Watchet + Onion Collective

Onion Collective, a social enterprise working to tackle social, cultural and environmental injustice in Watchet, Somerset, is collaborating with Hilary Cottam and community entrepreneurs and professional storytellers around the UK to conduct a project on the idea of ‘attachment economics’ - that is, an understanding of economics which perceives attachments to place, to people, and through time to be crucial to the existence of community, and to forge connections between that community and the economy. 

In collaboration with diverse partners within Watchet and across the country, Onion Collective are writing a book about this transformative and inclusive approach to the economy, bringing together between its covers ideas about the reformation and reclamation of economics by way of values such as curiosity, compassion and solidarity. They have also been working with the team at Moral Imaginations  to explore community narratives of the next economy through imagination labs, using multi-media experiential journeys, sound, live artwork, group work and embodied imagination practices to create a shared, immersive experience. 

The economic power of community and its constituent attachments is often not taken  seriously in the mainstream, and many consider it to be inherently insular, reactionary, and backwards-looking. And yet, as Onion Collective Director Jessica Prendergast notes, it has been communities who, facing the threat of the pandemic, have proved themselves “endlessly powerful — adaptive, kind, enveloping, but also fierce in [their] compassion.” The social infrastructure which is built on attachments is crucial to enabling this kind of powerful, moral community response.

In many ways, attachment economics builds on ideas about the commons developed by Elinor Ostrom in the mid- to late-20th century and practiced for centuries, if not millennia, by communities around the world to manage their relationships with each other and to their places across astonishingly long periods of time. By exploring new ways to understand the commons within the context of an emergent ‘fourth sector’ of community-led organisations imagining new futures for themselves and their communities, this project is doing vital work to expand the horizons of the commons and to bring about a more democratic, regenerative and moral economy.

You can learn about the Onion Collective here, read more about attachment economics from Onion Collective’s director Jessica Prendergast here.