Introduction

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the foundational economy, citizenship, democracy and social justice. Our argument is that the foundational economy approach is rooted in a conceptualization of citizenship rights and obligations that are derived from human needs, needs that are met through intermediate satisfiers that are contextdependent and responsive to sociotechnical system change – that is, they are socially, culturally and place-specific, and require agreement through continuous political negotiation and dialogue over time. A key area that becomes apparent from this approach is that there is an increasing and damaging asymmetrical relationship between the rights and duties of corporations as legal entities and the stratified rights and duties of individual citizens qua citizens. A second and related point is that while economies are zonal, people, households and groups live in places. Citizen wellbeing is therefore based on the contingent, place-based drivers of income, from jobs, pensions and welfare, and infrastructure, including grounded (housing, utilities, health, education and care), mobility (cars and public transport systems) and social (parks, libraries, community centres).

We begin this chapter by examining the scope of the foundational economy, and proceed to focus on the importance of foundational thinking for critiques of capitalist formations that involve financialization and extraction. We then discuss the relationship between the foundational economy and human needs and capabilities before developing the argument for a moral basis to the foundational economy and how this links to citizenship. We consider how an impoverished form of citizenship has developed, and within the literature on citizenship we delineate the links between the foundational and civil society, citizenship and the commons, focusing in particular on the potential for developing democratic governance and public action. We conclude by arguing that foundational thinking provides a means of linking citizenship to attempts to manage the commons. This proposes a citizenship based on universal human needs and rights to intermediate goods and services combined with recognition of heterogeneity and diversity in economic and social relations. If social relations and institutional arrangements vary contextually across space and time, this then requires innovative solutions based on experimentation at different scales.