Sustainable Community Movement Organizations

Solidarity Economies and Rhizomatic Practices

Francesca Forno, Richard R. Weiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000055887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This volume shines a light on Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs), an emergent wave of non-hierarchical, community-based socio-economic movements, with alternative forms of consumption and production very much at their core.

Extending beyond traditional ideas of cooperatives and mutualities, the essays in this collection explore new geographies of solidarity practices ranging from forms of horizontal democracy to interurban and transnational networks. The authors uniquely frame these movements within the Deleuzian concept of the 'rhizome', as a meshwork of alternative spaces, paths and trajectories. This connectivity is illustrated in case studies from around the world, ranging from protest movements in response to austerity measures in Southern Europe, to the Buen Vivir movement in the Andes, and Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in the Caribbean and Canada. Positioning these cases in relation to current theoretical debates on Social Solidarity Economy, the authors specifically address the question of the persistence and the durability of the organizing practices in community economies.

This book will be a valuable tool for academics and students of sustainable consumption, environmental policy, social policy, environmental economics, environmental management and sustainability studies more broadly.

1 Introduction

Sustainable solidarity economies: rhizomatic practices for another world

Richard R. Weiner and Francesca Forno

Introduction

Throughout the last decades, and particularly since the end of the Cold War and the spread of neoliberal capitalism, the global political space has profoundly changed. Shared disillusionment with traditional institutional politics has implied a retreat from its codified spaces; struggles for emancipation take place mostly through the informal constitution of groups that challenge traditional categories of political participation (e.g., left and right, class identities). Moreover, and not surprisingly, giving the market’s increasing importance in shaping the (everyday) worlds of people across the globe, these movements move “from the streets to the market” – more and more often enacting politics through consumption (e.g., boycott, buycott platforms and apps, alternative/sustainable lifestyles). Furthermore, against a patterning of action that tended to verticalization and centralization in bureaucratic institutions, emphasis is given on decentralization, self-organization in non-hierarchical groupings and the creation of horizontal alliances of potentially global reach among local groups who further similar interests: they have a “glocal” dimension.

This anthology weaves together a coherent series of contributions and case studies on emergent social-economic forms of alternative organizing. These forms try to constitute autonomous normative ordering based on mutual regulating social-economic networks whose constitutive provenance lies in heterarchical multi-stakeholder social pact-ing. As such, they are both embedded social insertion and embodied responsibility of pooling common resources. These forms by following along the theoretical lines detailed by Elinor Ostrom (1990), may also be interpreted as inter-connectedness of reciprocal solidarity and endogenous trust for common resource stewardship.

Often also referred to as “common-based peer production” (or CBPP), such a form of collective action is emergent in different parts of Europe as well as in North and South America. By focussing not only on production but also in consumption, procurement, micro-financing renewable energy, organic food schemes, and anti-extractivism, they aim at evolving toward sustainable alternatives to commodified patterns of consumerism. In doing so they manifest intent on meeting the need of the present without compromising the capability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Within recent debate on collective action and various forms of activism, the concept of Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (hereafter SCMOs) has been proposed to indicate grassroots efforts to build alternative, productive, and sustainable networks of production and exchange by mobilizing citizens primarily (though not solely) via their purchasing power (Forno and Graziano, 2014). By acting primarily on the market, such grassroots initiatives attempt to create new economic and cultural spaces for civic learning as well as consumerism and producerism actions (Andretta and Guidi, 2017) that aim to construct and sustain alternative markets based on knowledge exchange, loyalty, and trust. In other words, the networks they form facilitate both the circulation of resources (information, tasks, money, and goods) and the construction of common interpretations of reality, thus simultaneously providing a framework for collective action and enabling the actual deployment of alternative lifestyles (Forno et al., 2015).

SCMOs often include experiences of mutualism, such as in projects of welfare from below, consumer-producer networks and cooperatives, Alternative Food Networks, urban agriculture/urban gardening, barter groups, time banks, recovered factories, local savings groups/alternative currencies, fair trade, ecovillages, and social and solidarity economy networks. These initiatives address at once ecology (climate change, resource depletion, reduced biodiversity, diminishing land fertility, diminishing wildlife, etc.); economy (reduced family’s income and purchase power, unemployment, increasing difficulties for small enterprises to keep afloat in the face of increasingly powerful and oligopolistic multinationals); society-culture (insecurity and unsafety, polarization of life opportunities, diminishing happiness and well-being, spreading of so-called psychological discomfort) in their being interconnected and co-emerging aspects of the same system.

Instead of appealing to formal (local, national, international) institutions by lobbying and/or putting pressure so as to make them change their political decisions, SCMOs act locally by ongoingly building concrete alternatives to the system they are contesting. Instead of asking for change they produce the change itself in the form of alternative ways of socio-ecological and economic organization, establishing novel material and cultural-symbolic patterns.

