| On Babushkas and Postcapitalism: Theorising Diverse Economies from the Global East As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more-than-human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi-sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics. |
| Community Economics and the Social and Solidarity Economy Community Economies (CE) is a key term in the growing interdisciplinary subfield of diverse economies (DE) scholarship, a perspective that continually grew from the pioneering feminist political economy and economic geography scholarship of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006). It defines ‘community’ as a space where humans negotiate the terms of our shared coexistence and in which ‘solidarity’ is one possible disposition. CE and DE may offer Social and Solidarity Economies (SSEs) three important contributions: 1) an open and pluralist concept of both economy and community where humans negotiate the terms of our interdependence; 2) an appreciation for how these negotiations respond to different conditions and places producing different SSEs; 3) an argument for the necessity of extending solidarity that aligns with the cosmologies of many peoples, but has been only recently acknowledged in academic disciplines in depth. |
| Generative Anger: From Social Enterprise to Antagonistic Economies This essay offers conceptual development for thinking diverse economies in terms of their relationship to antagonism. Rather than seeing antagonism as unhelpfully fueling capitalocentric thinking, the essay argues that antagonism can usefully recognize and engage with problematic forms of power and domination. Building on calls for a closer engagement of community-economies thinking with wider anticapitalist praxis, the essay explores how social and solidarity economy (SSE) practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes challenge, and sometimes build alternatives to forms of power that attempt to shape, obstruct, and obliterate attempts to create better worlds. The essay develops conceptualizations of social enterprise, the social economy, and solidarity economies before offering the novel concept of the antagonistic economy, arguably a site from which angry opposition to constraining power relations can generate a more productive politics of possibility. The conception of the antagonistic economy is developed by discussion of taking back labor through recovered factories and land through community land trusts. |
| Alternative currencies: diverse experiments This chapter explores how people wishing to develop creative alternatives to money-as-usual issued by states have experimented with a range of diverse alternative forms of currency such as LETS schemes, time banks, local paper currencies, electronic forms of payment, and more recently, cryptocurrencies. Sometimes these are small, local schemes. Sometimes, such as in Argentina after December 2001, millions use them to survive an economic crisis. These different models of grassroots currency suggest, support and enable very different futures: libertarian, communitarian, hyper capitalist, ecological, inclusive. For diverse economies advocates, they enable people to live ethically, sustainably, prosperously, and with dignity and justice in the Anthropocene. The chapter discusses the implications of different ways of valuating alternative currencies (aligned with money-as-usual, with time, or with something else) and if they should be convertible. It discusses the extent to which an alternative currency should be issued and its use managed, and different geographies of circulation. |
| Independent and small businesses: diversity amongst the 99 per cent of businesses This chapter discusses the contribution of 99 per cent of businesses – independent, small or medium enterprises (SME) – to the project of building just, sustainable and dignified economies for the Anthropocene. Recognizing that place matters in understanding who is likely to be an independent trader or an SME owner, the chapter develops a broader and more inclusive understanding of entrepreneurship as something performed by a wide range of people who see small independent, community-based businesses as vehicles for living as they want to – not just the special, ‘heroic’ entrepreneurs that we all rely on to employ us, as lauded by business schools. It recognizes that many independent traders struggle to get by, and may be reluctant entrepreneurs who have no other choice. But many independent traders and SME owners relish their independence and ability to do things their way, putting their ethical values and commitment to their localities into practice in ways that are more-than-capitalist. |
| Alternative Currencies |
| The business of the Anthropocene? Substantivist and diverse economies perspectives on SME engagement in local low carbon transitions The involvement of private sector actors in low carbon urban transitions is a neglected element of geographical analysis. Drawing on Polanyian, cultural economic geographies and the non-capitalocentric ethics of JK Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies perspective, the paper engages with the wider literature on the engagement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in environmental action, corporate social responsibility and low carbon transitions to develop a substantivist account of the contribution of SMEs to local low carbon transitions. The paper argues that, contra formalist economic analyses of economic rationality, SME owners should not be thought of as uncritical profit maximizers but as actors in favour of positive low carbon futures. Thus the paper argues that Polanyian economic geographies and diverse economies perspectives, which rarely speak to each other, can be drawn together, and concludes with suggestions for future research. |
| 'War Stories’: morality, curiosity, enthusiasm and commitment as facilitators of SME owners’ engagement in low carbon transitions The ‘urban’ has emerged as a key site for policies to reduce greenhouse gasses in order to avoid dangerous climate change, especially given concerns at a lack of action at international and national levels. In cities, the private sector, especially SME owners, are key actors central to driving through emissions reduction at the level of the firm: yet they are often seen as laggards in emissions reduction. Drawing on data collected as a result of a recent Knowledge Exchange programme in Liverpool, UK, and on cultural and diverse economies perspectives, the paper argues that those SME owners can be effective change agents through their mobilisation of what they call ‘war stories’, through which they ‘show and tell’ other perhaps less convinced business people about the changes they have made. |
