This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

In May 2016 the European Parliament voted on an amendment for the “recognition of energy as a common good” as part of a report about decentralised local production, the “New Deal for Energy Consumers”. While the amendment was voted down by 298 votes to 345 votes, this vote reflects the support of almost half of Europe´s democratic representatives for seeing energy as a common good. The amendment was proposed by the “Commons Intergroup” which is part of the European Parliament´s Intergroup on “Common goods and public services” and is made up of Members of the European Parliament from different parliamentary groups, mainly Greens, the United Left (GUE/NGL), and several Socialists & Democrats Group (S&D) members.

In mid-November of this year, the European Commons Assembly was held in cooperation with that same Commons Intergroup in the European Parliament to promote the establishment of creative institutions and political alternatives, from the local to the European level. In the call for the Assembly, ‘commoners’ from around Europe stated: “We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation, and to prioritise the common good in all policies.”

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability.

Today, however, the predominant discourses that permeate political discussions in the EU and trump all others are economic growth, competitiveness, and efficiency. The majority of EU policy is focused on macro-economic indicators and the promotion of large commercial actors. Citizens are often uni-dimensionally viewed as entrepreneurs or consumers. For many Europeans and for many global citizens the business of the EU is big business and big member states. There is a growing concern among citizens that decisions affecting the well-being of local communities are often driven by distant centralised institutions with other priorities. In fact, the growing feeling of lack of control is eroding confidence in our political institutions on all levels, often sparking xenophobic and nationalistic movements.

The Commons across Europe

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability. The commons discourse considers people as actors deeply embedded in social relationships, communities, and ecosystems. This holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms and to consider human activity as a part of the larger living bio-physical commons.

Across Europe, more and more people are co-governing and co-creating resources. Whether in small local initiatives or in larger networks, new civic and economic structures are moving beyond the rigid dichotomies of producer and consumer, commercial and non-commercial, state and market, public and private, to construct successful new hybrid projects. The commons use voluntary social collaboration in open networks to generate social-environmental value, in ways that large markets and exclusive private property rights do not and cannot. This enormous value, though it may not be monetised, nonetheless constitutes a significant part of societal well-being in academic research, energy production, nature protection, health, creative sectors, drug development, and digital innovation. However it is largely ignored by EU policymakers and institutions, resulting in the atrophy of such social value-creation or, even worse, its appropriation by large investors and corporations.

Notable examples are community renewable energy, Wikipedia, permaculture, the peer-to-peer collaborative economy, distributed solidarity structures, and open source software. Sometimes local commons initiatives are sparked by the scarcity created by economic crisis, or in response to political powerlessness, or just fuelled by the need for social-ecological connectedness.

The European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production.

Building the commons encourages EU institutions to take a more holistic ecosystemic approach by combining collaborative, participatory, and egalitarian principles with concrete conditionality in favour of social cohesion and environmental objectives. The moral notion of common goods refers to goods that benefit society as a whole, and are fundamental to people’s lives, regardless of how they are governed. Certain matters will need to be claimed as common goods politically in order to manage them as commons, sustainably, and equitably in terms of participation, access, or use. For instance, natural resources, health services, or useful knowledge, or – like the above example in the European Parliament – decentralised renewable energy.

The European Union’s Responsibility

Due to its central role in policy-making for all the Member States, and its significant funding budget, the European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production. These initiatives and practices demand more flexible institutional and legal frameworks that at once prevent centralisation of market-power and promote dynamic, collaborative, self-governed civic networking. This includes orienting policy to enhance the blossoming of vibrant and caring local communities. To some degree this also implies stimulating new economic identities, where an individual or group orients their economic activity towards caring for the common good of community and their natural, social, and cultural surroundings, instead of solely towards maximising material interests.

According to a 2015 report published by the European Committee of the Regions, a “commons-based approach means that the actors do not just share a resource but are collaborating to create, produce or regenerate a common resource for a wider public, the community. They are cooperating, they are pooling for the commons”. This means helping people and communities to generate and regenerate urban, cultural, and natural commons as active citizens, producers, designers, creators, care-takers, local organic farmers, and renewable energy promotors. It also means embracing an open knowledge economy while promoting the Internet as a digital commons based on open standards, universal access, flexible copyright rules, decentralised internet infrastructures, and democratic governance.

Knowledge Policies

With regards to policies on knowledge management, the EU puts great emphasis on what one could call the ‘enclosure of knowledge’. This enclosure happens through the expansion of intellectual property protection, both within and outside of Europe by means of trade policies. Aside from potentially spurring innovation and helping European industries, this also results in, for instance, long patent monopolies on medicines and long copyright terms.

The copyright reform discussed in 2016 is of crucial importance to the online information commons. It will determine the boundaries of innovative social value-creation through sharing and collaboration online. Sufficient exceptions and limitations to copyright are essential. For example, allowing for text and data mining would support scientific and academic research. Moreover, assuring the right to link information from one web to another is one of the key characteristics of sharing online.

On the global level, through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the EU tends to defend the enclosure of knowledge, promoting further expansion of intellectual property rights of all kinds, from medicines and broadcast signals, to education materials and climate technologies. To allow for a collaborative knowledge sharing economy, the EU will have to be more open to socially inclusive and flexible business models that are more compatible with both the digital era and the urgent needs of people, in both the North and South.

The EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives.

The European Commission has made some efforts that recognise the need to share knowledge and embrace the possibilities of the digital age. This is for example reflected in commitments on open access publishing mandate in the context of Research and Development funding, open data in some of its policies, and the exploration of open science. Recently, Members States called for a review of monopoly-extending rules on biomedical knowledge in the area of pharmaceuticals due to concerns over increasingly high medicines prices.

However, these moves towards knowledge sharing remain timid and are not at the centre of EU policy strategies as it remains mostly conformist to the interests of the cultural industries, the pharmaceutical industry, or agribusiness.

The Internet and the Collaborative Economy

The recent establishment of net neutrality in the EU, an essential prerequisite for a free and open internet, marks an important victory. Yet truly promoting an “internet commons” would include supporting a universal infrastructure based on public and community-controlled digital infrastructures. It would need to be structurally disengaged from dominant market positions and include broad non-commercial access to bandwidth in spectrum, and open source software.

In its “Digital Single Market” strategy, the EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives. This is accompanied by the violation of our personal data for indiscriminate political-economic control, and the general extraction of profit from social interactions and peer to peer activity.

As part of the Digital Single Market strategy the European Commission released its “European Agenda for the Collaborative economy” in June 2016. The Agenda deals with issues of taxation, market liability, contractual agreements, and consumer clarity. However it fails to pay attention to democratic structures, social equity, and ecological health – the cornerstones of community-based peer-to-peer collaborative initiatives that regenerate the commons. In contrast, the EU Agenda seems to welcome – with just a few technical caveats – multinational “collaborative” platforms such as Uber and AirBnB despite their extractive, non-embedded nature and their tendency to undermine national laws that ensure fair competition and protect workers. The motor of a commons-based collaborative economy is not just a consumer seeking to possess or purchase a service. Instead the user is often also a producer and/or is involved in the governance of a collaborative platform that is serving social and environmental needs. The promotion of local platform economies requires a different regulatory approach than that currently taken by the European Commission. It requires an approach that understands and acknowledges the value of localised social relations and self-governed technologies, as well as having clear indicators that frame policy within high social equity and environmental sustainability objectives.

Energy

The EU can be an enlightened voice and a leader on global climate and energy commitments. Yet, while large energy companies are starting to invest in renewable sources, they may not be best suited for alleviating our social-ecological dilemma, primarily because they have little incentive to reduce overall energy consumption or to prioritise the social engagement of local communities in their commercial operations. At the same time, some climate technologies that can play an important role in energy transition are often not shared as quickly with developing countries as they could be. This is again partly due to intellectual property protections and a resistance to sharing know-how. In this conflict, the EU fights to enclose climate technology knowledge within UN forums.

In general, the EU’s energy strategy promotes large gas pipelines, giant energy infrastructures, and modest CO2 reductions. Despite more and more Europeans producing their energy locally or at home, most proposed European market regulations do not promote community controlled or self-produced renewable energy, do not offer financial risk facilities for community based energy, nor do they defend the right to sell electricity to the grid. While EU policy proposals are often unsupportive of feed-in tariffs or flexible grid infrastructures to support local renewables, little is being done to eliminate massive direct or indirect subsidies to large gas, coal, and nuclear projects.

A large part of the EU energy budget could be earmarked for community renewable projects and compatible infrastructures, with broad citizen participation. This would help optimise resilient energy supply costs through more efficient, short, and visible distribution loops while promoting flexible local energy autonomy. With this approach the EU could “commonify” energy as opposed to the current principal strategy of “commodifying” it.

Research & Development and Financing

EU research and innovation policy, such as Horizon 2020, the European Research Council, or public-private partnerships such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative, sadly also continue to allow the privatisation of knowledge generated by EU-financed scientific, technological, and academic projects. Instead, they could try to ensure a fair public return on public investments by mandating conditions such as social licensing, open source research, and open data.

To support the commons in the EU’s funding policies would include earmarking significant parts of EU funding programmes with criteria and indicators that give preference to commons-based economic, environmental, cultural, and research activities.

However, through its Horizon 2020 Research & Development programme the EU already funds important projects: Initiatives working on decentralisation of internet infrastructure, such as ‘DCent’ and ‘Netcoms’, as well as networks of renewable community energy cooperatives, such as RESCOOPS, and urban commons projects like Barcelona’s community wifi, guifi.net. This funding is hugely important and the expansion of such programmes could have a structural impact on our societies. The requirements and procedures for EU financing and grants could be especially adapted to commons-based projects to accommodate matching funds for peer to peer crowdfunding, municipal or community-based risk-sharing, small-scale, self-governed projects, and sliding-scale administrative demands.

