New Issue: IJCCR Vol 29 – 2025

Dear readers

The 2025 issue has  been published. We are delighted to present some very exciting new articles on complementary currencies and alternative finance:

The first contribution by Paolo Dini and Tomaš Fleischman Neutral Settlement Layer for Interoperability between Different Forms of Local Monetary and Financial Expression brings a novel thinking about the payment problem in B2B networks. It is a detailed treatise on the multilateral set-off of mutual debts in which several important aspects of accounting are presented and described:

• future commitments in addition to existing obligations;
• a new notation to represent balance sheet relationships as network edges;
• the concept of multilateral settlement flow as an innovation in the payment system.

These innovations, in turn, lead to the following significant financial innovations:

• payment system neutrality;
• monetary and financial expression:
• and finally, perhaps most interesting for local currencies: interoperability between non-convertible currencies.

The second contribution, a study of Raphaël Didier, The Polymerized Monetary Community of a Complementary Local Currency in France, taking the case of the French currency Florain, a complementary local currency in the Nancy metropolitan area. Asking who is using such a currency, it highlights four main user profiles: political activists, gentrifiers, casual users, and cultural users. The Florain users could therefore be seen as a polymerized monetary community. These findings have interesting implications from both a socio-cultural and marketing perspective and could help to understand and develop participation in small currency-systems.

The third paper is a long-awaited treatise on the history and background of the Bristol Pound and the failure of this once promising currency and ist successor Bristol Pay, by Marcus Petz and Diana Finch: The Rise and Fall of the Bristol Pound: An Exploration of the Learnings from Bristol’s Eponymous Currency.

Finally, we discuss two important books in our field: 

Jérôme Blanc has written a detailed and illuminating review, Unready-made money, of Ester Barinaga’s book: Remaking money for an inclusive and sustainable future: money commons, which highlights and further explores important points in the book. Even for those who are already familiar with the book, this review is well worth reading.

Juan Campo has written a review of Louis Larue’s book: Alternative Currencies: A critical approach in which Larue poses some critical questions about complementary currencies and finds evidence in his research that challenges the prevailing narrative about such currencies. An exciting discussion that will also be taken up online soon in the RAMICS book corner (see RAMICS events).

 

Jens Martignoni, editor-in-chief