Grassroots Economic Activism in Hard Times

Abstract

According to an authoritative literature (KOUSIS 2017, KOUSIS & PASHOU 2017), citizens of Southern European countries have developed “alternative forms of resilience” to cope with the hardship due to recession and austerity. This Chapter explores and questions this hypothesis. The first section illustrates the “alternative forms of resilience” perspective, second re-frames it into the more complex possible trends of grassroots economic activism in the shadow of crisis, third uses the case of alternative food networks in Italy in hard times to test the “alternative forms of resilience” hypothesis against competing ones. Although limited, the analysis shows that grassroots economic activism in times of crisis present a complex intertwine of persistencies and transformations. Some evolutions appear coherent with the “alternative forms of resilience” perspective, while some diverge.