In Spain, two private energy companies account for 80% of the country’s energy market, and green energy suppliers are scarce. In December 2010, 157 people decided to try to produce their own renewable energy, and set up Som Energia.

Some members signed up with the aim of doing something to create a post-fossil fuel economic order and experiment with new forms of democracy. Some were not happy with their electricity supplier, and many were already involved in other cooperatives or other political initiatives and were interested in the energy issue.

In January 2011 Som Energia started to apply for the necessary permits and soon after entered the market as a non-profit cooperative committed to producing 100% renewable energy from hydroelectric, solar, biomass and wind power. Its first project was a 100 kW solar project on an industrial building in Lleida. The installation started in early 2012 and by April it was fully functional. Eight more projects then got underway. Around 5000 members invested €11 million. At present the cooperative produces 10% of all its supplied energy, while the other 90% comes from certified green energy producers.

Board members and members of the technical team.

Today Som Energia collaborates with over 300 municipalities – 160 of them contracted it directly as their electricity supplier. Every member can share their membership with five others so that they do not have to pay the deposit fee of €100 – helping provide green electricity to people on lower incomes. Som Energia also collaborates with villages with less than 500 inhabitants, which can contract Som Energia without paying the €100 entrance fee.

Seven years after the cooperative started it has 44,600 members throughout Spain and 69,619 clients receiving 100% renewable energy – figures that continue to increase. In May 2016 through its project Generation kWh, a collectively owned solar field was set up – the first of its kind in the country – currently supplying 1,300 households. Its revenue amounted to €30 million in 2017.

The post Girona, Spain: Cooperative breaks the mould to provide renewable energy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Xse emerged when different organisations and individuals identified energy-related problems affecting local populations, including fracking, the managing of hydroelectric dams by private corporations and extremely high voltage power lines, and the building of a pipeline through Catalonia to transport gas from Algeria to Europe. It also wanted to challenge government obstruction of renewable energies, and collusion with companies that creates some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.

Resistance to Spain’s dominant energy model has existed for years, but associations, groups and individuals from all over the Catalonian territory came together for the first time at the Day of Action for a Change of Model towards Energy Sovereignty in June in 2013. A few months later the Xarxa per la sobirania energètica (Xse) de Catalunya was formed to create an energy future based on democracy and social control of energy production, sustainability and, decentralization and being rooted in Catalonia.

Xse works through four ‘hubs’ or active local committees (Barcelona, Girona, Tarragona and Mallorca) and most of its resources come from member organizations. Its ‘energy municipalisation’ working group aims to re-municipalise the power grid inspired by German models, such as those in Hamburg and Berlin. It also works with lawyers specifically to analyse the regulations of the Spanish energy sector to study the possibility of shifting to a municipal energy model. This municipalist proposal has been largely supported by civil society organizations, individuals and political parties.

The Catalonian climate change law, advocated together with the Climate Justice Movement and adopted this September, includes a ban on fracking in Catalonia, the dismantling of nuclear power plants and a proposal to create a fossil-fuel-free Mediterranean. This law is nowadays suspended by the Spanish Constitutional Court.

Volt 4, group photo.

Moreover, one of their main annual activities, el VOLT, gathers dozens of activists weaving networks around the catalan territory, inspired in the Oligotox tours of Latinamerica, claiming environmental and social justice for the global and local Souths from a ecofeminist perspective.

“It is truly impressive the wide range of organizations that are engaged in the network and how much they have managed to accomplish in a very short period of time (less than 5 years!), including passing several municipal and provincial laws and regulations.”
– Lorena Zarate

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit xse.cat

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Catalonia, Spain: Building a powerful regional network for energy sovereignty appeared first on P2P Foundation.

• June 8th 2018 19:30 – 21:30
• Location: IHECS Brussels School for Journalism and Communication, Stoofstraat 58, Brussel, Brussel, België
• Category: Evenementen denktank

Will cities change the world? At least, cities are becoming a new and hopeful transnational governance level. They are organizing themselves in a whole tissue of networks (Fearless Cities, Fabcities, …), working together in domains like climate policy, renewable energy and urban economy.

At the same time, citizens are developing a whole range of urban commons, based on co-operation and an ethics of care. Tired of only being a powerless consumer or a passive citizen, we get active as maker, urban farmer, solidarity volunteer, user of shared resources, civic or social entrepreneur, etc. This goes along with the establishment of new organisations and infrastructures like fablabs, energy co-ops, co-working spaces, urban food production plots, etc.

Recent years, we have seen cities like Ghent and Bologna moving a step further, establishing structures and processes that aim at building synergies between the public and the commons domain. This is part of a new political vision, the Partner State. So, a partner city sustains and gives incentives to alternative civil and economic institutions, like the commons and cooperatives. Taking these developments of collaborative city-making together, we see the emergence of a prototype of transformative cities, that could be the driving force towards socio-ecological societies.

Thanks to these transitions institutions, research groups and organizations where created to investigate how commons could be sustainable integrated in the vivid networks of cities.

How can a commons transition in cities be realized to create sustainable Eco-Cities? Experts from different projects and institutions will inspire you with their knowledge and findings about sustainable commons in cities. At this conference you can get inspired and motivated to start, or strengthen, your own project, common initiative or cooperation.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Michel Bauwens

Founder and director of the P2P Foundation and expert in peer production, governance and property. Bauwens is a well-known public speaker and thought leader. In 2017 he wrote the Commons Transition Plan for Ghent, after a similar project for Ecuador.

Elena De Nictolis

Research associate at LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons. She prepares a Phd thesis on public policies for urban co-governance and the relation with the quality of city democracy at LUISS University of Rome.

Photo by Dominic’s pics

The post Creating Eco-Societies through Urban Commons Transitions, with Michel Bauwens and Elena De Nictolis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

21-23 November 2018

ISCTE-IUL, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

Organiser: CEI-IUL, Centre for International Studies

With the support of the Department of Political Economy (ISCTE-IUL) and Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (CE3C), Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon

In response to the current global social and environmental crisis, various social movements are developing alternatives to the socio-economic status quo by mobilizing endogenous practices, institutions and resources and networking among grassroots initiatives. Within these movements stands out Solidary Social Economy and the Commons. This international and interdisciplinary conference, guided by an action research strategy, aims to respond to challenges that have arisen from recent research on forms of shared governance between the state, the market and the third sector, promoted by movements and public policies for the Social Solidarity Economy, as well as criticisms made by authors such as Martin Deleixhe, David Harvey and Massimo de Angelis to the theory developed by Elinor Ostrom on the management of common property:

• How to promote a strong sense of community belonging, necessary to promote the cooperation between stakeholders that is necessary for the harmonious governance of Social Solidarity Economy and the Commons, while preventing the emergence of totalizing visions, ensuring pluralism and promoting democratic deepening?

• How to promote shared governance strategies between the state, the market and the third sector, aimed at supporting the development of Social Solidarity Economy networks as spaces of self-organization, in which participants can autonomously construct themselves as economic and political subjects?

• How to promote organizations based on the constitution and / or management of Common Goods (Integral Cooperatives, Ecovillages, associations of users and / or producers, etc.) based on fair, inclusive and participative forms of governance, and integrated into grassroots socioeconomic dynamics?

The purpose of this event is to promote an intersectoral dialogue on this topic at the international level. We invite researchers, activists, public officials, social entrepreneurs and other actors in these fields to present communications that explore possible configurations which the convergence between the approaches proposed by the Solidarity Economy and Common Goods movements can assume in the following fields:

– Production and distribution of food, water and energy;

– Infrastructures (management of territories, means of communication and transport, information technologies, housing and economic and cultural activity spaces);

– Health, Education and Culture

– Financial systems (ethical finance, social currencies, crypto-coins).

The objective is to develop theoretical and empirical materials that facilitate convergence and the establishment of common action plans for the promotion of socially and environmentally resilient communities, in particular through:

(a) adaptation to climate change, transition to the use of renewable energies and promotion of “environmental ethics”;

b) public policies and participatory democracy mechanisms to promote social justice through empowerment and a more effective exercise of social, economic and civic rights by vulnerable social groups;

c) the revitalization of local economies through “short circuits” of production and consumption that stimulate the creation of employment and the establishment of wealth at an autochthonous level.

