Publications

This chapter discusses self-managed enterprises in Latin America with a focus on Argentina, analysing how they emerge, their implications for community economies, and their role in la econom'a de los trabajadores (the workers’ economy). The authors particularly address how empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises) transform capitalist and hierarchical firms into cooperative and horizontalized enterprises; how their self-managed workers rely on and further forge associated labour; and how these firms produce and share wealth rather than extracting surpluses for private gain. It is in these respects that the authors conceptualize these workers’ contributions to community economies and taking back the economy by and for workers.

Community energy (CE) initiatives are developing in many regions of the world through a great diversity of typologies. Europe has a leading role with thousands of ongoing projects of small and medium size, which are however unevenly distributed over the continent. The density of CE projects is highest in North-Western and parts of Central Europe; on the contrary, their spread in post-socialist European countries (PSECs) has been reported to be much more limited. However, the (under)development of CE in PSECs remains an understudied topic in the literature. In this paper, we present an exploratory overview of the situation and briefly discuss its potential explanatory factors for 16 PSECs.

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.

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.

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 chapter proposes a critical and practical approach towards acknowledging that most artists not only support their practices through a diverse range of incomes and support systems, but that an increasing number of artists conceptualize and enact artistic practices which resist the extreme commodification of mainstream arts, and are creating new plausible art worlds based on the concept of usership versus the conventional and dominant model of spectatorship. These new art worlds reorganize the relationships between art and everyday cultures, and are thus reorganizing their economic underpinnings and interrelationships.

Finance is a word for trouble. Activists often recognize its strategic and game-changing potential. Yet control over finance often feels out of reach. Exploitative and unsustainable financialization seems to continue relatively uncontested at large while the socialization of risks and spread of debt are well-recognized problems. Capitalist finance seems to determine and to escape being determined (otherwise). This chapter examines two hacking initiatives that have burst this capitalocentric bubble by exploring, learning from and rebuilding financial relations otherwise: the activist hedge fund Robin Hood Cooperative and the crypto-technological start-up Economic Space Agency.

Reclaiming and resignifying economic language is a strategy for constructing sites for ethical and political possibility in the diverse economies framework. As the framework travels across geographical boundaries and evolves in different contexts, the question of language increasingly concerns also translation and differences between languages. Fostering linguistic diversity alongside economic and ecological diversity is especially relevant regarding the current hegemony of English language in research and activism and its historical expansion hand in hand with modernization, the development of capitalist relations and the prevalence of capitalocentric economic language. This chapter draws from experiences of a project translating Take Back the Economy (J.K.

Modern-day mining is now highly mechanized and provides regular employment to highly paid workers in many parts of the world. However, there also exist millions of individuals who gain a livelihood from informal, artisanal and small-scale mining. From a diverse economies point of view, mining is as much non-capitalist as it is capitalist. The chapter aims to depart from the binary framing of informality and formality which situates informal mining labour only as ‘other’ to formal work in the capitalist mining industry. The author positions informal mining labour as part of the survival portfolio of poor and landless households to argue for a more dynamic view that opens up different possibilities for livelihood-making.

Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists’ lenses on care, commoning, and collectivity in our cultivations and analyses of urban change. We join a chorus of feminists who critique the devaluation, erasure, and isolation of care in the cities that we build and the stories we tell about them. But this is well-traversed territory, the ‘me too’ tale of every feminist who dreamsa different city or kind of urban theory. So, we outline a research agenda rooted in intersectional feminist imaginations and transformations that live around us. Neither nomadic nor confined to the home, care, commoning and collectivity can be aspirational, spatial, and practical.

A major outcome of the post-socialist transition in Russian has been widespread and persistent poverty. For three decades now, the capitalist economy has consistently failed to provide stable employment forcing large populations of the post-Soviet poor, as well as the thin middle class, to secure livelihoods through various forms of precarious work involving short-term, insecure, low-paid, unregulated and often off-the books employment. The case of Russia demonstrates the effects of neoliberal policies with particular clarity and may be indicative of a likely global neoliberal future unless challenged by researchers, activists, politicians, policymakers, and, as ever, people themselves.

This chapter focuses on alternative economies in a European post-socialist country, the Czech Republic, looking for transitions not towards, but beyond capitalism. After a brief historical excursion, the authors use the concept of eco-social enterprise and a five-dimensional, sliding-scale research framework to expand the EU social enterprise definition imported to post socialist-countries. The criteria include: 1. other-than-profit goals; 2. using profits to replenish nature and community; 3. democratic and localized governance and ownership; 4. rootedness in place and time; 5. non-market production, exchange and provisioning.

