Blog: System Change Rhetoric Disconnected from On-the-Ground Community Economics

[Ashwani Vasishth]

Beyond Cake-And-Eat-It: The Limits of Trendy ‘System-Change’ Frameworks 
Written By Neil McInroy and Joe Guinan
August 6, 2025

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Over the past decade, a wave of “economic system-change” frameworks have emerged in response to this crisis and entered into policy agendas and social movements. From inclusive growth to just transition through to wellbeing indexes and doughnut economics, these ideas promise to recast our economic system for social and economic justice, individual and collective well-being, and ecological balance.

Yet so far these visions remain too detached from the real struggles of everyday communities, admired in progressive intellectual and policy circles but sidelined in the spaces of big economic power and in the everyday workings of the economy. They tend to be high theory, low practice ideas, and as a result they are losing.

The widening gulf between elite theory and on-the-ground practice is a chasm from which more and more new monsters threaten to appear. Anything that preaches new ways of living and working but does not produce actual material gains for ordinary people and communities risks becoming a mere cry in the dark.

This is the gap that Community Wealth Building (CWB) directly confronts by rooting systemic ambition in concrete economic action.  In doing so, CWB shows how to turn abstract frameworks into actual lived reality....

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     Ashwani
        Vasishth         vasi...@ramapo.edu          (323) 206-1858 (cell)
                 https://www.linkedin.com/in/vasishth/
          --------------------------------------------------------
                  Professor of Sustainability (RETIRED)

                      http://ramapo.edu/ramapo-green
                  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8272006/

              Co-founder and Advisor, Sustainable Jersey City
                       http://www.sustainablejc.org

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