Reframing Green Prosperity: integrating sustainability and just transitions into Community Wealth Building

Community Wealth Building (CWB) has begun to ascend globally as an international policy movement promoting local economic development that advances economic democracy. However, despite the global embrace of CWB in various locations such as the USA, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK, it rarely explicitly connects to the notion of ‘Green Prosperity’ brought about by decarbonisation. As a result, CWB efforts lack explicit strategic, financial, policy and institutional engagements with core net zero legislation, approaches and actors, alongside the growing diversity of local, community and civil society organisations active in bottom-up sustainability transitions. We therefore see huge potential for more constructive and collaborative dialogue between burgeoning net zero and CWB communities, leading to more integrated research, policy and practice that supports the democratisation of just transitions. Drawing on insights from leading academic and policy research, our Perspective piece calls for four ways forward for CWB policy actors and advocates to integrate just transitions into CWB agendas; (1) Prioritise procedural justice through community & worker engagement in CWB & Net Zero strategies (2) Retrospectively integrate just transitions approaches into existing CWB programmes (3) Strategy alignment & working across policy silos for a just transition and (4) Involve anchor institutions and their growing networks in just transitions. Taken together, these four routes forward expand the sustainability and just transition dimensions of existing CWB principles at various scales of governance, whilst advancing CWB research and thinking into novel directions.