Darren Sharp: How do you create a viable business or organization without a hierarchy?

Enspiral, an entrepreneurial collective based in Wellington, New Zealand, has been working to answer this question since 2010. Started as a group of individuals doing contract work together, the community quickly shifted to launching companies focused on making its ongoing experiments in self-organization accessible to a wider audience. Successful projects include Loomio, a worker-owned co-operative that developed an open source app for consensus decision-making.

Distributed leadership has been key to the success of Enspiral and thousands of other sharing, open source and peer-to -peer communities around the world that rely on participation and networked governance to achieve outcomes for the common good.

Alanna Irving, who contributed to Enspiral’s new book Better Work Together: How the Power of Community Can Transform Your Business, has co-founded multiple startups, including Loomio, Cobudget, Enspiral, and Dark Crystal. She currently works as executive director of the Open Source Collective. We caught up with Irving to learn more about bossless leadership and her practical advice for how groups can both share power and tap members’ strengths to drive personal and social transformation.

Darren Sharp: What’s the book’s core message?

Alanna Irving: Better Work Together doesn’t give you a formula to instantly make your organisation collaborative, flat, or purposeful — because there isn’t one. In this book, we share what we’ve learned by pushing the boundaries of the future of work in a network of social entrepreneurs called Enspiral.

It’s not a book of theory, but a field guide by and for practitioners. As is fitting for a book about non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer, distributed practices, these stories are told through many voices, in many forms, like essays, toolkits, illustrations, exercises, and even a bread recipe. Sharing the failures is as valuable as sharing the successes. The truth is organic, emergent, and human. You can’t tie it all up neatly with a bow on top, or claim that everything fits into a clever 4-quadrant diagram.

We want to offer what we have learned to others, so they can make it their own and take it even further. We’ve gathered up the best insights and transformational experiences we’ve had while growing companies, networks, and ourselves in pursuit of truly meaningful work. The core message is: Join us on the journey.

Why was Better Work Together developed, how are people using it, and what’s its impact so far?

We’re doers, often too busy doing to reflect and communicate. Enspiral has never been great at marketing itself. We’ve never been good at productising or selling what we do, because that’s never what it was about. But whenever bits of our story got out, in talks or blog posts or podcasts, people clambered for more.

I think there’s a lot of abstract theory out there about new paradigms for human group dynamics, but a lack of real, unvarnished, on the ground lived experience. People are hungry for it. The book is a way for us to bring some structure to analyzing and communicating the ideas, tools, and practices we’ve developed, and offering them to the world in an accessible format. It’s our way of recognizing that we’re part of a much bigger worldwide movement, away from top-down, command and control structures, toward bottom-up, consent-based, shared power. The book is our contribution to the larger collective discourse.

It’s been truly amazing to see people respond to the book all over the world, excitedly realising that they are far from alone in this work, and how much further we can go by sharing our stories. A lot of people are telling us they want to go deeper, so now we’re developing workshops and courses based on the book.

Your contribution to the book is largely about distributed leadership in groups. Can you share what that looks like using examples from your personal experience?

Some people think that rid of bosses means there’s no need for leadership. I think just the opposite: It means you need to grow the leadership capacity of everyone. Personally, it took me a long time to reclaim the notion of leadership, because I felt uncomfortable with all the baggage it carried from coercive power hierarchies.

There is a name for this thing I do, and it’s called leadership, but it’s not about bossing people around. Once I was able to uncouple leadership from positional authority, I began to see it purely as a force that moves human groups toward coordination and velocity and away from entropy. It became clear that leadership is not contained in a specific role, but can and should be distributed among many people and processes.

This led me to questions like “How do I develop as a leader when there’s no ladder to climb?” and “How can I increase overall leadership capacity in my network?” I developed a framework for understanding these ideas, which is in a section of the book called “How to Grow Distributed Leadership”, which builds up from the base of shared power and self-leadership through leading others, leading leaders, and ecosystem leadership.

The framework has definitely helped me think more consciously about my own development, and how to mentor others who are intentionally developing leadership capacity in their own networks.

You use archetypes or personas to describe different types of leadership which have their corresponding shadow aspects. How can people become aware of their shadow aspects and make the most of them in group situations?

One of the chapters I wrote in the book describes a leadership development framework I created called Full Circle Leadership. In my work at Enspiral, I noticed an eight-step life cycle projects went through, and saw how projects fell over or fizzled if they missed some steps.

It partly came out of my annoyance that, as a network, we were great at coming up with new ideas but not as good at taking them all the way to completion. I needed to get the word “operationalisation” into our collective vocabulary. I also saw other organisations with the opposite dynamic: great at maintaining but struggling to innovate.

In parallel, as an operational leader, I went through a process of developing empathy for visionary leaders, and came to understand that we weren’t at two opposite ends of a spectrum, but part of a circle. Each of the eight steps represents its own unique kind of leadership, all of which are valuable and important.

This became a lens to better appreciate and nurture diverse leadership strengths. Equally, it’s a lens for awareness of the shadow sides. I got better at seeing my own shadows as a leader, and seeing both the light and dark sides of my collaborators. This is why working alongside diverse, respected peer leaders, who are different to you, is so important.

How can groups leverage people’s strengths and also take team members out of their comfort zone to learn new skills?

This work asks a lot of us. There is no way to keep engaging deeply, purposefully, and vulnerably in community without a lot of self-development. Sometimes we call that The Work. It never ends because humans are dynamic, complex, living beings, and groups of humans even more so.

On one level, it means always being out of your comfort zone. On another level, it means gaining a profound sense of purpose, confidence in you abilities, and unambiguous commitment to guiding values that stay steady in the face of enormous change. It’s great if you can be responsibly and safely held and guided by someone who “knows what they’re doing”, but really, no one knows what they’re doing when you’re charting new territory and constantly experimenting. It can be risky. You need a lot of self awareness and excellent boundaries.

My seven or so [years] at Enspiral felt like a never-ending stream of intensive challenges and growth opportunities. I learned so much about myself, at the same time I was learning about startups, facilitation, building technology, social impact, money, and everything else. It was incredibly rich — and, frankly, exhausting. I miscalculated and burned out multiple times.

There’s a lot in the book about self care, well-being, group processes for looking after each other, and strategies for avoiding burnout when you’ve got a fiery passion in your heart. The risk and challenge are inherent, so I’d definitely encourage people to regularly reflect and check in about how it’s really going. But to me, there is no question that it’s worth it.

Power dynamics are an inevitable characteristic of human groups. What advice do you have for groups for making them more transparent? When does it make sense to share power and what steps can groups take to get there?

The first step is to practice talking about power dynamics openly, regardless of their shape. A healthy culture means being honest about power. If you are a hierarchy, admit it. Own it! Sometimes hierarchies are the right shape for what you’re trying to do. You can have consent-based, ethical hierarchies. A lot of people actually just want to be told what their job is.

Talking about power dynamics will allow you to collectively ask important questions, like “How is our structure working for us? Could it be improved?” Sometimes groups that aspire to less hierarchy will treat power like a taboo, and try to pretend it doesn’t exist. This will not result in shared power, only in implicit, unaccountable power.

Power dynamics are an inherent property of human groups. Your collective task is to take ownership of your group’s power dynamics and make them work for you. One frame I often use is “align power and responsibility.” If people have responsibility for things they don’t have power over, or are exerting power over things they aren’t taking responsibility for, you’ve got a problem.

Sometimes that’s about an internal emotional boundary around what you will feel responsible for. Sometimes it’s about restructuring roles to give power over their scope of responsibility. Sometimes it’s about calling out unacknowledged power. It’s a frame I find useful to examine in a lot of situations.

Finally, consider how our work on power in the context of human society overall [is] inextricably linked to social justice. We need to consider how power dynamics function at every level, from the macro to the micro, to truly understand them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darren Sharp | Twitter

Darren Sharp is a leading sharing economy strategist, consultant and researcher.  As founding Director of Social Surplus he develops strategy and facilitates capacity-building using strength-based approaches including asset-based community development,

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By requiring planners to consider impacts on society and the environment as well as economics, New Zealand is setting a much-needed example for other nations.

“Life is about more than just money.” It’s almost a cliché. But that quote isn’t from a left-wing think tank or a green non-governmental organization. In fact, it comes straight from official documents of the Treasury of New Zealand.

When even famously conservative government economists are saying there’s more to life than dollars and cents, something interesting is going on. And in fact, New Zealand is at the forefront of a radical shift in economic policy. The aim is simple: to make nature and society just as important as gross domestic product (GDP) growth in government thinking.

A Bold New Policy

The administration of Jacinda Ardern, who became prime minister in October 2017, has lost no time establishing rock-solid environmental credentials, with the recent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling just the latest in a long line of climate-smart policy commitments. But the shift to a “well-being budget” for 2019 could be the boldest play yet.

The New Zealand Treasury has been instructed that, when planning policies or modeling future economic scenarios for the country, it can no longer only consider the impact on GDP growth. Instead, it must include social, human and natural considerations in its thinking. For example: Would a trade deal endanger existing jobs? Would a pipeline destroy valuable forest or freshwater? And could deregulation damage cultural cohesion?

All of these are questions that government finance ministries rarely, if ever, concern themselves with. But New Zealand wants to be different.

“We want New Zealand to be the first place in the world where our budget is not presented simply under the umbrella of pure economic measures, and often inadequate ones at that, but one that demonstrates the overall well-being of our country and its people,” Arden said in a January speech.

Getting Back to Nature

This approach has alarmed some traditional economists as radical, unscientific or conceptually confused. But I think it’s eminently sensible.

As recent research by Oxford University economists has shown, all economic prosperity rests on natural foundations. Simply put, without clean air, safe water and a well-functioning environment, there can be no material wealth. And even the business big cheeses at the Davos World Economic Forum now argue that policy-makers’ obsession with GDP has damaged our planet and our societies.

If all government decisions are made on purely financial terms, then ultimately those decisions will benefit finance and capital at the expense of people and nature. Traditional economics has forgotten that our economies should have a purpose: they should deliver greater well-being, increasing prosperity, improved security and comfort, without imperiling the things that make life worth living. If all government decisions are made on purely financial terms, then ultimately those decisions will benefit finance and capital at the expense of people and nature. As New Zealand treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf puts it, “The traditional view of economics is more of a caricature than reality.”

Measuring What Matters

Over the past decade, dozens of new sustainability indexes and “beyond GDP” frameworks have emerged.

Some have largely been forgotten; others have attracted some scholarly attention or the support of a well-meaning think tank or policy institute. Only tiny Bhutan, a landlocked Asian nation of less than a million people, has attempted to get beyond GDP at the policy level, with its Gross National Happiness Index. No other country has made a strong, public commitment to incorporating social and natural value in governance — until now.

In New Zealand, GDP will no longer be the sole measure of success for economic policies. In New Zealand, a new generation of leadership has arisen, symbolized by Ardern: wise to the danger our planet is in; alive to the opportunities of a greener, fairer society; and not beholden to the outdated economic doctrines that have led us into this predicament. In New Zealand, GDP will no longer be the sole measure of success for economic policies, because GDP is not, and has never been, the best or only way to measure social development.

In many ways, New Zealand’s new approach is a return to a more honest, more grounded way of practicing economics, more rooted in the real world, as Makhlouf explains. “Economics is about trade-offs,” he says. “Economics is about the fact that there are finite resources to meet unlimited wants and what’s the best way of dealing with that problem. What the Treasury is suggesting now is that we can become a bit more sophisticated than in the past at making those trade-offs.”

It’s a refreshing change of focus from a senior treasury official. I’m looking forward to the day — hopefully soon — when finance ministries around the world are equally candid about something the rest of us have known for a long time: There’s more to life than money.

Ben Martin  @GECoalition  – Green Economy Coalition marketing & communications lead

Header Illustration by Sean Quinn

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If you’ve read any of my writing, you will have guessed I have some opinions about how we could do large scale governance differently. But the tool we’re building is designed only for small scale: If you’ve ever used Loomio, you’ll see that it’s designed for groups of up to a few hundred people, max. There’s a big gap between the decision-making context of a grocery co-op and an entire country.

So I was really pleased to be invited to make a presentation at The Direct Parliament conference in Florence last week, where I could connect the dots between the large scale and the small.

