Beyond Cake-And-Eat-It: The Limits of Trendy ‘System-Change’ Frameworks
August 6, 2025
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Today, we stand at the crossroads of interlocking global crises – raging climate breakdown, accelerating biodiversity loss, deepening economic inequality, mass precarity, and the collapse of democratic norms. Heatwaves, floods, and wildfires displace millions each year as a result of climate change that is driven overwhelmingly by top elites; the world’s richest 1 percent now own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined; and a growing share of workers lack living wages or basic financial security.
The situation is not socially or politically sustainable, and we are seeing a dangerous retreat from democratic politics and a far-right backlash as the inadequacy of conventional policy approaches is laid bare. As public trust in institutions plummets and geopolitical tensions rise, half-measures and glossy manifestos simply won’t suffice. We need real systemic change – now.
“As public trust in institutions plummets and geopolitical tensions rise, half-measures and glossy manifestos simply won’t suffice. We need real systemic change – now.”
Over the past decade, a wave of “economic system-change” frameworks have emerged in response to this crisis and entered into policy agendas and social movements. From inclusive growth to just transition through to wellbeing indexes and doughnut economics, these ideas promise to recast our economic system for social and economic justice, individual and collective well-being, and ecological balance.
Yet so far these visions remain too detached from the real struggles of everyday communities, admired in progressive intellectual and policy circles but sidelined in the spaces of big economic power and in the everyday workings of the economy. They tend to be high theory, low practice ideas, and as a result they are losing.
The widening gulf between elite theory and on-the-ground practice is a chasm from which more and more new monsters threaten to appear. Anything that preaches new ways of living and working but does not produce actual material gains for ordinary people and communities risks becoming a mere cry in the dark.
This is the gap that Community Wealth Building (CWB) directly confronts by rooting systemic ambition in concrete economic action. In doing so, CWB shows how to turn abstract frameworks into actual lived reality.
Rhetorical System-Change vs Policy Reality
Around the world, governments, think tanks, and philanthropic foundations parade bold system-change agendas – green-growth roadmaps, “inclusive growth” manifestos, mission-focused policy approaches, and new-fangled sustainability frameworks – yet the substance rarely matches the slogans when it comes to outcomes. Some of this is down to a “cake-and-eat-it” mindset that posits a politics without enemies that ducks the real clash of competing material interests and operations of raw economic power.
“Governments, think tanks, and philanthropic foundations parade bold system-change agendas – green-growth roadmaps, “inclusive growth” manifestos, mission-focused policy approaches, and new-fangled sustainability frameworks – yet the substance rarely matches the slogans when it comes to outcomes.”
As a result, national and local administrations continue to unveil carbon-neutral plans even as they funnel billions into fossil-fuel subsidies, councils advertise progressive procurement charters then hand multimillion-pound contracts to global suppliers, and government budgets boast social-spending targets alongside savage austerity cuts. Meanwhile, where they have not yet nakedly abandoned such pretensions, financial and corporate elites cloak themselves in talk of “just transitions” while preserving shareholder primacy and extractive supply chains.
This gap between rhetoric and reality isn’t mere hypocrisy; it reveals a poverty of ambition, neoliberal state capture, and – critically – a disconnect between elite ideas and the hard, messy work of activism, practice, and community struggle. Where FDR wielded federal power to build dams, electrify the rural South and enshrine Social Security and postwar Britain constructed a cradle-to-grave welfare state, today’s “progressive” policymakers too often settle for virtue signalling, pilot schemes, minor tax credits, and voluntary corporate ESG commitments.
Under neoliberalism, the state has been reshaped to serve capital: regulators forge cosy ties with industry, parties dance to corporate lobbyists’ tunes, and think-tank research is bankrolled to protect status-quo orthodoxies. The result is an illusion of reform, divorced from the lived practice of economic democracy.
“Where they have not yet nakedly abandoned such pretensions, financial and corporate elites cloak themselves in talk of “just transitions” while preserving shareholder primacy and extractive supply chains.”
Community Wealth Building’s Practical Blueprint
The emptiness of such moderate reform agendas and the need for real systemic change has been forcing a deeper rethink in organizations oriented toward more fundamental transformations of the political economy. At The Democracy Collaborative, it led us to the launch of our Next System Project in 2015, coupled with our insistence – through our Community Wealth Building work – that rhetorical commitments to change must extend into meaningful practical action.
Community Wealth Building stands in stark contrast to the high-theory, low-practice trap. Born from the failures of traditional economic development and ‘urban renewal’ – tax breaks for absentee firms, siloed grants, hand-outs to poor places, and isolated flagship projects – CWB bridges vision and implementation through a five-pillar wedge driven into the status quo, which can then be expanded to displace today’s extractive economy with the burgeoning activity of a vibrant democratic local economy. This CWB wedge is designed to sequence linked interventions that together overcome the gap between theory and practice:
Inclusive and Democratic Enterprises: Grow worker cooperatives, social enterprises and municipal ventures where employees and community members hold real ownership and governance rights, turning abstract ideals of shared ownership into everyday reality.
Progressive Procurement: Embed living-wage charters and local supply-chain criteria in public contracts, shifting purchasing power toward democratically governed enterprises.
