The Social and Solidarity Economy in Kabylie: The Modernity of an Institutional Legacy

The Case of Sahel Village

Abstract

This article asks how far the category of the social and solidarity economy (SSE) can account for territorial development dynamics in the villages of Kabylie. The literature is divided between a continuist reading, which treats Kabyle SSE as the reactivation of long-standing mutual aid practices (Perret and Achir, 2014), and a critical one, which stresses the historical dismantling of local solidarity institutions and the instrumentalization of the contemporary associative movement (Zoreli, 2015, 2023). Drawing on the case of Sahel village, documented through our own fieldwork, we show that village organisation operates as a collective enterprise of general interest, endowed with deliberative governance, a mutualised fund and a codified contribution regime, and that it has been producing since 1967 the infrastructure that public authorities fail to supply. We map the canonical principles of the SSE onto observed practices and analyse village financing as a hybridisation of reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange, articulated with three forms of social capital. The limits of the model are then examined: constrained participation, dependence on the diaspora, the relative invisibility of women, and the absence of legal status.