Experimenting with a structured approach to building complementary economies for community resilience and positive social impact using digital social currencies and social valuation of transactions

Interest in complementary community economies as a strategy for addressing local challenges, especially those related to limitations of the mainstream economy and the welfare state, has increased markedly recently. Such economies use local community currencies alongside or instead of fiat currency to stimulate asset-based community development (ABCD), secure positive social impacts and increase community resilience. Increasingly, these are being developed around transactions supported by digital currency platforms able to capture data automatically and transparently to measure and verify social impacts of initiatives within community economies and the transactions they generate. This strategy attracts interest because it offers a structured, coherent and verifiable approach to community (re)development and the restoration of lost social capital, which might overcome the limitations of more usual community development initiatives, most of which are small-scale, ad-hoc, piecemeal and have difficulty attracting finance to establish and grow their activities or to generate income to sustain operations. We conceptualise these as CORE (COmmunity REsilience) economies. The paper includes reflections on infrastructural elements, activities and governance arrangements of CORE economies and on aspects of the processes through which these might be built, financed, governed and sustained.