David Bollier on Framing the Commons

Part of the Remix the Commons series, which contrasts various ways to conceive and frame of the Commons.

Here well-known commons’ advocate David Bollier:

Framing the Commons: David Bollier in Berlin from Remix the Commons on Vimeo.

David Bollier also has written an extensive interpretative summary of the Berlin Commons Conference, available here, of which we are excerpting the introduction.

David Bollier:

“For years the commons has been gaining momentum as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. Its rise can be seen in countless milieus around the world: among indigenous peoples in Latin America determined to protect their ecosystems and cultures; among farmers in India defending the right to share seeds; among Croatians seeking to prevent the privatization of cherished public spaces; among communities trying to preventing multinational bottling companies from appropriating local groundwater; and among diverse digital commoners who are creating “shareable” resources such as free software, Wikipedia, open educational resources and open access journals.

Until recently, mainstream political culture has regarded the commons as an inevitable “tragedy” that results in the over-exploitation of scarce resources. This has helped make the commons a marginal side-story that could be safely ignored. But after the “economic crisis” of October 2008, it has been much harder to dismiss the commons as a tragedy, anachronism or novelty. It became even harder after the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Professor Elinor Ostrom, a pioneering scholar of the commons, in 2009. The growth of countless Internet commons has also been a pointed rebuttal to orthodox economists who regard the market as the only serious means for generating valuable resources.

For these and other reasons, the commons is increasingly being seen as a rich seedbed of community empowerment and a template for new types of fair and sustainable resource management. It offers a way to critique the failures of neoliberal capitalism while encouraging the development of innovative policy alternatives.

It was in this context that the Heinrich Böll Foundation – a publicly financed nonprofit organization affiliated with the German Greens that works independently with various partners through its 28 worldwide offices – decided to convene a major international conference on the commons. Working with the Commons Strategy Group, a small partnership of commons thinkers and activists, the Böll Foundation brought more than 180 international, Germany- and European-based commoners, intellectuals, activists and policymakers to Berlin, Germany, for the November 1-2, 2010, conference, preceded by project visits on October 31.

The stated goal of the event was “Constructing a Commons-Based Policy Platform.” To that end, the conference sought to assess the range of existing and potential commons-based policy approaches; develop the fundamentals of a policy framework that supports the commons; and identify and explore specific strategic opportunities to advance commons-based approaches.

The event also sought to foster new types of participation and self-organization among commoners worldwide; to promote new forms of networking that could spur new collaboration and cooperation; and to inaugurate new types of open, non-linear ways to search for solutions. The goal was to incubate new ideas and strategies and identify new communication strategies, prototype commons, funding models and research needs. Finally, the event aimed to enhance the visibility of the commons in the media, the blogosphere and other online venues.

“The simple yet powerful and complex question to be explored throughout the conference,” the Böll Foundation stated in its announcement of the conference, is: “What does a commons-based policy framework look like? What already exists and what do we still need to develop to nurture and protect diverse sorts of commons?”

This report, by David Bollier of the Commons Strategy Group,1 is an attempt to describe the highlights of the conference and the more significant themes, philosophical tensions and strategic opportunities that emerged. This document is not a comprehensive account of the conference; there were too many different perspectives presented to capture that richness. This report is, rather, a selective, interpretive synthesis.

For a more complete sense of the conference, please consult the videos of presentations and other primary documents at the Boll Foundation website2 and a variety of other papers, reports and blog posts at the official conference wiki.

An Overview of the Conference

Barbara Unmüßig, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, opened the conference by noting how a woodland in the city of Templin, Germany, near the Polish border, had been entrusted to a trust following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The legal successor to that trust is now seeking to sell the wood to private parties – even though citizen and town authorities want to reclaim the wood as a common, ensuring that it will be accessible to everyone. But privilege is given to the private investor.

“Such controversies can be found all over the world,” said Unmüßig. “The question is always, ‘Who does it belong to? Who has the right of access to Griebnitzsee Lake, for example? Who do the water resources in a federal state belong to? Who do derelict inner-city sites belong to? Or the Internet? The Land? The drinking water or the waterworks? To whom does biodiversity belong?”

Unmüßig noted that the Boll Foundation has been exploring the issue of the commons for years, with such initiatives as a 2006 conference in Mexico City, a 2008 book anthology, To Whom Does the World Belong? and a series of political salons in Germany. She called on conference participants to explore “a new framework for the triangular relationship between ‘our’ commons, the market and the state.” She also urged new policies to support “the idea of the commons instead of regarding gross domestic product as the benchmark for everything in a market economy!”

In his welcome on behalf of the Commons Strategy Group, David Bollier noted, “Much of what brings us together is our shared resistance to a destructive system of market fundamentalism that insists upon the supremacy of private property and the price system over basic sustainability, equality, fairness and humane values.” But he noted that the commons movement “does not claim a unified-field theory of political change.” Rather, it is committed to an agenda that is “more modest, experimental and results-oriented. We are not looking for Big Daddy leaders to save us. We are stepping up to solve problems ourselves, without waiting for government or blue-ribbon commissions or corporate resources.”

In a sense, the conference actually began on October 31, when participants were invited to take tours of commons-based projects in Berlin. One project was a women’s housing and work project, Genossinnenschaft Schokofabrik eG. Another was a community-based nursing project, AKB. A third, NKL Karlshof, was a noncommercial agricultural project. Conference participants also got to know each other through a website containing short profiles of everyone, along with various commons-related documents.

