This is a story about people who build their own machines. It’s a story about people who, due to necessity and/or conscious choice, do not buy commercial equipment to work their lands or animals, but who invent, create and adapt machines to their specific needs: for harvesting legumes, for hammering poles, for hitching tools onto tractors.

The machines are just one part of our story, and this article will talk about encounters between people, tools and knowledge and it will take us to various places: Paris and Renage in France, Pyrgos and Kalentzi in Greece, and Tallinn in Estonia.

Let us begin our journey in Greece. In Pyrgos (southern Crete), there is a small group of people called Melitakes (the Cretan word for ants) interested in seed sovereignty and agroecology. It is a group that cares about organic farming and that tries to form a small cooperative. One of the things the group does is to plant legumes in between olive-trees or grapes. While olive trees are abundant in Greece, the land in between individual trees is usually not cultivated due to the distance necessary to avoid shading and foster the growth of the trees. So the idea was quite simple: use the unused land. However, the members of the group soon faced a specific problem: it’s hard to harvest legumes by hand and there are no available tools to do this arduous job in a narrow line between olive trees. On the market, there are only big tractor accessories, suitable for such a job, and only for large crops. That is why the group sought the help of a friend in a nearby village, a machinist, to help them out. He liked the idea. He saw it as a challenge and started to develop a tool (see picture 1). At that time, there were no concrete ideas or talks of ‘open sourcing’ the tool and of ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) practices. The situation was rather a pragmatic one: ‘there is a need for a machine that does not exist in commerce, we need a person to build it… and that’s what we did, supporting that person as much as we could, during the process’.

DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Several weeks later, the two authors of this article met in Paris: Alekos, who knew about his compatriots who built the legume-harvesting machine met Morgan, who knew about l’Atelier Paysan, a French cooperative specialized in the auto-construction of agricultural equipment, based in Renage. Alekos explained his plans: carrying out his PhD at Tallinn University of Technology on convivial technologies, getting to know l’Atelier Paysan, and ‘implementing’ some ideas in Greece through creating a makerspace for building agricultural tools within the framework of an EU funded programme called Phygital. Morgan explained the trajectory of his research on/with l’Atelier Paysan: his involvement in a collaborative project on user innovation since 2015 and his analysis of l’Atelier Paysan through looking at the politics and materialities of open source technologies in agriculture. After their discussion about theoretical approaches, methods, concepts and fieldwork, it was time for Alekos to meet l’Atelier Paysan ‘on the ground’ by participating in a 5-day workshop to build two tools for organic grape crops.

Alekos gained several kinds of knowledge via the workshop. Practical knowledge on working with metals, cutting, and welding. He also gained theoretical knowledge from l’Atelier Paysan: its organizational structure, the problems faced (and how they are solved), the financial setup and how to run workshops (see picture 2).

Construction of the charimaraîch (a wheelbarrow/wagon adapted for market gardening). Source: l’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is one of the few collectives specialized in such activities (other notable collectives being Farmhack and Open Source Ecology). L’Atelier Paysan has developed a range of practices and tools for ‘liberating’ agricultural tools: a website, workshops, a book, video tutorials, and open-source plans. In their recent article, Chance and Meyer (2017) have analyzed l’Atelier Paysan by retracing their history and form of organization, studying how they enact the principles of open source in agriculture, and by describing their tools within their economic and political context.

When Alekos got back in Greece, he visited the Melitakes group again. He explained how l’Atelier Paysan works – its practices, philosophies, and ethics – and the various tools that have been designed and built. While thinking about the future development of Melitakes’ tool and its possible diffusion through some of the standards developed by l’Atelier Paysan, the collective faced a new problem: none of them was a mechanical engineer. None of them thus could draw the design of the components of the legume harvesting tool in situ. Yet this was a crucial step for digitizing the design and making it accessible online. So they sought the help of architects for how to best illustrate each part of the machine. Subsequently, they dismantled the tool, took photos of each component (more than 300 photos in total) in the correct angle (90 degrees) and with a tape measure visible on each photo. They also used big pieces of paper to trace some complicated parts (see picture 3). And they started looking for persons who, based on the pictures and imprints, would be able to (digitally) draw the mechanical design of the tool.

The plan, at the moment of writing this article, is to draw the plans of the tool, open source them by publishing them on the Internet under a Creative Commons type of license and then organize workshops to teach people to build it. So while the full story about the legume-harvesting tool has yet to be written, some features can already be told: a practical problem has been translated into a technical tool; this tool has been disassembled and photographed in order to make it ‘drawable’ and thus available via Internet. The hope, for the future, is that many more people, in many more places, will be able to build this tool, further improve it and share the improved design with the global community. But alongside the tool, something else will travel and be reinforced: the principles of agroecology and the practices of open source.

Imprinting of some complicated parts from the DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Our second story begins in a village called Kalentzi in Northern Tzoumerka region, Greece. The local community of farmers (called Tzoumakers) had another practical problem: finding an appropriate tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground. Several tools have been used for this task for ages. But not without its difficulties and dangers: there are farmers who climb ladders and hammer the poles, and others who climb on barrels to do the job. But the combined efforts of hammering the poles into the ground and, at the same time, maintaining one’s balance on the ladder/barrel proves difficult – plus, you need two people to do the job. That is why several local farmers and makers got together, tried to find a solution and set up a plan to build a tool that can do the job without the need for acrobatic moves by making it possible for one person to hammer the poles while standing firmly on the ground (see picture 4).

Testing the newly constructed tool for hammering fencing-poles from the Tzoumakers group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

The next phase, after the current prototyping of the tool, will be the design of a booklet that will include a detailed presentation, an explanation of the usefulness of the tool, a list of all the equipment and material needed, instructions for building the tool (and the risks thereof), drawings and pictures.

It is time, now, to move back to France and give more details about l’Atelier Paysan. The first tool construction workshops took place in 2009 by a group of innovative organic farmers that was eventually formalized and structured into the cooperative l’Atelier Paysan in 2014. At that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already begun situating its practices theoretically, by mobilizing various vocabularies and concepts (agroecology, open source, social/circular economy, common good, appropriate technologies, etc.) as well as various authors and academics (André Gorz, Jean-Pierre Darré, etc.). Active collaboration with several academics in the social sciences was sought from 2015 onwards.

By that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already perfected its general methodology: doing its TRIPs (Tournées de Recensement d’Innovations Paysannes / Tours to Make an Inventory of Peasant Innovations); developing tools via testing, prototyping, upgrading and realizing workshops; and ‘liberating’ the collectively-validated tools via publishing detailed plans and tutorials on the Internet. One of its most prominent tools is the quick hitch triangle, which replaces the usual three-point linkage between a tractor and the tool to be fixed behind it. For the quick hitch triangle, l’Atelier Paysan has produced a 10-minute video, taken many pictures, issued a 47-page booklet, drawn several plans – all of which are freely available on its webpage (see picture 5).

Design, making and testing the quick hitch triangle from the l’Atelier Paysan. Source: l’Atelier Paysan.

It is important to stress a key feature: it is not l’Atelier Paysan that develops new tools from scratch ‘in house’; rather, they actively look out for individual farmers’ innovations. Only thereafter, through collective construction work, after testing the tool in the field and various processes of representation (plans, pictures, videos), are the tools released. Put differently, while user innovations are already there, ‘in the field’, the role of l’Atelier Paysan is to collect, formalize and disseminate these innovations.

In Greece, the situation is somewhat similar: local peasants already have several ideas in mind for tools that they would like to materialize. The idea is now to continue building tools with the local community, a practice that is usually experienced as positive and empowering. Ideas – like seeds – need fertile ground. Yet, a model like the one from l’Atelier Paysan, cannot simply be copy-pasted to another country and another context unmodified: a thorough understanding of both realities is needed. For example, in Greece, there are no public funding streams available for such endeavors, and the specific plants, soils, and morphologies of the country also call for specific, locally adapted tools. Apart from the political and natural peculiarities, socio-cultural characteristics also differ. For example, farmers’ skills are not the same in Greece than in France, and the collective memory and experience of building cooperatives in Greece is different. The conditions under which people can cooperate have their local ‘flavours’ rooted in habits, perceptions and social imaginaries. Therefore, l’Atelier Paysan’s model can act as an inspirational starting point but needs to be adjusted through continuous local experimentation.

The final leg of our trip brings us back to our respective academic homes (in Paris and Tallinn), to our keyboards to write this article, and to the theorizations that we are currently working on. Our stories have been about the work – and sometimes difficulties – that go into transporting ideas, machines, practices, and knowledge from one site to another. This is not a simple move, it is not just a matter of copy-pasting an idea, a practice or a technology from one place to another. Ideas, practices, and technologies are not immutable objects, but they are, in a sense, ‘quasi-objects’. In order to move ideas and technologies, they need to be transformed, disassembled and reassembled, translated, represented, adjusted. It is only via a variety of interlinked actions – imagining, testing, photographing, drawing, theorizing, sharing, rebuilding – that objects can travel and multiply. For these technological devices to be open, ‘convivial’ and low-tech, they need to be opened up in several ways. Our argument is that this opening up is both a technical practice and a social endeavor. Our stories are thus not only about the practices of open sourcing agricultural tools, but also about the (geo)politics, ethics, aesthetics and collective dimensions thereof.

(Note: the authors of the article would like to thank Luis Felipe Murillo, Evan Fisher, Chris Giotitsas and Vasilis Ntouros for their suggestions and comments. Alekos Pantazis acknowledges financial support from IUT (19-13) and B52 grants of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, COST Action CA16121 project and the Phygital project which is funded via the Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg V-B Balkan – Mediterranean 2014-2020)

Lead Image: L’Atelier Paysan

The post Making, adapting, sharing: fabricating open-source agricultural tools appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Open source products are essential to build a more sustainable, fair and circular economy

Take a look at this project by some of the people in our network. If you’d like to support it, please click on this page to contribute.

How does open source creates social and sustainable impact? If we make products open source this will bring benefits in different manners:

1. Everyone has access to the knowledge and DNA of products, having the four freedoms of free/libre products(freedom of use, freedom to study the technology, distribute and improve).
2. It creates jobs because it lowers the costs to start a business by providing the necessary know-how to create local economic impact.
3. It facilitates the recycling and maintenance of products, because the knowledge of how it works and how it breaks is available for everyone (Which also helps to create employment opportunities).
4. It makes it easier for people to engage in sustainable consumption and in raising awareness of the value of products. The lack of awareness, or lack of knowledge with respect to where our products come from, how they are made, what is the ecological and sustainable impact they have restricts people from taking actions, changing behavior, etc.
5. It creates resilience and less dependence on fossil fuel value chains, by reducing the shipping of components to what is only necessary. For instance, instead of shipping a whole container of cars, parts can be shipped so that local manufacturers assemble the product.
6. All in all this brings global impact for the developing and developed world, and helps in creating a sustainable standards of consumption and production.

