Deploying Time Banking for Human-scaled Economic Development - Marc, Stephanie, Preston

Deploying Time Banking for Human-scaled Economic Development Marc Brakken, Stephanie Rearick, and Preston Austin Problematic stuff Our economies appear to be in trouble. Over the past decades we have witnessed substantial economic gains throughout many social sectors. Much of this gain was derived by exploiting a series of market bubbles that facilitated our ability to build infrastructures. The dot com bubble of the 1990s included rapid development and increased accessibility of significant computational power. The infrastructures of the housing bubble do not require explanation. During the stock bubble that ran parallel to housing, investment firms put significantly increased resources towards the activities that were most rapidly profitable. Investors worked with highly leveraged portfolios focused on derivative trades. The gains that allowed for these expansions appear diminished at the moment while the structures built by them persist. We are forced either to pay for their upkeep or allow them to decay. We tend not to let the latter happen, so for the moment we are bridled by the former.

It is not uncommon for systems in the midst of rapid expansion to allocate resources to the structures that allow for that expansion. (Schneider & Kay 1994; Ulanowicz et al 2006.) The competitive advantage during expansion is on resource capture, so optimizations will tend towards that end. The reluctance to cull structures, however, causes significant problems. Those who produce currency in the normal marketplace, banks, retrenched as markets collapsed, holding instead of lending their currencies in order to shelter themselves from anticipated shocks.

Economic processes reliant on bank currency became unable to perform as a result. All social and economic processes that relied on business trade suffered a similar shock from proximal currency evaporation.

Government lending to financial institutions was intended to free up that currency so it could resume its flow through the economy. Although directed in this manner to address the problem of bank seizure, it provides an example of a common, and flawed, response in times of apparent crisis. The assumption is that banks are actually the creators and dispersers of resource. They are central institutions which spread outward the capital generated by them. Banks, however, create currency by lending against other forms of value. The bank may signify that value since it is willing to make a bet on it, but the bank does not generate the value. Other social forces and community interactions generate the value.

The error, stated more generally, is that structures like banks, houses, and hardware are the things that generate value in the world rather than the processes and behaviors that contributed to our development of stuff. The solution to poor economic circumstances is, from this viewpoint, to put more money into stuff. This is akin to cash-strapped cities and administrators deciding to build convention centers and redevelop downtowns, or other forms of stuff, in an effort to attract visitors with money.

There may be times when this is not entirely inappropriate. If there is a lot of currency moving around, a signal of an active economy, structures that provide further means of capturing and directing currency make sense. When currency is scarce, however, they are a problem.

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Scarce dollars are allocated to places that appear to be able to generate quick return in a manner easily recognizable to the agency dispensing the money. The source of money declares what is valuable: tourists with dollars, infrastructure, and so forth. If communities or individuals cannot demonstrate their ability to return recognizable value, the source excludes them. Yet as Edgar Cahn (2000) and time banking emphatically argue, all communities and people possess value regardless of how easily recognizable it is. One of our fundamental difficulties is that governance and financial institutions which possess the ability to disperse capital investment are often unable to recognize the types of value available in economically marginalized communities. The persistently unemployed face similar problems as they search for work. Prospective employers view a lack of a job as a signal for a lack of value. The excluded remain excluded because without liquidity, they make no detectable ripples in the flow of money.

These marginal people and communities are not simply valuable, though. Stuff is generated by people doing things. Different types of activity generate different types of structures. Structures are a form of wealth or capital. People come together to make productive capital that allows them to do new things, and they do so because they have a need for it. This is like a community that comes together to build a barn. They had been doing things that created a need for a barn, so they build a barn. Along with it, they create a new set of possible activities.

