They possessed an indefinite contract to live in the house and could make strategic decisions for the group.
However, even when becoming a co-responsible, if someone stopped attending community meetings or had any unresolved conflict with other members, his or her contract could be canceled by the cooperative members.
Results and discussion
The present section reports the interpretation of power relations occurring within the ecovillage practices and its effect on individual and community empowerment. We analyze the procedures, understandings, and engagements constituting the elements of each practice.
Procedures and the social contract
Here, we analyze the community's procedures, objectives, and how the inhabitants relate to them. By procedures, we mean the explicit rules, principles, precepts, and
instructions that constitute the practices (Schatzki, 1996; Warde, 2005). The cooperative established procedures through a social contract. Every potential new resident had to sign this contract before living in the ecovillage, which stipulated: the distinction between the
collective user members and co-responsibles; the governance procedures between co- responsibles; the co-responsibles’ financial responsibilities; the process of integration of newcomers into the community; the conflict solving process; and the obligations of every resident.
The social contract’s primary goal is to develop a notion of community which “has the common bases, one common intention, and adapts to different contexts,” as stated in the doc- ument. The intention is to create a lifestyle whereby people would want to live in the ecovil- lage their whole lives, reducing consumption, consuming only what is necessary, and being aware of product origins. The document establishes some procedures regarding community activities and decision-making processes. Critically, the inhabitants must engage in monthly management meetings and contribute at least one hundred hours per year of voluntary work for the community.
The decision-making process is based on projects, such as meal preparation or gardening. For example, those responsible for the cooking decided what to buy, how to organize the kitchen, and what renovations in the infrastructure of the kitchen they would like to do. One resident was the lead for a project, with others assigned as helpers; the project- based group then made decisions about the tasks under their responsibility, while the others had to accept. At least one co-responsible was part of each project, as one of them said:
We chose to have one responsible per project to make sure the project will be realized.
When a group decides to do the things together, that is cool, but when something needs to get done, it is expected that nobody does anything, assuming that the others have already done it.
Martinez-Cosio and Bussel (2012) point out that community empowerment enhances existing and creates new participatory practices. Through the contract and the project-based decision-making process, the cooperative members – including the co-responsibles – affirmed
that they are promoting collective empowerment – although how the empowerment played out in practice was less convincing. Indeed, most residents disagreed with the model conducted by the cooperative, claiming that these procedures led to a centralization of the decision-making power in the couple's hands as sole co-responsibles. When these discussions arose during the meetings, the co-responsibles claimed that the decision-making process was made explicit in the social contract, which all residents had signed. They justified their choice by saying, “We cannot let newcomers make decisions that can change the whole community.”
Of course, the residents who sign such a contract have no opportunity to experience decision- making practices beforehand and thus no opportunity to contest such a stipulation.
For example, before starting a meeting, two cooperative members (one resident – a co- responsible – and one non-resident, who was nonetheless in charge of technical aspects on location) announced plans to modify the heating equipment, because the current system was deemed to be under-performing. They were critical of the residents’ practices, stating that residents were not acting correctly in relation to the heating logic. Rather than closing their rooms, they should have been leaving their room doors open in order to let in the heat from the central heating system. Some residents tried to resist, claiming that they did not have a chance to discuss the issue, but the cooperative members answered that those responsible for the heating project were the ones who decided. The idea of a collectivity, with open and shared spaces, seems to be in tension with individual preferences to close off rooms to seek more privacy.
The lack of participatory decision-making extended to other projects as well. Most of the inhabitants complained that they were unable to choose the community’s priorities. The cooperative representative decided on the topics to discuss, and residents had to follow.
“When I arrived, I wanted to do something to help the community, but I never know how.
Sometimes, people who don’t live here have more power than we do.” The management
model’s consequences based on vertical normativity generated increasing dissatisfaction among the community inhabitants, causing a constant departure of residents. Throughout the six months of observation twelve people left the house, which welcomed twelve new people – a high turnover for a house that accommodates sixteen.