How you can help and What power do you have to make this possible?

You hold the power of the crowd. The more people join you, the less money each of us have to pay, share the burden and there will be no burden. Become a sponsor and ambassador of Open Source by donating and supporting. The more you donate to the common good the faster and healthier we will create impact.

Pay at least for one development hour and convince your friends to support this movement (9EUR, or 10.70USD). This is an hour for minimum wage in the Netherlands. If you think we deserve more than minimum wage feel free to add more.

Why pay for development hours? And why are we asking for 20000USD?

We have estimated for this project, based on our developer experience, 5760 hours. This is the equivalent of 3 persons fully employed working 40 hours per week for a year. Yo can also look at it as 6 persons working 20 hours a week for a year, or 12 persons for half a year committing 20 hours. This is the beauty of paying development hours, the more a developer works (well) the more he or she will get. To ensure quality of work we also want to open our partial results to the crowd, and have a forum to discuss technical challenges.

What we promise

• First of all we will give you a very nice perk: an ebook about open source, p2p and sustainable development made by us.
• We promise to work on this first print and deliver an increment of design and development as a prototype.
• Reflect on what limitations and opportunities we encounter along the development process with regard to developing and distributing open source designs of products like microwaves, ovens, fridges etc.
• Document and discuss the economic feasibility and contexts in which the development ,manufacturing, and distribution of open source products is sound and scalable.
• A channel to give feedback as well regarding the campaign, but also the project.

What we stand for:

• We want to design and develop open source home appliances, and most probably the next one will be a washing machine, or maybe a fridge. The point is to extend the portfolio of open source appliances.
• We want to establish as an open cooperative, dedicated to sustainable and social impact. An open cooperative is basically an ethical enterprise centered in solving human needs, and not centered on profit making.
• We are part of a broader community of open source and sustainability advocates pushing towards the democratization of technology as a driving force in sustainable development.

The post Open source appliances for sustainable development appeared first on P2P Foundation.

9 out of 10 startups fail in the first 3 years. This happens for many reasons: not the right time, not the right place, not the right team, not the right idea/solution, not the right context, and more…

The lack of quality of the solution is only in few cases the main reason. The solution might be good but the startup fails anyway for one of the others reasons. But when it has failed often the fully developed solution (a working prototype or even complete product) gets buried on some hard drives first and is lost a little later completely when those hard drives are buried. The entrepreneurs are busy with other things.

This is sad for sustainability reasons. Because a lot of time, money and energy has already gone into the development of the solution. Many technical problems were solved, many questions were answered. But this knowledge and the possibilities attached to it get lost on these buried hard drives. The progress that was made for sustainability is gone again.

Maybe the reason for the fail really was just bad timing and the same idea would work beautifully one year later or in another context. But the new team has to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel. And a lot of energy is already used up when they get to the point where the others have failed. This dynamic is really bad for sustainability where we need to be quicker and smarter. This is – as said – unsustainable itself.

So here is a simple idea for that: How about a fund where startups that have just failed or are about to fail go to and ask one more time for some last funding. They receive something between 5 000 to 10 000 Euros and this money is used to document the solution extensively and put it online under an open license – in short: they OPEN SOURCE it! Make it possible for others to study, build upon, distribute, make and sell the solution. To bring it to live after all.

The fund or institution behind it supports that process. It makes sure everything is done well, helps with the licensing questions and ensures that the data is well spread (on several platforms!) and promoted.

This could be fantastic! The solutions of dead sustainability start ups become humus for new ones:

(1) Some solutions really might get picked up by a new team with a fresh perspective.

(2) Often probably just parts get reused by other startups, for example the choice of materials or collected data.

(3) Maybe large companies pick up some solutions and end up becoming more sustainable.

(4) Even completely new ideas can be inspired and made possible for example when different solutions are combined with each other.

(5) Or maybe even the entrepreneurs themselves finally find a way to make their idea work with the opportunities of Open Source!

This “graveyard” of open sourced sustainability startups/solutions could be a fertile ground for a lot of new flourishing live and fruitful activities for sustainability.

For an institution or accelerator with the goal to support sustainability through startups this could be a very smart way and an opportunity to make more and more lasting impact. Sustainability is about opportunities for complex ecosystems!

How this would work in every detail is not for me to flesh out here. Whoever picks this up will have their own ideas anyway. But it is for sure an interesting path to explore! And I was really happy to learn in Milan, that within Climate-KIC the discussions if patents really make sense when we want to save the climate have begun! A real sustainable circular economy will only work with Open Source solutions and here we have a great angle to start this from. Instead of throwing things away (dead start ups) make sure they can be reused using Open Source.

And I just want to add that me and my colleagues from the OSCEdays and Opent It Agency are here to help with the “proper Open Source” part – here from Berlin to (literally) the other side of the globe (New Zealand).

UPDATE: The same idea in the program of the german party „Demokratie in Bewegung“

_______

Image Credits

1 – by Shantimarie, CC-BY-SA | 2 – by Andrew Dunn, CC-BY-SA | 3 a – SuSanA Secretariat, CC-BY | 3 b – by Tsaag Valren, CC-BY-SA| 4 – by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, CC-BY-SA | 5 – by S Molteno, public domain

Photo by Dru!

The post Turn Failed Sustainability Startups Into Fertile Soil (Humus) For New Ones – By Making Them Open Source appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This Commons Transition Special Report was written by Sharon Ede, a sustainability ideas transmitter, writer and activist working in Adelaide, Australia. Ede is also a co-founder of the Post-Growth Institute, one of Commons Transition’s most esteemed Partner Projects. We feel that the Post-Growth Institute’s work, specially their exploration of not-for profit business models, aligns with our own work on Open Cooperativism. These projects forge resilient livelihood strategies for commoners, a trend which is explored in this report. Going beyond issues of labor organisation, “The Real Circular Economy” also explores how and why we produce, paying special attention to prosperity, societal resilience, and the possibilities offered by relocalized production and desktop/benchtop manufacturing. This parallels the P2P Foundation and P2P Lab’s work on “Building the Open Source Circular Economy”, where we research and build upon global, open-access design repositories working in conjunction with on-demand, locally grounded and community-oriented micro-factories. This approach, known as “Design Global, Manufacture Local” is also explored in this report, making it one of the most complete, accessible overviews of P2P and Post-Growth economics.

As always, we’ve indexed the report. You can read it sequentially or jump to any of the sections below. You can also read the original in PDF format or consult the different sections and comment on the document in the Commons Transition Wiki.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ecological Footprint and Overshoot

Ecological Cities and Ecological Deficits

Fab Cities, Relocalisation of Production and The Future of Work

Post Growth, Circular Business Models and Not-For-Profit Business

The Real Circular Economy

Introduction

In recent years, the idea of a ‘circular economy’ has come to the fore as a way to tackle carbon emissions and waste. It has gained traction with thought leaders and jurisdictions around the world as a way to stimulate economic growth, foster innovation and generate employment.

The circular economy builds on concepts including zero waste, cradle to cradle and biomimicry. It is focused on creating economic value and reducing environmental impact through design, highest and best use of materials, and efficient use of resources and energy.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a leading authority on circular economy, defines a circular economy as:

…one that is restorative and regenerative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles[1].

How we design, make, use and manage things at the end of their useful life has enormous implications for everything from our demand on nature’s resources, our carbon impact, and the amount of waste we generate.

Efforts to crystallise and focus attention on creating a circular economy have created a huge awareness of, interest in and momentum for approaches that make a lot of environmental and economic sense. At the same time, a technological approach to the circular economy is necessary, but not sufficient, to get us on track for a secure future.

The principles[2] of a circular economy speak to material resources and our systems of managing them, however with a few exceptions, such as Douglas Ruskhoff’s call for ‘reprogramming our economic operating system’[3], Rammelt and Crisp’s ‘systems and thermodynamics perspective on technology in the circular economy’[4], and Christian Arnsperger and Dominique Bourg’s call for ‘perma-circularity’[5], there is little mention in contemporary circular economy debate of the wider milieu of economic, social and cultural systems in which a circular economy must operate.

Adopting a broader definition of ‘circular economy’ can help us build a sustainable, prosperous and fair society.

ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND OVERSHOOT

If it took Britain the exploitation of half the globe to be what it is today, how many globes will it take India?

 Mahatma Gandhi, 1908

The circular economy is primarily concerned with the flows of materials and energy, and it is often taken for granted that this circulation can happen within a growing economy. However, the demand for materials and energy needs to be considered in the context of the limits of a finite planet.

Materials can keep circulating through being designed for disassembly and remanufacturing, or kept in use longer through being designed for durability, but if the ‘circle’ or total demand for materials and energy keeps expanding, we have not solved our civilisation’s challenge.

When human demand on nature’s capacity exceeds what nature can supply, we are in a state of ‘overshoot’[6]. The level of overshoot is the amount by which nature’s biological capacity is being used beyond its regeneration rate – for example, overfishing or overharvesting, or emitting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and destabilising the climate.

The minimum, non-negotiable condition for a sustainable civilisation is to live within the means of nature – to avoid ecological overshoot.

This condition is at odds with the current development paradigm which dominates both economics and politics globally, that of continuous economic growth into the indefinite future. Historically, countries have sustained this growth by appropriating carrying capacity (resources, ecological services, waste sinks) from elsewhere on the planet through economic or military power, with waste (particularly CO2) being emitted into the global commons.

However this model of dependence on ‘ghost acreage’ ignores one simple reality – globally, not everyone can be a net importer of biocapacity.

Once the biological carrying capacity of the planet is exceeded, ‘development’ occurs through the liquidation of the planet’s natural capital stock, switching from the reproductive use of the resource base, which leaves it intact, to extractive use, which reduces the total store. Instead of living off the Earth’s ‘interest’, humanity begins eating into the Earth’s ‘capital’. Globally, we are liquidating natural capital and calling it economic growth. It is like ripping off parts of a house to use as firewood in order to keep warm.

Avoiding overshoot is not sufficient in and of itself for a prosperous, healthy society, but without it, sustainable civilisation is impossible.

All other human challenges are ultimately dependent on whether we sustain or undermine the resource base and the ability of ecological life support systems to function. The destructive and painful effects of economic collapse will pale into insignificance in the face of the consequences of ecological collapse.

How can we know if we are in overshoot? The majority of the resources people consume and the wastes they generate can be tracked, and most resource and waste flows can be converted into the biologically productive area required to maintain these flows.

The Ecological Footprint[7] is a resource accounting method and tool which measures how much biologically productive land and water area humanity uses to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management, wherever on Earth those bioproductive areas are located. It aggregates human impact on the biosphere into one number, a common currency of global hectares, or the bioproductive space occupied exclusively by a given human activity[8]. This allows comparison of supply (or biocapacity) with demand (the Footprint, or consumption) to determine whether we are in overshoot – or using more ‘nature’ than is available.

