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Solidarity Economy Markets as “mobilizational commons”

Ana Margarida Esteves

CEI researcher Ana Margarida Esteves has just published the scientific article “Solidarity Economy Markets as “mobilizational commons”: re-signifying the market through the lens of cooperation” on the international peer-reviewed Community Development Journal.

Summary

This article explores an understudied dimension of Solidarity Economy, which is how spaces of community development-oriented commercialization balance the embedment of their activities in cooperative norms and practices, while at the same time mobilizing support from mainstream society and its institutions. The analysis is based on the case study of the Solidarity Economy markets organized by Esperança/Cooesperança, a community development project based in the town of Santa Maria, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It engages the concept of “edge work”, from Social Permaculture Design, in framing Solidarity Economy markets as spaces that manifest Karl Polanyi’s vision of an “active society” in counter-movement to market commodification. This materializes as a reconciliation of cooperative practices with market mechanisms, based on trust-building and political mobilization, among different social sectors and agents, around direct producer-to-consumer exchanges. The analysis frames these markets as “mobilizational commons”: Sites of re-signification of market activity through the engagement of otherwise competing producers in experimenting, enacting and coordinating cooperative practices, as well as of consumers, social movements and the state in the re-framing economic activity over time. It concludes with an analysis of the political limitations to the “edge work” promoted by Esperança/Cooesperança, posed by electoral rotation and political socialization, as well as the suggestion to frame further research on this topic in the context of structural power relations.

Read the article on the website of the Community Development Journal.

Photo by Renate Vanaga on Unsplash

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ana Margarida Esteves

Ana Margarida Esteves is a Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies of the University Institute of Lisbon, Iscte and Guest Assistant Professor of the Department of Political Economy of the same institution. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University (Providence, RI, USA) where she was a Fulbright Fellow. Her research and teaching encompass the relations between the social and solidarity economy, the commons and the sustainability transition movements; synergies between nature, culture and technology; and the application of critical pedagogies, as well as strategies of non-formal education, to social mobilization and the promotion of participatory democracy. She is a founder and member of the International Editorial Committee of the journal "Interface: A journal for and about social movements" (www.interfacejournal.net). She is also a member the RC47: Social Classes and Social Movements of ISA - International Sociological Association and part of its editorial platform Open Movements / Open Democracy (https://www.opendemocracy.net/openmovements ). In 2020, Ana Margarida became a member of SEADS (Space Ecologies Art and Design), a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural collective of artists, scientists, engineers and activists that is actively engaged in deconstructing dominant paradigms about the future and develops alternative models through a combination of critical inquiry and hands-on experimentation.". Previous to joining CEI-IUL, Ana Margarida Esteves held teaching positions at Brown University, Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil), Tulane University (New Orleans, USA) and Sunway University (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). She is a Visiting Research Fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) and Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy).

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