• Describe the way our current monetary system works.
• Challenge the boundaries of the current monetary system and discuss the opportunities and limitations for change agents to impact it.
• Apply social innovation frameworks to the challenges of today’s financial and monetary system and discuss their limitations and potential expansions.
• Identify the potentials and shortcomings of the various efforts to re-imagine money.
• Explain and justify their position concerning the various experiments and imaginaries to re-organize money.

Growing inequality, apocalyptic environmental damage, and the protracted effects of a global financial crisis have resulted in a discussion on the role of our monetary system for the organization of society. At the same time, new technological and financial developments are giving rise to much experimentation on new forms of money. This course looks at various attempts to “re-imagine money.” It explores opportunities for addressing big societal challenges and asks in particular how new forms of money can contribute to developing more just and equal societies.

Imagine you have the possibility to re-imagine our monetary system: Where would you start? How would you build it on the new monetary technologies? How would you work to make it more conducive to just and equal societies?

The global financial crisis of 2008 marked the beginning of an intense discussion on the consequences of our monetary system on the organization of our societies. The concentration of wealth in “the one percent” in parallel to austerity policies, the increase of prices of financial assets parallel to a retrenchment of the welfare state have resulted in a generalised realisation that the monetary system has not been serving the interests of the population as a whole.

The discussion on the organization of our monetary system is however as much driven by frustration towards the financial system as it is by excitement about new monetary developments. New payment systems (such as Swish or Apple Pay), the decline of cash, the emergence of digital currencies (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) as well as local currencies (such as Time Dollars, Regiogeld or Transition Town currencies) and the development of new financial practices (such as P2P lending or crowdfunding) are opening up our thinking on money and our possibilities to re-imagine, re-organize and re-claim money.

That is, the changing nature of money is giving rise to a wave of experimentation on new forms of money. These experiments see money not as an obstruction but as a vehicle for constructing more sustainable economies, more resilient communities and more fair societies. While these new monetary ideas and real-life efforts may seem contradictory, money scholars, practitioners and activists agree that money needs to be re-organized, that this can be done from the bottom-up, and that we can indeed imaginatively engage with the future of money.

This course is addressed to students who want to explore the idea that money can be re-designed. Students will be exposed to the theoretical and practical realities that come with “re-imagining money”. The course does not require previous knowledge in neither finance nor economics. It however does ask students to be open to actively engage in re-thinking the monetary landscape. We will do this through a monetary workshop at the end of the course, in which student groups will be designing a monetary system for a particular purpose of their choice.

The course is part of the series Advanced Studies Electives. It addresses students in their last year of their master who are looking for inspiration for their master theses. The course will introduce the newest research in the field of Money, Social Innovation, Sharing Economy and Community Economies, including state-of-the-art research debates and questions for potential master theses. 

The course is part of the Minor in Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Business. Although the course can be taken as a separate elective, students will benefit from taking it together with the Minor’s three other electives: “Re-imagining Capitalism”, “Re-imagining Environmental Entrepreneurship” and “Re-imagining the Commons”.  To obtain the Minor Diploma, students need to pass all three courses in the Minor.

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