Democracy for the Commons

The deep crisis of the EU and the lack of confidence of its citizens in the European project is to a large extent due to the lack of democracy in all its different forms, whether the lack of transparency, the power of corporate lobbies, the unaccountable role of national politicians vis-a-vis Brussels, or the lack of public debate on policies. People need to feel much more connected and have opportunities to engage with EU policy making.

The defence and regeneration of the commons depends on meaningful strengthening of EU participative policy processes, greater institutional and legal responsiveness to local civic communities, and concrete advances in creating transnational citizen collaborative instruments to influence EU policy. This means, for instance, wider political support for new digital tools that render visible EU political decisions and empower citizen opinions on concrete legislation, such as a recent Green pilot programme proposal in the European Parliament.

The European Parliament´s Petitions Committee should be a very important channel for citizen power in favour of the application of EU law in defence of environmental or social standards. Unfortunately, it sorely lacks political backing, visibility, and sufficient resources to respond diligently and responsibly to citizen concerns. The European Citizens Initiative petition process, which was instituted as an instrument for grass-roots transnational citizen legislative proposals has been a near total failure due to a series of byzantine processes, and the lack of political will to take it seriously. These institutions need more support, and at the same time the EU has to significantly invest in the creation of additional and innovative tools & institutions for participatory democracy while supporting civic decision-making on local issues.

Allowing the Potential of the Commons to Flourish

Pivotal choices about the commons are also being made today in EU decisions about agriculture, climate, fishing, transport, international trade, and financial markets, amongst other areas.

The crisis of the EU begs for new, unifying, and constructive narratives that will crowd out the xenophobic populist right with its demands for democracy and sovereignty. The commons narrative with its emphasis on participative democracy, community, ecology, and stewardship could reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a better, socially and ecologically sustainable Europe. The logic of the commons is able to give clear guidance on policy, and does not sit within one ideological framework of left or right. It does not pretend to be an answer to all our problems. Yet it gives a clear ethical perspective and helps us to understand what happens when people collectively manage and steward resources without the dominant, centralised roles of either the state or the market.

Overall, EU policy objectives and standpoints contrast strongly with the commons approach. The alignment we do see is in some funding programmes and in the knowledge realm where the dynamics of scientific discovery and knowledge creation make this almost unavoidable. What is needed to favour this shift, in addition to strong social pressure from civil society, is a pro-commons shift in the discourses and political proposals of political forces of change such as the greens, and left and social liberal parties.

Due to the general political and economic power relationship within the EU today one cannot expect a major strategic shift toward commons-based EU policies anytime soon. What can be achieved is a significant enlargement of favourable EU policy environments where commoning activities can more easily take root and flourish.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 7th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Shohei Hanazaki

The post Finding Common Ground 7: How the Commons can Revitalise Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Christian Felber discusses the Economy for the Common Good, and how it can be combined with the commons to form the basis of a fairer and more sustainable economic order.

“The commons are goods that were given to us by nature, or which were produced by people in a collective way; they are shared and managed jointly, by communities and networks, so that we can preserve them for generations to come. The idea doesn’t sound complicated, but it is nevertheless revolutionary at its roots, as it helps us overcome a dominant dogma of the current capitalist economy. We were all taught that competition is the driver of innovation – and there is no doubt some truth to this statement, but recent research has shown that competition is by no means the only path we can go down. Cooperation can be even more effective. It is by now evident that if people cooperate to find a shared solution to a problem, the product becomes more innovative and more efficient. Commons therefore won’t necessarily hamper progress, they won’t make our societies lazy and backwards; indeed, they will have the potential to guide us down a much more humane and sustainable path to progress.

We must not forget, however, that the commons are not good per se. Collaboration is just a strategy, and the cooperative nature of an endeavour doesn’t in itself mean that it produces something good or useful for society. Reality does not always follow our wishes or ideals.

Collaboration is something that we support only when there is a common good orientation – it is far less desirable when people who share and manage a good only look out for their personal or their group’s interests, at the cost of others. To put it a bit crudely: even murderers can collaborate to become more effective in taking the lives of people. There are a number of active cooperatives today that are profit-oriented, for example the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank, which is partly a capitalistic hedge fund that is eating taxpayers’ money, while its contribution to the common good is marginal. Moreover, there is also the much hyped phenomenon of the collaborative economy, which is a catch-all phrase for a number of different endeavours, ranging from common good-oriented enterprises to capitalist, self-interested organisations – many of them conflicting with the original intent of the commons. Uber or Airbnb are a far cry from what Elinor Ostrom meant when she wrote about the commons, and they are not at all the kinds of endeavours that we could use to build a new, common good-focused economy.

Values of society versus values of business

When contemplating whether or not it is possible to build a commons economy, we also should not forget that today we live in the frame of a capitalist economy, and a complete reshuffling of our world might not be feasible in the short-run. Moreover, it might not even be necessary: in Germany alone we have 4 million companies – and in Austria 400.000; it would not be a good idea to convert all of them into commons, especially if there are companies among them that don’t cause harm to the environment or to our society, such as the “GLS Bank”, the organic bakery “Märkisches Landbrot”, or the “Regionalwert AG” which is a project similar to CSA (community supported agriculture), but formally a shareholder company.

Not to mention that there are some limits to the theory that have not been addressed by the commons community. The best way to go would be the marriage between a number of alternative economic approaches (such as the commons, the solidary economy, the degrowth network, and others), within the democratic framework of the Economy for the Common Good (ECG).

The ECG is a holistic, alternative economic model which envisions a free market economy, in which the common good is the ultimate goal of economic activity. It strives to dissolve the contradiction between the values held by many business interests (such as profit maximization and competition) and values held by society in general such as solidarity, sustainability, or democracy. Proponents of the ECG believe that the values and goals laid down in most Western constitutions can and should be implemented in business practices, so that the current economic order won’t contradict anymore the spirit of these constitutions. A good example of the principles underlying such an economy can be found in the Italian constitution: “Public and private economic activity should be oriented to the common good,” while the Bavarian Constitution says: “The economic activity in its entirety serves the common good.”

Economic success should be measured according to a company’s contribution to the common good. Businesses should be rewarded for practices that improve their compliance to human rights, social justice, and environmental protection. This should be done by measuring their contribution with a so called common good balance sheet (already used by 400 ethical businesses in Europe), which looks at how a business’s activities advance or harm human dignity, solidarity, justice, ecological sustainability, and democracy through evaluating whether products and services satisfy human needs, whether companies’ working conditions are humane, the production processes are environmentally-friendly, etc.  It then informs consumers, employees, business partners, and government agencies of the companies’ social and environmental performance (relative to its business-related activities).

The limits of the commons

The cooperation of alternative economies with the economy for the common good would, among other things, help overcome a clear limit of the commons approach: debt. Commons work parallel to the state of law, and parallel to the legal structures of today – debt, however, is a legal structure. If we want to eliminate the massive amounts of (sovereign) debt that are crippling Europe today, we need to work on the legal level. To overcome this problem, the proponents of the economy for the common good propose ways to reduce or eliminate debt (for example stronger taxation on big properties and heritages), as well as the introduction of “positive money”, which would reform the monetary system and would change the way money is created and, as a side effect, reduce sovereign debt significantly.

Today, most of the money we use is created by commercial banks, while the positive money approach prescribes that money should become a public good, and should therefore be created exclusively by central banks. Democratised and public central banks, of course. The transition from the old monetary system to the new one would create a huge gain for societies, approximately in the same value as the now circulating non-effective money (also called book money or banking money). According to some estimates, this non-effective money amounts to as much as 50 percent of GDP in the Eurozone, so by getting rid of banking money you could reduce public debt by exactly 50 percent.

There is also no fiscal policy in the theory of the commons, as the proponents of the commons understand themselves as a different culture than the exchange based market economy which would create the basis for taxes within states of law. In contrast, the economy for the common good has a proposal for a fairer fiscal policy as well: it would start with curbing the unconditional free movement of capital, by making it conditional of an international collaboration in tax policy, which would put an end to tax liberalisation, tax competition, and tax dumping. Then, as a next step we would shift the tax burden from labour to speculative capital and overconcentrated capital; moreover, we would increase the share of tax that comes from the unsustainable use of nature, which is today at around 5 percent and would have to increase to up to 50 percent so that we can experience an absolute reduction in the consumption of biological resources in industrialised nations.

Beyond the fiscal policy approach, we propose “ecological human rights” which are consumption rights. The idea is that the yearly gift of the planet’s biological resources is divided by all human beings, and the outcoming share is our yearly consumption right which could be credited on our “ecological account” that works in the same way as a financial account: when it is empty, you do not have purchase power any more… On the other side of the coin, the ecological human rights are the rights of nature, of our planet. This idea, like virtually all other innovations of the ECG, can only be implemented within a state of law that proclaims and protects this human right and the rights of Nature.

That is the general shortcoming of the commons approach: there are no known proposals on how to change our world on the legal level, let alone how to change the democratic system in itself. The strategic choice to work on the cultural, but not legal level, marks a strong limit of the commons. The ECG works strongly, but not exclusively, on the legal level, inviting the sovereign citizens to recognise and use their sovereignty and try to change both existing legal decisions as well as decision procedures, starting from the democratic reform of our constitutions. Thanks to the outflowing “sovereign rights”, the now sovereign citizens could then legally promote and protect commons, as well as anything else.

How to kick start the project of the common good?

To create a fairer economy, we need to first show that what we currently call an economy has in fact nothing to do with a real “economy” in its original (ancient Greek) meaning, as its success is measured by monetary indicators such as GDP, financial profit, or the return on investment, instead of what the actual goals of economic activity should be: the advancement of the quality of life, as well as the fulfilment of human needs and fundamental values.

We need to ask ourselves the question, what do we want to achieve with our economic policy? Full employment or the fair provision of food, housing, education, health services to our people, together with letting them have a say in the design of the rules?

Secondly, we need to prove that we know the solution to the current problems. To do this we need to offer a simple and clear narrative, a comprehensive guide, because the many good solutions that were put forward by progressive theorists, such as unconditional basic income, the elimination of interests, or the 20-hour workweek, cannot be called a theory of change while they stand alone.

