Social Economy, Solidarity Economy. A bit of history

For Jean-Louis Laville, the advent of democracy in France in the first half of the 19th century saw the emergence of associationism, a voluntary association between free and equal citizens based on "an interweaving of ideas and practices". Politics is not reduced to elected representatives but to public spaces for deliberation. The economy is based on reciprocal exchanges, based on cooperation, self-organisation and mutualisation between equals. Both the political and the economic participate in the protection of individuals and groups and their emancipation, as well as in the assertion of rights. The statutes of the social economy (mutualist, cooperative and then associative) will leave behind this close combination of the political, the social and the economic, but will retain democratic decision-making, collective ownership and other important principles within their structures.

In the 1960s and the following decades, the solidarity economy reappropriated these demands for the democratisation of the economy and of the vivre ensemble in the face of the neo-liberal wave, the rise in unemployment and the desertification of territories. Citizen initiatives for personal services (early childhood, the elderly, the unemployed), initially isolated, will regroup and link up with researchers. Based on hybrid resources (market and non-market), bringing together very different actors: employees, volunteers, users, producers, elected officials, etc., it will express political demands for social transformation, establishing social, ecological and social justice goals for its economic activities, while basing itself on the egalitarian status of the social economy, the close link between production and reproduction of the feminist economy or the notion of the Commons. This French approach to another model of development was then linked at the end of the 1990s with similar experiences in the rest of the world, for example, at the first meeting of Globalisation of Solidarity in Lima in 1997 and with the birth of RIPESS Intercontinental. Or the World Social Forums and the Brazilian experience.