In an attempt to synthesize some key points about the commons for discussion and reflection, the conference steering committee issued a two-page document, “Some Thoughts on the Commons,” which is included below in Appendix A. Also released at the conference was a major report written by Silke Helfrich, Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs and Christian Siefkes, “The Commons – Prosperty by Sharing.”

The conference itself began with a session, An Overview of the Commons as a Transformation Paradigm. This was followed over the next two days with three thematic streams:

Stream I: The Commons as a Challenge for Classical Economic Patterns and Thinking, and a New Narrative for the 21st Century;

Stream II: The Commons as a Challenge to the Market/State Duopoloy; and

Stream III: The Generative Logic of the Commons.

For each stream, there were several “consolidation workshops” that explored that stream’s themes in greater depth. To let participants explore topics of their own choosing, anyone could propose a self-organized “innovation workshop.” (A complete listing of these can be found in Appendix B. Documentation about some of them can be found on the conference wiki at http://p2pfoundation.net/ Berlin_Commons_Conference.) So, in addition to seven keynote presentations (in the introductory plenary session and three Streams), the conference featured “kickoff” speakers in more than twenty workshops.

The conference featured a number of other interactive formats as well:

“Speed presentations” of exciting commons projects, in which eight speakers had five minutes apiece to describe their initiatives;

World Café, in which self-organized discussion groups discussed basic principles of a “generative commons paradigm”;

A public event, in which two keynote speakers and two respondents considered the question of “the commons as the template for our future”; and

A closing plenary session, in which participants reflected on what worked and what didn’t work at the conference, and what strategies should be pursued in the future.

Introductory Session. The Commons as a Transformational Paradigm

In the introductory plenary session, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, President of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) outlined the scope and importance of the commons in contemporary societies around the world.

“Once you start looking at commons, you see them everywhere,” said Meinzen-Dick. “That is part of what we have come together to celebrate and discuss in this gathering. The commons play a vital role in the livelihoods of billions of people. Over 1.6 billion people live in and actively use the 30% of the global land mass that is forest, and close to one billion people use the 40% land mass that is drylands.” A 1996 study found that community forests contribute up to 29% of people’s income in India, or $5 billion a year, which was twice the development assistance to India that year.

“These areas, although often classified by national law as public lands,” said Meinzen-Dick, “are in many places actively managed by their inhabitants, very often through common property arrangements. In addition to many forest and dry land areas, fisheries, pastures, irrigation systems, and the oceans are examples of commons. Even private lands may have an element of commons, such as when farmland is used for grazing in the dry season, or in the Mekong region where flooded rice fields are used for collective fishing, supplying poor people with important sources of protein and maintaining the biodiversity of fish species.”6

Meinzen-Dick noted with disappointment, “Garrett Hardin is still being taught in an uncritical fashion, as ‘truth’ rather than ‘myth’. Professor Elinor Ostrom has noted that at some universities in the U.S., the average student is assigned Hardin’s [“tragedy of the commons”] article three times.” Meinzen-Dick urged that we “move to correct university curricula, so that the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is replaced with a ‘strategy for the commons,’ and that we tap into the optimism of youth, combined with knowledge of the possibilities of collective action to trump cynicism and narrow self-interest, in a really transformational paradigm of the commons.”

In a second keynote introducing the commons as a transformational paradigm, Michel Bauwens, Founder and President of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, gave a sweeping review of the evolution of cooperation throughout human history. Commons have existed from the pre-modern period, which featured slave, feudal and imperial orders, to the modern era of market-based, industrial order. But what distinguishes our time, Bauwens said, is the possibility of “globalizing the mutual coordination of small groups,” going well beyond “centralized hierarchy” to provide “autonomous, commons-based modes of provisioning.”

Achieving the potential of the commons in the peer-to-peer environment made possible by the Internet, however, requires some changes in the two dominant orders of power, the market and the state. Instead of a “welfare state” or “corporate welfare state,” governments need to become the “partner state,” facilitating the development of commons, said Bauwens. In addition, commoners need to “dis-embed markets from global capitalism” and make them more socially accountable. (verb missing in the following sentence) Two examples of the Arduino open-source computer hardware initiative, which makes sophisticated microelectronics cheaply available for customized purposes, and the initiatives by farmers to share seeds and so bypass the “artificially created scarcity” of genetically modified crops such as the “Terminator seeds.” (Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, there is a moratorium on Terminator Seeds and other “genetic use restriction technologies” (GURT), thanks to activities of civil organizations and farmers worldwide, some of them participating in the ICC, but the moratorium will certainly not last forever. )

“Bottom-up organizing” of new sorts of stable, networked communities is an important way to “embed value” outside of traditional markets, said Bauwens. But the commoners must also develop new sorts of “social charters” and legal mechanisms to protect their shared resources. They must also find better ways to connect with other players in the same ecosystem, and to escape monetary exchange and predatory market systems altogether, if possible. As an example, Bauwens pointed to the rise of “phyles,” or “sustainable, transnational value communities” that represent a new sort of self-provisioning model.7

The real challenge for the commons, said Bauwens, is how to secure the necessary support for its very different logic while still living within the existing market system. Another important challenge is how to create a global network of policymakers to advance the new value system.”

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