Our work
At the heart of CLES’ work is our mission to achieve social justice and effective public services by developing progressive economics for people, planet and place.
Our projects merge theory and practice to…
We seek to challenge conventional local economic development thinking and practice, so that it genuinely improves the fortunes of people and communities, whilst nurturing the environment.
Community wealth building aims to reorganize wealth and the local economy, from the bottom up, making it more socially and environmentally just.
To enable more people to transform and take control of their local economies, CLES has established the Community Wealth Building Centre of Excellence.
CLES works to democratise local economies, shift power to people and challenge powerful interests. In our work we seek to build democratic vitality – advancing participative and deliberative democracy.
CLES advocates and practices a deep consideration of how we assess aspects of planning, investment, the built environment and place making through the lens of progressive values.
Public services are the bedrock of well-being, environmental and economic success, but they have seen an erosion of the values they embody. Our work seeks to counter that.
CLES works to ensure “the economy” and “the environment” are not developed as discrete physical and conceptual spheres. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin, with a deep symbiosis between the two that is now impossible to ignore.
