Municipal Governance and Economic Democracy

Municipal governance and economic democracy address how cities and towns organise political authority and distribute economic decision-making power among residents, enterprises and civic bodies. Traditionally, municipal governments have focused on service delivery and infrastructure, but recent scholarship emphasises their potential role in shaping local economies through participatory budgeting, public–common partnerships, remunicipalisation of services and support for cooperatives and social enterprises. Economic democracy in this context entails collective ownership or control of resources, equitable sharing of surplus and mechanisms that enable direct community input into urban development strategies. Across Europe, North America and the Global South, municipalities are experimenting with community wealth building, foundational economy approaches and doughnut economics to balance growth, social equity and ecological sustainability. These practices span scales from neighbourhood assemblies to regional networks, underscoring the importance of polycentric governance and nested institutional arrangements. Emerging themes include the negotiation between market logics and common-pool resource management, the reassertion of the municipal state as an active economic actor and the strengthening of cross-sector alliances among local authorities, philanthropic organisations and grassroots movements. Practical applications range from municipal energy utilities to land trusts and cooperative public housing. Together, these developments signal a shift towards more democratic, resilient and socially just urban economies.

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Municipal Governance and Economic Democracy publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in municipal governance and economic democracy across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

New municipalism: A political approach that treats the city as a site for transformative, participatory politics, emphasising alliances between local government and social movements to pursue democratic economic reform.

Public–common partnership (PCP): An organisational form in which municipal authorities collaborate with community groups to jointly own, govern and manage assets or services for collective benefit.

Community wealth building: A place-based strategy that aligns civic procurement, local investment and cooperative enterprise support to retain and circulate wealth within a community.

Foundational economy: The segment of economic activity providing essential goods and services—such as healthcare, education, utilities and food—that sustains everyday life and livelihoods.

References

1. Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of the Fearless Cities. Antipode (2019).
2. Strategies for a new municipalism: Public–common partnerships against the new enclosures. Urban Studies (2022).
3. New Municipalism and the State: Remunicipalising Energy in Barcelona, from Prosaics to Process. Antipode (2020).
4. The return of the local state? Failing neoliberalism, remunicipalisation, and the role of the state in advanced capitalism. Environment and Planning A Economy and Space (2021).
5. Whatever happened to municipal radicalism?. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2023).
6. ‘Beyond GDP’ in cities: Assessing alternative approaches to urban economic development. Urban Studies (2023).