The cooperative members aimed to create a new lifestyle, in which there would be new practices around cooking, eating, organizing, or deciding. However, they used a different process of decision-making from other ecovillages. As Suh (2018) noted, and based on a comparative study worldwide, many ecovillages use consensus-based decision-making. The present ecovillage did so through more vertical strategies. Through the social contract and expressed rules, the cooperative members governed the residents’ actions or ‘conduct’, and attempted to control different dimensions of everyday life toward more ‘sustainable’
lifestyles. The cooperative members defended the project-based rather than consensus-based decision-making process as a way to preserve the inhabitants’ time and energy and be sure that the task would be handled through to the end. A co-responsible said, “Sometimes, when people try to reach consensus, they can sit all together, spend much time and do not find any conclusion,” and “If something goes wrong, we know who to blame.”
Even though the cooperative members can claim to be focused on an objective, of pro- moting a sustainable way of life, the residents of the ecovillage did not feel empowered. They did not have the feeling that they could take part in decisions toward their own goal. They had the abilities to do so, but the governing strategy did not give people the resources to experi- ence empowerment in relation to their everyday lives in the ecovillage.
Understandings – collectivity and individuality
In the present section we analyze the understandings in the context of the ecovillage.
Unlike the procedures described above, this section considers how people understand how to engage in daily practices. We studied the community strategies to ‘conduct’ the residents' actions, the conflicts and power relations involved, but also a transformation that took place near the end of the observation period.
One of the cooperative strategies was to ensure that some knowledge of the desired understandings would always be present in the community. The cooperative members hired some people from outside of the community for strategic tasks that were seen as necessary to- wards preserving the ecovillage’s permanence and make sure that everyday activities could run smoothly. Therefore, a hired person took care of the kitchen, and was responsible for buy- ing food and cleaning the common spaces. Two people were hired to build and renovate the house, and another was on location to receive newcomers and show them how to use the house. The first three workers also lived in the house. The co-responsibles saw themselves as responsible for improving the interactions among the residents. Some newcomers took care of what the co-responsibles called less strategic practices, like gardening, cleaning the heating system, helping with parties, and fetching the vegetables.
One co-responsible emphasized that “believing that each person is responsible for caring for the house does not work at the beginning of a project. Some people must be paid to do certain jobs. We must wait for 3 to 5 years for stabilizing the community.” After this period, the cooperative expected that most of the residents would become co-responsibles, sharing the leadership, thus sharing responsibility for the strategic practices and the finances of the community.
Even though the intention was to improve the inhabitants’ contact and responsibilities during meals and other activities, the approach reinforced some people’s dispositions to eat and work alone in their own spaces. For example, when participant observation began, some
residents used the shared kitchen for breakfast. They cooked there and went back to their rooms, or to the flat-sharing areas, to eat at night. Those who had their kitchens cooked and ate on their own for all meals. Sometimes, some residents had meals together in the evening.
From among the residents, very little common work was observed in the house throughout the observation period: one resident spent some time working in the garden, protecting the soil for the winter, and two people worked on the house upkeep. The cooperative members and co-responsibles wanted to promote community meals, towards creating new eating habits that involved having meals altogether and consuming less animal-derived food. The ecovillagers did so when required or when the co-responsibles organized such meals, but returned to their pre-existing eating pattern when they were alone.
Warde, Cheng, Olsen, and Southerton (2007) affirm that social habits, routines, and conventions hinder fast changes. In our example, the power relations between cooperative members and residents constrained the practices of having a: residents did not seem to enjoy engaging in ecovillage activity, such as eating together, despite the social contract convention and directives from the co-responsibles. Revell and Dinnie (2020) state that the feeling of empowerment whereby one could decide to make one’s own choices is essential for
individuals to take action in community issues and utilize all its resources. The outcome was that without the continuous stimulus from the cooperative members for changes in practices, the habits of eating and working alone remained.
The second governance strategy was the community meetings, which were used to inform and not to make decisions. During these meetings, the co-responsibles explained the projects in which each one was engaged, asked for each member’s personal time contribution, calculated the contributed hours, and expressed the upcoming tasks and needs, asking for volunteers who could assume these tasks. Each inhabitant who felt comfortable assumed one project. Sometimes, the person responsible did not know about the activity but tried to learn
the necessary skills, thereby building new competencies. As one of the older residents said: “I do not know about gardening, but I do my best to help.”
When someone questioned any decision during the meeting, the co-responsibles affirmed that the space was not for discussions. Only those responsible for the project could decide. For some inhabitants, the decision process was part of the learning, and it was
essential to adapt to the ecovillage’s objectives. For others, it was authoritarian, not leaving a place for their opinion and individuality.
