Placing the Foundational Economy: An emerging discourse for post-neoliberal economic development

Framing the FE

The concept of the FE found its origins in a 2013 working paper entitled the Manifesto for the Foundational Economy. A collaboration between several institutions, the concept nonetheless had a strong association with academics based at the University of Manchester. Responding to the fetishisation of high-tech and knowledge-based sectors within British industrial policies, the manifesto identified the FE as that ‘part of the economy that creates and distributes goods and services consumed by all (regardless of income and status) because they support everyday life’ (Bentham et al., 2013: 7). Incorporating the activities of private companies, state agencies and the ‘para-state’, the manifesto considered the FE to provisionally include health services, education, utilities, transport and distribution, banking, and food production, processing and retailing. The manifesto estimated that some 40% of the UK's workforce is employed across these sectors, with nearly 30% of all household expenditure being spent on foundational services and goods (ibid: 9, 12).

The years following the 2013 manifesto saw the formation of the Foundational Economy Collective, with a series of conferences and publications helping to internationalise those developing the concept particularly in Spain (e.g. de la Cuesta M and Estela, 2020), Italy (e.g. Barbera et al., 2016) and Wales (e.g. Barbera and Jones, 2020) along with Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. The 2018 book the Foundational Economy: The infrastructure of everyday life, published in German and Italian in 2019, serves as the principal statement of this broader collective and can be considered the key text for those introducing themselves to the concept.

The book refined the FE into three distinct domains of the material, the providential, and the overlooked. The material FE ‘consists classically of the pipes and cables, networks and branches which continuously connects households to daily essentials’ (FE Collective, 2018: 20) and thus includes everything from phone masts to farms, reservoirs, supermarkets, public transport and fibre broadband connections. The providential FE refers to the predominantly public-sector provision of welfare and services such as healthcare, education, childcare and different forms of income support. The overlooked FE refers to the ‘lifestyle and comfort support systems, which are occasionally purchased out of discretionary income’ (ibid: 30) and thus incorporates activities such as the manufacturing and distribution of clothing, furniture, central heating, house maintenance, funerals, leisure and tourism. Whilst the material and providential have a near-universal framing as the ‘essential goods and services that are necessary for wellbeing and human flourishing’ (Barbera and Jones, 2020: 10), the overlooked FE is somewhat spatially and historically contingent. Illustrative of the overlooked economy would be those firms involved in the manufacture of furniture or boilers. Neither a sofa nor central heating is essential (nor indeed present) in all cultures, yet would be considered basic items of human wellbeing in many others. It is perhaps this contingent quality that has led some (e.g. Heslop et al., 2019) to omit it from their definition of the FE.

With a distinctly Western gaze, the FE is conceived as having had two distinct historical phases. The first phase, which has been termed FE 1.0, encompassed the period between the mid-19th century and the collapse of the Keynesian industrial political-economies through the 1970s. Pioneered by the ‘gas and water’ socialism in cities such as Birmingham, Hamburg or Vienna, this period was initially dominated by municipal-led initiatives to develop the material FE in areas such as public housing, transport and utilities. The providential FE also found its origins in municipal initiatives such as the Tredegar Workmen's Medical Aid Society and Peckham's Pioneer Health Service. Whilst the New Deal-era and post-war expansion of the welfare state extended the providential FE and established large, vertically integrated, state monopolies in material sectors such as energy and telecommunications, it also had the effect of ‘severing the FE from its local roots’ (Heslop et al., 2019: 7). Whilst this framing incorporates many different approaches to the development of the FE, what coheres FE 1.0 as a phase was a public commitment (largely hard-won by organised labour) to the creation and social provision of goods and services considered essential to daily life.

From a foundational perspective, the past 40 years have been characterised by the ‘wrecking of the foundational’ through its fundamental mismanagement, resulting in privatised gains (in the forms of shareholder value and rising asset prices) and socialised costs (through declining real wages, worsening working conditions, decreasing quality of goods and services, increased inequality of access, and a raft of negative social and ecological externalities) (see FE Collective, 2018; Leaver and Williams, 2014). Against this background, the FE 2.0 is thus a hopeful and propositional ¹ framing orientated towards the renewal of the foundational. By breaking apart the singular conception of ‘the economy’ that treats everything as equivalent and as a matter of individual consumption, the foundational focuses on those necessarily social goods and services that must be ‘(re)built through a new political practice in provision, policy-making and measurement’ (Calafati et al., 2019: 19). This also ‘relocates the foundational project within the environmental limits we have to respect on our now damaged planet’ (Calafati et al., 2021: 3).

