Excerpted from a speech by David Bollier:
(given at the Caux Forum for Human Security in Montreux, Switzerland, on July 13, 2011.)
“The Value Proposition of the Commons
This brings me back to the commons. One reason that I am so attracted to the commons is it gives us a vocabulary for imagining a new sort of future. It lets us develop a richer narrative about value than the one sanctioned by neoliberal economics and policy.
The commons helps us see that we are actually richer than we thought we were. It’s just that our common wealth is not a private commodity or cash. It’s socially created wealth that’s embedded in distinct communities of interest who act as stewards of that wealth. Because the value is socially embedded, it can’t simply be bought and sold like a commodity. The commons can be generative in its own right – but the wealth it generates is usually shared, non-monetized value.
We can especially see the generativity of the commons on the Internet, which is a kind of hosting infrastructure for digital commons. A few years ago Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler wrote a landmark book, The Wealth of Networks, in which he wrote: “What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.”
Benkler’s term for this phenomenon is “commons-based peer production.” By that, he means systems that are collaborative and nonproprietary, and based on “sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other.”
Think of the hundreds of millions of photos on Flickr or the millions of Wikipedia entries in over 160 languages. Think of the more than 6,000 open-access academic journals that are bypassing expensive commercial journal publishers. Think of the Open Educational Resources movement that is making open textbooks and the OpenCourseWare movement started by M.I.T. Think of the hundreds of millions of online texts, videos and musical works that use Creative Commons licenses to enable easy sharing. Think of the vast free and open source software community that is the basis for a rich and varied commercial software marketplace.
There are countless such digital commons based on peer production and sharing. In fact, the bestiary of commons is now so large and varied that there is what amounts to a Commons Sector for knowledge, culture and creativity.
Natural resource commons can also quite generative even though they are dealing with finite, depletable resources. There are all sorts of successful commons for managing fisheries and forests and irrigation. There are the acequias for water in New Mexico. The ejidos in Mexico. Native American lands and their sacred relationships with Nature.
The commons is exemplified by traditional seeds and farming methods that Indian farmers use to avoid expensive proprietary seeds that have been made artificially sterile and the require synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. The Indian activist Vandana Shiva has done heroic work in this area. The commons is exemplified by researchers who generate and share gene sequences for the human genome; and by the community gardens of New York City that feed people nutritious food and improve property values in the neighborhood; and by the Slow Food movement, Community Supported Agriculture movement, the Transition Town movement, and many others.
When we start to see the commons from this angle, we see that there is no tragedy of the commons. The commons offers a value-proposition that neither the Market nor the State can provide.
The particular governance structures for generating this value differs from one class of commons to another. Subsistence commons do it differently than digital commons. The so-called gift economies such as blood banks, academic disciplines and Couchsurfing differ from urban commons such as community gardens and public squares. But what all commons have in common is an ability to manage shared resources and invite participation and inclusion. They rebuild a social fabric that neither the market nor the state is capable of rebuilding. This is the healing logic of the commons.
As a system of governance, the commons offers several critical capacities that are sorely missing from the neoliberal state and market system:
* the ability to set and enforce sustainable limits on markets;
* the ability to internalize the “externalities” that markets produce; and
* an ability to declare that certain resources are inalienable – that is, off-limits to markets.
Now I hasten to add that the commons is no panacea. Commons often fail because of bad leadership or inappropriate governance structures. Just look at the many failed fisheries and forest commons in poor countries. Commoners have plenty of disagreements and conflicts.
One key lesson to be learned from scholarship about commons is that their contextmatters a great deal. Their particular history, traditions, social practices, political circumstances, the specific resource, and much else, can make or break a commons. So please don’t let me leave with you the impression that the commons is somehow a magic bullet that is somehow exempt from the frailties of humanity and history.
Unfortunately, commons are more vulnerable than they need to be — because the Market/State often regards them as a competitive threat. After all, the commons gives commoners some measure of autonomy and control over their lives and resources. Corporations and governments don’t always like that.
The commons lets people wean themselves away from an unhealthy dependency on volatile or predatory markets. It lets people escape the indignities of charity and government handouts. As a commoner, you don’t necessarily need to buyseeds or software or books or water from a company. You can get them for free, or inexpensively, through your seed-saving collective….and from your free software network…. and from the public library…. and from your water collective or municipal water system. Moreover, as a commoner, you are entitledto these things.
The Healing Logic of the Commons
This brings us to the healing logic of the commons for us as individuals. Cicero had a great line: “Freedom is participation in power.” The commons decentralizes power and invites participation. People are invited to contribute their creativity on a decentralized, horizontal scale. They don’t need to remain supplicants to the elites who manage centralized hierarchies and expert-driven institutions, whether of business or government or nonprofits.
Self-provisioning through the commons is empowering. It helps to reduce social and economic inequality. It helps promote more responsible stewardship of resources. People have a real stake in the future of their resources. They aren’t just disengaged consumers or citizens looking to “someone else” to deal with a problem.
The commons doesn’t try to roll everything up into standardized, commoditized, fungible units that can then be centrally controlled – the way that global markets and governments aspire to do. Rather, the commons is all about re-embedding market activity within a social community so that resource management can become socially responsive and accountable. It is about making the management of ecological resources more sustainable.
