The current economic development model premised on the legacy of colonial dispossession is based on continuous growth, capital accumulation, profit as the driving force of the economy, exploitation of reproductive labour and nature, commodification, and financial speculation. Both in the global south and the global north, alternative socio-ecological experiences to the neoliberal economic development model are being developed.
We are a global working group of organizers, researchers, and practitioners advancing post-capitalist, decolonial, and eco‑feminist economic practices. We reject an economic order built on colonial dispossession, endless growth, capital accumulation, and the exploitation of labor and nature. Across the Global South and North, communities are already crafting socio‑ecological alternatives—we connect them, learn from them, and work to amplify their power.
We align around a shared horizon: economies that sustain life and freedom rather than extraction and control. That means:
- An economy focused on the conservation and reproduction of life.
- Economies in harmony with nature.
- Economies modelled on liberatory gendered relations of production
- Economies for the production and conservation of common goods.
- Economies anchored in territories.
- Economies based on mutual aid and solidarity
- Self-managed and self-governed economies.
In short, an economy centred on life that generates social and environmental justice as non-negotiables.
Pathways towards a socio-ecological transformation of the economy
- To achieve socio-ecological transformations, we are convinced that it is necessary to:
- Generate grassroots organisations and networks for reflection and action to achieve socio-ecological transformations that promote social and environmental justice.
- Manage socio-ecological transformations at the territorial level based on their potential and challenges.
- Generate communication and educational processes that enable the creation of a collective consciousness expressed in joint actions of resistance to the neoliberal development model and the promotion of alternative proposals to that model.
What are we doing about it?
Within our networks, we mobilise to:
- Generate mobilizations of resistance to the hegemonic model of development and promotion of new paradigms of life.
- Promote agroecology as a strategy for achieving nutritional sovereignty.
- Promote the expansion of self-reliant economic models in grassroot organizations
- research on the fundamental problems and contradictions at the local level that undermine the formation of stable cooperatives
- Promote the organization of cooperatives and other forms of association.
- Systematize and disseminate experiences that are contributing to the achievement of sociological transformations.
- Participated in local, national, and international networks working for socio-ecological transformations.
Our demands
As a group, we propose and demand that local and national governments establish and implement public policies for environmental conservation, esepcially with regard to the extractive and colonial economy. We also demand public policies that faour inititaives for transformative economies. To amplify our demands, we create spaces for education and social mobilisation. We have been part of organizing national political protests that agitate against economic exploitation by the state and demand for the erasure of exploitative financial legislation.
If you’re building or studying cooperatives, commons, agroecology, care economies, community finance, or territorial self‑governance, we want to learn with you. Join our sessions, share your experience, and help co‑create strategies that move us from resistance to reproduction—of life, livelihoods, and liberated futures.
Contact the Antisystemic Economic Alternatives working group to collaborate, present your initiative, or host a territorial exchan
The ASEA working group is committed to..
- Coordinate across scales — link local, national, and international actors proposing alternatives to the dominant model.
- Document and circulate inspiration — systematize practices that work and share them widely.
- Educate and communicate — disseminate proposals developed across the platform’s working groups through accessible tools and media.
- Be present in struggle — participate in mobilizations for socio‑ecological transformation.
Learn more about our work:
Next to popular mobilisation, research plays a central role in our efforts to strengthen and scale up anti-systemic alternatives. We produced two studies interrogating the criteria defining anti-systemic alternatives:
- We produced one study interrogating the criteria defining anti-systemic alternatives
- Video documentary on food cooperatives and their important work in Kenya and East Africa
- Video documentary on systemic alternatives more generally with cases from Latin America
Together, these help us to define characteristics of initiatives that pose systemic challenges to the current economic order.
These publications are available on our publications site.
