Gender, social economy and development: lessons from Bolivia

• Autores: Isabelle Hillenkamp
• Localización: La economía social, pilar de un nuevo modelo de desarrollo económico sostenible / CIRIEC España (dir. congr.), 2011, ISBN 9788495003850
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The recent financial crisis strikingly recalled us that the market, considered as the unique exchange modality, combined with democracy reduced to a narrow political sphere cannot lead to a sustainable development (Servet, 2010). The social and political issues cannot be separated from that of the organisation of the economy through the institutions, nor can the market be the unique modality for exchange and resource allocation (Polanyi, 1983 [1944]). This is true not only in the “Northern countries”, at the core of the processes of market expansion and financiarization of the last three decades, but also in “Southern” or “peripheral countries” (Coraggio, 2004), where neither trade openness, nor foreign investment, nor the attempts to impose the capitalist firm as a vector of modernization have permitted to relieve hundreds of millions of workers from poverty.

    A social economy as an organisation of production, exchange and financing based on the values of work, solidarity, social justice and democracy is indispensable for a fairer development which can thus be more sustainable. Social innovation, in the sense of “the capacity to envisage other options than reproduction” (Bouchard, 2006), is the driving force of this economy. Since their emergence in Europe during the 19th century, social economy organisations such as co-operatives, mutual societies and associations have been the place of innovating practices aiming at a democratization of the economy as an alternative to the reproduction of domination relations within capitalism. This necessity and dynamics, far from being limited to Northern countries, also exists in the South, where social economy is mainly situated in a popular economy (Sarria Icaza and Tiriba, 2006) with high degrees of informality.

    Women are, in many Southern countries, the main protagonists of this popular, social and solidarity-based economy (Guérin, 2006): because they are excluded, even more than men, of formal employment; because neoliberal policies force them into inventing new modalities of family and community care in order to compensate the reduction of care services provided by the State; and because women roles widely correspond to the functioning of social economy (Berger, León et al., 2008). The issue of social innovation and democratization of the economy and, through it, the possibility of a sustainable development thanks to a social economy must then be linked to the issue of the transformation of gender relations. The many solidarity-based productive initiatives led by women in the South indeed carry a potential of emancipation and development but are at the same time inserted in a material and symbolic order based on the submission of women that can reduce them to a mere poverty economy.

    Based on a case study performed in Bolivia, my work aims at contributing to the analysis of the links between gender, social economy and development. It concentrates on the “groups of solidarity economy and fair trade” (grupos de economía solidaria y comercio justo)1 in El Alto, a city of 900 000 inhabitants in the outskirts of La Paz and born from the rural migrations of the last decades. It relies on in-depth interviews with women producers, members of these groups, conducted between April and June 2010 as well as on a previous analysis of the functioning of this economy and its contribution to the mediation of the tensions between the models of market and democracy implemented in this country since the 1980s (Hillenkamp, 2009).