What is Cosmolocalism?
Some ideas shape into sharp strategies. Others, over time, wear into ways of being. Cosmolocalism is one of those rare concepts that stretches from the practical to the poetic, from open-source design to planetary ethics.
You might first encounter cosmolocalism under a more utilitarian name: Design Global, Manufacture Local, a phrase rooted in open-source design and peer production. In its earliest articulation, this principle combined the openness of globally shared knowledge with the resilience of local production. The idea was simple but powerful: when design is open source, creativity becomes shareable. When making happens close to home, it becomes meaningful, contextual, and maintainable. And when production and use are re-entangled in mutual accountability and care, the tired roles of “producer” and “consumer” get reimagined altogether.
But cosmolocalism has evolved beyond its design-and-manufacture origins. It has become a way of thinking, making, and relating – an ethos for regenerating the social and ecological commons. Its more lyrical name signals its deeper invitation: cosmo (universal, shared, planetary) meets local (embodied, rooted, particular). It encourages us to make graceful, intentional moves between the universal and the situated, between shared wisdom and grounded presence.
At its core, cosmolocalism proclaims its character through a simple refrain: small, local, open, connected.
– Small enough to stay accountable.
– Local enough to matter.
– Open enough to be shared.
– Connected enough to learn, grow, and resist in good company.
Cosmolocalism honors the local not as boundary, but as bedrock. The local is sensual, situated, lived. We are always somewhere. Our places shape us, our bodies, our memories, our stories. They carry histories we must contend with and futures we are called to serve.
At the same time, cosmolocalism resists the trap of parochialism. It remembers the cosmos. It invites us to hold our common humanity (indeed, our common animacy and being-ness) in view, to engage across difference, and to cultivate a shared sense of mutual recognition, mutual care, and common responsibility. It knows that we need each other, and not just those who are nearby.
Imagine a constellation of locally rooted communities, exchanging non-material resources, such as wisdom, skills, practices, designs, rituals, remembrances, freely and respectfully. Imagine infrastructures of sharing that are lightweight, privacy-conscious, and attuned to context. Imagine material exchanges happening only as needed, and only when they support mutual thriving – not private profit. That’s cosmolocalism in practice
“Knowledge is light—it should flow freely. Materials are heavy—they should stay close to home.”
— Michel Bauwens
Cosmolocalism offers a quiet but radical alternative to the totalizing forces of globalization that homogenize culture, extract value, and erode the planet’s living systems. And it offers an equally strong rejoinder to the isolationism, nostalgia, or xenophobia that can cling to certain strains of localization. Cosmolocalism slides. It blurs binaries without collapsing difference and distinction. It invites both rootedness and reverence for the beyond.
Some misread cosmolocalism as cosmological, a slip that is more revealing than wrong. It hints at a deeper intuition: that what cosmolocalism offers is not just a strategy for organizing knowledge and production, but a way of orienting ourselves within the cosmos. Cosmological, by contrast, refers to frameworks for understanding the origin, structure, and unfolding of the universe itself—scientific, metaphysical, mythic, or spiritual in scope.
And still others hear an echo of cosmopolitanism, another near-homophone that invites useful contrast. Rooted in the ideal of universal citizenship, cosmopolitanism has long aimed to transcend the confines of nationalism. But its “old” form has been critiqued as abstract, elitist, and unrooted. Privileging a disembodied, placeless humanism that floats above cultural and geographic particularity. Sociologists such as Craig Calhoun argue that cosmopolitanism too often dismisses the deep human need for belonging, and imagines solidarity as something that can be built from law or rationality alone.
“By pairing cosmo with local, we receive a potent reminder: locality is never sealed. It is always vibrating with memory, with myth, with forces beyond its borders.”
By contrast, cosmolocalism grows from a “new cosmopolitanism”. One that does not reject the national or the local, but insists that global ethics must be grounded in place. In this sense, cosmolocalism carries forward the cosmopolitan longing for mutual recognition and planetary care, while rooting those aspirations in the soil of situated life. It is not a withdrawal into localism, nor a dissolving into placeless abstraction, but a dance between the two.
Cosmo comes from the Greek kosmos, originally meaning order, arrangement, or ornament (the root of the word cosmetic), and later signifying the world or the universe as a harmonious whole. Local comes from the Latin locus, meaning “place” is not an abstract space, but a site of situatedness, a lived and felt ground. It gives rise to words like location, locale, and allocate—each suggesting both specificity and orientation. To be local is to be of somewhere in particular: shaped by soil and season, by memory and story.
To be cosmolocal, then, is not merely to participate in global knowledge flows; it is to inhabit our place within a relational universe. When one substitutes the cosmological or the cosmopolitan for cosmolocal, the misreading prompts an insight: cosmolocal already wants to hold the local within a wider field, one that is not only planetary in scale, but also potentially sacred, metaphysical, or cosmically entangled.
By pairing cosmo with local, we receive a potent reminder: locality is never sealed. It is always vibrating with memory, with myth, with forces beyond its borders. This enables us to understand the local not just as a point on a map or a node within a network, but as a time-space placement within the wider, always-dynamic order of things. It allows us to be both geographically distributed and meaningfully situated within a relational universe. To be cosmolocal is to be of a place and also of the whole. It allows us to hold locality as sacred and connect it with care into a wider pattern of mutual recognition and shared becoming.
