Sarah McKinley beats the drum for Community Wealth Building.
As I write, 1,200 farmers and their tractors have occupied the centre of Brussels where I live. Their synchronised horn blasts are a clarion call to the deep unrest in the European countryside where myriad challenges – from increasing regulation and reduced subsidies, to land unaffordability and trade deals favouring imports to push down costs, just to name a few – underlie growing precarity and a way of life on the brink.
There is no doubt that industrialised carbon-intensive agricultural practices must change. But in doing so we must also address the deep inequalities baked into the current system that favours big agri-businesses and encourages agglomeration over farmers and resilient local ecosystems. We are in a moment of huge transition, and huge risk – change is imminent and solutions exist, but continued reliance on the tools of our increasingly unstable, unsustainable, and unjust system hinder the ability to scale these solutions to meet the demands of the moment.
We cannot respond to our challenges with the same policies and institutions that created them.
At a time when climate collapse and unprecedented levels of inequality are converging to dangerous effect, our extractive Neoliberal economic model is not only unfit for purpose, it is actively accelerating these compounding crises. We cannot respond to our challenges with the same policies and institutions that created them.
The farmers’ protests remind us that merely tinkering around the edges of our fossil-fuel based capitalist system will not solve our climate problems. They emphasise the need to tackle structural drivers of inequality and extraction head on. We need to completely overhaul our economic system; to build new sustainable and just models and institutions; and, at the same time, reclaim and redirect our existing institutions as levers for scaling change.
And we already have frameworks and models that point to how we can do this and what a new, more resilient, green economy of place could look like.
For example, in recent years, the Green New Deal and a Just Transition have emerged as policy frameworks to rapidly decarbonise and green our energy infrastructure while tackling the economic dynamics driving the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. These frameworks offer an opportunity to deliver a green transition as part of an industrial strategy for local economies that decentralises and democratises energy markets, creates new systems of low-carbon local transport, retrofits affordable homes, and relocalises agriculture and food systems. The challenge is in developing the mechanisms and institutions that can deliver such plans and then ensuring that they are used in transparent and democratically-accountable ways that give communities – and those who live and work in them – control of their economic futures.
Community Wealth Building (CWB) offers a means of delivering this and unlocking the transformative potential of local Green New Deals and a Just Transition while also building community resilience.
CWB is an economic development strategy which focuses on broadening ownership and control of productive assets in place so that the wealth they generate stays and recirculates locally, creating greater stability, security, and resilience. Broadening ownership of assets fundamentally changes the nature and operations of wealth flows within the local economy.
By focussing on democratic ownership in a variety of forms from local and cooperative to community and public ownership, CWB ensures that more people can share in the wealth that is generated.
By focussing on democratic ownership in a variety of forms from local and cooperative to community and public ownership, CWB ensures that more people can share in wealth that is generated and have control over their economic conditions in intentionally more participatory and inclusive ways. It offers a set of concrete actions as well as a process to democratise. The goal is to reconfigure the everyday institutions and relationships of the economy, changing how the economy operates directly and addressing the structural causes of inequality rather than pursuing add-ons and fixes after the fact to ameliorate the worst effects of an unequal and extractive system.
By its nature, a CWB approach is rooted in the resources and assets of place and therefore must be adapted to, and fit within, local circumstances, conditions, and culture. To harness the full wealth of these resources and assets and establish shared goals to sustain change in a community, CWB necessitates the co-construction of place, a process that ultimately builds trust and creates greater community cohesion and resilience. This democratised and integrated approach to economic development can equally advance environmental justice by directing public funds to invest in low carbon projects that create good quality, protected, local green jobs, or reorienting local pension funds and municipal bonds to finance a green energy solutions, or localising supply and food chains and developing worker-owned cooperatives to meet local demand.
The agricultural sector and food systems are naturally amenable to community ownership and democratisation by virtue of the fact that they are inherently local and integrated into natural ecosystems. Cooperatives, in particular, are common in agriculture and are proven to provide more stable, good-quality jobs, and to weather both economic and environmental shocks better than private enterprise. In regions such as the Basque Country in Spain and Emilia Romagna in Italy, cooperatives are a key part of the local economy and have played a part in building more resilient and democratic local economies. Imagine now if in addition to cooperative ownership of farms as well as needed value-added services (such as packaging and freezing), we layered in community ownership of agricultural land, local institutional purchasing at scale, and the reinvestment of capital generated from local green energy production. The result would be an integrated, sustainable, and supported local food system that delivers not only good food but good jobs and healthy communities, rooting and recirculating the wealth of this system for the benefit of people and the planet.
In rural Viroqua, Wisconsin in the US, the Gundersen-Luther Health System set ambitious environmental sustainability goals, including sourcing as much of their food locally as possible. Through collaborative processes with local farmers and producers, this institutional commitment helped to capitalise a multi-stakeholder cooperative including farmers and producers and also shippers and purchasers, aggregating enough food to not only help the health system meet its goals but also to build a more robust and resilient local food system for the region. The initiative also included local wind and biogas generation and affordable home ownership for local residents.
This example is just one of many efforts taking place in communities across the globe that prefigure larger-scale, locally-driven green transitions – not just in agriculture but across the economy – with CWB strategies at their heart. In places as diverse as Cleveland, Ohio, the Wielkopolska region in Poland, and the highlands and islands of Scotland, communities are experimenting with transition strategies that deliver high quality and well-paid work while reimagining the ownership and governance of various sectors of the economy.
To ensure long-term sustainability while delivering greater community control and building resilience, these efforts must be participatory and engage workers and communities directly in shaping economic transition and local green transformation plans. There are examples for how this could be done.
The Lucas Plan’s experiment in industrial democracy during the 1970s, for example, offers a bottom-up and democratic model driven by workers not just to save jobs, but also to rethink and revalue what is socially useful production. This is precisely the kind of radical process that could help address the concerns of the farmers and model a broader transition for the whole of our economy.
The more that systems and institutions double down on the Neoliberal “business-as-usual”approach that has pushed us beyond ecological limits and led us down a path of wealth extraction, inequality, poverty and precariousness, the greater our social unrest and reactivity will become.
We stand on the precipice of much needed change. However, the more that systems and institutions double down on the Neoliberal “business-as-usual” approach that has pushed us beyond ecological limits and led us down a path of wealth extraction, inequality, poverty and precariousness, the greater our social unrest and reactivity will become. The farmers’ protests are really only the beginning.
Yet the on-the-ground solutions and experiments – for farmers, and for all of us – already exist. Now is the time to step fully into the transformative potential of local green transitions, grounded in CWB, as the main means of not just rebuilding our local economies but shaping more resilient and sustainable local economies with economic democracy at their core. To do so, we must scale and nourish these efforts through policy, resource, capacity building, interconnection, and the ecosystem supports that already exist for the extractive economy. And we must do so in a democratic and collaborative way that co-creates a more equal and more resilient future for us all.
