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ABOUT THE INSTITUTE
The Institute for Inclusive Economies and Sustainable Livelihoods (IIESL), based at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, is a research center devoted to the exploration, imagining, and planning of alternative economic futures.
Rooted in the recognition that building sustainable livelihoods requires new approaches to economics and economic development policy, the IIESL advances inclusive place-based research and policy that center the needs and knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities and peripheral territories, both in the Global North and South.
What does the IIESL do?
- Promotes research and academic exchange to advance the conceptual and practical foundations of building inclusive economies for sustainable livelihoods.
- Supports place-based efforts to build inclusive and sustainable economies by working closely with local communities in Scarborough and Toronto but also connected to international learning and solidarity networks around the world.
- Engages policymakers and local stakeholders to co-create strategies for economic inclusion and just transitions.
- Secures funding to support interdisciplinary and international research collaborations.
- Mentors students and early-career scholars working toward inclusive economic futures through research, teaching, and hands-on projects.
OUR RESEARCH THEMES
Theme 1. Conceptualizing Inclusive Economies
The IIESL fosters academic debate and theoretical development around the concept of “inclusive economies” as part of a broader family of alternative economic paradigms that challenge the centrality of growth, development, and trickle-down economics. These include degrowth and post-growth theories, doughnut economics, community welfare strategies, decolonial critiques of development, and circular economy models.
By engaging with feminist, ecological, and political economy perspectives—as well as with global development and sustainability studies—the IIESL will bring key thinkers to U of T and connect researchers with leading international networks.
How can inclusive economies be conceptualized in ways that move beyond GDP growth, and what alternative metrics or visions of development should guide public policy?
Theme 2. Planning Inclusive Economies
The IIESL will serve as a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration on the role of public policy, planning, and state action in promoting inclusive economies. This includes engaging with debates on the Green New Deal, foundational and mission-oriented economies, and emerging practices that reconnect economic development with ecological sustainability and social justice.
We are particularly interested in training a new generation of planners, public servants, and community organizers equipped to work across sectors and scales. The Institute also seeks to innovate in how research informs practice, through data storytelling, community-engaged methods, and experimental policy design. The IIESL will promote South-South and South-North dialogues, connecting researchers and students from the University of Toronto with local community leaders, policymakers, activists, artists, cooperators and social entrepreneurs in the region and around the world.
What is the role of the state in shaping inclusive or exclusive economies? How do place-based strategies vary across contexts?
How can public planning and procurement be mobilized toward more equitable and sustainable outcomes?
Theme 3. Cities, Regions, and Inclusive Economies
Cities and regions are key arenas for rethinking economic development. The IIESL explores place-based approaches to local and regional development that foreground equity, solidarity, and sustainability. This includes examining institutional frameworks and on-the-ground innovations such as community wealth building, cooperative economies, solidarity finance, and new municipalist strategies. We analyze how territorial governance, urban politics, and civic infrastructure can support inclusive economies and how these efforts travel across geographies through networks of policy experimentation and learning.
The IIESL is critical of universal approaches to promote local and regional economic development as well as quick-fix policy solutions in the face of wicked urban and regional sustainability challenges. Instead, it will promote place-based, experimental, and comparative approaches to reimagine economic development and sustainability by connecting ideas, practices and people across the Global North and the South.
What institutional, policy, and grassroots strategies are cities and regions using to reclaim economic agency and build more just and democratic economies? How can inclusive and place-based approaches to local and regional economic development be implemented across different political, cultural, and economic contexts?
Theme 4. Work and Inclusive Economies
Work is central to how economies create wealth, sustain life, and reproduce inequality. The IIESL foregrounds the role that workers and working communities play in advancing inclusive economies, while recognizing the historical and ongoing patterns of discrimination, exclusion, and exploitation that shape access to decent work.
The Institute embraces a broad and plural understanding of work—one that extends beyond waged employment to include informal and non-standard arrangements, unwaged labor, and forms of work exchanged outside of market transactions. Drawing on this expansive view, the IIESL supports research and action on the present and future of work, just transitions and inclusive workforce development, labor in the social and solidarity economy, worker-led economic initiatives, and strategies such as community benefits and public procurement aimed at creating decent, place-based employment.
How do different forms of exclusion shape people’s access to work and livelihoods—and what policy tools, community strategies, and institutional innovations can support more inclusive and sustainable forms of work?
