What Is Your Business Model, Local Government?

In this timely and provocative essay, What Is Your Business Model, Local Government?, Emily Samuels-Ballantyne invites a bold reimagining of the role and purpose of local government in the face of ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and bureaucratic drift. Drawing from lived experience in regenerative projects, from community harvests to Indigenous land care, she argues that local councils are too often locked into transactional models that fail to nourish the communities they claim to serve.

The essay challenges the obsession with “rates, roads, and rubbish” and calls for a cultural and functional transformation: from gatekeeping to stewardship, from abstraction to grounded care. It critiques the superficial focus on structural reform, how councils are carved up, while ignoring the deeper dysfunctions of waste, performance management, and disconnection from place.

What emerges is a clear-eyed case for a regenerative model of governance, one that centres community resilience, shared meals, public trust, and the radical possibility that local government could once again be a site of hope, not just administration.