Every so often, a new policy word comes along that promises to reframe everything – growth, wellbeing, prosperity, even hope. “Foundational” is one of those words. It sounds solid, moral, even comforting. It speaks to what keeps us going: the services, infrastructures, and relationships that make daily life possible.
But the more the word travels, the fuzzier it becomes. Depending on who you ask, the “foundational economy” could mean housing, care, utilities, food, or local shops – or it could stretch to include almost everything. Policymakers see it as a way to rebalance economic strategy toward everyday needs. Activists use it to argue for fairness, public value, and dignity. Academics debate its boundaries.
So what do we mean when we say “foundational”?
The ordinary as essential
For me, the foundational economy is a way of paying attention to the ordinary – to what’s been hiding in plain sight.
In Wales, this means the infrastructures that quietly hold communities together: bus routes that still run (just), care workers who make their rounds, the supermarket that employs half the town, the college training centre keeping local skills alive.
These are not glamorous sectors. They rarely feature in glossy “innovation” strategies. Yet without them, everyday life would unravel within days.
When foundational economy thinkers talk about the “foundational,” they’re really asking us to notice – and value – the mundane systems of support that sustain collective life. That noticing, simple as it sounds, can be radical.
A language that travels
The term itself emerged from a group of researchers trying to understand Europe’s economic geography after the financial crisis – how much of daily life depends on non-tradable sectors like utilities, care, and food distribution.
In Wales, the language has travelled far beyond academia: into government programmes, city-region plans, and even community projects.
But travel changes words. “Foundational” can become a slogan, used to badge almost any initiative with a social or local flavour. Sometimes, that’s fine; it opens up useful conversations. But sometimes it risks emptying the concept of meaning — turning it into another box to tick.
That’s why it’s worth pausing, as researchers and practitioners, to ask: foundational for whom?
What is being protected or repaired?
Who benefits from this re-valuing of the everyday, and who remains unseen?
Beyond growth, but not beyond politics
The foundational economy often positions itself as an alternative to growth-centred development – as a politics of care, maintenance, and sufficiency. But that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. Deciding what counts as foundational is a political act.
In some policy documents, the foundational becomes a way to protect jobs in basic sectors. In others, it’s used to discipline spending — to prioritise the essentials in an age of austerity. Both approaches use the same word, but they point in very different directions.
That’s why it’s important to hold on to the ethical impulse behind the foundational economy: the belief that a good economy starts with meeting everyday needs fairly and sustainably, rather than with maximising output.
In Wales, this impulse resonates with a longer tradition – the politics of mutualism, public service, and local stewardship. The challenge now is to turn that moral clarity into practical change.
Looking from the ground up
Part of my research asks what the foundational economy looks like from below – in places that have lived through deindustrialisation, centralisation, and uneven development.
In Treforest Industrial Estate, for example, there’s a striking mixture of endurance and fragility. Long-standing firms sit alongside shuttered workshops. Infrastructure both connects and isolates. The place tells a story about maintenance – of keeping things going, often with limited means.
Seen from this level, the foundational economy isn’t an abstract category. It’s a set of daily negotiations: how people make do, adapt, and sustain value in the face of neglect or change.
That grounded view matters because the foundational economy only really exists in practice – in the work, places, and relationships that reproduce social life.
A living idea
So when I use the word “foundational,” I mean something still alive, still in formation. It’s a lens, not a doctrine – a way of seeing that shifts attention from extraction to care, from novelty to continuity, from growth to sufficiency.
It invites us to ask:
- What infrastructures of care and support do we rely on every day?
- Who maintains them?
- How are they valued – and by whom?
Those questions don’t have simple answers, but they open up a more honest conversation about what kind of economy we want, and what it takes to sustain it.
This site will be one small place where I try to think through those questions – sometimes through fieldnotes, sometimes through theory, often through fragments. Because the foundational economy, like most things that matter, begins in the everyday.
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