Institutionalizing alternative economic spaces? An interpretivist perspective on diverse economies

This article offers an approach that helps geographers and others to carefully and critically reexamine prospects for diverse economies. We propose an interpretative institutionalist perspective is useful for elucidating overlooked opportunities for creating alternative economic visions and practices by revealing the process of ‘meaning making’ undertaken by actors in the process of developing policy responses to various dilemmas. We explore this notion in the context of de-growth or post-growth. De-growth is a way of thinking about the economy in ways that are not growth oriented, or fixated on GDP, but on the redistribution of wealth and living within the Earth’s ecosystems

The ‘Diverse Economies’ of Participation

This article begins to construct a theory of participation in architecture, urban design and urban planning as a range of practices undertaken across a landscape of economies that largely exists outside of the capitalist economy. These practices themselves overlap in terms of their material forms, bodily and mental activities with the practices undertaken by labour employed to produce the built environment within the capitalist marketplace. With respect to participation, our aim in articulating practices is to move away from a discussion of levels of participation and legitimacy within individual projects and towards an understanding of the organising, productive and reproductive work that is done in participating in the production of the built environment as part of an ongoing process of social change. They proliferate through multiple instances of performance and those who undertake them act as carriers of these practices, including forms of knowhow, understanding, motivational and emotional knowledge, creating resources through these acts of performance. The article contends that participatory practices are liable to be exploited re-presented or co-opted as commodified resources and this fragility limits the socially transformative potential of participation. Drawing on J.K Gibson-Graham’s conception of ‘diverse economies’, an alternative representation is developed to recognize the landscape of practices constructing alternative economic systems, and exploring means and methods of resistance to co-option or enclosure

The diverse economies of housing

This paper questions the uncritical transfer of neoliberal concepts, such as financialisation and overreliance on conceptual dichotomies like formal/informal, as the lenses through which to understand practices of housing provision and consumption in the post-communist space. To this end, it introduces the newlyestablished ‘diverse economies’ framework, which has been used elsewhere to reveal existing and possible alternatives to advanced capitalism. Applied to the Romanian case, the lens of diverse economic practices helps shed light on the ways in which the current housing system was historically constituted, with implications for how housing consumption is now stratified across some related housing typologies. The paper invites debate on the theoretical usefulness of the diverse economies framework to study housing phenomena, particularly its implications for understanding patterns of inequality and poverty, its potential to devise useful analytical categories, and its effect of directing attention to acts of resistance to neoliberal capitalism

The diverse economies of housing

This paper questions the uncritical transfer of neoliberal concepts, such as financialisation and overreliance on conceptual dichotomies like formal/informal, as the lenses through which to understand practices of housing provision and consumption in the post-communist space. To this end, it introduces the newlyestablished ‘diverse economies’ framework, which has been used elsewhere to reveal existing and possible alternatives to advanced capitalism. Applied to the Romanian case, the lens of diverse economic practices helps shed light on the ways in which the current housing system was historically constituted, with implications for how housing consumption is now stratified across some related housing typologies. The paper invites debate on the theoretical usefulness of the diverse economies framework to study housing phenomena, particularly its implications for understanding patterns of inequality and poverty, its potential to devise useful analytical categories, and its effect of directing attention to acts of resistance to neoliberal capitalism

Discards & Diverse Economies: Reuse in Rural Maine

This dissertation presents an ethnographic exploration of diverse reuse economies in rural Maine in an effort to illuminate both how used goods move between people and organizations, as well as the value of that movement for people and communities. In response to a growing number of calls for research into the social dimensions of circular economies, this research explores the varied and uneven impacts of materials reuse as they are experienced by local participants. This work uses a qualitative approach, drawing on two main methods: participant observation in reuse establishments and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with reuse participants. This rich qualitative data provides a detailed picture of reuse activities at a local scale, and helps us understand the complex relationships formed and perpetuated through reuse. This research presents three important contributions to the literature on reuse and circular economies. First, there are strong associations between reuse practices (buying, selling, lending, and gifting used goods) and social capital. This suggests that reuse practices might contribute to the social fabric of communities, building trust, relationships, cooperation, and support. Yet my research also highlights the negative consequences of social capital, such as when people are excluded from networks, resources, and opportunities along racialized and classed divisions. My research emphasizes that both reuse and social capital must be understood as complex practices that have the potential to exclude as well as include. Policymakers and community members eager to contribute to localized wellbeing must understand and plan for these complex effects as they create supports for localized reuse. Secondly, this research illustrates key differences between localized reuse economies and globalized platforms for exchange. The social value offered by reuse economies is absent in online, frictionless exchanges that allow for goods to move quickly between buyers and sellers. I find that the friction – the slowness, awkwardness, and time-intensiveness – of localized reuse is what offers potential social benefits. Growing globalized reuse exchanges forecloses important opportunities to foster these important social networks. Finally, my work examines the labor that powers localized reuse economies. I find that the unwaged, voluntary labor of elderly volunteers is often unseen and unvalued. Indeed, volunteers are performing emotional and affective labor as they manage the surplus of their communities. This research suggests that policies designed to address material surplus do so with these laborers in mind. Taken together this dissertation envisions localized reuse economies as diverse economies defined by complexity and social relationships. These findings offer policymakers and local decision-makers solutions for promoting just and equitable localized circular economies

