Content area
Full Text
Introduction
This article sheds light on the role of normative regulation processes in the development of community-based economic initiatives as parallel spatialities to that of the mainstream economy. It addresses how spaces of enactment and coordination of “solidarity economy” practices in the field of food production, commercialization and consumption are constructed by processes of normative regulation, driven by distinct approaches to collective action and underlying narratives of social change. Such processes aim to produce networks of trust, based on relationships of proximity and direct collaboration, by re-localizing and re-signifying economic behaviour and collective action. The field of food production, commercialization and consumption was chosen as the focus of analysis, as its centrality in human livelihoods and the lifeworld makes it a privileged realm for analysing processes of normative regulation of economic behaviour. Besides connecting human biology with that of the territory and the soil and species it contains, it is a field that intimately connects the productive and reproductive sphere, since nutrition plays a central role in the “hearth”, both within the family and kinship relations as well as in wider social spheres.
The analysis is based on the comparison of three case studies that represent distinct approaches to collective action and social change: Tamera – Healing Biotope I, an ecovillage that frames itself as a prefigurative model of sustainable human settlement; Esperança/Cooesperança, a commercialization network that is part of a wider political project of emancipation for marginalized sectors of society; Cooperativa Integral Catalana, an “open cooperative” that mobilizes online platforms and community currencies to develop a parallel institutionality aimed at de-linking livelihoods from the state and the capitalist market. The article begins with a review of literature on “solidarity economy”, with a focus on the development of parallel spatialities to that of the mainstream economy, as well as “holistic” and “dialectic” types of narratives of change and collective action. It continues with a section on the rationale behind the choice of methodology and case studies, followed by the actual case study analysis.
On “solidarity economy”
The social, economic and environmental externalities of neoliberal globalization led to the multiplication of community-based economic initiatives (e.g. Lockyer and Veteto, 2013, De Angelis, 2017; Kousis and Paschou, 2017; Lucas dos Santos, 2019). For Forno and Graziano...