IntroductionThe poor, unemployed, and unpaid workers who suffer money shortages have an inadequate and limited inclusion in the regular markets, which are organised on the assumption that buyers work in paid employment and have money available. These groups do not simply purchase less than better-off buyers. They have other buying practices, face the decision of purchasing goods and services with disparate considerations, visit other outlets and shops, and generally experience their provisioning differently. They participate and often organise alternative institutional frameworks to exchange goods and services öa phenomenon of interest within the diverse economies research programme (Gibson-Graham, 2008).Local exchange networks represent one of the alternatives to overcome the exclusionary mechanisms of the regular market economy. When local exchange networks include the use of a nonstate complementary currency to facilitate payments, they adopt an institutional form known as Local Complementary Currency Systems (LCCSs), described by Ekins and Max-Neef (1986). Among other goals LCCSs are designed to protect the local economy through global economic downturns (Blanc, 2006;Go¨mez and Helmsing, 2008), promote the social and economic development of the community (Seyfang, 2001a;2001b;Thorne, 1996), and offer an environmental alternative to the global domination of money on exchanges (Pacione, 1999). In the English-speaking world the most widespread variant is the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) which has been researched extensively (