According to the website relocalize.net:
"Relocalization is a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of Relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to dramatically improve environmental conditions and social equity".
"The Relocalization strategy developed in response to the environmental, social, political and economic impacts of global over-reliance on cheap energy. Our dependence on cheap non-renewable fossil fuel energy has produced climate change, the erosion of community, wars for oil-rich land and the instability of the global economic system".
A parallel movement in the UK is called "Transition Towns" and additional information on that movement can be found at www.transitionculture.org. These movements share a pressing concern over issues such as peak oil, climate change, and peak resources.
Our local communities have, over the past 60 years, transitioned from a fairly independant model of local self-sufficiency, to a model nearly completely dependant on outside (often global) inputs of energy, food, medicine, entertainment, and other essentials and non-essentials. This leaves our communities particularly vulnerable to disruptions in these systems of goods and services. Each individual as well as each small community has less and less influence and impact on the offerings of this global marketplace given its relatively small scale compared with the whole.
If the new model of democracy has become money being the equivilency of votes, our small communities have very few votes as a percentage of the global marketplace. Relocalization will allow local communities to regain much of this lost influence on economic futures while transitioning to more sustainable lifestyles, governance, re-developing the lost sense of community so eloquently noted in Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, and re-establishing control over numerous facets of community life lost over the past helf-century.
Is relocalization in a vacuum enough to ensure a better, more sustainable culture in the future? Perhaps even the most ardent and focused relocalization efforts may not stave off the equivalent of a collapse comparable to that portrayed historically in Jared Diamond's book Collapse of 2005 nor worst case scenarios described in Kunstler's The Long Emergency. But without it, these scenarious are far more likely, far sooner.