In this interview, Danielle Wiggins, a scholar of race and post-1960s politics and an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, joins editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh to explore the historical evolution of the US philanthropic system. They discuss its development from the late nineteenth century, its complex relationship with the state, and its dual role in both enabling self-determination and perpetuating existing power structures in shaping social issues like racial inequality.

Worker co-operatives and employee ownership trusts (EOTs) are two different approaches to pursuing employee involvement in the ownership of a business. But are the two mutually exclusive – could EOTs be more co-operative? 

A traditional workers co-operative has those who work in the business all involved in the ownership, typically on an equal basis. Members of staff will own a share (or shares) in the co-op, and often actively participate in decision making (though exactly how this is done may vary with the size and scale of the organisation).

By contrast, an EOT model (usually – but not exclusively – formed on the transfer of an existing business) involves the transfer of ownership of shares in a trading business to a trustee. The trustee holds those shares on behalf of all the employees for the time being, under the terms of a trust deed. 

That trustee is often incorporated, and will therefore have a board of trustee directors, whose job it is to act in the shareholder role on behalf of the wider workforce. Staff do not directly own shares (though some may do so separately, through an employee share scheme). Involvement in decision making varies (sometimes wildly) from one EO business to another.  The business continues to be run by the board of the operating company, with oversight from the trustee board.

There has been some suspicion of the EOT model in the co-op movement. Co-operators point to the fact that employees in an EOT-owned business do not, personally, own anything. They note that often selling shareholders continue to participate – actively – in the business, and that the board running the business may not change personnel. They see the trust model as insufficiently democratic, and failing to change a typically hierarchical set of relationships between managers and employees.

Developing a new ‘commons sense’ for council procurement and commissioning

‍

‘Procurement and spend’ is one of the central pillars of any council-led community wealth building (CWB) strategy, and is often discussed as a key lever in bringing about transformative change in the economy. Often this is done through policies and processes which seek to test and account for additional ‘social value’ in procurement decisions. However, the experience of many councils working in this area is that this agenda is not yet fulfilling its transformative potential. We’ve been exploring why this is the case and what councils might do about it through a Cooperative Councils’ Innovation Network funded Policy Lab to develop a Social Value Toolkit for co-operative councils. 

Re-convivialising Social Value

In Tools for Conviviality (1973), social critic Ivan Illich makes a useful distinction in the way that tools can be used: 

“[Tools] can be used in at least two opposite ways. The first leads to specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power, and turns people into accessories of bureaucracies or machines. The second enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, initiative.” 

The first has an inbuilt tendency to generate more of the problem it was designed to solve, creating an ever-expanding dependency which Illich calls a ‘radical monopoly’. The second creates the generative conditions for engaging people’s innate capacities and desires to contribute to human flourishing, which Illich called ‘tools for conviviality’. In researching social value policies and the use of social value measurement frameworks in local government, we found that often local government finds itself stuck in a ‘radical monopoly’ of social value practice. 

Rather than meeting its original intention to encourage public authorities to assess value more holistically, the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 has been absorbed into an organisational logic serving to preserve the status quo, and distract or disadvantage those suppliers, especially smaller enterprises, who are genuinely committed to wider public/social value objectives. 

The Social Value Toolkit attempts to reclaim social value from this radical monopoly and present the commissioning cycle as a convivial tool, reminding local authorities of the power they already have to deliberatively discern the qualities that lead to productive relationships and flourishing places and to put in place assessments and governance which will more effectively work to those ends.

Around the world, people, governments and labour movements are finding ways to provide energy that is affordable, democratic, and sustainable, showing that solutions to the climate crisis can not only help to meet basic needs but to improve people’s lives. The Labour government’s 2024 manifesto outlined plans for an ambitious new ‘publicly-owned company’, Great British (GB) Energy. Plans were reiterated in the King’s Speech where it was stated that GB Energy would create energy projects ‘owned by and for British people’, highlighting an understanding that the British public should start to benefit from energy projects, especially new renewables – the majority of which are publicly owned but by foreign states. 

GB Energy’s aims are rolling out the ‘energy transition’ and reducing energy bills, through a mixture of approaches including providing investment through local authorities, and creating new jobs, and supporting community energy projects – now explicitly referenced in the Bill following sustained advocacy from Power for People and a cross-party group of MPs and Peers. However, many of the plans are yet to be formalised with some fearing that it will become an investment mechanism for private participation in the energy transition and fail to deliver on measures that could systematically redistribute the benefits (such as profits) to the public. Alongside these fears, it has been reported that the government may seek to reduce GB Energy’s budget, diminishing the impact that the project can make, bolstering concerns that if GB Energy fails to deliver on its promises, public support for the energy transition may dwindle. 

So, why is energy so important?

The problem

In 2024, researchers around the world found that the planet had surpassed the 1.5 degrees of warming that signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement had aimed to prevent. Flooding, coastal erosion, wildfires, crop failures, and many more impacts have been felt by communities everywhere, with citizens left wondering what can and, more importantly, will be done to protect future and current generations from the worst harms of further global warming. The energy transition has long been understood as an essential component for tackling climate change. For decades, governments have been focusing on policy that leverages the private sector to invest, develop new infrastructure, and ultimately lead the way towards decarbonisation. Yet here we are, decades later; renewables are cheaper but fossil fuel usage is higher than ever before and renewable energy transitions are stagnating. All the while tariffs are becoming increasingly unaffordable whilst energy companies continue to make huge profits. 

Why is this happening? At the Transnational Institute (TNI) our years of research into electricity policy has found that the common logic underpinning a lot of energy policy is flawed. The core strategy has been to try to make the market more favourable for private investment in renewables. This has largely meant underwriting private profits, with guaranteed fixed returns or public subsidies. This model pours public funds into private purses, and once the subsidies dry up, so does the investment. In the meantime, public capacity and skills have been drained. In fact, relying so heavily on the private sector has stalled the transition. As our ‘Green’ Multinationals report found, in some cases some of the largest so-called green energy companies are actively working against climate-friendly policy.  

‍The solutions

We need to speed up the transition to renewables whilst also ensuring energy tariffs remain affordable. So, what can be done? Nine out of ten countries leading the transition to renewables have a publicly owned renewable energy company that drives the process. And moreover, prices have shown to be 20-30% lower in systems with public ownership. As we argue in our recent report, Reclaiming Energy, we need system-wide public ownership. This means a state-coordinated energy system that is a mixture of state, community, and local authority ownership, to ensure accountability and democracy. This would mean local people can decide whether to spend profits from their local energy projects for improving homes or funding a nursery; and that state profits could go into upgrading energy infrastructure and keeping bills affordable. 

 Public ownership is not a silver bullet; there are many cases where public companies do not act in ways to reduce climate change. Some of the fastest growing fossil fuel giants, such as Aramco in Saudi Arabia, are state-owned and play an active role in stalling international climate action. There are also cases where public systems have experienced some form of marketisation (or corporatisation), meaning that decisions are still made to benefit company or shareholder profits – as was the case in Austria during the recent energy crisis, where shareholders decided to increase tariffs significantly despite being a publicly owned system. This was fiercely contested by local groups and campaigns such as Attak Austria, yet so far few amendments have been made to the overall system.