Making Sense of the Alternative Highway
By Stephanie Guirand & Sara Suzuki
The 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings uplifted the abolitionist movement agenda to create alternatives to carceral approaches to public safety. The 2020 uprisings, like the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings before them, seem to follow a cyclical pattern: state violence, communities build alternatives, repeat. But where did the previous alternative public safety programs go?
Image drawn by Sara Suzuki, inspired by Paula X. Rojas, Sista II Sista *
The diagram above may illustrate what seems to be happening. Not only are we not disrupting the highway of colonialism and capitalism, but the alternative highway is stuck in a cycle. There are no entry points and no paths forward. If we want alternatives to thrive, we need to understand why our alternatives disappear.
At a community book launch about Newham Copwatch (1980-2016), a panelist said, “if only we could have hung on for another four years, you youngins wouldn’t have to build it all from scratch again.” These words snapped everything into focus for us.
Things Fall Apart
There are external factors that contribute to the disappearance of alternatives. The Black Panther's demise was coordinated by the federal government through the FBI’s counterintelligence program. Other organizations that facilitated alternative approaches to public safety ran out of material and financial resources, like Newham Copwatch and the Cambridge Community Response Team (CCRT) (Harvey et al, 2007). In addition to losing financial resources, CCRT’s involvement with the police lost them community trust. So, alliances with harmful institutions can cause organizations that are alternatives to fall apart.
And sometimes organizations get co-opted. Take Freedom House in Pittsburgh, PA, who began by training young Black men in the community to operate as emergency transport responders. But when Freedom House was later incorporated into the city government, their services became hyper-professionalized and the men who were the original responders were underqualified for the positions they initiated. In the process of hyper-professionalizing, Freedom House government edition alienated the marginalized community Freedom House was created to serve (Hazzard, 2023). So, co-optation and hyper-professionalization can cause an alternative to dissolve.
In addition to these kinds of external factors that social movements confront through organizing and building community power, there are also internal factors that movements must pay careful attention to, in order for alternatives to be sustained long term. For the remainder of this article, we will focus on these internal factors.
How Do Alternatives Fall Apart?
We would like to propose three key internal factors—structure, communication, and accountability—that are fundamental in examining why alternatives fall apart. We offer some pop culture references to highlight how these internal factors can result in the dissolution of alternatives.
On The Good Place (S3 E10), there is a depiction of progressive organizations dealing with missteps in two ways, either by creating long, burdensome investigatory committees, or by the person who commits the missteps stepping down and leaving. This creates a time suck, where it is difficult to focus on productive tasks, and/or it creates a revolving door of people stepping out, leaving the remaining people in an organization over-burdened while just trying to stay afloat. The productive people are putting out fires, building quick fixes instead of foundational infrastructure, wearing themselves out until they burn out and need to leave too. This dynamic is often an issue for those building and trying to maintain alternatives.
On Silo (S1, E3), engineers fought for the opportunity to fix the core generators. In order to do that, the whole Silo needed to be without electricity for hours. Everyone knows that things will eventually fall apart if they don't do anything about it. But alas, they lack what it takes to hold together long enough for a substantive fix: they don't have the communication infrastructure and the trust needed to get buy-in and enact a plan. So too with alternatives. Every alternative has a wonky makeshift fix in its organizational structure that originated as a quick fix to a problem long ago. These wonky structures inevitably give out, and everything falls apart.
On Parks and Recreation there is a government employee who doesn't believe in the mission of his own department and goes out of his way to prevent productivity. Alternatives are often ladened with people who don't buy into or lose faith in the work. People who have one foot in and one foot out, and prevent productivity and meaningful work from taking place. Alternatives that work by consensus or community-based processes are halted by the actions of these individuals, who may not even be aware of or intentional about what they’re doing.
Dr. Death dramatized the true story of a doctor who operated on 37 people over a period of two years. Thirty-three were severely harmed and three died. His colleagues saw red flags, but without strong, functional systems of accountability, investigations to uncover and meaningfully address the situation did not take place. The case of Dr. Death is important because a number of his colleagues attempted to use the whistle-blowing system to draw attention to the potential dangers in his work, but the system failed. In alternatives, there are commonly a number of individuals who are under-trained, act in poor faith, or otherwise commit harm. Thus, alternatives need an accountability structure and communication mechanisms to acknowledge and address the harm caused by these individuals, so the damage can be repaired.
So what can alternatives do to prevent the kinds of problems illustrated above?
A Robust Internal Structure for Alternatives
Building lasting alternatives will require a sustained investment of time and energy into the elements that strengthen core internal workings. Alternatives can draw on the work of those who have studied how systems, particularly economic systems, can be sustainable while still maintaining a horizontal power structure and valuing self-determination.
Communication
Political economist Elinor Ostrom, who studies the phenomena of the “tragedy of the commons,” discusses multiple processes of communication that can overcome the distrust and lack of cooperation that lead to the failure of a system (Ostrom, 2000). Ostrom refers to dialogue that breaks down uncertainties and information asymmetries as “cheap talk” that is immensely valuable for building social norms, trust, and opportunities for collaborative, collective action. Indigenous scholar Jorge Santiago, whose work outlines the principles of an alternative solidarity economy (such as those that emerged from the Zapatista movement) that can operate outside of a capitalist model rooted in exploitation and resource annihilation, also emphasizes the importance of dialogue rooted in respect, with room for a plurality of diverse opinions (Santiago, 2021).
This scholarship underscores that alternatives need to come together regularly to share, assess, and plan. This is how alternatives can finally break out of the cyclical alternative highway. This process of meeting to review and share needs to take place within organizations, within ecosystems, but also nationally and internationally, and funders need to support this essential work.
