The Promise of Democracy? Civic Enterprise, Localism and the Transformation of Democratic Capitalism

This chapter describes what people believe to be a new generation of social economy initiatives. It presents that the civic enterprises contain considerable economic and democratic potential. The chapter focuses on localism means in practice the acceptance of the increasing, place-based inequality of income and life chances that is one of the characteristics of the global, neoliberal economic order. The social economy and civic enterprise are responses to particular economic-social-democratic constellations. The transformation of post-war democratic capitalism created large groups of citizens who were excluded from both the welfare state as well as the newer forms of private capitalism. In civic enterprise informality and associative democracy come together to form a potentially powerful alternative to the currently toxic combination of the administrative state, production systems that are dominated by giant, transnational firms and precarious labour contracts, and the neoliberal discursive hegemony that pervades and sustains this arrangement.