Nadia Johanisova

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too‐often‐neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more‐than‐human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi‐sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.

This chapter opens with a discussion of mainstream and alternative conceptualisations of the enterprise and of the economy. It then discusses an overview of existing forms of eco-social enterprises and of their framings within different discourses and schools of thought. A central part of the narrative of orthodox economic theory is the enterprise as a capitalist firm operating in a generalised and abstract market and producing goods and services to be consumed by utility maximising consumers and measured in money terms. The chapter then explores five dimensions of a broad definition of eco-social enterprise, based on the literature and authors' own empirical research. The five dimensions of eco-social enterprises, drawing on existing definitions and on our own research, namely: other-than-profit goals, using profits to replenish Nature and community, democratic and localised ownership and governance patterns, rootedness in place and time, and non-market production, exchange or provisioning patterns.

The concept of economic localization, although receiving increasing academic and practical interest, still lacks a solid theoretical background. Our aim here is to suggest a working definition of the term economic localization and to outline its possible interpretations and operationalizations. Based on a detailed analysis of six monographs on the subject, we: (i) summarize the content of localization narratives as presented by the individual authors, capturing the variability of the localization agenda; (ii) present 11 localization dimensions and 17 more concrete aspects of localization arguments as a way to structure and operationalize the concept; and (iii) suggest a condensed working definition of the economic localization concept. We argue that it is crucial to acknowledge the complexity of the economic localization agenda, which should not simply focus only on some of its aspects without keeping a sense of the whole in mind. We thus propose to define economic localization as both the process and the result of moral, political and practical support of as many localized aspects of production and consumption as possible and desirable. Finally, we discuss the construction of “the other” within the localization argument, and the position of the localization concept within the research agenda of ecological economics. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.