Regards sur les monnaies sociales et complémentaires

The special section presented by this introduction is composed of four papers whose preliminary versions were discussed during the international conference "Thirty years of community and complementary currencies - what next?", held at the Ecole normale supérieur de Lyon, February 16-17th 2011. This introduction presents this conference and discusses the four papers. It stresses the diversity of the studied CC schemes, their common question of difficulties and achievements, and transversal issues emphasized by the papers.