Please email paper abstracts of no more than 300 words to  [email protected] by May 31 2018. Acceptance and rejection notices will be sent in mid-June 2018.

The organizing committee will subsequently selected papers presented at the conference to be published in the ISCTE-IUL Centre for International Studies (CEI) open source e-book collection. The authors and actors present at the thematic sessions will also be invited to contribute chapters on the topics discussed for publication.

Photo by pedrosimoes7

The post Call for Papers: Social Solidarity Economy and the Commons: Envisioning Sustainable and Post-capitalist Futures, Lisbon, Portugal, 21-23 November 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First of all came the voluntary, politically and ecologically motivated pioneers, who made it politically viable to introduce the second factor, without which it would have stalled or remained a niche.

The second factor is the regulation that permitted feed-in tariffs, which created a safe market to recuperate investments, which was the third factor.

This combination made the enduring success, while in other countries, where such policies and favourable market conditions were not present, the transition stagnated or even regressed.

Report: Diversity is Strength. The German Energiewende as a Resilient Alternative.

By Tadzio Mueller. Source Network /New Economics Foundation / Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2017

Extract:

The Energiewende and its institutions

Social movements, it has been argued since their heyday in the late 1960s, are actors, or maybe processes, that expand the limits of the possible, that bring ‘the new’ into the world, precisely because they emerge around problematics that the existing set of social and political institutions cannot find solutions for. At the same time, it is precisely this quality of bringing the new into the world that also brings with it one of the key problems of a politics based in movement(s): how do the gains of social movements become generalised and permanent? It is hard, in fact impossible, to constantly stay mobilised. The German anti-Nuclear movement, for example, fought long and hard against any new nuclear power installation in the country. But nobody can stay in the streets forever, so at some point, it becomes necessary to institutionalise movement gains. It is here where movements often fail – and where, for a variety of reasons, the German Energiewende did not fail. It is therefore to the institutionality of the process we now turn. I will argue that its remarkable dynamism and resilience are the result of a peculiar combination of local movement processes and national legislation, and of an unusual combination of political and economic logics. It is what it is not because of the basis of a particular purity, but because it lives by an open logic of articulation.

Diversity is Strength by Tadzio Mueller, as recommended and curated by P2P Foundation on Scribd

Photo by Windwärts Energie

The post Why did the German Energiewende succeed appeared first on P2P Foundation.

How relocating energy in the commons helps scaling-up renewables & saving energy

Is energy a mere commodity, or is it a common good? Why is this relevant in the first place? Here we look at why energy is part of our commons, from the sources to the product itself. In a second time, we will see that relocating energy in the commons has very important implications: it helps solve the energy efficiency dilemma (i.e., we need to reduce our energy consumption but who’s going to pay for that?) and scale-up renewables.

What is a commons?

Once upon a time… there was an alpine pasture, where cattle from the village came to graze. The air was fresh and brisk, there was enough grass for the animals. But it was also a delicate, sensitive environment: put too much pressure on it (too much cattle) and it would be ruined in no-time… In other words, the pasture was a finite resource, which could support a finite number of cattle.

A (finite) natural resource, that is necessary to all: that’s a natural commons.

There are three way of dealing with natural commons:

1. The commons (e.g., the pasture) is claimed by someone, who controls its access and monetize it: it becomes a commodity and the usage profits mainly to a few.
2. There is no communication in the community and no rules are set to use the commons. Individuals tend to exploit the commons as much as possible in order to maximise their own profit and compete for accessing to it. Eventually, the commons is destroyed. This is how Garrett Hardin described modern humans’ behaviour in the “Tragedy of the Commons” in 1968, which led him to argue that only privatization (as in 1.) or state regulation are successful mode of governance for the commons.
3. People actually talk to each other and are conscious of the problem of over-using their commons. Therefore, communities organise themselves and set some rules, compensation mechanisms and sanctions against free-riders. Benefits are shared and sustained. This is what Elinor Ostrom (and her colleagues) reported upon throughout her career: communities are able to (and do) manage their common goods by themselves.

Next to the finite or physical resources defining the classical commons framework, we can think of other non-finite and more abstract resources that can be treated as commons and referred to as social commons: digital commons, knowledge commons, health commons, urban commons… Shifting the paradigm from commodity to commons helps to reduce the (artificial) scarcity of these resources (created and sustained by privatisation and monetisation) by having a common-ownership or no-ownership. This is best illustrated by the creative common licences, which allow (for some of them) companies to sell a product but not to claim its ownership (which means that other companies can sell the same product, modify it, etc…).

And finally, there’s the act of commoning: doing together, sharing, benefiting from each other. As we saw in the previous episode, this is one of the recurrent arguments given by members of energy cooperatives as a ground and as a co-benefit from their project.

Renewable energy is a common good

SCAD Museum of Arts, Work by Nari Ward (“We the people”) Photo by JR P CC-BY-NC2.0

Here we will focus on renewable energy (RE) but this discussion also applies to fossil fuels. According to the definitions above, RE is a commons and we demonstrate this using three different viewpoints:

• the source (wind, sun…),
• the product (energy and more specifically electricity), and
• the energy transition process (i.e., the switch towards clean renewables).

The source. The renewable sources of energy (especially wind, sun, water and in a lesser extend biomass) are clearly part of our natural commons: no-one can claim their ownership and they belong to all. Furthermore, and this is particularly important, they are finite resources. It is therefore crucial to make sure that the access to these resources is equally shared throughout the society.

The product. Electricity and energy in a broader sense are part of the social commons. Indeed, accessing to energy being necessary in modern societies, it becomes a common good. And due to finite sources, the amount of energy available is also finite.
It is crucial to avoid the appropriation of this common good by individuals or single actors (i.e., free-riders) in order to prevent the creation of an artificial scarcity and efficiently fight energy poverty. If this does not sound too serious in the western word, it is a huge issue in poorer countries and has been placed in the United Nation agenda for 2030 as the sustainable development goal number 7.

Energy transition. By looking at the process of switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources, we enter into the field of “climate change mitigation”. Decarbonising the energy sector falls into the global commons: every gramme of CO2 released in the atmosphere will have an effect on all of us. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stresses the threat posed by free-riders to our mitigation efforts (summary for policy makers, AR5): “Effective mitigation will not be achieved if individual agents advance their own interests independently.”
As one can read on the website of the Mercator research Institute on Global Commons (MCC), energy is also part of the social commons: “These are public goods providing access to health services, education, clean water, sanitation, energy, or transport and communication infrastructure. They are essential for human well-being as the level of provision of these goods has significant effects on both growth and inequality.” The MCC describes the dilemma of the energy transition as an overuse of the global commons and an under-provision of the social commons.

The energy transition is a huge task for our generation and it creates both challenges and opportunities. On the winners’ side, a new market is being created, which is already profitable enough to attract institutional investors. Large investment in renewables from private sources is potentially a good news, as it speeds up the energy transition. However, there are serious drawbacks in the commodification of energy. First, the returns on investment will remain in private hands, which is a loss of revenue for society and increases the concentration of capital into the hands of a few. Second, as these investments are profit-driven, the primary goal is to install the technology providing the highest income, regardless of people’s needs and desires (so not necessarily the appropriate technology).
To summarize, here is how the EU Horizon 2020 research project REScoop presents the social relevance of framing RE sources in the commons (policy recommendation):
“Wind, solar, hydro, biomass and geothermal energy are natural resources. They in fact belong to no one and are in principle available to all. They are common goods. From the perspective of social justice, more attention therefore must be paid to the way in which decentralised renewable energy sources are managed. In a world where energy is scarce, these sources of energy will mean income for the operators. Citizens and users therefore have every interest in keeping this local energy production in their own hands as much as possible. Governments too have every interest in anchoring decentralised renewable energy with the users as much as possible so that the added value of the production also benefits society. This is especially true for wind energy, an energy source that extends over a larger area, but ultimately is exploited on a small site. The benefit of this exploitation should extend to the widest possible group of people. Thus, the exploitation of wind energy should not simply be privatised, but also allocated on the basis of socio-economic criteria.”