The coronavirus pandemic has brought the necessity of the foundational agenda into sharp relief. Access to those material and providential goods that are most essential to us, and awareness of the fragility of the systems that provide them, has become of general concern to whole populations (Froud et al., 2020b). As a research agenda, the FE perspective looks to bring into focus those radical social innovations developing ecologically and socially resilient alternatives, the political-economic frameworks that constrain them, and the conditions that enable them. Where the agenda is (by its own recognition) at its weakest is at its intersection with heterodox ecological economic thought, not least degrowth literature. As a practice agenda, the FE is envisaged as functioning much like a modern-day Beveridge Plan, providing a ‘vision of a better post crisis future backed by a concrete plan’ (FE Collective, 2020: 5) that advances a ‘practicable alternative economics commensurate with the enormity of the task of community stabilisation and reconstruction’ (Guinan, 2017: 59). Where exactly this sits on a broader continuum of radical and transformative change remains an open question, one that will only be answered by the direction of future research and conceptual enrichment.

A zonal view of the economy

Taking inspiration from Braudel’s (1981) The Structures of Everyday Life and Polanyi’s (1944) The Great Transformation, the FE is understood as ‘that ‘zone’ close to wellbeing and the needs of everyday life that constitutes the economic infrastructure of social citizenship’ (Barbera and Jones, 2020: 8). In Leaver and Williams account:

Polanyi saw the creation of the market in the 19th century as a violent political assault on the social, while the French historian Braudel argued that there was ‘more than one economy’ in early-modern Europe. Braudel developed a schema of different economic zones that held long-distance trade and finance to be distinct from internal market exchange, which excluded much of everyday life (then considered outside the market). (2014: 220)

Rather than the orthodox tendency to view ‘the’ economy as a monolith, economic relations ‘are considered to be heterogenous across place and time’ (Barbera and Jones, 2020: 8). This heterodox view draws parallels with Gibson-Graham's influential critique of capitalocentric visions of the economy that tend to ‘devalue or marginalize possibilities of noncapitalist development’ (1996: 41). In what they termed the ‘diverse economies’ perspective, and in commonality with the FE perspective, Gibson-Graham instead look to offer ‘a discourse of economic difference as a contribution to a politics of economic innovation’ (2008: 615).

Highlighting an oversight in existing theories of the FE, Gibson-Graham's work was heavily informed by Marxist-feminist theory that emphasised the hidden labour of unwaged social reproduction (e.g. Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Mitchell et al., 2004). Falling outside of the capitalocentric gaze due to its unwaged character, Gibson-Graham suggested that ‘non-market transactions and unpaid household work (both by definition non-capitalist) constitute 30–50% of economic activity in both rich and poor countries’ (2008: 615). Given the FE's concern with those parts of the economy that support everyday life (education, healthcare, eldercare, childcare, food etc.) there is an intersection with debates on the work of social reproduction. Yet FE literature currently has a blind spot when it comes to unwaged work, which remains overwhelmingly performed by women. Current framings of the providential FE mostly limit their understanding to public services provided by the welfare state (such as unemployment benefits) or para-state (such as elderly care homes or sports facilities), and indeed to work that is predominantly waged. Whilst there has been some initial engagement with debates around Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services as a prospective response to this challenge (FE Collective, 2018: 118–128), future research on the FE will need to address this shortcoming.

As Gibson-Graham suggest, the resulting ‘diverse economies’ framing understands the economy to be constituted out of an immense patchwork of activities – ‘a proliferative space of difference’ (2008: 615). The research agenda is thus located in an expansive field of economic activity, which incorporates everything from alternative currencies, cooperatives and squatting movements to slave labour, theft and poaching. In practice, this means that many innovative economic practices (community land banks being a good example) are of equal interest to those working with an FE or a community economies framing.

