Redirecting a proportion of institutional spending requires a value framework of one kind or another. Manchester City Council awards points in tenders for social value, eg for good employment practices such as paying the Living Wage and offering training and apprenticeships, and for environmental value such as sustainable practices and inputs. They also favour businesses which re-spend more into the local economy. Cornwall Council uses a Doughnut Decision Wheel for all major spending decisions to assess a range of influences on the social foundation and compatibility with planetary limits. Plymouth has its own Resurgam Charter awarded to businesses with a range of good employment and environmental practices. Authorities and institutions differ in their values and procurement practices but attain more of their goals for their place through systematic application of their values across major contract.

Co-operatives and social enterprises – businesses with democratic governance – are particularly well suited to ensure recirculation of community wealth. Co-ops distribute profits to their members, in many cases their employees (worker co-ops) or customers (consumer co-ops) ensuring that the benefits of recovery are shared locally. They are more likely to be value driven and maintain employment suffers in challenging times, lending a resilience to the whole local economy. Maintenance and enhancement of this sector can be encouraged by developing routes to democratic governance for owners ready for retirement and for community groups delivering a service seeking a more economically sustainable method of operation.

The process of re-localisation and achieving social value can often start with the commissioning process; seeking value-aligned local suppliers to co-design services enabled Leicestershire County Council to design and commission children's services with Barnardo's and to achieve quality and good value from them as supplier. The States of Jersey set up a 50% owned social enterprise to provide bus services which effectively served user needs and greatly reduced costly petroleum imports.

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The famously successful Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland Ohio helped set up three large co-ops to supply a group of institutions with renewable energy, salad crops and a hospital with laundry services. Where local suppliers are absent, there may be sectors where establishing sustainable and socially productive enterprises is an efficient and effective way to fill the gap.

Local institutions often own assets which can be made available for use by local community groups or provide a crucial resource for local enterprises. Rochdale County Council, seeking a service for adults with learning difficulties, set up a social enterprise to run a Community Farm on its own land with pigs and parrots instead of a day care centre.

For a buoyant local economy the benefits of regeneration need to be shared through fair wages and employment conditions and education and training for entrants to the labour market. Assistance for retraining is becoming increasingly important in the transition to decarbonisation and the need for changing skills in building, engineering, and digital sectors. 

In Europe and North America local and regional banks support local enterprises and assist the prosperity of their local economy. In UK banks are centralised and lending tends to be asset-based rather than risk-sharing and supportive of developing businesses. Savings and Loan societies and other local banking institutions have largely disappeared from UK, with few exceptions, but there are plans for establishing regional customer-owned banks such as the South West Mutual.