Local Community Challenges: Environmental Degradation, Labor Devaluation and Informalization. Can Social Economy Build Resilient Cultural Symbiotic Communities?

Wednesday, 9 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: FSE025 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
RC26 Sociotechnics, Sociological Practice (host committee)

Language: English

Public policies are facing dramatic challenges on issues of local democratic participation. During the past few decades the nonprofit sector and local civil society organizations, as social economy organizations, have been involved directly into the politics of local and endogenous development. The crisis of representational democracy also gave an impetus to local innovations, where combined and even development has become the new autarky issue also expressing the power of place- its people. Participative democracy has become almost mainstream in public discourses and practices while issues of empowerment are also in place to couple those participative trends.
We are interested in relating participation to a socio-economic cooperative process hereby local community cohesion issues emerge as dominant forms impressed by globalization forces on the one side, but also by new knowledge forms, such as info-technology, which require symmetries in the manner of holistic approaches to be co-founded at local level. Territoriality becomes important as local labor needs to organize new forms of organization where infotechnology becomes key for bio sciences, including services such as, labor mobility. Tourism, culinary culture and gaming are cases in point. Under conditions of a post-Covid-19, digitalized world how the Just Transition to an inclusive world can be attained? We seek papers which address these issues.
Session Organizers:
Georgios TSOBANOGLOU, University of the Aegean, Greece and Dimosthenis DASKALAKIS, Greece
Oral Presentations
The Presence of Participatory Budgets in Municipalities with Fewer Than 20,000 Inhabitants: A Descriptive Study Based on the Content Analysis of Official Municipal Portals
Lluís CATALÀ-OLTRA, Universidad de Alicante, Spain; Xavier GINÉS SÁNCHEZ, Universitat Jaume I, Spain; Alejandro OSORIO, Spain
Perspectives of Deprivation in Europe: Is the South Left behind?
Nikos SARRIS, Institute of Political Research, Greece
Governing the Commons in Exceptional Conditions. the Importance of Socio-Political Leadership in Governing Sustainable Development.
Georgios TSOBANOGLOU, University of the Aegean, Greece; Charalambos LOUCA NICOU, American College, Cyprus
Sustaining Local Development through Enabling Social Financing Instruments in Euro-Mediterranean Countries
Georgios TSOBANOGLOU, University of the Aegean, Greece; Nectarios OUDENIOTIS, Greece