The Common Good Economy: a new compass

A new book, and why this argument is urgent now

Jun 04, 2026

This morning, after 3 years of writing it, my new book, The Common Good Economy: a new compass, has been published in the UK. It will follow in the US with Basic Venture Group (11 September), and in translation across Europe and beyond: in the Netherlands with Park/Nieuw Amsterdam (25 June), in Germany with Campus (24 September), in Spain with Taurus (27 September), in Italy with Einaudi (October), and in Greece, Poland and Portugal in the coming months. I want to use this Substack to say something about how it came to be, and why I think the argument matters more now than ever.

The book is the natural next step in a longer body of work. The Entrepreneurial State (2013) made the case that the state has always been an active investor and risk-taker in innovation, not a passive market-fixer correcting failures at the edges. The Value of Everything (2018) asked who creates value in the economy, and who extracts it. Mission Economy (2021) translated that thinking into a framework: setting bold, time-bound missions, picking the willing rather than the winners, and structuring public-private partnerships around shared risks and shared rewards. The Big Con (2023), written with my PhD student Rosie Collington, examined how outsourced consulting has hollowed out the state’s own capacity to do any of this.

The Common Good Economy draws those threads together and asks a different question. It is no longer only about what the state can do, or how missions can be governed, or how value is collectively created. I lay out the wider set of principles that have to be in place for any of those things to deliver genuine economic transformation for people and planet. What does it mean to organise an economy around the common good, not as a slogan, but as an operational framework? And how can we hold all who talk about ‘missions’ and ‘purpose’ accountable for what they deliver, in practice, for people and planet?

From pillars to elements

The book has a more specific antecedent. In 2023, I published an academic article in the Journal of Economic Policy Reform titled ‘Governing the economics of the common good: from correcting market failures to shaping collective goals‘. That paper set out an early version of the framework as five pillars: purpose and directionality; co-creation and participation; collective learning and knowledge sharing; access for all and reward sharing; and transparency and accountability.

In the book those pillars have become elements, and they sit together as what I call the common good compass. The vocabulary has changed but the architecture has not. What has deepened is the case for why each element matters, and why they only work in combination.

Part I develops the approach to the common good that is grounded in new economic theory. Theory that is not about market fixing but market shaping, with attention to how to build more symbiotic (rather than parasitic) eco-systems, with pre-distribution rather than redistribution so that we get all the relationships right. Common good economics can learn from political philosophy: from Aristotle, where it is not only the telos (goals around wellbeing and the good life) but also the polis (how we value each other and build community) that matters. Indeed, modern philosophers like Michael Sandel have further developed this reasoning in communitarian philosophy.

Yet economics continues to consider ‘good’ in terms of public goods that are just correcting for something the private sector does not do. Filling the gap, as though there were a financial hole to fill, without attention to the form of finance or to the relationships embedded in that finance. The ‘commons’ framing, for its part, treats the problem as a government failure, with a great deal of expectation placed on citizens to fill the gap left by problematic governments.

Neither framing is sufficient. Common good economics is meant to move away from corrections and towards objectives, where the how all organisations — public and private, capital and labour, citizens and the state — interact matters as much as what they are trying to do together. That means embedding good in all contracts, whether water rights, property rights, procurement contracts, or bailout terms from the state, from the beginning, rather than picking up the mess later. Part I ends with the common good compass. The elements are described below.

Purpose & Directionality: Setting a clear direction or mission, proactively aligning activity towards collective goals.
2. Co-creation & Participation: All stakeholders at the table deciding what the common good should be and working together to make it possible. Genuine interfaces between public, private, and civil society.
Collective Learning & Knowledge-Sharing: How we embed shared learning in governance structures: IP rights, open access platforms, institutional capacity to learn together.
Access for All & Reward-Sharing: Redistribution and pre-distribution policies are critical for equitably sharing risks and rewards.
Transparency & Accountability: The enforcing pillar. Without visibility and accountability, the other four cannot hold. Openness is not optional.

It is also worth being explicit about one thing the compass adds to what came before. The Entrepreneurial State and Mission Economy are not normative frameworks. They can be used to advance the military-industrial complex just as easily as they can be used to deliver high-quality healthcare to all citizens. The Common Good Economy builds on those insights but adds something essential through the compass: it ensures that economic priorities are determined collectively and directed toward socially desirable outcomes. We are already good at setting goals — the SDGs, climate targets, pandemic preparedness frameworks. We are bad at achieving them. The compass explains why: we have not learned how to govern the ‘how’.

Part II takes each of the five elements and shows what it looks like when applied to a real economic relationship: co-creating missions, sharing knowledge during vaccine production, sharing rewards through public funds that reinvest in communities, and developing data commons that allow transparency and accountability. Neglecting any one of them leaves the framework open to capture, and the result is what I call common good washing, where public and private actors claim to serve a shared purpose while their actions fail to deliver it.

Why now?