The Global Footprint Network maintains a series of biophysical accounts for over 200 countries, dating back to 1961. The Ecological Footprint account of each country is determined by a complex spreadsheet designed to enable calculation of a country’s per capita Ecological Footprint, and compare that number with the biocapacity of the country and planet. Official data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), and data from a range of other reputable international sources, form the basis of national Footprint accounts[9].

The spreadsheets, which comprise thousands of data points, track a country’s production, import, export and consumption of a vast range of commodities – including food and fibre crops, timber and fossil fuels – in biophysical units (or volume of material eg. tonnes) rather than monetary units, which only reflect market value, not availability in the biosphere. Each category includes both primary resources, such as raw timber or milk, and manufactured products that are derived from them, such as paper or cheese[10].  The Ecological Footprint accounting methodology is deliberately conservative, to avoid exaggerating the Footprint, and is therefore likely an underestimate. Footprint accounting also trade corrects – revealing where countries are ‘outsourcing’ impacts like greenhouse gas emissions[11].

The Ecological Footprint is an indicator, and indicators are sensors. To be effective sensors, they must incorporate feedback mechanisms about the limiting factors of systems, so that it the system knows how to react to impending danger. In this case, the limiting factor is the biological capacity of the Earth, and how much of it humanity is consuming.

Each year, the Global Footprint Network calculates Earth Overshoot Day – the day on which globally, humanity’s consumption (Ecological Footprint) exceeds what the Earth’s biocapacity can supply. The remainder of the year, we are in global overshoot.

Earth Overshoot Day is determined by dividing the planet’s biocapacity (the amount of ecological resources Earth is able to generate that year), by humanity’s Ecological Footprint (humanity’s demand for that year), and multiplying by 365, the number of days in the year[12]. In 2016, Earth Overshoot Day was 8 August[13] – on that date, we began exceeding ecological limits.

How can we be using more than nature is regenerating? Ecological limits can be easily exceeded – for a while, we can harvest more than what grows – creating the illusion that limits can be transgressed without apparent consequences. The reality is that overshoot eats into nature’s reserves, weakening its ability to regenerate.

The Global Footprint Network accounts show that humanity uses around 1.5 planets’ worth of bioproductive space, meaning the Earth takes one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. If population and consumption trends continue on their current trajectory, we will need the equivalent of two Earths by 2030. There are billions of people whose material living standard needs to increase, and many who wish to emulate consumerist lifestyles.

The defining question of our age is not whether we can achieve the impossibility of sustaining more than nine billion people on a western industrial model of development, but how to deliver prosperous lives for the global population within the regenerative biocapacity of one planet.

Sustainability is like buying a chair. There’s no question whether the chair should be strong enough to sit on or not. That’s the non-negotiable condition. The questions are: Do you want a red one, a green one, a wooden one, a metal one? But not whether the chair is strong enough.

Mathis Wackernagel, Global Footprint Network, San Francisco Enquirer, June 2001

This sustainability challenge will be won or lost in cities, which are now the most common human habitat, primary economic drivers, and the most powerful physical and political leverage points for change[14]. To win the challenge we need to build, and reconstruct existing cities, as ecological cities. Among many objectives[15], ecocities seek to ensure that cities’ demands on the Earth are within the Earth’s biological capacity.

ECOLOGICAL CITIES AND ECOLOGICAL DEFICITS

An Ecocity is a human settlement modelled on the self-sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems. The ecocity provides healthy abundance to its inhabitants without consuming more (renewable) resources than it produces, without producing more waste than it can assimilate, and without being toxic to itself or neighbouring ecosystems. Its inhabitants’ ecological impact reflects planetary supportive lifestyles; its social order reflects fundamental principles of fairness, justice and reasonable equity.

Ecocity Builders [16]

Right now, there is no city on earth that is an ecological city. Twenty-first century cities are the primary resource manipulators on the planet. They are a meta-technology – a technology that organises other technologies. But it is precisely because they are such powerful drivers of all kinds of activities that the way we build and live in cities is the key to addressing social and environmental impacts everywhere.

Urban design and density determines much of a city’s carbon profile, and creating and maintaining the built environment generates massive demand for resources:

…as much as a tenth of the global economy is dedicated to constructing and operating homes and offices. And dollar for dollar, this activity uses several times as much wood, minerals, water, and energy as the rest of the economy: buildings consume one sixth to one half of the world’s physical resources…buildings account for roughly 40 per cent of the materials entering the global economy each year: some 3 billion tons of raw materials are turned into foundations and walls, pipes and panels…

Nicholas Lenssen & David Malin Roodman, Worldwatch Institute[17]

In the mid-2000s, a University of Michigan study showed that human activity moved 10 times more soil than all natural processes combined[18]. In the mid-1990s, Herbert Girardet, author of the Gaia Atlas of Cities, estimated the Ecological Footprint of London, and found that it was 125 times the actual surface area of that city, in terms of the space it needs beyond its physical area to produce the resources required to sustain its citizens[19].

With their linear metabolism, cities are at the heart of the take-make-waste economy:

‘Estimates at the time of the Earth Summit (Rio) in 1992 found that 75 percent of the natural resources that we harvest and mine from the Earth are shipped, trucked, railroaded and flown to 2.5 percent of the Earth’s surface, which is metropolitan. At that destination, 80 percent of those resources are converted into ‘waste’.’

Jac Smit, Urban Agriculture Network[20]

Cities are dependent on biophysical capacity and labour, both local and transnational, in order to deliver the needs of their populations. In doing so, they draw on the ecosystems and commons of other communities.

It is imperative that we understand the city as an ecosystem, acknowledging and addressing the behaviour of these mega-organisms, and their impact beyond the physical city.

These impacts and planetary ecological limits are typically not connected to an individual’s personal experience, and are rarely felt by more than the half of humanity who live in cities and towns. People in urban environments are rendered psychologically as well as spatially divorced from their dependence on nature, especially those who are caught up in a consumer culture that promotes abundance and has not yet encountered ecological limits.

If the true demand of the city was made visible, it would show that all urban areas are running ecological deficits[21] – that is, they depend on ‘occupied territory’ elsewhere.

The needs of urban dwellers are also dependent on extensive external supply lines, which are a large contributor to carbon emissions[22]. Shipping is projected to be responsible for 17% of global emissions by 2050[23], and incredibly, both shipping and aviation are excluded from international climate change negotiations due to the difficulty of allocating emissions to one country.

Creating an ecological city and reducing the city’s Ecological Footprint does not mean the end of trade – it just means trade happens where it is necessary, not where it isn’t.

‘Frequent flyer prawns’ are just one example of a multitude of long and unnecessarily carbon-intensive supply lines, which are only made possible by an era of cheap energy and the externalisation of costs. Prawns (shrimp) caught in Scotland are sent to Thailand for shelling, and shipped back again for distribution in the UK, because the labour in Thailand is cheaper:

Instead of transporting UK-caught langoustines the relatively short distance from sea to factory to distributor, Britain’s leading seafood supplier will send them on a 13,000-mile round trip to Thailand – in the interests of cost-cutting. The shellfish will then be repackaged and shipped back to the factory where they began their journey. Eventually, they will be breaded and sold across the UK[24].

Research by Germany’s Wuppertal Institute revealed that a typical container of strawberry yoghurt clocked up over twelve thousand miles of transport in the process of being made, assembled into its pot and delivered to the point of sale[25].

In its 2009 report, the new economics foundation cited the following research into ‘boomerang trade’ in the UK alone:

All around us still, are ships, lorries and planes passing in the night, wastefully carrying often identical goods from city to city across the globe and back again to meet ‘consumer demand’…we export 4,400 tonnes of ice cream to Italy, only to re-import 4,200 tonnes. We import 22,000 tonnes of potatoes from Egypt whilst exporting 27,000 tonnes back again. Then there are the 5,000 tonnes of toilet paper heading from the UK to Germany, with over 4,000 tonnes returning, and 10 tonnes of ‘gums and jelly’ sweets going back and forth to Thailand. And 117 tonnes of sweet biscuits, waffles, wafers and gingerbread came into the UK, rumbling past 106 tonnes headed in the opposite direction[26].

US author and food activist Michael Pollan also cited examples of wasteful trade:

…we are exporting sugar cookies to Denmark while we import sugar cookies from Denmark: a mind boggling trade that one economist said, when he was told of it, ‘Wouldn’t it be more efficient to swap recipes?[27]’

In the 21^st century, urban impacts are not just physical, but also digital. A multi-billion dollar submarine fibre optic cable link extending over 15,000km is being built between London and Tokyo via the Arctic Ocean, now accessible due to the retreat of sea ice. This cable will cut the ‘friction’ between the two cities from 230 milliseconds to 168 milliseconds, enabling reduced transmission time, which ‘will be a boon for high-frequency traders who will gain crucial milliseconds on each automated trade[28].’

Cities, with their immense economic and political power, are central to global and local ecological problems, and they must become central to solutions.  Cities should not only do less damage, but proactively work as an environmental repair kit – become biogenic, or generative, not biocidic, or extractive. 

An ecocity, in symbiosis with its region, is a lifeboat for human civilisation, an ark for defence of the biosphere, a regulator of the global climate, and a fractal of our sustainable future.

Paul Downton, Urban Ecologist and Ecological Architect[29]

 To successfully reduce our ecological footprint and move out of overshoot, we need to build ecological cities, including relocalising production of food, energy and things.

For cities to produce more of what they consume locally, they need to become productive, fabricating (making) cities – Fab Cities.

FAB CITIES, RELOCALISATION OF PRODUCTION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK

The first city to become self-sufficient – simultaneously increasing employment by creating opportunities through open innovation, and radically reducing carbon emissions by re-localising production – will lead the future of urban development globally. 

Tomas Diez, Fab City Global Initiative[30]

Digital technologies can either amplify and accelerate cities’ ecological devastation, or be channelled to create positive change, such as through digitally sharing open source design enabling distributed production[31].

A Fab City is a locally productive, globally connected, self-sufficient city.

‘Fab’ is short for ‘fabrication’, making and producing. Fab Labs (Fabrication Laboratories) and makerspaces offer opportunities for people to make and produce what they need for themselves, and to bring back to citizens the skills and knowledge needed to make things.

Makerspaces and Fab Labs are open access workshops, which means that anyone can access a range of production equipment (including but not limited to 3D printers and other means of digital fabrication) and networks of knowledge. Fab Labs (Fabrication Laboratories) emerged from the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT in the early 2000s[32], originating from a course designed to enable anyone to learn how to make almost anything[33].

Harnessing these spaces and digital manufacturing technologies in service of the circular economy offers the potential for returning production to cities in the form of distributed manufacturing with microfactories – small scale, cleaner production that is also less wasteful, occurring as-needed, often customised, instead of over-producing for markets[34].

