note Note générale

A Social Economy or a Reciprocal Economy?, communication, 6th International Karl Polanyi Conference

Introduction

I was recently invited to attend a strategic planning meeting organised by the Ontario Council of Alternative Businesses. The Council is, for all intents and purposes, a network of autonomous and semi-autonomous commercial ventures called community businesses1 that employ — and, as often as possible, are managed by and controlled by — their members. In this case, the members are consumer/survivors located in Ontario, individuals who have survived mental illness as well as the system of treatment, services and practices dispensed by health and social service professionals in both institutional or non institutional settings. Their ventures are true businesses operating in the market economy, although certain functions may be supported or sponsored by public or private funds, and their operations are geared towards the specific needs of the psychiatric survivors. The meeting was organised to explore various issues such as the problems related to “selling” their approach to both public and private funders, the difficulties in establishing relationships with conventional businesses of the private sector, and the obstacles to extending economic opportunities for consumer/survivors, either as workers or managers or owners.

A couple of days later, I received an invitation to Québec’s community economic development training institute’s next annual meeting. One of the questions that will be discussed will be a proposal to change its name from “Institut de formation en développement économique communautaire” to another as yet undetermined one. In the documents accompanying the proposed agenda, there is a suggestion that the expression “économie solidaire” should be incorporated into the new name since the notion of economic solidarity seems to correspond quite well with the objectives of the organisation. However, in an another document, IFDEC’s president wonders out loud if there is, in fact, a distinction to be made between “économie sociale” (social economy) and “économie solidaire” (reciprocal economy), since the terms are somewhat nebulous, often confusing and invariably overlapping.

This paper would like to try to shed some light on this question by examining differing development strategies. At the same time, it will try to link the difficulties and the issues related to the full-fledged integration of consumer/survivors to each of the various economies being put forward.