The following statement was originally posted on FocusWeb.org.

The Bolivian Government Must Stop Persecuting Those Defending Nature and Rights and Address the Real Problems

Pablo Solón, the Director of Fundación Solón, former Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, and former Bolivian Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), is being targeted by the Bolivian government for his vocal criticism of the government and the construction of two hydro-electric projects, El Bala and El Chapete in the Amazonian region. Based on the studies done by Geodata, an Italian company hired by the government to identify where the dams will be built, Solón says they will “inundate an area five times larger than the city of La Paz, displace more than five thousand indigenous peoples, deforest more than one hundred thousand hectares and will not be profitable for the country with the current prices of electricity in Brazil.”

Solón resigned as Bolivia’s UN Ambassador in June 2011, and was succeeded by the Deputy Permanent Representative, Rafael Archondo. Archondo a very well known journalist, served as the interim representative for 14 months, until Sacha Llorenti, who was Minister of Government in September 2011 during the repression of the indigenous peoples’ march in defense of the National Park and Indigenous Territory of TIPNIS, was appointed as the new UN Ambassador. The Vice Ministry of Transparency and Anti-Corruption has now decided to bring criminal charges with jail sentences of up to 4 years against Solón and Archondo, alleging that Solón “illegally appointed” Archondo and that Archondo committed the crime of “prolonging functions.” Both the accused have publicly responded showing that Archondo was appointed by the President of Bolivia as Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN and that he did not prolong in his functions.

Send your message of support and solidarity to Pablo here

Why such charges are being brought against Solón and Archondo now, six years after their tenure in government, is clear. The Bolivian government aims to harass, intimidate and criminalize those who dare to challenge the government’s policies and strategies. As Solón has stated: “The news [of the criminal charges] was not a surprise. Following our critical analysis of the mega hydroelectric plants at El Bala and Chepete, several friends had warned me that they would leave no stone unturned to accuse me of something, intimidate me, and silence me.”

Despite the threat of imprisonment, Solón has re-affirmed his commitment to voice his opinions. He says, “we will not lose hope for a different Bolivia, where the Rights of Mother Earth and Vivir Bien are a tangible reality.”

We strongly condemn the efforts of the Bolivian government to harass and intimidate Solón for standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples, nature and public interest. We urge the Bolivian government to withdraw the sham charges against both Solón and Archondo. We stand in solidarity with them as they challenge these trumped-up allegations, and continue to fight for justice and nature.

Signed

(Add your name to the comments and we will include your signature)

• P2P Foundation
• Commons Strategies Group
• Michel Bauwens
• Silke Helfrich
• David Bollier
• Stacco Troncoso
• Eric Doriean
• Ana Maria Peredo
• Nicolas Krausz
• Alain Ambrosi
• Miguel Novik
• Peter Lipman
• Marie Venner, CatholicNetwork.US

The post In urgent support of our colleague Pablo Solón appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A big thanks to Remix the Commons and Commons Spaces – two groups in Montreal, and to Alain Ambrosi, Frédéric Sultan and Stépanie Lessard-Bérubé — for pulling together this wonderful snapshot of the commons world.  The overview video is no introduction to the commons, but a wonderfully insightful set of advanced commentaries about the political and strategic promise of the commons paradigm today.

The overview video (“Les communs dans l’espace politique,” with English subtitles as needed) is striking in its focus on frontier developments: the emerging political alliances of commoners with conventional movements, ideas about how commons should interact with state power, and ways in which commons thinking is entering policy debate and the general culture.

The video features commentary by people like Frédéric Sultan, Gaelle Krikorian, Alain Ambrosi, Ianik Marcil, Matthew Rhéaume, Silke Helfrich, Chantal Delmas, Pablo Solon, Christian Iaione, and Jason Nardi, among others.

The individual interviews with each of these people are quite absorbing. (See the full listing of videos here.) Six of these interviews are in English, nine are in French, and three are in Spanish.  They range in length from ten minutes to twenty-seven minutes.

To give you a sense of the interviews, here is a sampling:

Christian Iaione, an Italian law scholar and commoner, heads the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons in Italy. The project, established five years ago, is attempting to change the governance of commons in Italian cities such as Rome, Bologna, Milan and Messina. More recently, it began a collaboration with Fordham University headed by Professor Sheila Foster, and  experiments in Amsterdam and New York City.

In his interview, “Urban Commons Charters in Italy,” Iaione warns that the Bologna Charter for the Care and Regeneration of Urban commons is not a cut-and-paste tool for bringing about commons; it requires diverse and localized experimentation. “There must be a project architecture working to change city governance and commons-enabling institutions,” said Iaione. “Regulation can’t be simply copied in south of Italy, such as Naples, because they don’t have the same civic institutions and public ethics as other parts of Italy….. You need different tools,” which must be co-designed by people in those cities, he said.

Jason Nardi, in his interview, “The Rise of the Commons in Italy” (27 minutes), credits the commons paradigm with providing “a renewed paradigm useful to unite and aggregate many different movements emerging today,” such as degrowth, cooperatives, the solidarity economy, ecologists, NGOs, development movements, and various rights movements. He credited the World Social Forum for helping to unite diverse factions to fight the privatization of everything by the big financial powers.

Charles Lenchner of Democrats.com spoke about “The Commons in the USA” (11 minutes), citing the important movement in NYC to converted community gardens into urban commons.  He also cited the rise of participatory budgeting movement in New York City today, in which a majority of city council districts use that process.  The City of New York is also encouraging greater investment in co-operatives, in part as a way to deal with precarity and income disparities.

Silke Helfrich, a German commons activist, discussed “Commons as a new political subject” (27 minutes).  She said that “it’s impossible today to know what’s going on about the commons because so many things are popping up or converging that it’s hard to keep up with them all.”  She said that there are three distinct ways of approaching the commons:  the commons as pools of shared resources to be managed collectively; the commons as social processes that bring commoning into being; and the commons as an attitude and way of thinking about a broader paradigm shift going on.

Kevin Flanagan gave an interview, “Transition according to P2P” (19 minutes), in which he speaks of the “growing political maturity within the commons world, particularly within digital commons, peer production and collaborative economy.”  Flanagan said that there has always been a politics to the commons, but that politics is moving from being a cultural politics towards a broader politics that is engaging hacker culture, maker spaces, and open design and hardware movements.   Commoners are also beginning to work with more traditional political movements such as the cooperative and the Social and Solidarity Economy movements.

Lots of nutritious food for thought in this well-produced collection of videos!

The post New Videos Explore the Political Potential of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.