Community Wealth Building: Learning from International Experiences. Policy Spotlight

This Spotlight reviews a range of international examples of the application of Community Wealth Building principles in both rural and urban contexts. The key features and success factors of these examples are described. Based on this evidence-gathering, the report concludes with some suggested learning points for Scotland.Community Wealth Building is a place-based approach to local economic development which seeks to redirect wealth back into the local economy and to place ownership into the hands of local people. The Scottish Government identifies five pillars of Community Wealth Building: inclusive ownership; finance; workforce; spending; and land and property.Community Wealth Building principles have been applied in different ways in different international contexts, including in Europe, North America, Australia and Africa. The international examples of Community Wealth Building reviewed here were identified through the existing knowledge and networks of the research team and were chosen to represent a range of different geographies as well as to be of relevance to the Scottish context.The evidence-gathering work undertaken was desk-based, drawing on academic and other literature and web sources. We focused our evidence-gathering on identifying the main features and understanding the key success factors of the different examples.There is a great diversity of Community Wealth Building approaches adopted in different international contexts. Many of the examples reviewed here build on historical features and strengths, such as a tradition of cooperative business models (in Italy for example), or informal exchanges of goods and services (such as seed exchanges in the rural US), to shape initiatives which address current socio-economic challenges. Some initiatives are targeted at specific populations or issues, for example supporting the integration of vulnerable populations into the workforce (e.g. the GROW project in Victoria, Australia) to support the building of local wealth. Others focus on the embedding of Community Wealth Building principles and practices at a strategic level and in an integrated way across a range of sectors (for example in Sydney, Australia).Despite the evidence here demonstrating the diversity of Community Wealth Building examples internationally, it is possible to distil a set of success factors which are common to many of them, and which offer useful learning for Scotland’s application of Community Wealth Building, including...