diverse economies

This paper develops a diverse economies account of fish ‘waste’ that revalues it as ‘surplus’. We examine ‘Kai Ika’, a community marine conservation experiment in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa New Zealand. Kai Ika rescues fish heads, frames and offal that were previously ‘going to waste’ and redistributes them to fish eaters who would otherwise struggle to access these foods. It involves fishers and community sector and Indigenous actors in an initiative that converts would-be waste into surplus.

Solidarity economy is at once an economic framework, a social movement, and an intervention into and away from the ontological foundations of colonial capitalism. This short essay briefly outlines and traces the history and development of solidarity economy as a formal, named project. Drawing from fifteen years of engaged activist ethnography in Massachusetts, the essay then explores the expansion of solidarity economy discourse in the United States and beyond, concomitant with the violence of neoliberalism and the increasing incoherence and unraveling of the dominant order.

This chapter explores two case studies that highlight the author's recent work co-designing frameworks and tools to preserve the heritage and knowledge of Mapuche community economies and livelihoods in Chile. While both case studies operate within a Mapuche framework, the approach and aims differ due to the distinct landscapes, biospheres and economic contexts where they are enacted.

Given calls to decolonise engagement with Indigenous communities, this article explores how allied researchers can participate in self-determined learning with Indigenous Peoples. Drawing on over a decade of experience within an action-research collective in a Mapuche context, the authors suggest that allied researchers can accompany Indigenous-led co-design in a manner that not only strengthens genuine Indigenous participation but also fosters mutual and collective learning from within the co-creative processes themselves.

As ecological and social crises mount, academic work which explores the transformation of unsustainable socio-ecological systems has flourished. Surprisingly, however, there have been few, if any, concerted attempts to consider the resonances and divergences between two of the most prominent approaches to rethinking the economy as we know it: degrowth, and diverse and community economies (DCE), respectively. In this Critical Review, I reflect on resonances and similarities, as they emerge from the academic literature.

This chapter provides an overview of the contributions of Gibson-Graham to heterodox economics. It discusses (i) the re-framing of economic representation through the theory of Diverse Economies; (ii) the development of postcapitalist alternatives through the perspective of Community Economies; and (iii) the building of economic knowledge commons through CEI and the CERN network.

Artist Ailie Rutherford has been working with Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) to visualise the complex nature of work and care for many women. The Pouring Out, Pouring In exhibition shares prints and other outcomes from the Mapping Women’s Work workshop series at GWL. Building on a University of Glasgow study, the women involved have mapped out their multiple paid and unpaid roles, thinking together about how a more equitable economic system might look. 

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 paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE). The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.

This chapter, written for the Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy, introduces the two primary theoretical traditions that have shaped diverse and community economies research and practice: anti-essentialist Marxian political economy and feminist poststructuralism. The chapter discusses the contribution of these two traditions highlighted how they have shaped the diverse economies and community economies approach.