DTAS Community Wealth Building Blog
Posted on: Tuesday 16th May, 2023
Centring the community in Community Wealth Building
Laura Worku - DTA Scotland Development Officer
The Scottish Government’s consultation on Community Wealth Building (CWB) closed last week, and DTAS welcomed the opportunity to respond on behalf of our members. We view CWB as highly relevant for our member network, and our work supporting community ownership and democratic finance. This came through strongly in the membership survey we carried out.
It is a sad indictment of our current economic system that CWB is necessary - currently the system enables ‘community wealth extraction’ and concentrates wealth, and land in fewer and fewer hands. Our members often feel that they are fighting this system and clearing up behind it. So, it is vital that we have a programme of economic transformation through CWB and a range of other policy measures, to create an economic system which delivers on our aspirations for a wellbeing economy and builds on what our members are already doing in their communities in both rural and urban settings. This would allow them to move away from some of the activities necessary to clean up behind a broken economic system, to activities which generate and keep wealth locally and are regenerative for the environment and the community. We would also advocate for a broader definition of wealth, to include social, cultural and ecological wealth (or capital) alongside economic wealth – aligning with the broad goals of a wellbeing economy and a just transition.
DTAS is committed to the kind of economic democracy embodied by our members – who are all community led and run - and supports a shift to a more democratic, resilient and community driven economy with a more distributed pattern of land/asset and business ownership, and access to a wider range of democratic finance initiatives. Many of our members consider that they are already delivering on one or more of the CWB pillars in their roles as community anchor organisations and will welcome the opportunity to deepen and broaden their practice and impact and connect it with new initiatives emerging in the public and private sectors.
Recognising that this is a model of economic development, nonetheless, one of our key points is that communities must be centred in Community Wealth Building. CWB as a framework is relevant at the national scale, has predominantly been located at local authority level in the UK, but must work for and be led by communities. This must look like true collaboration and a trust-based partnership of equals between the public sector and community anchors, not tokenistic consultation, or competition for resources.
To build a local economic democracy, we need deep democratic renewal, bringing economic and political decision making much closer to people and communities. Our members are a good example of local democracy in action, are democratic by nature and can respond directly to the needs and aspirations of their communities. The long-delayed process of Local Governance Reform is vital here.
A new duty to implement CWB must be matched by investment in secure funding for the third sector, whether that is through increased community ownership of productive assets to create a secure funding base, or more secure core grant funding; and an investment in capacity building to enable the third sector to build the capabilities needed to engage more deeply in their local economies.
National initiatives to support the process of culture change and embed a culture of collective leadership is required to bring about the changes needed to underpin the implementation of a CWB duty.
CWB must be properly contextualised to work in the economic, social, cultural and historical contexts found across Scotland, particularly in our rural and island communities, to be truly a national initiative.
There must be effective accountability in place and that’s why DTAS supports the development of a Community Wealth Building Commission, with a paid Commissioner to drive forward embedding CWB across multiple policy areas, and oversee implementation, in a similar way that the Scottish Land Commission has operated in recent years.
We recognise a tension between hope for a framework which, if implemented well, and with bravery, could offer our members and the wider sector the kind of radical economic change which will create foundations for sustainable, thriving and resilient communities; and a sense too that communities have been promised much before but progress has, particularly in economic transformation, been incremental. We try to hold both of those viewpoints in balance, recognising the opportunity that CWB brings whilst holding the past experiences of and challenges faced by our members which impact on their ability to engage.
You can find DTAS’ full consultation response published here.
If you want to discuss our response, please get in touch laura@dtascot.org.uk
We will be publishing a summary of our CWB member survey in the near future.