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]]>One of the great things about the commons tradition is that every instance is local and idiosyncratic and requires that we make it up as we go along. But do we have to reinvent the commonweal? Yes – probably we do, but what might be generic? What might be learned by sharing the experience? This article tells of how a group of practitioners in the UK developed what subsequently turned out to be commoning, and have sustained it for over 20 years.
Prologue
Commons have a long history, contested now as in the past. Around a thousand years ago in Europe, feudal and later seigeuries began to enclose land for arable and livestock exploitation that had previously been freely available for collective nourishment. Echoing this, today’s neo-feudal corporate seigneuries have enclosed the world’s materials and hearts and minds for exploitation, enclosures so comprehensive that there appears to be no outside – TINA, ‘there is no alternative’ has become an article of neoliberal faith. Just as for many centuries in Europe, there was no ‘outside’ to Christian faith, now, to envision an ‘outside’ to neoliberal economic hegemony amounts to heresy.
Neoliberal righteousness can take many forms, and recent decades in the UK saw psychology walling off its expertise in professional enclosures and attempting to have the credibility of these enclosure validated through state regulation. Practitioners seemed slow to see this as primarily a commercial initiative; there was little sense of the danger of putting psychological definitions of the human condition in the hands of the state; too few practitioners cared that, as with other forms of faith, there was to be no ‘outside’.
Evidence of actual harm or risk assessment was missing from the claims that the UK public needed to be protected from rogue psychologists. This was entrancing and difficult to contradict. Did ‘public protection’ constitute window dressing? Was state regulation primarily an instance of the psychological therapies seeking enhanced professional status? Was a ‘public good’, as with hindsight we would now call it, being compromised?
Yes answers to all these questions meant that resisting this social vandalism seemed inescapable, a life choice. Did we deny the stirrings of social conscience or did we act on them? The not-infrequent accusation that non-believers in state regulation (such as yours truly) were ‘charlatans’, and a growing list of ethical objections to it, fed resistance; two conferences were held; the creative juices of opposition began to flow and shortly afterwards came the birth of a network of psychological ‘heretics’.
In 1994, Em Edmondson, a practitioner in Leeds, came up with a single page proposal for a network of therapists, later ‘practitioners’, that would be based on their lived knowledge and experience as practitioners. We were about to step aside from the dominant professional psychological elite, in a heretical denial of the true faith that state regulation of the psychological therapies was both essential and inevitable. We were about to begin commoning. Prologue over.
Enter the Independent Practitioners Network (IPN).
The IPN founding proposal
IPN founding proposal 1994 – select the image for a readable version
Em Emondson’s proposal called for a network of small independent groups; each group, of at least five practitioners, would take whatever time with each other that was necessary to be able to ‘stand by’ each other’s work. How this was done was to be the business of the group. When the ‘standing by’ had been achieved, the group was required to establish links with two other groups whose task was to validate the ‘standing by’ process. In a further requirement, when this was in place, each group was to develop and agree an ethical statement and post it to the network.
Alongside the network of independent groups, the founding meeting kicked off a series of meetings that eventually became IPN National Gatherings which provide a forum for the overall governance of the network.
Civic accountability
Let’s step back for a moment – I was slow to see it but I eventually saw the social task of IPN as the peer production of ‘civic accountability’, (and not just a good enough alternative, but an exemplary one). I’ll come to it in more detail shortly. Why would a commons structure be better at providing and sustaining ‘civic accountability’ for ‘psychological practitioners’? Is the usual professional ‘qualification’/credentialisation route inevitable?
The ‘qualification’ route is typically a single gate-keeping operation ending with the assignment of a diploma, a degree, a masters, or PhD academic award. Sustaining the credibility of the qualification awarded is at the discretion of the practitioner. While there may be requirements for supervision and Continuing Professional Development (CPD), in both of these, engagement with the quality of life of the practitioner can be moderate or minimal. A deterioration of their life circumstances, or the often challenging impingement of the emotional work can be concealed or remain out of sight. How, under this system is practitioner malpractice discovered? The answer, regrettably, is via client complaints.
For IPN, ‘civic accountability’ means seeking to proactively eliminate or minimise malpractice – harm to clients – and in the twenty years of IPN, I know of only three formal complaints by clients. How did we achieve this?
At the root of the IPN purpose is the presumption that the tricky challenges of the human condition are likely to affect psychopractice practitioners as well as their clients. IPN practitioners handle this through supervision, sustained support and mutual scrutiny of each other’s work, including where we are in our lives. ‘Standing by’ is not a once and for all decision, it is a continuing process – so that a significant distortion of our lifework that might be harmful for clients will become apparent and can be attended to. Clients benefit but so also do practitioners, through participation in the mutuality, reciprocity and deep sharing of human unfoldings in an ongoing community,
IPN commoning – structure and culture
When introducing IPN to newcomers I often find it useful to say that it can be seen at least as much as a culture as an organisation.
People familiar with Elinor Ostrom’s academic research into commoning will perhaps see that IPN’s naive, bottom up development of a commons and commoning detailed above, echoes the key elements of commons management that she identified. Do we need the endorsement? Well no, IPN has very little ownership of its evolution as a commons but our example suggests that there will be other instances of naive commoning that have been arrived at in similar empirical fashion.
The IPN commoning experience
The IPN ‘Leonard Piper’ group – May 2014
What may be missing from this account is the human richness of IPN commoning, the mix of warmth, humour, delight and confrontation of sustained long-term face-to-face contact with valued colleagues – conversations where there are no no-go areas. While there has been some turnover, in the group I belong to, more than twenty years of this mutuality, reciprocity and equipotency has provided a secure enough foundation for the belief that cooperative commons structures can work sustainably and provide a rich enhancement of the lifework balance and civic accountability.
We meet for half a day around every six weeks.
Colleagues arrive, three people have travelled for over two hours for the meeting, tea is made and served, food to share is parked in the kitchen; the meeting opens with a ‘check in’ in which current personal/practitioner preoccupations are shared. After the ‘check in’ an agenda is built: on-going topics, including IPN network decisions, reports on relevant events, people electing to take time in the group about practice issues, and travel costs. A richly varied potluck lunch follows. For the rest of the half day we work through the agenda: someone describes the dynamics of a complicated client/parent relationship for comment and feedback; we discuss a potential psychopolitics development; someone declares a potentially hazardous client situation; we explore how to recruit another member for the group.
More tea and cakes are eaten.
We arrange a date and venue for a future local gathering; we discuss objections to the previous meeting’s group process; we arrange dates of future meetings; we pay each other the shared travel costs for the meeting and leave to catch buses and trains.
Such meetings are intense infusions of rapport, chat and learning from experience, a continual baking afresh of belonging.
Conclusion – a few more shares
If you were just beginning or were already up to your neck on commoning what else might we share from the IPN experience that you could find useful?
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