The Fab City Global Initiative[35], which originated in Barcelona in 2014, has expanded with the network now including Amsterdam, Shenzhen, Copenhagen, Detroit, Paris and Boston, who have all joined the challenge of leveraging the capability of Fab Labs to relocalise production of energy, food and things in cities to 50% by 2054.

FAB City takes the ideals of the Fab Lab – the connectivity, culture and creativity – and scales it to the City. It is a new urban model of transforming and shaping cities that shifts how they source and use materials from ‘Products In Trash Out’ (PITO) to ‘Data In Data Out’ (DIDO). This means that more production occurs inside the city, along with recycling materials and meeting local needs through local inventiveness. A city’s imports and exports would mostly be found in the form of data (information, knowledge, design, code)[36].

If the idea of digital trade seems peculiar, it is worth noting that a recent McKinsey report revealed that …‘digital flows—which were practically non-existent just 15 years ago—now exert a larger impact on GDP growth than the centuries-old trade in goods[37].’  Fab Cities are about swapping the ‘recipe’, not the ‘cookies’.

Fab Cities are not defined as a city full of Fab Labs, but are about reinvigorating old industries to make them more clean, dynamic, fast and adaptive, and connecting them with grassroots innovation.

In Barcelona, a 1km x 1km area in the Poblenou district has been designated the ‘Maker District’ with the objective of prototyping a fractal of a Fab City, focusing on:

• Fabrication & materials: with complementary production ecosystems happening inside the local network of Fab Labs, citizens have the possibility to produce what they consume, recirculating materials inside the neighbourhood and the city to reduce waste and carbon emissions associated with long-distance mass production and distribution chains.
• Food production: growing food on the rooftops of Barcelona. Through urban agriculture practices, citizens can grow part of what they eat turning production of local clean food in a regular part of their lives.
• Energy: Renewable energy production. With the arrival of domestic batteries and the cost drop of solar technologies, citizens have the tools to produce part of their domestic energy consumption[38].

The Fab City Research Laboratory team has recently initiated ‘Fab Market’, an online shop where designers can fabricate for low cost and sell their open source designs globally[39]:

Using digital fabrication as its main focus, the network promotes the idea of distributed manufacturing. With this model, designs can be sent to the other side of the planet, modified and made on the same day.…you can find a variety of locally made products designed by people from all over the world. All products are open-source and sold ready for use, assembly or fabrication, giving people the possibility to participate in the making process. The more you participate, the less you pay for the product[40].

Other terms being used to describe the approach advocated by Fab City include ‘Design Global, Manufacture Local’[41], and ‘cosmo-localization’[42]. In all cases, this means the ‘light’ things (bits, information, shared/open source design) travel, but the ‘heavy’ things (atoms, the physical, manufacturing) stay local.

The circular economy approach can reduce demand for energy and materials and production of waste, but if a city is not making things locally, does it truly have a circular economy? A city that is exporting recycled materials elsewhere to be remade into things arguably still has a linear economy. Our oceans churn with carbon-intensive cargo movements[43]. A true circular economy means relocalising production in our cities, needing to move less stuff, and making more of what we need, when and where we need it.

The Fab City approach offers potential to cut carbon emissions, reduce waste, and generate local jobs, however relocalising production in cities does not necessarily mean relocalisation of jobs[44]. Adidas have announced plans to shift production of boots back to Germany from Asia – but they will be built by robots[45]. There may be local employment of people who build and maintain robots, however the objective of replacing labour with machines will likely result in fewer job opportunities, especially for lower skilled workers who may not be able to access work roles that require skills they don’t have, or don’t have the ability or interest to train for. The 2016 World Economic Forum report, ‘The Future of Jobs’, found that technology could result in a net loss of five million jobs in fifteen developed and emerging countries by 2020[46].

In a system where people are dependent on selling their labour for the means to sustain themselves, a conscious choice must be made to prioritise labour and generation of local employment opportunities. In many cases, it could be beneficial to automate dangerous or undesirable work, however if the choice is made to automate jobs, a lot of social benefit will be lost, even though relocalised production may deliver environmental benefits.

Meaningful work is also about contribution and social identity, not just an income[47].

…while we insist that everyone must work to meet basic living expenses when the labour market is bifurcating into a small number of high-skill, highly paid jobs and a much larger number of unskilled, poorly paid and insecure jobs, we are preventing people from inventing new things to do and new ways of working…providing people with a reasonable income while they find or create for themselves the right job (not just any job), or to enable them to do creative and/or socially useful things that are currently unpaid, or to study and develop new skills, might be a good investment for the future, improving the productivity of human capital which over the longer term benefits the economy…[48]

A zero waste society should also mean zero waste of human potential, and this potential can be realised in ways other than seeking to match skills and aptitudes of people to fulfilling jobs – it can be realised outside the confines of paid work, outside the narrow definitions of ‘productivity’ and ‘work ethic’ that have characterised work since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In a provocative 2013 article entitled ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, anarchist author David Graeber noted that the increased leisure time predicted at the end of the 20^th century by economist John Maynard Keynes back in 1930 had not manifested, and that:

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working…technology has been marshalled…to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it[49].

If the nature of work is changing such that it is not fulfilling either material or non-material needs, is the very notion of a ‘job’ soon to be an anachronism? Perhaps it is time for us to reframe the question from: ‘how can we ensure everyone has the opportunity for a suitable job that helps sustain the needs of themselves and their families?’ to ‘how can we best meet everyone’s needs in a way that enables them to fulfil their potential and contribute meaningfully to society?’ 

In the meantime, within our current construction of the idea of ‘work’, there is a bigger question – why choose to automate jobs and throw people out of work, severing them from the ability to sell their labour to support themselves? The reason is that labour is one of the largest costs for any business, and replacing workers with machines that don’t need to eat, rest, sleep or be paid a wage, enables costs to be driven down, so that profit can be maximised.  An even bigger question is: in an automated world, who owns the robots, and who benefits from their productive capacity?

If automation is a societal choice, it will need to occur in conjunction with a reinvention of the social contract that reconfigures the job/work/income/means-to-meet-one’s-needs nexus, possibly with a form of Universal Basic Income[50], or Universal Basic Dividend[51].

Value is produced by all of society, including contributions to the commons and social reproduction in the domestic sphere, not just in the formal economy where monetised transactions occur. Private enterprise benefits from that which is created beyond its value-capturing boundaries, such as supply of a schooled workforce, and the provision of infrastructure such as transportation and power infrastructure.

How can we better share the benefits of collectively produced value?

One way to achieve this is through business models and modes of production that prioritise purpose over profit.

POST GROWTH, CIRCULAR BUSINESS MODELS AND NOT-FOR-PROFIT BUSINESS

A healthy economy thrives on circulation. If our economy has circulation built into its very DNA, we can ensure a fair distribution of our common wealth without dominating each other and nature. The difference between for-profit and not-for-profit business could be the difference between having a linear, extractive economy and having a circular, generative economy

Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, Post Growth Institute[52]

Ecological cities and Fab Cities, which have many similar objectives including reduction of urban Ecological Footprints, offer theoretical frameworks and practical ways to help us move out of global overshoot. Circular economy approaches are an integral part of both.

All are still embedded in and trying to change a world where the growth paradigm is dominant.

The drivers of growth are many, but they include money created as interest bearing debt[53], planned obsolescence, consumer culture and status envy, population[54] and the indicators that we use to manage our economic systems.

Economic growth, the overriding objective of governments everywhere, is measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is an indicator designed to track total economic activity, developed in the 1930s and 40s amidst the upheavals of the Great Depression and two World Wars. Its inventor, Simon Kuznets, the chief architect of the United States national accounting system, cautioned against equating GDP growth with economic or social well-being in 1934[55]. Yet eighty years on, economic growth is seen as the pathway to prosperity and wellbeing.

Although many people today still lack basic needs, many more people today have a material living standard higher than that of an average citizen at any previous time in history. Economic growth has delivered that standard of living for many people.

However, as an indicator, GDP is a blunt instrument in that it adds up the total monetary value of economic activity, but does not distinguish between the desirability of that activity. It does not count the value created in the non-market economy of social production – caring work, volunteering, domestic labour, ‘work for the world’. Yet every car accident, razed forest, oil spill, heart attack and break-in is counted as ‘growth’ because it results in greater production and exchange of goods and services.

We are systematically incentivising unsustainable behaviours, wreaking destruction on ecosystems and communities with abstractions we have ourselves created.

In order to keep growing, a system dependent on economic growth must continually convert nature into goods and relationships into services – things once provided to us as gifts become monetised transactions.

Yet past a certain point, the costs of more growth – congestion, pollution, declining quality of life, inequality, destruction of ecosystem services (such as bees’ ability to pollinate or the ability of a watershed to filter and clean water)[56] and liquidation of natural capital – start to outweigh the benefits.

Economic growth becomes uneconomic growth.

The UN defines uneconomic growth as:

• jobless growth, where the economy grows, but does not expand opportunities for employment;
• ruthless growth, where the proceeds of economic growth mostly benefit the rich;
• voiceless growth, where economic growth is not accompanied by extension of democracy or empowerment;
• rootless growth, where economic growth squashes people’s cultural identity; and
• futureless growth, where the present generation squanders resources needed by future generations[57]

Persisting with economic growth in a finite system is not only foolish when growth is no longer delivering the benefits it used to and the costs outweigh the gains, it is dangerous.

The ‘eat more’ message of growth economics is at fundamental odds with the ‘eat less’ message of sustainability.

This has been recognised with the emergence of concepts such as ‘green growth’, which is the bargaining stage of the end of growth grief cycle. It assumes we can still have growth, as long as it is ‘greener’ or more environmentally responsible. The idea is that we can decouple material throughput and energy from economic growth – that is, we can reduce the demand for new resources and energy, and still grow. Yet decoupling is not happening at the scale and pace needed:

UN Sustainable Development Goal 8 calls for improving ‘global resource efficiency’ and ‘decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation’. Unfortunately, there are no signs that this is possible at anything near the necessary pace. Global material extraction and consumption grew by 94% between 1980 and 2010, accelerating in the last decade to reach as high as 70 billion tonnes per year. And it’s still going up: by 2030, we’re projected to breach 100 billion tonnes of stuff per year. Current projections show that by 2040 we will more than double the world’s shipping, trucking, and air miles – along with all the things those vehicles transport. By 2100 we will be producing three times more solid waste than we do today[58].

A recent study revealed that for every 10% increase in GDP, a nation’s material footprint increases by 6%:

Metrics on resource productivity currently used by governments suggest that some developed countries have increased the use of natural resources at a slower rate than economic growth (relative decoupling) or have even managed to use fewer resources over time (absolute decoupling). Using the material footprint (MF), a consumption-based indicator of resource use, we find the contrary: Achievements in decoupling in advanced economies are smaller than reported or even non-existent…two-fifths of all global raw materials were extracted and used just to enable exports of goods and services to other countries[59].