When people are empowered and do things they are likely to encounter problems. Given resources and enough need, they will find solutions. Marginalized communities’ people do things just as anyone else does. They encounter problems just as anyone else does. Given the means to solve those problems they will do so. Those solutions could be significantly valuable. Yet institutions are only able to recognize the valuable they have previously encountered or that is closely similar. Novelty is a different matter altogether. It is only recognizable by the economy if it impacts system-recognized values directly, or via direct human observation. In every interaction runs the potential to develop novel solutions to unaddressed problems. Empowering the margins empowers future solutions. We cannot predict where on the margin solutions might arise, so we need a way of ensuring all of it can be so. Concentrated investment cannot see this job, so therefore cannot do this job.

Powering up Alternate, complementary currencies offer us ways to address this problem. Currencies facilitate our denotation and tracking of exchange, among other purposes. We can view different currencies as problem-solving tools. In a direct barter economy, transaction can become blocked if one side of an exchange cannot offer something the other side immediately wants or needs. A currency tradable in the future allows us to work around this.

A currency is only valuable if someone else is willing to accept it on the premise that they can spend it. If we develop a local currency to solve the problem of barter in our town, our currency is correspondingly less tradable with someone in a neighboring town. If they do not have easy means of transferring it for other goods it is worth less to them. With minimal trade between towns we might decide this is not a problem, but otherwise we need to find a solution to distant trade.

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A regional currency offers such a solution. If both towns accept the same money and at similar rates of exchange, inter-town trade becomes easy. We probably discover that the increased ease of trade across distance is useful. We could substitute the regional currency for the town currency to increase the value of the money. If we can do more things with it, it contains more value. Because the town currency is stickier, much like direct barter was sticky, it becomes less valuable in turn. We cannot do as much with it.

Therein lies a problem, and one that those of us interested in complementary economics are distinctly aware of: the regional currency is optimized for regional trade. It flows easily between towns. This means money will circulate as readily through the region as within the town. The currency serves a different scale of exchange. Bank or federal currencies have the same problem.

The money a bank issues is really good at servicing the needs of banks and the types of activities that bankers determine to be valuable. It is far less good at servicing the needs of communities.

During local down-cycles it simply flows away. We do not need to intend for it to behave as such.

Because different types of currencies are optimized for dealing with the problem for which they were particularly derived, we assert that complementary currencies empower each other by allowing each to focus on its specialized niche. Moreover, well-functioning currencies, and wellfunctioning communities, can create the contexts that attract other currencies while mitigating the downsides of doing so. A highly functional and vibrant community is likely to attract the attention of capital investors, and we believe at lower cost in both monetary and social terms. A vibrant community has both lower risk and substitute means, so it commands a better position in the marketplace when it shops for investment; it can walk away from predatory offerings.

Time banking currencies are designed to directly signify marginal activities and value captured by exchanges that other currencies are simply unable to capture. Many of the activities involved with time dollar exchanges are activities that typically occur within communities, or those that many involved believe should and could be better represented, but lack economic recognition and credibility. By capturing and recording those exchanges through a formalized mutual credit system, we are better able to demonstrate the vital role that marginal transactions, and correspondingly marginalized people, play in our communities. Moreover, by forming a more formalized economy around these exchanges we create the capacity for people to build various types of capital that they can leverage for larger endeavors.

The people and activities involved in time-based transactions, though marginalized by formally established economic practice, are more than mere margins. We hold that, from a certain level of analysis, the exchanges embodied in time banking are the very type that allow for other forms of economy. The intimate exchanges within a community to which time banking is particularly able to draw attention are those that create vital communities best able to generate and attract other modes of economy specifically because their core vitality makes other modes necessary and valuable to them. We draw analogy here to trophic food chains of ecosystem ecology. (Lindeman 1942) We envision time banking like the primary production system of an ecosystem. It allows for the initial capture of potential energies and can transform them to more refined types. As an example, time banking allows for people to be healthy, to have emotional needs met, to create 3

child care sharing systems, to get to and from sites of work, and there to learn and refine skills while developing reference networks that together can establish readiness and credibility for other forms of jobs and investment.

