Lakabe: The Three-Step Decision Practice

The three-step decision practice of Lakabe, an ecovillage of around 50 people in the Pyrenees of Navarra, Spain, where major decisions are processed across three separate meetings (emotional, logical, community impact) developed and refined over four decades.

Lakabe sits in the Arce-Artzibar valley in Navarra, in the Spanish Pyrenees. The village was abandoned in the 1960s during the wave of rural depopulation that emptied much of mountain Spain. In 1980 it was squatted by a group of young people from the Spanish conscientious objection movement, who refused military service and were looking for a way to build life outside the state's framework.

Around 50 people now live there. There is no leader. Homes and economy are shared. Food and basic supplies are pooled. Resources from food to finances are held in common.

The constitutional practice the community has developed over four decades is the three-step decision structure. Major community decisions are processed across three separate meetings:

The first meeting is emotional. Feelings about the question are surfaced and acknowledged. No decision is taken. The purpose is to make visible the affective layer that would otherwise distort the logical conversation.

The second meeting is logical. The analysis is worked through: the facts, the trade-offs, the implications, the alternatives. The emotional layer surfaced in the first meeting is held in awareness, not relitigated.

The third meeting is community impact. The decision's effect on collective life is weighed, and the decision is taken.

Separating these three layers across distinct meetings, with time between, is the procedural innovation. Most consensus practices try to hold all three in a single meeting and accept the costs (long meetings, decisions distorted by unprocessed feeling, decisions made before the impact is fully understood). Lakabe pulls them apart in time. The three-step process is now taught and adapted across the European ecovillage network and is one of the documented contributions of Lakabe to the sociocratic literature.

For a researcher building a comparative library, Lakabe is the case where the constitution lives in the procedural shape of the assembly itself, refined over four decades of practice. The text is the meeting cycle.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is looking for a consensus practice that is less procedural than formal sociocracy but more structured than open discussion, here is what others have done and where the door is.

Lakabe, in Navarra, Spain, has been running a three-step decision practice for more than 40 years. A proposal goes to the group. There is a period of silence for individual reflection. Then voices are heard. The practice has evolved continuously with the same community, in the same place, since 1980. The 60 or so people who live there now did not borrow it from a manual. They developed it together over decades of collective life.

Other long-running Spanish communal experiments, particularly those connected to the Las Casas Libres network, have worked with variations of consensus-based decision-making in comparable contexts: small groups, rural settings, long time horizons.

Quaker sense-of-the-meeting is the oldest version of this structural logic in regular documented use. The proposal is heard, the group holds silence, the clerk reads the sense of the room rather than counting votes. Lakabe's three-step is not derived from Quaker practice, but the underlying architecture is the same: silence as a functional element, not just a pause.

Dynamic Governance and consent-based decision processes codify a more formal version of a similar intention. They are easier to learn from a manual and easier to teach to new members. The trade-off is that they are more procedural, which helps some groups and frustrates others.

Where the door is:

• Lakabe receives visitors. Spending time there is the most direct way to understand how the three-step practice operates as part of daily life rather than as a formal meeting protocol.
• GEN Europe can serve as an introduction point to Lakabe and to the Spanish ecovillage and communal living networks more broadly.
• You can run the silence-before-speaking step in any meeting your group is already running, today, without adopting a new system. Put a proposal on the table, ask for 30 seconds of silence before anyone speaks, then open the floor. Notice what changes.

One caution: Lakabe's three-step works partly because the people in the room share 40 years of accumulated context. They know each other's histories, they know which silences mean assent and which mean discomfort, and they know how to read the room in ways that take years to develop. New communities that borrow the practice will be borrowing the structure without the context. The practice will work differently, and probably less fluently, until your community has built its own version of that shared history. That is not a reason not to try it. It is a reason not to be discouraged if it feels clumsy at first.