Green Utopias, Local Utopias: The Role of the Imaginaries of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) in Narratives of Transition

Although utopias ran out of steam during a twentieth century more marked by ideologies, they made a comeback from the 1970s onwards, both through the philosophy of deep ecology and the utopian fictions that renewed the literary genre. Green utopias thus appear that maintain a specific relationship to time and space, whose action provides the arrangements. There is thus a close link between utopias and their experiments, at the heart of which is the social and solidarity economy (SSE). What, then, is the role of the imaginaries of the SSE in the narratives of the transition? This article proposes to answer this question by crossing three books that have a common core around the principle "small is beautiful": Ernest F. Schumacher's 1973 essay of the same name, Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel Ecotopia, and Rob Hopkins' essay What If... We were unleashing our imagination to create the future we want? in 2019. This will lead us to specify their utopian coordinates, to analyze the role of the imaginaries of the SSE in the re-embedding of the economy and technology in society, as well as their inclusion in dissemination strategies based on experiments whose models must be disseminated.