No abstract

Complementary Currency Systems (CCS) are accounting systems that define local monetary spaces created by non-bank actors to pay for exchange of goods and services inside a trading network. This article aims to investigate the capability of complementary currency systems to foster social and economic changes. The authors use an analysis of the literature to examine the nature and diversity of CCS in terms of objectives, forms, modes of governance, and degrees of connection with political authorities and economic structures. They also assess the potential of CCS to support local economies based on social and environmental values, working to combat economic vulnerability and social exclusion, and examine how CCS challenge the conventional perception of money. The article ends by summarizing the challenges facing CCS, inquiring into the potential problems and benefits that a change of this sort could entail.The authors wish to warmly thank the anonymous referees for their comments, which have enriched and significantly improved the quality and content of this text.

This text focuses on the role of governments and administrations in the emergence, spread, development and differentiation of community and complementary currency schemes (CCs), highlighting their role as potential support for experimentation. This support can take various forms: technical, financial, fiscal, official and/or legal recognition. We present first the role of governments, mostly local, in the emergence and development of four generations of CCs. We distinguish then a series of modes of action of governments at central and local levels. This leads to identify the interest of being supported (greater professionalism, greater complexity and possibly greater impact) while emphasizing the risks linked to public support as well.

Alternative consumption schemes require the selection of producers and traders according to criteria and through processes that should make alternative values concrete. The way values turn concrete is crucial for the effectiveness of such projects. This paper investigates the ways criteria and processes are defined and their real meanings and uses through the case of associative local currencies. Drawing on the framework of proximities, it analyses local currency schemes as combining proximities (geographical and nongeographical) and selection processes set up for providers wishing to join. Selection processes may be based on a charter, an approval committee and screening criteria. The objectives of the selection, its measures in principle, the way in which it is applied as well as the practical consequences are discussed. Even when charters and formal participatory schemes for selecting providers are established, proximities appear as the keystone of selection and trust.