This paper addresses a gap in literature on transformative social innovation (Loorbach et al, 2020): How epistemological understandings of environmental and social crisis, as well as of humans and nature as agents, drive the choice, from the part of networks of Community-led Initiatives (NCLIs), of different strategic approaches to the promotion of a solidarity economy. The concept of “solidarity economy” is used by scholars, practitioners and policy makers to refer to emerging local and regional movements that are organizing community-based economic projects in webs of mutual recognition and support, aimed at building a democratic alternative to the economic orthodoxy (Eynaud et al., 2019). It frames community-based organizational forms and practices in Polanyi’s vision of an “active society” in “contradictory”, but creative, “tension with the market” (Burawoy, 2003, p. 198). The core goal of “solidarity economy” is to redefine the economic space by upscaling, giving visibility and promoting the institutional recognition of non-capitalist forms of work and organization that, although ubiquitous in the everyday life, have been marginalized from theory and policy by the dominant neoclassical paradigm (Eynaud et al., 2019). This paper identifies and categorizes different approaches to the promotion of solidarity economy, based on the following indicators: - Strategies of (re)localization of livelihoods; - Scaling of practices and organizational forms beyond the local level; - Choices of partners (grassroots and institutional), for the purpose of exercising influence in political decision-making processes at different levels of governance (local/regional, national and transnational).  Methodology This paper uses a comparative extended case study analysis (Burawoy, 1991) to compare the strategic approaches to the promotion of a solidarity economy adopted by the European nodes of three NCLIs: - Global Ecovillage Network (GEN); - Transition Network (TN); - The Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social and Solidarity Economy (RIPESS).  Main Argument GEN and TN share a regenerative approach to solidarity economy, which integrates the sociocultural and psychological dimensions of community-building in a strategy of de-linking livelihoods from the globalized carbon-based economy, re-localizing them along bioregional lines and making them sensitive to resource limits and ecologically enriching. RIPESS promotes a political economy-centred approach that focuses on the practice and institutional recognition of economic self-organization by marginalized groups and territories, namely through the translocal diffusion of organizational forms and strategies of skills development, as well as involvement in municipal and regional policy-making. The three networks have an instrumental approach to the national and European Union level of policy-making, focused on eliminating regulatory obstacles and channelling public funds to grassroots activities. Their post-growth and post-capitalist orientation also creates obstacles to a deeper involvement in national and EU-level policy-making, which the networks try to overcome by expanding their alliances with transnational social movement networks and organizations oriented towards climate and intersectional causes, as well as social entrepreneurship.  Main Conclusions and their Relevance to an International Audience Although often small in scale, low in resources and sparsely networked, these NCLIs promote multidimensional approaches to protecting or rebuilding the fabric of life from the impact of market pressures, as they tend to treat environmental sustainability and the promotion of economic democracy as inherently linked. They tend to have a localist approach to supply chains and policy processes. The goal is to capitalize upon local resources to arrest and reverse the loss of the capabilities necessary to form synergistic interrelationships among people and with nature. Still, multi-level governance, in the form of a strong connection with regional, national, and supranational levels of peer-to-peer collaboration, as well as policymaking, is recognised as needed to properly tackle the challenges faced by their members. The strategies adopted by these NCLIs for political advocacy at the national and supra-national levels of policy-making is still in a stage of emergence.  Main References: Avelino et al, 2020 Burawoy, M. (1991), “The extended case method”, in Burawoy, M. (Ed.), Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 271-291. Burawoy, M. (2003), “For a sociological Marxism: the complementary convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi”, Politics and Society, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 193-261, doi: 10.1177/ 0032329203252270. Chaffing et al, 2016 Eynaud, P., Laville, J.L., Lucas dos Santos, L., Banerjee, S., Avelino, F. and Hulgard, L. (Eds) (2019), Theory of Social Enterprise and Pluralism: Social Movements, Solidarity Economy and the Global South, Routledge, New York, NY. Loorbach, D., Wittmayer, J., Avelino, F., von Wirth, T., Frantzeskaki, N. (2020), “Transformative innovation and translocal diffusion”, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Vol. 35, June 2020, pp. 251-260, doi: 10.1016/j.eist.2020.01.009 .

--

Localism,Multi-level governance,Transnational Networks,Community-led Initiatives,Solidarity Economy,European Union