The Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) have released two papers that outline the challenges facing local governments as they begin to formulate their economic response to the Covid-19 crisis, the necessity to build back better and practical actions for local leaders as they move towards just recovery and profound reform.
The first of these papers Owning the future – written in collaboration with the US-based research and development lab The Democracy Collaborative – makes the case for community wealth building as the vehicle to drive systemic change through the initial rescue and recovery phases. In so doing, the paper argues, local authorities can lay the groundwork for a wholesale, much needed, reform of their local economies – making them fairer, more inclusive and more secure than those that existed before. This will not be easy.
CLES recognise the daunting task that faces local authorities and, in the second paper, Rescue, recover, reform, it begins to sketch out a framework for action – taking in three phases of response, with suggested actions for local authorities across each phase. The initial rescue phase must be concerned with preventing the loss of those most socially valuable parts of local economies. In recovery local authorities must ensure that the transition out of the crisis phase allows those valuable parts to thrive rather than falter. Building on these, the final phase of reform will ensure that these socially generative elements come to define local economies rather than exist at their margins.