Abstract
This paper aims to investigate how solidarity credit initiatives can promote participative practices of community organization that represent local socioeconomic development processes. As an empirical field analytical strategy, the researchers selected the case of the Banco Ita experience, a Community Development Bank that operates in the Itamarati Settlement, in a rural area of Ponta Porã, MS. Research on the object of study, associated with the analysis of the experience of Community Banks, argues that such organizations make significant contributions to the organization of financial resources of an associative nature, reducing bureaucracy and favoring low-cost access to credit services that are more suited to community needs. In this sense, although local development is a very restricted alternative when it articulated only within community boundaries, community mobilization was highlighted as a structural dynamic, and with emancipatory potential, evidencing the political strengthening of resistance alternatives against the global and financial forces of inequality.
Keywords:
solidarity credit; local development; solidarity finances; community banks; associativism