The cases discussed in this anthology demonstrate how SCMOs are alternative organizations which, while contesting around capitalism and markets, experiment with alternative ways of organizing. Then is done in the attempt to revamp moral principles (such as equality, democracy, and sustainability) within society and to contrast growing extremism and populism sentiments. By foreshadowing a confederal frame of thinking, imaginatively projecting and anticipating a more flexible and polycentric institutional architecture, such efforts involve a re-territorialization and re-municipalization of material flow in interlocal/interurban networks which more and more often converge in transnational advocacy networks of cities pursuing a geopolitics of communing and code connectivity.

SCMOs are the bedrock within the so-called Social Solidarity Economy (SSE), which is a term increasingly being used to refer to a broad range of organizations that are distinguished from conventional for-profit enterprise, entrepreneurship, and informal economy as they have explicit economic, social, and environmental objectives (Utting, 2014). All those myriad of experiences include cooperatives, mutual associations, NGOs engaged in income generating activities, women’s self-help groups, community forestry and other organizations, associations of informal sector workers, social enterprise, and fair trade organizations and networks. Such movement organizations are understood as the basis of:

• a sustainable governance, and
• generative social entrepreneurship of stakeholders co-creating value by a confederated communing connected to networks.

As Forno and Graziano note in the second chapter of this anthology, SCMO self-reinforcing value chain networks inclusively interlace and encourage direct relationship between consumer and producers. For example, there are innovative micro-credit/micro-financing alternatives; local and social currency alternatives; and investments through purchase of shares/or deposits with ethical financed institutions linked to another new practice, “ethical banking.” SCMO institutionalized governance is organized, not by private capital, but by mutualizing and networking cooperatives aligned SSE commitments and practices based on Alternative Exchange Networks (AENs) and/or Solidarity Economy Districts (SEDs). In such governance, reciproqueteurs associate themselves on the basis of skill and through effective communicative interaction on a multiscalarity of platform levels.

SCMOs are motivated by commitment to the creation of shareable resources along with the democratic governance of such resources to sustain people and the planet. They use markets and their privileged limits – rather than the streets – as the battlefields. But beyond the governmentality of neoclassical and neoliberal market-mindedness, SCMOs move to the creation of what Ostrom refers to as non-rivalrous common pool resources, both alongside and outside the market. These constitute eco-systems evolving toward sustainable development and alternative forms of consumption in different parts of the world.

Concretely, the SCMO involves a new mode of resilient social pact-ing that is grounded in decentred mutual stakeholder social pacts (MSSPs). The intention of such new multi-stakeholder social pacts is to rebuild new social relationships around some radical revision of the market and practices of an excessively commodified environment (Bäckstrand, 2006). SCMOs are institutionalized by MSSPs locally, and beyond in levels of multi-scalarity.

The SCMOs’ purpose is the creation of value chains of shareable resources embedded within the system of capitalism, such as knowledge, services, goods, labour, and solidarity purchasing power. Within this value chain network are co-stakeholders, co-producers, co-owners, co-users, and co-responsible reciproqueteurs. They seek to improve market access and market opportunities, therefore addressing grand challenges such as tackling climate change, fostering gender equality and attempt to reduce poverty, providing good food for all and more affordable healthcare.

In other words, the SCMOs can be understood as a community of practices underpinning new forms of consumption and production: an enduring constellation of arranged interconnected performances, with an arc of subject positioning (Torfing, 1999), a trajectory of how such practices shape, spawn, and develop each other. The SCMOs are assemblages of interwoven practices of mutually interactive performances for the sake of commitments, expressing mutual accountability (see here Rouse, 2006: 333; Schatzki 2008: 33). In this sense, they are “prefigurative”: they try to embody an alternative world that might become concrete for people outside of their “niche.” Privileging direct interaction and rejecting higher-level organization, in fact, does not imply that they cannot scale up through replication, the creation of networks, and alliances.

Stunning us out of habituated narrative, these (pre)fugitive instances capture moments of rupture and a collective imaginary, which overflow the framed field and mobilize demands that cannot be sufficiently satisfied in a habituated present (Touraine, 1977: 362). There is an institutionalizing at work – as an imaginative projectin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction: sustainable solidarity economies: rhizomatic practices for another world
• 2 Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs): reinvigorating cooperatives and mutualités via post-capitalistic practices
• 3 Operationalizing SCMO as a social-economic concept: the case of post-2008 Spain
• 4 The making of new commons in Southern Europe: afterlives of the movement of the squares
• 5 Shopping for a sustainable future: the promises of collectively planned consumption
• 6 Black diaspora women lead cooperative banks
• 7 Rondas Campesinas and Defense Fronts: the environmental justice movement confronting extractivist policies in Peru
• Index