Public-Common Partnerships for the Green Transition

Our friends at Common Wealth have produced a vital new report written by Nick Pearce advocating public-common partnerships as the institutional form through which Labour’s £3.3 billion Local Power Plan should be implemented. The report, titled Plug-in Public Power: The Case for Community Energy Democracy proposes a new structure for energy planning at a national, regional and local level. Democratic control over green projects, it argues, is the only way to get the buy-in needed from local communities.

Abundance co-director Keir Milburn also argues that PCPs could trigger the kind of positive feedback loop needed for rapid transition. “Using public-common partnerships as the means to implement the Local Power Plan would give communities control over the surplus each enterprise produces. These can be used to help initiate new green projects which in turn could create their own surplus for reinvestment. In this way a self-expanding dynamic could be introduced into the Green Transition, massively accelerating it while also expanding and strengthening democracy.”