We do not intend to develop fully this model within this document. Nevertheless, we hold that economically disenfranchised communities, those that have been abandoned by formal market economies, can use time banking as a bootstrapping technology and an empowering vehicle in negotiations. Economic deprivation is not a lack of capability; it is a lack of organization that can be significantly enhanced by a currency medium optimized for the implementation of the capability embodied in a community and the individuals who compose it. We intend to develop a model of time banking that empowers individuals and communities to regrow economic capability and power up into other forms of production and exchange.

Blocked Paths Time banking projects do not yet appear to be at a point where they can demonstrate or wield this bootstrapping capability. Some reasons for this are obvious. Time banking is an exchange system that exists in the margins of many of the communities that have implemented it.

Elsewhere it is simply absent. In periods of general economic stability and early phases of recession, the push towards economic experiments is absent. Institutional memory directs efforts to redevelop economies along standard paths. (Leitaer 2003) Even where time banking projects are in effect, they remain only loosely affiliated with the broader economy. They exist as narrow niches, mostly attracting participants on ideological bases. (Collum 2007) We contend that marginal implementations remain significant, however. Time banking can exist as a latent community capability to be more broadly activated when the need arises. The challenge becomes one of scaling in the appropriate moments.

In periods of general economic failure, mutual credit systems like time banking can be used to activate community potential in absence of other forms of currency. Indeed, its basis on timenormalized value and coproduction makes it ideal for this purpose. If it is to be rendered as productive as possible, though, we need to understand the forces which impose limits upon it, particularly before economic conditions reach low ebb. To achieve scale in times of need, time banks need to be operational in advance. Their learned adaptations to predictable roadblocks become vital in those moments.

In order to achieve this end, we are analyzing dimensions of success and abandonment of current and past time banking experiments. This paper offers a nascent assessment of these findings. We draw upon two sources of information. Our primary interest is with the perspectives of time bank project coordinators and organizers. We are interested in their bank-wide perspective on operations. To this end, the Time For the World project released an initial online survey for organizers. We asked about the current state of the time banking and complementary currency movements in respondentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; regions; the understood goals and desires of participants; hopes and plans of dissemination and project sustainability; and primary obstacles and opportunities. The survey was distributed to a selected list of known project coordinators. We also posted a link to the survey on the Time For the World project website: <http://blog.timeftw.org/>. The survey

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remains open, and participants are able to view other responses after they have submitted their own. Responses will be publicly available under a Creative Commons licensing agreement.

Additionally, we have conducted a survey of available papers that address time banking, in particular those that involve studies of individual sites. We have focused on the organizational perspective more than the participant perspective initially, although the latter is used to provide context as well as community support. We paid particular attention to stated limitations and goals of projects.

To date, we have received six replies to our survey. As a result, any interpretation should be viewed as significantly preliminary. We intend to pursue further the inclusion of more respondents.

We assigned responses to seven categories: need for funding; technology including software for facilitating the finding and recording of exchanges; community awareness of the time bank; behavior of time bank participants, particularly in regards to likelihood of exchange; services offered; internal organizational issues; and persistence of social norms which prioritize top-down or state-sponsored solutions to community issues, which we have labeled ‘structural disempowerment.’ For the literature survey we included an eighth category, institutional understanding, which refers to the tenuous relationship between time banking and national social services in the United Kingdom. In the UK, there is a recorded regular risk of time bank participants losing disability and other benefits on the basis of participation, as well as pressure on participants to look for ‘real work.’

San Francisco

Turkey

X X

NE Ohio

Lewisham (London)

X X

X X

X X

X

Awareness Behavior/Implementation Offered Services Internal Organization Structural Disempowerment

Dane Cty

Boston

Funding Technology

X X

X

X X

Across both survey respondents and the current literature, the issue of reliable funding was pronounced. Four of six survey respondents highlighted the issue. A fifth, a time bank from north eastern Ohio, was described as significantly marginal with minimal activity. It could be that they have not developed to the point of hiring a coordinator. The literature contained significant emphasis on the need for secure funding, with some (North 2003) drawing a distinction between 5

the robustness of non-coordinated LETS systems versus the fragility of time banks reliant on paid staff.

