Community Economies

HEALY, STEPHEN; HERAS, ANA INÉS; NORTH, PETER

Encyclopedia of the Social and Solidarity Economy

Edward Elgar

Lugar: Northampton, Mass. ; Año: 2023; p. 12 - 18

Community economies (CE) is a key term in the interdisciplinary subfield of diverse economies, growing from the pioneering feminist political economy scholarship of J.K. Gibson-Graham (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski 2020). Scholarship in this subfield has been influential in many academic fields including geography, anthropology, sociology, business and organization studies, as well as the humanities and arts. It has also informed movement activism in countries throughout the world. In keeping with this tradition this entry uses the term ‘community economies‘ to emphasize the plurality of economic forms of life but recognize the meaning of the suffix ‘ic’ as of or pertaining to something. Both ‘community’ and ‘economy’ have distinct pluralist and open meanings that contrast with their common-place understanding. Accordingly, community economies are spaces where humans negotiate the terms of their coexistence (Gibson-Graham 1996). From the CE perspective, ‘economies’ are always plural, containing diverse forms of economic organization, exchange, remuneration, finance, care, and ownership. Consequently, economies are not understood as a systematic totality. Correspondingly, ‘community’ is understood as always open. Coexistence is the basis for belonging, rather than being from a particular place, community of interest, class, or any conception of ‘imagined community’. From this perspective, ‘solidarity’ both names an aligned stance and disposition towards one another as well as designating (economic) spaces where these negotiations unfold. What community economies offer is a way of understanding what these stances entail, as well as a further opening up of the ‘with whom’, or ‘what’ we humans are in solidarity with.These theoretical starting points of ‘economies always plural’ and ‘communities always open’ plays a decisive role in shaping how CE relates to the social and solidarity economies (SSEs). In what follows, this entry makes three conceptual contributions: (1) it aligns the SSEs’ commitment to pluralist politics with the theory of community economies as already defined above; (2) it uses the theory of community economy as a way of theorizing the different ethical dilemmas that attend being together in solidarity in place; and (3) in conclusion, drawing on the theory of community economy it makes the case for the necessity of a commitment to solidarity that includes the ‘more than human’ world as crucial for our shared survival.