The importance of the local in today’s context

In our current political context it is easy to be pessimistic about the possibilities of taking action to change reality. Social movements face serious limitations in their efforts to pressure governments that ignore them. Traditional parties yield to pressure from business lobbies and governments legitimize decision-making spaces created and led by large corporations, where the course of public policies is defined (in what is known as multistakeholderism), and, moreover, reflect ways of doing that are typical of the nineteenth century (representative democracy), instead of adapting to the expectations of people in the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the far-right gains ground with its anti-equality and anti-democratic rhetoric.