From November 3 to 7, 2025, SERIGO project partners participated in the 10th EMES International Research Conference, co-organised by the Rotterdam School of Management of Erasmus University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Under the theme Scaling Through Communities: The Role of Social Entrepreneurs and Social Enterprises in Boosting Societal Transitions, the conference invited participants to explore the strategies, innovations, partnerships and contexts that enable the Social Economy (SE) to drive systemic change while scaling its impact across diverse settings. The theme also highlighted the historical resilience of institutions for collective action and showcased the potential of community self-governance as both a scalable and sustainable model.
The SERIGO project, dedicated to enhancing resilience, social inclusion and well-being in rural Europe through the lens of the Social Economy, was strongly represented throughout the event. The conference offered an ideal platform for SERIGO researchers to present their ongoing and planned work, connect with related initiatives and engage in critical discussions about the role of the SE in shaping the future of rural communities.
Social Economy in restrictive contexts: Insights from Hungarian case studies
A collaborative session titled “Enhancing Social Innovation through the Social Economy in Rural Areas” was organised by our sister project ESIRA. During the session, the SERIGO partners Judit Keller (ZSI) and Ágnes Németh (UEF) examined two Hungarian SERIGO case studies –Kiútprogram and SHANCO by BAGázs– to understand how Social Economy actors operate under conditions of neoliberal authoritarianism, welfare retrenchment, and increasing state control over civil society.
Kiútprogram is a non-profit organisation that supports Roma families through micro-enterprise development, unsecured lending, and agricultural production networks. Its work fosters supplementary income, increased self-confidence, new skills and local trust. However, its geographic reach and activities have contracted due to reliance on private donors, lack of state support, and restrictive regulatory frameworks.
SHANCO creates a safe, income-generating space for Roma women through community-based textile production. It strengthens empowerment, skills, and inclusion—but operates with minimal municipal partnership, illustrating the limits of bottom-up innovation in politically sensitive contexts.
Overall, the findings highlight that Hungarian Social Economy initiatives achieve incremental but meaningful change, yet remain constrained by a depoliticised, centralised, and increasingly authoritarian governance system that isolates civic actors rather than enabling systemic transformation.
Addressing rural vulnerabilities through intersectionality and critical systems thinking
The EURAC Research team (SERIGO partner), led by Marzia Bona, presented preliminary insights from applying Intersectional and Critical Systems Thinking (ICST) in empirical research on how Social Economy initiatives address vulnerabilities in rural areas within the SERIGO project. ICST integrates two perspectives:
- Intersectionality: examining how different forms of inequality (e.g., gender, ethnicity, class) overlap.
- Critical Systems Thinking: analysing boundaries, relationships, and power structures within a system.
Using this lens helps explain why certain groups in rural areas remain excluded, even when Social Economy ecosystems are well developed.
Three rural Social Economy case studies -focused on migrant newcomers, small farms outside monoculture models, and women facing gender-based violence– showed that:
- exclusions can be subtle but pervasive,
- the category of “beneficiaries” often needs to be redefined, and
- even progressive SE organisations can unintentionally reproduce paternalistic structures.
Throughout the research process, the team also reflected on their own social identities and positionality, showing how access to communities, interpretation of vulnerabilities, and the production of knowledge are shaped by power relations, language, and insider–outsider dynamics.
Key takeaways
Despite different political contexts, the presentations underscore several common insights:
- Social Economy initiatives play a critical role in addressing rural vulnerability, but their room for manoeuvre is shaped by broader political and institutional conditions.
- Exclusion is multi-layered and relational, whether produced by authoritarian governance (Hungary) or by subtle, structural systems (South Tyrol).
- Empowerment emerges incrementally, through trust-building, community engagement, and expanded capabilities, yet transformative impact depends on enabling frameworks.
- Reflexivity and methodological innovation are essential for uncovering hidden power dynamics, understanding lived experiences, and responsibly supporting social innovation.
Together, the two presentations offer a deeper understanding of how SE organisations operate at the intersection of social innovation, rural marginalisation, and evolving governance landscapes. They demonstrate that while SE can offer powerful tools for empowerment and inclusion, its transformative capacity is only as strong as the systems within which it operates, a key consideration for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers working to strengthen social innovation in rural Europe.