The solidarity economy is a theory of economic organization that prioritizes relationships between people. It is a response both to the failures of capitalism and the failures of state socialism.  Effectively, it seeks to develop a bottom-up approach to a democratic economy. The solidarity economy approach also identifies how capitalist processes impede economic justice and provides an open forum for considering how to build a just economy in a world freed from those constraints. As Emily Kawano and her colleague Julie Matthaei write, “For those working for system change, clarity is imperative. In its absence, the default is likely to be to ‘reform’ capitalism, without even considering the possibility of building an economy and world beyond it.” 

The articles in this collection, which were curated by Kawano in 2021, offer a wide range of applications of this concept—to the arts, to Indigenous land justice, to agriculture, and more.