If there was ever a time for the common good to come back to the global agenda, it is surely now. Climate change is projected to cause 83 million excess deaths by the end of the century. 4.5 billion people lack essential health services and 2 billion do not have access to safe drinking water. The wealth amassed by tech billionaires and finance executives has reached levels that eclipse entire nations. The multilateral system is under threat, with nationalism and “make my own country great again” rhetoric intensifying geopolitical tensions to a degree we have not seen since the Second World War.

Against that backdrop, three more specific shifts make the book’s argument particularly urgent.

The first is that, after four decades of being treated as faintly suspicious, industrial strategy is back. From the US Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, to Germany’s €500 billion infrastructure fund, to Brazil’s New Industrial Policy and the UK’s nascent Industrial Strategy, governments are once again willing to say out loud that markets need to be shaped, not just fixed. That is a profound and welcome shift. The market-shaping versus market-fixing distinction, which I have spent much of my career researching, writing about, and working with governments to implement, is no longer a fringe position. It is becoming, in places, a set of policies, tools and institutions with real-world results.

The second is that, alongside this, the language of missions has been adopted at speed: by the European Commission’s Horizon programme, by the current governments of Brazil and Mexico, by Spain and the United Kingdom, by countless cities, agencies, and even private firms. That too is welcome, and not accidental. Missions, done well, offer a way to turn broad challenges into concrete, cross-sectoral goals that galvanise action, investment, and innovation. But adoption is not the same as application. We are now seeing the beginnings of something it is worth naming clearly: mission-washing, the use of mission language to lend purpose-driven legitimacy to policies and programmes that retain, underneath, the old market-fixing logic, the old short-termism, and the old asymmetric parasitic relationships between public and private actors. A mission is not a mission just because it has been called one.

The third reason is the one I find most pressing. In many democracies, there is now a serious crisis of belief in the capacity of governments to deliver transformative change. Citizens look at what is announced and feel little of it in their lives. That gap between announcement and felt reality is what gives mission-washing its political opening, and what makes the principles of the common good not a nice-to-have but a precondition for industrial policy that holds together.

Industrial strategy and its legitimation problem

The renewed wave of industrial policy has been overwhelmingly technical in its self-understanding. Which instrument? Which institution? How do we measure additionality and crowding-in? These are necessary questions. The gap in the conversation is everywhere visible, however: there is far less attention to how to legitimise industrial policy in a context of polarisation, low trust and active citizen opposition. Two recent cases, on either side of the Atlantic, make the point.

In the UK, the Labour government has done something important by adopting five missions as its operating framework, drawing in part on the mission-oriented approach that my colleagues and I have developed over the past decade at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. But the framework, as it stands, leaves significant pieces on the table. Growth itself is not a mission. Growth is the result of well-executed missions that catalyse investment and innovation across the economy. Treating growth as a mission in its own right collapses the framework, because it removes the directional question: growth in what, for whom, with what spillovers. Every economy already has a direction, whether or not government chooses to set it. A deregulated economy has a direction. A financialised economy has a direction. The obvious question is whether we are actively choosing ours.

The institutional toolkit is similarly under-equipped. The National Wealth Fund could be a genuine market-shaping institution, a public investor of first resort, capable of crowding in private capital around clearly directional goals with conditionalities attached. Without the scale, mandate and freedom to take real risks, however, it risks operating closer to a de-risking facility for private investment than to the kind of market-shaping development bank, on the model of BNDES in Brazil or KfW in Germany, that the UK needs. And there is a political dimension that policy design alone cannot solve. There is a feeling in the country, and it is more than a feeling, that the government is not acting with the pace, ambition or power that the moment requires. The missions, as currently articulated, are neither memorable nor believable to most people. They have not been co-created with the public or with the civil servants meant to deliver them. The social contract for what citizens receive in return for the investment has not been made explicit. This is the political consequence of designing missions as a technocratic exercise rather than a participatory one.

The US case tells a related story at a different scale. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act constituted industrial policy at extraordinary scale: over US$300 billion in semiconductor incentives, hundreds of billions more in green investment, with genuinely innovative conditionalities attached, including restrictions on share buybacks, requirements on workforce development, and commitments to community engagement and energy-efficient supply chains. As I have argued before, these were real advances, and they had to be negotiated, including by organised labour. They were not given. And yet, for many voters, their impact was divorced from the reality of their lives. The price-of-eggs problem, as it came to be known: when grocery bills, housing costs and child-care costs all rise, the announcement of a large semiconductor fabrication plant in another state does not register as the answer. Industrial strategy, in that period, did not become an answer to affordability. The 2024 election made plain that the costs of getting that disconnect wrong are very high.

Neither case is an argument against industrial policy. Both are arguments for the principles that turn industrial policy into something citizens recognise as serving them: participation in setting direction, transparency about who is receiving public money and on what terms, and clear, enforceable conditionalities for reward-sharing so that the gains from publicly-funded investment do not accrue, again, primarily to shareholders. These are not soft-edge additions to industrial strategy. They are what makes industrial strategy work, and what gives it the public legitimacy without which, however technically sound, it will not survive a political cycle.

