As I argued before, what peer production and peer governance bring is an enrichment of social choice. Instead of the endless debate between the duality government vs. corporation, or regulation vs. privatisation, we now have a third form of production and government which may be more appropriate.
I have found another author who made a similar point before me, nl. Professor Ernst Weizsaecker, though he focuses on traditional nonprofits as expressions of Civil Society.
The following is an expert from the following paper:
Teodor Shanin and Ernst Urlich von Weizsaecker, Escaping Pernicious Dualism: Civil Society between the State and the Firm, in Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker et al (Eds) Limits to Privatization. p. 325-326. London: Earthscan, 2005, ISBN.
Excerpt:
“The continuum between private and public is still one-dimensional and therefore deficient with respect to the full and rich reality of healthy societies. Privatization is also deficient if it is nothing else than private sector economic efficiency encroaching on state economies. Civilization is more than high or low economic efficiency.
Let us try and identify functions and institutions that escape binarity and the purely economic universe. We find a fascinating universe of institutions already in existence, which are structured neither by governments plans nor by shareholder’s profit thinking. Many of the institutions we are talking about are non-governmental, not for profit organizations, mostly charities. Their raison d’être is neither profit making nor typical state functions. They typically draw on voluntary labor of people joining in a common interest such as ethical convictions, ecological objectives or urgent tasks popping up at local, national or global levels.
A very fine example in Britain is the National Trust. Its aim is to secure and defend natural and cultural heritage against the so-called “developers”. Its members elect its governing bodies. It collects considerable resources through tax-deductible gifts and wills, as well as entrance fees for visits of its properties Over time, the National Trust has become one of the country’s largest landowners. Although it doesn’t seek profits, the National Trust is run highly efficiently in terms of financial management
Thousands of charities and other civil society organizations (CSO’s) exist world-wide. They all have philanthropic, cultural or ecological goals, which the profit-seeking private sector cannot systematically pursue and which the state has either no money or no mandate to take care of. Acknowledging the necessary functions both of the state and the private sector, and yet seeing the huge scope of charities, we proceed to speak of a triangular relation. The expression is meant to indicate the impossibility of finding livable solutions under the restriction to the one-dimensional, mostly economic continuum between the state and the private sector.
Although there are certain parallels, we do not include in our notion of the third sector the “informal economy”, which is still the prevalent reality in the poorest parts of the world. The informal sector too enjoys a remarkable degree of independence from the state and from the formal economy. But it is the explicit and widely agreed objective of governments in developing countries to overcome the misery associated with the informal sector.
The third sector of charities and CSO’s can play a strategic role in our days. As has been argued in Chapter III.1, the last 20 or 25 years of history have resulted in a situation of a highly weakened nation state. We see scope for CSO’s graduating as a third player next to nation states and the private sector in the search for a balanced world. International CSO’s exert pressure on states as well as on private companies to respect human rights and the natural environment. They are gaining influence at international conferences and in the media. They begin to be instrumental in the shaping of global governance. Theoretically, they have the consumers’ purchasing power behind them, which to private firms is perhaps the most important factor influencing commercial success.”