Systems of Accountability
Accountability is essential for any organization, so we need to document and resource systems of accountability within alternatives. Intentional systems for holding entities within an alternative accountable to each other might incorporate ideas from Ostrom such as “graduated sanctions,” which ensures that violations of norms within an alternative are met with balanced, fair, and well-established countermeasures. This type of enforcement can build trust, as it is based on an assumption that all individuals need scaffolding in order to follow rules and practices, and considers that individuals may need to be informed of how they are making mistakes in the first place (Wall, 2017). Santiago’s (2021) list of principles for a solidarity economy also includes “a series of internal laws” that “can only be arranged and agreed upon by the partners who will follow them.”
Drawing on the recent literature on co-governance (Palmquist, 2023), we propose that for alternatives to remain accountable to community members, resources need to be put toward holding the vast bureaucracy of government accountable. This approach requires careful strategizing and relationship-building — the line between co-governance and co-optation and other efforts to destabilize alternatives is very thin. We should learn from past efforts to build accountability — like those cited here — that have studied the institutions wielding power instead of ignoring them.
Finally, we need to better document and share our systems of accountability for alternatives, including internal protocols and processes. Having accounts of what worked and what didn’t work for others would allow emerging alternatives to have a foundation to build on, rather than reinventing the wheel after each instance of police violence and the uprisings that follow. These examples from our movement predecessors can inform our present and help us break free from the cycle of the alternative highway.
Structure
Structure(lessness) is perhaps the most common catalyst for the dissolution of alternatives. Organizations need to have access to resources to evaluate and strategically improve their organizational structure. We encourage organizations to review the Creative Intervention Toolkit, the Interrupting Criminalization Help Desk and Just Practice. When we look to past approaches to make the governance of commons sustainable, we often see structures that are polycentric in nature, with multiple centers of decision-making (Carlisle & Gruby, 2017; Ostrom, 2008). We may even consider these multiple nuclei as a fractal, as described by sociologist Melanie Brazzell in their research on the shapes and structures of movements (Brazzell, 2021).
We need more transparency in our organizational structures. We are aware that making the structures of these alternatives visible may provide those with malicious intent some insight into how to disrupt our organizations. However, transparency will inspire trust in alternatives, by revealing the time and effort spent building these structures, and by empowering the communication necessary to gather input from stakeholders at every level of the organization. It will also make structures visible to others who are also trying to build strong foundations for their burgeoning organizations.
Alternatives need more guidance around how to build sustainable structures. We encourage existing and emerging alternatives to find a consultant to help facilitate and track the growth of your organization. A good consultant can be an excellent facilitator for developing new structures, managing their implementation, and evaluating their effectiveness. What is truly essential is for funders to recognize the value in funding external consultants to develop alternatives sustainably. Connecting organizations with the right consultants would not only advance each organization individually, but could weave networks of alternatives and their stories together, strengthening the collective and pushing new knowledge and practice forward, breaking us out of the cycle of the alternative highway.
Conclusion
We in the alternatives movement want to create millions of experiments. But what good is an experiment if we don’t document, share, and learn from our findings? There are lessons to be learned in the lifespans and cycles of movements past. Every generation, there seems to be an event of tremendous violence and harm that spurs the masses toward discussion and formation of alternatives. What is needed now is to have transparent structures, strong systems of communication, clear and accessible mechanisms of accountability, and a plan for assessing and engaging with challenges and changing circumstances as they come. This is how we can finally break through the cycle of the alternative highway and build effective and lasting alternatives.
Stephanie Guirand is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London in the Sociology Department. Her thesis project focuses on housing transience as experienced by African-descended men. Stephanie works as a Senior Researcher for The Black Response Cambridge (TBR). TBR is an abolitionist research and advocacy organization. Stephanie is leading TBR’s examination of the landscape of alternative public safety programs and the links between policing and material/welfare policy.
Sara Suzuki is a Senior Researcher at CIRCLE, where she works on projects that explore how organizations, institutions, and systems embedded within and across communities can support and sustain youth civic engagement in all of its forms. In particular, she focuses on how young people enact sociopolitical reflection and action (critical consciousness) to challenge systems of oppression and bring about social change. She previously volunteered as the Development Coordinator for Cambridge HEART, an alternative emergency response team in Cambridge, MA that provides a non-carceral option for community safety.
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* We first became aware of this image when a mentor suggested we read this essay Abolition Feminism and Jumping Scale: Transformative Justice as a Way of Life written by Andrea Smith. In the essay, the image is credited to Paula X. Rojas and the organization Sista II Sista. In not wanting to perpetuate a cycle of harm we choose not to cite the essay that this image first appeared in.
References
Brazzell, M. (2021). Building Structure Shapes: What Structure Reveals About Strategy from Six Movement Organizations in Transition. Realizing Democracy.
Carlisle, K., & Gruby, R. L. (2017). Polycentric Systems of Governance: A Theoretical Model for the Commons. Policy Studies Journal, 47(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12212
Harvey, M. R., Mondesir, A. V., & Aldrich, H. (2007). Fostering resilience in traumatized communities: A community empowerment model of intervention. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 14(1-2), 265-285.
Hazzard, K. (2022). American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics. Hachette Books.
Jorge Santiago Santiago. (2021). Political Solidarity Economy. Gatekeeper Press.
Ostrom, E. (2000). Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14(3), 137–158. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.14.3.137
Ostrom, E. (2008). Polycentric Systems as One Approach for Solving Collective-Action Problems. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1936061
Palmquist, B. (2023, March 23). Building Bottom-Up Democracy Through Co-Governance. The Forge. https://forgeorganizing.org/article/building-bottom-democracy-through-co-governance
Wall, D. (2017). Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals : Cooperative Alternatives Beyond Markets and States. Pluto Press.
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