Community Wealth Building

Building local wealth and resilient circular economies

Scotland has a huge opportunity to establish resilient local economies through forthcoming legislation on Community Wealth Building. Securing the principles of Community Wealth Building in law could create vibrant local economies which retain wealth in local areas and can displace the predominately extractive economic system we currently have with one which builds local wealth.

The five principles of Community Wealth Building are:

Plural ownership of the economy
Making financial power work for local places
Fair employment and just labour markets
Progressive procurement of goods and services
Socially productive use of land and property

Community Wealth Building provides the opportunity to place land reform and community ownership at the heart of the wellbeing economy.

We will demonstrate to government what successful Community Wealth Building looks like through the work of our members. We want any legislation to empower communities to expand existing good practice, enhancing existing community wealth building and fostering new community acquisitions and development projects.

Community Wealth Building can:

Help create more housing, services and jobs and retain and grow local populations
Help address inequality and devolve economic power to local areas
Build capacity, confidence and resources within local communities to take on further assets or land
Foster and expand local wellbeing economies
Further land reform by encouraging community wealth, creating the conditions of empowerment which make community landownership more likely. This in turn creates more local wealth and less extractive land use