Reducing energy consumption

The people’s windmill – outside European Parliament, Brussels More than a 150 people formed the shape of a giant wind turbine in front of the European Parliament in Brussels to call for more support for community renewable energy projects. Photo by Friends of the Earth CC-BY-NC 2.0

One aspect of commodifying energy that is often overlooked, is that in order to increase the profits, utilities have an inherent incentive to produce and sell as much energy as possible. This is totally counteracting all efforts made to increase energy efficiency and conservation.
As recognized by several experts, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions (by increasing our efficient use of energy) is a key pillar of the energy transition. However, efficiency measures are often presented as a burden, which is costly and does not generate enough profits.
As stated by John Byrne and his team at University of Delaware, effectively “relocating energy in the commons” (I stole this expression from this remarkable and very accessible paper) has the double advantage to stimulate the installation of renewable power plants and save energy simultaneously, whereas energy as a commodity leads to a state of “energy obesity”. This “commonification” of energy is presented through the Sustainable Energy Utilities (SEU), which are community-based institutions aiming at designing and financing local energy projects. The idea is to consider the energy consumption of a community globally, with the primary aim being to save it: when energy is needed, SEU should implement an appropriate renewable technology, and incorporate heat and transport systems in the design.

Originally posted on energycommonsblog

Lead image: Energy cooperative from the US, Touchstone Energy.  Photo by David Ingram CC-BY-NC2.0

The post Is renewable energy a commons? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Candidate Donald Trump made a campaign stop in February 2016 hosted by South Carolina’s Broad River Electric Cooperative. After taking the auditorium stage, observing that “it’s a lot of people,” and joining the audience in a chant of his surname, Trump began by asking, “Do we love electricity, by the way, all you electricity people?” He went on: “How about life without electricity? Not so good, right? Not so good.” He then changed the subject.

Trump appeared to have been briefed on the origin story of electric co-ops, which goes something like this: By the onset of the Great Depression, few people in the rural United States had electricity at home—about 10 percent. The power companies that had lit up the cities simply didn’t see enough profit in serving far-flung farmers. But gradually some of those farmers started forming electric cooperatives—utility companies owned and governed by their customers—and strung up their own lines. Many bought cheap power from dams on federal land. Their ingenuity became a progressive New Deal program, which Franklin Roosevelt initiated in 1935 and Congress funded the following year. The Department of Agriculture began dispensing low-interest loans across the country. Farmers set up their own power lines and co-ops, even as corporate competitors tried to undermine them, building stray “spite lines” through their prospective territories. But the cooperators prevailed. They switched on their own lights.

We typically think of our democratic institutions as having to do with politicians and governments. But there are democratic businesses, too—not just these electric co-ops, but also hulking credit unions, mutual-insurance companies, and ubiquitous cooperative brands from Land O’Lakes to the Associated Press. Their democracy is fragile. When it’s not exercised or noticed, these creatures act on their own volition.

A government guide for members of rural electrification cooperatives, 1939.

People, like Trump, who are used to paying their utility bills in cities tend not to know that 75 percent of the country’s landmass gets its electricity from such cooperatives. That amounts to about 42 million member-owners, 11 percent of the total electricity sold, and $164 billion in assets, serving 93 percent of the persistent-poverty counties in the country. Local co-ops band together to form larger co-ops of co-ops—power suppliers that run power plants, cooperatively owned mining operations, and democratic banks that finance new projects. Population growth and sprawl have brought wealthy suburbs to many of these once-rural territories. It’s a scale of cooperative enterprise unheard of for those who associate “co-op” with grocery stores, community gardens, and apartment buildings. It’s also a neglected democracy—neglected by member-owners of the co-ops, who often don’t know that they’re anything more than customers, and by a society that forgets what cooperative economic development have achieved.

Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon regarded the electric cooperatives as creeping communism, while Democratic presidents tended to benefit from the sector’s support. Lyndon Johnson helped set up the co-op that served his ranch, and Jimmy Carter’s father had been on the board of the co-op that served his area. But the progressive base retreated to urban centers. Bill Clinton singled out the co-ops for cuts. More recently, between 2010 and ’16, the political contributions by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association 
(NRECA) flipped from 50/50 between the two parties to 72 percent Republican. Vice President Mike Pence has had long-standing ties with Indiana’s electric co-ops. And the co-ops, this remnant of rural progressivism, helped deliver the Electoral College and Congress to him and President Trump.

Among those celebrating after the 2016 election was Jim Matheson, a former Democratic congressman from Utah who now serves as the association’s CEO. “Rural America’s voice was heard in this election, and it will be a powerful voice moving forward,” he was quoted as saying in a press release published on November 14. A spike in rural, right-leaning voter turnout coincided with his organization’s Co-ops Vote campaign, which mobilized member-owners in a subset of the country’s 838 local electric cooperatives. What’s more, the next president would be the candidate who had promised to scrap his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, fulfilling a chief policy priority of the NRECA under Matheson. Subsequent press releases praised Trump’s climate-denialist, regulation-smashing cabinet appointees.

Territory served by energy co-ops, shown in green. (America’s Electric Cooperatives)

The administration’s initial “America First” budget draft, however, proposed slashing a batch of rural programs, including the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Cooperative Development Grants. When the draft came out in March, Matheson attempted to reassure his members. “This is only the first step in the budget process,” he said in a statement. Days later, at least, Matheson had the opportunity to celebrate an executive order meant to doom the Clean Power Plan.

The co-ops are a remnant of rural progressive movements, and they helped deliver the Electoral College to Trump.

Electric cooperatives are conservative institutions, carrying out the business of reliability while balancing their members’ interests with formidable inertia. But they’re also poised to lead a radical shift to a more renewable distributed-energy grid. They can be fiefdoms for long-entrenched establishments, but they’re also bastions of bottom-up, local self-governance. They tend to be far less regulated by states than investor-owned utilities, on the rationale that their member-owners do their own regulation. This is a chunk of the US energy system that depends not just on the whims of investors or on the promises of presidents, but on the readiness of the people who use it to organize.

Jim Heneghan is the renewable-energy
 engineer at the Delta-Montrose Electric Association, a co-op on the western end of Colorado. I followed him as he checked out a company pickup truck from the DMEA’s headquarters, a complex that includes one of the cooperative’s two 10-kilowatt solar farms. From there he drove me through the dusty landscape to the co-op’s first two hydroelectric plants along South Canal, a waterway piped in from the mountains. They opened in 2013 and operate mostly without human intervention, but Heneghan checks in on them personally when he can. “I like to start the plant manually,” he told me in one of the control rooms. A small man of terrific posture, he made his way among the towering, whirring machines like a librarian among shelves of rare books.

Soaking up the sun: Through the use of solar panels, Jim Heneghan is moving his co-op toward sustainable energy. (Nathan Schneider)

The first two plants proved the promise of the business model. Soon, other developers wanted to build plants along South Canal and sell the power to the local co-op, too. By 2015, the model was the subject of a federal regulatory dispute. The DMEA had begun bucking the co-op inertia.

Like most electric “distribution” co-ops, the DMEA is an owner-member of a larger co-op. These are called “generation and transmission” co-ops, or G&Ts, and they run big power plants that smaller, local co-ops cannot afford to manage themselves. The contract the DMEA has with its G&T, Tri-State, specifies that Tri-State must provide at least 95 percent of the energy the DMEA sells. This has long been a practical economic arrangement, but one with dirty consequences: Federal policy dating to the 1970s ensured that much of the G&Ts’ investment went into coal plants. But the DMEA has been finding opportunities to generate more of its power locally, from ever-cheaper solar panels and hydro dams to the methane leaking from the area’s retired mines. The member-elected board liked these opportunities, for reasons of cost, jobs, and the environment. The DMEA relied on Tri-State for most of its power, but its contract was getting in the way of adopting greener energy sources that could bring needed jobs for members.