 In 2011, a study commissioned by the CEO of Veolia was published in a peer-reviewed journal focused on sustainability, with the objective of assessing the business opportunities of the circular economy and recycling. It found that the ability to ‘decouple’ is only possible if the total annual raw material consumption growth rate is under one percent, and that ‘the influence of recycling on resource preservation is negligible for any raw material with a greater than 2% per annum increase in world production’[60]. Even then, growth in material consumption kept below that rate is still insufficient to decouple, and requires a high rate of recycling (60% – 80%). Economist and Professor of Sustainability and Economic Anthropology Christian Arnsperger of the University of Lausanne[61] analyses what this means:

Efficiency gains…become themselves the ‘raw material’ for generating new economic growth thanks to lower raw material requirements…and it explains why the circular growth economy attracts so much enthusiasm among businesspeople and industrialists: The mirage is that of perpetually expanding markets along with perpetually contracting raw material consumption…we have no use for a pseudo-circular metabolism that is actually a steadily widening spiral: circling, yes, but spinning slowly out of control nevertheless, in ever-broader circles of ever-growing circumference. We need a genuinely circular metabolism…one that doesn’t spiral outward but, rather, promises to keep the same circumference…

Images by Sharon Ede

The earth is a finite system of nutrients, resources, minerals and energy. Human impact must fit within these limits, and leave some ‘breathing room’ not only for humanity, but for millions of other species. If the absolute amount of resource and energy use is still rising, economic growth will negate resource efficiency gains. It is a global Jevon’s Paradox[62].

Capitalism’s answer to every problem is more of the same growth and overconsumption that has wrecked the planet and the climate in the first place. There can never be a market solution to our crisis because every ‘solution’ has to be subordinated to maximizing growth, or companies can’t stay in business.

Richard Smith, Six Theses on Saving the Planet[63]

Running physical ecological deficits as part of growth economics is also a financial and political security risk. The UN Finance Initiative is working in partnership with the Global Footprint Network on how to quantify natural resource and environmental risks, and incorporate them into risk assessments used by insurance companies, investors and credit rating agencies[64] (see overview of this project, ‘Integrating Ecological Risk in Sovereign Credit Ratings and Investments’[65]).

For the world as a whole, the growth model is no longer safe – we are already in overshoot.

Uneconomic growth, where the benefits flow mainly to the rich, also creates social inequality and contributes to social breakdown. In 2016, Oxfam’s report ‘An Economy for the 1%’, found that, worldwide, just 62 individuals own as much wealth the 3.6 billion who make up the bottom socioeconomic half of the world’s population[66]. Research by authors of The Spirit Level, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, shows that social problems (including mental illness, drug addiction, obesity, loss of community life, imprisonment) are more prevalent in more unequal societies, even among the richer strata of those societies. Inequality affects the entire social fabric, not just those less well off[67].

Mental health is one of the biggest public and human costs. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that mental illnesses are the leading causes of disability worldwide, with an estimated global cost of almost $2.5 trillion – more than cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer or diabetes[68], and mental illnesses are more prevalent in more unequal societies This is largely due not to absolute poverty, but rather relative wealth, or where you ‘rank’ in society – in other words, ‘how am I doing compared to what I see around me?’

A growth economy requires ongoing consumption, which is why it promotes the defining of individual identity, focusing our attention on what we are doing to maximise our consumption and generating the income to sustain it.

While people are busy concentrating on the pursuit of individualistic, increasingly commodified lifestyles, there is a corresponding retreat from involvement in civic, community and family life, and a weakening of the social cohesion that has been part of life for centuries. This atomisation of society is at the basis of much social and community breakdown:

When the relationships of gift-giving in a community are replaced by monetary transactions, the fabric of the community unravels…in sharp contrast to the monetized world of financial security, which inexorably separates everyone from everyone else, a gift economy is an economy of obligation and dependence. Financial security is not true independence, but merely dependence on strangers, who will only do the things necessary for your survival if you pay them…the monetized life removes some of the incentives for people to adhere to social and ethical norms. Dissolution of community is built in to our system of money.

Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity[69]

In an economic system that depends on growth, pursuing more growth is entirely rational. But there is a deeper question that goes unasked: is an economic system that depends on growth itself rational? Growth is not working for most of humanity, it’s no longer working as well for those who have benefited, and it’s not at all working for the natural systems on which the security of our civilisation depends. But just like in the movie Speed, we are ‘stuck on the bus’[70], in a catch 22 of our own making.

How can we harness economic, financial and cultural dynamics to get us safely off the growth bus before we run out of fuel, without the damage that will occur if we slow down?

In this light, circular economy business models are not transformative enough, as they tend to be focused on how to unlock business growth through better management of materials[71].

Zero Waste Scotland cites the following examples of circular economy business models[72]:

• Hire & Leasing: Hire or leasing of products as an alternative to purchasing.
• Performance/Service System: Providing a service based on delivering the performance outputs of a product where the manufacturer retains ownership, has greater control over the production of a product, and therefore has more interest in producing a product that lasts.
• Incentivised Return: Offering a financial or other incentive for the return of ‘used’ products. Products can be refurbished and re-sold.
• Asset Management: Maximising product lifetime and minimising new purchase through tracking an organisation’s assets, planning what can be re-used, repaired or redeployed at a different site.
• Collaborative Consumption: Rental or sharing of products between members of the public or businesses, often through peer-to-peer networks.
• Long Life: Products designed for long life, supported by guarantees and trusted repair services.

While they are all worthwhile approaches, models such as hiring or leasing and asset management are not new, and the stated benefits of these models primarily focus on the opportunities for business growth.

Growth of what, and for whom? Who benefits? Should the impetus for a circular economy be restricted to opportunities for business owners?

Part of the growth mythology is that ‘growing the pie’ enables wealth to trickle down, that giving tax concessions to the wealthy will result in investment and productive activity that creates jobs[73], however this is not necessarily the case. The lion’s share of the benefits of growth are typically privatised in the hands of a few, while the costs are socialised[74].

Are we missing bigger opportunities to profoundly transform our societies through a broader definition of ‘circular economy’?

In the business world, surplus value is typically extracted from an economic system as returns on investment to shareholders and owners, not reinvested back into the business, or society more broadly.

Like our take-make-waste economy, our financial economy is also a linear economy.

The primary legal responsibility of corporate executives is fiduciary, that is, to make as much profit as possible for returning to shareholders and investors. To do this, costs – like frequent flyer prawns – are externalised to the environment and to society. One report sponsored by the UN revealed that none of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they had to pay for the natural capital they consume[75].

This externalisation also relates to social costs, and is one of the drivers of both automation of jobs, and increasing precarity and casualisation of work – over a third of the US workforce is now freelance[76]. This focus on maximising shareholder value is now being challenged in the business arena itself[77].

One consequence of a system structured this way is that wealth is increasingly captured and sucked out of the ‘real’ or ‘common’ economy of goods and services, and into the ‘elite’ economy – including an estimated at $32 trillion in offshore tax havens[78] – where it is then locked away from and unavailable to wider society:

A recent study found that the super-rich, on average, invest 18% of their wealth in real estate, keep 26% of it in cash and bank deposits, use 27% of it to buy more equity in companies, and put 30% of it into hedge funds, derivatives, securities, currency trading and bond markets[79]. The wealthy essentially extract the surplus from the real economy of goods and services, putting most of it into the elite economy of business equity, shares, securities, derivatives, money markets, and hedge funds. We call this the elite economy because it is a speculative market that only those who have a certain amount of extra money can afford to bet in.

Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, Post Growth Institute[80]

Diagram from How On Earth, forthcoming in 2017 [81]

One powerful way is to change how value is shared and distributed.

There is increasing momentum in support of employee/worker owned co-operative enterprise[82], including platform co-operatives[83] – such as a ridesharing platform owned by the drivers and other stakeholders, rather than the benefits flowing back to suppliers of venture capital.

Even more broadly, open co-operatives[84] share the wealth and governance of a business with all stakeholders who wish to participate. Complementary and local currencies[85], including cryptocurrencies[86], can play a role, locally and transnationally.

The potential of commons based peer production in creating a truly circular economy is enormous:

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation. He compares commons-based peer production to firm production (where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom) and market-based production (when tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job)[87].

Michel Bauwens, Founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, cites the emergence of global open design communities, which through open contributory systems are now able to massively scale co-operation in creating commons projects of value, like Wikipedia[88], Rep Rap[89] and Arduino[90].

Around these commons, there are extractive business models on how to maximise profits from these commons, but also generative business models. This is a new type of economy, where people organise to make a living without destroying the commons, and find democratic solutions to work together[91].

 Bauwens cites Enspiral[92], which originated in New Zealand, as an example of a generative business model. Enspiral embodies the three elements Bauwens has identified: 

• an open contributory system, where people (whether paid or unpaid) add to a common shared resource that is outside the market ie. not subject to the supply-demand dynamic
• a coalition of ethical entrepreneurs that seek to co-operate with the commons and global design communities, creating markets and livelihoods around these commons that enable people to continue their contribution to shared resources and make a living around solving social and environmental problems
• a for-benefit association that manages the commons (at the territorial governance level, this could be the ‘partner city’ or ‘partner state’)

Enspiral produces a commons, Loomio[93], which is an open source decision making software for virtual teams. Around that, they have numerous business ventures that seek to solve human and ecological issues. The Enspiral Foundation is the entity that manages their common infrastructure.

When value is captured by extractive models and not reinvested in the commons, it creates economic uncertainty and insecurity for many people[94]. Commons based peer production seeks to change that dynamic, returning the rewards to those who generate value and contribute to the commons.

How can capital be accessed without those needing it being beholden to investors indefinitely?

One approach is that of ‘capped investments’ where investors are guaranteed an agreed percentage of return on investment, but over a time period that eventually expires, rather than requiring the enterprise to continue to provide a dividend in perpetuity.

The biggest problem with our current system is that the growth path of successful companies very often end up with an IPO or acquisition by a listed company. No matter where they start, companies tend to end up in a profit maximising system with incentives to externalise as many costs as they can onto society. In this model, a few win while society loses.

The shares in those public companies never expire. They transition from being a vehicle for fair compensation to investors and entrepreneurs to becoming licenses to extract wealth from society that are sold to the highest bidder. There are dividends being paid out today on shares in companies where every person who took the risks and put in the capital to start it up has been dead for 100 years. The returns have become divorced from their original connection to meaningful inputs to the business.

If capped returns became the norm of business then the growth path of a successful enterprise would be to pay back its founders and investors early on in its lifecycle (first decade or two). Then there would be a big celebration as the business became a freehold impact venture with a binding mandate to serve wider society.

Joshua Vial, Enspiral[95]

This is an example of ‘transvestment’[96], reversing the effects of the wealth siphon by transferring value back into the ‘real’ economy. Such a scenario would need investors who seek a fair financial return – but not a never-ending return of claims on wealth from value generated by others – and a willingness to invest for positive and environmental impact.
All of these examples shift us away from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy.