The cooperative members stated in the interviews that they would like to stimulate the flow of responsibilities within the community and the development of new abilities. Never- theless, the decision centralization in the hands of a few co-responsibles discouraged some of the newcomers’ participation. People are assigned tasks – such as gardening or cooking – but these tasks prompted conflicts with ‘decision-making’ practices, and people were not given opportunities to develop competencies in collaborative decision-making, which could have led to empowered people in an empowered community. The ecovillage inhabitants become the subjects of the governing principles of the eco-village, all the while resisting the required subjectivity by questioning the rules they are being asked to follow. The governance strategies over daily practices also created tensions between the cooperative intentions and the individu- als’ lives, which led to disagreements between the inhabitants, and influenced how practices played out.
We could observe that the conflict between the cooperative strategies and the individuals’ lives interfered in the social practices. While the co-responsibles worked to assure the correct way of doing and saying, the other residents would like to co-create understandings. The influence of the power relations in social practices and community empowerment became evident. The data analysis contradicts what the social contract proposes: the ecovillagers felt they were not heard and did their activities mostly alone.
To change this situation, they needed to change the power relations. Three inhabitants who had conflicts left the house, and in the last three months of the research period, the co- responsibles stayed away, together, for two periods of 20 days each. Slowly, while the co- resposibles were away, the residents started to eat together every evening. One resident explained that “when I searched for this place, I was looking for this kind of community situation. We can do things spontaneously without planning everything.” Afterward, when the two co-responsibles returned, they were less directive about how collective user members were required to use the house. The residents started to conceive their actions with a
community mindset. They cooked collectively and set aside some food for those who would come later. They cleaned the kitchen in the evening to avoid bothering the cook. Every time that someone traveled, they brought something different to eat and shared it with others.
Because of the less directive strategy in conducting community life, the inhabitants felt self- empowered and wanted to invest more in interpersonal relationships. As one inhabitant said,
“Nowadays I like to cook with others, to separate some food to them. I enjoy doing things for the neighbors. That gives me pleasure. I did not have this feeling last year.” While we cannot exclude the fact that the presence of a researcher on location may have prompted a change in eating and living arrangements, the departure of the co-responsibles certainly created a new ambiance in the ecovillage and lead to more collective activities.
In some intentional communities (Markle, Rodgers, Sanchez & Ballou, 2015), the social structure facilitates supportive interactions such as community meals. These meetings to eat together promoted new discussions, new rules, and new practices. The practice of eating and cooking together created a spillover effect affecting other practices. For Warde (2005), practices are not closed in themselves. As pointed out by Roysen and Mertens (2016), some practices have the potential to create new ones. In the ecovillage, this spillover effect promoted new ways of caring for themselves. The planting that had previously been done
alone was now done with 15 people. The house cleaning had previously been done exclusively by the cook; now it was taken over by some residents in her absence.
Even keeping the procedures, the changes in power relations had led to changes in the understandings. The governance strategy was less centered on the cooperative normativity. It was now based on mutual trust, creating new ways to carry out practices and improving individual and community empowerment. When power was centered in the co-responsibles and mutual surveillance was demanded, the ecovillagers primarily did their practices alone, and there were more conflicts and less investment in the community by the collective user members. When power circulated among the inhabitants, they exercised more freely the care of self, had the chance to choose how to use the house, to invest more in community life, and to create new practices. As Foucault (1987) pointed out, power relations require practices of freedom, and we can affirm that the improvement of self-empowerment resulted in
community empowerment as a whole, enhancing their relationships with each other.
Engagements and power relations
In the present section we analyze the ecovillagers’ engagement in practices. We compared the inhabitants’ and cooperative’s intentions toward the community, their desires, and perceptions, analyzing how these aspects in turn impacts community empowerment, and maintains or changes the practices inside the ecovillage. Engagements are Warde’s (2005) interpretation of Schatzki's (1996) concept of ‘teleoaffective’ structures and are the ends, projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions, and moods tied up with practices. We analyzed engagements as how the ecovillagers constituted themselves as subjects when performing practices, highlighting the power relations.