Locally Rooted Finance: Channel capital through public-community banks, credit unions and regional reinvestment rules, keeping wealth circulating locally under more democratic oversight.
Fair Work: Guarantee living wages, end precarious work contracts, and establish collective bargaining rights, strengthening worker voice and control.
Just Use of Land and Property: Mobilise public assets into community land trusts and asset-locked entities, ensuring democratic stewardship of space and housing.
Each pillar reinforces the others in this model, creating self-sustaining loops of democratic wealth creation, displacing and replacing the corporate economy of inequality and financial extraction. This is not an approach without enemies or a sunny vision that ducks hard choices or ignores the depredations of established wealth and power. Instead, it is one of democratic agency and genuine choices and priorities, moving the needle on outcomes by striking right at the heart of our current problems and the deep economic drivers of corporate concentration and economic inequality.
Community Wealth Building Impact on the Ground
We are very much in favor of ambitious economic system-change frameworks, we just think they should ultimately be measured by real-world outcomes from on-the-ground practice. With the spread of Community Wealth Building to more and more jurisdictions around the world, we now have a growing body of evidence against which to judge its efficacy as a strategic approach to local economic system change and transformation. This evidence base includes:
Scotland. CWB in Scotland is already delivering results through a “three-legged stool” of practice, networks, and policy — now set to deepen under the forthcoming Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill.
Practice: Originating in North Ayrshire and piloted in Clackmannanshire, Fife, Glasgow City Region, South of Scotland and the Western Isles, CWB action plans are now self-generated by dozens of councils and woven into anchor institutions (including Health Boards).
Networks: Local practitioner hubs and national bodies — the EDAS CWB Centre for Excellence, Improvement Service Community of Practice, Scottish Rural Action and others — provide peer learning, technical support and coordinated advocacy.
Policy: Existing procurement powers, land-reform measures, social-enterprise schemes, fair-work commitments and community-finance initiatives form a powerful secondary framework. The new Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill will consolidate these into binding CWB action plans, mandatory reporting and cohesive legislation that helps to advance living wages, local sourcing, democratic ownership and community-led finance across every public body.
Preston, England: Anchor institutions redirect ~£60 million yearly into local co-ops and SMEs, creating over 1,600 new jobs and circulating an extra £200 million in the local economy — many local, worker-owned or socially accountable firms. In-depth academic studies have found significant improvements in area median incomes and community mental health as a result.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Kindred Futures (formerly the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative) partners Emory University and Emory Healthcare to channel procurement and technical assistance into Black-owned businesses. Its “1,000 Black Businesses in 1,000 Days” campaign combines capacity-building investments with living-wage requirements, creating democratically governed enterprises.
St. Louis, Missouri, USA: WEPOWER’s Community Wealth Action Group co-designed a seventy-policy “St. Louis CWB Playbook” with residents, public bodies and anchor institutions. This blueprint now guides procurement, land use and investment decisions, exemplifying practice-driven system change.
Why CWB Scales Better Through Action Planning
Community Wealth Building was born from the hard lessons of traditional economic development, and its attendant wealth extraction — endless incentives for footloose firms, ad hoc grant schemes, and siloed projects that failed to lift wages, anchor capital locally, or share ownership. Instead of chasing headlines and elite prestige, CWB begins with action plans that repairs those failings by combining its five pillars into a single, coherent wedge of place-based renewal that can be driven into the status quo.
This disciplined, practice-driven choreography of CWB through its five pillar model advances procurement reform, localized finance, democratic enterprise formation, fair-work standards and just-use land strategies, and in so doing bridges the gap between aspiration and implementation. By learning from what succeeded or failed before and embedding each step in a roadmap, CWB action plans convert scattered pilots into a self-reinforcing engine of economic democracy — scalable, adaptable, and enduring across neighborhoods, regions, and (increasingly) nations.
Grand narratives of green growth, doughnut models or post-growth visions have undeniably enriched our discourse, expanding the parameters of what truly counts as “prosperity.” They challenge the narrow pursuit of GDP and remind us that social well-being, ecological balance, and shared ownership are essential goals. Yet, in the absence of binding practice, these frameworks risk remaining aspirational rather than practical and implementable roadmaps and approaches. They illuminate what could be, but lack the scaffolding to translate rhetoric into resolved action.
“Genuine system change is neither top-down nor exclusively technocratic — it flourishes when democratic institutions, grassroots activists and municipal leaders co-author the rules of the economy and hold each other accountable.”
Community Wealth Building, by contrast, embeds economic democracy at every turn. Its five-pillar wedge — linking progressive procurement, locally rooted finance, inclusive enterprise, fair work and just use of land — does more than theorize systemic overhaul. It offers a step-by-step approach to local economic transformation.
Ultimately, genuine system change is neither top-down nor exclusively technocratic — it flourishes when democratic institutions, grassroots activists and municipal leaders co-author the rules of the economy and hold each other accountable. Community Wealth Building doesn’t merely map the path to a fairer, more sustainable future: it lays it. As cities and regions around the globe grapple with inequality, climate disruption and political fragmentation, CWB stands out as a proven, scalable engine of economic transformative change — one that invites every community to become both architect and steward of its own shared prosperity.
Neil McInroy is Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative.
Joe Guinan is President of The Democracy Collaborative.