The economy for the common good, however, is clear and consistent, and provides a real theory of change: a comprehensive description of how and why the desired improvement of our economy is expected to happen. This, amongst others, is one of the reason why so many people have joined our initiative, and even many Green parties have expressed interest in the theory: in Salzburg (Austria) and Baden-Württemberg (Germany), for example, the local Greens have already adopted the basic tenets of ECG and made it part of the economic programme of these counties.

Why a market economy?

According to the categorisation of the ECG, there are 4 possible types of economic models: a planned economy, a market economy, a gift economy, and self-sufficiency. The economy for the common good falls under the category of the market economy, while the commons are a type of gift-economy.

The economy for the common good doesn’t say that the market economy is the best of all. The most important reason why we are a market economy is that today’s current capitalist system is also a market economy. We know that if we want to establish a more just economy, we need to start from here.

However, there are 3 restrictions to the market economy that we propose: firstly, it should be a non-capitalistic, cooperative, and fully ethical market economy; second, it should be a truly “liberal” market economy (meaning that every human being should have the same rights, liberties, and opportunities); and third, we envision a shrinking market economy: since we are consuming too much today, we believe that we should shrink the market economy to about half of its size, and with it halve the working hours of people, so that they only work 20 hour weeks in the monetary based market economy. This way there can be enough time for the people to engage in other kinds of economic activities, such as self-sufficiency, and gift economic practices. Moreover, the economy for the common good says that not only the time and space should be open for creating more commons, but there should also be legal opportunities and legal support to facilitate the commons – another argument for working with and on the state of law.

Our strategy

The strategy of the ECG is to work with companies, municipalities, universities, consumers, the general public, the media, and the representatives of other alternative economic approaches – first and foremostly the commons – to get the word out, and lay the groundwork for a new economic system.

The basis of this system would be the acceptance of a wide range of property forms: private property, public property, collective or cooperative property, social property (meaning big industrial companies in the hands of society, similar to the enormously successful but shortlived Yugoslav experiment of the early 1950s that enabled “workers’ self-management”), commons (which are not a form of property per se, but a cultural practice and a worldview), the use of nature without viewing it as some form of property, and finally the respectful non-use of nature. For me, all of these forms of property are acceptable in an economic order, but none should be exclusive or predominant. The economy for the common good therefore proposes a mixture of all of them, and gives limits and conditions to all.

In a nutshell, this means that the users of all these property forms need to show that their activities are not harmful to the rest of society, and are compatible with an economic order that aims to improve quality of life, satisfy human needs, and fulfil fundamental values.

Our envisioned economic system would exist in the current framework of a rules-based state of law – however, the flaws of current democracy would be fixed, in order to make the new system more functional. We aim to deepen democracy towards a sovereign democracy: this would mean that the fundamental rules and guiding principles of our lives would be elaborated and defined by the people.

The formation of the democratic constitution(s) would start with a one-year-long democratic process, in which we would organise assemblies for all policy fields (such as economic policy); and in these assemblies everyone would be able to make a proposal on the most important cornerstones of the economic system. All alternative economic approaches, like the solidary economy, degrowth, the Transition Town movement, and many others would be allowed to present their ideas on how to design and shape the twenty most important cornerstones of the economy, and then we would make a decision, using a procedure that has already proven extremely effective: the systemic consensus. That means that all the participants can propose several rules to guide the economy (at least two: the current state of the art and one other) and the winner will be the one that meets the least resistance. This procedure is particularly important because building a system around the widest support doesn’t work, and can easily become a door-opener for lobbyists. Our procedure, which was invented by two mathematicians at the University of Graz, however, would cause the least pain in society; every rule, norm, or system gives and takes freedom in a higher or lesser degree; the method of “systemic consensus” allows to find that alternative that restricts the liberty of all citizens in the least possible degree.

There is no doubt that the economic order in which we live today cannot stay as it is forever. The financial, economic, social, political, and environmental crises of Europe are clear signs that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we use our resources. As outlined in the previous paragraphs, the commons are one of the many ideas that can provide a solution that could be the basis of a just, solidary, and sustainable economic order. Added together with the economy for the common good, and other alternative economic approaches, they become a structural element of the economy of the future.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 6th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by miuenski

The post Finding Common Ground 6: Collaboration is just a strategy – Overcoming the limits of commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

GEJ: What would your definition of the commons be?

Ugo Mattei: The concept of the commons cannot be defined in straight terms; I simply use the following definition: commons are resources managed in the interest of future generations.

Molly Scott Cato: I agree; it is the use that defines whether a resource is commons or not. Let’s take for example the provision of livelihood: you can use your resources to secure the basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and clothing in many different ways; if you approach it in a form of ‘enclosure for exchange’ that means that you have done it in a market way, if you approach it in form of use for subsistence, then you have done it in a commons way.

What is the connection between the commons and ecology?

UM: The connection is pretty straightforward. We are used to living in a legal and socioeconomic system that is based on the extreme individualisation of society; an individualisation that favours technological transformations and capitalist extraction. The way in which this process has evolved throughout modernity is clearly not sustainable, as it assumes infinite resources on a finite planet. Any attempt to change direction, and to create new forms of social organisation requires us to create new intellectual categories. The idea of the commons has been certainly the most promising effort to overcome the capitalist mindset.

MSC: In the market model, resources are privately owned and scarce, while a commons model adopts a framing in which resources are abundant and shared socially. The reason we want to shift from the market model is that once you enable the enclosure of resources and their transformation into saleable units of goods and services, and once you create an incentive to exploit them more, serious ecological problems will follow. Whereas if you accept that the resources we all depend on are common property, and that we have a social incentive to cooperate in order to share them, we will obviously manage them in a more sustainable way.

UM: We are challenging the assumption that value corresponds to exchange and capitalist accumulations, and the alternative that we are looking for is a view that puts the ecological community and the sharing of resources at the centre, in a model in which satisfaction is derived from use, rather than exchange. This of course requires us to completely rethink the free trade agreements, for example, that are based on the opposite presumption, as well as many other capitalistic structures.

Are the commons that we find in nature different from those in the digital world?

MSC: Not really. As the examples of pollenating insects, wind, or sunshine show, almost every commons can be conceptualised as something that has a market value, and this works both ways: anything that you can make money out of, you can also conceptualise as a commons.

The classic example of the commons in the digital world is Wikipedia. Everybody uses Wikipedia, many of us write new Wikipedia articles, and we also often donate money to Wikipedia so that it can keep on working. It is a very good example of a platform that works because people are sharing. The opposite of the digital commons is something like Facebook, where we all put our photos online, but the platform is enclosed, and the money that is made goes to Mark Zuckerberg and his team. Imagine how much money Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could have gotten if he had decided to privatise Wikipedia, but he deliberately didn’t do it.

If you accept that the resources we all depend on are common property, and that we have a social incentive to cooperate in order to share them.

~ Molly Scott Cato

UM: Pretending that there is an ontological difference between nature, science, technology, and politics in the current era is nothing more than an ideology. Due to the project of modernity, today we have an enormous amount of capital in the world, but almost no commons anymore. So the next project should be to transform some of this capital into commons. And clearly the information economy, such as the internet, is the first kind of capital that we can win back in the form of the commons. But this requires a huge transformation, because even Wikipedia, the only significant example of commons on the web, is dwarfed by Twitter or Facebook.

You said that with the commons we need to find an alternative to the market model. But don’t we also need an alternative to the state model?

MSC: I disagree with the three-way distinction of public, private, and social enterprise models. For me, we are all living in a world that is shaped by the market, and the fact that we provide some services through a public system doesn’t really take us away from this basic concept. So when I talk about the market model, I don’t just mean the private sector, I am talking about an economic model in which we are focused on exchange rather than production for subsistence, and the state is an accomplice.

Anything that you can make money out of, you can also conceptualise as a commons.

~ Molly Scott Cato

Is a commons regime an exclusive regime, or should it coexist with capitalism?

UM: If we started with a blank sheet I would say that the whole notion of the commons is a foundational notion, as foundational as the notion of individual rights for today’s capitalist economy. It is a completely different way to conceptualise law and social organisations – and in a utopian world, the commons could actually be seen as an alternative to today’s economic system.

There is, however, a more realistic perspective in which neither the public nor the private sector can yield to the commons easily. These sectors are very resilient. Since the Nobel-prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom started talking about the commons, things have gone in a completely different direction than we would have desired. There has been even more ‘technologisation’ and digitalisation, and the only way for the commons to prevail would be to live together with the capitalist organisation of things. In order to do so, commons have to be very smartly steered into some of the institutional settings that we have out there. We have to use what we have, in a way that exposes the contradiction of the capitalist economy, in the hope that it will fall at some point.

MSC: Here I think we have a bit of a disagreement, because the Green approach would be to say that you don’t wait for the collapse of the capitalist system, but you create commons-based alternatives wherever you have the chance to do so. That in itself provides us with a sense of learning and understanding, and a different consciousness around those economic activities that facilitate the transcendence of the capitalist system into something better. There are already some smaller examples, all over Europe. In Stroud, the town that I live in, we have set up a community-supported agriculture system that provides food for 200 contributing families; we pay rent for the land, but that is only a minimal rent. It is an example of a system that is based on a commons approach to provide vegetables to the community. It operates within a capitalist society, but it has a different understanding of how the economy should work.

The millennial kids are cyborgs, they think about themselves as individuals, rather than parts of a community, and are living their lives connected to these machines.

~ Ugo Mattei

UM: I don’t think there is a fundamental disagreement. We look at our possibilities, and try to construct a new form of consciousness which is necessary for a larger, revolutionary enterprise.