The conference was coordinated by Marco Deseriis, who studies networked society with a cultural/political examination of Internet-based activism. The Direct Parliament came at the conclusion of his 2-year research project Scalable Democracy. I was first introduced to Marco when he interviewed me back in 2016, looking especially at the mass adoption of Loomio in the early phase of Spain’s Podemos movement-slash-party. I have really appreciated following along with his research blog, which is full of excellent interviews like this one with Miguel Arana Catania from the Participation Team of Podemos, revealing the tensions between the social movement’s manifestations in the streets and in the institutions.

The day-long conference was all live-streamed, so you can watch videos of the presentations and discussions here. My talk starts 13 minutes in, there’s a direct link here. If you prefer reading to watching, I’ve included an approximate transcript below.

I usually avoid speculation about the large scale because I often see it distracting us from more immediate local concerns, where we can actually have tangible impact. But people keep asking me what I think we should do about governments, so I’m starting to develop some thoughts on the topic. I’d love to hear what you think. Feedback welcome

Transcript: Everyday Governance with Loomio

Thanks for the invitation to join this conference. I’m grateful to be here, and looking forward to learning with you all. I come from New Zealand, so sorry about my poor English. I co-founded a technology company called Loomio. I think technology is quite boring though so I won’t talk too much about it.

software is an artefact of values and beliefs

I think software is an artefact, a by-product of our values and beliefs. So I don’t want to spend much time telling you about the software we built; I think it will be more interesting to share some of my values and beliefs, rather than telling you all about our software platform. Bear in mind I’m one of many co-creators of Loomio, so my subjectivity is only a limited slice of the pie.

First I want to share some of my personal experience so you know where I’m coming from.

In 2011, I joined the Occupy Movement. I had no experience with activism or social movements before then. I had just been watching Occupy Wall Street online and I thought it was interesting. I saw all these people saying that society is in crisis, that we face enormous environmental and economic challenges, and that our institutions are not capable of coming up with good solutions. In retrospect, I think Occupy was an opportunity to get firsthand experience of the challenges of democracy, and to start prototyping alternative institutions.

When the Occupy Movement made it all the way to Aotearoa New Zealand, I went down to our Civic Square in Wellington to observe: who are these people, what are they going to do? Very quickly, I changed roles, from observer to participant. I found there was no way to stand outside, I had to be involved.

For the first time in my life, I met with citizens in the city square. We talked together about our hopes and fears, sharing, learning, debating, connecting. It was tremendously inspiring, and shocking, like, why have I never met other citizens like this before?

On the first day, somebody decided he was going to stay the night in the square. Two weeks later there were 100 tents, a whole village had appeared.

The amazing thing about this village was that nobody was in charge. We made decisions together: everyone needs to eat, so how are we going to organise food? We made a kind of free university, so what kind of education programs shall we run? All these people want to stay in the square: how can we make shelter for everyone? TV cameras keep visiting us, what should we tell them? Nobody was the boss, we had to negotiate and improvise.

Now nothing in my education had prepared me for this. I’m trained as an engineer. As an engineer I was taught an approach to problem-solving that was all about being right. I did research, I made simulations, I built electronic circuits and tested them with careful measurements. I was trained to be objective, detached, outside of the system, an expert observer with a brilliant intelligence.

In the assembly at Occupy, I discovered these skills are not very useful in deliberating with others. In the assembly I learned that my empathy is much more useful than my intelligence. 

Negotiating with other people, trying to find agreement about how we should organise our little village, I learned the most important thing I could do was to listen. Not just listening to rebut — listening to understand, where are you coming from? what do you believe? what do you value? why do you think like that?

When I truly understand somebody’s position, then I can make a proposal that they can agree with. It’s not about being very clever, having the best ideas, or the best ethics, it’s just about listening, being flexible, and looking for solutions that satisfy as many people as possible.

So, there we are in the city square sitting in circles and making consensus decisions, it’s very picturesque and inspirational.

It was also kind of a disaster, right? In my opinion, the Occupy camps all over the world ended for basically two reasons.

Some camps were destroyed by the state. Violent, brutal, armed thugs paid by the government to vandalise and dismantle these flourishing communities. The other camps collapsed under the weight of consensus. We learned how difficult it is to govern a public space, especially when you’re making decisions with random people, some of whom are drunk, or they are just passing through and sharing an opinion without any commitment to the community.

Actually maybe these two reasons demonstrate the same thing: governance is very difficult. The state does stupid things like pepper spraying students at a peaceful protest. And we activists do stupid things like spending 6 hours in a consensus meeting that brings us no closer to our aims.

So, as our camp disintegrated, my friends and I were left with an enormous question: what next!? It felt like we had come so close to a dramatic evolution of how we govern society, and then it collapsed. So what do you do after the revolution fails?

Being the kind of people we are, we decided to make some software about it. We thought we could help activists organise more efficiently with software to support inclusive decision-making.

So Loomio is a discussion forum like many others online, but the unique piece is the facilitation tools which are designed for productive and efficient deliberation. It’s not an endless conversation, the process is guided towards an outcome. E.g. you can poll people so see which options they like, then test for agreement with a proposal.

When we started we were just thinking of activists. But immediately we were swamped with interest from all parts of society, in many different countries. Now we have tens of thousands of groups using Loomio. In Wellington, the city government used Loomio to involve citizens, experts, and officials in policy making. Co-ops use Loomio for governance: approving new members, approving funding applications, debating about constitutional bylaws.

My favourite example right now is social.coop: it’s a social network very similar to Twitter. But instead of selling advertising, the platform is funded by users paying a small subscription fee. In return, users are invited to participate in governance, in a Loomio group: what kind of censorship should we have on the platform? where should we host the data? what code of conduct should users adhere to? It’s wonderful to see a digital platform being governed like a public utility.

Loomio is very simple software: you have discussions, suggest proposals, and people can say what they think about the idea. There’s no magical automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or decision-making robots, it is a very human process. I think it contributes at least two very useful innovations to the problem of deliberation, which can be generalised to other tools and processes.

1. asynchronous deliberation

First, Loomio breaks the tyranny of time. Usually, when you want to include people in a decision-making process, you do it in a meeting. These days we have video-conferencing so our meetings can extend into multiple spaces, but still, we need everyone paying attention at the same time. This is a fundamental constraint of deliberation: you need to organise a meeting, get everyone to pay attention simultaneously, and there’s a pressure to make all your decisions before the meeting ends.

With Loomio you can involve people in decisions, without coordinating a meeting. People participate in their own time.

I’m travelling through Europe with my partner. Back home, we’re negotiating about a new investment round for Loomio, and potentially restructuring the cooperative. We’re on the road, in a different timezone from the rest of the team, but we can participate in these very important decisions in our own time. We call it asynchronous decision-making, I think it is a very profound breakthrough, even though it is quite mundane!

2. visualise positions

The second innovation: visualising people’s positions. It’s very common for deliberation to get stuck in a very frustrated state. Essentially, everyone is simply arguing for their preferred option. I think we should do this. Well I think we should do that. No we should do this. Often what is happening here is that people are advocating for their preferred option, simply because their preference hasn’t been acknowledged. I get louder and louder describing the benefits of my proposal, because nobody has demonstrated that they understand my idea. So it really accelerates the deliberation process when you can visualise everybody’s position. First, everybody needs to be heard. Then they are much more willing to negotiate and make concessions.

So with a Loomio decision, somebody makes a proposal, and then you can visually see where everyone stands. People agree or disagree, and they share a short summary explaining why they feel that way. so you can quickly focus in on the concerns, and evolve the proposal to respond to them.

Again, it is quite simple, but also a profound breakthrough. We use the same technique in face-to-face workshops and meetings to deal with difficult decisions. In this case, the graphic is used to visually distinguish preference (I love it) from tolerance (I can live with it):

I want to share a bit more about my beliefs, some of the thinking behind the software.

This shows you how I understand social change. The chart keeps going up to the right, with bigger and bigger scales: cities, states, the planet, all of life, etc. Many of us are motivated by large-scale change, I expect that’s why we’re at this conference: we want to rebuild the economy for equality, or reimagine politics, or repair the division between humans and the rest of nature. Big big change. But social change is very complex, and non-deterministic, it’s not a straightforward system. I don’t know how we re-wire society, but this picture shows my intuition. I believe we need to consider many different scales at once.

For example: I want to change the system called patriarchy. It seems to me a very urgent challenge. But if I just focus on the large scale, trying to dismantle the system, I may miss a lot of insights that are down at the lower end, much closer to me and my immediate experience. Down here there are some questions just for me: how do I support patriarchy, how do I benefit from it? or, how do I reproduce patriarchal dynamics in myself, how do I dominate myself? and then one step up, looking to my relationships: am I in equal partnership, or in domination relationships? Then I can examine my teams: are we treating each other with respect and equity, or does one person dominate the rest? To me it is very important to have integrity and alignment at all scales. So yes, I will join a social movement against patriarchy, demanding a change in how we distribute power in society and how we run institutions. And also I need to work at the very small scale.

This is what is in my mind when I am using Loomio. I believe it is very important to practice deliberation at the small scale. Learn how to share power, to negotiate, to listen, to make concessions, to empathise, to let go of demands, to find creative solutions. Simply, I believe the practice of small scale democracy makes me a much more capable citizen.

I’m not sure about the large scale. I think we will have much better ideas once people have more opportunity to practice at the small scale.

Right now, the best large scale example I know of the is in Taiwan. My example is 4 years old, but still most people don’t know about it, so I guess I will be the Asia-Pacific representative for this conference and share the story again.

In 2014, the Sunflower Movement occupied government buildings in Taiwan. They stayed there for 23 days, demonstrating how to run a transparent deliberative democracy process to renegotiate a trade deal with China. After the movement, many independent politicians won seats in government, including the premier of Taiwan and the mayor of Taipei. That is, they are there to represent citizens directly, without the mediation of a political party. Since then, there have been many experiments in citizen participation in law making.

The vTaiwan project uses a tool called pol.is to involve thousands of people in opinion gathering, which like Loomio, creates a visualisation of people’s position on an issue. Once the opinion groups are clear, then representatives of each group come together for an in-person deliberation. This is broadcast publicly for anyone to watch. Then, having understood the perspectives of the different stakeholder groups, citizens are invited to suggest statements that they believe everyone can agree with. In the end, the government agrees to implement every consensus point generated by the process, or to provide detailed rationale for why it is not feasible.

This is incredibly inspiring to me, and I hope more people in the Western world will pay attention to the developments in East Asia. And I will say, the technology is useful, but more important is the political strategy and the facilitation skill of the activists driving this change.

I’m not sure if the government of the future is going to use pol.is, or Loomio, or LiquidFeedback, or whatever technology. But I hope as more people have access to a kind of everyday democracy, we’ll be much more able to work together creatively, efficiently making great decisions that work for everyone.

So if the question of this conference is “how do we reclaim our vision of democracy?” I think the answer is very straightforward, and very difficult. How do you get better at anything? With practice. I propose we should practice democracy more-or-less everyday. In our schools, in our homes and workplaces. Learn what democracy is composed of, in our own intimate experience, and then we will be more equipped citizens, less naïve, less easy to manipulate by demagogues and propagandists. I imagine children and teachers collaborating to govern their schools. Workers coming together to self-manage their workplaces. Citizens working together with city officials and experts to develop good policy.

Most of all, I imagine what extraordinary breakthroughs we might discover if more of us learned to listen to the people on the opposite side of the political fence. What if we could hear the values and beliefs beneath their position, rather than just dismissing them as stupid or evil?

p.s. this story is licensed with no rights reserved, available for reproduction on my website

p.p.s. you can support me to keep writing with claps, shares, and dollars

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“If something goes wrong, its not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s.”

[Tweedie Waititi, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Sunday Star Times]

Anne Salmond: In April 2011, a small flotilla of protest vessels headed out to sea from the Eastern Bay of Plenty in New Zealand. Among them was a fishing boat, the San Pietro, owned by the local iwi (kin group), Te Whanau-a-Apanui, and skippered by Elvis Teddy, an iwi member. Rikirangi Gage, a senior tribal leader, was also on board.

At that time, a large ship, the Orient Explorer, contracted by the Brazilian oil company Petrobas, was conducting a seismic survey of the Raukumara Basin, about 300 kilometers north of East Cape. In 2010, Petrobas had been granted a permit by the New Zealand government to prospect for oil in these waters, which crossed Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s ancestral fishing grounds.