Distinguishing cosmolocalism and translocalism
-While often used in overlapping contexts, translocalism and cosmolocalism arise from distinct genealogies and carry different implications for how we understand connection, care, and place. Translocalism originates primarily from migration studies, urban geography, and anthropology. It describes the social, cultural, and economic linkages that emerge when people maintain ties across multiple locales, often due to displacement, migration, or transnational community-building. These connections form networks of support, identity, and action that transcend fixed borders. Translocality is especially useful for understanding diasporic experiences and the distributed ways that people navigate multiple belongings. Translocals are often engaged in Edgework and may be holders of otherWisdoms and otherWays that can increase the odds of Surviving the Future. But as a concept, translocalism remains human-centered, largely descriptive, and oriented toward movement. It is the movement of people, stories, and resources between places.
Cosmolocalism, on the other hand and in our usage, is a normative and organizing principle that emerges from the intersection of commons-based peer production, material realities, and post-capitalist imaginaries. It is less about movement between locales (though it does not pathologize such movement) and more about right relationship among them. As we coaxed the concept of cosmolocalism beyond its original context of “design global, manufacture local”, it showed its versatility. Cosmolocalism proved capacious enough to hold situated life and shared knowing. It invites us to think with ecosystems, mycelial networks, ancestral memory, and more-than-human kin as part of the web of shared knowledge and interdependence. Where translocalism maps what is, cosmolocalism points toward what could be: a framework for globally interconnected local autonomy, in which mutual aid, love of limits, and Gaian ethics replace competitive extraction.
For otherWise, this distinction matters. Translocal people (and beings) can be generously embraced in their new homes by cosmolocalists committed to an ethic of being where we are together. (Those practiced in opening themselves to otherWisdoms and otherWays will have a lot less trouble welcoming other people.)
Additionally, translocal networks can describe our existing reality – the persistence and adaptability of bonds across distance. But cosmolocal networks offer us something more: an ethic of presence, an architecture of sharing, and a humble approach to co-creation that is planetary in scope but rooted in place. Such networks resist one-size-fits-all solutions and instead nurture plural, place-based possibilities. Cosmolocalism allows many paths to be walked, many seeds to be planted (and transplanted), many kinds of wisdom to swirl. Translocalism helps us trace the lines; cosmolocalism helps us draw the circle – a shape that holds, reciprocates, and re-members. One that holds the possibility of a commons-rich, post capitalist future shaped by small paths, reciprocal learning, and humble re-configurations.
Cosmolocalism, like post capitalism, does not aspire to be yet another “ism” replacing previous ideologies (though it does emerge in response to globalization and attempted one-worlding of modernity). Rather, it is a conceptual container for plural ways of life-sustaining loosely cohered by a small set of shared values. Values that arise not from abstraction, but from the lived experience of interdependence, creative response to collapse, and place-based care.
When paired, cosmolocalism and post capitalism might help liberate us from the Enlightenment-inflected, rationalist, and colonial impulses to codify and control. Together, they offer an invitation to reinhabit entanglement as a condition, not a problem; as a source of meaning, not a complication. In this way, cosmolocalism and post capitalism are guiding lights and wayfinding instruments for those who pursue entangled liberation.
Cosmolocalism as otherWise’s Theory of Influence
At otherWise, we bring cosmolocalism to life in the realm of learning and transition. We don’t peddle universal solutions. Instead, we offer a network of alternatives—otherwisdoms, otherways—that can be adapted, remixed, deviated from, and made one’s own. We encourage experimentation within and across places, with care—rooted in place, emergent through practice, and shared in trust.
As our founder Nicole Civita wrote previously:
“The remix spun by cosmolocalism encourages us to make some sweet, sliding moves between locality and universality. Its rhythm drives a deep respect for the local as our most important social and ecological sphere; its melody sings of the potential for global networking beyond the logics and narrow incentives of capitalism. Its chorus proclaims its characteristics: small, local, open, and connected.”
otherWise exists as a distributed, place-sensitive learning community. We invite people to be where they are together. To offer their presence, their care, and their creativity to their own communities and ecosystems. At the same time, we remain in conversation across geographies, building bridges through practices of mutual respect and shared inquiry. We link “small path walkers” across the world, cultivating a constellation of mutual support rather than a centralized hub of authority.
This heavy-connection, light-touch approach allows us to share what can flow freely without harm and protect what must remain held, private, or context-bound. It honors the necessary surface tension created by boundaries and the pooling made possible by limits. It lets us ride the recursive swells of generative uncertainty and drift through the shimmering eddies of slipstream crossing—where difference doesn’t collide but glides, overlaps, and gestures toward unexpected synthesis, mutual transformation, or delightful surprise.
“The slipstream is where we stop resisting the flow and begin to feel ourselves carried by something larger than our own effort.”
— Norma Wong
As a cosmolocal network, otherWise shifts its energies between rootedness and reach. We know that ours is not the only way, and that’s precisely why we gather. So that together, we might remember how to live in a world of many worlds.
In the cosmolocal way, we become threads in a weaving. Each strand local, each crossing a point of contact, each pattern a possibility.