Yet as Madra and Özelçuk observe, ‘as a research project, diverse economies is not about providing a more complete picture of the economy but rather about constituting a field of economic difference with a curiosity and readiness to be surprised’ (2015: 129). The emphasis lies on ‘reading for difference’ and maintaining a deconstructed account of the economy, recognising the need to make visible those practices rendered ‘“non-credible” and “non-existent” by dominant modes of thought’ (ibid: 623). Whilst reading for difference is essential, the FE perspective seeks to go further in developing a reconstructed account of economic relations. This maintains the focus on diverse socially and ecologically just economic practices that could meet (or are already meeting) foundational needs, but it also means advancing ‘alternative frames of value that are rooted in continual and evolving political engagement and democratic dialogue’ (Barbera and Jones, 2020: 11). The focus of the FE is thus not only the recognition and promotion of diverse economic practices, but on finding their place in the wider reconstitution of a ‘zone’ of activity that guarantees the reproduction of everyday life. This resonates with concerns raised by Schmid and Smith (2020: 4, 14) regarding the ‘tension between antagonism and imagination’ in diverse economies research, both ‘looking upwards, to omnipotent overarching systems’ but also ‘more horizontally, at everyday reproduction and practice’.

The focus of Foundational research is hence not simply on a zone of activity in and for itself, but practices for transforming foundational provision and their role in fomenting wider systemic effects. There are commonalities here with the systems approach put forward in The Spatial Contract (Schafran et al., 2020) and Chatterton and Pusey's recent framing of post-capitalism as ‘a set of activities and ideas that have multiple and interconnecting characteristics simultaneously in, against and beyond the present condition’ (2020: 28). Rather than drawing a crude line between capitalist/non-capitalist zones of activity, the focus is on practices with the potential to simultaneously improve wellbeing within the current conjuncture, confront and push-back against socially and ecologically destructive processes, and contribute to processes that move us beyond an exploitative and extractive growth-based economy. Chatterton and Pusey suggest platform cooperatives are particularly indicative of such practices, but this lens can be useful in evaluating existing initiatives (from experiments in UBI to community wealth building strategies) and as a normative basis for the development of transformative approaches to the FE.

In offering a propositional and zonal framing, the FE perspective also contributes to what Peck called the ‘still-to-be-realized potential of Polanyian approaches’ (2013a: 1537), particularly in the commitment to ‘enrich[ing] the political imaginary through the exploration of alternative socioeconomic arrangements’ and pursuing ‘a different way of thinking about the relationships between the general and the particular’ (Peck, 2013b: 1546). Whilst the full spectrum of intersections between the FE perspective and Polanyi's thought is yet to be explored, the former's propositional framing certainly responds to the ‘Polanyian injunction’ that ‘explorations of this unevenly developed, heterogenous economy should be conducted systematically, with a view to theoretical recalibration and reconstruction [rather than] unprincipled celebration of surface-level economic-geographical difference for its own sake’ (ibid: 1558).

This Polanyian influence can also be traced through the work of Foundational scholars (such as Sayer, 2019) whom draw on debates on the moral economy. Broadly speaking, a moral economy builds upon Polanyi’s (1944) distinction between ‘formalist’ and ‘substantivist’ economic approaches. Formalist approaches can be associated with orthodox economic theory, where all transactions are understood as equivalences separated only by degree, performed by a universally rational benefit-maximising economic subject. ‘The economy’ is perceived as a singular zone of activity entirely disembedded from other social relations, where economic resources (including fictitious commodities such as money, land and labour) are considered an end in themselves. ² In contrast, substantivist perspectives adopt an anthropological starting point focused on the diverse means through which people fulfil needs and wants.

Theories of the moral economy build on this distinction, emphasising that human activity is guided by an assemblage of different rationales. As E.P. Thompson (1971: 78-9) noted in his account of the 18th-century food riots, people did not riot solely because of an animalistic response to their hunger, but because of perceived injustices that underpin their hunger. With a ‘popular consensus as to what were illegitimate practices’ in the preparation of grain, it was the transgression of these ‘moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation’ that was the object of unrest. In the context of the contemporary account of the FE, it is remarkable that whilst neoliberal reforms have dismantled the provision of the foundational (as rising cases of homelessness, food or fuel poverty would attest to), this has not (in the Global North) produced civil unrest on the scale one might expect. This can be attributed, at least in part, to the effect these processes of neoliberalisation have had on the ‘popular consensus’ about what can or can't be done in the name of ‘the economy’. Recalling Thatcher's dictum that ‘economics are the method: the object is to change the soul’, it is both the actual and moral economy of the foundational that has been eroded. The focus of the FE is thus not only about material provision, but how innovative approaches to such provision can reassemble a new common-sense of ‘minimum socially defined standards [that] coexist as governing principles – and therefore moral choices’ (FE Collective, 2018: 91).

