The modern hyper-separation of economy from ecology has severed the ties that people have with environments and species that sustain life. A first step towards strengthening resilience at a human scale involves appreciating, caring for and repairing the longstanding ecological relationships that have supported life over the millennia. The capacity to appreciate these relationships has, however, been diminished by a utilitarian positioning of natural environments by economic science. Ecologists have gone further in capturing the interdependence of economies and ecologies with the concept of socio-ecological resilience. Of concern, however, is the persistence of a vision of an economy ordered by market determinations in which there is no role for ethical negotiation between humans and with the non-human world. This paper reframes economy–ecology relations, resituating humans within ecological communities and resituating non-humans in ethical terms. It advances the idea of community economies (as opposed to capitalist economies) and argues that these must be built if we are to sustain life in the Anthropocene. The argument is illustrated with reference to two construction projects situated in ‘Monsoon Asia’.

Across the globe, groups are experimenting with initiatives to create alternatives to the dominant food system. What role might research play in helping to strengthen and multiply these initiatives? In this paper we discuss two research projects in Australia and the Philippines in which we have cultivated hybrid collectives of academic researchers, lay researchers and various non-human others with the intention of enacting community food economies. We feature three critical interactions in the “hybrid collective research method”: gathering, which brings together those who share concerns about community food economies; reassembling, in which material gathered is deliberatively rebundled to amplify particular insights; and translating, by which reassembled ideas are taken up by other collectives so they may continue to “do work”. We argue that in a climate-changing world, the hybrid collective research method fosters opportunities for a range of human and non-human participants to act in concert to build community food economies.

Minority world consumers are being asked to rethink about their I-ness fixations and the individualism apparent in community food practice. Meanwhile, poor and economically marginalised in the majority world are prioritising civic we-ness and taking collective responsibility for meeting local food needs. In Mindanao in the Philippines, a municipality-wide communal gardening project is feeding malnourished children in schools, supporting poor families in self-provisioning and generating income and employment opportunities for volunteer gardeners. As such, it is benefiting the individual households and the community simultaneously. Of interest is how different actors within this project “successfully” negotiate I-ness and civic we-ness in ways that achieve desired outcomes such as reduced malnutrition. In this paper, I examine the ethical economic decision making of various actors within the Opol Food Project in Mindanao. I reveal how economic decisions are generating social surplus, creating and sustaining commons and building a community-based food economy. I also demonstrate the valuable role that local government can play in enabling and cultivating civic we-ness and in building a different food future.