When they learned of this permit from press reports, the iwi leaders were incensed. Under the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, Queen Victoria had guaranteed their ancestors the “full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties… so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.” (Waitangi Tribunal)

Since 1975 the Waitangi Tribunal, established to inquire into breaches of the Treaty, had held hearings around the country and investigated many complaints by Maori kin groups, including those relating to fishing and the ocean. The Tribunal issued reports and made recommendations, and over this period, successive governments had offered apologies and settlements in cash and kind to many iwi around the country.

When Te Whanau-a-Apanui leaders met with the Prime Minister to state their opposition to drilling for oil in their ancestral waters, he expressed sympathy, but refused to revoke the permit. Determined that their point of view should be heard, the tribe put out a call for assistance, and the environmental group Greenpeace responded by sending a flotilla of protest vessels to the Bay of Plenty.

As anger about the oil prospecting increased, placards and signs sprang up on windows and fences along the road between Opotiki and Gisborne. Bonfires were lit in protest, and large-scale haka (war-dances) performed on the beaches.

In April 2011 Greenpeace protestors swam into the path of the Orient Explorer, watched by members of the Air Force, Navy and police. The police issued notices under the Maritime Act, ordering the protest boats and their crews to stay 200 meters from the ship, or to face a fine of NZ$10,000 or up to a year in jail (Hill 2011).

In a press interview, Tweedie Waititi from Te Whanau-a-Apanui expressed surprise at the depth of feeling among her people: “We are the most placid iwion earth. And I tell you what, the government has awakened some sort of taniwha [guardian creature]. It’s quite a surprise to see my people react the way they are reacting. We’re all virgins at doing this. We never fight.” (Waititi 2011).

Like other New Zealanders, tribal members had heard a great deal about the Deep Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico the previous year, and the damage done to the ocean, sea life, coasts and estuaries, and the livelihoods of local people. They were fearful that a similar catastrophe might happen in their ancestral waters.

Tweedie also expressed concern for the moki, a sacred fish that migrates every year from Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland, to Te Whanau-a-Apanui waters. “That’s the moki’s home”, she said, “Right where they want to drill. Every June, there is a star that shines in the sky and her name is Autahi, and that’s our indication that the moki has come home.”

The story of the moki is told in paintings in the dining hall and carved meeting-house at Kauaetangohia marae, at Whangaparaoa. I had also heard about this sacred fish many years earlier when I worked with Eruera Stirling, a leading elder of the iwi, on a book about his ancestors and his life. He told me about a time in his youth when a senior elder, Manihera Waititi, invited him and his elder brother to catch the “first fish” to open the moki season.

On that occasion, the two boys went to the Whangaparaoa River before dawn and boarded Manihera’s boat. With a land breeze behind them, the elder took them to the moki fishing ground about one hundred yards offshore from Ratanui, a beach where ancestral voyaging canoes had come ashore.

After catching several moki, they headed out to a deep water fishing ground, where they caught several more of the sacred fish. Back on shore, the old man gave them the moki to take home to their mother, Mihi Kotukutuku. As the tribe’s senior leader, it was customary for her to be presented with the first fish of the season.

According to Eruera, the waters offshore from Raukokore, his home village, are known as Te Kopua a Hine Mahuru, the deep waters of Hine Mahuru, named after the ancestress of his people. Its fishing grounds and shellfish beds are linked with the carved meeting-house on shore, also named after this high born woman, whose mana(ancestral power) extended over the land and sea.

A rock named Whangaipaka stands in these waters, guarded by a kai-tiaki or guardian, a large sting-ray. If a stranger went there without permission, a great wave carrying the stingray would sweep over the rock, drowning the intruder. Eruera told me that in his time, shellfish beds and fishing grounds were jealously guarded:

Each district had its own mussel beds, and they were reserved for the people of that place. If the people saw a stranger picking their mussels, look out! He’d be a dead man if he came ashore. Fishing was very tapu [imbued with ancestral presence], and each family had its own fishing grounds, no one else could fish there or there would be a big fight.

The old people were very particular about the sea, and nobody was allowed to eat or smoke out on the boats. If a man took food with him when he went fishing, he’d sit there all day with his hook and line empty and the fish would stay away.

Sometimes if the fishing was very bad the people would start asking questions, and if they found out the guilty man, he’d get into big trouble for breaking the sacred law of tapu. The people would just about knock him to pieces, and he wouldn’t be allowed to go out to sea again for quite a while. If a thing like that happened at home, you were well marked by the people (Stirling 1980:106).

Given the intensity of this bond between people, their land and ancestral waters, it is not surprising that Te Whanau-a-Apanui were outraged when, without prior warning, the government issued a permit for an oil company to explore their ancestral waters. As Tweedie Waititi remarked, it was as though a taniwha, a powerful ancestral being, had woken up and was thrashing around in the ocean.

When Rikirangi Gage, an acknowledged senior leader of the iwi, joined the protest flotilla, the government ignored this gesture. Several days later, Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s fishing boat San Pietro motored across the bow of the Orient Explorer, trailing tuna fishing lines and a string of buoys tied together with rope. When the captain of the survey ship told them to stay away, Gage replied, “We won’t be moving. We’ll be doing some fishing.”

Soon afterwards police officers boarded the fishing boat and arrested the skipper, Elvis Teddy, charging him with an offense under the Marine Transport Act. Back on shore, Teddy defended his actions, saying that he was simply exercising his right under the Treaty of Waitangi to fish his ancestral waters. If his boat had come close to theOrient Explorer, it was the fault of the drilling ship’s commander for not avoiding a fishing vessel.

Teddy was prosecuted, and during his trial in the Auckland District Court, his lawyers argued that since the confrontation had happened outside New Zealand’s twelve mile territorial zone, the Maritime Transport Act did not apply. The judge agreed, and the charges were dismissed.

When the police appealed the judgment to the High Court, however, the Court ruled that as a New Zealand vessel, the San Pietro came under New Zealand jurisdiction, even on the high seas (Woolford 2013). Although there was no specific provision in the Maritime Transport Act to this effect, the Act must apply beyond the twelve mile limit, or the New Zealand government would be unable to uphold its international obligations under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. (Webster and Monteiro 2013).

After this verdict, Teddy’s lawyer issued a statement saying that by granting a drilling permit in their ancestral waters without consulting Te Whanau-a-Apanui, and by sending the Navy, Air Force and police to stop Teddy and Gage from fishing in ancestral waters, the New Zealand Government had breached not only the Treaty of Waitangi but the International Convention of Indigenous Rights, which New Zealand has also signed (Te Whanau-a-Apanui 2012).

Soon afterwards, the New Zealand government took further steps to tighten its control over New Zealand vessels on the high seas, passing a hotly debated act that prohibits protest at sea in the vicinity of oil exploration vessels (Devathasan 2013).

This clash between Te Whanau-a-Apanui on the one hand, and Petrobas and the Crown on the other, was not just a physical confrontation. It was an ontological collision – a clash between different “worlds” or ways of being. Different claims to the sea, different ideas about collective rights, and different kinds of freedoms and constraints were being negotiated.

At the same time, this is not a simple confrontation between different “cultures” or “ethnicities.” It is a complex story, with different resonances for different people.

The Sea as a Theater of Protest

For many in New Zealand, the standoff between the San Pietro and a large oil drilling ship recalled an episode in 1973 when the New Zealand government tried to stop French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Two naval frigates, one with a cabinet minister on board, were sent to Moruroa atoll, a testing site in the Society Islands. When a Greenpeace yacht was boarded off Moruroa, its skipper was assaulted by French marines.

In 1984 when the New Zealand government declared the nation nuclear-free and refused to allow visits by US nuclear vessels, the country was ejected from the ANZUS alliance. A year later, French agents sank the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, which was about to lead another protest flotilla to Moruroa, in Auckland harbor (Thakur 1986).

In New Zealand, as one can see, freedom to protest at sea is deeply entangled with national identity, and a concern for environmental issues. For many New Zealanders, by pitting its small boat against the oil drilling ship, Te Whanau-a-Apanui was following in that tradition, fighting to protect the ocean.

For many members of Te Whanau-a-Apanui, on the other hand, this was more a question of protecting the mana of their kin group. The San Pietro and its crew were asserting the right of their iwi to protect their ancestral fisheries against unwanted intrusion, based on the guarantee of “full, exclusive and undisturbed possession” of their fishing grounds under Article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi.

At the same time, for the Government and many other New Zealanders, it was a matter of upholding the sovereignty of the Crown, and the government’s right to manage the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone; to issue exploration permits to oil companies; and to protect prospectors from interference by protest vessels, including those owned by iwi.

Nevertheless, this was not an ethnic confrontation. Many of the protestors were not Maori, and as Tweedie Waititi remarked, “If something goes wrong, it’s not only our beaches that get ruined. It’s everyone’s. I’m pretty sure that not only Maori have a connection to the sea.” Also, some iwi were flirting with the idea of supporting oil exploration: “Like our lawyer said,” she added, “our mana’s not for sale and no amount of money could pay us off. Maybe some iwi you could dangle a carrot. But this one’s not biting.”

In order to explore these ontological collisions, and what they tell us about different relationships between people and the ocean in New Zealand, and different ideas about the commons, I’d like to explore some of the deep, taken-for-granted presuppositions that underpin the positions adopted by different protagonists, along with previous alliances and confrontations.

The Fountain of Fish: The Ocean in Te Ao Maori

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once remarked, “The [Mori] universe is a gigantic kin, a genealogy… a veritable ontology” (Sahlins 1985:195). Te Ao Maori [the Maori world] is ordered by whakapapa – vast, intricate networks of relationships in which all forms of life are mutually defined and linked, and animated by hau [breath, wind, life force].

In 1907, Elsdon Best, a New Zealand ethnologist who had spent a lifetime studying Maori customs, wrote to an elder called Tamati Ranapiri, asking him to explain the idea of the hau. Ranapiri replied:

As for the hau, it isn’t the wind that blows, not at all. Let me explain it to you carefully. Now, you have a treasured item (taonga) that you give to me, without the two of us putting a price on it, and I give it to someone else. Perhaps after a long while, this person remembers that he has this taonga, and that he should give me a return gift, and he does so.

This is the hau of the taonga that was previously given to me. I must pass on that treasure to you. It would not be right for me to keep it for myself. Whether it is a very good taonga or a bad one, I must give to you, because that treasure is the hau of your taonga, and if I hold on to it for myself, I will die. This is the hau. That’s enough (Ranapiri 1907).

The hau is at the heart of life itself. As Ranapiri explains, if a person fails to uphold their obligations in such exchanges, their own life force is threatened. As gifts or insults pass back and forth, impelled by the power of the hau, patterns of relations are forged and transmuted, for better or for worse.

When Elsdon Best wrote about Ranapiri’s account of the hau, it captured the imagination of a French sociologist, Marcel Mauss. In 1925, Mauss published The Gift, a classic work exploring gift exchange in a range of societies, including his own. Quoting Ranapiri, he contrasted the Maori concept of the hau and chiefly generosity with the utilitarian assumption in contemporary capitalism that all transactions are driven by self-interest, arguing that this gives an impoverished, inaccurate view of how relations among people shape social life.

For Mauss, the hau, or the “spirit of the thing given” impels a gift in return, creating solidarity. His discussion of the concept is perceptive, but in fact, it only scratches the surface. In Maori philosophy, hau drives the whole world, not just human communities. It goes far beyond the exchange of gifts among people.

According to the tohunga [experts] in the ancestral whare wananga [schools of learning], hau emerged at the beginnings of the cosmos. In a chant recorded by Te Kohuora, for example, the world begins with a burst of energy that generates thought, memory and desire (Te Kohuora 1854).

Next comes the Po, long aeons of darkness. Out of the Po comes the Kore, unbound, unpossessed Nothing, the seedbed of the cosmos, described by one of Best’s contemporaries as “the Void or negation, yet containing the potentiality of all things afterwards to come” (Tregear 1891:168).

In the Void, hau ora and hau tupu, the winds of life and growth begin to stir, generating new phenomena. The sky emerges, and then the moon and stars, light, the earth and sky and the ocean.

When the forest ancestor Tane creates the world of light and life by forcing earth and sky apart, his brother Tawhiri, the wind ancestor, attacks him and his children, the trees, smashing their branches, and the ancestors of root crops, forcing their offspring to hide in the ground. In this cosmic battle, only Tu, the ancestor of people, stands tall against the Space Twister. For his bravery, he earns for his descendants the right to harvest the offspring of his brothers – birds, root crops, forest foods and trees, fish, crayfish and shellfish.

