Between Resilience and Resistance: SCMOs in Italy in Times of Crisis

Sustainable Community Movement Organizations (Forno & Graziano 2014) are social movement actors that work towards building dynamics within communities in which environmental protection and social justice issues are inextricably intertwined. Examples of such phenomena include solidarity-based exchanges and networks, new consumer-producer cooperatives, barter groups, urban gardening, time banks, local savings groups, urban squatting and others similar experiences. Although not new, over the last decade, such experiences have registered a rapid increase. Behind this diffusion, we may see various factors such as: (I) increasing attention towards sustainability among citizens; (II) changes in consumption practices due to the increase in unemployment and the reduction of credit access; (III) a general loss of meaningfulness in the wake of consumerism and the rise of social individualism. Starting out from this analytical framework, the paper is aimed at understanding on how collective action was deployed, sustained and transformed by the 2008 economic crisis by looking at three different cases of SCMOs in the Italian case: the Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (solidarity-based consumer groups), Addiopizzo (a relatively new anti-racket organization) and an Italian factory ‘recovered’ by its workers in 2013, Rimaflow. In particular, the paper aims to discuss why, how and whether Sustainable Community Movement Organizations emerge and succeed in triggering sustained political engagement. Data for the analysis comes from various sources, such as interviews with key actors from the three SCMOs, surveys among activists and participant observation.