Post-Partisan Pathways

Post-Partisan Pathways is a practitioner-oriented framework for working across political, cultural, and worldview difference in times of institutional strain, ecological limits, and fractured sensemaking.

It emerged from years of food systems, place-based, and community organizing work, where familiar political narratives increasingly failed to explain lived reality. On the ground, people were not primarily divided by ideology. They were navigating overlapping pressures: economic precarity, institutional breakdown, role loss, identity threat, and information fragmentation, often all at once.

This framework responds to that terrain.

Rather than attempting to resolve disagreement through persuasion or consensus, Post-Partisan Pathways focuses on building capacity for cooperation around shared material stakes such as food, water, land, housing, care, and safety, while maintaining clear boundaries against domination, dehumanization, and extractive harm.

Post-Partisan Pathways does not assume shared worldviews, cosmologies, or epistemologies. People understand land, authority, responsibility, and interdependence in profoundly different ways. This framework does not seek to resolve those differences through argument. It focuses on creating material and relational conditions where cooperation is possible despite them, and where new ways of seeing may emerge through lived experience rather than persuasion.

Why This Framework Now

Post-partisan practice does not step away from power or justice; it asks how power is built and constrained when familiar political channels are unreliable. Across the political spectrum, exhaustion, falling trust, and institutional overload signal a growing mismatch between inherited political frameworks and present conditions. Many approaches assume stable institutions, shared facts, and sufficient material security to support deliberation and reform. In many communities, those conditions no longer reliably hold.

Post-Partisan Pathways is grounded in the recognition that:

• People are shaped less by left–right ideology than by material stress, uncertainty, and identity disruption

• Persuasion often backfires under conditions of threat

• Cooperation becomes possible when agency, dignity, and shared responsibility are restored

• Complex systems require adaptive capacity, not ideological purity

This work does not offer a universal solution or a new political identity. It offers practical orientation for acting with integrity and effectiveness under constraint.

What Post-Partisan Practice Offers

Post-partisan practice builds the conditions for collaboration when agreement is unlikely or impossible. It does so by emphasizing:

• Shared material stakes as grounding reference points

• Economic solidarity as protective infrastructure against precarity

• Discernment and boundaries, not universal bridge-building

• Triage, directing effort where conditions are generative

• Role reconstruction through contribution, not argument

• Meaning and belonging rooted in care and shared work

• Movement ecology, coordinating across strategies rather than collapsing them

• Agency at multiple scales, from local to bioregional

The framework integrates insights from complexity science, peacebuilding, moral psychology, Indigenous and decolonial thought, ecological economics, commons practice, and collapse-aware work, woven together through food systems and community practice.

Who This Is For

This framework is intended for practitioners already navigating threshold conditions, including:

• Food systems, water, housing, and land-based organizers

• Mutual aid networks, cooperatives, and solidarity economy practitioners

• Those working across political or cultural difference on shared material needs

• Facilitators and organizers encountering the limits of dialogue-only approaches

• People seeking frameworks that match the reality of systems strain and uncertainty

If you are looking for reassurance, quick fixes, or a new ideological banner, this may not serve you. If you are working in complexity and need orientation that does not flinch from power, limits, or loss, this work is offered to you.

About the Framework

Post-Partisan Pathways: An Overview is a working document that includes:

• Core principles with illustrative scenarios

• Notes on power, limits, and upstream constraints

• A comparison with other political and civic approaches

• A curated, annotated bibliography spanning multiple disciplines

The framework is robust enough to use now and alive enough to evolve through practice, critique, and shared learning.

About the Author

Nicole Negowetti is the founder of Food For Us and a practitioner-scholar focused on democratic resilience, economic solidarity, and collaborative, place-based governance. She comes to this work through nearly two decades in food systems as a lawyer, educator, policy advocate, and facilitator, and through direct experience with the limits of policy reform, dialogue, and institutional stability under conditions of crisis.

An Invitation

Post-Partisan Pathways is not a finished theory. It is a working synthesis shaped by practice and dialogue.

If you are experimenting with cooperation across difference, building economic solidarity, organizing around shared material stakes, or navigating governance under conditions of volatility, Nicole welcomes conversation.

Contact: negowetti@gmail.com
Shorter essays: https://foodforus.substack.com