Although everybody living in the ecovillage was longing for community life, their intentions toward it were different. The oldest co-responsible saw himself as the ‘operative arm’ of the cooperative. He often said that he represented the cooperative. He stated, “I see the community as a one or two-year-old child, which I need to teach how to do the things before I leave it on its own.” For him, his dual role was hard to balance and manage: “It is difficult for everybody to understand my double position here. While we have dinner together, I have to say what is going wrong, and that makes our relationship hard.” The collective user members agreed with that. They said that “it seems that they (the co-
responsibles) do not enjoy the house and the encounters (with other residents)” and “I do not feel comfortable with them (co-responsibles) because I do not know if I am talking with the cooperative representatives or with my neighbors.”
After the changes in the community, the co-responsibles’ attitude and residents’
perceptions transformed. They had more leisure time together inside and outside the house.
One of the collective user members pointed out after a dinner that “Since I have been here, this was the first time that we (the collective user member and co-responsible) had eaten together and talked about our personal lives more spontaneously. I am glad about that. It was different.”Here we can see how power relations interfere with the practitioners’ engagement and impact community empowerment. The less the cooperative guided the inhabitants, refraining from telling people the right way to do things or from surveilling them, the more they engaged in community activities and gathered for practices that enhanced the
relationships between the members inside the ecovillage. Toomey (2011) highlighted that horizontal relationships empower communities more than vertical ones.
Some inhabitants stated that they had looked for a residence where they could live with others and focus on their regular jobs outside the ecovillage. They did not want to live alone in an apartment in a big city and wanted to share their lives, having more contact with
nature. They pointed out that the community was good the way it was: “Here things work themselves out. When I have some problem, I only need to send a message and the people who work here solve the problem in one day. In the city, it is not the same. It can last two weeks,” and “I see it as a platform for encounters. Within this structure, it is easier to meet each other.” The three workers who lived in the house shared a similar opinion. For them, the house had no significant problems to solve. It was quiet. Nobody had significant conflicts with others, and the inhabitants had everything they needed. Because of that, they thought that the co-responsibles forced unnecessary situations, bringing unnecessary stress.
After comparing the residents’ intentions toward the ecovillage life, the cooperative’s project embodied a contradiction between the community project and individual autonomy.
On the one hand, the cooperative and the co-reponsibles focused on the prescribed rules, community needs, and each inhabitant’s behavior in relation to daily practices. They affirmed that the inhabitants did not invest enough energy in the house and that not everybody was interested in community life. A co-responsible said that to “live in a community is not a pink world. It is a hard life, like any other. It is not a place that you come to receive things. It is more an exercise in giving.” The cook added, “At the end of last year, some people thought that they just needed to pay, and then they could do everything they wanted. It cannot be like that.” These points of view formed the moral code and the prescribed moral conduct
(Lefebvre, 2017), crucial governmentality points. The intent is to foment an ethical code of conduct that made ‘community formation’ the aim of all actions.
On the other hand, most residents would like to learn new abilities, make decisions, and assume responsibility for the ecovillage. If we consider ethics as a process (Lefebvre, 2017), they wanted to create a meaningful existence by taking part in decisions about the practices they perform. As we saw before, a common complaint about the community was that the collective user member could not choose their own priorities for their lives – they are
thus limited in their agency. Following Warde (2005), the practices tend to both renew and maintain themselves. These practices' tendencies depended on the power relations between cooperative and inhabitants in the present case. After the changes in power relations, at the end of the year, the practice of cooking and eating together promoted mutual care and changed their forms of engagement. The shared kitchen became the meeting point of the community. There, they exchanged experiences, supported each other emotionally, and organized parties. The new atmosphere helped to integrate the newcomers and prompted cooperative feelings. As one inhabitant said, “It is great to be received with everybody here together, but I feel ashamed that I cannot help with anything.”
The cooperative's governance strategies were not sufficient to engender the inhabitants' necessary mood to invest energy in the ecovillage. The personal will and the relationships' quality were essential parts of promoting the practices. Through the lens of our analysis and from Brown and Baker (2019), we can also affirm that trust, sense of community and cohesion, engagement and collective action, and openness to transformation predict personal investment in the behaviors necessary for community empowerment.
