When it was launched in 2018, Ireland‘s €116 billion National Growth Plan (NDP) was heralded as a once‑in‑a‑generation chance to reshape the country’s economic and social landscape. Promising record investment in transport, housing, health, and climate action, the plan was framed as the engine that would drive balanced regional growth and long‑term prosperity. Yet, beneath the headline figures and enterprising timelines, a critical question lingered: whose economy was really being built?
In this issue, agendaNi examines how the NDP, for all its scale and scope, stopped short of embedding a genuine politics of a shared economy. Instead of hard‑wiring social equity, community ownership, and inclusive decision‑making into the state’s biggest capital program, policymakers largely defaulted to familiar models of growth and delivery. The result, critics argue, is a missed prospect to anchor investment in structures that would more fairly distribute power, wealth, and voice across society.
As record sums continue to be spent and the NDP undergoes periodic review, the debate over what a truly shared economy would look like – and how it might have been underwritten from the outset – has never been more urgent.
Revisiting the National Development Plan as a blueprint for inclusive prosperity
Once heralded as a roadmap to long-term transformation, the framework faltered when confronted with short political cycles and siloed departmental thinking. Rather than anchoring a new social contract around redistribution, participation, and resilience, it became largely a catalog of capital projects and growth targets. The result was a missed chance to hardwire social inclusion into the machinery of the state: fiscal rules that prized stability over equity, infrastructure priorities skewed toward already-connected regions, and enterprise supports that favoured incumbents over innovators. A recalibrated approach must treat economic strategy as inseparable from social cohesion, embedding clear metrics for who benefits, how quickly, and at what democratic cost.
That recalibration demands a sharper focus on how public investment, regulation, and partnership can expand the circle of opportunity. Rather of assuming that growth will trickle down, policy design needs to be stress-tested against the realities of low-income households, marginalised communities, and small firms operating at the edge of viability.This means:
- Targeted regional investment that closes infrastructure and skills gaps rather than amplifying existing advantages.
- Inclusive enterprise policy that prioritises start-ups, social enterprises, and microbusinesses alongside foreign direct investment.
- Participation in decision-making through structured dialog with trade unions, community groups, and local government.
- Obvious, shared metrics so citizens can track whether promises on housing, childcare, and decent work are being kept.
| Policy Lens | Old Approach | Shared Economy Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | Aggregate GDP targets | Distributional and regional impact |
| Investment | Project-by-project appraisal | Social value and equity criteria |
| Work | Jobs quantity | Quality,security,and access |
| Accountability | Periodic reviews | Live,public performance dashboards |
Structural gaps that sidelined shared economy principles in policy design
The plan’s architecture leaned heavily on legacy industrial metrics and siloed departmental targets,leaving little space for platform-based collaboration,peer production,or community ownership models to influence core decisions. Rather of building cross-cutting frameworks for co-operative housing, shared mobility, and distributed energy production, policies defaulted to conventional public-private partnerships that privilege large incumbents. This structural bias was reinforced by procurement rules that favoured scale over local embeddedness, and by risk models that discounted informal, mutual-aid and co-operative initiatives as “too small” or “too complex” to integrate into mainstream delivery.
Absent from the framework were the institutional mechanisms needed to normalise shared economy practices across sectors. Key omissions included:
- Data-sharing protocols that would allow communities and SMEs to co-create services with the state.
- Regulatory sandboxes to test co-operative digital platforms in transport, care, and housing.
- Fiscal tools (tax incentives, blended finance) tailored to co-ops and mutuals, not just corporations.
