Abstract
It has been noted that during times of crisis, economic practices organized on principles of reciprocity often arise. In the last decade in Greece Social and Solidarity Economy seemed to gain a momentum under the shadow of the debt crises that struck the country from 2009 onwards. This momentum included both grassroots movements in the form of civic association and institutional changes that attempted to tune in with a European trend towards social economy. In our contribution we review both the social and the institutional changes that resulted to a social economy ‘big bang’. Furthermore, by following the formation of a local association of social enterprises we sketch the landscape of social entrepreneurship in Greek periphery and its relation to a long genealogy of both local subsistence economy and transnational policy networks.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
KOISPE, Social Cooperatives of limited liability were introduced in 1999 (Law 2716) and were the first form of social enterprises introduced in Greece, as part of the psychiatric reformation that was initiated during the 1990s.
- 3.
A pre-existing work integration social enterprise for people with mental health problems based on Law 2716/1999, art. 12.
- 4.
Despite the fact that we look into the development of Social and Solidarity Economy through the prism of the aforementioned developments in the field in the last decade, we cannot ignore that social economy in the form of cooperatives has a long history in Greece and more specifically in the area we focus on, Epirus. Although a detailed history of cooperatives in the area runs far beyond the scope of this paper we cannot avoid to mention that cooperatives in the local context, mainly in the form of local unions of producers in the primary section, follow the fate of cooperatives in the Greek context (Vetsopoulos, 2018).
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- 8.
A case in point is the project Incultum (https://incultum.eu/pilots/7-aoos-the-shared-river/).
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Mantzos, K., Theodosiou, A.(., Kameas, A. (2024). Social and Solidarity Economy in Greece: European, National and Local Perspectives. In: Bianchini, S., Bandini, F., Bolzani, D. (eds) Social Entrepreneurship and Migrants' Inclusion. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55791-0_11
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