Seyfang 2003

Seyfang 2004a

Seyfang 2004b

Seyfang 2006a

Seyfang 2006b

Van Kiosk 2009

X

Seyfang 2002

Ozanne 2010

Collum 2007

Callison 2002

Funding

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Technology X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Awareness X

Behavior/Implementation

X

Offered Services X

Internal Organization Structural Disempowerment Institutional Understanding

X

X X

X

X

X

X X

X

X

X

Survey respondents had a parallel emphasis on technological needs, in contrast to the literature where it received hardly any mention. This distinction could be attributed both to the age of some of much of the literature and the relative recency of digital transitions in time banking as well as distinctions between time banks in the United States and the United Kingdom. The issues of funding and technology are linked, however. Online and user-directed organization help reduce staff time and costs, a significant issue when faced with funding uncertainties. However, many who participate in time banking, particularly those who do so for economic reasons, may lack ready access to the internet, resulting in difficulty in gaining access.

One of the persistent difficulties expressed in the literature, but only by one survey respondent, is participants’ willingness to offer their time, but reluctance in requesting the help of others.

Obviously, this one-way emphasis significantly interferes with the ability to generate a vibrant co-production system as well as the empowerment of the economically marginalized. This will be returned to in the following discussion.

The other persistent issue across both groups is the problem of services offered. Certain services central to many peoples’ livelihoods – home repair, auto repair, etc. – are not well represented within time banks. These absences make difficult the legitimization of time banking as an economic system. While a partial solution is increased outreach to individuals able to provide needed yet absent services, we believe that there is more to be done.

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Performing Power Time banking has been developed and implemented as a means of reconnecting and empowering marginalized members of society. (Cahn 2000) It is based primarily on notions of social good. It contains an obvious economic aspect, but time banking as economy plays a distant second. We believe this is a problem.

Many of the barriers listed above can be viewed as derived from time banking’s lack of principal economic focus. Many time bank participants regularly express a willingness to contribute time to others while maintaining reluctance to ask for assistance. It becomes a volunteer system with marginal reward instead of a currency. Earned credits stagnate instead of encourage and empower further production. The social and individual needs the currency is intended express and address fail to be so, and economic development is inhibited.

There are probably many reasons for this. An appropriate focus on the social justice dimension of time banking strongly aligns it with other forms of civic volunteering. This leaves people willing to expend acute effort not motivated by expectation of reciprocal flow within the time bank, but from excess stock gained outside it. This generosity should not be discouraged, but the time bank structure must address it appropriately. In the case of United Kingdom time banks, participants are explicitly referred to as volunteers, furthering this association. There are strategic reasons for using the term – it is aimed to shelter participants receiving other forms of statesponsored social benefits from losing them – but costs of nomenclature need acknowledgement and accommodation.

Time banking is an alternate economy designed to provide compensation for and facilitate value creation in meaningful activities that the regular monetary economy persistently overlooks.

Without mutual exchanges, value cannot be created. In this regard, willingness to go into debt and allow another to gain credit is as significant as the activity performed for the credit. The idea of ramping-up, that you cannot spend what you do not have, persists throughout our economy, often because people do not understand the nature of debt money creation. This is particularly true in periods of scarcity. Debt, however, when assumed for value-creating enterprise, is not a negative. One’s debt is an expression of another’s belief in one’s value. When economic activity is scarce for reasons other than excessive indebtedness, it should be encouraged, not shunned.

Debt can however become excessive, and people are often strongly conditioned to fear indebtedness. This must be addressed. Demurrage, where a currency loses value over time, is incorporated in monetary systems in order to encourage the regular flow and exchange of currency. It dissuades people from storing money under the bed by making it worth less. We suspect that implementation of demurrage could be considered in time banks. What is more, and perhaps counter intuitively, any demurrage should be equally applied to both sides of the ledger: credit and debt. This is more than a simple accounting device to keep the overall sum zero as is appropriate in mutual credit systems. It should be done because both people in the exchange are doing the same thing. One is offering skills while the other is offering the opportunity to use skills. Debt in typical national currencies is not of equivalent character to debt in mutual credit, and particularly not in time banks. The more people ask for assistance, the more people allow their neighbors to develop and grow skills, the richer the community is. There may be a limit, 7

past which point this becomes problematic. However, we suspect that national currencies come into play before this is reached.

