Community Currency

This is the first book to present a new approach of institutional design as an evolutionary applied policy based on coherent conceptualization and methodology, and to study the actuality and implications of diversifying real/virtual community currencies. In contrast to a de facto standard theory, an institutional ecosystem can be composed of various institutions that continue to coexist with changing relative frequencies. In this view, diversified monetary institutions with local rules are feasible and realistic. Community currencies are worldwide attempts to redress such problems as financial instability, chronic stagnation, and decline of communities caused by globalization of the economy. Considering those alternative movements as a new type of policy, “evolutionist institutional design”, this book clarifies the feasibility and significance of community currencies in the current era of globalization. The book also provides a better understanding than mainstream approaches of such platform institutions as money that determine fundamental means of cognition and action of interacting agents. Money is a symbolically generalized communication medium in the mesodomain that mediates between socioeconomic performance and patterns in the macrodomain and motives and cognitive frameworks in the microdomain. Conventional national systems of money and finance are platform institutions that determine basic replicators for a capitalistic market economy to evolve. In contrast, community currencies conveying both economic and social/cultural values are distinct platform institutions that are expected to endogenously change such basic replicators in outer and inner institutions for agents to a noncapitalistic market economy. These currencies are considered target institutions for “media design” in the framework of evolutionist institutional design.