MSC: I agree, but instead of “revolutionary”, I would rather use the word “transformative”. And the internet could be a good terrain for this transformation, as today’s young people intrinsically understand how a commons economy might work. When they use and share digital goods, they are outraged by restrictions such as geoblocking (when access to content is restricted to users in some geographical areas). The internet also provides lots of opportunities to learn and conceptualise. Just look at Facebook: the value of Facebook is created by the users who contribute their content, there is only a very tiny amount of innovation involved in creating the algorithm and coming up with the initial idea. Nevertheless, this initial innovation was rewarded a million times over. I think we now need to make a claim that Facebook should be owned by the people who use it – like in the case of the Wikipedia model. I think it is outrageous that Zuckerberg can pretend to be a great philanthropist who solves the problems of the world, using money he enclosed from stuff I put on Facebook.

UM: It would be very important to look openly at the fact that Zuckerberg controls those large servers that store our data, and to figure out how to get back control over them. The governments are not going to do that for us, because they are in the pocket of corporations. So you have to use people power but that would require a level of consciousness and activity that the young people you are talking about don’t have.

The millennial kids are cyborgs, they think about themselves as individuals, rather than parts of a community, and are living their lives connected to these machines. It seems very unlikely that critical thoughts can come out of that generation. I think the wide use of smart phones and computers has a similar effect on people as heroin had in the 70s: it keeps complete control over generational aspirations, they are addicted to these things, and now they don’t talk, and don’t organise anymore. Don’t tell me the Arab Spring was something that proves this statement wrong, after five years we have a clear understanding of how little the Arab Spring has achieved.

Can the commons be useful for the European project? Can they be a driver for further integration?

MSC: The majority of European politicians are in support of an economic model that clearly isn’t working, while many citizens are losing confidence. Today, we can find two groups in the European Parliament who are advocating for a new economic model, but there is an important difference between the two of them: the GUE/NGL – Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left would see a bigger role for public ownership and social ownership, while we [the Greens/EFA Group] would advocate for commons, community ownership, and the social management of resources.

UM: I have been very perplexed about this for quite some time. One part of me wants to think that the EU is still worth saving, and believes that the commons could be used to gain some kind of constitutional balance. But it is not going to be easy. Today there is a very bad constitutional balance in liberal Western constitutional democracies. If tomorrow we wanted to socialise Facebook, we would have to go over many phases of social litigation, and the likelihood of losing would be extremely high. On the other hand, if any European government decided to privatise something they could do that without any form of control. If for example the Italian government is selling the post offices, there is no legal action possible for me to stop the process, even though it is my property as a taxpayer. An important role of the commons would therefore be to ensure that public assets are entitled at least to the same protection as private assets. This is why we need to advocate for a fundamental transformation in the constitutions of Europe, changes that would allow some kind of reconfiguration of the relationship between the people of Europe and their belongings.

A major worry for me concerning the EU is that I don’t know whether the commons are compatible with a system in which the centre of power  is so far away from where things actually happen; half a billion people in a single market, governed by the same laws and the same institutions seems too much to me. The commons are based on the philosophy of ‘small is beautiful’, whilst in contrast the European project is huge.

MSC: I disagree, I think that we need citizen participation at all levels: at the global level we need to solve climate issues, set common rules for corporations, and so on, then we can start with tax-policy at the European level, in order to stop corporations from making profits by avoiding taxes. Part of what we need to do is find out which powers should be exercised at which levels.

There is a liberal argument according to which most people only start caring about the environment once they become rich with the help of capitalism – and indeed we can see that Green parties are most successful in the richer Member States of the EU. How can we overcome this problem when advocating for the commons?

MSC: I think this is rubbish; if we look at where the environment has been destroyed less, those are the poorer countries of the world, and even the destruction that has happened there is due to the Anglo-Saxon and other European colonisers and post-colonisers. I think it is a complacent Eurocentric view to say that. But I take the point about our own societies; in Europe we haven’t been really successful in reaching out to working-class communities, but I think that’s mainly due to the way Greens speak and debate, and I think it is also patronising to say that that the poor are not concerned about the environment, because they absolutely are, and if they haven’t found a way to express that through politics that’s because the political system is failing them.

UM: This is a new, revamped form of the old, disproven trickle-down argument.1 I think claiming that only the rich care about the environment is completely unfounded. California, where the environmentally-friendly Tesla electric cars were invented, has an ecological footprint of six, which means if everybody else in the world were to live like the Californians, we would need six planets to reproduce the resources that we use. Burkina Faso, in contrast, has an environmental footprint of 0.1. These are the facts; all the rest is bullshit.

If the Greens are doing poorly in some countries that’s because of their poor leaders, at least in Italy, where the Greens existed as a small clique of people who had no capacity to talk to anyone who was different from them. But I admit that there is a problem due to the very strong relationship between the structure of representative democracy and the capitalist society, due to which a movement that doesn’t follow a capitalist mindset – someone who, for example, thinks in terms of the commons, rather than of the individual – will find it very difficult to be represented by the process of representative democracy. It is very difficult to impose commons from the top down, as the commons are a bottom-up platform, it has to come from the people, and the most conducive thing we can do now is to create some commons literacy, to talk to people, and to free them from the technological cage in which their heads are stuck.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 5th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Magalie L’Abbé

The post Finding Common Ground 5: Taking Back Ownership: Transforming Capital Into Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

KVV: We probably all know of some commons initiative in our neighbourhood but the commons as a concept is less well known – how would you sum it up?

CI: How do you explain the commons to people who lead a “regular life”, which is basically getting to work, earning money, and then using this money to live and work within the framework of our current society? Well, this life is simple because it is based on two pillars: first, you produce something to take care of your private needs, your subsistence, and maybe more because if you’re able to do well in life, then you accumulate resources and in return you get more influence and social status in life, or wealth. Then as a second pillar, the state takes care of all your individual needs: transportation, infrastructure – how water and light are brought to your house. If you want to make your life more complex you then add a third pillar which is all about volunteering, reciprocating, giving back, etc.

It’s between these lines that the commons work, in a very complex way. And their real nature is underinvestigated. For instance, instead of going to the supermarket to get groceries, one could farm and produce food using a community garden or by placing an urban farm on the rooftop of one’s building. Or one could manage a piece of the city or produce goods and services together with one’s peers, instead of relying on an entity in which an owner or shareholder owns the means of production. These activities are not public nor private, nor even social. So they form a new pillar: the commons. This pillar should be seen both as complementary to, and as a way to rethink, the previous pillars.

For quite a while the commons were perceived as something small, in the sense that some small communities managed themselves without the state or market. They were long seen as something that substitutes the public or the private and this is relatively true in very remote communities, like rural communities in Africa which actually evade the state and the market. But more and more we see the commons spreading in urban areas, complementing the state and the market rather than rejecting them. Think for example about community gardening or cultural spaces.

I am currently working on defining how, in the future, such initiatives can offer a way to update, improve, and change the state and the market. The commons can be an infrastructure for experimentation, a space where new institutions and new economic ventures are born that rely on this idea of cooperation, sharing, self-empowerment, collaboration, and coordination among peers.

How did you get involved in the commons? 

Ten years ago I studied the subject of climate change regulation in the context of urban law and policy, to find out whether it was possible to address climate change issues through action at the grassroots and city level. So I started with a specific case study rooted in urban mobility, public transportation means and systems. And I ended up talking about what has nowadays basically been labelled as both the sharing economy and the urban commons.

My conclusion in this study, ‘The Tragedy of Urban Roads’, was twofold: in the future, on one hand, more cities should invest in forms of sharing means of transportation. On the other hand regulation could enable behavioural shifts of individuals that are willing to embrace more economically and environmentally sustainable behaviours, because I discovered at the time, more than 10 years ago, that two thirds of the emissions come from households and individual consumption. So I thought we need to look at what political economist and Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom labelled in 1990 as the ‘governance of the commons’: everyone should be part of a locally rooted but worldwide regulatory scheme in which everyone is a ‘commoner’, and is part of the solution – not part of the problem – by changing their behaviour, shifting from car ownership to car sharing, trying to save water and energy because this creates less emissions and so on and so forth. We need an individualised citizen-centred approach and a regulatory scheme that is based on sharing and collaboration. That’s where I started to study the commons and how governments were designed, especially governments’ mechanisms connected to the commons.

You co-designed the ‘Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Commons’¹ . Two years after its implementation, can you give an assessment of the present state of affairs?

Today in Bologna there are more than 200 projects or pacts of collaboration that were approved according to the regulation. People see it as a way to take action as individuals and as groups, formal or informal. The Regulation is also about trying to involve civil society organisations as much as possible, which mistakenly perceived it as a way to bypass them. Bologna is now aiming at an implementation that goes from just sharing to collaboration, from small everyday economically unsustainable practices towards forms of economically viable ventures that are self-sustaining and also more independent.

We’ve learnt that it is important to underpin the ecosystemic nature of the commons in governing them, which could also be a way to design other public policies. There is another public policy called ‘Incredibol’: creative innovation in Bologna – it’s all about creative spaces, more rooted in the idea of start-ups than the Bologna Regulation. We are now trying to merge these two public policies. Through Incredibol for instance, you have a space in one of the main parks, Le Serre dei Giardini Margherita, that was regenerated and turned into a co-working space, with also a kindergarten, and a restaurant.

Another space I always mention is ‘Dynamo’. It’s a former bus depot that has been transformed into a repair shop and a hub for sustainable mobility and bicycle sharing. Some people are working on the re-use of clothing, or creating a library of objects, while others help with the upkeep of local parks. Others still are working on integration of migrants and low-income people, involving them not only in the care or maintenance of the city but also in the creation of social innovation and collaborative economy processes. You have FabLab spaces like ‘Make in BO’ in Piazza dei Colori, community gardening, real urban farming in Pilastro… A lot has been done on the civic restoration of historic buildings in the city centre and on the regeneration of vacant buildings or public spaces. We see groups of “city makers” that take care of the city and have the right to do so – an important measure that fosters social control and which, in this case, is more effective than policing, command, and control and public provisioning strategies. These examples could light the spark for a Europe-wide movement because similar processes are happening in many cities around Europe, as shown by the Cities in Transition project. For me, the most important way to foster social, economic, and institutional transition in cities is through the urban commons.

You mentioned a commons project on the integration of migrants. Nowadays we witness many problems of social exclusion. How do you see this aspect of integration within the commons?

