In the twenty-first century, several initiatives for the search of alternatives in the form of ‘economic democracy’ that could move beyond capitalism have been theoretically articulated (Shantz and Macdonald, 2013; Solimano, 2014). However, the success of an alternative economic system partly depends on whether capitalism has become obsolete or whether it still has enough elasticity to resolve its periodic crises and accommodate various demands articulated within it. So far, in the last century, alternatives in the form of public ownership of means of production, self-management, planning, market socialism, universal basic income, state support for basic capital, shareholder socialism, and a compromise of a market economy with a workable welfare state have been noticed in various parts of the world. At present, there is hardly any positive social system that could ensure that a post-capitalist system will necessarily be more humane, just, and efficient than the alternatives that could be arrived at by reforming capitalism instead of altering the basic social structure of the capitalist economy (Corneo, 2017). The point is that if contemporary capitalism is reproducing uncouth economic inequality and unemployment of magnanimous proportion as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, then a search for an alternative to capitalism is something worth pursuing given the fact that the exploitative and unequal character of contemporary capitalism is not going to change even in a post-COVID world.

PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM

The lifestyle and consumption patterns of the top 1 percentile population of the world comprising of the economic elites, super-wealthy business tycoons, upper-middle-class technocrats, and productive entrepreneurs have been distinctively different from the rest of the global population (Solimano, 2014). The tremendous inequality within contemporary capitalism is due to the excessive returns on capital over the rate of growth of output and income (r > g) and the money gained from inheritance accumulated over time.

In imagining an alternative to the capitalist system, three fundamental issues have to be addressed. The first is the identification of the domain of resistance to the capitalist order. The second is the nature of agency that can resist capital and state with an agenda to transcend capitalism. The third task is the construction of an alternative imagination of a viable post-capitalist system.

With the ongoing advancement of capitalism, corporate capitalism – a specific variety of capitalism that is grounded in neoliberal ideology (Harvey, 2007) – has been engulfing economic and social relations worldwide (Giridharadas, 2018). Simultaneously, the search for alternatives to corporate capitalism has been ascending in both academic (Bollier, 2014; Cruz et al., 2017; Kothari and Joy, 2017; Parker et al., 2014; Wright, 2010) and non-academic circles (Cumbers, 2017; A. Ferguson, 2009). A major focus of this search has been in ‘developing’ countries like India that face the onslaught of corporate capitalism (Kothari and Joy, 2017; Shrivastava and Kothari, 2012) while being ranked 103 out of 119 countries in the Global Hunger Index. The neoliberal economic reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have had a significant influence on developmental policies of even the states such as Kerala and West Bengal that have been governed by left-of-centre parties (for example, Communist Party of India–Marxist) (Das, 2019; Krishnamoorthy, 2010).

A central theme of inquiry on alternatives to corporate capitalism is of women-inclusive emancipation (Werlhof, 2007) and thereby the need to explore the emancipatory struggles of marginalized women who are involved in the creation of alternatives (A. Ferguson, 2009). In this chapter, we undertake such exploration through ethnographic field immersion in a programme called ‘Kudumbashree’ instituted by the Kerala state in 1998 with the objective of women empowerment and inclusion (NIPCCD, 2008).

The extant literature on Kudumbashree can be categorized into two broad streams. One stream evaluates the programme from the perspective of its ability to produce economic empowerment among women belonging to below poverty line (BPL) families, who are the primary targets for the Kudumbashree programme. This research uses traditional indicators of economic empowerment such as economic and financial asset accumulation and land productivity (for example, Agarwal, 2018; Chathukulam and Thottunkel, 2010) and finds that the Kudumbashree programme outperforms similar poverty eradication programmes elsewhere in terms of creating economic empowerment. The second stream of literature acknowledges the programme as being different from traditional anti-poverty programmes because of Kudumbashree's explicit focus on the participation of target groups in decisions that involve their livelihoods (for example, Williams et al., 2012).

The war on drug users developed in tandem with neoliberalism. By examining the way that society polices and treat people who use drugs, Lenhard and Meng offer a perspective on how neoliberal governance individualizes responsibility and abstains from any kind of collective support. Lenhard and Meng make use of narratives drawn from their fieldwork to illustrate both what criminalized drug use looks like, and how people’s lives change when criminalization goes away. The chapter shows that it’s not necessarily the drugs that make people’s lives difficult and painful but rather the approach that is taken to their behavior. In one model of treatment – exemplified by the war on drugs and the use of methadone programs – a responsibility to change lies solely with the individual, and drug users are criminalized, surveilled, and disciplined primarily by law enforcement. Lenhard and Meng contrast this model with one where society is conceived as collectively responsible to provide support for whomever requires it (e.g., in the form of safe injection facilities) and addiction is understood as something to be managed both medically and holistically. What is interesting in the first model is the way that individual autonomy and responsibility is taken for granted as a preexisting, self-standing capacity that needs only to surveilled, incentivized, and disciplined from the side of the authorities. In the second model, on the contrary, autonomy and responsibility are conceived as capacities that needs to be nourished and cultivated within collective structures of trust and support.