- Governance seats reserved for citizen-led initiatives in monitoring and implementation bodies.
| Missed Mechanism | Shared Economy Potential |
|---|---|
| Co-operative investment fund | Scales community-owned assets |
| Open public data charter | Enables local service innovation |
| Participatory budgeting | Aligns spending with collective needs |
| Platform co-op incubators | Democratises digital markets |
Fiscal and governance reforms needed to embed shared economic outcomes
Unlocking genuinely shared prosperity demands a reset of how money flows through the system and who gets to shape those decisions. That means rebalancing revenue-raising powers, linking spending to measurable social returns, and hard-wiring transparency into every major budget decision. A reformed fiscal framework should reward long-term investments in inclusion, not short-term political gain, by prioritising regionally balanced infrastructure, inclusive labor market programmes, and community wealth-building over one-off, headline-grabbing projects. Embedding multi-year, outcomes-based budgeting would allow communities, councils, and social enterprises to plan beyond electoral cycles, while an independent fiscal watchdog could bring daylight to opaque trade-offs that have historically favoured the already prosperous.
- Redirect subsidies towards low-carbon, high-skill sectors rooted in local supply chains.
- Introduce participatory budgeting in deprived areas to give citizens real influence over public spend.
- Set statutory equality and regional impact tests for all major economic decisions.
- Mandate data openness so that performance against shared outcome targets is visible and comparable.
| Reform Area | Current Practice | Proposed Shift |
|---|---|---|
| Budgeting | Annual, input-led | Multi-year, outcome-led |
| Governance | Centralised decisions | Co-designed with local actors |
| Accountability | Limited scrutiny | Independent fiscal oversight |
Equally significant is redesigning governance so that shared outcomes are not an afterthought but the organising principle of the system. That requires devolving genuine decision-making authority to city-regions and local partnerships, with clear, legally defined responsibilities and co-governance structures that bring together government, trade unions, business, and civic society. Citizen assemblies on economic strategy, open contracting requirements, and stronger procurement rules that favour social value over lowest cost can redraw the map of who benefits from public money. Without these institutional guardrails, the rhetoric of inclusion will remain just that – rhetoric – and the chance to anchor economic power closer to the people and places it is meant to serve will be lost yet again.
Aligning future development strategies with community wealth building and social equity
Instead of treating investment as a race to attract the largest balance sheets, future development must be judged by how effectively it multiplies local ownership, stable employment, and democratic control of assets. That means shifting emphasis from short-lived construction booms and large, externally owned projects towards community anchor institutions, cooperatives, and social enterprises that recycle wealth within local economies. In practice, this involves using planning powers, procurement rules, and public land policy to favour bidders who can demonstrate living-wage jobs, participatory governance, and clear pathways for communities to build equity in the assets created. The key question for any new project should be simple: who ultimately owns it, who benefits first, and who holds the power to shape its future?
To turn that question into practice, policy makers require a new toolkit of criteria and incentives that hard-wire social equity into the heart of development decisions, rather than relegating it to the margins of voluntary “community benefit” clauses.
- Public investment tied to local ownership and participatory governance models
- Procurement frameworks that prioritise social value and fair employment over lowest cost
- Planning consent conditional on community benefit agreements and shared equity stakes
- Land policy that protects strategic sites for community-led housing, energy, and enterprise
| Policy Lever | Main Outcome |
|---|---|
| Social value procurement | Local jobs and fair pay |
| Community land trusts | Affordable, secure housing |
| Equity stakes for residents | Shared returns from growth |
| Anchor institution pledges | Long-term local spending |
Insights and Conclusions
As the political dust settles on the National Development Plan, what remains is a sense of opportunity squandered. The framework promised a route toward a genuinely shared economy, but in practice it skirted the harder questions of power, ownership and long‑term redistribution.
Instead of embedding social partnership into the economic architecture,the plan largely defaulted to orthodox growth strategies and short-term targets.In doing so,it missed the chance to underwrite a new political consensus around shared prosperity – one that might have reduced volatility,widened buy-in and built resilience into the system.The debate now moves beyond what was written in the NDP to what must come next. If policymakers are serious about a shared economy, the next iteration of long‑term planning will need to go further: hard‑wiring inclusion into fiscal choices, investment decisions and institutional design.Anything less risks repeating the same pattern – ambitious rhetoric, cautious delivery – and leaving the politics of shared prosperity for yet another plan, at yet another moment, already slipping out of reach.