The community-economies approach eschews explanatory frameworks premised on structural analysis, arguing that such approaches prematurely foreclose the progressive potential of existing ethically oriented economic practices and enterprises. Several scholars have argued, however, that to activate the political potential and broader significance of noncapitalisms, it is necessary to trace their articulations with far-reaching political assemblages. To explore this point, this essay examines the genealogical orientation of some diverse- and community-economies research in conversation with the Nietzschean tradition of critical, constructive analysis and the notion of power as ontogenetic.

This chapter explores how analysing the formation of economic assemblages from a Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical perspective has allowed diverse economies researchers to account for power in its many forms, without falling victim to the melancholic narrative of capitalist domination that a focus on power too often engenders. The goal of genealogy is to cast the taken-for-granted as contingent, contested, and often fraught with instability. This approach enables other ways of being in the world and a methodology for what Foucault called the ‘ethical cultivation of the self’.

In this introduction, we briefly frame the impetus behind this special issue focused on theorizations of power in diverse- and community-economies research. Catalyzed by a panel session at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, this collection of essays reflects broader, ongoing discussions about how to grapple analytically and practically with power—in all of its forms—as a feature of economic formations. We outline here how each of the contributors to this issue, unsatisfied with a division of labor between theorists concerned with power’s constraining force and those focused on its enabling or generative force, offers new paths for critique that neither reify existing power relations nor turn away from them.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated response have brought food security into sharp focus for many New Zealanders. The requirement to “shelter in place” for eight weeks nationwide, with only “essential services” operating, affected all parts of the New Zealand food system. The nationwide full lockdown highlighted existing inequities and created new challenges to food access, availability, affordability, distribution, transportation, and waste management. While Aotearoa New Zealand is a food producer, there remains uncertainty surrounding the future of local food systems, particularly as the long-term effects of the pandemic emerge.

The accessibility, availability and consumption of food in food and agriculture systems are key public health and food security concerns. We draw on empirical research from members of the Community Economies Research Network from Australia, New Zealand, India and Finland to reimagine food and agriculture systems as a planetary food commons (PFC). PFCs situate food-futures in relation to a broader post-capitalist commons sociality.

In the early 2000s the minority world turned towards the creative sector to revitalize regional economies. The resulting development policies ultimately led to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. This chapter draws on an action research project that aimed to reframe artists and artisans as active subjects of a regional economy so that they could take a more active role in shaping the nature of redevelopment. The project employed the practice of reframing as used in post-structuralist participatory action research.

Many formulations of economy, even those that substantially challenge the narrow confines of market-centered economism, tend to assume a discrete human subject at the center of the action. Whether maximizing, optimizing, making ethical decisions, or just “getting by,” rational or quasi-rational humans enact the economy through their work of making a living—laboring, producing, transacting, saving, investing, and negotiating various forms of care and access. Recent developments in posthumanist and radical ecological thought, however, challenge this image. This chapter unpacks some key implications of these ideas for diverse economies theory, challenging the conceptual, material, and ethical viability of distinguishing between an “economy” and an “environment.” 

In this paper, I reflect on multiple “failures” I encountered during my fieldwork on agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: from my own “failure” to comply with a linear research design to the alleged “failure” of farmers to cooperate within the formal boundaries of cooperatives. I then suggest how a feminist research practices based on a performative ontology enables a reframing of these experiences that opens space for more hopeful affects. 

My doctoral thesis investigates cooperation practices within and beyond agricultural cooperatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in Kyrgyzstan, it unravels local and international discourses of nostalgia, contempt and pride linked to cooperation practices in socialist and postsocialist times, and reflect on the subjectivities entangled with these discourses. It thereby proposes a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as a concept and space. 

We comment on Bruno Latour's post-COVID futures essay and his book on terrestrial politics with reference to Aotearoa New Zealand and grounded Indigenous politics of place. We seek postcapitalist possibilities in a number of key events of 2020.

Mushroom-foraging in Finland is often done in forests that live according to a cycle of clearing, planting and thinning. In this article, forest management that prioritizes short-rotation timber production is termed ’plantationocentric’, following critiques of capitalocentrism in feminist economic geography. In plantationocentric discourses and practices, plantations, characterized by simplification, forced multispecies labour and temporal disturbances, are taken as the model for all primary production. This in turn subordinates various actual and potential livelihood practices, including foraging.

Fair trade certified exchanges are often cast as an ethical purchasing choice compared to those conducted as part of free trade. Producers are cast as members of marginalized communities who can ‘lift themselves out of poverty’ by producing for the certified market. Third-party certifiers claim that consumers can empower producers, reduce poverty, and improve communities through their purchases. Here, fair trade exchanges may be read as a site of ethical encounter. In this chapter I argue that despite attempts to cast fair trade as an ethical encounter, these claims are mired in a capitalocentric worldview that puts profit ahead of people.