The Social and Solidarity Economy in Jordan
Introduction
This knowledge paper comes in the context of the second dialogue as part of a track that aims to contribute to the formulation of a national learning model in Jordan that links the social and solidarity economy with the cultural and creative industries. This track is based on an understanding that knowledge building is achieved through a cumulative path that combines field visits, dialogues, networking, and the production of knowledge papers that document learning and establish an understanding emanating from the Jordanian reality. This dialogue focused on the question of spaces as places that host activities or events, of course, but because they are It is a pivotal element in the cultural and creative system, and a potential lever for integration, operation, and the production of social value. So the deeper question was: Do these spaces constitute an infrastructure that is possible for cross-sectoral and actor integration, capable of supporting employment, promoting sustainability, and contributing to building a more established local autonomy?
Discussions also showed that the importance of spaces lies in the roles they play and the possibilities they offer for learning, networking, production, presentation, circulation, memory preservation, and community building. On the other hand, the interventions also revealed structural challenges related to sustainability, the regulatory environment, the lack of official recognition, and the limited systematic investment in the cultural and creative field, despite the clear social impact that these spaces produce in their different societies and contexts. This paper aims to capture the most prominent questions, observations, and analytical trends produced by the dialogue on spaces, and read them as part of a broader system that includes sectors, actors, gaps, and opportunities for integration. It also seeks to contribute to the rooting of participatory knowledge that reflects the Jordanian reality, and helps develop a more coherent local understanding of the relationship between the cultural and creative industries and the social and solidarity economy.
What do we mean by spaces in this context?
The dialogue showed that talking about spaces as part of a broader infrastructure that performs multiple functions within the system. The dialogue suggested moving from the concept of “spaces” to the concept of “infrastructure enabled for integration”, including spaces for production, display, training, networking, sale and circulation, heritage and memory preservation, in addition to digital spaces. This shift in understanding is important because it moves the debate from the question of the existence of a physical place to the question of the function that this space performs within a broader range of economic, social, and cultural relations. Space, in this sense, is an active element in generating employment opportunities, connecting actors, developing skills, facilitating access to the public or market, and enhancing the potential for continuity and integration between different sectors (i.e., space is not just a receptacle for activity).
This functional understanding of spaces is in line with the diversity of Jordan’s cultural and creative sectors, from visual and performing arts, music, cinema, publishing, and design, to digital media, electronic games, traditional crafts, events, heritage, architecture, and other fields that each need different spaces, support forms, and operating structures. This means that spaces must be understood in terms of their roles, their relationships to the sector they belong to, and their ability to serve more than one function at the same time. An important point that has also emerged is that some spaces go beyond narrow cultural categorization, and operate at a clear intersection between cultural or creative production, social impact, education, employment, and community building. For example, how a productive food-producing community space can link food, land, agricultural knowledge, memory, learning, and food sovereignty, making it part of the broader debate about value-producing community infrastructure. Similarly, a theatre, independent cultural center, community educational youth space, or independent art institution appeared to act as platforms to produce accumulated social, cultural, and cognitive impact.
Therefore, it can be said that spaces in this context are any physical, hybrid, or digital space that provides a vital function within the system, and contributes to moving the relationship between culture, creativity, and the social and solidarity economy. The importance of this definition lies in the fact that it helps to move beyond the reductionist view of space as a fixed place, towards viewing it as a link within a system of actors, resources, values, opportunities, obstacles, and possibilities for integration.
The roles of these spaces
There are four main roles of spaces: operational, social, learning and networking roles, and transformative roles that link culture, economy, and society. These roles do not appear in the same way in all cases, but together they constitute an important entry point for understanding spaces as a living infrastructure within the system.
These spaces perform complex roles that go beyond hosting or presentation, and extend to the formation of environments of production, learning, and social and economic connectivity. Rather than viewing space as a neutral space, it has emerged as a medium that creates relationships between people, resources, knowledge, and opportunities. This is why the question of spaces is directly related to employment, social value, solidarity, sustainability, and local sovereignty or autonomy, themes that the dialogue also suggested as an entry point to reading any space within the system. Spaces can be job generators, but not only In the direct or traditional sense. In some models, space has emerged as an environment that provides direct jobs, part-time work networks, freelancing, extended partnerships, and work-related learning portals. In other models, operational value was not limited to direct employment, but rather to building skills, creating career paths, and preparing youth for future economic and social participation. This expands the understanding of employment from being a number of jobs to being the capacity of space to sustain a sustained professional, productive, or learning life.
