local currency

The Catalan Integral Cooperative … The Simpler Way revolution is well underway!

Ted Trainer describes the rapidly growing cooperative movement in Catalonia: "In a world where capital, profit and market forces dump large numbers into “exclusion” and poverty, and governments will not deal properly with the resulting problems, these people have decided to do the job themselves."

The Challenge of Re-localisation

Feasta's particular approach to sustainability economics is to focus attention on the inadequacies of underlying systems. The development of local economies suffers from two particular adverse systemic effects - the in-built transfer of wealth from those that need money to those that already have money via the servicing of debt; and the transfer of wealth from the locality to the centre as globalisation progressively centralises economies. Local currency developers need to develop strategies that mitigate these two effects or they will remain limited in size and influence.

New articles about the Liquidity Network and debt-free currency

The Liquidity Network group, which is developing a debt-free currency, submitted this entry to the Your Country, Your Call contest, which will award two €100,000 prizes later in the year. An article in the May issue of Construct Ireland magazine about the group’s plans is here.

You can also download a powerpoint file of a talk that Richard Douthwaite recently gave at the Degrowth conference in Barcelona here. …

Short Circuit

Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies in an Unstable World
by Richard Douthwaite. Expanded online edition published June 2003 with updates by Richard Douthwaite, Joanne Elliott and Caroline Whyte. Read Short Circuit online in its entirety.
Download pdf version(6 MB)

The global economy can no longer be relied upon to provide the necessities of life. Even in wealthy countries, the vagaries of free trade and the unimpeded movement of capital pose a threat not just to job security but to food and energy supplies as well.

Short Circuit proposes that each community build an independent local economy capable of supplying the goods and services its people would need should the mainstream economy collapse. It details the financial structures necessary for self-reliance, and it describes the techniques already in use in pioneering communities across the industrialized world. These inculde local currency schemes and community banks that enable local interest rates and credit terms to differ from those in the world economy. Efforts to meet local food and energy requirements using local resources are also reviewed.