“Part of the culture here in this area is the desire to keep things local,” says Virginia Harman, vice president of member relations and human resources at the co-op.

“We are experiencing a phenomenally exciting technological revolution.”—Christopher McLean

When the DMEA hired Jasen Bronec as CEO from a Montana co-op in 2014, he brought with him a new strategy; a half-smile sneaks into Bronec’s all-business demeanor when he talks about it. The co-op filed a request with the Federal Regulatory Commission, inquiring about whether a Carter-era law enabled the DMEA to source its own local energy if a more affordable, renewable option were to compete with a standing contract. In June 2015, the FERC ruled that the DMEA was in fact required to do so. Tri-State objected, but the ruling has so far held.

Heneghan lives on a farm so out of the way that it’s off even the DMEA grid. He produces his own power there. “I’m confident that we won’t keep the central-generation model,” he said, as we drove on the narrow dirt roads between dams. “There are so many things that point to a structural change in the electrical industry.” He compared the change to what cellular did to telephones. He daydreamed about testing one of the new Tesla Powerwall batteries and reveled in the ongoing convergence of moral, environmental, technological, and economic imperatives—if only we allow ourselves to embrace them.

Heneghan believes that co-ops are uniquely positioned to benefit. Their lean, local, customer-centered kind of business has already made them pioneers in easy, low-risk financing for energy-efficiency improvements and renewables. In 2016, about a quarter of the power delivered to Tri-State’s members came from renewables, and the G&T announced the closure of two coal stations that were no longer economical; according to the NRECA, the co-op sector’s solar capacity is set to double over the course of 2017. Co-ops not locked into G&T contracts have been especially ambitious in switching to renewables. The DMEA is also one of the co-ops across the country that have begun bringing broadband Internet to underserved rural communities—a development that parallels the circumstances that gave rise to electric co-ops in the first place. Abroad, especially in Denmark and Germany, cooperative ownership has proven useful for scaling solar and wind facilities.

“We are experiencing a phenomenally exciting technological revolution,” says Christopher McLean, who oversees electric programs at the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service, the federal agency that still provides low-interest loans to co-ops—today, a $5.5 billion, revenue-positive fund. “Used to be, the electric program was kind of like the boring program, but now we get all the exciting stuff.”

McLean wouldn’t comment about policy, but Heneghan did. “I don’t see enough in the Trump administration to change what we saw as the trends from a year ago or two years ago,” he told me. “Change is here, it’s permanent, and it’s up to utilities to figure out how to best manage it.”

“Local co-ops are primarily owned by dead people.”—Congressman Jim Cooper of Tennessee

This kind of talk overlooks the fact that electric co-ops still lag behind the national average in their use of renewables. The local co-ops are bound to their decades-long G&T contracts, and the G&Ts say they can’t walk away from their past investments in coal anytime soon. On the record and off, co-op executives talk a lot about their commitment to member-owners and to the seven international co-op principles that hang on their boardroom walls. Heneghan was careful to justify his every ambition in terms of a cost-benefit calculus for members. But co-op staffs know as well as anyone that their democracy is in some respects nominal—an opportunity, but by no means a guarantee.

As I concluded my visit to the DMEA’s headquarters, I met a woman on the way out the door who had come to pay her bill. Photos of board members hung on the wall next to us. I asked if she liked being a member of the co-op, and she looked at me like I was speaking the wrong language. I asked the question again but said “customer” instead. She smiled and said she’d been getting power from the DMEA for 20 years and loved it—great service, super-reliable. She’d grown up in Hawaii with no electricity, so she appreciated being able to turn the lights on when she came home.

Five times during the fall of 2016, Della Brown-Davis and her 12-year-old daughter made the two-and-a-half-hour drive, each way, from their home in Tylertown, Mississippi, to Jackson. Their purpose was to learn about electric cooperatives. Brown-Davis is a schoolteacher and therapist, as well as a member-owner of the Magnolia Electric Power Association, one of the nine co-ops that have fallen under the scrutiny of One Voice, an affiliate of the state’s NAACP. Before it could make any headway, One Voice had to teach co-op members what it means to be cooperators.

Brown-Davis and her daughter became acquainted with the lofty cooperative principles shared by co-ops around the world. They learned how to read the 990 tax forms that the electric co-ops’ nonprofit status requires they make public. And they saw evidence that their fellow African-American co-op members across Mississippi were not getting their due—exorbitant bills, all-white boards in black-majority districts, opaque governance procedures that prevented participation. Brown-Davis noticed a picture of white high-school students representing her co-op on a trip to Washington, DC. On the drives home from Jackson, she and her daughter would discuss what they’d learned.

“It’s disappointing to find that, in this day and age, so many things are occurring the way they did back in the ’50s and the ’60s,” Brown-Davis says.

In 2014, Benita Wells, One Voice’s chief financial officer, helped out on a review of co-ops by the state Public Service Commission. It was her first exposure to the distinct mechanics of cooperative accounting, but she knew enough to notice incongruities. Executives were getting inflated salaries, together with board members who had been on the payroll for decades. Co-ops weren’t returning millions of dollars in accumulated equity to the members, to the point of risking their privileges as nonprofits. “None of the numbers added up,” she says. Making her task harder, co-ops have few disclosure requirements, and they frequently resist sharing financials even with their members.

One Voice invited researchers from MIT and Cornell to investigate. They conducted listening tours, scrutinized utility bills across the state’s Black Belt, and used what they learned to help develop the Electric Cooperative Leadership Institute. Brown-Davis was part of the institute’s first cohort, among other co-op customers ready to organize their neighbors. But the first day, many weren’t yet aware of their status as co-owners.

Mississippi is unusually dense with electric cooperatives. Nearly half of residents get their power from one. And although 37 percent of Mississippians are African-American, One Voice found they accounted for just 6.6 percent of co-op board seats. Women held only 4 percent. In the largely poor districts the campaign identified, residents frequently spent over 40 percent of their income on electricity.

According to Derrick Johnson, the president of One Voice and the state NAACP, “Our ultimate goal is to help them understand how to develop a strategy to maximize members’ participation.” Then, he hopes, “they can begin to think about renewable energy differently.”

There does appear to be some correlation between member participation and energy innovation. The Roanoke Electric Cooperative in North Carolina, for instance, underwent a black-led member-organizing campaign in the 1960s; its current CEO, Curtis Wynn, is vice president of the NRECA board and its sole
African American. Roanoke has meanwhile become the first co-op in the state to adopt financing for members to make energy-efficiency improvements. It also allows members to buy in on a community solar array and is developing a broadband Internet program.

“When the makeup of your management staff or your board of directors isn’t fully reflecting the makeup of your communities,” Wynn told me, “there could easily be a disconnect between what the constituents want and need, and what decisions the board and the management team will make.” Without member pressure, for instance, managers often have an incentive to sell more power rather than helping members reduce their consumption, their costs, and their carbon footprints.

The successful organizing at Roanoke is more the exception than the rule. During the 1980s and ’90s, the Southern Regional Council mounted the Co-op Democracy and Development Project, a series of campaigns in co-op districts across the South, including some of the same ones that One Voice is now targeting. The campaigns were largely unsuccessful; it was too easy for incumbent boards to adjust the bylaws and election procedures to protect themselves. In some cases, these co-ops were carrying on habits that go back to their origins in the 1930s and ’40s, when white residents could expect to see power lines earlier and cheaper than their black neighbors. But One Voice may fare differently. Before the first set of trainings was over, Johnson told me, at least two co-ops appointed their first African-American directors.

The co-op associations mainly stand aloof
 from the kind of organizing that One Voice is undertaking. A spokesman for the state association, Electric Cooperatives of Mississippi, told me he’d never heard of the campaign. His counterpart at the NRECA merely 
alluded to the organization’s general support for fair elections. Nor have concerns about racial justice unsettled the Rural Utilities Service, whose lending comes with a requirement of nondiscrimination. “We have a very low level of complaint to the Office of Civil Rights on issues like this,” says Christopher McLean. Even so, the concerns motivating co-op members like Della Brown-Davis are limited neither to Mississippi nor to African Americans. They are symptoms of more widespread neglect.

Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from the Tennessee district that includes Nashville, was raised by a father who helped start an electric co-op where they lived. When Cooper later visited co-ops as a politician, he’d make a point of browsing their tax forms, and he noticed some of the same things that Benita Wells did. “I’d congratulate them for being so wealthy, and they’d look at me like I was crazy,” Cooper tells me. This led him into an investigation of what he now calls “a massive, nationwide cover-up.” He published his findings in a scathing 2008 article in the Harvard Journal on Legislation. In particular, he pointed out the billions of dollars in “capital credits” that co-ops collectively hold—excess revenues technically owned by members, but that often go unclaimed, serving as a pool of interest-free financing. Policies vary, but some co-ops even prevent members or their families from recouping equity. This can go on for generations. “Local co-ops are primarily owned by dead people,” Cooper says.

Cooper’s article proposed a series of reforms, including more mandatory disclosures to members and the public. He suggested that unless co-ops take on a new New Deal of economic development and environmental conservation, they should not be entitled to never-ending federal support. His essay entered the Congressional Record the year it was published, but the co-op lobby fought back hard, and his proposals didn’t get any further than that. “When I talk with my colleagues about this, they shut their eyes and close their ears,” he says. “The NRECA pretty much gets what it wants.”

The see-no-evil stance of the associations has helped inspire a new wave of agitation, of which One Voice is only a part. We Own It, for instance, is a new network started by young but seasoned cooperators determined to support organizing among co-op members—rather than the executives and directors who steer the associations. They’re connecting activist members at electric co-ops across the country, helping them learn from one another about policies to seek and strategies for winning them. In an online forum, they pass around news about co-op corruption alongside tricks for financing solar power and efficiency improvements.

“Our goal is to build a social movement,” says founder Jake Schlachter.

A movement will take some doing. According to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, nearly three-quarters of co-ops see voter turnout of less than 10 percent in board elections. When I attended a board-candidate forum for an electric co-op near where I live, in Colorado, there were more candidates and staff present than anyone else. Only one of the four seats on the ballot was contested. (Hundreds of members come to the annual meetings, however, which include door prizes, a hearty dinner, live entertainment, and a person in a robot suit.) By way of explanation, a staff member repeated what I’ve been told by the leaders of other big co-ops: Low turnout means that members are satisfied.

The movement makers don’t accept that. “The most important lesson I’ve learned over the years is that the cooperative system is really dependent on member involvement,” says Mark Hackett, a We Own It collaborator who was part of a successful organizing effort after a corruption debacle at his co-op in Georgia, Cobb EMC. “If the members are not involved in any significant way, the directors become very insular, and they can basically do with the co-op as they please.”

The conditions of managerial capture are not quite so arbitrary. The best and worst co-op managers alike carry on their books and in their habits the weight of decades-long contracts, of old loan conditions, of billion-dollar coal plants. There have been astonishing cases of self-dealing by boards and staff. But co-ops can still serve as vehicles of participatory economics on a vast scale, just as when farmers suspicious of banks and abandoned by capitalists built utilities for themselves—so well that Washington saw fit to give them bank-rate loans. It was a rare bit of development policy designed to actually empower the people it was supposed to help.

Murray Lincoln, an early architect of the electric co-op system, recalls in his memoir the nature of the enterprise. “Farmers were just itching to have electricity, and to have it from their own cooperative was a dream come true,” he wrote. “We rushed into the business half-blind, not knowing what it was going to cost us, but knowing that it was something that ought to be done and something that we ought to be doing for ourselves.”

As the Trump administration assembles its promised trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it seems unlikely to unleash a fresh spree of cooperative rural development. White House strategist Steve Bannon did, however, offer an ominous tribute to the milieu from which the electric co-ops came. The plan, he said, will be “as exciting as the 1930s.” Few remember that decade so fondly as the electricity people.

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All these and much much more make up the Sustainable Development Goals – the globally agreed wish list for saving the world and building a better future. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re not alone. Their public outreach leaves a bit to be desired. In any case, they make up the UN’s development agenda up until 2030.

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to what the SDGs are, what’s good about them, and my one problem with the SDGs that actually drives me crazy every time I think about it.

What are the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals (aka SDGs or Global Goals) follow on from where the Millennium Development Goals left off, in 2015. They will guide the development priorities for the UN and its agencies, the aid budgets of most wealthy nations and major development charities up until 2030, when it’ll be all change all over again. Here’s the full list:

• Goal 1  End poverty in all its forms everywhere
• Goal 2  End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
• Goal 3  Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
• Goal 4  Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• Goal 5  Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
• Goal 6  Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Goal 7  Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
• Goal 8  Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
• Goal 9  Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
• Goal 10 Reduce inequality within and among countries
• Goal 11 Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
• Goal 12 Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Goal 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*
• Goal 14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
• Goal 15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
• Goal 16 Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
• Goal 17 Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

As you can see, they’re… Let’s call them ‘stretch targets’.

The SDGs. Image credit: Reedz Malik

Others more cynical than I have called them a utopian wishlist more suited to a letter to your fairy godmother than a serious policy statement, or words to that effect. But you know what they say about ambitious goals: even when you don’t hit them you still end up doing pretty well. And to be honest, aren’t these exactly the things we should be aspiring to?

What is amazing about the SDGs

Before I get on to my one glaring problem with the SDGs, I want to take a moment to consider what’s so good about them, particularly in comparison to the old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

They apply to the whole world

.No country has locked down 100% of this stuff. The UK certainly hasn’t. These goals are for every country to work towards, and kisses goodbye to the patronising old development model of ‘developed’ countries that have apparently got it all worked out (yeah, right) and ‘developing’ ones who need help.

They’re holistic

.They cover a lot of ground because they understand that poverty and wellbeing are complex, multi-faceted and relate to a lot of different things at once. I like the way the goals are not split up into environmental, social, economic, but instead many of the goals cover all three aspects of sustainability. Goodbye silos.

They’re inclusive and collaborative

When the goals were being drafted, diplomats from each country got to contribute and they also engaged with charities, scientists and academics for their contributions. You may not have been consulted or even told about them until now, but compared to other high-level global policy, this was very inclusive.

My one problem with the SDGs

So the SDGs sound wonderful, right? They do. Really, they do, and overall I think they are a fantastic thing that will do a lot of good in the world. But there’s one problem that I think people should be aware of (and I want to get it off my chest).

One of the goals is liable to contradict the others. Yes there will always be trade-offs and that’s understandable, but in my opinion, one of these goals sticks out like a sore thumb because it just doesn’t fit.

Goal 8 calls for ‘decent work and economic growth’ and I take issue with it for several reasons.

What’s wrong with Goal 8?

Problem 1: it’s a means not an end

This may just be me, but I can’t stand it when you have a list of things and one doesn’t fit with the others. Like if you had a whole list of your favourite books and one of the list items is ‘Waterstones book token’. What the hell is this?! A book token isn’t a book, it’s just a way to get more books! Goal 8 is kind of like the book token here. It isn’t a goal in itself, it’s at best a means to reach other goals. As this article on postgrowth.org puts it: “Growth that is at best a means to reach certain welfare goals is redundant as a development goal in itself.”

Problem 2: Growth doesn’t necessarily benefit the poor

Problem 1 on its own would just be a grammatical pet peeve. What makes it problematic is that it isn’t even a very effective means to achieve the other goals. In fact sometimes it can do the opposite. The most important goal of all the SDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty. The thinking is obviously that economic growth helps with this – but that isn’t actually necessarily true. Of all the wealth produced by growth since 1990, the poorer 60% of the world population only received a pitiful 5% of it. And that’s not even the poorest, that’s over half of all humanity. The very poorest people who need it most got such a tiny sliver it’s almost nothing. Growth is a very inefficient way of helping the poor out of poverty because the vast majority of the wealth goes to the rich, a slice goes to the middle class and the poor just get some crumbs. So, Goal 8 could easily conflict with goals 10 (reduced inequality) and Goal 1 (no poverty).