Utu, the principle of reciprocity, drives the interactions between individuals and groups and all other life forms in the Maori world, working towards (an always fragile) equilibrium. In the process, hau is exchanged among and between people and other life forms, binding their fates together.

Here, individuals are defined by their relationships, and subject and object are not radically divided. From this we can see that any idea of the commons that presupposes this Cartesian division is rooted in a particular modernist cosmo-logic, one that cannot claim universal validity or application.

In Maori life, the mingling of self and other is reflected in many ways. When greeting one another, for instance, Maori people press noses and breathe, mingling their hau [wind of life] together. People speak of themselves as ahau[myself], and when rangatira or chiefs speak of an ancestor in the first person, it is because they are the kanohiora [living face] of that ancestor.

A refusal to enter into reciprocal exchanges, on the other hand, is known as hauwhitia, or hau turned aside. Hauhauaitu [or “harm to the hau”] is manifested as illness or ill fortune, a breakdown in the balance of reciprocal exchanges. The life force has been affected, showing signs of collapse and failure.

This also applies to people’s relations with other life forms. Unless the exchanges between people and the sea are balanced, for instance, the hau of both the ocean and the people alike will suffer.

Stories about the sea illustrate this point. According to Timi Waata Rimini, an elder from Te Whanau-a-Apanui, many generations ago the son of the ancestor Pou drowned in the Motu River. Setting off in search of his son, Pou arrived at the home of the sea ancestor Tangaroa, a “fountain of fish” teeming with different species, where he asked the sea ancestor whether he had taken his son. When Tangaroa denied it, knowing that he was lying, Pou asked him to attend his son’s tangi [funeral].

Returning to the Bay of Plenty, Pou told his people to make a great net. That summer, a huge shoal of kahawai (Arripis trutta) approached the coast, escorting the sea ancestor to the funeral. On a signal, Pou ordered his people to cast the great net. Thousands of Tangaroa’s children were caught and fed to the crowds that had gathered to mourn Pou’s son (Rimini 1901).

As Rimini explained, when the kahawai arrive at the mouth the Motu River every year, a chiefly youngster was sent out to catch three kahawai, which were offered to Pou and the high chief of the region. By acknowledging the mana of the sea ancestor, these “first fish” rituals opened the fishing season, protecting the fertility and abundance of the ocean.

Other local customs related to the kehe or granite trout, a sacred fish that frequented rocky channels in the reefs, grazing on kohuwai, a particular type of seaweed. There were a number of methods used to catch this fish, including shaping channels in the reef with stones, waiting until the kohuwai grew back again, and then using a hoop net to scoop up the kehe as they grazed on the seaweed, or using a pole to drive them into the net.

When the chief’s wife at Omaio became pregnant, he said, the rahui or sacred prohibition on a famous kehe fishing ground called Te Wharau was lifted, and as people gathered on the beach, men with hoop nets were sent to stand on particular named rocks. When the tohunga or expert called out Rukuhia, people dived into the channels, swimming underwater and driving the keheinto the hoop nets, in a joyous pandemonium. Afterwards, the fish were cooked and presented to the chieftainness as a delicacy (Te Rangihiroa 1926).

In this onto-logic, the sea itself was alive and breathing. When Te Parata, a powerful being in the heart of the ocean, breathed out, the tide began to flow, and children were born. When he breathed in, a great vortex formed, swallowing canoes at sea. At death, a great rangatira might be farewelled with the chant, “The eddy squall is gone, the storm is passed away, the Parata is gone, the big fish has left its dwelling place.” (Colenso 1887:422).

Here, ideas about collective rights acknowledge the vitality of other life forms – fish, rivers, mountains and land, for example. Rights in particular localities are distributed between people and other phenomena, nested and linked in exchange relationships at various scales. In relation to the sea, these ideas allow the control of use rights, along lines of kinship and descent or gift exchange.

In contemporary times, these ways of thinking are receiving legal recognition in New Zealand. In 2014, for instance, in a Waitangi settlement with the Whanganui iwi, the Crown has recognised their iconic river as a legal being; while in a Waitangi settlement with Tuhoe, an inland people, their ancestral land Te Urewera has been recognized in the same way, with co-management regimes with the Crown and regional authorities being established.

In many ways, these legal innovations echo contemporary biological understandings in which people and other phenomena (such as the ocean) are engaged in complex interactive systems, mutually implicated at every scale, while the idea that people might be linked by kinship with marine life forms is shared with evolutionary biology, for instance.

The virtue of these arrangements is that the well-being of a lake, a river or the ocean can be given legal priority in the allocation of resource rights and management regimes, alongside the interests of human beings.

The Ocean in the Enlightenment

There are both divergences and resonances between Western and Maori ideas about the sea. When Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour arrived off the east coast of the North Island in October 1769 and brought the first Europeans ashore, for instance, the ship was a travelling sideshow of the Enlightenment in Europe, laden with a cargo of colliding cosmologies.

This was a scientific naval expedition, sponsored by the Royal Society of London to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti, and by the Admiralty to find Terra Australis, the Unknown Southern Continent. It is a mistake to think of the meetings that followed as binary clashes between two “cultures,” however. As at present, Maori and European ways of thinking alike were diverse.

One strand of Enlightenment thought, for instance, can be traced back at least as far back as the seventeenth century, when the philosopher Descartes had a new vision of reality, at once powerful and intoxicating. In his dream, the Cogito – the “thinking self” or Subject – became the eye of the world, which in turn became an Object for inspection.

The Cartesian division between mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), Subject and Object is historically and culturally specific. During the Enlightenment in Europe, as culture was separated from nature, the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences began to diverge (Descola 2013).

As entities were detached from each other, they were objectified and classified, and the different disciplines emerged. This “Order of Things,” as Michel Foucault called it, was at the heart of Enlightenment science (Foucault, 1970). It also shaped the law of the sea, and how forms of control were distributed over the ocean.

In this style of thinking, the ancient motif of the grid was used to divide and sort different dimensions and entities into bounded units, bringing them under control for practical purposes. Often, the grid was hierarchical – the old idea of the Great Chain of Being, for example, with God at the apex followed by angels, divine Kings, the aristocracy and successive ranks of people, from “civilized” to “savage,” followed by animals, plants and minerals in descending order (Lovejoy 1936, Hodgen 1971).

As the cogito or thinking self became the guarantor of being, the all-seeing “Eye of God” was replaced by the “Mind’s Eye,” and human beings were put in charge of the cosmos. Often, this was understood as a machine, made up of distinct, divisible working parts that performed particular functions.

In the mid-eighteenth century in Europe, the Order of Things went viral. Many aspects of life were transformed – administration (with censuses, surveys, and bureaucratic systems), industry (with manufacturing based on mechanization and standardization, the replication of parts and processes), and science (with the use of instruments and quantification, and the increased specialization of knowledge), for instance (Frängsmyr, Heilbron and Rider 1990). In the case of surveying, this was closely associated with military activities, and the scientific use of force (Edney 1994).

As it happened, Captain James Cook, the first European explorer to land in New Zealand, as a leading hydrographer, was in the vanguard of this way of reimagining the sea. Like his cartographic peers, he adopted an imaginary vantage point high above the earth – an “Eye of God” perspective.

In Cook’s charts, the ocean – grey or blue-green, the home of birds, fish and whales, surging with tides and currents, ruffling or roaring in the wind – was transformed into a static, white, two-dimensional expanse, gridded by lines of latitude and longitude and mathematically partitioned and measured.

Near harbors or lagoons, the depth of the coastal seabed was measured with the lead, and these soundings were recorded on his charts. Using a process of instrumental observation, the blurred, shifting liminal zone between land and sea was reduced to a simple line (Salmond 2005).

As Jordan Branch has recently argued, this process of cartographic simplification was intimately entangled with imperial power and the creation of the modernist nation-state. Except for scatters of islands, new stretches of the Pacific were depicted as vacant expanses, waiting to be explored, charted, claimed and ruled by European powers (Branch 2011).

At this time in Europe, the sovereignty of the Crown (or imperium) in Europe was held to extend about a league (three nautical miles) from the coastline, or within cannon shot, although property rights [dominium] could be granted within that limit (Bess 2011:87). Captain Cook had instructions from the Admiralty to claim any new lands he might “discover” for the British Crown.

At the same time, as Peter Hans Reill has remarked, one should not underestimate the diversity of Enlightenment thinking. In the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, men including Erasmus Darwin and Priestley, many of those involved in the Scottish Enlightenment, Buffon in France, Benjamin Franklin in America, and later the Humboldt brothers, understood reality as living networks of relations among different phenomena, animated by complementary exchanges – an account that has strong resonances with Maori and Polynesian thinking (Reill 2005; see also Israel 2006).

In this Enlightenment tradition – the Order of Relations, one might call it – people are just one life form among many, and the world is constantly changing. Ideas such as justice, truth, equality and honor, and balance and equilibrium suggested how exchanges – particularly among people – should be handled. Here one can find the origins of participatory democracy, and much of contemporary anthropology, earth sciences, cosmology, ecology and evolutionary theory. The World Wide Web and scientific ideas about complex systems and networks also trace back to this strand of modernist thought.

Not surprising, this diversity of views was reflected on board the Endeavour. In addition to his orders from the Admiralty, Cook had a set of “Hints” from the Earl of Morton, the President of the Royal Society, which acknowledged the legal rights of Pacific people to control their own lands and coastlines, and suggested how to describe in detail the people, places, plants, animals and minerals that they might encounter during their voyage around the world.

While Cook’s charts abstracted the land and sea, the journals, sketches and collections produced by the scientists and the ship’s officers restored them to life again, at least in part, with meticulous depictions of local people and landscapes, canoes and fishing gear, different species of fish, as well as currents, tides and the temperature of the ocean (Salmond 2004).

During the Endeavour’s circumnavigation of New Zealand in 1769-1770, these divergent strands in Enlightenment thought – as reflected in the Admiralty orders and the Earl of Morton’s “Hints” in particular – helped to shape what happened. The presence of Tupaia, a brilliant man later described as a “genius” by Georg Forster, also powerfully shifted the dynamics of these encounters. A high priest from one of the homelands of Maori, he was quickly able to master the sound shifts between Maori and Tahitian, and speak with the local people.

The warriors who came out in their canoes to challenge the ship were unsure what this bizarre apparition might be. In Turanga, for instance, the first harbor visited by the Endeavour in New Zealand, the people thought this might be Waikawa, a sacred island off the end of the Mahia peninsula, floating into their harbor. Nevertheless, they used their own time-honored rituals for challenging the strangers, performing wero [ritual challenges], karakia [incantations] and haka [war dances].

While Cook followed his Admiralty orders and took possession of New Zealand, marching the marines ashore to set up a British flag, he also followed the “Hints” by negotiating with Maori, using Tupaia, the Ra’iatean star navigator, as his interpreter. When the first encounters on land and sea ended in shootings, Cook was bitterly chagrined.

There were many such clashes around the coastline of New Zealand. When the Endeavour arrived at Waikawa, for instance, off the end of the Mahia peninsula, a sacred island and the site of a school of ancestral learning, priests chanted and warriors in canoes threw spears at the hull of the Endeavour. As they sailed across Hawke’s Bay, flotillas of canoes came out, led by elderly chiefs wearing fine cloaks, chanting, making speeches and brandishing their weapons, preventing the Europeans from making a landing.

When the Endeavour headed north and arrived in the Bay of Plenty, a large canoe carrying sixty warriors came out from Whangaparaoa in Te Whanau-a-Apanui waters, and circled the ship, a priest reciting incantations as the crew performed a war dance. They cried out, “Come to land and we will kill you,” paddling at high speed to attack the Endeavour and stopping only when a volley of grapeshot was fired beside their canoe. When a cannon loaded with round shot was fired overhead, they fled back to the land.

As one can see, there is a strong continuity between Rikirangi Gage’s presence on board the San Pietro and their confrontation with the oil drilling ship, and these earlier clashes in which Te Whanau-a-Apanui defended their mana(ancestral power) over their tribal waters.

On the whole, Captain Cook respected these challenges, retorting with warning shots rather than shooting the warriors. The Earl of Morton had insisted that people in these new lands had the right to defend their own territories, including their coastal waters. Later, this same understanding underpinned the promise in the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi that Maori would enjoy “full, exclusive, undisturbed possession of their Fisheries and other properties… so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession.”

