Community Wealth Building and System Transformation 

Community Wealth Building is a systems approach to local economic transformation. It is action-focused, place-based, and people-centred. Through deliberate actions to improve the five mutually reinforcing pillars underpinning the socioeconomic fabric of a place, this community-led approach has the potential to pre-distribute wealth, advancing environmental and social justice.  

The recently published Scottish Community Wealth Building bill piqued our interest in the potential of community wealth building to support the aims of GALLANT. Case studies of successful implementation, in different local authorities across Scotland and other parts of the world, inspired our team to explore how this agenda could help to achieve the outcomes of the Thriving Glasgow Portrait using systems transformation.  

In 2025 Laavanya Varadarajan, a third year Economics MA student with the Adam Smith Business School, undertook a summer internship with the GALLANT team to conduct a comprehensive literature review and systems mapping around community wealth building. This has given us an understanding of the existing use of community wealth building across key strategies in Glasgow.  Additionally, it showcased the potential to augment the scope of policy actions in achieving a wider range of Thriving Glasgow Definitions by adopting an integrated whole-systems change in policymaking. Based on this work, we are developing actionable recommendations towards realising the wider potential benefits of community wealth building.  

First published: 13 November 2024

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