Qualitative growth”-oriented Collective Action Frameworks: Articulating Commons and Solidarity Economy

A EMES, rede internacional de pesquisa sobre empreendedorismo social e economia social e solidária, acaba de seleccionar para publicação na sua página web, após revisão por pares, o artigo “Towards “Qualitative growth”-oriented Collective Action Frameworks: Articulating Commons and Solidarity Economy“, apresentado inicialmente na forma de comunicação oral por Ana Margarida Esteves, investigadora do CEI-IUL, no 3rd EMES-Polanyi International Seminar, que teve lugar na Universidade de Roskilde, Dinamarca, a 16 e 17 de Abril de 2018.

Este artigo inclui conclusões preliminares do projeto comparativo “The Emerging Action fields of Solidarity Economy”, que Ana Margarida Esteves tem vindo a desenvolver desde Novembro de 2014, ao abrigo de uma bolsa de Pós-Doutoramento da Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

Este é o resumo do artigo, em língua inglesa, que pode ser consultado na íntegra no site da EMES:

Under what form would a convergence between the Commons and Solidarity Economy movements promote “qualitative growth” (Capra and Henderson 2014) in a way that also ensures equity, justice and participatory democracy in access to resources? What aspects in the predominant organizational forms emerging from these movements need to be addressed in order to make such convergence possible?

This paper is based on an inductive comparative analysis of three major types of commons-based peer production (CBPP): An ecovillage, an “integral cooperative” and a self-identified commercialization-based solidarity economy network. Benkler (2006) defines CBPP as a modular form of socioeconomic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively over any type of commons. The case studies were chosen due to the fact of being leading agents whose practices are reproduced within three of the largest and most significant international social movement networks operating in the fields of the Commons and Social Solidarity Economy. They also represent three infrastructure types  of “new commons”:

a) Tamera, an ecovillage founded in 1995 in southwestern Portugal, which applies regenerative ecology and community-building to the development of a “foundational economy” (Conaty 2015), meaning the infrastructures that sustain everyday life (i.e. food, water, energy, housing);

b) Cooperativa Integral Catalana, an “integral cooperative” founded in 2010 in Catalonia. It defines itself a governance system that combines information technologies and face-to-face assemblies in the promotion of a network management system for economic activities;

c) Esperança-Cooesperança, an urban commons-based commercialization network based on Solidarity Economy principles and goals, based in the town of Santa Maria, in the heartland of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It was founded in 1985 with the support of pre-existing Ecclesial Base Communities, as well as Caritas Brazil.

These case studies also represent attempts at developing respectively an alternative political ecology, an alternative political institutionality and an alternative political economy. Each of them was the object of four months of fieldwork, carried out between 2015 and 2017.

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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