It was not until quite recently in New Zealand (in 1965) that the Crown’s sovereignty was formally extended out to three miles from the coast, to twelve miles in 1977, and in 1982 under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (or UNCLOS) out to 200 miles, defining an oceanic “Exclusive Economic Zone” that the Government sought to defend against Whanau-a-Apanui and Greenpeace protestors.

Thus in very recent times, the high seas or mare liberum¹ – that part of the ocean which falls outside the Exclusive Economic Zones, an expanse free to all nations but belonging to none – has been shrinking, as nation-states expand their terrestrial sovereignty out from their coastlines – a kind of oceanic enclosure. As we have seen, such cartographic visions of the ocean embody particular assumptions about the world. This atomistic, quantifying, abstracting, commodifying logic is still unfolding.

This cosmo-logic fragments the sciences, detaches people from “the environment” and makes the well-being of other life-forms contingent. It therefore is not particularly successful at understanding or safeguarding the vitality of those intricate socio-biophysical systems in which human beings participate, and on which their own well-being and futures rely.

In New Zealand, as in other situations where the government has sought to commodify and privatize resources formerly held in common, Maori have reacted by challenging the Crown’s right to make these decisions. As Alex Frame, a law professor in New Zealand, has observed, under the Treaty of Waitangi:

The commodification of the “common heritage” has provoked novel claims and awakened dormant ones…Claims to water flows, electricity dams, airwaves, forests, flora and fauna, fish quota, geothermal resources, seabed, foreshore, minerals, have followed the tendency to treat these resources, previously viewed as common property, as commodities for sale to private purchases. Not surprisingly, the Maori reaction has been, if it is property, then it is our property (Frame 1999:234).

The Foreshore and Seabed

It would be possible to examine the unfolding of this logic with the quantification of fish stocks in the fisheries quota system in New Zealand, for instance, which provoked one of the first claims to the Waitangi Tribunal. Here, however, I will focus on the confrontations between many Maori and the Crown over the foreshore and seabed, since this forerunner to the clash between Te Whanau-a-Apanui and the Crown also illuminates complexities in contemporary debates about the commons.

The foreshore and seabed saga began in the Marlborough Sounds, at the northern end of the South Island. Although the local tribes had repeatedly applied to the local District Council for licenses to farm mussels in their ancestral rohe (territory), none were granted. Finally in frustration, they finally applied to the Maori Land Court to recognize their customary rights over the foreshore and seabed in the Sounds (Bess 2011:90-93; Boast 2005).

In Maori ancestral practice, the foreshore is a fertile place. At the time of the Treaty, clans and families moved from gardens and forests to wetlands, sandy beaches, rocky reefs and out to sea in seasonal migrations, maintaining relations with a complex mosaic of fish, plants and animals, and harvesting at peak times of plenty. Particular groups held nested use rights to particular resources at particular times of the year, creating overlapping, shifting networks of rights that crossed the shoreline, binding people, land and sea together.²

According to English common law in 1840, on the other hand, land and sea were divided at the high tide mark, and subject to different regimes of control. On land, the Crown held the right of imperium or sovereignty, whereas dominium or ownership was generally held as private property; whereas at sea, it was assumed that the Crown held both imperium and dominium, at least as far as three miles offshore, unless it had granted the right of ownership to other parties.

When land began to be surveyed, partitioned into bounded blocks and sold in New Zealand, the government and European purchasers alike generally assumed that if they bought coastal land, they owned it to the high tide mark, but that the foreshore or tidal zone and the seabed belonged to the Crown.

From the beginning, Maori contested this assumption, which clashed with the Article 2 Treaty promise about their control of ancestral fisheries. But in 1963, when the Court of Appeal ruled in a case over the Ninety Mile beach that customary rights to the foreshore had been extinguished when the Native Land Court had issued title to coastal land, the matter was assumed to be legally settled.

The application of the Marlborough iwi to the Maori Land Court overturned that legal precedent, however. The judge held that the legislation cited by the Attorney General, including the Ninety Mile Beach case, had not in fact extinguished the customary rights of the Marlborough iwi.

The case was appealed, and then referred to the High Court, where the judge reversed the ruling, and then to the Court of Appeal, where the judges ruled unanimously that upon the signing of the Treaty, the Crown had acquired only a radical right or imperium over the sea with the acquisition of sovereignty.

Citing the doctrine of aboriginal title, they ruled that unless the rights of dominium had been legally extinguished, they remained with Maori kin groups, and that this was also the case with the foreshore and seabed. Furthermore, they argued, the distinction in English common law between land above the high water mark, and land below it, did not apply.³

As Judge Elias said, “The common law as received in New Zealand was modified by recognized Maori customary property interests. There is no room for a contrary presumption derived from English common law. The common law of New Zealand is different.” The judges referred the case back for the Maori Land Court to determine whether or not the Marlborough iwi had customary ownership of the foreshore and seabed in their ancestral territories (Elias, S, in the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, CA 173/01).

By this time, however, most New Zealanders took it for granted that, apart from riparian rights, the foreshore and seabed were owned by the Crown, and the decision caused a furor. Over the generations, many non-Maori New Zealanders had also formed close ties with particular beaches and stretches of coastline, echoing an ancestral Maori habit of setting up summer fishing camps by heading to beaches and coastal camping grounds, and spending a great deal of time fishing, diving, surfing and sailing.

Although some Maori leaders insisted that they only wished to exercise kai-tiakitanga or guardianship over the foreshore and seabed, and not treat them as private property, others were clearly interested in commercial possibilities, and claimed property rights in the ocean. Fearing that their relationship with particular beaches and harbors would be severed, and their recreational as well as commercial interests in these places would be lost to Maori, many non-Maori New Zealanders were incensed by the Court of Appeal’s decision.

Again, this was not strictly an ethnic confrontation. None of the Court of Appeal judges, for example, were Maori. Nevertheless, public anger was such that in 2004, the Government hastily passed legislation to ensure that the foreshore and seabed would be owned by the Crown, with open access for all, subject to various regulatory restrictions and acknowledging Maori customary interests (but not allowing this to be translated into freehold title).

When a hikoi (march) of thousands of Maori protesters marched on Parliament, they were dismissed by the Prime Minister as “wreckers and haters,” a comment that hurt and horrified many of the elders who participated.

In the aftermath, however, as different iwi signed Treaty deeds of settlement with the Crown, anger on all sides gradually cooled (Palmer 2006:197-214). When a new Government formed a coalition with the Maori Party, which had been created in protest against the Foreshore and Seabed Act, in 2010 new legislation gave Maori further customary (but not freehold) rights to these areas, while protecting public access and enjoyment by defining the foreshore and seabed as “public domain” (Bess 2011:92-93).

Out at sea, on the other hand, the Crown reserved its right to allocate oil and mineral licences, without public participation. By the time that Te Whanau-a-Apanui’s fishing boat confronted the Orient Explorer, they had many non-Maori supporters who shared their fears for the future of the ocean. In October 2011 when a container ship the Rena ran aground on a reef in the western Bay of Plenty, it seemed that they had been prescient. A cargo including hazardous materials, fuel oil and diesel spilled into the sea, causing widespread environmental and economic damage.

“Tie the Knot of Humankind”: Experiments Across Worlds

As one can see, in New Zealand, fundamentally different onto-logics about human relations with the ocean have proved very resilient. At the same time, there have been significant transformations, both to Maori ideas and to modernist thinking.

In the law, for example, at different times, the doctrine of continuity in relation to Maori rights has transformed English common law by the incorporation of Maori customary law. As Sian Elias, now the Chief Justice of New Zealand, put it succinctly, “The common law of New Zealand is different.” One can see this in many New Zealand laws that cite tikanga (ancestral conventions), whether in general or in particular,⁴ including those recent laws giving effect to those Waitangi settlements in which ancestral rivers and stretches of land are recognized as beings with their own legal rights.

At the same time, while particular tikanga may be cited in legislation, their content has often fundamentally shifted. One can see this in the case of kai-tiakitanga, for example, once exercised by non-human beings such as sharks and stingrays over particular ancestral stretches of the ocean. Today, a more anthropocentric version is common, with people regarding themselves as kai tiaki (guardians) of these places.

On the other hand, the assumption that with the signing of the Treaty, sovereignty was transferred to the British Crown, has not been seriously disturbed, despite many challenges, since this provides a fundamental scaffolding for legal processes in New Zealand.

In relation to the sea, this means that mechanisms such as mataitai and taiapure, where Maori kin groups either exercise or share limited rights over coastal subsistence fishing with other community members, operate within strict limits. For example, Ministers appoint tribal “representatives” to management groups and require that their arrangements not clash with commercial fishing rights.

Simultaneously, however, the idea of the “Crown” itself has also altered, so that any pure opposition between Maori and the Crown is now difficult to sustain. For many years in New Zealand, Maori have been lawyers and judges, officials, members of Parliament and Ministers. In fact, it was a Maori Minister of the Crown, Matiu Rata, who helped to set up the Waitangi Tribunal.

Again, the relation between iwi and the Crown is structural rather than strictly ethnic, and this is played out in fisheries management as well, with non-Maori as well as Maori managing fishing quota for iwi according to strictly commercial principles; while in mataitai and taiapure, the management of customary fishing is usually shared with non-Maori community members (Jacobson and Moller 2009).

At the same time, some non-Maori New Zealanders now speak of themselves as kai-tiaki or guardians for rivers, beaches and endangered species. As Maori terms increasingly shift into Kiwi English, both European and Maori ways of thinking are being transformed.

This holds promise for the future, because in relation to the sea, experiments of this kind are urgently needed. In New Zealand as elsewhere, a radical division between Nature and Culture, born of one strand of modernist thought, and the belief that Nature is there for human beings to exploit without limit and that any damage can be fixed, is fundamentally disruptive to relations between people and the ocean.

While surfers, swimmers, divers and fishers still frequent our beaches and coasts, and sailors still cross the Pacific, their activities are increasingly at risk from water-borne pollution, sedimentation, over-harvesting of reefs, shellfish beds and fisheries, and the intense storms, acidification and current shifts driven by climate change, for example.

Contemporary scientific models, with their fragmented partitions, and the split between Nature and Culture with its deep separation between people and other phenomena (also born of the Order of Things), are flawed. They fail to adequately grasp the cascading dynamics of complex systems in which people are implicated at every scale, putting the future of many marine species andcoastal human communities at risk.

Ideas of the commons do not always escape these limitations. In New Zealand, these play out in complex ways, sometimes to oppose Maori claims to fisheries or waterways (“No one owns the water!”), whose control may then be privatized – but also to forge alliances with Maori kin groups (in the case of the San Pietro, for example) to try and prevent extractive activities that seem too damaging or dangerous.

Until people grasp that their being and that of the sea are bound together, they will not demand that human activities that put our futures at risk are conducted within survivable limits. We need new ways of thinking about the shifting relations between people and the ocean – and indeed, all the intricate biophysical systems of which human beings are a part.

In New Zealand, deep resonances may be found between relational thinking from the Enlightenment (including the commons); Maori ideas of complex networks that bypass Cartesian divisions between subject and object, mind and matter, society and nature; and the contemporary science of complex systems. These convergences may help to incubate some new ideas about the ocean.⁶

Just as the physicist Niels Bohr drew upon Asian conceptions to grasp quantum theory, or Marcel Mauss reflected on the Maori idea of the hau to imagine alternatives to a commodified world, such cross-philosophical experiments (and not just in New Zealand) might help to engender new kinds of environmental science.

They might also foster ideas of the commons based on complex systems – those intricately entangled, cascading, dynamic, interactive networks among people, and between people and other life forms at different scales – and legal arrangements in which rivers and the ocean have their own being and their own rights.

As my mentor, Te Whanau-a-Apanui elder Eruera Stirling, used to chant:

Whakarongo! Whakarongo! Whakarongo!

Ki te tangi a te manu e karanga nei

Tui, tui, tuituiaa!

Tuia i runga, tuia i raro,

Tuia i roto, tuia i waho,

Tuia i te here tangata

Ka rongo te po, ka rongo te po

Tuia i te kawai tangata i heke mai

I Hawaiki nui, i Hawaiki roa,

I Hawaiki pamamao

I hono ki te wairua, ki te whai ao

Ki te Ao Marama!

