Sustainable Community Movement Organizations

Book excerpt: This volume shines a light on Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (SCMOs), an emergent wave of non-hierarchical, community-based socio-economic movements, with alternative forms of consumption and production very much at their core. Extending beyond traditional ideas of cooperatives and mutualities, the essays in this collection explore new geographies of solidarity practices ranging from forms of horizontal democracy to interurban and transnational networks. The authors uniquely frame these movements within the Deleuzian concept of the ‘rhizome’, as a meshwork of alternative spaces, paths and trajectories. This connectivity is illustrated in case studies from around the world, ranging from protest movements in response to austerity measures in Southern Europe, to the Buen Vivir movement in the Andes, and Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in the Caribbean and Canada. Positioning these cases in relation to current theoretical debates on Social Solidarity Economy, the authors specifically address the question of the persistence and the durability of the organizing practices in community economies. This book will be a valuable tool for academics and students of sustainable consumption, environmental policy, social policy, environmental economics, environmental management and sustainability studies more broadly.