Estudios de la Economía

Multiple moneys and development: making payments in diverse economies. 2nd International Conference on Complementary Currency Systems (CCS)  19 – 22 June 2013. Deadline for submission of abstracts and sessions. 10 January 2013.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The conference is organized by the Civic Innovation Research Initiative at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The conference will be hosted by ISS in The Hague.

1. It calls for papers on complementary currency systems, historical experiences with multiple monies, alternative exchange networks, and other practices with diverse means of payment.
2. It seeks to discuss the social, economic and political significance of multiple currency systems for development.

The conference is bilingual (English and Spanish), with sessions organized in either language. It offers space to academics and practitioners alike to organize panels, workshops, and any other session formats that participants see fit to stimulate the exchange of ideas and experiences.

In principle the conference will have two strands with academic and practitioners’ activities respectively but there will be various instances for interconnection. The first two days of the conference (June 19th and June 20th) will concentrate the academic panels and the last two days (June 21st and June 22nd) will focus on the practitioners’ activities.

The last International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies held in Lyon, France, in February 2011 noted that there was no historical equivalent of such a growing tide of currency schemes since the beginnings of industrialization at the turn of the 19th century.

Among others, community and complementary currency systems include initiatives like the LETS, time banks, the Argentine Redes de trueque, the Ithaca Hours in the USA, the German regiogeld, the Brasilian community banks with surrogate currencies, the SOL currency in France, the ‘Transition Towns’ in the UK, the RES in Belgium and the Wir in Switzerland, mobile-phone payment systems in Uganda and Kenya, and for digital remittances in El Salvador.

THEMES

• Meso and micro level analysis of CCS and their viability
• Alternative economic systems and diverse economies
• Social constructions of local resilient economies
• Autonomous local development of regions
• Environmentally sustainable local economies / low-carbon economies
• Micro politics of resistance and civic-driven change
• Historical experiences with multiple monetary circuits
• The ontology of money as economic institution

PRACTICAL DETAILS AND IMPORTANT DATES

PARTICIPATION DETAILS

Submission of abstracts
Please submit an abstract of up 500 words to the conference e-mail address: ccsconf@iss.nl by January 10th. Include a list of 6 keywords.

Full papers have to be submitted electronically in PDF format to the same address. Papers should be written in English and ideally should be no more than 10.000 words. Authors are requested to follow the Harvard style referencing system. The first page should contain the title of the paper, names and addresses of all authors (including e-mail), an abstract (100-150 words) and a list of keywords.

You will be informed by February 15th if your paper has been accepted.

Panel proposals
Please submit an abstract of up to 1000 words to the conference e-mail address: ccsconf@iss.nl by January 10th .

Please include the title of the panel, content, and a list of no less than three participants. You should be prepared to chair the panel. Please specify whether you would like the panel to be open to other conference participants or closed.

You will be informed by February 15th if your panel has been accepted.

Requests for subsidies and fees waiver
Please send a brief description of your reasons for requesting a travel subsidy when you submit your abstract or as soon as possible.

Specify whether you need:

1. fees waivers;
2. support for the accommodation in The Hague,
3. travel subsidies.

We will not fund personal expenses, per diems, and so on.

We regret that we will only be able to support the participation of a small number of delegates but we will make every effort to base the selection on the quality of the abstract.

PROPOSED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Professor Katherine Gibson, Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy University of Western Sydney, Human and Economic Geography, Australia.

GOALS OF THE CONFERERENCE

The 2nd International Conference on Complementary and Community Currency Systems invites you to explore the ways in which CCS and the multiplicity of monetary circuits affect local development, households’ welfare, governance and civil society organizations.

The concept of development has a variety of meanings to different social groups, including economic and environmental sustainability, community resilience after shocks, political autonomy, and culturally embedded economic systems. Moreover, the conference seeks to consolidate the practice of meeting every two years to share and discuss research in the area of CCS, the ontology of money and alternative economic systems with own means of payment.

PROGRAMME

To be announced shortly

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Georgina M. Gómez	AHJ (Bert) Helmsing
Rosalba Icaza Garza	Kees Biekart

BACKGROUND

A myriad of communities and localities around the world have become increasingly aware of the need to develop more resilient local economies, in balance with cultural diversity, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. With civic agency and innovativeness, they have multiplied the schemes that give life and nest these values. NGOs and governments, noticeably at the local level, have also contributed initiatives with complementary currencies that pursue changes in social and economic practices.

To some extent, the present profusion of complementary and community currency systems should not come as a novelty. Kuroda asserts that ‘the majority of human beings throughout most of history dealt with concurrent currencies’[1], although separate monetary circuits typically coexisted in a given territory for different types of agents. Multiple money economies were the rule in history, which leads Blanc to discuss a complementary relationship between them, as opposed to a competitive view in which only one type of money can circulate in a given territory[2].

The principle of “one money, one country” is a relative newcomer in institutional history[3]. National monetary systems with only one currency regulated and protected by central banks emerged as a symbol of national capitalism in which states sought to control money, markets and accumulation within a nation, Keith Hart argues in The Memory Bank[4].

National monetary systems are being challenged by communities and localities that build CCS as a form of resistance to the expansion of global capitalism, at the same time as global capitalism is experiencing another chapter of critical transformation and financial downturn that has left thousands unemployed, excluded, and vulnerable. This reinforces the need to understand the local economy as a myriad of various economic practices with a framework as the one proposed by the diverse economies’ framework of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson , keynote speaker in the conference.