Publications

Purporting that particular manifestations of social enterprises are conditioned, at least in part, by the cultural context in which they are enacted (Peredo & McLean 2006), the chapter seeks to unveil the ethnocentrism inherent in dominant renditions of social enterprise by zooming in on a United Nations project geared toward promoting entrepreneurial activity in and, ultimately, the livelihood of indigenous Cambodian forested communities. This research explores the everydayness of social enterprise among an indegenous resin tapper community in two adjacent villages, in Rovieng District which lies to the south of Preah Vihear Province in northern Cambodia.

Dominated by conflict, Turkey’s Kurdish Question has transformed over time, opening up new areas of inquiry. Under the Democratic Autonomy project ongoing since the mid-2000s, Turkey’s Kurdish Movement has promoted cooperatives and communes—a post-capitalist marketization project—in Northern Kurdistan. Drawing upon economization studies and diverse and community economies studies’ engagement with assemblage thinking, this article scrutinizes the retailers’ cooperative model the Movement experimented with and explains the practices linked to post-capitalist marketization: creating inclusive platforms for debate, incorporating ordinary actors as experts, and upscaling post-capitalist marketization through building relations with other cooperatives.

This article advances a framework for the study of community economies as assemblages constituted and shaped by three primary dynamics: relations, resources and constraints, and processes of stabilization and destabilization. Drawing on diverse and community economies scholarship, assemblage theory and actor-network theory, we develop a framework that will contribute significantly to understandings of the emergence of community economies and the strategies that make them more resilient and sustainable. The conceptual framework is illustrated through a case study from Turkey’s Kurdish region – a women’s cooperative that remained resilient in the face of armed conflict and political violence.

Increasing small-scale vegetable production is a key target for growing a more sustainable food system. At first glance, meeting this target seems straightforward. On closer inspection, particularly in contexts experiencing the on-going effects of climate uncertainty and economic uncertainty, it can be hard to achieve. Community education has a vital role to play.

Invasive Tourism and Mapuche Tourism: indigenous territory and entrepreneurship with identity in Lake Icalma, Higher Biobio - This qualitative research explores the economic agency of Mapuche tourism entrepreneurs at the intersection between Development with Identity discourse and the touristification of Mapuche-Pewenche territory in Southern Chile.

Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird many ethical commodity networks today. The essay uses a labor-centric conception of solidarity to demonstrate that the pressures and demands created by certifications intended to generate more just outcomes can also strain existing solidarities that bind cooperatives together.

Until recently, there was not much connection between feminism and cartography or GIS (geographic information science and/or system) but today they are increasingly intertwined. The meaning and purpose of mapping have significantly changed in recent decades due to several reasons. For example, the mapping process has become computerized, virtually all spatial information is now digital, and GIS has emerged as essential when working with spatial data. At the same time, women have increased their visibility and presence in science and technologies. Feminist scholarship, too, has made a profound impact on social science and geography and has come to inform and influence the fields of cartography and GIS.

Property concerns exclusive rights to the access and use of a resource, the possession of an object or territory with a right to exclude others, or the ability to dispose of or exchange an owned object. The particular property regime that has, for at least the minority world, become a ‘common sense’ is a private and individualized notion of property that is manifest in legal title and state enforcement. Emerging along with the enclosure of the commons in the sixteenth century, this property is also closely associated with the origins and alleged efficiencies and rationalities of capitalism. Contemporary initiatives that disrupt this ‘common sense’ and repurpose property include, for example, the movement of workers to ‘recover’ abandoned factories in Argentina.

Este texto permite tanto a quienes recién se inician en la obra de Pichón Rivière como a quienes toman su perspectiva y ya están formados en su campo de actuación, revisitar algunos conceptos centrales de la teoría de grupos y de su relación con técnicas de intervención. Asimismo, el estudio preliminar sitúa la obra de Saidón (originalmente producida en portugués) en el campo de trabajo de la psicología social y el análisis institucional en su momento, y permite pensar asimismo la vigencia de una forma de trabajar en grupos que sostenga e intervenga, que indique modos posibles de lectura y –simultáneamente— permita modos abiertos a una nueva construcción de sentido posible.

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.