Abstract
When community currencies (CCs) are introduced to activate local economy and community, it is vital to induce local residents to positively participate in CCs. To support spontaneous community development more effectively, we propose a new policy approach named “community dock (CD)” in which community is conceived as an association of not only local residents, but also various organizations, companies and local government. CD is a synthetic method of empowerment evaluation and improvement by which research groups periodically conduct comprehensive checkups to local socioeconomy and subjective satisfactions of residents, and encourage communities to observe the outcomes of such checkups, to evaluate and solve the shared problems by themselves. It is designed as a self-support tool for integrative development of social capitals in local communities. CD is composed of the following four phases: (1) analysis and diagnosis of current performance of socioeconomies of the community, (2) self-estimation on the performance of the community and self-reflection their own internal rules of CC participants, (3) self-alternation of their frames of cognitions, motives, values and norms of CC participants, (4) change of properties of CCs as platform media. The loop of CD is subsumed by media design of CCs. After sufficient times of repetitions of CD, external rules of CCs as platform media can be redesigned to fit the altered internal rules of participants and attain the initial goals effectively. Media design of CCs is situated on the upper level of CD in the whole picture of evolutionist institutional design.
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Notes
UNDP published its first human development report in 1990 (UNDP 1990) and has promoted development of human development index.
This paper defines “basic data” as objective basic local profile data and “subjective data” as local people’s views and opinions about their own lives and communities.
Domains of community dock are listed as the economy, education and health in this paper following the human development index by UNDP. However, in reality, local resources, culture and tradition, environment, economy and social structure vary with local areas. Local considerations should allow local people to select factors influencing the level of people’s well-being from the human development point of view.
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Kusago, T., Nishibe, M. Community dock: a new policy approach for altering institutions. Evolut Inst Econ Rev 15, 431–459 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40844-018-0108-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40844-018-0108-7
Keywords
- Community dock
- Community currency
- Empowerment evaluation
- Subjective satisfaction
- Social capital
- Media design
- Evolution