Abstract
Abstract A movement is gaining traction in New Zealand around timebanks, networks of support in which members exchange favors such as gardening, lifts to the supermarket, pet care, language lessons, career advice, or smartphone tutorials. An online currency is used to track these exchanges, with one hour of work earning one time credit. While each transaction may seem commonplace, when timebanks flourish they work to reshape motivations and opportunities for engaging in labor, and relocalize networks of solidarity, friendship, and resources. Participants reported examples of developing unexpected friendships and renewed enthusiasm for a larger collective project of building alternatives to the currently dominant growth-addicted economic model. These processes contribute to the establishment of foundational, mostly small-scale networks that are enjoyable to use in the here and now, while also creating the potential for these systems to be scaled up or linked together in response to greater economic, ecological, and social changes. Timebank developers in New Zealand are negotiating several structural challenges in their attempts to bring these networks to fruition. This article shares results of ethnographic research amongst seven North Island timebanks, and offers suggestions for future research in this area. Keywords: timebank, community currency, activism, degrowth, New Zealand
Highlights
The maxim "We have what we need, if we use what we have" attributed to the founder of the contemporary timebanking movement, Edgar Cahn (2004: xv), is a popular phrase repeated in the websites and brochures of timebanks across New Zealand
Most of the participants I encountered during this study described their primary goal as building larger networks of solidarity, neighborliness, friendship and support, with the timebank infrastructure and currency viewed as a means of achieving these outcomes
As Kallis and March (2015: 362) explain, degrowth is an expansion and continuation of practices that have long been underway, "... degrowth reads the capitalist present as full of latent elements from a noncapitalist past, such as the gift economies of barter markets or the commons of urban gardens; it is these that carry the seeds for a different future." Many of the participants interviewed for this research had followed the rise and fall of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), Green Dollars, and timebanks in other countries, and were conscious of the need to learn from these examples, while adapting their projects to suit New Zealand contexts
Summary
The maxim "We have what we need, if we use what we have" attributed to the founder of the contemporary timebanking movement, Edgar Cahn (2004: xv), is a popular phrase repeated in the websites and brochures of timebanks across New Zealand It sums up neatly a key component of timebanking philosophy, by calling on members of post-industrial societies to become more creative in using and distributing the abundance of manufactured resources already produced, and the existing skills and talents of community members. Timebanks have been established through iterative cycles of development in many New Zealand locales, amongst communities that have tested, evaluated, and modified other forms of community currencies These processes have led to the creation of foundational, mostly small scale networks that are enjoyable to use and experiment with in the here and but that contribute to wider strategies of laying foundations for broader systems. The closing sections of this article consider the wider educational benefits of timebanking, and areas for future research
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