Community asset transfer and strategies of local accumulation

Abstract

Community asset transfer enables local groups to own or manage a government owned facility and related services. For critics, it is merely an extension of rollback neoliberalism, permitting the state to withdraw from welfare and transfer risk from local government to ill-defined communities. The paper uses quantitative and case study data from Northern Ireland to demonstrate its transformative potential by challenging the notion of private property rights, enabling communities to accumulate and creating local consumption circuits. It suggests that asset-led social enterprises are entangled in a mix of pro-market and alternative economic strategies which are necessarily traded off each other in the reproduction of social value. There is not an ethically pure form of asset transfer but the tactical adaptation of different modes of working, including the enhancement of state services as well as more independent forms of economic and social organisation. However, the analysis points to the political weaknesses of three specific projects and in particular, the lack of corporate working that has limited their reformist potential. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for more progressive forms of social economics and the skills, finance and practices that facilitate local accumulation strategies.

Myths and Realities of “Left Behind” and “Levelling Up”

“…Some of this dominance of the arts and media by an elite, again, is not new, being the result of longstanding systemic issues like the reliance on family connections or networks formed at school and university. Where the activism of the 1960s and 1970s did succeed in gaining space in broadcast media for forms of non-professional democratic participation, such as the BBC's Community Programme Unit, this was rolled back as neoliberal forms of corporate governance took hold after the 1980s (see Dolan 2023;Mills 2020;Oakley and Lee-Wright 2016). An accompanying and less acknowledged issue, however, has been the incidental loss or deliberate withdrawal from the 1990s onwards of the kinds of support for artists and creatives without independent wealth that had existed in the 1960s, 1970s, and even the 1980s.…”

The Community Asset Transfer of Leisure Facilities in the UK: A Review and Research Agenda

“…This built on methodologies used in cultural geography (e.g. Murtagh and Boland 2017) which have been developed from post-modernist theorists advocating the analysis of language, for example, Latour (1996). A criticism of the postmodernist approach and Latour in particular, is that it is not possible to make definitive statements about the world because any view is socially relative (Harvey 1989).…”

Impact of Senior Government Policies on the Renewal of Built Capital for Rural Non-Profits

“…Building assets can either connect groups through shared space or reinforce separation (Aiken, Taylor, & Moran, 2016). Built assets can also represent "spaces of action" and "shared commitment" to socio-economic issues (Murtagh & Boland, 2019). In rural regions, building assets have profound impacts on nonprofits.…”

“…Most multi-purpose facilities examined in this study were generally owned by a single stakeholder, notably the school district or, in some cases, the local government, with lease arrangements made to nonprofit partners. This raises important questions about property rights and how urban-rural politics unfold to shape ownership, control, and access to built capital (Murtagh & Boland, 2019). Final agreements for the ownership, use, and management of multi-purpose facilities created discomfort for some nonprofits that have invested time and resources to raise funds, contribute expertise and, at times, manage site construction but were excluded from the security of ownership and control of such key assets.…”