Understanding the Conditions for Community Ownership

Community ownership has variously been claimed to support public service reform, build community resilience, strengthen democracy and catalyse wider social change. Examples of community ownership such as community land trusts (CLTs) are seen as the crucible where answers may be found to some of society’s most intractable challenges from the right to housing, gentrification and democratic deficit. Yet, evidencing such claims often defaults to single case studies. We argue that such analyses only take us so far and we here draw upon techniques from qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to begin to systematically map and analyse the conditions for successful community ownership of assets. Focusing here on CLTs, bodies established for the community ownership and management of land and other physical assets for community benefit, we collate existing secondary data for further analysis. In doing so, we both extend the use of the existing evidence base, and provide a more robust footing for theorising of both the space for ‘commoning’ forged through this intersection of democratic innovation and the social economy and the polycentric governance conditions which may support these forms of ownership and experimentation.