This is a big issue. We need to demonstrate that the commons can be a means of achieving urban justice because there is currently still a lack of diversity among the people who are ‘commoning’. So we need to find ways of including other people, migrants, refugees, etc. in the commons and in commons-based governance schemes. In fact this is important for the work that one could do on the outskirts of cities where there are clusters of people (especially in public housing), immigrants (people that are now living in the city in a stable way), and migrants (people who just landed or are even maybe just in transit to another city because of the current refugee crisis). We need to understand if and how the commons could be an answer.

I am running an experiment in Piazza dei Colori (in English “Square of Colours”) in Bologna. It’s a public housing cluster where 60 percent of the inhabitants are foreigners: people that are now based in Bologna legally. But in close proximity we also have the so-called migrants’ hub, a place where refugees from Africa or the Middle East are now arriving. They are hosted for up to three months before they are dispatched to other areas of the city or to other cities in the region. So, there is a FabLab and a network of cultural and creative spaces in Piazza dei Colori, as well as a pact of collaboration in a nearby area. The CO-Bologna project is now leveraging both the Incredibol policy and the Bologna Regulation to involve the migrants and other people from the public housing compound and the Hub of the migrants in creating a collaborative economy district in which they can all manage the public space through the pact of collaboration and at the same time produce, manage, and manufacture by working in the FabLab or in those spaces.

So the commons, which is about social value, and the kind of connections you build around the commons, could be a way to create a shared set of values in a society that is becoming, or already is, more diverse, especially in European urban areas. In fact, the commons are more about the social process than the results. It doesn’t work like the state and the market where you have only formal rules, only organised structures. Most of the time, the commons are also about social norms in an informal organisation, which is adaptive, intuitive. It is very organic and changes over time. What might be suited to one context is not suited to another. It is very important to have this focus on diversity.

You are coordinator at the Laboratory for the Governance of Commons (LabGov)². As an expert, what advice can you give other cities with regards to governing the commons?

LabGov is the first step of this Co-City process, which should be established by local knowledge institutions, together with city officials and commons practitioners in the city. It should be creative in a way that it is designed to start debates and discussions on what the commons are in that specific city, what is the entry point to start from, what is the real commons. What is a commons in Gent might not be a commons in Bologna. After all, the community, the ‘commoners’ decide what the commons are, so they should be able to define by themselves what square, what park, what street, what abandoned building needs to be reframed as a commons. Once you worked this out, you have to start mapping the commons institutions in the city because there might already be examples, as well as the ‘commoning’ communities that might not know of each other.

For instance, you decide that food is a commons for Gent. There might be projects, people, associations that are not speaking ‘the language of the commons’ but are already doing precisely that: a commons-based project, in the sense that you have a community that is cooperating and producing in an open way, collaborating with other urban actors, to produce some form of positive spillovers for the city in an open, non-hierarchical way. So you need to go out there, talk to them and invite them to be part of an experimentation process to practice the creation of commons governance tools together. Then you prototype a governance scheme. It could be a public policy regulation, a governance device, an institution, an economic venture, etc. It doesn’t need to be laws or regulations, it could also be social norms like civic uses. But it is vital that you first practice together. Then you prototype, you evaluate, you test the effects of this prototype, and lastly, you might model it into some form of governance. At the end you always need to evaluate and measure the impacts. That is what the co-city protocol is about.

Notes

[1] A pioneering policy that regards the city as a collaborative social ecosystem where citizens’ initiatives and collaboration are legally recognised, valued, and actively supported by thegovernment.

[2] A place of experimentation where students, scholars, experts, and activists discuss the future shapes that social, economic, and legal institutions may take. LabGov  has been developing the international research and experimentation protocol ‘Co-Cities’ to design the city of the future based on the governance of urban commons, collaborative land use, social innovation, sharing economy, collaborative economy. LabGov adopts a learning-by-doing approach.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 4th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Dimitris Graffin

The post Finding Common Ground 4: The City as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

Green European Journal: What exactly do we mean when we talk about the commons today? What is all the fuss about?

Tine De Moor: A common is a governance model that facilitates cooperation between individuals who see the benefit of working together, creating a (modest) economy of scale. When talking about the commons, you need to consider the following three aspects: a group of users, generally ‘pro-sumers’, meaning they are both producers and consumers at the same time. They take collective decisions on the use of the resources. The resources are collective too, meaning that their use is dependent on the group’s decision; as a group member, you have user rights. Although the collective use of a resource can be interesting, both economically and socially, cooperation is not necessarily straightforward. When working and using resources together, a social dilemma may arise, forcing the individual members of the group to choose between their individual short-term benefits or the collective long-term benefits. ‘Commoners’ make rules in order to facilitate interaction between the group of users and the collective resource and to overcome such social dilemmas.

If your institution allows everybody have a say in what the institution should look like, and that the resources are useful to the users (though not over-used), it should be possible to achieve resilience of the common

As such, a new institution for collective action emerges. Its design and functioning is markedly different from the market and the state as governance models since it is based on self-governance, meaning self-regulation, self-sanctioning, and self-management. It sounds like a wonderful idea – like a utopia – but it is very hard, so if a commons functions well, it’s usually because it has a good balance between the above dimensions. Firstly, it is very important to function as a collectivity. Reciprocity is key but does not happen by itself; you need to have equity in the decision making process. Demanding reciprocal behaviour means involving people in the rule-making and management of the common. Secondly, commoners will be more inclined to act reciprocally if the resources are useful to them. However, the institutional arrangements should be such that they offer sufficient utility to individual users without over-using the resource. The collectivity may disappear if resources are not managed efficiently or sustainably. So if you make sure that your institution allows everybody have a say in what the institution should look like, and that the resources are useful to the users (though not over-used), it should be possible to achieve resilience of the common and to build an institution that lasts for generations, often even centuries.

Can you tell us a bit more about the commons’ historical trajectory and the three waves of institutions for collective action which you describe in your work?

Over the past 1000 years we have seen a number of major upsurges of institutionalised forms of collective action, both in the countryside and in towns across Western Europe.  The first “wave” developed in the late Middle Ages – a period characterised by rapid commercialisation and urbanisation – with a real growth in the 12^th century, with commons in rural areas and guilds in cities being built in large numbers, and this lasted until the 17^th century. There was no real state to intervene, so people responded to the new market developments by taking advantage of being a group or by engaging in collective action. Top-down enclosure attempts on the European continent were in most cases not yet very strong, and mostly failed due to resistance from the regional boards who saw that their farmers needed the commons to survive. In the 18^th century, much harsher legislation pushed the European continent towards privatisation of the commons. Political thought such as that of the Enlightenment or of the emerging Physiocrats [1]fundamentally altered the role of collectivities in European society. The second half of the 18^thcentury was characterised by a population boom and impoverishment due to several severe economic crises. Institutions for collective action somewhat lost support among their members – what is the use of a common if you are too poor to graze cattle on it? Meanwhile, the nation state developed rapidly as a very strong actor. The Belgian 1847 Loi sur le Défrichement des Terres Incultes [2] forced the local municipalities to privatise all local commons. Ideas based on individual citizens and individual responsibility started to take precedence over ideas of collectivity. It was at this time that judicial and legal foundations rooted in individualism were laid, while legal foundations for collectivities were removed.

Unlike some utopian ideas surrounding the commons, it is important to know that historically, many commons are exclusive.

But there was already a new wave on the way when Liberalism swept through Europe. The period from 1880 to 1920 witnessed a steep rise in the number of cooperatives, as well as other types of collective action like cultural and sports associations, but also trade unions. But while institutions from the first wave would split up when they became too large, similar institutions from the second wave were more prone to fuse and form a larger cooperative or association. There is clearly a very strong belief in the possibilities of economies of scale, even if the ever increasing size of these institutions makes member control and the necessary balance between equity, utility and efficiency much harder. This explains partly why the institutions for collective action of the second wave often had a considerably shorter lifespan.

What about today’s situation?

Today, we seem to be witnessing a third wave, though it is hard to judge while in the middle of it. Although it might have a stimulating effect, the crisis is not, in my judgement, the immediate driver; it is rather the increasing privatisation and commercialisation of public good provisions. In the Dutch care sector for example, the chain between those who need care and those who deliver it has, due to privatisation, become so long that people realised they could do it much better and even more cheaply by doing it themselves. They started a care cooperative in which they have a stake and a say in how things are done, without having to wait for help. In the Netherlands, cooperatives started booming in 2005, long before the crisis, and they pop up in every sector. These cooperatives are full of people who want reliable, high-quality sustainable energy, for instance, on a short chain so they know what they get and are in charge of how they get it.

But unlike some utopian ideas surrounding the commons, it is important to know that historically, many commons are exclusive. Studies show that public services offered by the government are not equally divided amongst the users either. Often the middle and upper classes benefit the most from public services. Just like privatisation, the public system is not perfect. Nor are the commons an “ultimate” solution to the deficiencies of market and state. We should look at how to create more optimal access to more optimal quality products or services for everybody in society. This is supposedly the credo behind privatisation, though in reality this is not always the case; we need to open our minds to other forms of governance regimes which might be more suitable than what the market or the state can deliver.

How can we explain the emergence and appeal of the commons model that we are currently witnessing?

Privatisation and subsequent market failure are probably the most important explanations. A private company might very well be looking for the best way to invest and create a good product, but in many cases it will cherry-pick, leading to a situation in which a substantial part of society has no access to what the private market offers. Many goods and services needed in specific regions are not available because the demand is too low, the economies of scale are too small. You see that happening in elderly care in the Netherlands. People don’t want to leave their village to go to a fancy private care home two villages away because it is too far and they don’t want to leave their network behind. I think too much privatisation is leading to an insufficient offer of, and access to, high quality goods and services.

Privatisation works for a lot of things, but not for everything. Take my toothbrush: it would be nice to have it produced in a cooperative company as a useful product, but I don’t want it to be a collective or state-governed resource as it is my toothbrush. I keep it private. But some resources can be governed in different types of resource regimes, too.

