Assessing the socio-economic impact of Community Currencies: Cross examination of case studies with a standardized framework

Details

Supervisors

Gailly, Benoît ; Lejeune, Christophe

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en Ingénieur de gestion

Abstract

Nowadays, Community Currencies (CCs) are a trending system for bringing change in communities. Changes act mainly around the 3 pillars of sustainable development (ei Economic, Social, Environmental). In the field of CC, besides Place and Bindewald’s prototype, there is no standardized impact assessment framework in academic publication yet. The present research aims at taking a look at how effective this prototype is by analysing the impact of 4 CCs. The research is based on a comparison of 4 case studies (Le Florain, Le Cairn, La Gonette and the GEM Project). The results show that the analysed CC have indeed an impact on communities in line with their objective. Regarding the framework, because of its prototypical stage, issues are still to clear up. It is recommended to create a lighter version that would be embeddable into the CC operations by volunteer and CC managers. This research is an effort to start a compendium of impact assessment case studies which can in fine help to the emergence of new initiatives as well as providing recommendation for further development of the framework. However, limitations result from the type of research methodology adopted (i.e. data collection and case study format).