News & Views

The Scottish Parliament’s passing of Community Wealth Building (CWB) legislation marks a turning point in Scotland’s economic development story. For the first time, local authorities will have a statutory duty specifically focused on Community Wealth Building (CWB). Hitherto, Local Economic development has been encouraged and funded but it has never been a core legal requirement for councils. CWB now placed in statute, councils and partners must prepare CWB plans, act on them and report progress. 

This legislative moment does not come out of nowhere, it stands on the shoulders of six years of work that began in North Ayrshire, where the first CWB strategy in Scotland demonstrated what a different approach to economic development could look like. Since then, practice has developed across the country, supported by the CWB Centre of Excellence hosted by EDAS, and work by SLAED and Improvement service and strengthened by national policy movements around fair work, democratic finance, plural ownership and land reform. The new Bill legitimises and amplifies this work. It provides a launchpad from which economic agencies, councils, anchor institutions, communities and businesses can now act with greater confidence and clarity. 

More work is now ahead of us. Even before the dust settles and the Bill moves toward Royal Assent, this launchpad will need structural supports.The legislation is enabling rather than prescriptive. The statutory guidance to follow needs to be clear as to who does what, how responsibilities will be fulfilled, and what resources and national support councils can rely upon. We need to co-produce ‘the how’ with the government.  

And in that, we must be deeply cognisant as to how central and local government and economic agencies are operating in a constrained fiscal landscape, with limited headroom and rising pressures. We don’t have more money coming into the system, which means economic development must change how it works. CWB is fundamentally about doing things differently – using the assets, people, land, procurement levers and financial power we already have in more integrated and productive ways. 

This is vital at a time when the global frameworks that shaped economic development over the last 70 years are being shaken to their core. Economic development as a discipline emerged from a post‑war world order defined by predictable trade flows, expanding fossil‑fuelled growth, stable geopolitics, and the assumption that inward investment and market liberalisation would bring prosperity. That world no longer exists. We face a polycrisis: climate breakdown, turbulent geopolitics, tariffs, and concentrations of economic power across the global system.  

Crucially, at the core of CWB sits a simple but powerful economic insight: patterns of wealth and investment matter. Scotland’s history is marked by economic extraction. From the Highland Clearances to the North Sea oil boom, wealth and people have too often flowed out of communities rather than being reinvested or invested in. CWB is about reversing that pattern. Scotland must not tolerate high levels of economic leakage: where value created locally/regionally and nationally is extracted through distant ownership, external supply chains and footloose capital. Every pound that leaves a local economy is a pound that cannot be reinvested in skills, innovation, wages, infrastructure or enterprise growth. CWB seeks to reverse this dynamic by deliberately increasing local economic multipliers – the rate at which spending, ownership and value circulate within a place before leaking out. 

When anchor institutions shift procurement toward Scottish firms, cooperatives and SMEs, each contract becomes a local multiplier. Local wages are spent in local shops; local SMEs reinvest profits in new equipment; workers support local services; community‑owned enterprises reinvest surpluses into social benefit rather than shareholder extraction. These higher re‑spend rates are not peripheral; they are the foundations of local income growth and fiscal strength. 

And this is where CWB speaks directly to real productivity. For too long, productivity has been framed as a technical fix, something delivered by new tech, R&D boosts or the right skills programme. But productivity doesn’t rise in a vacuum. It rises when firms and workers have the stability, agency and ownership power to plan, invest and innovate over time. 

That only happens when value isn’t siphoned out of a place. When ownership is relational and embedded in place. When enterprises aren’t drained by distant shareholders. When workers have voice, security and fair pay. When the economic system allows everyday innovation to flourish rather than be extracted. CWB creates these conditions. 

This is productivity not as a taxing puzzle, but as a place-level system property, forged from a resilient, circular economy that keeps value circulating rather than leaking. CWB makes this real. Treat anchor spending as investment, not cost, and procurement becomes a generator of business capability and innovation. Build fair finance including credit unions, CDFIs, mission aligned investment vehicles with firms and Inclusive and Democratic Business Models gaining access to patient capital that fuels long-term improvement. Shift land stewardship and ownership and you unlock the renewable sites, affordable housing and critical infrastructure that productivity actually rests on. Invest in fair work, skills pathways, worker representation, cooperative transitions and productivity rises through reduced churn, and higher capability. These are not soft social add‑ons. They are the foundations of resilience. 

And in a turbulent world, with changing economic order, resilience is no longer a nice‑to‑have – it is competitive advantage. CWB builds that advantage. CWB is not a fluffy complement to “real” economic development. It is economic development done properly.  

Some may say the legislation is not radical enough. But that misunderstands how real economic transformation happens. Beyond legislation, the other two legs of the CWB “three‑legged stool”, which are movements, networks and practice, will now be even more important to driving deeper change. The legislation provides momentum and mandate, but the power of this reform will ultimately come from bottom‑up practice, community action, anchor collaboration and the wider movement pressing for more.

Scotland is not promising transformation overnight. What it is offering is something more valuable: a foundational platform, and a practical blueprint for how to build a new economy through everyday work. Step by step. Community by community. Action by action. In turbulent times, Community Wealth Building is the kind of grounded, resilient economic development that Scotland, and the wider world, now urgently need. 

Neil McInroy

Chair, EDAS