There are distinct parallels here with recent work on ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ (Thompson et al., 2020a), which draws explicitly on Polanyi and the FE Collective's own work. Posited as diametrically opposite to an ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ that tend[s] to let the global market dictate trajectories’, entrepreneurial municipalism is conceptualised as ‘the local state taking a more proactive – or entrepreneurial – role in shaping land and labour markets in ways which harness local assets and maximise the benefits of stabilisers and accelerators for local economic growth’. Here economic growth is not conceptualised in the orthodox sense of increased GDP/GVA, but as the proliferation and expansion of ‘socially embedded institutional structures’ that provide for people's needs or livelihoods, ‘in which success is measured not by a return on investment but evaluated according to alternative metrics, such as social value or democratic assent’ (Thompson et al., 2020a: 1178-9). Reflecting recent work on re-evaluating productivity (Engelen et al., 2017; Froud et al., 2020a), it can be suggested that emerging studies on entrepreneurial municipalism can be aligned with the corpus of work exploring theories and strategies for the expansion of the FE.

Finally, distinctions can also be made between the FE and long-established debates on the concept of the social economy. A recent review of social economy literature indicates a highly fragmented field incorporating (at least) three distinctive definitions: ‘an “empirical” definition of specific organisational forms and activities; an “essentialist” self-contained category complementing the more familiar public/private sectors; and a “holistic,” relational approach underpinning a normative project of socialising the whole economy’ (Thompson et al., 2020b: 4). This is further complicated by the introduction of the related concepts of the solidarity economy and the resulting ‘social solidarity economy’ and ‘social and solidarity economy’ framings – which are conceived again as different perspectives (see Utting, 2015).

This complexity arises, at least in part, from the divergences between anglophone, francophone, and Latin American traditions. The former broadly treats the social economy as a synonym for the third sector, composed of non-profit and non-public sector organisations (which the original FE Manifesto named as the para-state) whilst paying ‘little attention to the role of market agents (co-operative firms, mutuelles) which have managed to introduce modes of organisation based on solidarity and reciprocity’ (Moulaert and Ailennei, 2005: 2043). Although offering a zonal framing, this anglophone account of the social economy lies in marked contrast to the FE's cross-sectoral approach. Furthermore, the social economy discourse has in practice facilitated a well-documented ‘return to the vagaries of ‘good acts’ and ‘good people’ in combating social exclusion and meeting welfare needs, whilst legitimating cuts in state expenditure or state welfare’ (Amin et al., 2002: x). In contrast, the francophone and Latin American framings of the social economy put less emphasis on a zonal perspective, instead drawing strong parallels with the ‘diverse economies’ focus on heterogeneous practices of solidarity, leading to some of the same commonalities and distinctions with the FE as highlighted above.

Social innovation

If the zonal framing is central to understanding the proposition of the FE, then its granular focus is on the practices and processes that constitute it. The historical perspective traces the ebb and flow of how new material arrangements and social practices constituted the FE 1.0, the embedded moral economy and subjectivities associated with these practices, and their subsequent deconstruction through processes of roll back and roll out neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell, 2002). Yet as a propositional research and practice agenda, the FE is focused less on what has been than on what is to come. Rather than longing for the forms of social provision associated with the Keynesian welfare state, the foundational perspective turns our attention towards (possibilities of) socially innovative practices that cut across conventional distinctions such as the public/private and state/non-state, focusing on ‘local and regional experiments that make the foundational visible … these would be disruptive, mobilising experiments of the kind envisaged by Roberto Unger as radical social innovation, not “what works” experiments, which allow established power to negotiate the world more intelligently’ (FE Collective, 2018: 6; see also Unger, 2019).