The end of postsocialism (as we knew it): Diverse economies and the East

This paper brings together two streams of literature which rarely enter into conversation: diverse economies scholarship and critical readings of postsocialism. Mobilising the cases of food self-provisioning (FSP) in Czechia and agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as an empirical basis for our reflections, we pursue a two- fold aim. Firstly, we call for attention to the postsocialist East as fertile ground for the study of diverse economies. Secondly, we offer a postcapitalist reading of postsocialism as embedded and emancipated theorising, arguing that diverse economies thinking can support novel representations of this geopolitical area and open space to appreciate economic diversity on the ground

Surviving well: From diverse economies to community economies in Asia-Pacific

CAUL read and publish agreement 202

Beyond capitalocentricism: are non-capitalist work practices "alternatives"?

It is widely believed that there is no alternative to capitalism. Over the last two decades however, the critical geography literature on diverse economies has demonstrated the existence of alternatives to capitalism by revealing the persistence of non-capitalist forms of work and organisation. The aim in this paper is to question the validity and usefulness of continuing to frame these non-capitalist practices as "alternatives". Positioning non-capitalist economic practices as “alternatives” fails to capture not only the ubiquity of such practices in everyday life, but also how those engaging do not see them as “alternatives” in the sense of a second choice, or less desirable option, to capitalist practices. The intention in doing so is to reveal that it is not non-capitalist practices that are “alternative” but rather, capitalist practices themselves, thus opening up the future to the possibility of a non-capitalist world more fully than has so far been the case. Key words: Economic geography qualitative UK capitalism diverse economies community self-hel

Re-writing the Sustainable Development Goals from marketplaces in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico

The aim of this paper is to reflect on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and informality which is an economy not acknowledged within the SDGs. Based on anthropological fieldwork the article analyzes how informal, diverse economies in this case, marketplaces in different Latin American countries, might contribute to elaborate and rewrite sustainable development models. Throughout history, marketplaces in Latin America have provoked strong political debates because they operate in the informal sector and now they are increasingly being framed as tourist attractions. This creates an opportunity to reposition marketplaces as an asset in the formal economy. The informal, diverse economies constitute more than half of the GDPs in the Global South including Latin America. Despite repeated claims about the importance of informality as one of the fastest growing phenomena of our time and increasingly an issue of public and political concern, no systematic studies within tourism engages with the SDGs dealing with informality. Consequently, central to this paper is to consider integrating existing practices into SDGs to create pathways for sustainable development models

RETHINKING THE CREATIVE ECONOMY: THE DIVERSE ECONOMIES OF ARTISTS AND ARTISANS IN RURAL MASSACHUSETTS

This dissertation explores the contours of artistic economic activity through participatory action research conducted with artists and artisans in the Greater Franklin County, Massachusetts. The creative economy has drawn significant attention over the past ten years as a principle economic sector that can stimulate the redevelopment of post-industrial cities. However, dominant creativity–based development strategies tend to cater to the tastes of an economically privileged, and implicitly white, “creative class,’ leading to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. The data were collected as part of a collaborative research project in which twenty-two artists and artisans were hired from the region to conduct interviews to explore the economic lives of their peers. These peer-interviews were embedded in a collaborative research process, which generated two data streams: one hundred and thirty-two peer-interviews conducted by the research team and the ethnographic data from the collaborative research process itself. Through analyzing the peer-interview data, I find that regional artistic economic activity spans both the formal and informal economy and derives from a wide range of non-market logics. I argue that the multiple values of artists and artisans give rise to heterogeneous economic practices and logics, which fall outside the formal economy and are thus largely ignored in existing entrepreneurial initiatives to support the arts. Within the already precarious situations of professional artists, I also find that these conventional initiatives intensify vulnerability for artists from marginalized groups. Through analyzing the ethnographic data from the research process, this dissertation also deepens understandings of community-based research methods. In particular, I extend the discussion of peer interviewing beyond how interviews are conducted to developing new ways to analyze the data produced by this method. I also illustrate the micro-political effects of conducting participatory action research on its subjects, arguing that this method offers an innovative model for transformative social change