City of Port Adelaide Enfield is undergoing rapid growth. It has a diverse, productive business base, strong anchor institutions, and an unprecedented wave of inbound investment on the way, creating real opportunity for Community Wealth Building and other new approaches to economic development to benefit people, place and planet.
The City of Port Adelaide Enfield Council engaged SGS on a discussion paper exploring Community Wealth Building in the local economy. Council has since resolved
to continue delivering Community Wealth Building outcomes through its current strategic framework, with scope to strengthen this approach in future reviews of the City Vision and the Economic Development Plan. The discussion paper builds on our earlier research into what a renewed focus on economic development could look like in practice.
Community Wealth Building is an action agenda for a different kind of economic development, one that locks in sustained, inclusive prosperity for local communities. Rather than relying on investment from outside, it deliberately builds more local employment, economic participation and wealth from the people, businesses, institutions, land and property already in a place. This happens through action aligned to five pillars of Community Wealth Building:
- Progressive procurement: Expanding opportunities for local businesses to capture a greater share of procurement spend by local anchors, linked also to securing labour and sustainability benefits.
- Fair employment and just labour markets: Maximising employment opportunities for disadvantaged groups and the rewards from local employment.
- Socially productive use of land and property: Leveraging property, land holdings and other assets to support local business and community development and build local resilience.
- Making financial power work for local places: Investing local savings and wealth locally for legacy community, business, workforce and environmental benefits.
- Plural ownership of the economy: Spreading wealth and opportunities amongst more local businesses and expanding the role of cooperatives and mutuals such as employee, producer or consumer-owned businesses.
Port Adelaide Enfield is fertile ground for Community Wealth Building. It has real assets to build on: a diverse, competitive small-to-medium business community specialising in manufacturing, engineering, wholesale trade and transport, and its home to AUKUS — a hitherto unprecedented investment, with at least $30 billion to be spent on expanding the local shipyard and many billions more on local construction and maintenance of new submarines.
The area also has a clear scope to benefit from a Community Wealth Building approach to local economic development, with significant leakage of labour to neighbouring LGAs, strong local businesses capable of capturing a greater share of local procurement spending, and a community eager to ensure that investment and change accelerate inclusion, lock in participation and deliver tangible, sustained improvements to people’s lives.
Community Wealth Building was developed in post-industrial towns and cities in the US and UK, under different economic and governance conditions than exist in a fast-growing, inner-metropolitan LGA in southern Australia. The paper focused on translating Community Wealth Building to the Port Adelaide context and explaining, in clear, practical terms, what successful implementation would look like for the local community and economy. To do this, we reviewed local economic and demographic data and prepared case studies of Community Wealth Building in practice, in Australia and the world. The paper confirmed that Port Adelaide Enfield is well suited to Community Wealth Building.
We then ran a diagnostic. First, we reviewed how Council is already embracing and implementing aspects of Community Wealth Building, and secondly assessed the readiness and willingness of local anchor institutions to progress Community Wealth Building in the local area. From the Port Adelaide Football Club to Coopers Brewery and the defence primes, ASC and BAE Systems, which are driving AUKUS locally, it was clear that anchors were already doing aspects of Community Wealth Building in various forms and were generally keen to do more.
This is important, because anchors are what makes Community Wealth Building actually happen in a local economy. Anchor institutions are large, spatially immobile commercial, public and social sector organisations with a significant stake in a city, town or place, unlike businesses whose capital is mobile, and whose shareholders and decision-makers don’t have a place loyalty or connection. When anchor institutions deploy their capital in community-minded ways, they help generate and consolidate community wealth. And by modelling a genuine connection to people, place and planet, their everyday practices can shift the character of local economic activity more broadly.
Finally, the discussion paper sets out recommendations — clear, staged, considered actions that Council and others could take to further develop and embed Community Wealth Building as a leading economic development practice in Port Adelaide Enfield. Council is already ahead of the curve on some Community Wealth Building-related actions, but there's more to do, both internally and beyond the organisation, to drive and broaden the agenda's implementation. Our recommendations were pitched at different levels of ambition, leaving the choice in the hands of those responsible for driving change.
Port Adelaide Enfield is entering an exciting phase — one with real challenges, but also real opportunities. A renewed approach to economic development has clear scope to address issues that concern this community, and communities across Australia: economic and political inequality, extractive growth that leaves places poorer, blander and less resilient, and declining social cohesion. Our work with Port Adelaide Enfield Council shows that Community Wealth Building is ready-made for these times and these places, and that local government can, and already does, play a leading role.
