Local Exchange Trading Schemes in Britain, 1999

Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS) have begun to receive attention in policy circles as a potential tool for mitigating social exclusion. Prior to this project, the only evidence available concerning the role of LETS for tackling social exclusion were one-off evaluations of individual LETS. In order to evaluate whether this is possible this project provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of LETS in tackling social exclusion. The project, therefore, makes an important contribution to 'evidence-based policy-making'. This 'applied' aspect of the research, however, is but one of the major contributions of this project. The original project proposal emphasised our desire to use LETS as a laboratory to develop theory on value, exchange and money. This too has become increasingly important. The desire to rethink 'the economic' has gained considerable momentum over the past three years in academic discourse. As one of the first in-depth empirical investigations of the socially constructed meaning and nature of value, exchange and money, this research is set to make an important contribution to rethinking 'the economic'.