Community Wealth Building: A New Transatlantic Perspective for Social Emancipation[Le community wealth building, une nouvelle perspective transatlantique d’émancipation sociale]

A new strategy for local economic development that seeks to break with the neoliberal financial model has emerged in several American and British cities: Community Wealth Building (CWB). Conceived in the United States in the early 2000s by the think-do tank The Democracy Collaborative, CWB aims to transform economic institutions and relations locally to generate more just, sustainable, inclusive, and democratic results for residents. It is a development model characterized by its intention to displace corporate power and global markets through the construction of local economies composed of organisations co-owned and managed by members of the community and local government. Following the analytical framework provided by the work of Erik Olin Wright on "Real Utopias", we shall present in this seminar the preliminary results of our research on two case studies: the Cleveland model in the US and the Preston model in the UK. In particular, we will present: a) the actors' own diagnostic of the socio-economic conditions of their respective cities in which the models are inscribed; b) the design and the viability of the pathways to social empowerment that these models represent; c) the prospects of these strategies for transforming the economic structures and institutions on a larger scale and in a more conflictual context.