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Financial exclusion is increasingly being recognised as an important aspect of socioeconomic inequality where disadvantaged individuals and communities are isolated from mainstream financial services, particularly affordable and readily available credit. In the face of these problems, social policy initiatives have emerged that have travelled under various names: social investment, micro-finance, community finance and community development finance. These initiatives are seen as the basis of a 'new economics' that will create self-sustaining local economies. The government is also promoting community development finance as an aspect of community regeneration with the aim of providing credit to poor communities to stimulate local enterprise and thereby reduce dependency on state support. The same approach is being taken to grant-funded community and voluntary organisations to encourage them into a neo-market approach to the delivery of services. This article explores the phenomenon of community development finance and assesses its proposed role in community regeneration and in relation to the community and voluntary sector.

Cecile Jackson's arguments that radical environmentalism and ecofeminism have propagated myths is admissible, but the contention ignores the potential of a mature historical and materialist analysis. Jackson's feminism is equally contentious for its undue reliance on gender analysis within the transcendental model of Western capitalist patriarchy. However, a radical ecofeminism that addresses the immanence of human existence offers better prospects for a historical materialist analysis than does capitalist Marxism.

The author describes a participatory research project that took place in a garment workers' co-operative. The project's purpose was to record the history and working relationships of the co-operative in an attempt to help similar ventures. Problems of participatory research are considered. (CH)

Byline: Mary Mellor This paper will argue that ecofeminist political economy can make a major contribution to green economics. Ecofeminist political economy sees women's work and lives, like the natural world, as being externalised by current economic systems. Through an analysis of the gendering of economic systems, the paper explores alternative ways of conceptualising the provisioning of human societies. Central to this is a critique of conventional notions of 'the economy' and its dualist framework that only values marketable aspects of humanity and nature. The paper identifies the core elements of an ecofeminist analysis, including women's work as body work in biological time, and the necessarily embedded and localised nature of this work. From this perspective the paper goes on to explore conceptions of an embodied and embedded economics that would not be exploitative of women and nature.

The article talks about the eco-strategy, arguing about the Green New Deal, relation between the productive economy and biosphere, bearing the costs by the exploited people and the unstable economies and thinking about strategies to solve climate change and saving biodiversity.