Conceptualisations of the FE 2.0 share a recognition that ‘the paramount limitation of social democracy … [with its focus on] the preservation of a high level of social entitlements, paradoxically funded by the regressive and indirect taxation of consumption … has been that it abandoned any effort to reshape production and power: the institutional arrangements of the market and of democracy’ (Unger, 2015: 237-8). For this reason, Unger is critical of minimalist conceptions of social innovation ³ that retain the tripartite structure of state-economy-civil society, and whose ‘properly piecemeal changes’ concern themselves with mobilising civil society to ‘fill in the gaps’ that the state-economy either overlooks or marginalises. Such a critique of the minimalist conception of social innovation resonates strongly with concerns regarding the anglophone social economy discourse (e.g. Amin et al., 2002), where social innovation becomes relegated to the efforts of an underfunded and ill-equipped third sector doing ‘the job of putting a human face on an unreconstructed world’ (Unger, 2015: 236).

Against this, Foundational theorists emphasise ‘the potential for a maximalist approach that has citizen activism at the heart of foundational thinking and practice’ (Barbera and Jones, 2020: 5). The maximalist ⁴ approach retains a focus on new socio-material practices that can meet the needs of present and future generations, yet the ‘horizon of transformative ambition expands to include the economic and political institutions, as well as the beliefs informing and sustaining them’ (Unger, 2015: 237). This perspective emphasises ‘the need to be unsentimental about the scope for these alternatives’ (FE Collective, 2018: 140) when couched within ‘the analytical cocooning of alternative or community economies … that may be executed with the best of intentions, to preserve and indeed promote noncapitalist economies, but [that] does little to advance understandings of how such economies can be reproduced in late-neoliberal times’ (Peck, 2013b: 1563).

That the zonal perspective of the FE adopts neither a binary (e.g. state/non-state, capitalist/non-capitalist) or tripartite (state-market-civil society) analytical focus is an important starting point for conceptualising what maximalist approaches to social innovation mean in practice. Indeed, the maximalist approach resembles what Erik Olin Wright termed the ‘strategic vision of eroding capitalism’ which:

imagines introducing the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches and figuring out ways of expanding their habitats … As a strategic idea, eroding capitalism combines using the state in ways that sustain spaces for building emancipatory alternatives with a wide range of initiatives from below to fill those spaces (Wright, 2019: 61, 64).

There are clear parallels here with the FE Collective's proposition of instigating ‘experiments in inserting alternative principles and practice of ‘elements of revolution’ into capitalist host bodies that would normally reject them’, with an understanding that it is this ‘everyday practice [that] can begin to make hope practical’ (2018: 159, 118). The goal being a ‘public heterarchy’ offering new spaces in which to act (Barbera, 2021: 559). The strategic challenge of a maximalist approach is to ask how social innovations can ‘take the step beyond being small prefigurative lifeboats of “otherness,” and instead orientate themselves as part of a self-expansive dynamic capable of coalescing into the kind of broader project of transformation’ (Russell and Milburn, 2021: 138).

A partial answer to this problem lies in the building of a new moral economy (Sayer, 2000) – the production of a new subjectivity or common-sense and the concomitant emergence of radical forms of citizenship – and its intersection with a material foundation. Suffice to say this helps makes sense of the claim that the ‘foundational renewal problem is about centralised, top-down policymaking as much as it is about the wrong policies’ (Foundational Economy Collective, 2018: 126) and that efforts to develop a new paradigm come with the ‘need to reinvent democratic politics and empower the regional and local’ (Bentham et al., 2013: 20). Underpinning these statements is the recognition that the Foundational problem is not simply about the provision of basic needs within the world as we currently know it, but about practices of systemic transformation capable of re-embedding economic activity within socio-ecological limits. It is through this perspective that Foundational interventions ought to be assessed, and their ‘maximalist’ potential evaluated (Gough, 2020).

Whilst it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide such an assessment of the many proposals or practices associated with the FE, two broad tendencies have been developed in some depth: social licensing and place-based approaches. Proposals for social licensing (Leaver and Williams, 2014) rest on the principle that all foundational activities in the material and providential domains, including those performed by private companies and the para-state such as retail banking and some social care providers, should ‘be treated as in the public domain regardless of ownership’ (FE Collective, 2018: 106). This is not to suggest that they must all become enterprises owned by the state, but rather that many of these enterprises have been given public privileges (such as supermarkets having regulated catchment areas, or water utilities given spatial monopolies) without any corresponding social duties.

