The veteran sports journalist David Miller once wrote: “Size has become so inflated that everything, now more urgently than ever, needs reducing.”

He wasn’t talking about packaging or portion sizes or SUVs. No, he was talking in 1988 about the Seoul Olympics. It doesn’t seem like much has changed on that front then, does it? The quote caught my attention as my thoughts were turning to some of the incongruities that now seem hard-wired into our modern world as a result of the obsession with size. I chanced upon it during a reread of Leopold Kohr’s The Inner City, a collection of articles that articulate the virtues of the small scale within a complex urban situation.

I am thinking particularly about how one of the effects of bigness is to reduce the ability to control and influence. We can all think of examples where we feel unable to influence because of our smallness in the face of something bigger and complex; whether it be the frustration felt on the end of a phone to a faceless corporation’s call centre or a small business trying to pick its way through a raft of legislation to make sure it is compliant.

Sometimes this phenomenon manifests itself in unpalatable ways. Consider this: it was recently reported that a global economic elite of around 100,000 people have squirrelled away £13 trillion pounds in assets in offshore tax havens well away from the legitimate demands of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. In the meantime, here in taxpaying Britain, if a small business misses the deadline for its employers’ PAYE bill by even one day, it gets a call or a knock at the door from an HMRC inspector. Is it a question of a misplaced priority or is it that the size and complexity of the tax evasion schemes make it easier for officialdom to target the small person?

Closer to home in the resources world, our smaller-scale social enterprises and community groups often find themselves battling in the face of big procurements that make it hard for them to get a toe-hold into public sector contracts for materials collection and reuse. Equally, they may find themselves wrestling with regulators over the blanket application of, for example, compost standards that were designed to eliminate poor practice, not stifle localcommunity innovation.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the same world, officialdom seems reluctant to legislate well in the face of some large business interests. I am thinking about the resistance of Defra to determine clear quality standards for the output of materials from MRFs, instead seeming to prefer to codify a system that will continue to allow many thousands of tonnes of recyclables to be processed at variable quality levels and possibly exported illegally for further sorting in sub-standard conditions – all in the name of improving our recycling rates. It will also continue to make it harder for UK manufacturers using recovered materials to maintain competitiveness as they deal with inconsistent and poor-quality material coming into a quality manufacturing process. We are told that there is no need to intervene as the market is being satisfied under present arrangements, and yet many see this as one area where more regulation can actually benefit the UK green economy, both in terms of jobs created and resources used more efficiently at home and abroad.

The big solution to recycling – big wheeled bins, bigMRFs, big containerships full of recyclables – doesn’t really seem to be working (at least not in the interests of UK recyclers and reprocessors), but is revered and preserved by officialdom. The small solution (or at least one part of it) provided by local communities wanting to take more control of their resource stream has constant barriers put in its way by the same officialdom.

The transition to a green economy is going to take some doing. Trouble is, the small people aren’t in charge of enough of the big decisions at the moment. The time has come for officialdom to be sent on a crash course of reading – the originator of ‘small is beautiful’ Leopold Kohr (and E F Schumacher, of course) would do for a start – and maybe pass over on the invitation to visit the world’s largest MRF!