Land, Labour, Capital: Solidarity and Inequality in a Community Currency

Building on empirical material from 6 months ethnographically inspired fieldwork in Málaga Común, a mutual credit community currency in Southern Spain, the paper uses Ostrom’s (1991) theoretical framework on common-pool resources to look deeper into the provision and appropriation dynamics of the currency. Particular attention will be put to the sources of inequality in members’ provision and appropriation capacities. Findings suggest that, embedded as community currencies are in the conventional economy, the sources of inequality from the conventional economy are also brought into the community currency. More particularly, ownership and specialised complex skills lie behind members’ unequal capacity to earn community currency in relation to their spending needs. Some considerations are outlined to attend when designing the governance institutions of community currency schemes that aim to overcome the inequality brought in by these currencies embeddedness in the conventional economy.