Second, it is clear that these spaces produce high social value, sometimes far beyond what can be measured financially in the short term. Some independent cultural spaces have created a significant social impact in society in terms of making art and culture available, building an audience, creating forms of solidarity, and embracing expression, debate and encounter. Some productive community spaces have also linked food, agricultural knowledge, memory, and community learning, making their impact beyond the idea of service or product to a deeper role in reconnecting people to the land and to local lifestyles and knowledge. Third, spaces can be incubators for learning and networking, people meet in these spaces, and then later develop forms of collaboration and joint work outside of them as well, which means that the impact of the space extends temporally and networkally beyond the event or program itself. This is where space emerges as a relationship generator, capable of supporting a community of actors.
Fourth, some spaces have emerged as practical examples of the possibility of overlapping between the cultural and creative dimensions and the social and solidarity dimensions. These spaces are presented as places that attempt to combine economic and social value within a system of values, ethics, and daily practices, whether through a collaborative model, by building a learning community, by linking knowledge with practice, or by investing in infrastructure to serve specific social groups. This is important because it shows that the relationship between the cultural and creative industries and the social economy can actually be embodied within the way the space itself works.
The space function is not automatically complete once it is present. The existence of a physical space does not necessarily mean the existence of an infrastructure capable of integrating or producing the desired impact. There was a clear indication that infrastructure alone is not enough without free space, and without a vision of what we want these spaces to do, and in what direction we want them to lead us.
Challenges and Gaps
The existence of spaces, no matter how effective and influential, does not necessarily mean that the system around them is capable of supporting or enabling them. It has become clear that many of these spaces are operating despite structural, organizational, financial, and conceptual obstacles, and not thanks to an integrated ecosystem. The challenge is not just to develop each space individually, but to address the gaps that limit the transformation of these spaces into an interconnected, viable and integrated infrastructure. The first of these gaps relates to sustainability. Spaces, even when they produce a clear social and cultural value, remain under constant pressure to secure their finances and continue to operate. Some spaces are trying to build hybrid income models that combine programs, training, renting space, and selling products or services, but that doesn’t eliminate their vulnerability to fees and taxes, weak long-term funding, and limited stable institutional support. Here a fundamental paradox emerges: the social impact is high, but the conditions for sustainability are not always proportional to this effect.
The second gap is related to the regulatory and legal environment, with obstacles related to taxes, fees, approvals, and laws that impose burdens on artistic and cultural events or activities, which in some cases prevent the expansion or stability of the work. The issue of formal and legal recognition has also emerged as a crucial issue, as personal or societal recognition of the importance of cultural and creative work alone is not enough, since it is the official recognition that largely determines who can work, how it works, and what can be supported or invested in within the system. The third gap is related to conceptual recognition itself, and here an important question has emerged about the definition of cultural and creative industries: what do they include, and what do we gain or lose with or without a clear definition? The lack of a coherent definition is reflected in policies, funding, measurement, representation, and even prioritization within the sector. Reducing cultural and creative industries to a limited number of sectors, or focusing on specific industries such as video games and films, threatens to marginalize other sectors and spaces that are no less important in terms of impact, employment, or social value.
A gap in the relationship with the public and the market also emerged. There appeared to be a challenge in building a public willingness to pay for a cultural product or act, reflecting not only a matter of purchasing power, but also a limited understanding of the economic and cultural value of the work. This means that the gap also lies in the broader socio-economic environment that receives or interacts with this production. Also important are the limited human capital, or disparities in efficiency, ability to manage resources, expand and integrate. The problem is not always only the lack of resources, but sometimes the lack of sufficient experience to manage these resources within a long-term integrative and solidarity perspective. Building solidarity requires leadership, mobilization, a culture of teamwork, and a common will that transcends the logic of competition or fragmentation.
Taken together, these gaps reveal a deeper issue: the system is still incomplete in terms of the interconnectedness of its sectors, spaces, and effectiveness. The challenges include not only weak funding or difficulty in operation, but also a lack of adequate recognition, confusion of concepts, uneven sustainability, weak systematic investment in different sectors, and limited integration between spaces as parts of a broader infrastructure.
Integration Opportunities
There is important potential for integration that has not yet been fully crystallized, but it is strongly present within the experiments presented; the first opportunity for integration is to rethink spaces as a shared infrastructure rather than just as independent sites that operate in isolation. When we understand spaces as performing the functions of producing, displaying, training, networking, selling and trading, memory preservation, and digital presence, it becomes possible to think about how these functions are interconnected between more than one space and more than one sector. The space that produces knowledge or skill does not have to be the same as the space that displays, markets, or stores memory, but the power of the system is shown when these functions become connected, and able to refer. The second opportunity for integration lies in the relationship between social impact and economic structure. A number of spaces already have great social value, whether by building an audience, supporting learning, creating forms of solidarity, connecting people to land, food and memory, or embracing and developing the energies of young people. But this social value can become more entrenched and influential when it is more clearly linked to value chains, employment opportunities, production and trading pathways, so that it does not remain isolated from the economy, nor is it reduced to a narrow logic of profitability. This is where an important opportunity emerges to build models that combine economic and social value within an integrated vision.
