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Community Wealth Building Evaluation Learning Lessons from Scotland

Calendar icon Communities, Economy and Work

Folder icon Sep 2025 - Ongoing

Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a strategy for economic development that focuses on creating, retaining, and circulating wealth within local communities to benefit local people.

Inspired by early efforts in Preston, England, CWB has been championed in Scotland by North Ayrshire, which began implementing the approach in 2020. Building on North Ayrshire’s success, five other local authority areas – Clackmannanshire, Fife, Glasgow City Region, South of Scotland, and the Western Isles – were chosen by the Scottish Government to pilot their own initiatives.

Community Wealth Building will soon be a requirement for all local authorities in Scotland, under the Community Wealth Building Bill which was introduced in March 2025. The Bill will require each local authority to publish a statement setting out the measures they intend to take in relation to implementing Community Wealth Building. Each local authority will also need to work with local anchor institutions (such as Health Boards and universities) in their area to publish a Community Wealth Building action plan and implement any measures set out in these.

Community Wealth Building Evaluation Learning Lessons from Scotland (CoWBELLS) is a three-year collaborative research project designed to assess the impact of CWB on the health and wellbeing of the people living in the six areas mentioned above, and to explore whether or not CWB has helped to reduce health inequalities.

CoWBELLS is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and led by Glasgow Caledonian University. Other research partners include the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH), the University of Glasgow and Lancaster University.

Drawing on our learning and experience from CommonHealth Assets and CommonHealth Catalyst, GCPH will lead the Patient and Public Involvement strand of the research.

Content icon Overview of page

  1. Project objectives
  2. What is involved
  3. Project outputs
  4. Further resources & reading

objectives icon Project objectives

The aim of the project is to evaluate the health and health inequalities impacts of CWB, looking specifically at:

1. What pathways to impact are likely to be most effective in building community wealth, improving health and reducing health inequalities?

2. What changes have taken place along these pathways and how does this vary between different Local Authority (LA) areas?

3. What are the barriers and facilitators to CWB?

4. Do population health and intermediate economic outcomes differ between LAs in Scotland where CWB has been implemented and those in both Scotland and England where it has not?

5. What is the impact of CWB on health inequalities between LA areas and between different socioeconomic groups?

6. Is there a ‘dose-response’? i.e. is there an association between the extent of changes in health outcomes, intermediate economic outcomes and health inequalities and the extent to which CWB has been implemented in different LA areas?

involved icon What is involved

Bringing together expertise from academia, the public sector, the third sector and local enterprise, CoWBELLS is a multi-method, multi-site project which will evaluate CWB in North Ayrshire and the five CWB pilot areas, using five ‘Work Packages’ (WPs).

Control areas (LA areas of Scotland that have not been designated CWB pilot areas and control areas in England) will be selected to compare health outcomes and health inequality with the six study areas.

Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used across the five WPs, including techniques such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis, which enables the examination of multiple cases in complex contexts by exploring how different conditions relate to specific outcomes.

Public Involvement Panel

The CoWBELLS Public Involvement Panel (PIP) will be comprised of around 18 people from organisations based across the six study areas that are involved in CWB activities such as development trusts, social enterprises and small-medium businesses engaged in public sector procurement.

The development of the PIP will be guided by our learning from leading and evaluating Patient and Public Involvement Panels on CommonHealth Assets and CommonHealth Catalyst.

The PIP will meet six times in person across the project duration to advise on, and co-design, activities across the five WPs to ensure that the voices, expertise and perspectives of those working across various sectors involved in local CWB implementation across Scotland are able to shape and inform this project, so that the evaluation of CWB is grounded in local insights, and that learning is relevant to local people and communities.

The PIP will also have representation on the Study Steering Committee to further embed their expertise and perspective into the oversight of the project. As CWB is being implemented differently across each LA, the PIP will be vital to grasp how local contexts in CWB shape health outcomes, and to understand how CWB works on the ground in practice.

Output icon Project outputs

Publications & Documents

News

resources icon Further resources & reading

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