Presentation short abstract

Despite its postgrowth potential, we argue that Scotland’s experimentation with Community Wealth Building policies has been absorbed into technocratic practice that has limited contestation and curbed structural change, which reveals the need for a more radical agenda we term democratic localism.

Presentation long abstract

Traditional, growth-orientated models of urban development are increasingly challenged by a range of alternative economic visions and political projects, including radical municipalism and other local innovations. One version of this, from which proponents of municipalist projects might learn, is community wealth building (CWB) – a transnationally mobile policy that has seen some uptake in the US and UK. Although CWB offers a potentially radical contribution to postgrowth urbanism by encouraging plural models of economic ownership and aspiring to partially decommodify land and labour, it has met scepticism within the local state, drawn criticism from community groups, and so far failed to ignite the political imagination or institutional rupture needed to challenge urban growth dynamics. In this paper, we aim to unravel this puzzle by exploring how CWB is being developed and mobilised in Scotland. While radical municipalism seeks to politicise local economies through grassroots struggle, we show that CWB in Scotland has been absorbed with minimal contention. We further problematise the policy mobilities literature to argue that the widespread uptake of CWB policies in Scotland has not been matched by imaginative experimentation, but remains stuck in a technocratic rebranding of existing activity. As such, we argue that the domestication of CWB in Scotland exposes the limits of policy activism and the politics of policy mobility across national, municipal and community levels, and points to the risk of transformative localist agendas being discursive rather than structural. This tension sets the ground for a more ambitious alternative that we term ‘democratic localism’.