I would plead for a substantial rethinking of how we, as a society, apply governance regimes in order to come to wiser solutions to societal problems.

It may be a very radical view, based deeply on the belief in the welfare state and in redistribution of income etc., but when it comes to care, and caring for people who are in need of it – whether it is the elderly, the young or the sick – reciprocity is the basis of the welfare state for which so many people have fought. And it really is worth fighting for. It might not be perfect to go back to the situation of exclusively state-controlled governance, especially in an increasingly open society, but we should invest more in direct solidarity and make it more visible again. A lot of people don’t know why they pay taxes. Personally, I think it should be part of the national educational curriculum to learn why it is that street lights come on in the evening. It’s the foundation of citizenship: you are willing to contribute to society as a whole for the common good, so that you can also benefit from it, because if you have street lights, you will drive more safely at night.

From a historical perspective, what political lessons can be learnt from experiences surrounding the commons? Do we need new governance models?

I’m not sure if the political lessons are always the same as the historical ones. Politicians need to think about how we give people access to resources. They all think in terms of panacea – one size fits all- but that simply doesn’t work. I would plead for a substantial rethinking of how we, as a society, apply governance regimes in order to come to wiser solutions to societal problems. For instance, Dutch mums are stopping work in huge numbers to care for their kids, as privatisation of the child care sector has led to very high fees without reliable quality. We need to achieve a better understanding of which governance models work best for what and under which circumstances and come to a society that allows for a diversity of governance regimes, including commons models, but without completely dismantling the state or excommunicating the market.

Today, within the third wave, our choice to build an alternative to what the state or the market have to offer around the commons stems from a lack of options. Not all negative externalities of privatisation lead to new commons initiatives though, as the example of Dutch mothers shows. Often there is a collective solution possible but it takes so much effort, in this case from parents, that they don’t even try. We need a system where we have a more diverse institutional landscape; where the choice to set up a cooperative or a commons initiative is a conscious choice among various options. A choice that is supported by governments, and not simply ‘allowed’ because budget-wise, these days it is a smart solution for governments in the midst of austerity.

When looking at today’s wave from a historical perspective, the trick for cooperatives is to have more bargaining power while staying relatively small and local so they can work efficiently and ensure resilience. Being multipurpose may also increase organisations’ resilience. There is a real gap for organisations and governments to fill. The Dutch government, for example, is very keen on citizens taking the lead, as it helps to keep government expenditures low. But it’s not just about them and us saving money: it can actually be good for society if it runs cheaper and more locally. However, it does cost people considerable time and energy. And it’s not always legally easy to set up a cooperative; the current legislation is also not built for competition between collectivities and the private market. So the government can play an important role by stimulating citizens’ collectivities, for example in the form of public-collective partnerships. Legal reforms are needed to give these collectivities the power to provide public and private goods.

The first thing these initiatives have to do is make themselves visible.

What do the commons tell us about society, the state, and the market in Europe today?

It’s a good time to discuss this, considering the topicality of TTIP. A lot of the commons are grounded very locally and thus are rather invisible, especially to higher level governments, unless you really become an accountable force. So the first thing these initiatives have to do is make themselves visible. But European governments also have to create room in their legislations for these initiatives. A lot of EU legislation is intended to harmonise the way we produce and consume across Europe, which is often a huge obstacle for these local initiatives, given their often local character. Some care cooperatives in the Netherlands, for example, developed a programme to help the elderly meet each other at least once a week in their village over a meal. But their kitchen has to be TAACP-certified, and ingredients from the local food market are not allowed because they’re not traceable like those from a supermarket. What are we doing? The European Union should recognise and value local products much more. I doubt that the TTIP-negotiations at the European level failed because of that awareness, but all the protests may have played a role.

Do we need a new organisation that can help defend the commons at the European level?

I doubt that – because it may end up being a supra-structure again. We’re used to state and private organisations that stand for two things: economies of scale; and top-down governance. That’s basically the EU, but I would rather plea for more polycentricity, which is a fundamentally different way of thinking about organisations. One of the great things about the commons movement is that it forces people to think differently about governance and how things can be organised. The biggest challenge right now is to involve more people in a different way of thinking; maybe not even to set up a common, but at least to provide room for citizens’ initiatives. Breaking open minds for a fundamentally different governance model should be the top priority.

So how can we get in the game? How can Greens, in the current political and economic landscape, promote the commons?

On a national level, governments have to recognise the existence of collectivities – legally and fiscally – even if many collectivities don’t ask for subsidies. That’s a pity in a way because it leads to missed opportunities. But on the other hand, it’s the “purest” form. It would also mean that you do not give subsidies to companies in the same way as today. Current fiscal subsidies for companies are so large that it is totally impossible to actually compete with these. Although, maybe it shouldn’t even be competing, because a lot of these companies are just cherry-picking anyway. Maybe it is a system that can exist side by side, not just as a ‘Plan B’. Maybe the following contradicts what I said about the connection to the crisis, but in times of crisis and severe need, the emergence of these institutions should be a wake-up call. Let there be room for collectivities, but try not to create a reason why. Give them a better reason than that.

Notes

[1] From the Greek for “government of nature”, this is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th century Enlightenment French economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of “land agriculture” or “land development”

[2] Act on the Reclamation of Uncultivated Land

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our third article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by barnyz

The post Finding Common Ground 3: Commons from Past to Present: An Interview with Tine De Moor appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post, written by Dirk Holemans, is part of our series on articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

Two real-world stories

One: a medieval city called Ghent. The remnants of the age-old St-Baafs abbey are a public museum. Sounds logical; it is where the history of the city started. But the municipal government had to cut its budget and, as there are not many visitors, the site is closed. For a few years, nothing happens. Who cares? Then the people of the neighbourhood decide it is a great shame, a beautiful medieval refectory and garden hidden from public life. They take action because such a thing of beauty should be shared by everyone. They start a citizens’ initiative and organise lectures and concerts in the abbey. It evolves into a very successful organisation. Twenty years later, around 150 volunteers organise more than 200 public events, reaching out to thousands of people. A vibrant new urban common is created.

Two: a big country called Germany. In the 1990s, the state produces electricity mostly from nuclear energy and fossil fuels. Even in light of climate change, the four big German electricity companies think that business as usual is the only way forward. Investing in renewables is laughed at. So citizens come together and start their own energy initiatives, mostly renewable energy cooperatives (REScoops). In cities and villages, the idea turns out to be contagious, and together they start to change the energy system. Nowadays, half of the new renewable energy systems in Germany are owned by citizens and their organisations. Call it a state-wide network of local commons.

You’ll never walk alone

These examples are true, but they only tell half the story.

In Ghent, the neighbours had to ask for the key to the abbey. The civil servant responsible, probably a visionary, not only gave it to them but added: “Nobody can inspire such an abbey as a neighbourhood”. Several departments of the municipal government actively supported the citizens’ initiative by, for example, announcing the activities in the newsletter of the official neighbourhood centre. The responsible alderman had to back their civil servants who, in a gesture of trust, just handed over the keys; after a while, on a permanent basis.

In Germany, the REScoops could only establish themselves in such numbers because of a stimulating legal framework, with stable feed-in tariffs for the renewable energy delivered to the energy network. First introduced in 1990, this law was consolidated with the ambitious Law on Renewable Energy, (and other far-reaching government policies), ten years later. When the financial crisis arrived later, putting your money in renewable energy systems was not only a civil gesture, but also a financially smart move.

These two examples are in line with research done in the Netherlands on citizens’ initiatives. In one way or another, they all have to rely on support from the government, be it for a space they need for their activities, a piece of land for urban agriculture, or some money. As we will argue, this support is not a problem, but rather a vital part of democracy.

There is still a dimension missing in these stories: the economic one. People in Germany who produce their own renewable electricity still sell it on a market, albeit a highly regulated one. And, luckily, when there is no wind or sun they can buy energy that comes from other sources or other countries. Even if the ‘Neighbours of the Abbey’ is run by volunteers, they also have to pay their bills. So they run a café during their activities, which, from a Belgian perspective, is the most obvious thing to do financially.

Together with the Liberals and the Socialists, ecologists acknowledge that a combination of market, state and autonomy components is optimal.

Complex thinking

Let’s move from the examples to the general societal debate. If, for instance, we look at opinions about how we should organise housing, they tend to lie on a spectrum between two opposing views. On the Left, there is the view that the government is the best option to organise it in a fair way. On the other side, the Right argues that only the market can allocate houses in an optimal manner. On a higher level, a lot of commentators interpreted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the victory of the Right side of the spectrum. Concretely, in countries such as the UK, this led to the dismantling of public social housing, and the transferral of care homes from the public to the private sector.

What matters is that discussions on this, as well as other areas of society, are trapped in a Left-Right framework, within which the radical Left, without any critical analysis, invariably pushes the government forward as a solution and the Right, equally unquestioningly, only sees merit in the market approach by private companies. It is as if the citizen – the bearer of democracy – may only watch from the side-lines and is unable to propose solutions to societal needs. Remaining on the question of housing for elderly people, arguments for citizens’ initiatives, the Abbeyfield Houses for example, are rarely heard in the mainstream debate. This initiative was born in 1956 in Britain in response to a growing social problem: an increasing number of elderly people in the poor neighbourhoods of London were no longer able to live independently in a dignified manner. Today, the British Abbeyfield Society manages 700 homes with 7,000 seniors, aided by 10,000 volunteers1. Abbeyfield is a concept of collective living and a volunteer movement which has already taken root in many countries.

This is not to imply that citizens’ initiatives are the panacea for all challenges; but they can be an important part of the future if we are willing to widen our gaze. These examples clearly demonstrate that we have three basic options to address these challenges and to organise society. This broadened view of society can be visualised in the following triangle. The spectrum discussed above is actually only the line at the base of the triangle.

Each corner indicates an extreme society: a fully market-oriented society; a 100 per cent state-run society; or one exclusively managed by autonomous citizens. How a given society formulates a response to a social need – such as the nursing homes – can be situated within this triangle.

