The role of ‘Community’ in Community Wealth Building
By Joe Guinan and Neil McInroy
June 17, 2025
The work of communities, community groups , and activists is all part of a wider Community Wealth Building theory of change model which seeks deep economic system change through economic democracy.
In our work on Community Wealth Building(CWB) around the world, we are sometimes met with interpretations which suggest its scope as being limited to traditional notions of ‘community development’ and ‘community power’. Whilst community development – including the advancing of community ownership, gaining of community asset control, and advancing of community gain from economic activity are all part of CWB, they are not in themselves wholly reflective of the wider theory of change at the heart of the approach.
As the term “Community Wealth” is popularized and as the CWB movement spreads with differing enabling conditions, in various contexts across the globe, co-option of the term and dilution of its intent can happen easily and is part of the price of success. As such, there is a need to emphasize that CWB is not just another model of community development but is about advancing fundamental political-economic system change in response to the economic, ecological, and social crises, through the pursuit and establishment of greater economic democracy.
The CWB theory of change is distinct from the traditional progressive response, whereby social democratic forces seek to implement top-down traditional economic reform measures, putting faith in a steady gradualism within the system. This approach, while it might have worked once in the particular conditions of the postwar “Golden Age,” is now demonstrably inadequate and failing. In recent times governments in political democracies have struggled to build a consensus around these reforms, and even when attempted are often too weak and timid given the scale of the crises being confronted. Instead of reform producing improvements or amelioration of difficulties the pattern has been a familiar one of stagnation and decline – of, at best, “things getting worse at a slower rate.”
Conversely, we could look to see change through the other traditional method of a radical break or rupture – “revolution.” However, a radical overthrow of power and wealth, or the transcendance of it through acute crisis, is hard to envisage, bar the ascendancy of authoritarian populists. And the objective forces driving our crises leave little room for error, making the risks of revolutionary departures and the chances of failure even more dangerous. Indeed, in a phrase that is variously attributed to the political philosopher Mark Fisher or the cultural theorist Frederic Jameson, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Instead of reform and revolution the CWB change model operates in a space of real-world application of progressive and radical economic policy and practice, that does not rely upon either a linear top-down gradualism – as in the reformist approach advanced by the above traditional centrist social democracy – or radical change through revolution and rupture.
In contrast, CWB is an approach grounded in “evolutionary reconstruction”, a term coined by TDC founder Gar Alperovitz, building on the notion from André Gorz of structural or non-reformist reforms.
Evolutionary reconstruction is about transforming the system in ways that create alternative behaviors, policies, agency, and institutions – and opens up rather than dissipates space and pressure for still further demands for change. This approach responds directly to the crisis by displacing the existing patterns of wealth extraction, inequality, poverty, and damaging resource use and replacing them with institutions and relationships capable of delivering different and better outcomes. CWB is not a reform which regulates for and redistributes wealth ‘after the fact’ of its creation, as in traditional economic planning, strategy, and policy, but rather looks to predistribute wealth before and during economic activity on the basis of the normal operations of the new systemic design.
CWB in practical and in everyday terms, seeks to achieve evolutionary reconstruction through the deployment of its five pillar model, including an emphasis on shifting economic power toward the creation of local, community-, and worker-owned and -controlled assets as a means of fostering greater economic democracy.
The system change CWB induces may not be that obvious in its early stages: the adoption of a real living wage, a local cooperative winning a public procurement contract, the growth of a public/community bank, community ownership of land, a new ecosystem of support for employee ownership., and so on. However, CWB is about ‘walking on two legs’ – it is about direct action through the advancing of individual activity, and about a suite of collective CWB activity, thus providing a method for a reconstruction of the economic system from within and below.
Of course many people working on CWB are essentially focused on the particular specifics of actions across the five pillars – and we need to give sustenance to and celebrate the successes. However, that alone is not enough, and to solely focus on that is to miss a key element of CWB movement-building. Amplification of activity under the auspices of CWB, including local, regional ,and national CWB action plans, changing policy institutions, and agency within them makes it distinct from traditional reform measures. And this is central to our movement-building work through our wider partnerships, policy, and dissemination work – including the networks which TDC formally curates: our United States CWB community of practice, and the Global Academic and Researcher Network (GARN) on CWB. In these spaces and fora we celebrate the wins but are restless in seeing it as a step to deeper system change.
This CWB theory of change, whilst compelling and effective, can be subject to misinterpretation. In many instances, a singular CWB action across one of the pillars can be perceived critically as mere isolated minor reform, and thus not part of wider, more penetrative change. Furthermore, some may see a singular success of a CWB action and laud this as an example of how the system can embrace change, and thus fail to instigate wider application and amplification.
The key here is intentionality, judging CWB activity on the immediate and granular, but also seeing the bigger system change aims and objectives.
“Community” is important for Community Wealth Building. However, the CWB theory of change is more than just community development or a set of progressive policies. CWB is about a plural, community building, institution-changing, economic-democratizing strategy to confront the crisis.
As traditional reform flounders, and revolution remains a forbiddingly distant prospect, evolutionary reconstruction offers a step-by-step systemic change strategy that can trigger steps in the direction of, foreshadow, and prompt into being a new type of economy which truly works for all people, places, and the planet, and has communities at its core.
Joe Guinan is President and Neil McInroy is Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative.