Community-Led Economic Initiatives and Their Potential for Change on a Local Scale: Empirical Case Studies from a 'Social Provisioning’ Perspective

This paper empirically investigates the potential of local community-led economic initiatives (CLEIs) to contribute to systemic changes towards more social-ecologically favorable economic processes. CLEIs are activities, managed by groups of people from civil society, that develop and experiment with alternative forms of economic provisioning for the sake of actively restoring, maintaining and creating ecological and social qualities at a local or regional scale (Seyfang and Haxeltine 2012; Penha-Lopes and Henfrey 2019; Esteves 2021; Dawson 2010). A fundamental premise of this paper is that CLEIs, in order to contribute to a profound transformation of the economic system, need to address the dominant economic institutions and structural conditions that produce unsustainable provisioning processes in the first place. This premise is grounded in the assertion that economic processes and decision-making are not only a matter of individual choice and rationality, but are rather shaped by the structural conditions of the context in which they take place (Røpke 2009; Spash and Dobernig 2017). In order to conceptually frame the empirical investigation of the impact of CLEIs on structural and institutional conditions, this paper employs the heterodox economic framework of ‘social provisioning processes’ (Jo and Todorova 2017; Jo 2011; Gruchy 1987; Dugger 1996). According to Jo (2011), provisioning processes are strongly influenced by the constitution of three interrelated societal ‘bases’: The material basis (e.g. technology and resources), the social basis (e.g. class and gender relations), and the cultural basis (e.g. dominant societal norms and values) of an economy together constitute the structure in which social agents act and in within which their actions are bound.

Building on this theoretical fundament, the paper empirically addresses the following questions: How do CLEIs, engaged in local provisioning processes, shape the three bases of provisioning? What evidence, if any, suggests that these CLEI-induced bases are more conducive for social and ecologically favorable provisioning? What are the causal mechanisms that enable or constrain CLEIs potential for favorably influencing the three bases? To this end, the paper employs a critical realist metatheoretical foundation and a qualitative multiple-case study design for investigating three German CLEIs: Kommune Niederkaufungen, Schloss Tempelhof, and Fuchsmühle Waldkappel. For the data collection, and multi-cited ethnographic approach as ben chosen: semi-structured interviews, focus groups, document analysis, and participant observation will be used. The data collection is still ongoing but will be completed by June 2022.

Even though the current literature on CLEIs frequently highlights the economic dimension of such initiatives (Dawson 2006; Sima 2010; Lewis and Conaty 2012), the conceptual link to economics remains usually rather anecdotal and underconceptualised. Therefore, the paper seeks to theoretically enrich the literature by linking it to established heterodox economic theory, namely the social provisioning process framework. At the same time, it offers empirical insights and thereby seeks to stimulate greater attention for the role of CLEIs for economic change within the ecological economics community. Furthermore, to increase the ‘real world’ impact of this study, the findings are made available to practitioners in the field through a collaboration with ECOLISE, the European Network for Community-led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability, and open-source publications in ECOLISE’s ‘Communities for Future Knowledge Commons’.