Problem 3: Growth probably isn’t compatible with a safe climate

There’s no hard evidence that economic growth is compatible with the kind of emissions cuts we need to keep climate change to below 2 degrees. The only time global emissions went down is when we had the 2008 global crash and recession. People get all excited about decoupling when they see that the UK’s economy grew while our direct emissions went down, but that figure for direct emissions doesn’t include ‘embedded emissions’ in consumer goods, and it doesn’t include aeroplane flights or international shipping. We have seen that emissions can hold steady while growth rises, but we need emissions to go down, and fast, and we just don’t know that that can happen with growth. If not, then we need to prioritise climate action (Goal 13) rather than growth (Goal 8).

Problem 4: it shouldn’t be 2 in 1, it’s already an important goal

Unlike the others, goal 8 is a double whammy: decent work and economic growth. They obviously thought those were a natural pair, but they could easily be in conflict, as a company that abuses its workers could make more profit and so contribute more to economic growth. Well-paid workers contribute more to growth than poor ones, because they have more spending power, but healthy workers could contribute less to growth than sick and stressed ones because they won’t be paying for medicines and therapies. All this is because of what a strange and unhelpful metric GDP growth is. Decent work – good jobs that are useful and fulfilling with fair wages and rights – is already a very important goal. Why stick something else in there as well? The way it stands, Goal 8 could even come into conflict with… Goal 8.

Problem 5: it gives companies/governments a loophole to keep doing the same

As well as being unnecessary and counterproductive, the growth part of goal 8 also gives regressive companies and countries a loophole where they can say ‘we’re working on the SDGs!’ when they’re doing anything that will boost growth, even if it goes against the other goals. A study by Ethical Corp found that Goal 8 was in the top 3 of the SDGs that corporates are most keen to engage with. I recently saw a major brand boasting on their website that they were making progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 8. Like… Every other company out there.

The SDGs also sidestep deep systemic issues (but that’s understandable)

The Sustainable Development Goals were never going to be perfect. They have flaws because they are trying to make progress from within the capitalist system we have. They sidestep fundamental causes of poverty like structural readjustments, unfair debts, unfair trade deals, and of course the history of colonialism. They seek to bring the poor and ordinary up, but don’t dare to mention the elephant in the room: that the elite have too much. None of this is surprising and I don’t think the drafters of the SDGs or the UN can be blamed for that. They weren’t going for a radical political statement that would be divisive. They wanted to get everyone on board. Like sustainable development itself, it’s very hard for anyone to disagree with the SDGs as a whole. That means that as well as the UN, charities and governments, they have also had excellent buy-in from corporates, with the likes of Unilever, Coca Cola and H&M using them to inform their ‘corporate responsibility’ and sustainability work. 46% of corporate reps said their business would engage with the SDGs, according to a survey by Ethical Corp. Their engagement is worth a little watering down, given their immense scale.

Conclusion

The SDGs represent real progress. They give everyone across sectors a common language for sustainable development and gets everyone on the same page. They represent a clear roadmap on where we collectively want to go from here. The progress they aspire to can be best realised if we ignore growth and work on the things that matter – which are summed up perfectly with all the other goals.

Photo by Davezilla was taken

The post My one problem with the Sustainable Development Goals that drives me crazy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Global Resistance to Fossil-Fuelled Capitalism

1. What is the key idea of the climate justice movement?

We are not all in the same boat: The climate crisis as a crisis of justice

What is climate change about? First and foremost, justice! The best symbol for this process is not the sad polar bear, but New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There, the majority of the wealthy white population succeeded in fleeing from the floods and the ensuing chaos, because they (for the most part) owned their own cars, which they could use to leave the city. The mostly poor black population largely remained behind, and was subjected to the government’s incompetent and repressive disaster management for several weeks. Burned into our minds are images of African-Americans, standing on rooftops, signalling to the helicopters flying over the city that they need help —and yet being wantonly ignored.

Black inhabitants of New Orleans call for help after hurricane Katrina while securing themselves on the roof of their house. (Image: World Socialist Web Site)

We often think of ourselves as being all in the proverbial ‘same boat’. Unfortunately, this is not true. If we are all in the same boat —let’s say, the (space)ship Earth— then there are several classes on this ship, and in the event of an accident, the lower decks are flooded first. And just like on the Titanic, there are lifeboats available for those who can afford them. Another example is rising sea levels. They are rising for everyone, but in Bangladesh people are being flooded, while in Holland floating cities are being built with resources accumulated there while using the global environment as a dump, all without a second thought.

In summary: On average, those who have contributed least to climate change suffer the most, while those who have contributed most suffer the least. The latter usually have sufficient resources to protect themselves from the effects of climate change. They have accumulated these resources, this wealth, precisely through those activities that have driven climate change. This central fact, which, by the way, applies to almost all so-called ‘environmental crises’, is perhaps best described as ‘climate injustice’. That is why the call for mere climate protection does not go far enough. What we need is climate justice.
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2. Who is part of the climate justice movement, what do they do?

From the environmental justice movement to the climate justice movement

In order to understand the demands and requirements of the climate justice movement, it is worth taking a look at the history of social struggles, in particular the emergence of the environmental movement in the USA in the 1960s, which was first and foremost a movement of the white middle class for the white middle class. It originated in relatively privileged ‘white’ city districts and towns, and fought to keep these communities free from air pollution and to prevent the inhabitants’ children from being poisoned by chemical plants and power plants. As understandable as these demands were, they had a regrettable effect. Instead of such plants being closed down, they were simply moved; from the richer communities to the poorer ones, populated mostly by African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and other marginalised groups. The struggles of the liberal environmental movement did not lead to the solution of the problems they had criticised — instead, they were simply shifted a few steps further down the ladder of social power.

The fight for environmental justice is a fight for your own life. Material from the website “beautiful solutions”. (Image: Wake Forest University)

Resistance to environmental and climate racism

The communities of colour, suddenly oppressed by a whole range of polluting industries, did not merely become passive victims. Instead, they organised themselves, accused the environmental movement of ‘environmental racism’, and began their own movement for environmental justice. Analytically, this means: If apparent environmental problems are not seen as social problems, if there is no awareness of how a single polluting factory is embedded in broader social structures of domination and exploitation, not only are these problems impossible to solve, but existing social inequalities will be exacerbated.

In the 1980s, as the debate on climate change began to gain momentum, the idea developed that the problem was above all technical —that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had to be reduced and eliminated through certain mechanisms. In the 1990s, this in turn facilitated the development of so-called market mechanisms to combat climate change. Without opening up the entire critical debate on these impressively ineffective environmental policy tools (Altvater/Brunnengräber 2007; Moreno/Speich Chassé/Fuhr 2015), they are based on a technical logic that does not take social structures into account; i.e. that because every CO2 particle is the same, it does not matter who saves CO2 where and under what conditions.

In economic terms, it is actually best to save CO2 where it is cheapest, and that is easiest in the global south, where everything is cheaper on average. So, we could give money to development aid organisations to protect forests from deforestation, so as to protect the climate, while we in the global north continue to burn fossil fuels. However, this idea has a huge catch: the forests which were suddenly to be saved from excessive deforestation were often home to indigenous peoples who have excelled at sustainable forest management for thousands of years. And these peoples were threatened by expulsion from their ancestral lands, so-called ‘green grabbing’ (see Heuwieser 2015) through the market mechanisms negotiated in the 1990s as part of the Kyoto Protocol. In the context of these negotiations, the story of environmental justice was once more taken up. In response to the ‘climate racism’ of official climate policy, American activist for indigenous peoples and founder of the Indigenous Environmental Network Tom Goldtooth, who himself comes from the environmental justice movements, for the first time formulated the demand for climate justice. Thus began the fight to construct climate change as a question of human rights and justice.

