Community-based social enterprises offer a new strategy for people-centred local economic development in the majority 'developing' world. In this chapter we recount the stories of four social enterprise experiments that have arisen over the last five years from partnerships between communities, NGOs and municipal governments in the Philippines, and university based researchers from Australia.
Chapters
This chapter explores how Nuestras Raices and the Alliance to Develop Power, two community organizations in Western Massachusetts, are building community economies and unsettling traditional formulas for economic development.
This article reviews current literature within geography focused on alternative economies, a term that has contradictory effects in a discipline fixated on a realist imagining of the link between 'capitalism" and state through neoliberal governance.
In this chapter we stage a conversation between two innovative and longstanding projects, (1) the multiphase European-based research project on local social innovation that is represented in this book and (2) the Community Economies project which is engaged in rethinking economy through action research in Australia, the Philippines and the US.
This paper addresses three topics: an easy-to-understand review of money and complementary currencies
This chapter explores how the idea of sustainable development might be transformed from an impossible dream (sabotaged at every turn by the force various identified as 'capitalism," 'the market," 'modernization," and 'development") into a realistic and attainable project for organizations and communities.
This chapter introduces the focus group as a method for qualitative social research.
This chapter elaborates an economic and social policy responses to build on the skills and ideas of marginalised groups.
Offers a counter to the common denigration of local economic politics 'in the face of globalization'.
This chapter in the Companion to Economic Geography overviews three poststructural strategies: deconstruction; discourse analysis and genealogy; and performativity. It then uses examples to show how these strategies have been picked up in the work of economic geographers, and it concludes by focusing how economic geographers have used these strategies in research projects that have an explicit agenda to help shape positive change in the world. Overall, the chapter aims to give a sense of the powers and potentials of poststructural interventions.