With this broadened view we come to the core of political ecology, as has been pointed out by the philosopher Philippe Van Parijs. For this presentation shows the narrowness of the dominant discourse in our society (oscillating between more state or more market), as it only takes place on the horizontal side of the triangle. Once one conceptualises the three corner points, with autonomy above as the vertical dimension, it becomes immediately clear that when the liberal and socialist logics praise the importance of the market or of the state, they not only advocate less state or less market, respectively, but plead also for a smaller autonomous sphere. But there exists a third perspective that emphasises autonomous activities and, thus, less of both state and market involvement. The horizontal ‘Left-Right’ axis is typical of modern industrial society; transitioning from this line up to the top of the triangle is a feature of the current post-industrial society that promotes other forms of participation in social life from the perspective of autonomy, rather than that of money and work. This is exactly the field of the commons.

The strength of social innovation

The autonomy perspective is a key element of political ecology (ecologism). As for the other two ways of thinking, it is not desirable, from a Green perspective, to drive society into any single corner of the triangle. Together with the Liberals and the Socialists, ecologists acknowledge that a combination of market, state and autonomy components is optimal. At the same time, their point of view distinguishes itself clearly from the liberal and socialist approach. For ecologists, autonomy represents the joyful potential to shape the world together. Autonomy is at odds with a unilateral individualisation: the joyful shaping is always done in cooperation with others. Therefore, ecologists speak about connected autonomy: I can only find fulfilment and build a world to live in through a fruitful connection with others, which also entails the dimension of care, for each other, for the world we live in, and for our living planet. This perspective is related to the notion of stewardship: our freedom to act and change the world implies, at the same time, feeling responsible for it.

With more and more citizens taking initiatives of their own, the challenge for governments is to turn themselves into a partner state, as is already happening in Bologna and Ghent.

As a source of social innovation, the importance of the autonomous sphere cannot be underestimated; a lot of solutions to societal challenges did not come from the government or from business, but from creative citizens. The aforementioned Abbeyfield Housing is a good example, as are social innovations such as car sharing, organic farming initiatives, and food teams2. And who built the first windmills to produce electricity? It was citizens developing a positive alternative to nuclear plants in countries like Denmark and Ireland.

The triangle shows that political ecology cannot be reduced to environmental protection. Ecologists want not only to respect the boundaries of the earth’s ecosystem; they strive at the same time for a larger independent social sphere where people can deploy their capabilities without the interference of market or state. The final goal is a good life for all.

From public-private to public-civil partnerships

As these examples show, most citizens’ initiatives rely in one way or another on cooperation with the state. This is not a problem: it is the future. The neoliberal regime of the last thirty years dictated that the best approach to organising anything in society was one based on markets and competition. This has led to a wide array of public-private partnerships, which, most of the time, leads to a government losing its grip on policy areas and citizens paying too much tax for the services delivered. Again, the triangle clearly shows the alternative, future way to develop: public-civil partnership. With more and more citizens taking initiatives of their own, the challenge for governments is to turn themselves into a partner state, as is already happening in Bologna and Ghent. Here, politicians don’t see their political constituency as a region to manage from above, but as a community of citizens with a lot of experience and creativity. Leaving top-down politics behind, they develop forms of co-creation and co-production. In Ghent, citizens developed, within the frame of a participatory climate policy, the concept of ‘living streets’: they decided by themselves to reclaim their streets, getting rid of all cars for one or two months. And the municipal government took care of all the necessary measures to make it happen in a legal and safe way. With public-civil partnerships, an underestimated area of the triangle of societal possibilities is explored in a positive way.

Stimulating and sustaining the commons requires an active state which develops new institutions that allows citizens to engage in transition projects.

Institutional diversity for resilient societies

With the revival of the commons, it has become clear that there exists a third fundamental way to develop and organise society. Centred on the basic principle of autonomy, it has its own logic, consisting of specific forms of social relations based on reciprocity and cooperation. It is more than probable that new commons initiatives will form a crucial part of the transformation towards a social-ecological society. At the same time, it would be very unwise to strive for a pure ‘commonism’. Just as with communism or neoliberalism, a society based on only one of the three approaches to organisation is unable to cope with the broad array of severe challenges we face nowadays. Having said that, stimulating and sustaining the commons requires an active state which develops new institutions that allows citizens to engage in transition projects in a secure way, so their autonomy and creativity can flourish. In combination with other innovations, a universal basic income could be part of this new socio-ecological security framework for the 21th century.

This is probably the most important argument at the political level in favour of the commons. At the level of who we are and how we relate, it stimulates the basic human ability to cooperate and take care of ourselves and each other. What more can we dream of, than citizens using their freedom to take their future in their own hands?

Their passion is unbeatable.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 2nd article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by pni

The post Finding Common Ground 2: Institutional Diversity for Resilient Societies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series on articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

Rosalie Salaün: What links do you see between the commons and the participative politics that you are conducting in public spaces, which embrace several areas, such as  culture, traffic, and so on?

Eric Piolle: The link is strong: we have removed billboards from public spaces; we are working on street furniture especially designed for children, on the frontiers, both physical and temporal, within the city; on reclaiming public space with, for example, the potential tensions between night-time and day-time use of space.  At each stage we have to explore and preserve what we have in common. Citizens have to rediscover their capacity for action, individual and collective, and what we hold in common must be managed, shared, and supported politically to have any meaning:  we don’t simply ‘consume’ the commons; we find meaning there.

In all public services, users are the ultimate owners of the commons. Rather than reinforcing the logic of a consumer society, we adopt an Aristotelian approach, which is that each citizen must be able to govern and be governed. That is our perspective, on both public spaces and participatory democracy.

This vision of the public space is quite unusual in France…

The ecological vision which flows from this is an actor-network vision (which is doubtless more developed in other European countries). First and foremost, there is a logic of subsidiarity: each level has its relevance and meaning. What we do together, we can do more easily.

Last week I was with the Norwegian ambassador, who was speaking about his experience in France; he mentioned this capacity to think both in terms of history and the long-term, with leaps of progress, and to do things which go in the right direction, without fitting perfectly into an ideology.

Citizens have to rediscover their capacity for action, individual and collective, and what we hold in common must be managed, shared, and supported politically to have any meaning

Our aim in Grenoble is to stay our collective course with this society of actor-networks which find meaning in social and economic exchanges; a society with debate and conflict, but also the ability to get things done. We want to stimulate conflict that is organised and goes beyond intellectual debate to action: ideas must generate action.

Is it not a little risky, for the achievement of some of your ecological policies, for example for billboards or parking, to have this participatory approach?

The real risk is that nothing changes; that we continue as before. Transition is an innovative societal project, for it responds in concrete new ways to the emergencies and extreme constraints that we are dealing with nowadays. Yes, we must change, but we must actively choose, not just passively put up with change. That’s what my engagement in public life is about: clearly recognising constraints, without submitting to them. The urgency of the current situation pushes us to shake off old habits; some say that austerity management is enough. For my part, I maintain that it’s through more democracy that we will succeed.

How are local people reacting to this change in how things are done?

Firstly, people are contacting me a lot. Secondly, residents have a two-fold reaction: satisfaction that there is no more queue-jumping; but also frustration, because you can’t pull strings anymore!

Transition is an innovative societal project, for it responds in concrete new ways to the emergencies and extreme constraints that we are dealing with

The old system was a bit of a lottery: the losers tell themselves they can win next time if they bump into the mayor at a good time – everyone plays the game. This was also true for cultural politics, in Grenoble as elsewhere, where cultural life often revolved around arbitrary decisions from above. Certain stakeholders got used to this. We are staying the course of transparency and the same rules for all; what matters is to respond to the needs of the people of Grenoble.

The approach we have adopted is ambitious, but it also recognises each person’s capacity to take charge of their own lives, both individually and collectively.  I was recently at a citizen’s forum in a disadvantaged part of town. They have worked on defining indicators of well-being (peace and quiet, housing, education, living together, etc.), and on identifying their resources.

For me, managing conflict is eminently democratic – it’s where the visions of all of us meet that the city comes to life.

We are moving on from the old mentality of raising all issues with the mayor’s office, which creates a really interesting dynamic which values the actions of local people. They are organising their own support for school children, initiating campaigns for people to greet each other in the street and get to know their neighbours, working on managing waste, developing mentoring networks for local people, creating activities to build links between parents and young people in a sometimes problematic public square, and even creating ‘true/false’ activities on the allocation of housing. All that, simply on a neighbourhood scale, is support in action in our city.

Does the mayor’s office provide a framework for this?

Yes, for the participatory budgeting, we impose limits. The project that I just mentioned was supported by the public landlord: for example, we wanted to bury the waste disposal points because they were causing problems, so we incorporated that into redesigning the square.  Even such an apparently trivial matter raises fundamental questions. We did the planning with local residents, and there was a debate about a children’s play area in the middle of the square. In the end, it was decided collectively to put it in the middle; the local senior women say that when there is no noise that’s when the dealers appear, and so on.

All this also involved discussions about what public spaces mean to us, our relationships with our neighbourhoods, and the tensions between different uses of space. For me, managing conflict is eminently democratic – it’s where the visions of all of us meet that the city comes to life.

Innovation is generally the fruit of a blend of various inputs, which shift, hybridise, and cross-pollinate.

So you see yourself in a role of mediator, rather than coming down on the side of one plan or another?

Yes; there is even self-regulation of conflict. The work of the city’s stakeholders enables us to reframe the terms of discussions.

With participatory budgeting, the rules were a little stricter. Projects varied in size, and we mustn’t allow operating costs to outstrip start-up costs; we can’t support a project which would entail ever-increasing expenditure. So it is a matter of investment, which, naturally, needs to be maintained.

In the spring, you are welcoming an Assembly of the Commons, as part of the first Transition Towns Biennial gathering.  Is your ambition to be a model, or innovator for this movement?