A powerful approach detailed in the Post Growth Institute’s forthcoming book, How On Earth[97], makes the case that not-for-profit business models – which prioritise purpose/mission ahead of profit – will become the core of the global economy by 2050, because they will outperform business whose primary focus is profit.

How often do we hear the term ‘for-profit business’? It is assumed that all businesses are for-profit, just as it’s assumed all markets operate on the basis of growth, extractive practices, even greed. Yet businesses of all kinds can be not-for-profit – social enterprises, sustainable businesses, cooperatives, and even multinational corporations. Not-for-profit businesses already exist across sectors as diverse as telecommunications, engineering, retail, manufacturing, software development, construction, healthcare and the food industry.

A not-for-profit business is one where profit cannot be privately distributed to anyone, including workers or stakeholders as well as shareholders. It is different to a traditional non-profit, which is often dependent on government funding, philanthropy or corporate charity.

Diagram from How On Earth, forthcoming in 2017

Not-for-profit business is legally different to other models such as B Corporations (a certification scheme), corporate social responsibility and for-purpose business, where the surplus is still allowed to be privatised:

While some for-profit organizations may never even make any profits, all of them have the ability to privately distribute profits. A company that can distribute profits to individuals (such as owners, shareholders, investors, partners, workers, managers and board directors) is legally for-profit. Although the way for-profit entities handle their financial surplus varies, the key distinction is that they can distribute surplus to individuals, and almost always have the intention to do so.

By law, not-for-profit businesses are mission-based and they must invest 100% of their profits back into their mission. Because of this, they are more likely to care about whether or not their supply chains are ethical; about their environmental impact; and about their employees’ wellbeing. They are more likely to take into consideration the concerns of the local communities in which they operate and to give their employees the chance to express themselves. And they are not at all likely to sacrifice any of these concerns in the name of profit-maximization.

For-profit companies that are trying to incorporate ethical business practices can easily drift from a social mission due to the pressure to maximize profits or generate financial value for owners and investors. It’s not that for-profit companies can’t do work that has a deeper purpose; rather it’s that the profit motive often distracts them from that deeper purpose.

Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, Post Growth Institute[98]

A not-for-profit business works the same as any other business: it must be financially sustainable, everyone gets paid, and it can make as much profit as it likes – but it cannot distribute profit privately. Any surplus is required to be reinvested back into the mission or purpose of the business. These businesses see profit as a means to achieving deeper goals, rather than as a goal in itself.

Not-for-profit businesses have many advantages in the marketplace, including being more resilient in times of economic downturn, because they don’t have to provide dividends to shareholders. They also have greater freedom to innovate, due to the absence of owners and shareholders who tend to restrict creative energy to the areas they decide will yield a good financial return.

Not-for-profit businesses that constantly cycle their surplus back into the real economy provide a practical, tangible way to redirect the flow of both value and capital, enabling us to prime the wealth circulation pump in the real economy, to meet social needs and ensure we are not undermining our ecological life support systems.

If we want to move out of the danger zone of ecological overshoot, we must move away from dependence on profit maximisation and ever more economic growth, which drives extractive behaviour, extreme inequality and destruction of the Earth’s life support systems.

If we want an economic operating system that is regenerative, not extractive, we have to change how surplus is managed.

Profit is neither inherently good nor bad. But, as the surplus of economic activity, it is important. And what happens to the surplus in our economy is at the root of whether we have a healthy economy or a destructive economy.

Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, Post Growth Institute[99]

The not-for-profit model is about preventing value extraction and keeping it invested and circulating in the real economy. It promises value creation, rather than value appropriation, and is a system that runs on shared interest, not self-interest.

It can help support the push for worker and open co-operatives, platform co-ops, commons based peer production and, eventually, partially or completely replace the need for ‘transvestment’, as there will be less need for a transfer of capital back from the elite economy to the real economy if the value is retained in the real economy in the first place.

An economy based on not-for-profit enterprise would take us beyond the current debate about whether the market should be more heavily regulated or if it should be allowed to operate more freely, because the functioning of a not-for-profit market economy would be so different from the for-profit market economy.

Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, Post Growth Institute[100]

The not-for-profit model meets the needs of those who want a market economy, individual choice and reward for effort; those who want a more equitable society, where people’s needs are met; those who champion innovation and technology; and it satisfies those who understand that our wellbeing and safety depend on the health of our environment.

It is not a panacea, but it is a practical approach and realistic bridge from the old economy to the new economy, and most importantly, it is already emerging in the world we live in right now.

THE REAL CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Electric light did not come about from the continuous improvement of candles. 

Oren Harari

A circular economy can play a crucial role in improving the design and management of our material world.

But can we meet our ultimate objective of a sustainable society by improving on the current system, or must we transition to a new system?

Any approach which is aligned with or dependent on an economic system based on perpetual growth and the pursuit of more, or one where value is created by many but captured by a few, does not offer the structure that can deliver the changes we need to address our environmental and social challenges.

A circular economy is necessary, but not sufficient, for the systemic change we need to get us on track for a secure future. The not-for-profit model is also necessary but not sufficient, though it differs from circular economy in that it is a transformational approach away from the growth paradigm, giving us a better chance to move out of ecological overshoot, and deliver prosperous lives for everyone.

A real circular economy would expand the definition of the circular economy to one where its operating system is regenerative not extractive not only towards nature, but people; one where wealth is equitably circulated and shared. A truly circular economy would mean that the circular ethos is also reflected in our social systems, including our financial services, our business structures, and the political frameworks and cultural norms that influence human behaviour.

What if circular economy businesses were commenced as, or transitioned to, not-for-profit business models?

This is a way to fund circular economies in their truest sense – not just by moving to a circular economy of materials that has to keep growing and maximising profit, but by also making circular the value flows that could help fund the positive social and environmental change we need to make, creating a circular economy of wealth in service of the common good.

Supplementary Material and Credits

Authored by Sharon Ede

• CoFounder, Post Growth Institute
• Catalyst, Fab City Global Initiative

December 2016

Images: Lead image by Sparkleice. Additional images by Andy Tolsma, @ondasderuido, Leo HSU, Sparkleice, Francokv, Fui and Jan Fidler. Circular economy diagrams sourced by Sharon Ede/Post Growth Institute.

References

• Diez, Tomas (2016) ‘Locally Productive, Globally Connected, Self-Sufficient Cities’ – Fab City Whitepaper:  http://fab.city/whitepaper.pdf
• Hinton, Jennifer and Maclurcan, Donald (2017 forthcoming) ‘How On Earth’: www.howonearth.us

In addition to specified references, this paper reflects years of mentoring by, and collaboration with: 

• Paul Downton, architect and urban ecologist, Cherie Hoyle, community leader and urban ecologist, the driving force behind Adelaide’s ‘piece of ecocity’, Christie Walk 
• Mathis Wackernagel, Global Footprint Network founder and CEO and William Rees, creator of the Ecological Footprint concept 
• Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton, co-directors of the Post Growth Institute 
• Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation 
• Tomas Diez, instigator of the Fab City Global Initiative

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Tomas Diez, Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hinton for reviewing this paper, and for their contributions and suggestions.

Footnotes

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• [4] www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue68/RammeltCrisp68.pdf
• [5] http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Perma-Circularity
• [6] www.footprintnetwork.org/images/article_uploads/EOD15_PR_scenario_graphic_final.jpg
• [7] The Ecological Footprint concept was initiated and developed by the University of British Columbia’s Professor William Rees, who has been teaching the Ecological Footprint concept since the mid-1970s, and Mathis Wackernagel, a PhD student of Rees, went on to further develop and promote the Footprint, founding the Global Footprint Network.
• [8] www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview
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• [12] www.overshootday.org/about-earth-overshoot-day on the supply side, a city, state, or nation’s biocapacity represents its biologically productive land and sea area, including forest lands, grazing lands, cropland, fishing grounds, and built-up land. On the demand side, the Ecological Footprint measures a population’s demand for plant-based food and fiber products, livestock and fish products, timber and other forest products, space for urban infrastructure, and forest to absorb its carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
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• [52] in www.howonearth.us forthcoming 2017
• [53] https://youtu.be/DOa8U0yixgQ
• [54] http://postgrowth.org/learn/about-post-growth/faq/#consuption-vs-population
• [55] www.spiegel.de/international/business/beyond-gdp-economists-search-for-new-definition-of-well-being-a-650532.html
• [56] www.esd.ornl.gov/benefits_conference/nature_paper.pdf
• [57] http://steadystate.org/discover/downsides-of-economic-growth
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• [61] http://arnsperger-perma-circular.com/2016/06/22/one-engineers-deeper-wisdom-francois-grosse-and-the-rediscovery-of-the-perma-circular-mindset; http://unil.academia.edu/ChristianArnsperger
• [62] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons’s_paradox
• [63] www.thenextsystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/RichardSmith.pdf
• [64] www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_for_finance; www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/UNEPFI_Ecobonds_Brochure.pdf
• [65] www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/UNEPFI_Ecobonds_Brochure.pdf
• [66] www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-summ-en_0.pdf
• [67] www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/society-unequal-the-spirit-level
• [68] www.shareadelaide.com/blog/hearts-minds-sharing-as-a-mental-health-intervention
• [69] http://charleseisenstein.net/ascent-of-humanity/the-anonymous-power
• [70] http://postgrowth.org/stuck-on-the-bus
• [71] www.forumforthefuture.org/sites/default/files/Card%20deck.pdf
• [72] www.zerowastescotland.org.uk/content/what-are-circular-economy-business-models
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• [74] http://newint.org/blog/2011/03/02/privatizing-profit-and-socializing-risk
• [75]http://grist.org/business-technology/none-of-the-worlds-top-industries-would-be-profitable-if-they-paid-for-the-natural-capital-they-use/
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• [79] www.worldwealthreport.com/sites/all/themes/wwr/images/WWR2015-GeneralInfographic.jpg
• [80] in www.howonearth.us forthcoming in 2017
• [81] www.howonearth.us
• [82] www.theselc.org/cooperatives
• [83] http://platformcoop.net/
• [84] http://open.coop/open
• [85] http://reconomy.org/economic-enablers/alternative-means-of-exchange/complementary-currencies
• [86] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies
• [87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production
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• [89] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_project
• [90] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
• [91] www.youtube.com/watch?v=46xXynjY4Nc
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• [93] www.loomio.org
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The post The Real Circular Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What is the circular economy going to change in your field of activity? What are the priorities of your company/organisation to contribute to the transition towards a circular economy?

