The Social Economy in a Jamaican Perspective

The chapter addresses the absence of scholarship on social economy, which reflects the experience in Jamaica, as with other developing nations. It achieves this by outlining the evolution of the concept of the social economy, beginning with the Maroons in the post-emancipation period and ending with the work being done by participants such as the Houses of Rastafari. It further grapples with the definition of the social economy and typologies of social enterprises within the local context, while applying Kushner’s model to research on a sample of social sector actors to evaluate their effectiveness and sustainability (Kushner and Poole 1996). It concludes by outlining the importance of the findings for stakeholders and the broader policy context of the social economy, and specifically the social enterprise sector in Jamaica.