(Illustration by Juan Bernabeu)
What does it mean to own something? In The Second Treatise of Civil Government, the philosopher John Locke understands ownership in terms of extensions of the self. What we own, first and foremost, is our person. When we mix our labor with natural resources to create something of value, the product becomes something that belongs to us, that is proper to us. It becomes our property. This English notion of property continues to influence ideas of ownership. We straightforwardly understand what it means to own personal items, title to real estate, or shares in a company.
But when social innovators discuss ownership, they often mean it in a metaphorical sense of having a say over something or taking responsibility for it. What is this sense of ownership, and how does it relate to the notion of property? Our Winter 2025 issue delves into ownership in both the straightforward and metaphorical senses and how the idea grounds a community and provides a source of systemic change.
In our cover story, “Collectively Owned Strategies,” Jordan Fabyanske, Sonila Cook, and Mariah Levin from Dalberg Catalyst advance the ideal of shared strategies for social impact. “It is common practice,” they write, “for major funders to shape agendas, set priorities, and determine how funding is allocated—in short, to ‘own’ strategies for social impact.” This approach has proven less effective, the authors argue, because it makes the organizations and people with whom funders seek to work into merely nominal partners without voice, agency, or responsibility. In its place the authors recommend “collective ownership” of strategies, in which funders and their partners participate on a more equal footing, and partners share “a sense that the strategy belongs to them, is theirs to improve or change, and is incumbent on them to take forward.”
Community development experts David Fukuzawa, Nancy O. Andrews, and Rebecca Steinitz apply a similar sense of collective ownership in “A New Blueprint for Financing Community Development.” To be truly impactful, investments in community development must be flexible and share the formulation and control of projects with the communities they seek to serve. The authors’ vision of a “new blueprint” for community development not only is more equitable than traditional models in ceding power to low-income communities, but can even advance their equity in the literal sense of property ownership. Read their account of how Boyle Heights, a historically significant Mexican American neighborhood of Los Angeles, has helped long-term residents resist gentrification by gaining ownership of their homes and storefronts.
Finally, in “Strengthening Africa’s Urban Informal Economies,” management scholars Joel Bothello and Tim Weiss reject conventional global development policies that focus on what African cities allegedly lack or need for those that respect and tap into the manifold assets that they already have. To put it another way, instead of owning projects themselves, global development agencies should look to what African cities already own and try to help them build equity in those assets. One might even call this an equitable approach.
Read more stories by David V. Johnson.