This article focuses on the question of whether and how social and solidarity economies (SSE) can contribute to the eco-social transformation. It is about approaches to diverse economic activity (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013) that can simultaneously achieve positive social and ecological effects. The range of culturally embedded solidarity-based economies that cover the livelihoods of large portions of the population in the global South (Acosta 2012) or the solidarity-based self-help of migrants from the global South in Europe (Tadesse 2023) are not taken into account. However, these variants and the underlying epistemologies should be recognized and protected as postcolonial and postcapitalist alternatives (Kothari et al. 2019; Sarr 2022) to Western-style development in the face of multiple crises and urgent ecological needs. Like forms of SSE in welfare states, they are potential elements of an eco-social model of society.