One thoroughgoing assumption of both classical liberal and neoliberal thinking has to do with the supreme importance of property rights. Accompanying most liberal notions of property ownership is the ability to exclude all others from using your property should you wish to. This has led to a curious phenomenon – the absentee landlord. The absentee landlord owns property, controls its use, and profits from it despite not being physically present or practically using the property. In this chapter, Goel looks at how a group of holy, third-gender people in India, hijras, think about property ownership and use. Due to a century or two of colonial degradation, hijras have been stripped of many of their rights to property and its use, and occupy a marginal place in Indian society today. As a result, they maintain an elaborate system of communally maintained use-rights in the cities they live in, apportioning the ability to walk mendicant rounds and grant blessings. This chapter, more than just offering a strict dichotomous set of cases, invites the reader to think about what possession of land or space looks like when we abandon contractual exclusive ownership and instead embrace rights that come from use. The chapter thereby moves beyond the neoliberal tradition and takes the reader right to the edge of the classical liberal tradition of thought, with its emphasis on property rights as an intrinsic component of individual liberty.

This chapter develops the economics theory of demonstration projects and then investigates the role of one demonstration project – the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design – at lowering information barriers for the adoption of innovative energy and environmental technologies. The KBISD demonstration project allows us to observe the formation of a network around a demonstration project and how attitudes and behaviors relating to environmental technologies permeate and disseminate throughout the network. This section presents results from an industry-wide survey as well as several dozen semi-structured interviews related to the KBISD. The interviews reveal motivations, challenges, innovations, costs, and risks associated with participation in a demonstration project, as well as key differences between this living building approach and design–bid–build approaches often employed in traditional buildings.It finds that, while working on the building was not affiliated with increased levels of technology familiarity prior to building construction, being affiliated with the US Green Building Council is highly correlated with increased knowledge of emergent technologies. This points to professional knowledge networks as having a key role in disseminating information regarding emergent technologies.

This chapter develops a theory to explain how demonstration projects can help facilitate transformation in the marketplace. This theory is based primarily on a single economic concept: The costs of acquiring and utilizing new information. Understanding the role that pilot and demonstration projects can play in disseminating information is crucial to understanding the prospects for market transformation. These information flows occur both on the supply side and demand side of the (building) technologies market. This chapter details how information flows across supply networks and throughout markets can eventually shift standard operating practices, though these results are hardly guaranteed. We speculate that geographic networks and communities of practice are largely responsible for leveraging information spillovers, lowering costs, and facilitating dissemination of innovative technologies.

Over the past two decades, globalization, technology disruption, the 2008 financial crisis, activist shareholders and more recently, climate change, Covid-19 and new geopolitical risks have unleashed several earthquakes with deep and lasting effects on the business world and society. For most of the twentieth century, companies were institutions that helped create wealth, innovation and jobs, and raised the standards of living for many people. In a stable international context, firms played a key role in spreading economic growth and prosperity around the world. Unfortunately, the rising uncertainty unleashed by those trends has made the role of boards of directors in governing companies extremely complex.

This chapter organizes the review of our perspectives on Green Market Transformation into factors that predict and explain Green Market Transformation.First, we describe the conditions associated with this transformation.These are factors that supports the transformation occurring. To transform markets through voluntary mechanisms requires the strong rule of law, institutions to curtail fraud and to support property rights to encourage long-term investments. These boundary conditions become assumptions about the context that can help enable Green Market Transformation. Next, the catalysts are reviewed – those causal mechanisms that actually bring about the deep greening of the building sector markets – that previous chapters detail.Our theory of Green Market Transformation argues that the dissemination of information through voluntary mechanisms can help address the barriers and market failures that produce the Valley of Death. It is hypothesized that these mechanisms include, though are not limited to, well-designed ecolabels and iterative demonstration projects that overcome market barriers by disseminating information about the cost and performance of nascent technologies to the marketplace, lowering costs and risks associated with the adoption of greener technologies.These predictive conditions and causal mechanisms form the blueprint for those seeking to engineer green market transformation.