Third, the opportunity for integration emerges at the level of building communities of actors. Much of the value produced by spaces does not stop at direct activity, but is reflected in the meeting, acquaintance, networking, and subsequent development of business relationships or cooperation between individuals and institutions. Spaces can be fulcrums for building a community of learning and sustainable application Integration means coordination between institutions and also developing a shared sense of belonging to a broader ecosystem that shares knowledge, builds trust, and supports different experiences without erasing their privacy. There is also a clear opportunity for integration between the sectors themselves. There is a breadth in the map of the cultural and creative industries in Jordan, and the variety of forms of spaces associated with them, from performing and visual arts, music, cinema, and publishing, to design, digital content, crafts, heritage, events, architecture, and others. This diversity is seen as a rich resource that can generate new forms of collaboration and intersectionality. However, this requires moving away from the logic of treating each sector as a separate island, and moving to a vision that sees the intersections of sectors as fertile space for production, experimentation, operation, and value creation.
Another important opportunity is the production of local, localized knowledge. The dialogue itself is part of a process that relies on visits, discussion, documentation, and the production of knowledge papers, with the aim of building an understanding stemming from the Jordanian reality, rather than importing ready-made models and imposing them on the local context. There is also a clear sensitivity to the risk of the system being reduced to imported models or only in specific sectors, as opposed to the need to develop a local perception that accommodates the actual complexity of Jordan’s cultural and creative landscape. This in itself is an opportunity for knowledge integration, because building a common local language and concepts is a prerequisite for any subsequent institutional or sectoral integration. Finally, there is an important opportunity to link the idea of local autonomy or local sovereignty to the day-to-day practice of spaces. This idea was associated with food, land, supply chains, memory, education, institutional autonomy, values, freedom of space, recognition, and building business models that were in harmony with the local context. This opens the door to understanding integration as a broader process aimed at enhancing the ability of this system to produce its conditions, meanings, and priorities from within the society itself.
Accordingly, it can be argued that the opportunities for integration presented in the dialogue stem from elements that already exist: spaces that perform vital functions, actors with expertise and experience, diverse sectors, a clear social impact, and a common need to develop a more coherent local vision. However, transforming this potential into a real system requires deliberate action at the level of linkage, recognition, sharing of resources and knowledge, and the formulation of common frameworks that help to move from parallelism to integration.
Conclusions and Open Questions
This dialogue demonstrates that spaces can be treated as part of a social, cultural and economic infrastructure that can contribute to employment, learning, networking, social value production, and fostering forms of local autonomy. This shift in understanding is one of the most important things that the discussions have produced, because it shifts attention from the description of the space to the accountability of its function, the conditions for its sustainability, and its relations with the rest of the system. The social value produced by these spaces is also significant and clear, whether by building an audience, creating learning opportunities, embracing artistic and cultural expression, connecting people to land, food and memory, or opening the way for young people to participate, develop and work. However, this value does not always find its match in terms of sufficient legal, institutional or economic recognition, which makes many spaces work under constant pressure, between the need to survive and the need to preserve their message, values and societal impact.
One of the central problems is the lack of sufficient coherence between spaces, sectors, and actors. The structure is partially there, the experiments are there, and the impact is there, but the system still needs more connectivity between its components, so that these scattered capabilities can be transformed into a more cohesive and sustainable integrative capability. The challenge is to build a broader vision of how different functions: production, presentation, training, circulation, documentation, and digital presence can be connected in a more collaborative and interactive environment.
The question is how we understand the cultural and creative industries in our context and in a way that reflects the diversity of their sectors, spaces, practices, and values, without reducing them to two sectors or models or narrow definitions that may open certain doors and close others. Therefore, the knowledge sheets themselves seem to be part of the process of building this local understanding and not just as a documentation tool. With that in mind, this paper can leave a set of questions open for future dialogues and for the track as a whole. These questions include: How can we move from having active but disparate spaces to an interconnected infrastructure that supports integration, operation, and learning? And what do these spaces need to be recognized not only socially, but also legally, institutionally, and economically? How can local definitions and frameworks for cultural and creative industries be developed that accommodate the Jordanian reality and do not impose ready-made models on it? How can the significant social value produced by these spaces be transformed into a negotiating, policy, and financing force that supports their continuity?
Finally, this dialogue suggests that the most important question is where we want to go with these spaces and what we want them to build for us and with us. When space is seen as a living infrastructure, the debate about it becomes a debate about what kind of society we want, what types of economies we consider fair and feasible, and what kind of relationships we want to build between culture, creativity, work, solidarity, and local sovereignty.
