Excerpted from Tommaso Fattori:

“The commonification of public services is part of an overall paradigm shift: it contributes to building a new commons-based development model, which changes social relations, man-nature relations and finally the relations between current and future generations. Commoning incorporates future generations because it implies long-term “care” and “stewardship” of the world’s joint heritage, starting with natural resources; but commoning also generates the increase and multiplication of common riches and resources, starting from non-material ones: knowing and knowledges but also human relations, trust and solidarity.

Commoning does away with the concept of property as the right of individuals or companies to enjoy things in an absolute and exclusive manner to the point of being able to destroy them – this being a concept which in a neoliberal age is again popular, as it reconnects with a history of ancient origins, whose roots are found in the “ius utendi, fruendi et abutendi” (the right to use, enjoy and destroy) of Roman law and, more recently, in the version of it incorporated into the Napoleonic code, where ownership is conceived only as individual and translates into absolute power of the owner over a good. The dimension of commons does not only refer back to a concept of inclusive property rather than exclusive, or even a field definable as the opposite of property1, but to the essential active responsibility of the commoner towards “the other”: be it the collectivity, Nature or future generations. If proprietary reasoning implies that we can do what we like with anything we own, commons and sharing reasoning imply that we are co-responsible for anything we co-use.

Commons are resources and services with their own intrinsic value, which is independent of the economic use that could be made of it. Resources and services on which the realization of fundamental rights and the resilience of ecosystems depend; resources and services related to the production of material and non-material goods of collective interest, and at the same time of relations and participation. Taken all together, these dimensions constitute “well-being” for all. Nowadays we are witnesses to an overall impoverishment of society, not only of an economic nature, which translates into a generalized decrease in “well-being” (measured by the various indices of wellbeing and happiness which are alternative to GDP indices) and a decrease in commons available to the whole collectivity, both material and non-material. Wealth was for a long time identified solely with the growth of GDP and the individual accumulation of private goods, without taking into consideration the dimension of common wealth. We are all becoming poorer in relationships, in time, in wellbeing and quality of life; poorer in commons and natural environment, that is, in the common bases of life itself and of every production and creation, material or non-material. On the contrary, we are all richer when there is fair access to fundamental commons – from water to knowledge – when we can go to a good school, go to a functioning hospital or breathe clean air; when commonified public services are in their turn creators of new commons for present and future generations. On the other hand, becoming richer in private assets and poorer in commons corresponds to a worsening of everyone’s environmental and relational wellbeing and prepares a depauperated world for posterity. As we saw for the commonification of public services, the “rules” that commoners give themselves aim to reduce consumption of natural resources (as in the case of water services or the production of energy) and the multiplication of the production of non-material commons such as knowledge.

The objectives are to ensure the reproduction and increase of natural commons, the growth of non-material commons and relational assets, producing intragenerational and intergenerational environmental and social justice by sharing. Some things must grow and others must decrease. So it is a question of cultivating sharing and cooperation rather than competition, of fostering the social and collaborative tendencies of human beings as opposed to the model of the homo oeconomicus. Commonification of public services and the invention of forms of public-commons partnerships are one piece in this collective task: one pillar of the bridge is sunk into the present and the responsibilities of our generation, the other pillar rests in the world to come and the future generations who will live there.” (draft manuscript)

Source info: Excerpts from a text prepared by Tommaso Fattori as part of the book-project “Protecting Future Generations Through Commons”, organized by Directorate General of Social Cohesion of the Council of Europe in collaboration with the International University College of Turin. The text will be published soon in “Trends in Social Cohesion” Series, Council of Europe publications