Ester Barinaga is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Lund University (Sweden). Her research and teaching focus on social innovation, social entrepreneurship and grassroots economics. She also teaches the course „Business Administration: Re-imagining Money for a Sustainable Future“ and she is currently involved in the EU-funded research project DECODE (Decentralized Energy Communities with a Digital Economy).
Her research focuses on the concepts, strategies, methods and practices that social entrepreneurs use to drive social change. Ester Barinaga got interested in complementary currencies, because she wanted to build more equal and resilient cities. She is currently particularly engaged in exploring complementary currencies as tools for building sustainable economies, inclusive cities, and resilient communities.
Her most recent book, Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future: Money Commons, was published in 2024 as an open access title by Bristol University Press. You can access and download it free of charge here.
She presented this book in a monneta online-conference in 2026 to show amoungst others how complementary currencies (CC) open up new possibilities to build socio-economic resilience. In her lecture she presented examples of CCs implemented to reduce inequality through the introduction of unconditional basic income.
You can find the video of her presentation here.