Scaling Up or Deepening? Developing the Radical Potential of the SSE Sector in a Time of Crisis

In this paper, we suggest that not enough attention is being paid to the place of political contestation and antagonism in terms of how SDGs are being rolled out as part of a broader consensual, liberal geo-politics under conditions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In particular, we argue for more consideration of the significance of the SSE as way to achieve the SDGs through responding to a broader crisis of social reproduction and work where millions of people cannot live with dignity, and looming climate crisis is not addressed. We want to foreground that the SSE is offering novel and tangible alternative forms of social production, useful work and means of the social reproduction of life beyond the current capitalist crisis that are being developed from the grassroots up, and which represent a challenge to conceptions of the SDGs as a policy prescription or mobilising utopia within an overall framework of neoliberal globalism. Consequently, we argue for policy in support of the SSEs that facilitates, rather than tames, these radical grassroots critiques and for the development of an autonomous, meso-civil society SSE sector.