English Translation:

Listen! Listen! Listen!

To the cry of the bird calling

Bind, join, be one!

Bind above, bind below

Bind within, bind without

Tie the knot of humankind

The night hears, the night hears

Bind the lines of people coming down

From great Hawaiki, from long Hawaiki

From Hawaiki far away

Bind to the spirit, to the day light

To the World of Light!

References

• Bess. 2011. “New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi and the Doctrine of Discovery: Implications for the Foreshore and Seabed.” Marine Policy 35:85-94.
• Blomley, Nicholas. 2003. “Law, Property and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey and the Grid.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(1):121-141.
• Boast, Richard. 2005. Foreshore and Seabed. Wellington: LexisNexis.
• Branch, Jordan. 2011. “Mapping the Sovereign State: Cartographic Technology, Political Authority, and Systemic Change.” PhD thesis in Political Science, Berkeley.
• Brookfield, F.M. 2004. “Maori Customary Title in Foreshore and Seabed.” New Zealand Law Journal 34(1).
• Colenso, William. 1887. “Ancient Tide Lore, and Tales of the Sea.” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 20:418-22.
• Cox, Michael, Arnold, Gwen, and Tomás. 2010. “A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Ecology and Society 15(4):38.
• Descola, Phillipe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Devathasan, Anna. 2013. “The Crown Minerals Act 2013 and Marine Protest.” Auckland University Law Review 19:258-263.
• Diaw, Mariteuw. 2008. “From Sea to Forest: An Epistemology of Otherness and Institutional Resilience in Non-Conventional Economic Systems.” http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/312/diaw.pdf?sequence=1
• Edney, M.H., 1994. “British Military Education, Mapmaking, and Military ‘Map-mindedness’ in the Later Enlightenment.” The Cartographic Journal 31:14-20.
• Frame, Alex. 1999. “Property and the Treaty of Waitangi: A Tragedy of the Commodities?” In Janet McLean, editor. Property and the Constitution. Oxford: Hart Publishing: 224-234.
• Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things. London: Tavistock.
• Frängsmyr T., J.L. Heilbron and R. Rider, editors. 1990. The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Grotius, Hugo, translator. Ralph Magoffin. The Freedom Of The Seas: Or, The Right Which Belongs To The Dutch To Take Part In The East Indian Trade. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Henare [Salmond] AJM. 2007. “Taonga Maori: Encompassing Rights and Property in New Zealand.” In A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell, editors. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. 47-67.
• Hill, Marika. 2011. “Police Make Arrest on Protest Ship.” Stuff NZ, April 23.
• Hodgen, Margaret. 1971. Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Israel, Jonathan. 2006. “Enlightenment. Which Enlightenment?” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(3):523-545.
• Jacobson C., and H. Moller. 2009. “Two from the same cloth? Comparing the outcomes of Mtaitai and Taipure for delivering sustainable customary fisheries.” He Khinga Rangahau No. X. Dunedin: University of Otago.
• Lovejoy, Arthur. 1936. The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea. Boston: Harvard University Press.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West Ltd.
• Palmer, M. 2006. “Resolving the Foreshore and Seabed Dispute.” In Raymond Miller and Michael Mintrom, editors. Political Leadership in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 197-214.
• Ranapiri, T, 1907. Letter to Peehi (Elsdon Best), 23 November 1907, p. 2, MS Papers 1187-127, in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Anne Salmond, translator.
• Reill, P.H. 2005. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley, California. University of California Press.
• Rimini, Tiimi Waata. 1901. “Te puna kahawai i Motu.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 10(4):183-190.
• Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. “Hierarchy and Humanity in Polynesia.” In A. Hooper and J. Huntsman, editors. Transformations of Polynesian Culture. Auckland. The Polynesian Society.
• Salmond, Anne. 1992. Maori Understandings of the Treaty of Waitangi, F19, for the Waitangi Tribunal, Muriwhenua Land Claim.
• —– . 2004. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas. London: Penguin.
• —– . 2005. “Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different: European and Tahitian Navigators in the 18th Century.” In History and Anthropology,16 (2):167 – 186.
• —– . 2010. Brief of Evidence of Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond, WAI 1040, #A22, for the Waitangi Tribunal.
• Stirling, Eruera, as told to Anne Salmond. 1980. Eruera: The Teachings of a Maori Elder. Christchurch: Oxford University Press.
• Te Kohuora of Rongoroa, dictated to Richard Taylor. 1854. [The Maori text is in Taylor, Richard (1855), Te Ika a Maui. London:15-16.]
• Te Rangihiroa, Peter Buck. 1926. “The Maori Craft of Netting.” Transactions of the New Zealand Institute 56: 597-646.
• Thakur, Ramesh. 1986. “A Dispute of Many Colours: France, New Zealand, and the Rainbow Warrior Affair.” The World Today 42(12):209-214
• Schmidt, Jeremy and Mitchell, Kyle. “2014 Property and the Right to Water: Towards a Non-Liberal Commons.” Review of Radical Political Economics46(1):54-69.
• Te Whanau-a-Apanui. 2012. Statement of Te Whanau-a-Apanui, iwimaori.weebly.com/…/te_whanau_a_apanui_statement_16_may_2012
• Tregear, Edward. 1891. The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. Wellington: Lyon and Blair.
• Waitangi Tribunal. http://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/waitangi-tribunal/treaty-of-waitangi
• Waititi, Tweedie. 2011. Quoted in Sunday Star Times. April 24.
• Woolford, J. 2003. Judgment in NZ Police vs. Elvis Heremia Teddy, CRI-2011-470-00031 [2013, NZHC 432].
• Webster, Kerryn and Felicity Monteiro. 2013. “High Court clarifies jurisdiction over New Zealand ships on high seas, International Law Office.” http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.aspx?g=96970d24-7159-4b4c-b41f-71d8c0f58 

Anne Salmond (New Zealand) is a Distinguished Professor of Mori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. For many years she has worked with indigenous leaders and groups in New Zealand and the Pacific. As a writer, she has won many literary and academic awards. A passionate environmentalist, she has also led major ecological projects in New Zealand. In 2013 she was awarded the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s top scientific award, and was made the New Zealander of the Year.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by amg1994

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Fountain Of Fish: Ontological Collisions At Sea appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm, who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand.

Dominic is often offline, but he’s still able to use a social network to communicate with his friends such as James Halliday (a.k.a. substack), who is also often offline. James has also authored hundreds of npm modules, such as Browserify, and is building a shack with his partner Marina on top of 300-year old lava flows in Hawaii.

Dominic and James are a few key figures in a community of eccentric open source hackers gathering in a social network independent from mainstream internet. The unique properties of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) make it possible for digital information to spread easily even in the absence of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the internet’s backbone. What makes that possible is a decentralized protocol based on the mechanics of word of mouth.

Scuttlebutt is decentralized in a similar way that Bitcoin or BitTorrent are. Unlike centralized systems like PayPal or Dropbox, there is no single website or server to connect when using decentralized services. Which in turn means there is no single company with control over the network.

However, Scuttlebutt differs from Bitcoin and BitTorrent because there are no “singleton components” in the network. When accessing the BitTorrent network, for instance, you need to connect to a Distributed Hash Table (DHT, think of it as a huge round table where anyone can come and take a seat). However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881. These are very lightweight servers which simply introduce you to the DHT. They still depend on the existence of ISPs and the internet backbone. Also, those systems are concerned about public information. For instance, with Bitcoin, each peer stores the entire log of all transactions ever sent by anyone.

Secure Scuttlebutt is also different to federated social networks like Mastodon, Diaspora, GNU social, OStatus. Those technologies are not peer-to-peer, because each component is either a server or a client, but not both. Federated social networks are slightly better than centralized services like Facebook because they provide some degree of choice where your data should be hosted. However, there is still trust and dependency on third-party servers and ISPs, which makes it possible for admistrators of those to abuse their power, through content policies, privacy violations or censorship.

In Scuttlebutt, the “mesh” suffices. With simply two computers, a local router, and electricity, you can exchange messages between the computers with minimal effort and no technical skills. Each account in Scuttlebutt is a diary (or “log”) of what a person has publicly and digitally said. As those people move around between different WiFi / LAN networks, their log gets copy-pasted to different computers, and so digital information spreads.

What word of mouth is for humans, Scuttlebutt is for social news feeds. It is unstoppable and spreads fast. Once the word is out (just an arbitrary example) that Apple is releasing a new iPhone model, there is no way to restrict that information from spreading. A person may tell that piece of information to any of their friends, and those friends may in turn spread that information onwards.

With typical gossip, however, information deteriorates as it spreads and eventually becomes harmful rumor. Scuttlebutt on the other hand makes word of mouth securewith cryptography. Each Scuttlebutt account is comprised of simply two things: an append-only diary and private/public asymmetric crypto keys. An account’s identity is its public key. There are no unique usernames, because you can’t guarantee two people in separate places from choosing the same username, much like you cannot forbid the name “John Smith” to be given to a newborn in Canada if it is already taken by another person in Australia.

All information a person has published is registered in their diary. Public messages (like in Twitter) are the most common type of message in a diary, but you’ll also see “I am friends with that person” type of messages. To ‘send’ a private message to someone, I simply record a message in my diary, but encrypt it first, so the message isn’t plainly readable by anyone who gets their hands on a copy of the diary. Authenticity of diaries is preserved in that all diary entries reference the message that was written before, and then is signed. This prevents tampering and makes replication easier.

Every time two Scuttlebutt friends connect to the same WiFi, their computers will synchronize the latest messages in their diaries. Another way of synchronizing information is to connect to a common Scuttlebutt server, known as “pub”, set up by any member in the community. Pubs make information spread faster, and globally, but are totally dispensable. It’s even feasible to exchange latest news through sneakernet, using e.g. USB sticks.

This architecture is built so that network connections accurately represent the social graph and word of mouth. Typically with social networks like Facebook or Twitter, the network connections are centralized with their servers. The network architecture looks completely different to social architecture. Most users don’t care about this because the network architecture is invisible to them. However, it becomes a real problem once an authoritarian government or even the host company itself takes control over the network architecture in ways that disrupt the social architecture. It is not uncommon for a government to shut down a social network in a country for days/weeks, affecting how people communicate with each other. This has happened in Egypt, Cameroon, and Brazil.

With Scuttlebutt, the social graph is the network architecture, with peer-to-peer infrastructure accurately matching peer-to-peer interactions. It makes communication and the spread of information highly resilient, bringing improvements to freedom of speech with modern information technologies.

This peer-to-peer system has existed for more than two years and brought unique challenges and possibilities. For instance, unique usernames are impossible without a centralized username registry. On the other hand, this questions the need for a login system in the first place: why do you need to “enter” into the service? Scuttlebutt will not have a user registration flow, because such thing makes no sense in that world.

So far, the network has received a dedicated social network desktop app, a Soundcloud alternative, a Viewer webapp, and a git layer (putting “distributed” back into “distributed version control”). These work seemlessly together: a person using the git layer to push a commit will record that on their diary, which is visible also in the social network app, for their friends. Currently, the community is using this to “eat their own dog food”, coordinating team work and contributing code all on the same platform, without any intermediate company. GitHub being down will rarely be a problem for them.

The platform is being improved constantly, in areas such as: mobile support, an NPM alternative, WebRTC support for browser peers, and even legal transactions in New Zealand. It has proved to work as a platform setting the requirements and examples for a human-centered social network, as Dominic well described:

I wanted an open platform that anyone could build things on. (…) Also, we couldn’t realistically plan to just sit down and create an app that everyone wants to use, we need many experiments so that one can succeed, therefore we need a decentralized application platform more than we need any given a decentralized application.

To use Scuttlebutt, I recommend reading the ssb handbook.

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Stephanie Rearick:  Happy new year! (yeah, I know it’s a bit late but this too-long post took too-long to write! but you can take too-long to read it, there’s plenty of good stuff to be found)

I’m excited to see what big developments 2018 will bring, and expect that we’ll have some happy ones in MAN-land. There’s a convergence afoot among lots of likeminded people and their networks, all across the globe. And that’s all we need to remake this world. So let’s get on with it!

But first, some reflection on 2017…

I wrote much much less than usual in 2017, primarily because it was so extremely eventful and that eventfulness included breaking my shoulder (and other arm injuries from the same bike crash), and more recently getting tendonitis in my other arm while helping redo my roof.

So I’m trying to make up for some of that in this recap. Hope you enjoy it!

