If Community Wealth Building offers a pathway to more inclusive and resilient local economies, what stands in the way of its more widespread adoption as a model of local economic development?
Recent legislative and policy developments in Australia and around the world suggest that awareness of Community Wealth Building is growing, as governments and stakeholders search for new and more effective ways to tackle widening inequality, economic marginalisation, and to strengthen shared prosperity.
Community Wealth Building is based on five pillars of action:
- Progressive procurement
- Fair employment and just labour markets
- Socially just use of land and property
- Making financial power work for local places
- Plural economic ownership
Many local councils and community organisations embed aspects of Community Wealth Building into economic development practice, operating models, and longer-term strategies. The Australian scholarship and collective action on Community Wealth Building is also growing, backed by evidence of community ownership success and the growth of Indigenous and social enterprise.
Despite the above, Community Wealth Building thinking and implementation have yet to be widely embraced in economic development practice.
SGS and Neighbourhood Economics sought to understand the Community Wealth Building ‘implementation gap’. The result is a novel report, launched in May 2026, that draws on insights from Australian and international policy, practice, and evidence to present a clearer picture of the types of barriers that stand in the way of a wider adoption of Community Wealth Building.
For communities and economies in search of a more resilient and inclusive future, the report is a valuable resource to understand and address some of the roadblocks to translating the Community Wealth Building promise and opportunities into action.
A framework of barriers
The framework was developed through a literature review led by SGS followed by collaboration with Neighbourhood Economics, The Democracy Collective and the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals. It fills a clear gap in existing research, where there had been limited research that systematically focuses on the barriers to Community Wealth Building.
Two categories of barriers are described:
- Barriers to Community Wealth Building as a distinct model of economic development. These are drawn from literature on the challenges, opportunities and outcomes associated with Community Wealth Building implementation. The evidence is predominantly from the UK, US and Canada, which have led the development of the Community Wealth Building agenda since the mid-2000s.
- Barriers to each of the Community Wealth Building pillars. The pillars have informed the design of Community Wealth Building as a full-system reset of the economy. Current practice, however, may focus on perhaps one or two pillars, or aspects of them, and there is a reasonably developed body of literature describing barriers to each of the pillars. However, Community Wealth Building is more than the sum of its parts; it is most effective when every pillar is activated and reinforces the others.
The barriers framework is shown below. Our research and discussions suggest that entrenched power structures and the belief that the economy will continue as the way things are, the way things have always been is the single biggest hurdle to building local wealth. It is a mindset that perpetuates the status quo, from the way business is done to the construction of modern economics education.
