Complementary Currency Systems Bridging Communities : Proceedings of 6th Biennial RAMICS Congress, 27-29 October, 2022, University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria
This paper discusses conceptional issues of establishing community currencies (CCs). First, we provide a qualitative discussion about the different concepts of money, community currencies, complementary currencies, social currencies or even vouchers, which are often used interchangeably in the literature about CCs, which itself is as diverse as the experiences in the field are. These heterogeneous notions make it difficult to evaluate this rising phenomenon, detect general insights, distinguish these from country-specific features and arrive at policy conclusions. Second, based on the existing literature comprising both analogue and digital CCs, we identify critical features for the success as well as possible. To those features
belong a rather diverse production structure and a supply of heterogeneous goods and services for which members can spend their community currency. We also find that capacity building and training by and for local multipliers is indispensable to ensure ownership, voice and participation and thus the empowerment of local stakeholders. This is particularly relevant in case of a digital CC, which entails more (technical) challenges than the use of physical and analogue means of payment, to which community members are already accustomed to. Factors, which might explain the high number of non-active community currencies, are above all the lack of acceptance, the lack of institutional backing, regulatory requirements
and challenges arising from the technology as such.
