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individual opportunities and enabling the 'free and equal' interplay of
social forces (Hill 2007).
As an alternative, and in the face of the intransigence of national
economic policy makers, many marginal societies are moving to
strengthen their collective capacities to govern themselves, shape their
productive systems, and manage their environments; in the process they
are reevaluating the contributions of their traditional activities to their
well-being while also exploring ways to forge new strategies for their
advancement and the protection of their ecosystems. They are focusing
on inherited knowledge and their inherited productive systems as sources
of wealth and means to consolidate their cohesiveness as societies, while
incorporating the latest technological and scientifi c advances, becoming
able innovators and managers and creating new governance capacities
consistent with the demands for negotiating with regional, national and
international institutions. Their proposals for creating viable strategies
require local control of geographic and political space, involving alliances
among peoples searching for new responses to the global forces of
marginality and exclusion.
A new post-development policy framework is being formulated to
help design the appropriate responses for reversing past tendencies of
impoverishment and environmental destruction. Traditional organizations
and knowledge systems are generating innovative forms of collaboration
and production, of political consolidation and social collaboration. The
experiences briefl y mentioned below offer an attempt to explain why it is
necessary to expand beyond the improvement of individual capabilities and
the exercise of individual freedoms, if societies are to liberate themselves
from the globalized straitjackets imposed by international economic
integration with its imperatives of 'free' trade and markets. Although
individual improvement and self-betterment continue to be signifi cant,
we focus on the primacy of collective determinations of the worth of their
activities and the focus on collective entitlements, assuring the viability of
community processes for individual participation.
This approach to community welfare requires new forms of collaboration
and the forging of alliances that colonial practices and national politics
discouraged or even prevented for decades if not centuries. The reasons
for this repression are rooted in the autonomy that such practices might
have generated for the communities, along with the possibility that the
benefi ciaries could reduce or even prevent the capture of surplus by outside
investors or political groups. The methods used by these communities to
produce the goods needed for their survival and reproduction refl ect an
accumulation of knowledge of the workings of the natural world through
the centuries; they developed interesting and innovative solutions to
complex problems, appreciated by local communities worldwide and
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