Power relations (Foucault, 1987), and engagements (Warde, 2005) were intertwined in the practices, either supporting or hampering them. The new strategies impacted each one's will to work over their attitude and action, improve their abilities to have better relationships, and conduct practices that support the community. The cooperative and co-responsibles had to solve the paradox to create a structure in which everyone could freely desire to change themselves in favor of the community. During the feedback meeting, three cooperative members (a co-responsible and another two members) said they needed to rethink the role of the co-responsibles inside the community.
The governance strategies promoted different engagements in the ecovillage. Each inhabitant had particular means to handle the cultural norms proposed (Ferreira Neto, 2017)
and their “ends, projects, tasks, purposes, beliefs, emotions and moods” (Schatzki, 1996, p.
89). The chosen strategies propitiated distinct relations with themselves and others, improving or reducing the members’ commitment to daily practices.
The platform created by the cooperative enabled different engagements inside the community. Depending on the governance strategies, each individual felt more or less em- powered, with the possibility of deciding how to guide their lives while living in the ecovil- lage. The strategies interfered with their will and intentions to invest their energy in the com- munity practices, whether empowering the ecovillage or not, to sustain itself for a long time.
Conclusion
Based on the qualitative study of an ecovillage in Western Switzerland, we found that power relations and social practices greatly influence one another, and the relationship between them promotes or restricts opportunities for empowerment. This theoretical framework – understanding empowerment through social practices and power relations – proved to be a useful tool towards explaining ongoing processes, their transformations, and their subjective effects. While most of the studies around ecovillages analyze specific
practices, such as collective care responsibilities around cleaning and cooking (Roysen &
Mertens, 2016) or decision-making processes around building construction practices
(Chitawere, 2017), we highlighted the relationship between power relations and each aspect of varying practices – the procedures, understandings, and understandings related to food (buying, cooking, and eating); cleaning; gardening; and decision-making – and how this relationship affects individual and community empowerment.
The procedures, established in the social contract and materialized in this eco-village housing structure, were the basis for promoting a change from more individualistic to more
collective practices through new forms of experimentation. And yet, this change did not play out in practice – due to a lack of common understandings. While the ecovillagers’
engagements were aligned with the cooperative vision on paper, how actual practices were performed revealed a tension between theory and practice. People wanted to live in the community, share goods and activities, and learn new practices while reducing their impact on the environment (consuming less and developing more awareness), but were not able to do so – thus lacking in agency.
Our findings shed new light on the relationships between social practices, power relations, and empowerment. Engagements were aligned with common understandings when power circulated more freely between the residents, notably when the two co-responsible were away and people were not being told what to do; spontaneity and participation in decisions in the performance of practices (during meal preparation or gardening, for example) led to more empowerment at an individual and community-level. Consequently, people changed their emotions toward others and their mood, in order to contribute to the community project. While governance strategies determine the procedures and understandings, organizing what to do and how to perform practices, it is the power relations that interfered the most with practitioners’ engagements, especially on an emotional level.
Watson (2012) affirms that some practices can orchestrate and align other ones, creating an institutional hierarchy between differential capacities of action. In this ecovillage, we see quite clearly that the decision-making process is a central practice in the cooperative’s governance strategy – directly affecting the understandings around other practices, such as cooking or cleaning. Thus, the process of instituting ‘decision-makers’ in the roles of co- responsibles creates a decision-making practice that restricts power to the few, rather than the many. All of the decision-making instances then become “distinctively capable of
orchestrating, disciplining and shaping practices conducted elsewhere” (Watson 2012: 175).
Given this paper’s scope, we were unable to verify the method and theoretical
framework’s usefulness in analyzing long-term, routinized practices. We found this approach to be useful when it is possible to study moments of change in relation power relations. When both power relations and social practices are well-established over time, and the shifts in actions and reflections are not visible nor explicit, this kind of analysis is less evident.We posit that such an approach could also be applied to other community development studies, where questions around the tension between self-determination and collective action are central. To conclude, given the growing interest in eco-communities worldwide, we
encourage more studies on the relation between social practices in eco-villages and forms of (dis)empowerment that shed light on how living in such spaces might contribute to
‘sustainable wellbeing’, or meeting human needs in light of environmental issues including the climate crisis (Gough 2017). A perspective on human need satisfaction could help to further our understanding of what needs are being satisfied in an ecovillage, such as a need for participation in society, autonomy in decision-making, critical thinking, and health, among others.
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