Community currencies and sustainable development: A systematic review

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Community currency Sustainable development Complementary currency Local exchange systems Systemic review Community or complementary currency systems have spread all around the world. Most often, they have been promoted as tools to foster sustainable development albeit they differ in terms of specific objectives. While many case studies have tried to assess the actual impact of these systems, there has been no global analysis summarizing their global impact. This paper aims to fill the gap by exploring whether complementary currencies contribute to the three pillars of sustainable development. We use the systematic review methodology on an original dataset gathering most academic publications on the topic in English, French and Spanish. Our main findings suggest that community currencies mostly contribute to social sustainability, and that their economic benefits are somewhat limited due to their small scale and the lack of awareness on their scope. Moreover, very few studies explicitly identify environmental outcomes. Finally, this review reveals some limits regarding current methods for impact assessment in this field. Therefore it encourages more standardization to provide greater accuracy and strengthen the legitimacy of community currencies in order to foster their continued development. Over the last few decades, a growing number of social movements have turned their attentions to the challenges of globalization in terms of sustainable development. Concerns have been raised about the conventional monetary system notably that such a system is unsustainable because of the constant drain of financial resources going from poor to rich segments of the population, and the obsession for economic growth as main economic philosophy (Seyfang and Longhurst, 2013; Lietaer et al., 2012; North, 2007). All of these result in the amplification of economic disparities and the decline of local economies (Robertson, 1999; Strange and Bayley, 2008) and even frequently the depletion of natural resource (Jackson, 2009). In response, a few 'new economic' approaches argue that we need to revise priorities away from the principal objective of economic growth and more oriented towards the well-being of society and community-level sustainable development They argue that all three pillars of sustainability need to be addressed and given some importance. In parallel with this approach, and frequently inspired by green movements, community currencies have been developing all around the world by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profit organizations (NPOs) and informal groups. The motivations to create such systems vary. Some of them were …