The next step in the development of the climate justice narrative was the publication of the Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice report (Bruno et. al. 1999). The report focused on fossil fuel energy companies; and instead of suggesting solutions at the individual level (for example, ethical consumption), it focused on major structural transformations. In addition, the struggle for climate justice was quite explicitly described as a global struggle. The report also put forward the movement’s most important policy framework to date, namely a critique of the Kyoto Protocol’s market mechanisms as ‘false solutions’.

This image was made by the Ingham County Health Department in Michigan (USA) and shows topics connected to environmental justice (Image: Jessica Yorko, Environmental Justice Coordinator, Ingham County Health Department)

A global movement for climate justice is created

In Bali in 2002, the organisations that would later become the core of the movement, and articulate the Bali Principles of Climate Justice, met for the first time. In 2004, several groups and networks which had long been working on a critique of market mechanisms in general, and emissions trading in particular, came together in Durban in South Africa and founded the Durban Group for Climate Justice. The final breakthrough came at the 13th Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007. The aforementioned network of critical organisations provoked an open conflict with the politically more moderate Climate Action Network, whose cosy lobbying strategy had been shown to be something of a flop. One result of this conflict was the founding of the Climate Justice Now! network in 2007. The press release announcing the formation of this new actor articulated a number of claims which still apply to the climate justice movement today. Later translated into a sort of founding manifesto, the press release demanded:

• that fossil fuels be left in the ground, and replaced with investment in suitable, safe, clean and democratic renewable energies;
• the drastic reduction of wasteful overconsumption, especially in the global north, but also in terms of southern elites;
• a massive transfer of funds from North to South, under democratic control, based on the repayment of climate debt (…);
• resource conservation based on human rights and enforced under indigenous land rights, with control of energy, forests, land and water driven by these communities;
• sustainable, small-scale farming and food sovereignty.

To achieve these goals, the movement has made use of a wide range of instruments, from the publication of clever reports and day-to-day political work in communities particularly affected by climate change, through civil disobedience (for example coal mine blockades), to the militant struggles of the Ogoni in the Niger Delta.

In summary: the climate justice movement is a descendant of the environmental justice movement. Like the environmental justice movement, the climate justice movement originated in the global south (see below), and aims to focus less on technical change and more on basic social structures. I would venture the following definition: Climate justice is not so much a state of affairs — e.g. the fair distribution of the costs of a potential solution to the climate crisis— but more a process, namely the process of struggling against the social structures which cause climate injustice. If we heed this broad definition, we can even say that many of the struggles for climate justice are not necessarily being fought under the banner of climate justice, but are represented as struggles for land, water, and other basic needs and human rights.

USA: Indigenous peoples and communities of colour as supporters of resistance

The fact that the climate justice movement arose in the US also structures the way that the project’s social base is viewed. On average, alleged ‘environmental problems’ hit the most socially vulnerable the hardest. In the US, this usually means the communities of colour, among which Native American communities are once again generally the most marginalised. Thee groups designated in the USA and Canada as First Nations see themselves as part of a global indigenous network which is most affected by environmental disasters. In addition to this, they live (on average) in places where the highest biodiversity is concentrated, and their socio-ecological practices —for example, forest use— are highly sustainable. Our survival may also depend on them, as learning from them could mean learning real sustainability. This is why so-called ‘frontline communities’ or ‘affected communities’ (often indigenous communities) are the main supporters of the resistance, the famous ‘revolutionary subject’ of the climate justice movement.

These ‘frontline communities’, often communities of colour in the USA, thus join forces with typically white and/or otherwise privileged ‘allies’ (see Moore/Kahn-Russel 2010). With regard to these activists, we tend to find the social milieus we have been expecting in this part of the world since the emergence of the so-called ‘new social movements’ from 1968 onwards: younger, more mobile, better educated, and often slightly more ‘alternative’ than the social average.

Boreal forests are destroyed by the expansion of Tarsands (Image: Dru Oja Jay, Dominion)

The view of Europe: The role of allies, and differences from the environmental movement

The European wing of the movement, which does not have the US’s tradition of environmental justice struggles to fall back on, and which is dealing with different social structures, is significantly more represented by the white and privileged than the movement in the US. This is quite logical to a certain extent: in the global north, there are simply fewer affected groups or ‘frontline communities’ —with a handful of exceptions, such as the villages in the Lusatia region and the Rhineland which still fall victim to the madness of lignite mines. Most of us act, globally speaking, in the role of allies.

In Europe, the climate justice movement differs from the broader environmental movement in two main elements: firstly, through its conceptual anti-capitalism, including a clear rejection of all varieties of green capitalism (green market economy) (see Müller/Kaufmann 2009); and secondly, through its focus on the tactics of civil disobedience (often mass civil disobedience) and deliberate rule-breaking, in contrast to the more legalistic tactics of traditional environmental organisations. Examples of this type of climate activism in the global north are the civil disobedience campaigns at the climate summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Paris (2015), but above all sit-ins and blockades of coal power plants and coal mines, airports and other places where climate change is generated. Of the above-mentioned key demands made by the climate justice movement, the central one is: ‘Leave it in the ground!’ —fossil fuels must be left in the ground!

3. How do you see the relationship between the climate justice movement and degrowth?

Climate justice and degrowth: United against fossil capital!

There is a positive, fairly close relationship between the climate justice movement and the degrowth movement, something which should come as no surprise to anyone after the Degrowth Summer School at the Rhineland Climate Camp in 2015. The reason for this is obvious: they have a common enemy, namely the fossil fuel-based energy system.

Protests at the climate summit in Posen/Poznan (Poland) in 2008: Juana Camacho Otero of Friends of the Earth Columbia at the global action day. (Image: Friends of the Earth International)

On the side of the climate justice movement, the argument is quite clear: Climate change, as explained above, is a deeply unjust phenomenon. Behind this are a number of social structures, but the key driver of climate change is an energy system that has been based on fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. After the COP21 climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 demonstrated to the climate change movement and its more radical climate justice wing that little should be expected from ‘the powers that be’ in the fight against fossil fuels, they began to focus on local and national energy struggles (see Müller 2012; Bullard/Müller 2011). The core of the climate (justice) movement now consists of fighting for a rapid phasing out of fossil fuels, opposing fracking and the development of gas infrastructure, and campaigning for the development of democratically controlled, largely decentralised renewable energies.

From the perspective of degrowth, the argument is a little more complicated, due to the ‘political polyvalence of the growth-critical paradigm’ (Eversberg / Schmelzer 2016). In other words, there are a wide range of political positions on the degrowth spectrum, some of which are more critical of capitalism than others, and some which concern themselves with environmental issues to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, Eversberg and Schmelzer describe degrowth as having a perspective of transformation which is predominantly ‘critical of capitalism’, and which has abandoned the idea that sustainable development is possible in the context of a capitalist economy. Although there are also non-ecological reasons to be interested in the topic of degrowth, it appears that many people become involved with the issue due to the constantly escalating socio-ecological crises with which we have been confronted in recent years.

And so we come to the crux of the matter: If the post-growth movement is first and foremost about the destruction of our natural resources, then it also has to be about capitalism, because capitalism has an in-built microeconomic compulsion towards infinite growth. The growth dynamics of capitalist production are not explained through oft-cited metrics such as gross domestic product, but through the microeconomic behaviour of individual companies, which are driven by market forces to invest money today in order to make more money tomorrow —companies that don’t achieve this don’t survive. If this is not mere speculation, then the result is the following correlation: money => commodity production => consumption => more money, followed by the re-investment of at least part of this money. Or in summary: M => C => M’. This microeconomic equation represents the general formula for capital, and it expresses the compulsion to act felt by each businessperson every day. From an ecological point of view, this means that this necessary additional daily profit must come from somewhere ‘in nature’. If every day more workers convert more raw materials into commodities by using more energy, then M => C => M’ also means a continuous rise in global resource consumption (see Müller 2014). This is the nature of capitalism.

And capitalism would not have developed in this way, perhaps would never have arisen at all, if it had not entered into a quasi-symbiotic relationship with fossil fuels (coal at that time) in 18th century England (see Malm 2016). I do not believe that a form of capitalism based on renewable energies is impossible, but the capitalism which exists today, and which has already passed several ‘environmental limits’, could never have existed without fossil fuels. Whether we speak of fossil capital or fossil-fuelled capitalism, capitalism is the root of our global need for growth, and its motor runs on fossil fuels —precisely those fossil fuels which are also driving climate change.