January we worked on proposals for hubs in the Madison MAN here at home.

February we decided to officially change our name from the Main MAN to HUMANs (Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks). Read more about that here.

Then we hosted another Summit.

We scheduled this to coincide with a visit from our friend Kali Akuno, of Cooperation Jackson. He and other friends were set to present at a public event called Resist & Build, of which Mutual Aid Networks was a sponsor. So we organized a summit around this event, and brought more of our active members and pilot stewards together for mutual learning.

A lot of very rich discussion and forward momentum happened here, and I’ve shared pictures of our whiteboards and shown where to find some notes here.

But now will note just one very lovely bit of serendipity –

Our friend Blair Anderson, a potential pilot steward in Detroit and generally amazing human and organizer, was in Chicago for a family memorial. The night before our summit’s last day, Blair suddenly felt called to come to Madison. He went and booked a bus at one in the morning, then got here early the next day. He called me in the morning to ask what was happening here, and I was able to invite him to our last day of workshops and planning.

Blair came and gave us a really beautiful and poignant history of his own family, through slavery, then chain gangs under Jim Crow vagrancy laws, then civil rights activism, to Black Panther leadership, to political imprisonment, to organizing new ways of thriving in this culture. And then introduced an incredible vision of making a mutual aid network that can provide meaningful sanctuary to people under threat for a variety of reasons, unfortunately the list of which grows daily.

This discussion spawned lots of new ideas and energy. And also inspired me to think of creating a Church of HUMANs (for real, I’ll share details later) and gain a fondness for the adjective “superversive.” Superversive incorporates, transforms and transcends all which comes before it. That’s the HUMAN approach to our economy.

Speaking of (needing) a new approach to our economy – In March we officially Ran Out Of Money. Well, it actually does hurt. But it is the way of getting all our (my) skin in this game. As the main person who has relied on Mutual Aid Network work for somewhat of a livelihood, it’s giving me a new urgency to making this work to support me doing what I feel called to do in this world.

April – I did a MAN tour of New Zealand!!! This one I did post about, a bit, as I went – in segments 1 and 2 (more photos here). And it resulted in a couple radio interviews you can hear here. But in a nutshell, I was given the most incredible opportunity to tour New Zealand for three weeks, with 11 different stops and hosts, at no monetary cost to myself. My hosts paid for my flight so I could speak at the Living Economies Expo (amazing!) in Lyttelton (home of the famous Project Lyttelton and Lyttelton TimeBank that did such fantastic work in earthquake relief after the 2011 quakes). Then Cherie Conrad put out word to cooperative economy leaders throughout the country and I was hosted for the rest of the time on an epic journey of learning and sharing experience, ideas and inspiration. I learned how they approach savings pools and was also able to show how MAN frameworks could turn savings pools into a more deliberate driver of equity. Tons of beautiful ideas emerged throughout the trip, and are taking form as Mutual Aid Networks of Aotearoa (MANA).

I returned home April 22 and a week later I broke my arm (left humerus right up by my shoulder) in a bike crash. Ouch.

May – The week after breaking my arm I flew to Barcelona Spain to present at the fourth International Complementary Currencies Conference. Actually, staying with 10 friends at a beautiful home in Barcelona was a fine place to recover from a freshly broken arm. And my presentation went well too, despite my awkward gesturing with a sling-bound arm… Here are the slides to the presentation I gave and here is the paper I wrote, Becoming HUMAN: Superversive Strategies in the Face of Fascism and Ecocide, in order to be able to present. Unfortunately I wrote the paper in a hurry so it isn’t academic enough in style and doesn’t have good citations in order to be publishable. But I do hope to keep working on the theme, and implementing the ideas. The gist is that, during this time of the US doubling down on corporate hegemony, private ownership and deregulation, Mutual Aid Networks are a form of corporation that should position ourselves to compete for the new economy and win by playing a smarter game that’s more fun and that includes everyone.

And speaking of smarter, I had the immense pleasure of meeting some of the people from Cooperativa Integral Catalana, a beautiful project I’ve heard about (in concert with Fair Coop, another favorite of mine) for years. I got to talk a lot with Joel, meet one of the coop’s founders, and tour their Barcelona space (photos from there). Here’s an article that p2p Foundation ran about them. Check it out! They’re great at integrating different sectors of a local economy to make a pretty self-sustaining system.

June we held a small MAN retreat and pilot exploration in Detroit and attended the Allied Media Conference.

During the conference we crashed the meeting of the Digital Stewards, a Detroit organization making mesh wireless networks owned and operated by neighbors, who also use them to create community communication systems. We plan to replicate this in Madison and beyond! We were also thrilled to connect with people from Red Hook Initiative in Brooklyn, who train in this and lots of other cool tech stuff. Hopefully we’ll work together in the future.

For our pilot exploration we held a discussion about how to move forward on a couple projects, including the sanctuary network that came up in our February summit, and a learning circuit between different pilot sites including St. Louis, Detroit, Jackson, and Madison. We had people from St. Louis, Madison, and Detroit, and laid the initial groundwork for a more future work in Detroit and between sites.

July 27 was an inauspicious day, when we lost the wonderful Cheri Maples to injuries she’d sustained in a bike/van accident the previous summer. The loss of Cheri was huge for me personally and for all of us professionally, and as humans. Cheri was instrumental in helping to start and run the Dane County TimeBank, and especially its various transformative justice efforts including the TimeBank Youth Court, mindfulness and NVC training in prisons, support for people coming home from prison, and timebanking in jails. This work was just one piece of a lot of interconnected, powerful, beautiful work in the world as a Dharma teacher (ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh) and former cop, corrections official, assistant WI Attorney General, and more. You can read more about her here.

Summer was spent building the Madison MAN Cooperative, for which we met weekly.

October I did a little MAN tour through Ohio and then Asheville NC. Ohio stops included Columbus, Youngstown, and Yellow Springs where I presented at the Economics of Happiness Conference hosted by Community Solutions, and also did a MAN exploration there. Lots of exciting possibilities, and the conference was cool.

Youngstown was an informal chat at the TimeBank Mahoning Watershed’s monthly movie night.

Columbus was particularly fruitful, and fortunately we solidified more of a relationship with the Care and Share TimeBank and especially Steve Bosserman, who has been helping a lot with Mutual Aid Platform software and way more. Here’s his report on the Columbus MAN developments:
“We gave a presentation at our September Care and Share Time Bank potluck to prep the audience for your program at the October Potluck on the OH-NC tour. Here’s a link to the presentation handouts.

Also, following your visit, we posted a summary of outcomes to our CSTB Facebook group in which we outlined ways we could bring CSTB more fully into the MAN experience. Here is the link to that post on Facebook and as a viewable Google Doc.

In addition, based on your tour visit, we are featuring MAN in a grant proposal to be submitted by the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio (IACO), Simply Living, and CSTB to the Ohio Humanities in March with a preliminary review next month. The purpose of that grant is to have faith groups, “nones”, and secular humanists convene a set of online and face-to-face conversations in the Columbus area to explore how we can move more aggressively toward a “time-based economy” rather than remain dependent on the prevailing monetary economy.”

Awesome!

Then I headed to Asheville NC at the invitation of our friend from the Impact Economy summit and Madison mapping summit, Paul Hartzog.

At the end of the Asheville trip Steve Cooperman took me to meet Kevin Jones, co-founder of SOCAP and champion of Impact Hubs, among other stuff. We had a quick and energetic chat about each of our work. He’s working toward making a long-term investment model for young people to invest in forests. I was able to show him the way MANs can create means for people with money to directly redistribute it, investing in communities with less access. He was intrigued enough to become my first-ever patron! Helping me with a regular donation toward my living expenses, Kevin got the ball rolling on the vision we’ve held for awhile, creating crowdfunded patronage that everyone can tap into. His generous support will be a good motivator for us to create a web-based template to accept contributions like this regularly, in all kinds of currencies and resources. Watch for it!

November – We incorporated the Madison MAN Cooperative, our multi-stakeholder cooperative which we intend to be our city-wide MAN pilot site!

And the next day I flew to LA and went straight to Santa Ana, about 40 min. south, to spend time with the amazing and wonderful Ana Urzua, one of my fellow BALLE fellows and powerhouse cooperative organizer, and her friends and colleagues. I learned some of what they’re doing with Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities and beyond, and we held a MAN pilot site exploratory discussion that was super exciting.

December 13 we held the official launch party for our Madison MAN Cooperative. And one of the first projects we’ve set up is to host a monthly gathering with food and childcare, to make it easy for people to drop in after work or whatever they need. We’ll partner with a founding member organization, Dane County TimeBank, to be at each other’s monthly events so that each of us can have a presence on both a weekday and a weekend each month. The point now is maximum accessibility and consistency so we can keep inviting people in and building our collective work. Stay tuned!

If you’ve gotten this far, you just read a long-ass post. (or skipped ahead. but that’s OK. You can always search keywords if you want to know about certain places, or bits of work, or you can read bit by bit or skip it altogether). Thanks for bearing with me!

Follow the links to learn more about each thing, and join us in our soon-to-resume office hours. And of course join the HUMANs global cooperative network.

And thanks for your interest, work, support, and everything else.

Enjoy your 2018!
–Stephanie

founder of this version of Mutual Aid Networks, Board President of HUMANs

The post Mutual Aid Network: an update appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We know, for instance, that we are more age diverse than we previously thought. While a third of our users are young (i.e., below 40 years old), nearly a quarter of us are 60 and above. Pew research has shown that messaging and decision-making apps are not popular amongst senior groups, so it is fantastic to see how well we are doing with senior demographics. We have also confirmed, as we suspected, that we are an (over)educated bunch of people; a full 75% of us have undergraduate degrees, and 40% of us have postgraduate degrees!

We also now know that Loomio is an important part of our decision-making media matrix. Over a third of us have reported that 50% or more of our group interaction takes place on Loomio, and about half of us report that Loomio is very important or absolutely essential compared to other digital platforms we use for group interaction.

The top three tools other than Loomio that we use to communicate are Email, Facebook and Texts or iMessages, with Whatsapp, Twitter, Skype, Telegram and Slack also being important complements.

Finally, we are beginning to get a detailed sense of what we use Loomio for. We asked you to tell us what sorts of issues your work connected with, and over 37% of all users so far have identified democracy and justice as central issues. Other critical issues for us include environmental issues, human rights, economic inequality, feminist and gender issues, sustainability, technology, and labour.

Over the next few months we expect to produce more fine-grained pictures of how we use Loomio and for what purposes, the organizing archetypes that drive this use, and how we feel about Loomio and its effectiveness.

There is still an opportunity to participate. If you would like to take the survey, please click here for the English version, and here for the Spanish version.

Photo by Kevin Doncaster

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Playing for Team Human today is Silvia Zuur. In 2012, Zuur founded Chalkle to reignite adult education in New Zealand. Today, Zuur serves as a director at Enspiral, a social impact network that builds community driven solutions for a diverse set of issues including education, funding, and cooperative organizing. Enspiral is famously home to Loomio, a cooperative founded 2012 to create more effective tools for collaborative decision-making. Zuur joins Douglas Rushkoff to talk about the value of open, people-focused organizing strategies and her efforts to facilitate sustainable solutions for positive social change.

Enspiral offers a number of resources from accounting strategies, metrics, apps, volunteer resources, and decision making tools on their ventures page.

Visit handbook.enspiral.com for a model on how Enspiral has structured their business. Enspiral also relates the details of both their successes and struggles on their blog, blog.enspiral.com.

Photo of Silvia by Andrew Fyfe

Enspiral Photo by Silvia Zuur

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The metaphysical reality that the law recognizes is one that remains quite alien to the western mind:  “I am the river, and the river is me.”  That’s how the Iwi express their relationship to the Whanganui; the two are indivisible, an utterly organic whole. The river is not a mere “resource” to be managed.

The idea of conferring of a “legal personality” on a river and explicitly guaranteeing its “health and well-being” is a major departure for Western law, needless to say. We westerners have no legal categories for recognizing the intrinsic nature of nonhuman living systems and how we relate to them ontologically. As if to underscore this fact, the practical legal challenges of defining and enforcing the rights of the Whanganui are far from resolved, notwithstanding the creation of a new legal framework.

Still, the law is an important start. It settles the historical claims on the river made by indigenous peoples, and it makes nineteen remarkable “acknowledgements” of the Crown’s behavior over the past century. The law even recognizes the “inalienable connection” of the iwi and hapū to the river, and tenders an official apology.

