Why does SONEC matter?
The metacrisis and toxic power
We have multiple crises in our society: environmental, social, and economic.
These include climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, migration, war, prejudice, disinformation, polarisation, rapid economic change, poverty, wealth inequality, oligarchy/kleptocracy…
These crises reinforce one another. Often, people try to solve one in a way that makes another worse. Because they are all connected, we call them a “metacrisis”.
Fundamentally, these problems are created by human power — they are created by the way we go about trying to meet our needs and accomplish our goals.
When we feel helpless or selfish, when we are driven by fear and greed, we tend to act in ways that harm others, and often (especially long term) harm ourselves as well. This is what we call Toxic Power.
To solve this metacrisis, we must replace Toxic Power with Healthy Power in every community, organisation, and network.
How does SONEC solve these interlocking problems of toxic power?
By making sure that every voice is heard, and that the organisations that are active in every neighbourhood — businesses, charities, governments, small voluntary associations — are connected to one another and led by the needs of the people who live there.
By ensuring that organisations connected to these Sociocratic Neighbourhood Circles are aware of the opportunities offered by sociocratic governance, cooperative ownership, and similar ways of operating with healthy power.
By ensuring that the networks that connect organisations and communities are aligned around global goals and local needs, and responsive to changing circumstances as people, communities, and our world change.
Healthy power in communities, networks, and organisations
Healthy power is power (the ability to know what matters to us and create the results that matter) that results in more power and wellbeing for all the people, communities, organisations, and ecosystems involved. This stands in contrast to toxic power, which depletes the power and/or wellbeing of some or all participants, often including the person or group exercising it.
Over the last ten years, we have identified three qualities that allow the exercise of power to be healthy: it is circular, fluid, and consensual. Circular means that we lead one another in feedback loops of mutual influence; it’s different from the myths of linear or flat hierarchies. Fluid means that positions of influence are temporary and emerge from personal initiative and systemic need; it stands in contrast to aristocracy or modern capitalist wealth. And Consensual means that it’s optional to participate; we’re neither tricked nor coerced to join in or comply.
There are real communities and organisations that provide examples of this kind of power. The Cooperative movement, Sociocracy, the Neighbourhood Parliaments and Sociocratic Neighbourhod Circles movement have all been demonstrating that healthy power works better than toxic power in the real world.
In fact, we came up with a system of organising from the neighbourhood up that has the potential to solve all of the world's big problems. Of course, we didn't come up with this ourselves: we brought together patterns of organising that have been developed by millions of people over the past several decades, patterns such as cooperative ways of owning things together, sociocratic ways of (self)organising, the Internal Family Systems model of internal and relational transformation, Asset Based Community Development and Collective Impact Networks... You can find some of this documented at https://sonec.org/. Look for the handbook!
SONEC history
The Sociocratic Neighbourhood Circles model was developed by a trans-European research partnership of 9 organisations in 7 countries, as a way to translate what worked well in the Neighbourhood Parliaments movement in India.
In the 1970s, Father Edwin Maria John launched the Neighbourhood Parliaments movement in Tamilnadu, one of the states of southern India.
In the 1980s, the movement spread to Kerala (launched by the Kudumbashree organsiation). In the 1990s it went India-wide. In the 2000s the Neighbourhood Parliaments began including circles for children, the Children’s Parliaments. In the 2010s, the lead organisers and teachers of the movement began teaching Sociocracy as the core form of deliberative and representative governance for Neighbourhood Parliaments.
In 2020, we launched the SONEC project, researching ways to translate the experience of hundreds of thousands of communities in India to patterns of organising that work well in Europe and North America. In 2022 we published our handbook.
In 2023 we incorporated SONEC WISE CIC, to serve Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England in developing our local version of the SONEC model. As a partner organisation of CTRL Shift, we are working with partners across Eire and the UK to serve the neighbourhoods, organisations and networks that are building a world that works for all of us, starting where we live and work.