Timebanking

👉🏽 This story is developed as part of the Doughnut Economics for Policymakers guide.

Governments can play a pivotal role in supporting timebanking: a service exchange system that uses time as currency for those socially valuable activities — like caregiving, mentoring, and civic participation — that are undervalued by money-based markets. When implemented effectively, timebanking empowers vulnerable communities, fosters wellbeing, and builds resilient communities.

Overview

Governments can support and spread timebanking proactively through:

• Transforming public services as collective co-production: Many local governments in China mobilise residents to provide elderly care and help make public services more relational and community-based.
• Ensure supportive regulatory environment: In the UK, time credit earnings are tax free and exempt from state benefit calculations, while timebanking hours count toward jobseekers' required time spent looking for paid employment.
• Offer financial backing and raise awareness: Local governments in Chile, Italy and Spain fund community-led timebanks. In the UK, Regional Councils provide educational information, maintain directories of local timebanks on public websites, and offer funding support.
• Establish strategic partnerships: In Switzerland, municipal authorities collaborate closely with community members and service providers to create networks where time credits can be used for wide-ranging services, from healthcare to home maintenance.

Implementation

Since the first timebank was established in Japan in 1973, they have been established in over 40 countries, mostly through nonprofits or social enterprises. Growing evidence of positive impacts has prompted governments across Europe, Asia and the Americas to experiment with timebanking as an innovative response to budget constraints and social fragmentation. Usually it is local governments providing such support, but in some countries — such as the UK and China — national policies and strategies support timebanking initiatives.

Impacts

Timebanking creates meaningful social and economic change by engaging a wide range of people across a society. It can help empower vulnerable communities, including older people, ethnic minorities, those with disabilities, and low-income individuals. Well-implemented programmes foster wellbeing and build connected, resilient communities. When applied in public services, timebanking shifts power to communities, enabling co-production of better services while strengthening the social fabric.

Challenges

• Governance barriers: Timebanking requires government agencies to view service users/recipients as partners, and use budget allocation methods that account for hard-to-quantify, cross-departmental benefits. Such shifts require time, experimentation and capacity building.
• Trust and engagement barriers: In places where there is high social distrust, timebanking requires patience and long-term funding to reach the wider community. 
• Participation imbalances: Some timebanks struggle with convincing participants to redeem time credits, or engaging young people effectively.
• Balancing flexibility and scalability: Timebanking needs to be designed based on local contexts. However, it must also be considered that fragmented local initiatives can prevent wider uptake, as those who travel or relocate have limited ability to use time credits. 
• Safeguarding: Web-based platforms facilitate wider use, but face cybersecurity risks, fraud prevention challenges and the need for robust data protection.

Reference and further reading

• The 4th World Report on Timebanks (2024) also links to stories of timebanks around the world. 
• The Policymaker’s article on the potential of national time banks.
• Timebanking UK collates research and provides support to wide range of stakeholders, including governments.
• Timebanking UK and the New Economics Foundation’s 2008 report collates case studies from the UK and the US and provides policy recommendations.

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