The specific priority of the P2P Foundation is to focus on the ‘open source’ circular economy. This is a open source circular economy that is based on participatory and open supply chains that allow both for the mutualization and knowledge, and thus for a much more rapid transition than under conditions of proprietary and secret knowledge, but also the increased capacity for mutual coordination in supply and demand. We also focus on ‘subsidiarity in material production’, i.e. the capacity of new model which combines globally shared productive knowledge, with distributed manufacturing closer to the place of use and demand, a process which is also called sometimes ‘DGML’ (Design Global, Manufacture Local’) or ‘cosmo-localization’ (what is light is global, what is heavy is local)

Are you going to cooperate differently with your partners in this cycle?

The P2P Foundation is an observatory and research network, hence our activities in this field are about observing ‘best practices’ in this field, and to catalyze their use.

What should be the role of public authorities and at which level of intervention should they be involved? Should they coordinate the circularity or rather be “organising authorities”? Does an organising authority (a public local or regional player) have to intervene in this process?

Public authorities should be active at all levels by providing legal and regulatory frameworks but also practical facilitation. We recommend the institutionalization of this practice through ‘Sustainability Empowerment Platforms’, which are public-civic (public-commons, public-social) multi-stakeholder arrangements. Public authorities can also help by providing ‘circular financing’, i.e. encouraging those actors that save public resources by sharing the gains that they help provide. For example, if a community land trust provides land to farmers, which allow them to practice ecological and non-toxic farming at low rents, thereby providing substantial better health outcomes for the population and dramatically less polluted water and thus water purifications costs, then sharing the savings as investments, can create positive loops for the circular economy that also allow for the redirection of public funds to other purposes. The public authorities, knowing that any growth that is above 1% annually in raw material extraction, renders circularity inoperable, should also set limits that encourage this transition, so that it can be effective.

Is the circular economy creating new Services of General Interest (SGIs) and Services of General Economic Interest (SGEIs) (e.g. waste collection and management)?

These should and will exist for every provisioning system needed by humanity for its social reproduction, and should use public-civic, polycentric, multi-stakeholders institutional forms.

How can we guarantee that the externalisation of waste management is not made at the expense of one actor rather than another, especially concerning citizens/users?

The use of open accounting and open supply chains involving all actors, should make the material processes transparent, so that a dialogue between the stakeholders, especially the citizens/users, can discuss and organize more just distribution mechanisms.

How is it possible to include ensuing benefits, such as social and vocational integration, and to move away from an “all-market” position?

We believe this can be achieved through a commons-centric model, which puts open contributions to the productive knowledge commons at its centers, strives for mutualization of physical infrastructures, creates more generative entrepreneurial forms, and can be managed by polycentric for-benefit associations for their governance. This new mix of commons, market and institutional forms is geared towards the integration of negative social and environmental costs in the economic models of these new ecosystems. The role of public authorities is to make sure that such integration leads to rewards compared to those who fail to make such adaptations.

How is it possible to budget and apportion transition costs in a fair manner? How is it possible to socialise transition benefits?

We propose to transition towards a biophysical economy using the appropriate metrics for matter and energy usage. Gains in such thermo-dynamic efficiencies should be rewarded; and circuits for generative funding should be used to create virtuous cycles. The use of common assets based organizations can be used to reward those that generate value as compared to those who maintain extractive practices. This means the introduction of commons trust that can generate incomes for all members.

Which political priorities are you identifying for the next months and years?

The goal in the material economy is to create meta-economic circuits that generate a mode of production and exchange that combines shared knowledge that increases innovation in this field, the mutualisation of physical assets and objects to diminish its material footprint, and a just distribution of income and rewards. We believe this takes the form of open and contributory communities, ethical and generative entrepreneurs, and democratic institutions that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. This requires more social and political representation of the forces that are engaged in such process, and enabling public services. This means that pubic officials and political movements need to be made aware of the potential of this model, so that appropriate public processes can be developed to encourage this transition.

Which investment and accompanying measures need to be implemented?

We propose the creation of more commons trust for the ownership and governance of material infrastructures, the creation of circular finance as explained above, and the development of integrative Commons Transition Plans by public authorities.

Photo by thtstudios

The post The P2P Foundation on the (Open Source) Circular Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following 10 ideas for action are the result of 10 years of research at the P2P Foundation on the emerging practices of new productive communities and those ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that can create livelihoods on top of shared resources. Together, they emphasize the emerging practices that can bolster the resilience of a new ethical economy. Our goal is to encourage the creation of new entities that overstep the traditional corporate form and its extractive profit-maximizing practices. What we need, instead of extractive forms of capital, is generative ideas that co-create value with and for commoners.

These 10 ideas already exist in some form, but need to be used more widely and integrated. We present them below in three sections addressing each concern (free, fair and sustainable). Each recommendation is followed by links to related resources.

I. OPEN AND FREE

1. Practice open business models based on shared knowledge.

Traditional closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. In contrast, open business models are market strategies based on both the recognition of natural abundance and the refusal to generate income and profits by making it artificially scarce.

Knowledge is a non- or anti-rival good which gains in use value the more it is shared. Although it can be shared easily and, when in digital form, at very low marginal cost, many extractive firms still use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digitized knowledge.

Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so that extra profits can be generated. This is particularly grievous for life-saving or planet-regenerating technological knowledge.

The first action is, therefore, an ethical one, with three elements: share what can be shared; only create market value from resources that are scarce; create added value on top or alongside of these commons.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open Business models see the sections on Business Models, Open Company Formats, Open Knowledge, and post-corporate enterprises.

• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Content, Open Models, Copyright/IP, and P2P Business Models

II. FAIR

2. Practice Open Cooperativism

Many new ethical, generative forms are being created that are better aligned with the contributory commons. The key is to choose post-corporate forms that can generate livelihoods for contributing commoners. Cooperatives are one of the potential forms that commons-friendly market entities could take.

Open cooperatives are cooperatives with the following characteristics:

1) Mission-oriented, with a social goal related to creating shared resources.

2) Multi-stakeholder governed, including those affected by or contributing to the particular activity.

3) Constitutionally committed by their own rules to co-creating commons with the productive communities.

4) Along with other cooperatives, global in organisational scope, in order to create counter-power to extractive multinational corporations.

We see the emergence of more open forms, including “neo-tribes” (eg. the Ouishare community), or more tightly organized “neo-builds” (eg., Enspiral.org, Las Indias or the Ethos Foundation).

Even more open is the network form chosen by the open scientific hardware community Sensorica, which allows all micro-task contributions to be accounted in the reward system through open value or contributory accounting (more below), thus more tightly coupling those contributions with generated income.

• Commons Transition: Open Cooperativism Definition, Stories on Open Cooperativism. See also David Bollier’s and Pat Conaty’s Open Coops report
• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open and Platform cooperativism, see our Cooperatives Section and dedicated sections on Open and Platform Cooperativism and Open Company Formats
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Cooperativism and Sustainable Livelihoods

3. Practice open value or contributory accounting

Peer production is based on an open, community-driven, collaborative infrastructure, with freely contributed, distributed tasks.

The most appropriate way to reward those contributing to such a process may not be the traditional salary, and so open value accounting (or contributory accounting) have emerged.

Sensorica, mentioned above, practices this in the following way. Any contributor may add their contributions (tasks performed) into the system, logged by project number. The contributor is then assigned “karma points” after a peer evaluation. Income is then flowed to these contributions which have been accounted-for and weighted (valued), so every contributor is fairly rewarded.

Contributory accounting and similar solutions avoid situations where only a few contributors — those more closely related to the market — capture the value co-created by the much larger community. Open book accounting also insures that the (re)distribution of value is transparent for all contributors.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on open value accounting and streams, see our section on P2P Accounting

4. Insure fair distribution and benefit-sharing through CopyFair licensing

Copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the knowledge commons they require, on the condition that changes and improvements are added back to that commons. This is a great advance, but should not be abstracted from the need for fairness.

In physical production, which involves finding resources, raw materials and payments to contributors, extractive models benefit from the unfettered commercial exploitation of these commons.

Therefore, while knowledge sharing should always be maintained we should also demand reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of the commons. This would create a level playing field for the ethical economic entities that presently internalize social and environmental costs.

CopyFair licenses, which allow knowledge sharing while requesting reciprocity in exchange for the right of commercialization, would facilitate achieving this.

• Commons Transition: An introduction to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses
• For P2P Foundation documentation on licenses see Licensing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on CopyFair licenses.

5. Practice solidarity and mitigate the risks of work and life through “commonfare” practices

The power of nation-states has gradually weakened as one result of financial and neoliberal globalization. We are seeing a strong, integrated effort to dismantle the vital solidarity mechanisms that were once embedded in the welfare state models.

While we may yet not have the power to prevent this destruction, it is imperative that we reconstruct distributed solidarity mechanisms, a practice which we call commonfare.

Examples all over the world, such as the Broodfonds (NL), Friendsurance (Germany), and the health sharing ministries (U.S.), or cooperative entities such Coopaname in France, demonstrate new forms of distributed solidarity which can be developed to allay risks to life and work. We are particularly happy about the emergence of labour mutuals like the European cooperative SMart-eu, which represents the missing link between the precariat and salaried workers by offering a mutual guarantee fund and “virtual salariat” (i.e. insertion into social protections) for autonomous workers.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our P2P Solidarity Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Healthcare

III. SUSTAINABLE

6. Use open and sustainable designs for an open source circular economy

The practice of planned obsolescence — a feature, not a bug, for profit-maximizing corporations — is alien to people operating in a context of shared, abundant resources. Open productive communities insure maximum participation through modularity and granularity.

Using open and sustainable designs for producing sustainable good and services is highly recommended for ethical-entrepreneurial entities.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our Design Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on the Open Source Circular Economy

7. Move toward mutual coordination of production through open supply chains and open book accounting

What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the market, mutual coordination is for the commons.

In a circular economy, the output of one production process is used as an input for another. Closed value chains won’t help us achieve a sustainable circular economy; neither will non-transparent negotiations for any form of cooperation.

But through open supply chains, entrepreneurial coalitions that are interdependent with a collaborative commons can create ecosystems of collaboration. Here, production processes become transparent, and every participant can adapt his or her behaviour based on the knowledge openly available in the network.

There is no need for overproduction when the network’s actual production realities become common knowledge.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Mutual Coordination

8. Practice cosmo-localization

“What is light is global, and what is heavy is local.” This is the new principle animating commons-based peer production, in which knowledge is globally shared and production can take place on demand — based on real needs — through a network of distributed coworking spaces and microfactories.

Studies have shown that up to two-thirds of matter and energy goes not to production, but to transport. Clearly, this is unsustainable. A return to localized production is sine qua non for the transition towards sustainable production.

• More information: Cosmo-localism and the futures of material production
• Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

1. Article 1 [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text
2. Article 2 [2015] “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”. text

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sustainable_Manufacturing.

9. Mutualize physical infrastructures

The misnamed sharing economy, from AirBnB to Uber, has shown the potential of matching idle, under- or unused resources, but in the right context of co-ownership and co-governance, a real sharing economy can achieve dramatic advances in reducing resource use.