4. Which proposals do they have for each other?

Better together: The weaknesses of one are the strengths of the other

Accordingly, the climate justice movement can provide the degrowth movement with something that the latter occasionally lacks: a common, antagonistically structured field of practice. This has nothing to do with the now somewhat tedious question of whether degrowth is a movement or not, given that it has no identifiable opponents. I accept the argument of Eversberg and Schmelzer (2016) that the target of the post-growth movement is not a single sector or institution or external process, but the ‘imperial mode of living’ as a whole, which we in the global north have —at least to a certain extent— internalised. This is not about the academic definition of a movement, which is ultimately irrelevant anyway, but about the motivation of the people involved, and the need to create conflicts so that the movement can develop transformative potential beyond articles in the culture section and niche day-to-day living practices. In 2015, the Ende Gelände campaign brought more than 1,000 people together (and over 4,000 people in 2016!) in an act of mass civil disobedience, namely the peaceful occupation of a lignite mine. This action created a conflict which the campaign then won, thus generating an enormous sense of collective empowerment (see The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 2015). It is this collective empowerment that enables the creation of a type of antagonistic identity construction, without which major social transformation is almost certainly impossible.

Ende Gelände activists in the lignite mining region Lusatia claim the democratisation of energy production and much more. Image: CC BY-NC 2.0, Ende Gelände 2016 / Fabian Melber.

In turn, the degrowth movement can offer the climate justice movement something that it lacks: a narrative that will have strong appeal in parts of Europe and the global north. Exhibit 1: The fourth Degrowth Conference succeeded in gathering together approximately 3,000 people in Leipzig, while no other social movement I am aware of can muster more than 2,000 (even in Berlin); I would hazard that a conference on climate justice would find it difficult to attract even 1,000 participants. Doubtless this success is in part due to the amazing work of the organisers. But it is also an indicator that the degrowth narrative is attractive to more than just the ‘usual suspects’ who attend social movement events. (This impression is reinforced by the fact that many of the participants had never been to a social movement conference before.) Exhibit 2: The culturally important (albeit politically somewhat irrelevant) German parliamentary commission of inquiry on ‘Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life’ from 2011 to 2013 shows that criticism of growth has even ‘infected’ conservative and liberal cultural milieus. Exhibit 3 (from my own experience): When I try to convince my conservative grandfather of the climate justice narrative, and of the fact that the wealth we have accumulated in the global north is —in reality— a great debt that we should return to the global south, he usually ignores me. When I present him with perhaps the central point of degrowth reasoning, namely that you cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet, he is forced to agree. On this basis, we can then start a conversation critiquing capitalism. In this story, my grandfather is representative of many people in the global north who have little interest in ‘climate justice’, but who share the unease that the degrowth movement is able to formulate.

5. Outlook: Space for visions, suggestions or wishes

Strategy, strategy, strategy!

Politically speaking, the climate justice movement reached a new peak in May 2016. In the second round of Ende Gelände, this time held as part of a global campaign entitled Break Free from Fossil Fuels, which led actions against fossil fuels and in favour of energy democracy on five continents, we achieved a number of significant successes. By gathering together approximately 4,000 participants in a highly tactical and strategic act of civil disobedience in the field of climate action, we have set new standards; the level of international participation in the act itself, and the international coordination of the act in the context of the Break Free campaign are reminiscent of the degree of internationalisation which made the alterglobalisation movement so inspiring. More important, however, is the fact that this time we did not remain in the coal mine; instead we reacted to the tactical and political retreat of our opposition from the pit (Vattenfall and the Brandenburg Ministry of Interior) by playing off our political and moral strength and setting up the blockade on the tracks. ‘On the tracks’ here refers to the railway tracks in the Lusatia region that supply the coal-fired Schwarze Pumpe (Black Pump) power station with lignite from three opencast mines. This rail blockade was of prime importance because we in the global north do more damage to the planet through expanding our industrial and service sectors than through primary resource extraction (such as lignite mining): this primarily refers to power plants, factories and server farms, not to gold mines and coal mines.

Start of a group of Ende Gelände activists in 2016. Image: CC BY-NC 2.0, 350.org.

Why am I writing about this at the end of this text? Because this time something happened that very rarely happens in the social movements that I have experienced: They assessed their own strength realistically, and developed tactics and strategies which related this strength realistically to the scale of the challenge. So if I could articulate a wish to both movements (a somewhat strange task, I might add, as for me the two are not unrelated), it would be: Let us plan strategically, let us act wisely, and not merely expressively, because we are few, with scarce resources, and we have an enormous task ahead of us (the abolition of capitalism, saving the climate etc. …). Consequently: strategy, strategy, strategy. Without strategy, it’s all bullshit.

Literature and links

Links

• Ende Gelände
  Socio-ecological restructuring at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
  Beautiful Trouble – A Toolbox for Revolution

Applied as well as further literature

Bruno, Kenny; Karliner, Joshua; Brotsky, China 1999. Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice. San Francisco: Transnational Resource and Action Center. Accessed: 11.07.2016. <http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1048>

Dietz, Kristina; Müller, Tadzio; Reuter, Norbert; Wichterich, Christa 2014. Mehr oder weniger? Wachstumskritik von links (Reihe: Materialien). Berlin: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. <http://www.rosalux.de/publication/40728/>

Eggers, Dave 2011. Zeitoun. London: Penguin Books.

Elmar Altvater; Achim Brunnengräber (Hrsg.): Ablasshandel gegen Klimawandel? Hamburg: VSA.

Eversberg, Dennis; Schmelzer, Matthias 2016: Über die Selbstproblematisierung zur Kapitalismuskritik. Vier Thesen zur entstehenden Degrowth-Bewegung. Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 1/2016: 9-17. Access: 11.07.2016. <http://forschungsjournal.de/node/2821>

Focus on the Global South [without year]. What’s missing in the climate talks? Justice! Access: 11.07.2016. <http://focusweb.org/node/1301>

Heuwieser, Magdalena 2015. Grüner Kolonialismus in Honduras. Wien: Promedia-Verlag.

Kaufmann, Stefan; Müller, Tadzio 2009. Grüner Kapitalismus: Krise, Klima und kein Ende des Wachstums. Berlin: Karl Dietz.

Moreno, Camila; Speich Chassé, Daniel; Fuhr, Lili 2015. Carbon Metrics. Global abstractions and ecological epistemicide. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. <https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/2015-11-09_carbon_metrics.pdf>

Müller, Tadzio 2012: Von Energiekämpfen, Energiewenden und Energiedemokratie. LuXemburg 1/2012: 6-15. <http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/von-energiekampfen-energiewenden-und-energiedemokratie/>

Russell, Joshua Kahn; Moore, Hilary 2011: Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections on Navigating the Climate Crisis. Oakland: PM Press.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 2015. Drawing A Line in the Sand: The Movement Victory at Ende Gelände Opens up the Road of Disobedience for Paris. Access: 11.07.2016. <https://labofii.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/drawing-a-line-in-the-sand-the-movement-victory-at-ende-gelande-opens-up-the-road-of-disobedience-for-paris/>

Header-image: 2014 People’s Climate March NYC, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, Stephen Melkisethian

Author Tadzio Müller was born in 1976 and has been involved in the climate justice movement for a decade, before which he was active in the alterglobalisation movement.

As an activist, his main area of focus is the organisation of mass civil disobedience, for example, the successful Ende Gelände¹ protests. He currently works as an expert on climate justice and energy democracy at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned skepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

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

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

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

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

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

The Commons across Europe

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

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

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

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

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

The European Union’s Responsibility

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

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

Knowledge Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Internet and the Collaborative Economy

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

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

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

Energy

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

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

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

Research & Development and Financing

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

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

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

Democracy for the Commons

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

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

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

Allowing the Potential of the Commons to Flourish

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Shohei Hanazaki

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