Transformative Economies Lab is a collaborative investigation exploring, mapping, and articulating a practical, sustainable, equitable economy as it unfolds around the globe. The aim of the lab is to use an existing platform (Real Economy Lab) which provides a comprehensive picture of the projects, ideas, movements and networks offering viable alternatives to the mainstream market-bases economic system, and to present this as a compelling case for wider coordination and support by all stakeholders.
An increasing array of practitioners, researchers and changemakers are working towards a new economic system, transforming the current paradigm based on growth and wealth accumulation. The idea of this project is to create a map of the organizations that have participated in the World Social Forum of Transformative Economies in order to visualize the connections between them.
The Transformative Economies Lab is the result of a collaboration between Real Economy Lab, RIPESS Europe, MES Occitanie and Open Atlas (Communecter) emerging in the WSFTE Mapping commission and from the COMMAP initiative finance through FundAction. It is based on the Real Economy Lab, a project initiated by Jules Peck, with support from Foundation Charles Leopold Mayer, New Economics Foundation, Transition Network, and Metamaps.
This project is based on a questionnaire, which through not very complex questions, allows to collect the most general lines of work of the organizations –understanding that the answers will not be presented as an official position of the organization–. This questionnaire is available in the WSFTE Virtual Forum, has 25 questions and has been answered by 85 organizations around the world. Resulting data will be used to create infographic and graph-based visualizations and may be adapted and integrated with parallel research for consistency during analysis. Finally, the data obtained will be distributed under the Creative Commons license.
The main objective of the project, is not only to make the existing initiatives visible, but also to multiply the links and interrelations in order to make these alternatives emerge, in other words, to contribute giving visibility to the Social and Solidarity Economy as well as to the alternatives that it provides and that cover different aspects of society and needs of the populations such as: food, health, education, culture, housing,access to water and land, energy or protection of the environment etc.
This type of map facilitates the exchange of knowledge and allows us to learn about social innovation initiatives, what are the challenges and how to overcome them. The results of this research will then allow us to reflect on: the characteristics and peculiarities of these experiences, that is to say, it will allow us to reflect on what and how we are doing it in order to achieve a more sophisticated intervention on societies. Our first, and current task is to create a mind-map of the international alternatives to the economic system. We understand that there are many and very diverse voices that day by day build the other possible worlds, and for that reason, this map includes different meta- categories. In this sense, this mind-map shows actors with different interests but who share the same vision of life, and the desire to implement changes on a global scale.
Click HERE to access the map.
- General view of the map