This latest episode in granting rights to nature is nicely summarized in a piece in The Guardian by Ashish Kothari and Shristee Bajpai of the Kalpavriksh Environmental Action Group in India, and Mari Margi of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in the US.

The new law does not alter the philosophical foundations of Western law, but it does constitute a notable opening of new metaphysical possibilities. A sacred, natural flow of water now has a legal right to participate in government policymaking and go to court!

And why not?  The money-making organizational form known as the corporation is every bit as much a legal fiction. Surely natural systems ought to be entitled to have a legal personality to protect themselves against the state and the legal person known as the corporation.

The Te Awa Puua Act achieves this by establishing an office of Te Pou Tupua to act as a trustee and “human face” for the legal person of the . Kothari et al. note that the trust structure for the Whanganui has “its origins in the Maori concept of kaitiakitanga or “commons” / guardianship.”

The New Zealand law follows in the footsteps of other nations that have recognized the rights of nature.  Ecuador was the first when it recognized the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth, in its constitution in 2008. Bolivia also did so a few years later. In the U.S., many communities have also recognized the rights of nature – although the legal enforceability of those rights, standing in the jurisprudential shadows of US federal and state law, is problematic.

In any case, the trend to recognizing nature’s rights seems to be gaining some momentum. A few weeks after the New Zealand law was enacted, according to Kothari et al., “a court in India ruled that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their related ecosystems have ‘the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities…in order to preserve and conserve them.’”

These grand declarations of law will require much addition work if they are going to have real impact. As Kothari and his coauthors write:

What does it mean for a river to have the rights of a person? If the most fundamental human right is the right to life, does it mean the river should be able to flow free, unfettered by obstructions such as dams? Does the right extend to all creatures in the river system? How can a river, with no voice of its own, ensure such rights are upheld or ask for compensation if they are violated? Who would receive any compensation? And can such rights undo past wrongs?

….How will [government] officials be responsible “parents” – as designated by the court – if their superiors continue to make decisions that are detrimental to the rivers, such as massive hydro-project construction? Can these officials sue their own government?

The limits of this approach have been seen in Bolivia and Ecuador, where enforcing nature’s rights in court have often encountered formidable opposition.

It seems that we stand at the threshold of a new field of jurisprudence whose terms remain uncertain because they are legally under-developed and still politically contested. But the problem goes deeper. The cold reality is that state law can only achieve so much without accompanying changes in social practice, personal beliefs and culture. These are arguably the bigger challenges ahead.

At least now there is a beachhead of legal precedent into which cultural energies can flow and develop. That’s progress!  Onward to the odyssey of changing the culture, and learning from the long struggles of indigenous peoples.

Photo by tewahipounamu

The post “I Am the River, and the River is Me” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Try: feminised politics, proximity, ecology and community. As we turn off ‘post-truth’ politics, face-to-face meeting, listening and community-building supported by safe technologies are some of the salves for human-scale democracy. While New Zealand is facing a national election, it’s worth considering other forms of democracy, namely engaged local politics, currently being called municipalism in Europe.

Jump to Barcelona in June — where 700 people from 180 countries converged in inaugural Fearless Cities summit on municipalism — organised by the current political movement, Barcelona En Comu.

If you’re not one for party politics, municipalism is attractive — it’s about designing a process of involving all citizens in the self-organising of their communities, towns or cities, not so much about creating new policies and group think from the top down. My interests: developing self-empowered societies, commons-building and in art processes that develop communities. After registering and paying 20 Euros online, I found myself connected to and hosted by the Corbella family who — mother, sister, son, father are all involved in the movement of people-driven democracy.

The summit was hugely powerful — not only connecting us to a major international network but giving visibility to residents, activists and councillors who have been elected from the ground up — from Europe and North America, Middle East and Africa, all encouraging us to continue work with people to eliminate fear that divides citizens. All the summit sessions can be found at You Tube here.

I attended sessions on non-state institutions, on sanctuary cities and on municipalism in towns and rural areas, thinking always, how might New Zealand might relate to this new movement?

Try these recurring themes from the summit:

1. Feminised politics. The new municipalisism is radicalising the process of representation and it is female-led. It will grow from those experienced in listening to their communities. Barcelona City Councillor, Laura Perez Castaño suggested that no matter how we look at it, women’s needs are different to men’s. Issues such as mobility and working hours are different for women and our political positions different. New Zealand knows about historic suffrage; and we should start to recognise the new community-driven leaders who are women.

2. Proximity is a key asset when it comes to municipalism. Having access to all the members of our small communities allows for genuine engagement. We talk about New Zealand’s ‘2 degrees’ social geography and this is powerful. The traditional elite have used proximity in recent times and it can be just as easily employed. Recommended reading: Joan Subirats on Proximity (included here the book Cities in the 21st Century).

3. Ecology and people are connected. Legendary Indian activist Vandana Shiva spoke about forests self-organising and that the natural state for people too is also to self-organise within their urban ecosystems. To quote US activist Debbie Bookchin, “We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy.” We know this in New Zealand: the mauri of the land is connected to the mauri of the people. That means the people and land stay well together.

4. As community organisers, don’t rely on the mainstream media to reach your people or reflect your community. Organising at community level is the way to connect where you are dealing with people at a personal level. It’s time consuming -get used to it. Barcelona En Comu was largely ignored by the TV and newspapers until the election. Trust your community networks and not the media.

Leading European examples

Barcelona En Comu started out as movement of self-organising groups and Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau is one of the more public faces of it. Back in 2014 she was part of organisation, Platform for Mortgage Victims, working to stop people being evicted from their homes by banks.

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau at #FearlessCities

Connecting with other groups, the Platform members became more politically active when they realised that it wasn’t just about tackling banks — that public institutions had to change too. Running for Barcelona Council, initially under the banner Guanyem Barcelona (We will win Barcelona) they didn’t meet in secret or in members’ sitting rooms. They held meetings in the squares, in the streets, and in all neighborhoods. For more history see this Guardian piece How to win back the city.

Although Barcelona en Comu evolved to become a political party, their connection between the people and political process continues fluidly. Oriol Corbella, one of my young hosts, sent me a message as he was attending a recent meeting in his neighborhood with the elected members of Barcelona En Comu, reporting back after two years in Council. He described how the room was separated into five circles (each circle a subject), with the respective politicians explaining “the goals we had accomplished, the difficulties and the future. There are many difficulties for the ones in government to communicate what they do to the people from the party.” But intention is there.

Participatory democracy is fast-shaping the operations of other local governments over Europe, and it may be that smaller towns are easier to manage than cities. At the session Municipalism in towns and rural areas I learned that in the UK, in Buckfastleigh, Devon, Pamela Barrett, Mayor of Buckfastleigh, was elected once her community collectively developed 8 new initiatives and Council raised rates by 1 pound a week (equating to an 100% rise) without backlash. Buckfastleigh runs its meetings in football clubs, in parks and the streets, and allows members of the public to contribute in a Roman-style ‘polis’.

In Torrelodones, Spain, Marina Vicen, Councilor for Youth and Education, spoke of how the Council has established a drop in centre to deal with issues immediately — same day if possible.

In Celrá, we heard from Mercè Amich Vidal, Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), Councilor for Youth and Equality at Celrà City Council where their constituency asked them to ring the elderly residents every morning to wish them good morning and will check-in on them personally if they don’t respond. They call this the Bon Dia service.

In Celrá, 10o% of local budget (outside of Council staffing) is allocated participatorily. The town has since been trialing an online app — Celrà participa — which will assist.

Municipalist Councillors from Spain and UK: Marina Vincen, Mercè Amich Vidal, Pamela Barrett

In London, the Right to the City campaign started before the UK general election and has similar principles to municipalism, with a certain pick up especially since the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. Yet it feels as if class and power issues could take a while to be fully shaken from the English psyche — see Caroline Molloy’s damning piece on UK local politics.

Surely it’s possible for those of us in NZ to leave behind the colonial psyche of ‘us’ and ‘them’?

New Zealand community-driven politics?

Our New Zealand local governments are generally approachable. I’ve found Councils responsive and Councillors increasingly open minded. In Wellington I often see our Councillors in community events, football games, coming readily to invited meetings through my varied involvement in several community-driven planning programmes. The organisation I co-direct, Letting Space, for example, has worked with Wellington City, as well as Dunedin City, Masterton District, and Porirua City on a platform for community voice — the Urban Dream Brokerage*, a place for all-comers to suggest good ideas for vacant city spaces.

And in terms of political advocacy the work of New Zealand organisation Action Station has begun to reveal the possibility of crowd-sourcing support for specific causes. It’s work is driven by what people want to see happen and has had huge effect in selected areas.

There are many groups who see themselves as legitimate voices of the land, and thousands of Friends’ groups who inadvertently become the main caretakers for the rivers, streams and wilder habitats of our country. Many of recent our environmental victories have been thanks to our nation of volunteers. Yet these groups are at arms length from politics. We’re just playing in the shallows with what is possible. We need to connect voice and ideas with real politics.

Perhaps we don’t perceive the need for radical transformation in New Zealand like those in bigger cities and countries. Perhaps we don’t perceive we have an issue with corruption or access to power.

And yet we still have major problems — hugely disempowered communities and those whose needs are not being met. We’ve seen the rate of homelessness at world-beating levels, of cities too expensive for average wage earners to live in, increased mental illness, youth suicide at record levels and huge disenfranchisement in society. Many of these problems lie in Central government policies. But some issues can be met in our local towns and cities.

With the majority of the New Zealand population saying they think that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about them, we need to find new ways for people to have a voice.

Political commentator Bryce Edwards suggests:

“The idea of participatory and decentralized ways of doing politics are particularly apt for contemporary New Zealand, because the political system has become the opposite of that — it’s currently very centralized and elite. Few people are involved in the political process, and power is highly concentrated. So, we desperately need to be talking about and trialing ideas like municipalism.

“Municipalism might well be a philosophy and practice tailor-made for contemporary politics in New Zealand…People are increasingly either disenchanted with how politics currently works, or at least highly suspicious about democracy and authorities in general. There is a backlash forming against the status quo of how decision-making occurs, and about who has the power. That means that people are particularly open to new ideas about running society — and so concepts like municipalism have a very good chance of resonating with a wide variety of people. It could indeed resonate with many of those on both left and right, with young and old, and with many different types of communities (rural, provincial, urban, etc).”

The movement toward municipalism in Europe tells us that it is at the local level that we can really address peoples’ needs. Cities and towns have more connection with our daily lives. It is not the direction that New Zealand has been heading with recent attempts at reforms.

What would full municipalism look like in New Zealand? Listening and working collectively requires open-mindedness. It would require people to put aside their cynicism and their egos. Would it be more Āotearoa hui-style politics that we adapt? It needs people who are disempowered being given the platform to speak openly and for those with more resource to listen and finding solutions together, from the ground up.

Could we imagine ourselves like Celrá, where our local Councils fund services that we ourselves have prioritised? Imagine — if it were not just our elderly but also the unwell and fearful being phoned every morning to see how they were. Could we imagine participatory budgeting at a large scale, to decide what we spent our money on?

Imagine regular, official Council meetings in our parks and squares (or vacant sites if the weather is bad) where our communities come to talk about their local needs for, say good local food, or cheaper activities or safer traffic and these were addressed directly by the neighborhood representative? Engaging Maori tikanga would be vital and important- hui are the ideal reference point for the practice of listening hearing each other.

Barcelona en Comu have a step by step guide about how to organise a municipalist driven culture. Is New Zealand is ripe for a truly people-led approach to politics?

For more writing on the Fearless Cities summit, I recommend fellow Wellingtonian Richard Bartlett’s snapshot How a Global Network of #FearlessCities is Making Racist Colonial Nation States Obsolete.

Author Sophie Jerram in Barcelona

*My experience has been in the transformation of space from private to public. We need more spaces to debate and meet in. We’ve witnessed first-hand the submission of hundreds of new ideas for public life. Often all is needed is space and encouragement.  has helped people launch ideas, taught new skills, redistributed resources, connected property owners with creative makers, and moreover given people the chance to practise their ideas in public space free of commercial pressure. I’ve been in Europe talking with the local city of Helsingør about how this ‘radical’ programme handing over spaces to people with ideas could be adapted to Danish life.

*

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

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