Municipal Finance Beyond Redistribution 2027

What’s already working elsewhere

• Non-profit and cooperative banks and credit unions proved more resilient during the great financial crisis, putting communities before profit
• Multilateral trade credit set-off shows that collaborative approaches optimise liquidity efficiency and reduce late payments
• Ergodicity economics proves mathematically and empirically that pooling resources outperforms acting alone
• Non-convertible mutual credit frameworks already give SMEs cash relief through local currency systems, especially in times of crisis

Of course, solutions based on the financial economy, such as municipal bonds and sustainability bonds issued by local authorities, are the obvious default option for raising much-needed liquidity at the local level. But they come with additional costs, mainly the interest payments to the bond-holders that fluctuate with the vagaries of the financial markets.

Why keep it local

This symposium is inspired by the motivation to keep the control of local finances local. More specifically, why not extend or connect the monetary, financial, and organisational models and trust-based and trust-reinforcing frameworks listed above to municipalities? Integrating these discursive threads — and looking more deeply at monetary architecture — opens fundamentally different solution spaces than are visible from within any single discourse.

Three areas of innovation anchor the symposium:

Two structural questions frame the discussion throughout: How can the economic power of municipalities be radically expanded beyond zero-sum competition for redistributed funds? And how can mutual credit systems be extended to include public sector actors?

Why municipalities

Municipalities are closest to citizens, to the local region, and to the material conditions of everyday life. They are the key agents of any serious transformation project. Yet they are systematically denied the economic and political power this role demands. The yield of this symposium is oriented toward identifying strategic pathways through which municipalities can be endowed with substantially greater economic agency — and implicitly political authority — by placing non-extractive finance and local monetary instruments at the centre of that project, and by beginning to break away from the deep institutional path dependency that makes the status quo appear inevitable.

Exchange Format

Rather than functioning as a conventional conference centred exclusively on presentations, the Municipal Finance Symposium is designed as a collaborative working symposium. We currently envisage an alternating format of:

• Keynote presentations
• Research presentations
• Thematic workshops
• Moderated discussions
• Collaborative reflection sessions

This format is intended to encourage dialogue across disciplines and between theory and practice, allowing participants to jointly explore new approaches rather than merely presenting completed work. The final programme will be shaped by the range and quality of submitted contributions.

Transdisciplinarity

The Municipal Finance Symposium is intentionally designed as a transdisciplinary forum. Rather than organising contributions according to established academic disciplines such as economics, political science, public administration, or finance, the symposium is structured around concrete domains of innovation. These themes are intended to foster dialogue between researchers, municipal practitioners, public authorities, ethical and cooperative banks, complementary currency initiatives, regional development organisations, social enterprises, and policymakers. Our central premise is that genuinely innovative approaches to municipal finance will emerge not from isolated disciplinary perspectives, but from integrating bodies of knowledge that have largely developed in parallel. We therefore explicitly encourage contributions that bridge disciplines, sectors, and practical experience.

Speakers

We will announce first speakers asap and add more until the final programme is published. 

Registration

Registration will open following the notification of acceptance for contributions.
Accepted contributors will automatically receive registration information. Additional places may become available for invited participants and observers, subject to capacity.

Live-Stream

Most presentations of the MFS-2026 will be live-streamed here.

Why join

Working the symposium means direct exposure to the people and institutions actively rethinking municipal monetary architecture — not as an audience member, but as part of the team making the event happen. You’ll work alongside practitioners from ecoloc and our partner institutions, see how a symposium comes together, and leave with a concrete line for your CV or portfolio and a special experience at the avant guard of social change.

How to apply

Send your application to events@ecoloc.org.

Ulm School of Design — 1953-1968 

A Pedagogy for Democracy

Founded in 1953 by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher, and Max Bill, the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG Ulm) was never conceived as a conventional design academy. Its origins were explicitly political: Inge Aicher-Scholl, sister of the executed White Rose resistance members Hans and Sophie Scholl, founded the school as a direct response to the moral and institutional collapse that had enabled National Socialism. Design, in this founding vision, was not a matter of aesthetics or commercial styling — it was a civic discipline, a means of rebuilding a rational, transparent, and participatory public culture in postwar Germany.

This conviction shaped the school’s entire pedagogical architecture. Students were trained not merely in form-giving but in semiotics, sociology, ergonomics, systems theory, and political philosophy, on the premise that objects, environments, and communication systems structure the possibilities of collective life. Good design was understood as an infrastructure of democratic participation: legible, honest, and resistant to manipulation — the visual and material counterpart to an open society.

The school’s most enduring legacy, the “Ulm Model,” fused rigorous scientific method with social responsibility, producing designers who saw themselves as co-authors of public institutions rather than servants of private clients. Though the HfG closed in 1968 amid funding disputes and internal political tensions, its influence on Germany’s postwar identity — and on the broader European tradition linking design to democratic renewal — proved durable.

For our symposium on municipal finance and monetary architecture, the schools history offers a resonant frame for what we mean by “kitchen”: institutions, like objects, can be designed — deliberately, transparently, and in service of collective self-governance — rather than simply inherited.

Organiser

ecoloc – local transformation design is a steward-owned think tank (ltd. & foundation) based in Basel (CH) working on local monetary architectures and municipal institutional innovation. We develop local transformation frameworks that align economic, social, and environmental sustainability objectives through the design of non-extractive monetary and financial instruments in collaboration with local public sector actors and key local stakeholders to cultivate socio-economic transformation at the local level.

www.ecoloc.org (our website currently under construction)

Partners

We will announce all our partners, sponsors and other supporter before registration.