| Ten Square Miles Surrounded by Reality: Materialising Alternative Economies using Local Currencies This article examines the success of paper-based alternative currencies in facilitating convivial, sustainable localised economies. Based on fieldwork in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, it discusses the capacity of activists to create alternative forms of currency that communicate the organisers’ visions of a localised economy, before examining material practices: for whom do the currencies work, and who struggles to use them? Using insights from a diverse economies perspective, the article argues that we cannot read off the likelihood of an economic actor using the currency from the extent of their local economic embeddedness: economic actors in similar positions respond to the same stimuli in different ways, and local business owners and activists can form productive alliances to develop their shared project. The article concludes by arguing that local currencies should be used more proactively to stimulate new forms of concrete local production to meet locally identified needs. |
| Grassroots localisation? The scalar potential of and limits of the ‘Transition’ approach to climate change and resource constraint This paper engages with the progressive politics of climate change and resource constraint developed by the Transition ‘movement’ which looks to develop a positive local politics of the transition to a low carbon economy and society. At the heart of this politics is a vision of economic localisation rooted in a geographical imaginary of market towns with agricultural hinterlands. Consequently, the question of how the Transition model can be applied in urban settings has not been clear, leading to the implicit assumption that urban Transition initiatives are more complex and difficult. In contrast, this paper argues that the plasticity of Transition politics means that, in some cases, an urban context might be more productive for the development of Transition initiatives because it allows for a greater diversity of political action as well as providing a density of networks and resources that can be critical for the survival of grassroots interventions. |
| Eco-Localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – a sympathetic critique This paper critically but sympathetically examines eco-localisation as a response to ‘peak oil’ and to reduce the emission of CO2 to avoid dangerous climate change. Rather than seeing the politics of climate change and peak oil as in some way ‘post-political’, the paper argues that protagonists of localised economies are developing radical new conceptions of livelihood and economy that directly cut against the logic of growth-based capitalist economic strategies and elite conceptualisations of economic development. Building on development theory, the paper develops a conceptualisation of ‘immanent’ and ‘intentional’ localisation, with the former a simple move by businesses of economic activities that have high transport costs closer to their markets. Advocates of intentional localisation are working more pro actively at grassroots level to develop local solutions to peak oil and climate change based on developing less resource-intensive yet enjoyable and fulfilling livelihoods in more localised economies. In discussing the contested nature of localisation, the paper engages with critiques of eco-localisation from neoliberal advocates and from the left, before concluding that localisation should be seen more as a different calculation of where economic activities would be located, which aims to reduce oil consumption and CO2 emissions, rather than a call for autarky. The paper concludes by arguing that analyses of the scale of economic networks need to pay more attention of the materiality of oil consumption and CO2 emissions, and that scales cannot be seen as socially constructed. |
| Scaling Alternative Economic Practices? Some Lessons from Alternative Currencies This paper engages with recent geographical debates on alternative economic practices, arguing that insufficient attention has been paid to the scale at which they operate. Through an analysis of recent attempts to 'fix' economic activity at a scale felt to be normatively desirable through alternative currencies, the paper argues that when attempting to build non-capitalist practices, scale matters. The paper discusses processes of financial structuration that limit and channel these spaces through an analysis of localized alternative networks in the UK (Local Exchange Trading Schemes - LETS) and the geographically wider barter networks in Argentina. |
| Explorations in Heterotopia: Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS) and the Micropolitics of Money and Livelihood In this paper I examine the politics behind the establishment of Local Exchange Trading Schemes or LETS. By deploying concepts of the ‘heterotopia’ and of ‘micropolities’, I examine the extent to which advocates of LETS as a resistant space have developed a micropolitical tool that enables the realisation of resistant conceptions of money and exchange, of livelihood, community, and cooperation. A fourfold conception of the heterotopia is developed to examine, first, the multiplicity of resistant conceptions of money and work developed by participants. Second, LETS is held to be effective micropolitics if these benefits are realisable, irrespective of the attitudes of elites, for any length of time within this resistant space. Third, I consider whether participation in LETS transforms the values of network members who do not initially share these changed cultural codes, and, if not, whether, fourth, LETS is consequently best thought of as a vision of a presently ‘impossible’—that is, unrealisable—space. In conclusion, it is argued that LETS is a resistant social movement that has developed an effective micropolitical technology which enables members temporarily but discernably to actualise their changed cultural codes within this resistant space, restricted by exclusion from the access to economic resources beyond participants' private ownership or control. |
