A New Prospect : The Social and Solidarity Economic Regime

We are now suffering from what has been termed "the worst financial and economic crisis in a century". Neoliberalism, which swept over the globe under the banner of market supremacy, has at last self-destructed, leaving behind high unemployment and deepening cracks in social integration and an urgent crisis for the symbiotic relationship between the earth and people\u27s lives and living. In the midst of this social and economic catastrophe, there is an acute need for alternative visions of a sustainable society. We have tried to present such a vision for a sustainable society in our latest book, On the Social Enterprises: The Promoters of a New Public Sphere (Jichosha, 2006). We argue, firstly, that the "third sector" (comprising NPOs, co-ops, mutuals, funds and social enterprises, NGOs, etc., which we call social and solidarity economies), which is not the state-public sector, but neither the for-profit organization sector, has been developing from the grassroots and gaining power both within nation-states and on a global scale. Secondly, we argue that social and solidarity economies have worked in both the market sector and state-public sector to make socially and environmentally sustainable. However, the outline and features of a macro vision of the socio-economic system formed following such a model remains to be clarified. Thus, we argue, first of all, that in line with Nishikawa, Jun\u27s The Solidarity Economy (2007), there is a need to give a name to the macro vision of the above-mentioned socio-economic system, we call this the "social and solidarity economic regime", and attempt to analyze how and why social and solidarity economies are able to effectively work on the market and public systems, especially in the areas surrounding the two great requirement that the sustainable society must meet, i.e., "social integration" and "symbiosis between the earth and people\u27s lives and living". This analysis also implies that the any public policy to be effectively pursued needs to be deepened to include collaboration with the social and solidarity economies. It is these logics that determine the basic outline and features of the social and solidarity economic regime. We try to provide a whole contour of this regime, including a global vision in as much detail as possible, by applying and extending the basic logic. However, we have only been able to present a partial and simple image of the whole regime, leaving the description of a fuller image as a task for the near future