The proposition of social licensing is that government ‘negotiates with large financialised companies operating in the FE to specify explicit social obligations – like living wages, fair treatment of suppliers and support for community activities’ (Calafati et al., 2019: 21). As these providers are largely anchored (a supermarket or care provider requires proximity to its client base), capital cannot simply ‘take flight’ in response to these conditions. An intriguing example of what this might look like at a national scale is the French government's €7bn bail out of the Air France-KLM group in early 2020. The financing was made conditional on the airline ceasing operation of domestic flights, and limiting to hub transfers, those journeys that can be done by rail in less than 2.5 h. Whilst significant questions may be asked as to whether such a condition is sufficient in addressing aviation emissions, and the non-binding nature of these conditions ought to raise eyebrows, it is indicative of the scope for experimentation in approaches to social licensing.

Whilst social licensing can be thought of in place-based terms (such as the conditionalities put on a particular supermarket franchise and mediated through a local authority), place-based approaches tend to refer to socially innovative approaches to the ownership and governance of resources, networks and services. These might include a diversity of models such as public-common partnerships (Russell and Milburn, 2018, 2021; Russell et al., 2022), ‘new foundational infrastructures’ such as Long-Term Care Centres (Autonomy/LABORA, 2019: 33), and innovative forms of ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ (Thompson et al., 2020a). These proposals all share the hypothesis that ‘radical change is only likely to come through a new politics of foundational alliance involving hybrid organisations with regional/local government, intermediary organisations and businesses working together’ and that ‘such alliances are easiest to put together on a local basis’ (FE Collective, 2018: 155).

This emphasis on constructing power through the local is certainly not new in geographical and urban debates. A vast literature is concerned with the Right to the City (see the special issue of City, Brenner et al., 2009), visions of progressive localism (e.g. Featherstone et al., 2012) and calls for the local ‘to become the active subject of its economic experience’ (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 50). Although these debates cannot be rehearsed here, all such propositions must contend with what Purcell calls ‘the local trap, in which the local scale is assumed to be inherently more democratic than other scales’ (2005: 1921) and the fallacy that ‘local scale decision-making is inherently more likely to yield outcomes that are socially just or ecologically sustainable than decision-making at other scales’ (Purcell and Brown, 2005: 280). The correlate implication is that whilst ‘a foundational approach focuses on intermediary institutions as a means of supporting social and economic relations at the city level’ (Barbera and Jones, 2020: 2), the process of ‘re-localisation may be necessary but it is not in itself a sufficient principle’ (Barbera et al., 2018b: 377) for a maximalist approach to social innovation.

Theorists associated with new municipalist movements (or more precisely, debates within these movements) have begun to confront this problem through the concept of the ‘politics of proximity’ (see Subirats, 2016). Rather than identifying the local as an essentially virtuous category, a political project of proximity is instead focused on ‘the activation of municipalist political processes that have the capacity to produce new political subjectivities’. Local scales (such as the municipality) are not considered to offer inherently progressive qualities, but instead offer latent potential for constructing ‘strategic entry points for the development of a truly prefigurative and transformative social movement’ (Russell, 2019: 1001–1007), where proximity is not a given but something that is built. In this guise, the local focus should not be read as an abdication of critical scalar thinking, but instead be approached as a strategic wager. Nonetheless, it is critical that the Foundational agenda explores what it means to follow through on such a wager, rather than falling into the alluring trap of celebrating local difference.

The FE in action

A persistent challenge for those working with the concept of the FE, especially when engaging with policy makers and civil servants, is the potential for it to be used as little more than shorthand for a particular (mundane) sector of the economy. For example, Greater Manchester's 2019 Local Industrial Strategy frames the FE in orthodox policy terms, emphasising the need to drive wage growth through an ‘increase [in] the productivity of big sectors in the “foundational economy’’ such as ‘retail, social care, hospitality and tourism’ (GMCA, 2019: 16, 26). Ignoring that productivity and wage growth have been radically decoupled since the late-1970s, ⁵ such a reductionist reading of the FE avoids the critical and normative content that positions it as ‘a compelling counter-project against neoliberalism’ (Streeck in FE Collective, 2018: iv).

