Economía solidaria, prácticas cooperativas y desarrollo local en el sur de Brasil

This paper presents the results of research into the situation and tendencies of the social economy in Rio Grande do Sul, analysing fundamentally its contribution to the construction of new community spaces and local development. We study the diverse associative and co-operative experiences which spread during the 90s in a search for alternatives to the crisis of the fordist production model and the increase in the processes of impoverishment and social exclusion. Starting from the empirical results, the paper describes the various practices which comprise the supportive economy, identifying its ways of organisation, its relations with institutionalised cooperativism and its co-ordination in larger spaces. It also analyses the advances, limits and possibilities of supportive economic experiences in the present national and international regional context.