An ECO coin community for a greener economy? 

This blogpost is a result of the graduate seminar “Informative Cities” 2021

Rianne Riemens
April 21st, 2021

An ECO coin community for a greener economy? 

New monetary systems, such as bitcoins, are increasingly introduced as alternative for formal  currencies. Especially small-scale, informal initiatives have the potential to foreground values that  remain underrepresented in institutionalized monetary systems. The ECO coin, an initiative by the  Dutch organization Next Nature Network, is designed to financially reward ecological actions  taken by its users. Companies, governmental institutions or cultural organizations can make the  coins available to their staff or visitors. But as this discussion of the ECO coin will show, informal  currencies do not only shape, but are also shaped by institutional practices. While ECO coins  (ECOs) have the potential to green the economy, they can also offer a way to deflect attention  from corporate actions and larger solutions to the climate crisis.  

Alternative monetary systems are often introduced as an attempt to step away from current  institutionalized practices. New currencies hold the potential to disrupt an economic system while  emphasizing local and social relations. They often aim to intervene in the shortcomings of existing  currencies, or prioritize different values (Kanters 2017). The ECO coin is designed to financially  reward ecological action by offering users a way to collect and spend ECOs. As explained in the  ECO coin white paper, the goal is to monetize the intrinsic value of nature, so that not the wood  of a tree as consumer product, but the tree itself becomes valuable. Like Bitcoin and Dogecoin,  the ECO coin is a cryptocurrency, which users can access through a digital wallet. Users can earn  coins by doing sustainable actions as small as having a vegetarian lunch. The earned coins can  also be used to spend ‘ECOs’ through an online marketplace that offers services and experiences  with green impact or cultural value, such as a cinema visit or bike repair.  

Because the ECO coin is designed as Decentralized Autonomous Charity (DAC), the communal  structure of the currency is represented in its organizational structure, that gives every participant  “a voice” (Next Nature Network 2018, 3). In relation to the users of the ECO coin and the event or  working space in which it is used, the ECO coin has emancipatory potential. Understanding space  as both a social reality and a form, Stavros Stavrides argues that if “emancipation has to do with  social relations that are based on equality, justice, sharing, and solidarity, experiences in space,  experiences shaped through existing spaces, may concretize such relations in the form of lived  conditions” (12). In this sense, the ECO coin can create new relations around sustainable  interactions that speak to a new form of community. But, the value of the ECO coin is not only  described as communal and ecological. In the ECO coin whitepaper, the authors suggest that  ECOs can be used by students, as an education tool but also as a sign of their “sustainable  reputation that can be shown on their CVs to potential future employers” (7). This makes the  currency also of value for their job prospectives, which highlights an instrumental, economic value  more than an ecological value. If the ECO coin is used to increase ones social capital, the  community works more as a form of exclusion or enclosure: “the spatial practice of appropriating  what used to be common, shared by all” (Stavrides, 20).  

The ECO coin can be seen as a critical response to what Andreas Malm (2016) has called the fossil  economy, an economic system that is intrinsically linked with the production and use of fossil  fuels. As formal currencies are tied to a ‘dirty’ economy, the ECO coin presents a cleaner  alternative. The ECO coin could be a way to stimulate green purchases, but might also be  vulnerable to practices of greenwashing.The idea of a coin also simulates people to buy things,  while in some cases, not buying something would be the most sustainable option. In addition, it  could offer companies a way to account for their sustainability efforts, while actually stimulating  others to become more green, instead of the company itself. In this way, the ECO coin can be  used by institutions to “set the rules for appropriate behaviour — and as such delineate their own  social responsibility and activities in community building” (Kanters 2017, 18). Companies can thus  set the rules for user behavior that reflects social as well as ecological responsibility, instead of  become socially and ecologically responsive themselves. 

With its emphasis on social and ecological value, the ECO coin project distances itself from  systems that are governed top-down and that are linked to fossil fuel industries. As researcher  Coco Kanters (2017) writes, this fits within critiques of the neoliberal government that does not  protect its citizens from climate crisis, so that public and private initiatives will fill this gap. The  ECO coin presents an opportunity to stimulate green financial transactions and motivate people to become more aware of activities with high or low environmental impact. But while it can be a  good addition for companies to work on their sustainability efforts, the project risks becoming a  replacement, instead of an addition to green, corporate initiatives. Through its focus on a green  user community, the ECO coin reinforces the idea that social and environmental efforts should be  done by individuals and not by businesses or governments, while appropriating the language of  community. This presents a challenge for initiatives such as the ECO coin that aim to change  institutional practices from within the institutions themselves. 

References 

Kanters, C. (2017). “Instituting Citizenship: On the Formalisation of Monetary Multiplicity in the  Netherlands”. Unpublished conference paper (Sovereignty and Social Contestation (SoSCo). 

Malm, A. (2016). Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso. 

Next Nature Network. (2018). “The ECO coin: A Cryptocurrency Backed by Sustainable Assets.”  Retrieved from https://www.ecocoin.com/ 

Stavrides, S. (2019). Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation. Manchester University Press.