I don’t know if we are as innovative as all that. It seems to me that innovation is generally the fruit of a blend of various inputs, which shift, hybridise, and cross-pollinate. So many things are springing up all over the place that being a model doesn’t mean very much. Simply to demonstrate consistency, rather than to be a blueprint, would be pretty good.

When considering all areas of our work, we have to think in intersectional terms. For example, measures to combat air pollution are social policies: l’INSERM (the National Institute for Health and Medical Research) has shown that in Grenoble, not only are there two deaths per week from polluted air, but that this mainly affects the poorest people. I like to use the image of sailing with a compass:  I tack into the wind, so that even if things are not exactly how I would like, we are all going in the right direction. The important thing is not to do anything which takes us backwards or in the wrong direction.

For example, the government’s environmental policies are mind-boggling: on the one hand they host COP21 and create a law on energy transition, and on the other, we have plans for more motorways, a new airport at Notre-Dame des Landes, a high-speed railway between Lyon and Turin, a nuclear programme, and so on. They set a course, yet all the while sending out strong signals that are not only out of line with it, but taking us in completely the wrong direction.  Consistency is essential for us to unite the forces which will carry society forward.

Conversely, does giving more power to citizens give local politics more consistency?

Well, it raises the question, anyway. The debate about advertising is interesting. When we decided to ban billboards, the vast majority of people were in favour.  99% of the feedback went from ‘we didn’t even think that was possible’, through to ‘we didn’t think that politicians had the power to make that sort of decision’ (which also gives people more confidence in political decision-making), to ‘that’s great – we are deluged with adverts, and I don’t want to see naked women, cars, and alcohol when I’m taking my children to school’. It was amazing; these reactions came from everyone: young, old, all political persuasions, from here and even around the world.

What appeals to me about the commons approach is that it brings together individual and public interest.  There is a third way.

Over time, with the difficulties of transition, cuts to funding from central government, and Grenoble’s financial situation, we have no choice but to impose pretty savage savings measures.  Several times a month I find myself with key people in culture or education who tell me to put the adverts back so we can have a bit more money for them.  I understand them, but there is a contradiction here: to have more money for education do you want me to stick up a massive billboard for Landrover because they would give us more money for exercise books?

This means local stakeholders have to think in a very broad way…

Beyond their own immediate interest, yes, certainly.

Does this consultative, or co-constructive, approach, in a very complicated budgetary context, also mean the processes are more accessible to people?

What appeals to me about the commons approach is that it brings together individual and public interest.  There is a third way. The general interest can sometimes be paralysing – there is a risk of being unfocused, saying we can’t do anything about anything because there is too much at stake everywhere, so we don’t know what to do about climate change, we become demoralised and end up doing nothing. It’s by working through the commons, this space where we come together in all our differences, that we get a sense of how our personal interests are part of a whole, and are not in opposition to the public interest.

Coming back to the commons, do your traffic policies chime with this thinking?

In the 1950s and 60s, we really designed our towns around cars, and since the 70s we have, little by little, tried to reclaim some of what we handed over to cars during that period, in a similar way to how we have tried to reclaim some of what we handed over to shopping malls in the 80s and 90s.  It’s a matter of seeing the car as a 10m² of private space, ‘squatting’ in public thoroughfares.

In real terms, what sort of feedback have you had for these policies?  Do local citizens understand that it’s best for everyone to travel by bicycle?

Yes and no – there’s a bit of everything!  Some, for example, say that if parking were free,

they would leave their car parked and take public transport. And this is also an opportunity for us all to learn from each other. Here in Grenoble in 2012 there were already 35% of households which didn’t have a car, and it has progressed since then.

As for what we spend on cars in public spaces, we are realising that ultimately the local community is paying for something which only benefits a few people. Is that really what we want? The social pricing which we put in place for parking created howls of rage at the thought of price rises, but the first figures show that in fact, for 40% of people, it’s cheaper. To those for whom the price has gone up, I reply that local taxes are those that are the least linked to income.

We can also combine that with the particular situation in Grenoble, which is that the town spread in the 1950s and 1960s and the tax income from the more disadvantaged parts of town are greater than those of the wealthier areas.

There is also the element of gender, which is extremely interesting. If we are not careful, a town can become a town for men: fit, able-bodied, for whom the system works well. We must also consider the elderly, children, women, and so on.

In relation to the vote on social pricing for parking, how will you react if the majority of voters turns out to be against your proposal?

What interests me is bringing the debate to life.  In theory, that could be difficult; we are raising overall parking costs, so we could expect 90% of people will vote to scrap this consultation. However, we can also have an interesting debate with, for example, people who have private parking for their car and therefore don’t use public space; those whose cars are in public spaces but not in the city centre (where you have to pay), with the 40% who will pay less, and so on.  Will all those people join the debate and vote, or will it only be those who feel hard done by who will be mobilised? The debate continues, and in any case, I will accept the result.

Photo by gauthierchovin

The post Finding Common Ground 1: Rethinking the City through the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“A striking brand of political momentum is building, driven by the resurgence of citizen-led initiatives around the commons – movements which amount to a contestation of existing regimes and models. Taking place at a certain turning point of European history, these phenomena refute the “end of history” hypothesis of 1989, with the disarming of the sharp polarisation between the ideologies of capitalism and communism, and point to alternatives to an exhausted narrative. Free individuals are reinventing together a form of political mobilisation and innovative organisation.

In the contemporary political landscape, the commons blur the lines of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors as we have known them in the last century. Today’s approach to commonality is: “mine as much as yours”. The commons reintroduce in the political landscape an old archetype of political ecology: the steward, the warden, the custodian – of nature, resources, land, or neighbourhood.

The commons reject and provide alternatives to the deeply ingrained ideologies associated with the market and the state: the former’s refrain of growth, extreme individualism, and hyper-competitiveness; and the latter’s coercive standardising model. The movement of the commons and its importance on the ground, as well as the accompanying language of common goods increasingly taking root, constitutes a fundamental challenge to corporate privatisation, commodification and the grabbing of land, culture, and social ‘acquis’ following a neoliberal logic of extraction.

Kaleidoscopic Fluidity

The immense diversity of meanings ascribed to the commons testifies to the rich and multifaceted significance this concept has acquired. But the differing ways in which this term has been deployed in varying contexts and moments in time also pose a dilemma for imposing a definition or framework. Applied in contexts ranging from urban public spaces to agriculture, from natural ecosystems to the virtual world, the contents of this edition alone demonstrate this diversity.

Some of these cases pertain to earthly, material resources, such as Vandana Shiva’s vivid account of the David vs. Goliath battle of subsistence farmers’ resistance to the attempted monopolistic capture of all seeds by an ever dwindling number of multinational corporations. Jonathan Piron’s case study in forest conservation shows that the commons can be a space for innovation and experimentation, while Ewa Sufin-Jacquemart and Radoslaw Gawlik’s examination of water management stresses the crucial need for communities to take ownership, in the broad sense, of the common goods they rely on. Richard Wouters and Liesbeth Beneder take a look at the potential for harvesting resources from outer space – a fascinating prospect though one which threatens to delay the much needed acknowledgement that even non-finite resources must be managed in a way that is equitable, just and does not cause harm.

Data and information constitute less tangible forms of the commons, and Julia Reda discusses the digital commons and pioneering platforms for managing knowledge online. Cities have also become the scene of struggles against the private appropriation of space. Eric Piolle’s experiences in Grenoble illustrate the challenges to the management of public spaces for the common good, while Daniela Festa’s descriptions of original initiatives by ‘urban stakeholders’ in Italy teach us that the urban commons are about far more than simply passive stewardship.

To these we can add the governance regimes and decision-making models, establishing novel hybrid structures and procedures. Tomislav Tomaševi? contends that the strict dichotomy between state and market as regulators of resources and public life is outdated, with both experiencing a certain crisis of legitimacy. Dirk Holemans explores a third option described as ‘autonomy’, rooted in a different economic approach to creating and measuring value through alternative means than the market and the state, bearing an implicit critique of the inadequacies of both these mechanisms.

From a European perspective, Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein criticise the EU for a lack of leadership in this area, while on the other side of the coin, Vedran Horvat shows the disruptive potential of social movements and transnational struggles – illustrating the potential of the commons to stimulate solidarity across borders. Underlying all this, Tine de Moor charts a historical trajectory that situates today’s initiatives within a long and rich history of collective resource management and collaboration.

Harnessing the Untapped Potential of the Commons

The proliferation of citizen-led initiatives for the management of resources is a development that Greens in Europe must pay close attention to. The commons help highlight the weak links and fault lines in current policies that need to be addressed. In the face of a challenged institutional realm and the increasingly emboldened grassroots mobilisation, the Greens must grasp the underlying political lessons for 21st century politics that the commons can teach.

One fundamental issue the commons raise is that of power, of which the concentration has had and has far-reaching implications. In the panel interview, Hilary Wainwright describes the commons as containing a new kind of power, in contrast to the traditional dominant power of the state, a power whose transformative capacity stems from its autonomous and creative nature. Equally, the transformative potential of the commons becomes clear when we grasp the idea that anything which can be privatised and used for profit can also be thought of within a commons perspective, as the discussion between Ugo Mattei and Molly Scott Cato demonstrates.

Michel Bauwens, however questions whether the commons, as a new narrative or new ‘value regime’, can or should truly emancipate itself from the state or if it is rather to be seen as a struggle for a certain vision of the state. Danijela Donelec underlines this perspective when she asserts her vision of the commons as politically useful when confronting the state and presenting potential models for reform, rather than as distinct autonomous zones that could potentially rival or even surpass the power of the state.

An exploration of the commons risks leading us into the trap of believing that power seized will automatically lead to fair organisation and inclusive decision-making, as John Clarke warns. Instead, it can provide a language for alternatives and making these a reality on the ground through a process of trial and error which, as with all genuinely inclusive democratic practices, is a laborious and painstaking process which necessitates a constant re-examination to ensure that we are moving in the right direction.

We should be heartened, however, that this journey has already begun.”

This article was originally published here.

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