The cooperative GLS Bank in Germany was established in 1992. Today, it has 26,000 members and 130,000 customers, which are small family businesses and cooperatives. 40% of the bank's portfolio is invested in businesses with social aims and another 40% is invested in the development of renewable energy sources and ecological agriculture.
Big corporations cannot create social economy in its essence. It is based on small- and medium-sized business. The large size of the corporations does not allow the average consumer to either understand or control them.
What other examples of a real application of social economy did you see?
In agriculture, there are many examples of sustainable development of socially oriented cooperatives or small businesses. In Belgium, for example, cooperative unions on a municipal basis are very common. These are schemes that do not come from above. People organize themselves alone. One of them is responsible for the planting and then his followers (the members of the cooperative) help harvest the crop. The funding for the project comes from all participants, who help not only with funds but also with work, which is then paid. Such cooperatives involve approximately 60-70 families and they are active at a regional level.
Another sector, in which social economy achieves a lot of good results, is the development of small production units of electricity from renewable sources. The residents of a village can create a cooperative to apply for funding and building a small photovoltaic park, for example, to reduce the cost of the electricity they use. I can give you the example of Ecopower, which began as a very small company in Belgium, and now it has a bit of everything, including photovoltaic projects, small hydroelectric production units, biomass and wind power. Currently, the same company is the supplier of the cheapest electricity in the region of Flanders.
The most common argument in the discussion on the greater use of alternative energy sources for electricity generation is that their application is still more expensive than the methods established to date (lignite, nuclear energy). How would you comment on that statement?
It should be clear that many countries in the world finance nuclear power with public funds. Nuclear power is not free; on the contrary, taxpayers pay dearly for it and the threats to human health are well known. Cheap electricity from nuclear power plants is a highly questionable concept. The management of their waste is not cheap. It is not cheap to build them either. If this money had been used for the improvement of green energy, we would have been in much better condition.
Are there Greek examples of successful operation of this model of economy?
There may not be many, but there are some. One of them is the cooperative bank Karditsa, which works under the "Development of Karditsa" programme. The bank provides funding for a small biomass-manufacturing unit and for different agricultural cooperatives.
Being the creator of the film about social economy, I would like to ask you whether you think that the examples you saw abroad can be applied more widely in Greece.
Greece is a country with very cumbersome bureaucracy, which is either lacking determination to complete a task, or is full of enthusiasm that has never been harnessed into real actions.
I want to stress that all businesses that are based on social economy in Europe have the direct support of mayoralties. If I have a small company that recycles waste and that opens jobs for the unemployed, the mayoralty may subsidize part of the employee's salary.
The companies that operate in the social economy most often cooperate with regional governments and mayoralties. They undertake to commit actions, which anyway are the responsibility of local government organizations, but they hire long-term unemployed or representatives of other weaker social groups.
In Greece, the state and municipal organizations do not communicate with ordinary citizens. Wherever you go in the state administration, you find yourself against a wall of bureaucracy or government officials who do not want to cooperate. All this determines the environment.
On the other hand, the Greek economy, by its nature, is built on small- and medium-sized businesses, on family businesses. In other words, we have a tradition in microeconomics and this gives us a great advantage for the development of social economy.
What needs to change in order for the social economy to become a driver of development, especially at a time when the established economic models obviously do not work?
It takes very good organization, an analysis of the opportunities and extraordinary perseverance. These are conditions that are not very well developed in Greece.
On the other hand, in Greece we have a tradition of cooperative activity both in tourism and in the production of olive oil, for example. Furthermore, wherever we were shooting in Europe, the people told us: "Here, we do not have much sun and we do not have wind either. Why don’t you hurry up and develop the opportunities that you have in Greece?"
How can ordinary people turn to this type of activity?
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