Radical Abundance

Sets out a blueprint for the radical transformation of society using public-common partnerships, replacing artificial scarcity with collective abundance.

Radical Abundance tackles the central problem of our times — the transition to a new, environmentally friendly economic model — and argues that a ‘just transition’ has to move us away from a global economy defined by resource extraction and ecological degradation and towards the establishment of an alternative, self-sustaining social order in which democratic economic planning and radical new approaches to the control and ownership of assets are vitally important.

Radical Abundance proposes Public-Common Partnerships (PCPs) as a way for organised communities, working in partnership with public bodies, to gain ownership and control over the assets and resources which impact their lives and to set in motion self-expanding circuits of radical democratic governance, where the focus isn’t just on individual assets but the development of a wider democratic economy: a Community Wealth Building ¨gone viral¨.

Drawing on a wide range of case-studies developed through five years of research, and situating their arguments in wider debates on Community Wealth Building and the Social and Solidarity Economy, the authors offer alternative models to those proposed by Bidenomics and the EU’s Green Deal, opening up a key battleground in which social movements can organise, and a broader strategy of transition can take root.Keir Milburn is a writer, researcher, and activist. He has a background as an academic in political economy and organisational theory. He is an internationally recognised expert on economic democracy, the commons and Public-Common Partnerships. He also co-hosts the popular ACFM podcast on Novara Media.

Kai Heron is a Lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre. He specialises in the politics of land, agrarian systems, political economy, climate justice, and participatory ethnographic research.

Bertie Russell is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a former co-editor of Red Pepper and member of Minim. He specialises in urban commons, economic democracy, co-production and radical municipalism.

All are co-directors of the new action-research organisation Abundance.