International Experiences of CWB
This Policy Spotlight is the third in the series on Community Wealth Building for the NISRIE project. Following the first report on Community Wealth Building in a rural and islands context, and the second offering an overview of
the evolution of Community Wealth Building policy and practice in Scotland, this third report reviews a range of international examples of the application of Community
Wealth Building principles in both rural and urban contexts. Key features and
success factors of these examples are described in the report, as well as potential learning points
for Scotland. The report can be downloaded directly using the link below.
What did we do?
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.
What did we learn?
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).
What do we recommend?
Despite the evidence here demonstrating the diversity of Community Wealth Building examples internationally, it is possible to identify 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 in a rural context. These are:
- Supportive and facilitative national legislation and policies (on Community Wealth Building specifically or supporting some of its key principles, for example around community ownership of assets), alongside other support which could include funding.
- Building on existing strengths, assets and interests (for example, a history of cooperatives or of informal seed exchanges).
- Good working relationships ‘vertically’ between different levels of government, nationally, regionally and locally, and ‘horizontally’ through strong networks between cross-sectoral stakeholders at the local level, including anchor organisations and communities.
- Long-term commitment from key institutions (referred to as anchor institutions in Community Wealth Building terms) and other stakeholder partners
- Ongoing support for communities and/or businesses (of all different types) to build capacity and empower and enable them to fully engage in, and ideally lead, Community Wealth Building activities.
- An openness to ‘do things differently’. This might be a commitment to support those who are disadvantaged in terms of (re)entering the labour market, for example, to identify ‘champions’ to lead change in different ways across different policy areas, or to ensure flexible frameworks to guide Community Wealth Building activities.
- Clear goals which can be effectively evaluated, and consistent data gathering (relating to the full range of indicators, outputs and outcomes) to measure and evaluate the efficiency of the actions against these outputs and outcomes.
