Where is the 'community' in Community Wealth Building?

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Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, via the Scottish Graduate School for Social Sciences, and GCU this PhD will examine how the implementation of an emerging policy area which ostensibly aims to empower communities can work to inhibit or bolster local democracy. It will investigate the experiences of local people involved in community development efforts during the implementation of 'Community Wealth Building' in Scotland, a people-centred approach to local economic development which intends to redirect wealth back into local economies by placing control and benefits into the hands of local people. The Scottish Government's recent commitment to a national Community Wealth Building Strategy - the first of its kind globally - makes it possible to study, in real time, its implementation. Collaborating with the Development Trust Association Scotland, who have twenty years' experience in supporting community organisations, this doctoral research will purposefully seek the views of especially data rich participants working in diverse communities across Scotland (both urban and rural, and experiencing different levels of deprivation), to explore the experiences of those the policy is ostensibly designed to support. Since Community Wealth Building itself is at an experimental phase of development and implementation in Scotland, this will be necessarily explorative, examining how it is being constituted in different local authority areas. The PhD student will examine the differences between policy rhetoric and reality; examine how and in what ways local government is working with community groups, and how experience differs in different places around the country; and - ultimately - to examine the difference in people's lives (and the communities in which they reside) because of these efforts.