Short Abstract

This panel explores how indigenous and agrarian communities in the Global South challenge top-down financial models, fostering alternative futures through local agencies, grassroots innovation, and community-led financial systems.

Description

Global development agendas often equate financial inclusion with access to formal banking, microcredit, or digital finance. Yet, such models frequently disregard the cultural values, ecological ethics, and collective knowledge that shape indigenous and agrarian economies. This panel will interrogate the questions: inclusion into what, and for whom? Bringing together case studies from across the Global South, the panel will highlight how local communities mobilize ancestral knowledge, mutual care, and cooperative economies to construct financial systems grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction. From indigenous savings circles to agroecological cooperatives and land-based credit networks: the panel will show how various communities are not merely passive recipients of aid or technology but active designers of context-specific, culturally rooted economic practices. The discussion aims to unsettle linear development narratives and explore how community knowledge, social solidarity, and ecological ideologies shape alternative financial imaginaries. And questions such as what does financial justice look like when defined by the community, not imposed from above? How can policy, research, and practice support rather than override these grounded efforts? By focusing on voices and strategies from the grassroots, this panel calls for a radical rethinking of inclusion, one that prioritizes relationality, sovereignty, and sustainability over scalability and profit. The panel welcome papers that answer these questions on post-development thinking, financial alternatives, and decolonial futures in developing economies.

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