Séminaire LLEG. Martin O'Neill: "Community Wealth Building as Democratic Resistance"

Abstract: Strategies of community wealth building, through which cities and regions look to adopt more egalitarian and democratic models of public policy, have become increasingly influential in recent years. In this talk, we examine the justification for this kind of approach, and also it's potential as a form of 'democratic resistance', where local communities are able to pursue progressive economic policies even in the absence of support from central government.

Keywords: community wealth, social justice, equality, democracy, local government, anchor institutions

Martin O'Neill is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of York. He is a member of the trustee board of the Democracy Collaborative, a Washington DC-based "think and do" tank, which develops models for a democratic economy, and he was also an adviser to the UK Labour Party's Community Wealth Building Unit (2018-2020). Along with Joe Guinan, he is the co-author of The Case for Community Wealth Building (Polity Press, 2019). He works on various issues concerned with the theory and practice of social and economic justice.