Time bank projects are threatened by a greater issue than the economization of the currency.

Across the board, the need for operational funding remains a critical issue. The presence of a paid coordinator holds critical significance on a time bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to be successful. Full time coordinators are able to teach members about the workings of the bank, help with the discovery of personal skill potentials, offer advice on how exchange, and play a general role of mediator and counsel. Due to necessities of economic circumstance, thus far they need to be paid at least partially in market currency.

There is a certain irony that the tool for generating wealth without currency requires currency.

Currency acquired from central sites does not come without cost. Issuers of resource are the ultimate judge of quality of outcome. The outcomes on which they focus, as evidenced by the continued disenfranchisement of valuable communities, are not those of our communities. What is more, given that time banking can be at its most meaningful in periods of stark economic deprivation, when no other currency is available, a time bank that relies on the scarce currency will be constrained in its ability to facilitate the creation of value that the community needs.

When the need is greatest, we risk being at our weakest.

Time banks need to look elsewhere for sustenance. They need to aggressively cultivate their communitiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; resources. Collum (2007) provides evidence of time bank participantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; willingness to help support the organization they find valuable. There is the necessary question of capability given the economic limitations of many involved, but this once again draws attention to the necessity of economization. It should be the goal of the time bank to empower members to level up, so to speak, and become able to generate other forms of wealth. Time banks should not be viewed as replacements to the regular market economy but as a means for enabling a more balanced relationship with that economy.

Multiple studies of time banking programs have offered similar analyses of projects: time banking facilitates the reconnection of communities, particularly those most likely to be marginalized by broader social processes, but it fails to facilitate the reentry of these people into the established economy. (Collum 2005, 2007) It exists as an auxiliary phenomenon within the community, not critical. It is fully able to create connections and achieve social integration goals.

Its performance on economic goals still has room for improvement. Addressing these not-yetachieved goals is linked to the solution to the funding problem. Participants have limited ability to pay into the time bank because they remain economically marginalized. They do so because the economic priority, that of the exchange of value, is itself marginalized. Yes, we want to hold to the core principles of time banking, including reconnection. Those connections, however, need to be used for mutual benefit. Time banks must take seriously the economic value their participants are willing and able to contribute, and in fact need it to function.

Part of this means re-teaching participants about economy. From personal conversations, we can assert that time banking is not immediately intuitive to many people. We have strongly entrenched concepts of money, value, and exchange that are not easily disrupted. This is evidenced in part by the aforementioned reluctance to ask for services or assume debt.

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Gregory (2009a) offers evidence that time banking projects without an initial focus on coproduction are able to develop that capacity through implementation alone. It would appear that the act of exchange alone is able to teach. This appears in correspondence with theory from other fields, like Butlerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s performativity (1990) which draws attention to the coherence of identity through the reiteration of practice. The theory of coproduction is profound, but it becomes profound through practice. Strong training and facilitation of time exchanges and the expansion of an exchange network that can provides referential context may be all that is needed for the formation of new ideas of economy.

Making Time For the World The movement needs the development and dissemination of a strong and flexible implementation strategy. We need powerful, accessible, mobile, and context-responsive tools that allow us to address better the particular needs and capabilities of individual communities. Time banking already has taken root in 34 countries to date and has demonstrated a resiliency and demographic inclusiveness not commonly seen in complementary currencies. Moreover, time banking values as core economic functions many activities, such as caregiving, civic engagement and creativity, that are undervalued when commodified in the market economy, including in market-based complementary currencies. By providing an appropriately abundant and fungible means of exchanging these core economic functions, time banking increases the economyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to appropriately allocate resources. Economic tools that fail to value these functions, or treat them as market-based commodities, will frequently replicate many of the social problems our current monetary system generates.