Our means of production, including machines, can be mutualized and self-owned by all those that create value. Platform cooperatives, data cooperatives and “fairshares” forms of distributed ownership are tools to help us co-own our infrastructures of production.

Co-working, skills-sharing, ridesharing are just a few examples of the many ways we can re-use and share resources to dramatically augment the thermo-dynamic efficiencies of our consumption.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sharing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Sharing

10. Mutualize generative capital

The 38 percent financial tax owed on all goods and services should be abolished; we must transform our monetary system, and substantively augment the use of mutual credit systems. Generative forms of capital cannot rely on an extractive money supply based on compound interest payable to extractive banks.

• Commons Transition: See features on Capital for the Commons and the Commons Strategies Group report of the same name.
• For P2P Foundation documentation on generative capital see Peerfunding and the Democratic Money Initiative
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Money

In conclusion: What the world, humanity and the environment that sustains us needs is an economic system driven by free, fair and sustainable practices. It is our belief that the holistic adoption of the recommendations and practices above will accelerate this change. We can’t afford to wait any longer, so let’s get to work!

• Cross-posted from Shareable
• Lead image by Josef Stuefer, “Open” image by Open Knowledge, “Fair” image by OpenSource.com, “Sustainable” image by USAID Nepal

The post 10 Ways to Accelerate the Peer-to-Peer and Commons Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Note: All Procomuns videos feature simultaneous translation, please switch from left to right channels to change languages.

This plenary was filmed at PROCOMUNS, a 3 day event which was held in Barcelona in March, 2016 to discuss commons-oriented approaches to public policy, peer production and the commons collaborative economy. Key goals included proposing public policies and providing technical guidelines to build software platforms for collaborative communities. You can find more Procomuns material on the P2P Foundation blog, compiled under this tag

The post Procomuns Plenary 11: Open Source Circular Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The shift to a circular economy presents a wicked, multidimensional problem: how can we redesign our operating system so that it works in the long term, and reflects the current context in terms of resources, energy and economic pressures?

It’s hard to know where to start. After all, with our once-successful linear economy reaching its limits, you could say that designing economies that last has, never really worked that well for us in the past. The challenge is really about enabling an ecosystem to emerge which effectively (re)uses materials and resources, and rebuilds economic, social and natural capital.

When we look at the circular economy field now, it’s dominated by large corporate players – and we do need these businesses taking on responsibility and leading with their considerable research, manufacturing and marketing clout. But redwoods and rhinos don’t make a whole ecosystem, there are many more parts to be played. To live up to the rhetoric and develop a real circular economy we need diversity of size, of focus, of motivation, and perspectives.

Diversity of scale – key to a healthy economy.

Reaching this goal will require a shake-up of not just our products and services, but also the way in which we develop them and interact with each other.

Much like the steam engine was able to power the rapid economical, social and – for better or worse – environmental change of the industrial revolution, at this stage it seems we’re waiting to see what invention will propel us headlong into a thriving 21st century circular economy. Will it be some magical nanomaterial? A molecular assembler in every home? Or some other fantastic Star Trek technology, beamed down to our production lines?

I believe that the ‘steam engine’ for the circular economy has already been invented – but it’s not a machine, it’s open source collaboration.

Currently much circular economy development is being done company-by-company, focused on individual proprietary solutions. If limited collaboration is happening, it’s behind closed doors in bureaucratic consortia. Following this trajectory there is still a chance that we may, in time, reach our goal of a functional circular economy – but time is perhaps the most precious of all the resources we’re fast running out of.

We still don’t know how the circular economy will work on many levels, but we know we want to get there. Fortunately, each improvement, each small step along this road can still be useful and practical for individuals, for business, society and the environment. It just so happens that this combination of an epic goal and diverse motivations is where open source shines.

Open source is a methodology which enables people to work effectively and invite collaboration with unknown others – whomever and wherever they are in the world. It provides a system wherein organisations and individuals can all autonomously contribute to and benefit from a shared ecosystem, tackling different parts of a larger problem without wasting time on redundant replication of work.

In practice, open source means publishing how things are made, such as a recipe, software code, production data, or design files so that anyone can study, use, and build upon this information. This often occurs through decentralised and distributed online collaboration: diverse groups discussing project ideas, giving feedback, fixing bugs, prototyping solutions and building useful, customisable software, hardware, tools and culture.

It’s interesting to compare the guidelines and best practices for developing a circular economy with those of the open source world, you’ll see many similarities – practical requirements for transparency, repairability, modularity, long-term perspectives, open standards…

Many people have already seen these connections and are developing open source circular economy solutions to recycle plastics , building extendible modular design systems like Open Structures , or open platforms for the transport industry like OSVehicle .

To some, open source sounds like chaos, like design by committee – it could never work.

But designs that are ‘free for all’ doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all: open source means that anyone can contribute, but it doesn’t mean that all contributions are accepted as is. A project leader can still pick and choose from open source components, and they maintain control over their version of a project. If you don’t think OSVehicle’s two-seater has enough trunk space, you can duplicate the designs and develop a van based on the OSVehicle ‘DNA’.

But poor OSVehicle, you might think! Or perhaps ‘those stupid chumps’… a competitor has ‘stolen’ their work and is making money off it! But in fact, the van market hardly ‘competes’ with the small hatchback market. In this scenario, the utility of the the OSVehicle platform has increased dramatically with an extra model, meaning that more third-party suppliers of seats, steering wheels, other parts or services will see more value in supporting the OSVehicle system, lowering costs and increasing choice for OSVehicle and their customers. And any improvements the van company makes to the underlying system will benefit the hatchback company too.

The collaborative development of the Linux Kernel

In order to develop solutions to fit a diverse range of problems and opportunities, this kind of genetic mutation is not just desired, it’s necessary. It’s evolution. In the digital world, the open source approach is now well established and successful part of business. In the server market, Microsoft has been soundly beaten by open source, thanks to multi-party collaboration and investment on the GNU/Linux operating system. Now Linux dominates not just servers, but also supercomputers, mobile and embedded devices. Every major player in tech is using open source to achieve their goals in some way – even the old holdouts seem to have come around.

Despite this growing movement, many (business)people outside of the tech world are understandably sceptical of the idea – 30 years ago when today’s CEOs were learning how the business world works, there was no way to collaborate effectively with unknown others around the world, and there didn’t seem to be a reason to. There was no way to ensure trust, no tools for distributed collaboration, no network of engaged individuals and organisations, and no open source business models. Allowing one’s competitors to study, improve upon or sell a company project would have been seen as madness.

But now we live amongst a growing global culture in which collaborating and working online is fast becoming the norm. We have professional tools for distributed co-creation, for documentation, for version control, we have trustworthy legally-tested open source licenses, and an ever-growing pool of individuals and companies with a range of motivations, skills and resources, keen to collaborate wherever their goals may be aligned with others.

There’s also a huge range of effective open source business models based around new markets, open collaboration, reduced R&D costs, and services or customisation. These business models work not despite their open nature, but because of it.

The world has changed. The old rules are no longer relevant everywhere.

But of course, open source is not magic. Merely having designs online doesn’t mean that people will actually engage with them – in order to get the best out of open source development, projects should be designed with collaboration in mind from the start. Knowing how to do this is tricky without the right experience.

So we want to spread this idea and make it easier for everyone to understand the opportunities that open source can offer them, and learn to work more effectively together on specific projects building towards a circular economy. We’re providing an opportunity for people and companies to try out this collaborative open source approach during the second edition of the Open Source Circular Economy days, an event taking place in more than 40 cities around the world between June 9th-13th 2016.

Over these days experts, citizens, and companies come together to discuss, design and prototype circular economy solutions, and share their findings for others to learn from. We work in the open and connect people from around the world, from the grassroots to the corporate level, across industries and cultures. And anyone is welcome to participate  – simply find an event in your local area, an interesting challenge to work on, or start your own.

Organisations all over the world are embracing the circular economy framework. However, if we are to truly accelerate this transition, a collaborative and transparent open source approach will prove vital in overcoming challenges and realising the full opportunities of a regenerative, restorative circular economy.

How open source can accelerate the circular economy shift by Sam Muirhead is licensed under CC BY SA.

The post How open source can accelerate the circular economy shift appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So what might a commons-based economy actually look like in its broadest dimensions, and how might we achieve it?  My colleague Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation offers a remarkably thoughtful and detailed explanation in a just-released YouTube talk, produced by FutureSharp. It’s not really a video – just Michel’s voiceover and a simple schematic chart – but the 20-minute talk does a great job of sketching the big-picture strategies that must be pursued if we are going to invent a new type of post-capitalist economy.

Michel focuses on the importance of three specific realms that are crucial to this new vision – ecological sustainability, open knowledge and social solidarity. Each is critical as a field of action for overturning the existing logic of market capitalism.

Fortunately, there are many promising developments in each of these realms. Many parts of the environmental movement seek to go beyond the standard “market-oriented solutions.” There is a growing body of open source-inspired projects for software code, information, design and physical production, which is now spawning new types of global sharing of information with distributed local production. And there are many advocates and initiatives for social justice and fairness in the economy, such as cooperatives and the solidarity economy movement.

The problem, says Bauwens, is that these movements do not generally connect with each other or coordinate internationally. He therefore sees the need for “meta-economic networks” to bridge these fields of action. So, for example, we need “open cooperativism” enterprises to bridge open knowledge systems and cooperatives, so that open-licensed systems are not simply dominated by large corporations in the way that Google, Uber and Airbnb have done. We also need to develop an “open source circular economy” to bridge the worlds of eco-sustainability and open knowledge.  We will never address major environmental problems if the technological and product solutions are based on proprietary knowledge; open circulation of knowledge can change that.

Bauwens also sketches a compelling scenario by which commons-based projects can begin to develop a new politics through such vehicles as a new “ethical entrepreneurial coalition,” a “Chamber of Commons,” and “Commons Assemblies.”  He calls for new types of cooperative finance that can support sustainable production (based on the idea of sufficiency shared by all) as well as the mutualizing of knowledge (vs. its privatization via patents and copyright) and social solidarity (to ensure just and fair distribution of any surplus value created).

While the overall vision may strike skeptics as utopian, the truth is that many of the ideas in Bauwen’s scenario are already underway, if not well-developed.  What’s mostly missing is a wider orientation and commitment to a coherent, shared vision such as this one.  There is also a need for new bridges of social practice and coordination among the three key fields of action.

You can also check out several short short videos introducing the basic concepts of peer production here.

Anyone who is especially interested in this topic should know that the P2P Foundation plans to host a three-day summer school on “The Art of Commoning,” from August 25-27, in Cloughjordan ecovillage in Tipperary, Ireland.  Details here and here.

Originally published at Bollier.org

The post Here’s What a Commons-Based Economy Looks Like appeared first on P2P Foundation.