The same logic applies, with even greater force, to green industrial policy. As I argued in ‘Making the Just Transition Just‘, the transition will be just or it will not happen. Decarbonisation that fails to share its benefits with the workers and communities living through its disruptions does not produce climate policy; it produces backlash to climate policy. The principles of the common good are not separate from the green transition. They are the design constraints that determine whether it succeeds.

Five glimpses of the compass in practice

The compass is not abstract. It is built from work with governments and communities that have tried to put each element into practice. Five short examples — one for each element — illustrate what this can look like.

Purpose and directionality: Barbados.

Between 2022 and 2024, I worked with Prime Minister Mia Mottley and her government on a mission-oriented industrial strategy for Barbados. What struck me most was her decision to make culture both a mission in its own right and a ‘beacon’ cutting across all the other missions. The culture mission invests in shared local heritage and the creative industries; the cross-cutting dimension seeks to foster confidence, dignity and value for all Barbadians in their ‘large ocean state’ (not a small island state), against the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Crop Over, the country’s flagship festival, contributes an estimated US$80–100 million annually. Culture here is not ‘soft’ policy. It is direction-setting at the heart of the economic strategy.

Co-creation and participation: Camden.

Camden Council, where I co-chaired the Renewal Commission with the then-Leader Georgia Gould, has become a genuine laboratory for co-creating missions with residents. Through ‘We Make Camden’, the Council brought citizen assemblies, residents’ associations and ‘citizen scientists’ into the process of deciding which missions mattered most. The Commission then developed a ‘Mission Incubator’ to translate ambitions into delivery. In adult social care, procurement specifications were redesigned in workshops that brought together officers, residents and care workers — with one of the strongest recommendations being that care workers be recognised as ‘place shapers’, not just service deliverers. Co-creation is what turned procurement from a back-office function into a mission-aligned act.

Collective learning and knowledge sharing: the mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer Programme.

After COVID-19 exposed the structural inequities of global vaccine supply, the WHO-backed mRNA hub based in South Africa was established to do something new: distribute technology across multiple production sites in the Global South, counter extractive intellectual property practices, and make early-stage public funding conditional on knowledge sharing and equitable access. It is not a perfect model and it remains under-resourced and contested, but it shows what it looks like to govern knowledge as a common good rather than as a private rent.

Access for all and reward-sharing: the US CHIPS and Science Act.

The 2022 CHIPS Act offered approximately US$53 billion in incentives, with conditions designed to shape how the benefits of public investment were distributed. Recipients could not use the funds for share buybacks or dividends. Projects above US$150 million had to share profits with the government above a certain threshold. Companies had to provide childcare plans for facility and construction workers. Proposals had to align with workforce development, R&D investment, and energy- and water-efficient supply chains. The point is not that CHIPS was perfect [it could have gone further on worker representation and the right to organise], but that it shows how reward-sharing can be designed into industrial policy from the start, rather than tacked on at the end.

Transparency and accountability: Barcelona.

Under Mayor Ada Colau from 2015, Barcelona moved decisively away from a corporate-led ‘smart city’ model toward what it called digital sovereignty. The Digital Plan, launched in 2016 with €75 million in annual investment, established a ‘data commons’ that treated municipal data as a shared resource for collective benefit. The city built CityOS to consolidate municipal data, created a Municipal Data Office, and through the DECODE project gave residents cryptographic tools to control how their data was shared, and with whom. Barcelona shows that transparency is not a procedural add-on. It is an active design choice about who governs the infrastructure of public life.

Legitimation as design, not afterthought

The common good compass matters in this moment because legitimation does not come from communications strategy after the fact. It is built in through two things: participation and transparency at the front end, and benefit-sharing at the back end. Citizens accept directional public investment when they have a meaningful voice in setting that direction, and when they can see, plainly, that they share in what is produced. No matter how technically sound an economic policy is, without popular support it will fail. This is not a problem to be solved at launch. It must be designed in from the beginning, into the way the policies themselves are developed.

This is what The Common Good Economy is about. The book argues that the common good is not a utopian ideal but a practical, measurable and governable project, if we choose to build the spaces, reimagine the institutions, design the metrics and invest in the capabilities to make it real. In the decisive years ahead, it can form our collective ambition: shaping economies that are sustainable, inclusive and properly democratic, governed by the values and vision of the people they exist to serve.

I will be saying more about specific chapters over the coming weeks, including on public banks, the procurement architecture, the missing role of arts and culture in how we conceive of value, and what a common good dashboard could look like in practice. For now, I hope you will read the book.

The Common Good Economy: a new compass is published by Allen Lane on 4 June.

Buy it here

Book talks and launch events

Monday, 15th June 2026 | LSE Festival, London UK | Register here.
Tuesday, 16th June 2026 | UCL IIPP Forum, London UK | Register here.
Monday, 22nd June 2026 | Novara Media: Downstream IRL, London UK | Register here.
Thursday, 27th August 2026 | Edinburgh Book Festival, Edinburgh UK | Registration to come
Thursday, 22nd October 2026 | Southwark Cathedral, London UK | Registration to come
Friday, 6th November 2026 | Kilkenomics, Kilkenny Ireland | Registration to come

A full and updated list of book events will be maintained on my website.

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