However, appropriately scaled and locally contextualized approaches for publishing and distributing information, training and supporting organizers and participants, and methods of assessing and evaluating effectiveness have not yet been developed, causing time banks to experiment somewhat blindly.

Time For the World (TFTW), a new international time banking dissemination project, aims to remedy this problem through analysis of current and past time bank and LETS programs. With comparative studies and a focus on types and degrees of variation we intend to construct a general time bank implementation model that can be localized for novel efforts.

We wish to see time banking develop as a tool for empowering communities as a whole. We view it as an intervention in traditional economic thought that draws focus away from the topdown behavior of governments and other centralized institutions and towards the bottom up potential embedded in our communities. We also believe that time banking is the type of activity critical to any effort to redevelop local economies in a more just and inclusive fashion.

It is our thesis that time banking unlocks the primary production capacities of social communities and will enhance the sustainability and ease with which other complementary currencies, particularly price-based mutual credit systems, can take hold. This allows local economies with a time bank-supported core to bootstrap internal markets that need, value, and can utilize local labor. TFTW intends to test and analyze the technique of using time banks as experiential 9

learning tools and resource bases to design and build additional local economic tools such as market-oriented mutual credit systems.

As part of this project we are proposing two complementary scaled strategies to help develop project vitality. One, CC Labs, is a program to create, recruit and support communities willing to test implementation models and factors that lead to greater success of complementary currency systems, with time banking at its core. CC Labs focuses on developing focal projects able to pool resources across a community in order to construct something that solves direct needs within the community. In this model the project itself becomes a holder of debt, which helps smooth barriers to adoption.

We are developing a menu of project kits for experiential learning designed to produce results that bring the community together and offer early tangible successes. Examples of the types of scaled projects we envision are community gardens, neighborhood weatherization, a youth court, a prison reentry program, LETS system development, meal programs, education and literacy projects, and so forth. Like the novel currency uses proposed by Batchelor (2003), the goal is to further facilitate exchange of credits while also transforming community potential. Actual projects should be determined by the community implementing the Lab so that it can most directly serve local need while involving and empowering a broad segment of the population.

We intend to provide detailed instructions on how to use time banking to catalyze the project, including access to training and support.

Parallel to this large scale and focused project, we propose that communities incorporate streetor block-level coordinators in parallel with the general community coordinator. These individuals would be paid in time currency through the community bank and be tasked with generating their neighborsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; involvement in the bank. We believe this is useful for several reasons. Neighborly assistance and favors are the significant types of activities to which time banking intends to draw attention. These marginal interactions are not ancillary to healthy, just economies; they are core to just economies. By incorporating neighborly interaction in the time bank system, greater attention can be drawn to its significance. At the same time, strong personto-person interactions can help members realize more they are able to offer in exchange. A stated limitation of some participants is that they are unsure what they have to offer. Often this can be solved through direct conversation.

Neighbor-level interactions can also engender greater trust in the time bank. Feedback between participants can occur more quickly, and pressure to follow through is more pronounced. If these transactions are arranged through the online interface used by the time bank, it could also help foster reliability and trust in those systems. While reconnection is the primary directive behind time banking projects, necessary reliance on online scheduling risks reincorporating social elements that many find alienating. Networked relations do not need to be viewed as more or less alienating as other forms, but unfamiliarity and lack of direct feedback runs that risk.

Finally, we see a need to bridge time credits with other systems like LETS. Long term viability of any project is contingent on our ability to become self-sustaining. An active local economy or industry able to recognize the value in time banking and community empowerment can become a vehicle for self-sustenance. By drawing correspondence between time banking and LETS 10

systems, we hope to foster the mutual support of our social and economic communities. We recognize, like Gregory (2009b), the need to maintain certain separation between currency types.