Clearly articulating a critique of growth-led strategies for the transformation of foundational sectors, not just in distributional terms (e.g. discourses of inclusive growth) but as a critique of growth per se, will be a necessary step in clarifying the contribution of FE scholarship to theories of socio-economic development. It could also prove to be the cornerstone in addressing the comparative weakness of FE scholarship in engaging with questions of ecological crisis and transition. One starting point here would be the increasingly mature literature on economic degrowth, a term that signifies a ‘radical political and economic reorganization leading to drastically reduced resource and energy throughput’ (Kallis et al., 2018: 291) with a simultaneous improvement in wellbeing. Recognising that ‘green growth’ is doubtful from both a theoretical and empirical perspective demands that we ‘find ways to decouple prosperity and development from growth’ (Hickel and Kallis, 2019: 483), instead focusing on how a wellbeing economy can be developed within ecological limits (which at a conceptual level is what Kate Raworth (2018) refers to as ‘the safe and just space for humanity’). As a recent paper on the FE has argued, ‘the ability to shape such desired changes hinges on comprehending the systematic non-sustainability of capitalism’, helping us to frame how an ‘empowering of the foundational economy … offers pathways to undermining capitalism from within’ (Bärnthaller et al., 2021: 1-2. Emphasis added). Debates concerning the viability (and desirability) of policy interventions associated with a Green New Deal should similarly be evaluated not on whether they can decarbonise economies (which itself would be subject to degrowth critique, and has nothing to say on issues such as biodiversity loss or ocean acidification), but the extent to which they can act as ‘reforms which, when implemented, not only radically reduce carbon emissions, but may also stretch the limits of the very system’ (Mastini et al., 2021: 8). The strength of the FE's contribution can precisely be to focus on what this means in practice.

With this in mind, existing examples of foundational interventions should be approached with the intent of exploring what can be done across the material, providential and overlooked domains. Examples of these approaches include alternative platform-based taxi services (e.g. LeCab in Paris and Modo in Vancouver) and social care (e.g. Equal Care in the UK https://www.equalcare.coop/). The strengths and limitations of such approaches and the variability in coverage have been illustrated by Arcidiacono and Pais (2020) whilst the potential of data cooperatives to enable communities and citizens to control local economic relations by sharing and owning data through peer-to-peer (p2p) repositories has been highlighted by Calzada (2021). There are also strong links between the FE and arguments for Universal Basic Services (Coote, 2020) as well as the provision of housing through new forms of public ownership (Plank, 2020). With respect to food systems, the example of partnerships between charities and school meal provisioning such as The Food for Life programme in the UK as well as local grass root initiatives such as the Oldham's Education Catering Team point to the potential for a FE of public food provisioning that has positive health and well-being outcomes as well as addressing current economic and ecological concerns (Morgan, 2020).

There are strong zonal and place-based elements in all of these examples but perhaps the clearest illustration of the spatial aspects of the FE is to be found in alternative food supply chains or alternative food networks. These can take diverse forms including direct sales on-farm, food box schemes, local markets and Farmers’ markets as well as forms of collective production and consumption. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is seen by some to offer a form of prefigurative agriculture that transforms producer-consumer relations and prioritises community-based food production and distribution. First developed in Japan in the 1970s (as ‘Teikei’) examples of CSA can be found across North-America and parts of Europe. In the Italian case, Solidarity Purchasing Groups (SPGs) seem to be one of the most important forms of local action that are connected to wider political and ecological concerns (Barbera et al., 2018a, 2018b). SPGs mostly arise as informal groups formed by consumers and producers that organize food supply purchasing in a collective way. One example of the way such movements can grow to operate at different spatial and political levels is provided by Mostaccio (2020) who illustrates their potential to be catalysts for a wider political solidarity through the case of the ‘Orange rebellion’ in the small rural village of Rosarno in the Gioia Tauro Plain. First emerging as a response to the exploitation of immigrant workers in Orange cultivation, ‘SOS Rosarno’ (https://www.sosrosarno.org/) has grown to create an alliance between small producers and aiming to conserve local territory, protect the quality of life of the local population and defending the rights of immigrant farmhands.