Local economies

How can potential leaders from underprivileged backgrounds tackle economic inequality and climate change when they spend most of their time trying to earn a decent living? Here’s what we learned in Massachusetts.

Coal production is gradually leaving Appalachia—having already extracted much of the region's natural wealth. Local people are figuring out how to build a new economy based on shared vision and community knowledge. If transition can happen here, it can change the debate everywhere.

Two-thirds of the country’s low-wage workers are women. That’s why they stand to benefit the most from greater equity in and control of the workplace.

For the movement to succeed, it must be led by the dispossessed—those for whom the mainstream economy has never worked.

The British government is reversing damage done to local economies by the Great Recession by protecting local pubs.

In our increasingly interdependent world, mayors may be more motivated to collaborate and possibly more capable than our national governments of effectively working across borders.

Can you be a revolutionary and a mayor? Chokwe Lumumba—who spent eight months as mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, before he died—did his best to be both.