As I said, the commons is not a magic wand. It’s simply an opening, a pathway, a scaffolding to build anew. Indeed, a commons works only if there are commoners participating in it. Or as the great scholar of the commons historian Peter Linebaugh puts it, “There is no commons without commoning” – the social practices and ethics that sustain a commons. The commons is a verb, not just a noun. It is not something that we just hand off to politicians and bureaucrats. You could say that commoning is a new species of citizenship and a new ethic.
But how can we actually promote commoning? It won’t be easy. The Market/State, as I mentioned, tends to regard the commons with indifference or hostility.
Fortunately, there is a lot of energy pushing the commons forward. The many different “trans-national tribes” of commoners are starting to discover each other: the free software programmers, the free culture and open knowledge activists, video mashup and music remix subculture, the worldwide Wikipedian community, the indigenous peoples networks, the farmers of La Via Campesino, the international water activists, the World Social Forum, which has issued a manifesto to reclaim the commons.
These groups are by no means a coherent, united front. If anything these groups are highly eclectic. But they are showing a great deal of energy and innovation….and they do suggest the beginnings of a new sort of global movement.
What unites them is a belief in the commons as a new social organism and metabolism for governance and law – outside of the market and traditional government. And the idea of the commons is starting to get some traction in official circles.
UNITAR, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, is launching a new online course on the commons this very week. This should do a great deal to educate people about the commons and galvanize fresh interest in it.
A few months ago, the Supreme Court of India officially recognized the rights of commoners to be protected against market enclosure – in this case, real estate development of a village pond.
Bolivians have rewritten their constitution to give Mother Nature explicit legal rights of standing to be represented in court – and their president, Evo Morales, is urging the United Nations to ratify a treaty to the same effect.
Last November the Commons Strategy Group and I co-organized the first International Commons Conference, in Berlin, with the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The event brought together 200 self-identified commoners from 35 countries around the world – activist farmers from the Philippines, Spanish hackers, Croatians trying to protect their public spaces from enclosure, American academics, the minister of patrimony from Ecuador. That event released a lot of energy, including a forthcoming anthology of essays about the commons, due out in the spring of 2012.
I am currently working with a colleague – Professor Burns Weston of the University of Iowa, a noted international law and human rights scholar – on what we call the Commons Law Project. Our goal is make a strong case for the commons as a distinct governance sector for ecological concerns. We believe the right to participate in ecological commons should be treated as a human right and have the sanction of State and international law.
We draw upon legal history of commons law (not to be confused with common law); note the impasse at which current human rights and environmental law are at; point to the deficiencies of the existing order in naming and protecting value; and suggest a new architecture of legal principles and action strategies to advance the commons paradigm.
There are several reasons why we should not regard the commons as some utopian agenda or faddish political ideology.
First of all, it is not an ideology; it’s a worldview and sensibilitythat is ecumenical in spirit and analysis, if only because no two commons are alike.
Second, the commons has a venerable legal history that stretches back to the Roman Empire and the Magna Carta, which is highly instructive for our times….
Third, it is a serious intellectual framework and discourse for critiquing market culture and rediscovering human cooperation and community.
And fourth, it consists of a rich array of successful working models that in many instances are out-competing the Market and out-performing the State. (It’s notable that even the CIA has established its own Intellipedia for its internal purposes.)
As this suggests, the commons has a lot of promising things going for it in a time when the old models are clearly not working. It offers a powerful way to re-conceptualize governance, economics and policy at a time when the existing order has reached a dead-end. It offers a way to revitalize democratic practice at a time when conventional representative democracy is terribly dysfunctional, often corrupt and highly resistant to reform. It shows that societies can actually leverage cooperation, self-restraint and stewardship to help solve problems.
For me, the real driving force of the commons is its ability to heal our inner lives and cultivate a new societal ethic. Alain Lipietz, a French political figure and student of the commons, traces the word “commons” to William the Conqueror and the Normans – not the English, interestingly. The commons supposedly comes from the Norman word commun, which comes from the word munus, which means both “gift” and “counter-gift,” which is to say, a duty.
I think we need to recover a world in which we all receive giftsand we all have duties. This is a very important way of being human. The expansion of centralized political and market structures has tragically eclipsed our need for gifts and duties. We rely on money and state bureaucracies for everything. And so we forget what Ivan Illich called the “vernacular domain” – the spaces in our everyday life in which humanity once created and shaped and negotiated our sense of how things should be.
The vernacular spaces of the commons have been eclipsed by large and mighty institutions that are not easily held accountable, at least to ordinary commoners. But we need these spaces for commoning to exist, and flourish, and be consequential in our lives.
You might say that our basic challenge is to rediscover commoning. “The allure of commoning,” historian Peter Linebaugh has written, “arises from the mutualism of shared resources. Everything is used, nothing is wasted. Reciprocity, sense of self, willingness to argue, long memory, collective celebration and mutual aid are traits of the commoner.”
What I find reassuring is that this is not just an idle fantasy. It’s happening right now. Around the world. In countless different milieus. And with new convergences and open-ended synergies.
When theory needs to catch up with practice, you knowthat something powerful is going on. At a time when the old structures and narratives simply are not working, and exciting new models are spontaneously emerging like green sprouts through the concrete, the commons gives us a reason to be hopeful. And we very much need some good news and reasons for hope.”