In Part 1 of this blog, we looked at Olivier De Schutter’s case that capitalism doesn’t fail to serve the poor by accident. De Schutter is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He says capitalism is structurally built to follow the purchasing power of the wealthy. Neither elections nor consumer boycotts are enough to fix that. De Schutter’s answer is to democratize the economy itself, giving people a formal, lasting say in the decisions made inside workplaces, corporations, and markets.
So, what does that look like in practice? De Schutter points to an existing model already operating at scale: the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE).
SSE is a collection of economic practices, norms, and institutions that prize democratic governance, social (Oliveira, 2025, p. 174, citing Moulaert & Ailenei, 2005; Salamon & Sokolowski, 2018; and Utting, 2018, 2023) and environmental objectives (Yi et al., 2023, p. 1). In SSE, economic producers, workers, and consumers work in solidarity, cooperation, donation, reciprocity, and self-management (Duch-Plana & Pons-Altés, 2024). Some SSE organizations focus on the needs of communities. For example, mutual aid networks (Centros de Apoyo Mútuo) emerged in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María to help people build new ways of living and organizing to meet basic needs (Vilarrúbio & Vélez-Vélez, 2020).
Social and Solidarity Economy organizations and enterprises emphasize democratic participation, as opposed to exclusive control by boards and shareholders. Decisions center on solidarity, equity, rights, self-determination, mutuality, and cooperation in economic decision-making. Examples of alternatives to conventional profit-seeking finance include credit unions, cooperatives, mutual associations, self-help groups, open-source movements, digital commons, and crowdfunding (Yi et al., 2023).
The aim is collective wellbeing and planetary health, to which profit motive is subordinate. It is a call to a postgrowth society in which our measure of success prioritizes other kinds of growth beyond the GDP. GDP tells us little about people’s actual economic well-being, who benefits or loses, or how resilient individuals, institutions, and society are in the face of disruptions (OECD, 2020).
“We should accept that there are things we would like to see grow,” says De Schutter, naming bicycle lanes, the solidarity economy, time people spend with family and community.
A Leg Up for Social and Solidarity Economy
To shift the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) from the margins to the core of economic life, De Schutter offers the following policy fixes in his publication Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth (De Schutter, 2026).
It also calls for the following measures:
- Decommodification of health and human sectors, such as elder care, disability support, early childhood, health, social services on the grounds that decisions based on profit maximization for shareholders are structurally incompatible with human rights in those sectors. It positions SSE entities as complements to public provision of the same.
- The right to initiative through the legal recognition that social innovation is a public responsibility “on a par with technological innovation,” thus redirecting public research budgets in the same way as current R&D investments.
- Capacity building through SSE organizations to foster effective self-management through social-purpose management frameworks distinct from capitalist ones. One might interpret this as a nod to Freirean critical consciousness raising.
- SSE public policy co-designed with civil society and the SSE networks themselves, akin to Brazil’s National Forum for the Solidarity Economy or France’s Rtes network.
The roadmap does not rely solely on non-economic measures. De Schutter also advances two economic policy levers to remove structural disadvantages:
- Targeted tax relief and cheap credit access to encourage democratic enterprises to scale faster.
- Preferential treatment in public procurement to guarantee market access for SSE entities.
Ultimately, targeted market interventions and institutional redesign have distinct ends. Mechanisms like socializing consumer costs, consumer boycotts, and land value taxation attack the problem of economic inequality by mitigating market externalities. The Social Solidarity Economy framework that De Schutter advocates for embeds democratic decision-making directly into economic institutions to make them more responsive to the well-being of people and the environment. Whether through legal frameworks, public procurement, tax incentives, or the decommodification of health and human services, these proposals offer an alternative for evaluating economic inequality and governance.
