Dr Max Lacey-Barnacle, Senior Research Fellow

As global climate policies face growing public scrutiny, rising political tensions around the costs of decarbonisation and increasing geopolitical instability, researchers, practitioners and policymakers are being forced to grapple with a core societal challenge that extends far beyond emissions reduction and growing renewable and low-carbon energy deployment. Increasingly, they are trying to understand how to ensure that the benefits of the global energy transition are rooted in communities, making material differences to everyday lives and ensuring that the promise of ‘green growth’ is equitably shared.

Over the past two years, a British Academy-funded international research collaboration led by the University of Sussex and NorQuest College (Edmonton), in partnership with the Centre for Local Economies (CLES) and with support from Carleton University (Ottawa), has explored this question through a comparative study of Community Wealth Building (CWB) and just transitions in the UK and Canada. Bringing together researchers, policymakers, practitioners and community organisations, the project has found that these two agendas have much more in common than is often recognised. This finding has significant implications for future energy and climate policy.
At first glance, just transitions and CWB appear to come from different policy traditions and thus remain the remit of different government departments, resulting in siloed policy processes. Just transitions typically focus on ensuring that decarbonisation is fair, democratic and inclusive. CWB, meanwhile, seeks to reshape local economies through democratic ownership, fair work, progressive procurement, locally rooted finance and the socially productive use of land and assets. However, our research found deep synergies between these two fields, as they both seek to ensure that broader economic transformations benefit the communities at the forefront of them. When brought together, a new political economy of net zero begins to emerge, where the economic empowerment of communities becomes central to a just transition.

This insight became particularly clear through a series of international workshops held across Sussex and Birmingham (UK) and Edmonton and Ottawa (Canada) during 2025, involving more than 120 participants. Despite the different national contexts, participants repeatedly identified similar challenges. Climate policy, economic development and social policy are too often designed and delivered in isolation from one another.

Our project found the contrast between the UK and Canada especially revealing. The UK has emerged as a global leader in CWB, with Scotland recently becoming the first country in the world to legislate for it, alongside the UK’s £1 billion Local Power Plan being touted as an opportunity to build community wealth in local energy transitions. Yet the UK continues to lack a comprehensive national just transition framework. Interestingly, Canada presents almost the reverse, as federal policy has embraced just transition principles through legislation and sustainable jobs strategies, but Community Wealth Building remains fragmented and largely outside formal policy frameworks. Instead, CWB activities are largely led by non-profit and social enterprise networks and organisations.

Another important finding emerging from our research concerns the role of ‘anchor institutions’ such as local authorities, universities, colleges, hospitals and housing associations in supporting and enabling energy transitions. Rather than acting independently, successful local transitions emerge through networks of organisations working together to coordinate investment, procurement, skills development and community engagement. The research suggests that these networks are often more influential than any single institution in shaping local pathways to net zero. As anchor institution networks begin to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic, one particularly important area of focus and collaboration may be on linking up CWB strategies with net zero requirements at broader regional levels of governance.

The project also points towards the need for a broader reframing of energy transitions. Net zero is frequently treated as a technological challenge requiring new infrastructure, technologies, markets and innovations. While these remain essential, our findings suggest that questions of ownership, participation and economic power in the energy transition are equally important. Community energy and community-led retrofit schemes, anchor institution partnerships with renewable energy cooperatives and local sustainable finance initiatives all demonstrate that decarbonisation can simultaneously reduce emissions whilst retaining wealth, skills and decision-making power within communities.

Beyond these research findings, the project has generated a substantial body of academic, policy and public-engagement outputs that will help advance debates on Community Wealth Building, just transitions and community-led decarbonisation. These include our final project report ‘Aligning Community Wealth Building with Just Transitions’ , which summarises our international workshops, a workshop guide for practitioners led by CLES, two peer-reviewed journal articles in Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions and the Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law, a policy article for Policy Options in Canada, public-facing articles in The Conversation and The Guardian, and further publications currently under review, including a forthcoming special issue on CWB and Net Zero in the journal Energy Policy.

For energy transition researchers, this is a critical area of further research going forward. Public support for climate action must be supported by a new political economy of net zero transitions. This must be built through institutions and policies that connect environmental goals to social and economic outcomes that are rooted in communities. In an era of political polarisation and economic insecurity, transitions that rely on external investment and international corporate ownership to deliver carbon reductions will struggle to secure long-term support from the public.

If net zero is to succeed, it must be understood not merely as a technocratic project, but as a project of economic renewal and democratic participation. Community Wealth Building offers a framework for achieving precisely that. The future of just transitions will depend not only on how quickly we decarbonise, but on who owns, shapes and benefits from the economies that emerge in the process.