Growing green money? Mapping community currencies for sustainable development

By Gill Seyfang, Noel Longhurst. 2013

288 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Parallel sustainable monetary systems are being developed by civil society groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), informed by ecological economics perspectives on development, value, economic scale and growth, and responding to the unsustainability of current global financial systems. These parallel systems of exchange (or community currencies) are designed to promote sustainable development by localising economic development, building social capital and substituting for material consumption, valuing work which is marginalised in conventional labour markets, and challenging the growth-based monetary system. However, this international movement towards community-based ecological economic practices, is under-researched. This paper presents new empirical evidence from the first international study of the scope and character of community currencies. It identifies the diversity, scale, geography and development trajectory of these initiatives, discusses the implications of these findings for efforts to achieve sustainable development, and identifies future research needs, to help harness the sustainability potential of these initiatives.

Subfields: Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/051e8b45855610e1c19aaf0b9622a6c45d0d10a1

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Citations in the corpus

Sustainability transitions in the developing world: Challenges of socio-technical transformations unfolding in contexts of poverty (2017, background): “On the contrary, innovations based on values of solidarity and sufficiency might bring about broaden access to services, reduced ecological footprints, discouragement of consumerist behaviour, capacity development and empowerment of socially excluded groups (Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013; Seyfang and ”
Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual (2013, methodology): “However, the fact that LETS are now on a worldwide retreat (Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013), rather than an emerging alternative to be uncovered by readings for economic difference, suggests that they do more to confirm the continued validity of the Marxist critique than to dispel it.”
Desperately seeking niches: Grassroots innovations and niche development in the community currency field (2013, background): “The number of community currency experiments has expanded over the last 30 years (Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013), and within the literature they are often considered as a single movement (Blanc, 2012; Collom et al., 2012).”
Diverse economies and alternative spaces: An overview of approaches and practices (2016, background): “To illustrate the point further, in March 2012 3,418 such networks existed in 23 countries, across six continents (Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013b).”