Happy Holidays from Common Wealth
As 2025 draws to a close, we are proud of what we have achieved this year and affirm our commitment to the bold, radical and rigorous research, adequate to the overlapping crises we face.
In our current moment of overlapping crises and insecurity, we are more certain than ever that transformative, ambitious change is needed to secure a genuinely sustainable and thriving future for all.
As 2025 draws to a close, we are proud of what we have achieved this year towards that better future, and we affirm our commitment to the bold, radical and rigorous research that will be needed in the years to come.
Thank you for your support and solidarity. We are excited to share some of our highlights from 2025 and hope that you will continue to follow our work in 2026.
During 2025, we published 23 reports and briefings, along with three interactive digital projects, on topics including:
Our work was covered 111 times in the press, with stories in:
In September, we launched Who Owns Britain? — a landmark new project investigating our private island.
The privatisation of essential services has stopped us from acting with ambition and at scale. It has incentivised asset sweating over asset building, financial engineering over real engineering, extracting over investing, private profits over public needs.
We examine this failed model by identifying who profits from ownership of our energy and water systems, from transport and housing to care and mail services, and analyse how privatisation shapes the country and our lives.
Dig into our interactive Data Dashboard and trace how essential services that once belonged to us are in the hands of a new cast of owners: international asset managers, foreign governments and private equity giants.
Read our Visual Essay and follow the Williams family in Manchester from cradle to grave, revealing the invisible web of ownership and profit — the hidden pattern of our lives.
The project was covered as a mini-series in The Guardian, starting here.
Last week, we published our final report of the year — on the case for reparations for Caribbean countries, including Barbados.
Four hundred years ago, in 1625, the English imperial claim to Barbados set in motion centuries of rapacious economic extraction across the Caribbean. From the formation of the plantation slave economy to the modern-day climate crisis, we map how empire shaped Barbados, Britain and the wider world.
Read coverage in The Guardian here.
In partnership with Climate and Community Institute, we launched a new research centre, Transition Security Project.
Listen to the recording of the launch for the Project here:
Two Transitions is Transition Security Project’s essay series on the transformation of US empire, its implications for the climate and strategies for collective safety in a warming world.
Read the introductory essay, “Two Transitions”, by Khem Rogaly, Patrick Bigger and Lorah Steichen.
Read the first essay in the series, “The Middle East and Fossil Capitalism”, by Adam Hanieh.
More from Transition Security Project:
Explore our interactive project on military conversion on the Clyde here.
Read our briefing on the Pentagon’s stockpiling of transition minerals here, which was covered in The Guardian.
Find more of Transition Security Project’s work on our website and follow them on Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram.
This year also saw the launch of the Green Planning Commission, our latest transatlantic project.
Composed of experts from business, trade unions, and academia, it aims to rethink the role and remake the case for green planning to get the climate transition back on track and address the crisis of affordability, which is worsening living standards.
Commissioners include world-leading experts in economics, climate and progressive politics, including Richard Kozul-Wright, Mika Minio-Paluella, Ha-Joon Chang and Isabella Weber.
The Commission will formulate an agenda that decarbonises and makes the economy fairer by developing solutions adequate to the scale of the transformation that these crises demand.
More from our US Programme:
Visit our website to find out more about the Green Planning Commission.
Read an introduction to our US Programme here.
Watch our launch video on Instagram, Twitter/X, BlueSky and LinkedIn.
The BREAK—DOWN published two issues: Right Turn and Frontiers. You can read them online or buy copies of the journal through their website.
Best wishes for the festive season and the new year.
Warmly,
Common Wealth