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Towards Alternatives

What Richmond is beginning to imagine may ultimately be less a collection of isolated projects than a different theory of economy altogether. The Othering & Belonging Institute's work on climate futures and belonging economies argues that climate resilience cannot be separated from democratic participation, social cohesion, and community governance. In this framing, the economy is not simply a marketplace. It is the set of relationships through which people organize collective survival and collective flourishing.

That understanding appears repeatedly throughout Richmond's emerging vision. The proposed projects — community-owned grocery stores, social housing, worker cooperatives, wellness hubs, reentry programs, childcare cooperatives, urban agriculture initiatives — share a common logic even when operating in different sectors. They attempt, in different ways, to keep wealth, care, decision-making power, and stewardship rooted within the community itself.

Also alongside these neighborhood-scale visions, another conversation has been emerging in Richmond: whether the city can build economic alternatives at the scale necessary to replace the industrial and fiscal footprint of the refinery economy itself. That question introduces a more difficult tension into Richmond's Just Transition work.

Community ownership, cooperative development, and local resilience remain central aspirations. Yet residents and organizers are also confronting the material reality that Chevron's economic role has operated at a massive scale. Replacing that scale requires more than small businesses or symbolic green initiatives. It requires confronting the harder question of which industries, infrastructure, and public investment systems could sustain an entire municipal economy while remaining aligned with climate and justice goals.

The "Green Blue New Deal" work emerging in Richmond attempts to wrestle directly with this dilemma. The initiative's stated goal is ambitious: to catalyze at least 1,000 new green-blue jobs for Richmond residents. What is notable, however, is that the proposed sectors do not resemble the typical language of post-industrial urban revitalization. Rather than focusing primarily on service-sector growth or technology campuses, the proposals remain grounded in production, infrastructure, manufacturing, logistics, and industrial transformation itself. The sectors identified as such include: renewable energy; building electrification and energy efficiency; sustainable transportation; green infrastructure and urban forestry; zero-waste systems; water systems; offshore wind turbine manufacturing; battery manufacturing; and green hydrogen production.

There is something significant in this orientation. For decades, environmental transition narratives have often implied that industrial communities would need to abandon manufacturing identities altogether in favor of cleaner, knowledge-based economies. Richmond's emerging proposals suggest a different possibility: not deindustrialization necessarily, but industrial transformation.

The Green Blue New Deal repeatedly emphasizes that Richmond already possesses many of the conditions necessary for this transition: an existing industrial land-use pattern, port infrastructure, utilities infrastructure, and workers with transferable technical and mechanical skills. The analysis notes, for example, that the utilities industry supporting clean energy development grew by 117% between 2010 and 2021, while Richmond's port and industrial geography offer a "unique competitive advantage" for future clean-energy manufacturing. In this sense, Richmond's transition conversations are not rejecting labor history or industrial knowledge. They are attempting to imagine what those histories could become under different political and ecological conditions.

That possibility becomes especially evident in discussions about offshore wind turbine manufacturing and battery production. The analysis from Full Spectrum Group, which builds on the City of Richmond's Green Blue New Deal findings and regional and state priorities, identifies offshore wind, battery manufacturing, and green hydrogen production as among the few promising sectors potentially capable of approaching the economic scale of the refinery economy while simultaneously aligning with climate goals. Port development, in particular, is imagined as potentially operating in tandem with offshore wind and battery manufacturing infrastructure.

Yet even here, Richmond's conversations remain cautious. Community members repeatedly raised concerns about whether "green industries" could reproduce the same environmental harms and inequalities associated with previous industrial economies. During discussions around battery manufacturing, residents immediately questioned where waste would go, what environmental impacts would emerge, whether pollution protections would exist for workers and nearby residents, and whether Richmond communities would actually benefit from the jobs created.

The skepticism feels earned. For many Richmond residents, promises of jobs and economic growth have historically arrived alongside pollution, exclusion, displacement, and broken trust. The concern emerging in Richmond is therefore not simply whether green jobs will materialize, but whether the underlying political economy of extraction will truly change.

Can an economy still organized around large-scale capital accumulation become genuinely regenerative simply because its energy source changes?

That question lingers quietly beneath many of Richmond's proposals. At the same time, the city's alternative economic visions are not limited to industrial transformation alone. Another strand of the conversation focuses on rebuilding local economic ecosystems from below. Full Spectrum's East Bay ecosystem work, which is connected to Richmond, repeatedly emphasizes the need for community land trusts, non-extractive finance, public banking, cooperative business development, public-benefit development authorities, and community-governed capital systems capable of supporting long-term stewardship rather than short-term extraction. In these proposals, alternative economies are not understood simply as different industries. They are understood as distinct ownership structures, governance systems, and relationships between communities and capital itself.

This distinction matters. A battery factory owned and governed through extractive financial systems may still reproduce forms of inequality and instability, even if its products support decarbonization. By contrast, Richmond's more expansive Just Transition conversations suggest that truly regenerative economies would require communities to exercise meaningful control over land, investment, development priorities, and long-term stewardship.

The "Belonging Economy" framework visual also captures this shift. Rather than centering solely on private accumulation, the framework centers stewardship. Land and capital are positioned not simply as commodities but as collective resources to be governed through "Structures for Belonging and Stewardship." Economic projects emerge from analyses of community needs and the commons themselves. Repair and accountability are treated as central economic functions rather than external social programs.

And perhaps that is what makes Richmond's conversations distinct from many conventional climate-transition plans. The city is not only attempting to attract green industry. It is also struggling with a deeper civic question: whether economic transition can become an opportunity to democratize ownership, rebuild public trust, repair historical harms, and construct forms of collective life less dependent on extraction altogether.

Whether Richmond ultimately succeeds remains uncertain. The tensions are real: between industrial scale and community control, between urgency and democratic process, between investment and displacement, between climate transition and economic survival. But the conversations themselves reveal something important already underway. Residents are no longer asking only how to participate in the economy they inherited. Increasingly, they are asking whether another economy — one rooted in stewardship, democratic governance, repair, and belonging — might still be possible.