Different currencies serve different purposes. Bank currencies do not do a good job of empowering communities. Time currencies can. We do not want different systems to be completely isolated from each other; that risks interfering with people’s ability to leverage themselves into greater capacity, but we do not think they should be cleanly frictionlessly transferable. To do so risks devaluing both. Addressing the problem of currency interaction is critical to the goal of community empowerment, though, so will be central to the project.

We are at a point where we can no longer rely on old models of economic recovery and value creation. Like all models, those that focused on center-out or top-down distribution of money were false. They were merely falsities we could get away with for a period of time. Those sources have dried up or moved away. We now need to redevelop our capacity to build capital and value on our own, without dollars or Euros, from our communities. We need to regenerate our ability to produce and create. A time bank focused not on community networks but on the empowerment of those networks through mutual exchange. The exchanges are what make the network, and the community, powerful.

Works Cited Batchelor, J. (2003) ‘More than tea and biscuits; the role of time banks and LETS in local economic development’. Local Economy. Vol 18(3), pp. 253-6.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York: Routledge) Cahn, E. (2000) No More Throw Away People, (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books) Callison, S. (2002) ‘“All you need is love”? Assessing time banks as a tool for sustainable economic development’. Local Economy Vol 18(3), pp. 264-7.

Collum, E. (2005) ‘Community currency in the United States: the social environments in which it emerges and survives’. Environment and Planning A Vol 37, pp. 1565-87.

Collum, E. (2007) ‘The motivations, engagement, satisfaction, outcomes, and demographics of time bank participants: survey findings from a U.S. system’. International Jounral of Community Currency Research Vol 11, pp. 36-83.

Gregory, L. (2009a) ‘Change takes time: exploring structural and development issue of time banking’. International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 13, pp. 19-32.

Gregory, L. (2009b) ‘Spending time locally: the benefit of time banks for local economies’.

Local Economy Vol 24(4), pp. 323-33.

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Leitaer, B. (2004) ‘Complementary currencies in Japan today: history, originality and relevance’.

International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 8, pp. 1-23.

Lindeman, R.L. (1942) ‘The trophic dynamic aspect of ecology’. Ecology Vol 23, pp. 399-418.

North, P. (2003) ‘Time banks – learning the lessons from LETS?’, Local Economy Vol 18(3), pp.

267-70.

Ozanne, L.K. (2010) ‘Learning to exchange time: benefits and obstacles to time banking’.

International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 14, pp. A1-16.

Schneider, E.D. and J.J. Kay (1994) ‘Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics’. Mathematical and Computer Modelling Vol 19(6-8), pp. 25-48.

Seyfang, G. (2002) ‘Tackling social exclusion with community currencies: learning from LETS to time banks’. International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 6, art. 3.

Seyfang, G. (2003) ‘“With a little help from my friends.” Evaluating time banks as a tool for community self-help’. Local Economy Vol 18(3) pp. 257-64.

Seyfang, G. (2004a) ‘Time banks: rewarding community self-help in the inner city?’. Community Development Journal Vol 39(1), pp. 62-71.

Seyfang, G. (2004b) ‘Working outside the box: community currencies, time banks, and social inclusion’. International Jounrnal of Social Policy Vol 33(1), pp. 49-71.

Seyfang, G. (2006a) ‘Harnessing the potential of the social economy? Time banks and UK public policy’. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol 26(9-10), pp. 430-43.

Seyfang, G. (2006b) ‘Sustainable consumption, the new economics and community currencies: developing new institutions for environmental governance’. Regional Studies Vol 40(7), pp.

781-91.

Ulanowicz, R.E, S.E. Jørgensen and B.D. Fath (2006) ‘Exergy, information, and aggradation: an ecosystems reconciliation’. Ecological Modelling Vol 198, pp. 520-24.

Van Kuik, M. (2009) ‘Time for each other: working towards a complementary currency model to serve the anti-poverty policies of the municipality of Landgraaf, the Netherlands’.

International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 13, pp. 3-18.

Source: http://conferences.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/index.php/cc-conf/2011/schedConf/presentations

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